When Darkness Falls

by James Grippando

  “Something to drink, gentlemen?” said the mayor, standing at the bar. He made the offer with a smile, but it seemed strained to Jack. The bags under his eyes had almost doubled in size since Jack had first spoken to him in the privacy of his limo. His skin had taken on an unhealthy, ashen hue. Had Jack been forced to guess, he would have said that the mayor hadn’t slept in at least three days.

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” said Jack.

  “You got any smoothies?” said Theo.

  Jack tried not to roll his eyes.

  “Uh, no,” said the mayor.

  Theo looked around and said, “I ever trade in my little open fisherman for one of these babies, it’s gonna have smoothies. Strawberry. Banana. Mamey.”

  Jack resisted the urge to strangle him.

  “Papaya, carambola, kumquat-”

  “Theo, we get it, all right?” said Jack. “The man doesn’t have any smoothies.”

  “Funny,” said Theo. “Falcon didn’t have any either. It’s weird, the things you crave when you’re being held hostage. I couldn’t stop thinking about smoothies. But Falcon didn’t want to hear anything about it. Said I was just making him hungry, all this talk about food. So you know what we did?”

  The mayor filled his glass with ice and scotch. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “We talked about money.”

  Jack detected a rise of concern in the mayor’s eyes. “Is that so?” said the mayor.

  “Yeah,” said Theo. “But I guess you already knew that. Alicia must have told you about our phone conversation.”

  The mayor used his finger to stir the ice around in his scotch.

  Jack said, “Alicia didn’t tell her father anything.”

  “She had to tell him,” said Theo. “Why else would Felipe show up at my bar in her place?”

  Jack glanced at Felipe and said, “Because somebody tapped her phone.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Felipe.

  Jack was bluffing, but Felipe’s quick denial was as good as an admission. Over the past five days, he’d heard and seen enough to formulate his own theories. The old Argentine woman with her DNA files-the work of modern-day scientists trying to solve the crimes of the Dirty War-had confirmed his darkest suspicions. “Alicia doesn’t want to know the truth. That’s why she didn’t show up tonight. That’s why she didn’t dare tell her father anything about her conversation with Theo. She simply doesn’t want to know that her dad is Sikes.”

  Felipe stepped closer, his tone threatening. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s okay,” the mayor told his bodyguard, “I want to hear what he has to say. Go ahead, Mr. Swyteck. I’m finding this very interesting.”

  “Interesting,” said Theo, scoffing. “One of those great fudge words. Sex is interesting. The Holocaust is interesting.”

  “So is blackmail,” said Jack.

  “Meaning?” said the mayor.

  “That’s what it was, right? Two hundred thousand dollars cash deposited in a Bahamian safe deposit box. You make the drop under a fictitious name. Falcon agrees never to tell anyone that you took a baby from one of his disappeared prisoners. It’s blackmail, with a little twist at the end. Falcon doesn’t keep the money for himself. He apologizes to the daughter of the woman he murdered, and he gives the money to the grandmother, who has spent over a quarter-century searching for her.”

  “Justice from the Dirty War,” said Theo.

  “Dirty Justice,” said Jack.

  “Is this the best you morons can come up with?” said Felipe, his anger rising. “You come up with this totally bogus story to get a little blackmail of your own going?”

  “We’re not here for money,” said Jack.

  “That’s a shame,” said the mayor. He laid a briefcase on the table and popped it open. “Because that’s all I can offer you.”

  Jack did a double take. Stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills were laid out before him.

  “How much is that?” said Theo.

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” said the mayor. “That’ll buy a lot of smoothies.”

  “We don’t want your money.”

  Theo said, “The boat, maybe, but not your-”

  Jack kicked him under the table.

  “Look here,” said the mayor. “If it’s simply a matter of negotiation, we can work something out.”

  “It’s not negotiable. We came here for the truth, and you gave it to us the minute you opened that briefcase.”

  “So what do you want to do now, ruin me?”

  “I think that’s up to Alicia and her grandmother. Her biological grandmother.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. Nothing positive can come of this. You’re just destroying a happy, loving family. Until Falcon called and asked me for two hundred thousand dollars in hush money, I didn’t have the slightest clue that Alicia had been stolen from her birth mother.”

  “That’s another lie,” said Jack.

  “How would you know?”

  “Because you adopted a two-week-old baby with a birth certificate that said she was two years old. And you did that for one reason only: to make it harder for her blood relatives to find her.”

  The mayor fell silent, but his expression spoke volumes. Suddenly, his complicity in the most horrible crime imaginable was as plain to see as the briefcase full of money on the table.

  Felipe said, “Mayor, you don’t have to listen to these insults.”

  The mayor had gone pale. “You really should take the money, Mr. Swyteck.”

  “We don’t want your money.”

  “Please,” said the mayor. “Take the money.”

  “We’re leaving,” said Jack, rising.

  “No you’re not,” said Felipe. He was pointing a pistol at Jack. “Now sit back down.”

  “Felipe,” the mayor said in a shaky voice, “this is not the answer.”

  “It worked fine when you sent me down the river to get Falcon to back away from Alicia. It worked just as well when you sent me over to Nassau to talk some sense into Riley about where all that money came from.”

  “I never told you to threaten anyone’s life. Put the gun away.”

  “I’m just protecting both of us, Mayor. It’s best if you went back to shore now.”

  “Listen to your boss,” said Jack. “Put the gun away.”

  “Shut up! You’re nothing but trouble, Swyteck, starting with the way you tried to make me into a bad guy for going down the river and telling your client to stay away from the mayor’s daughter. You had the cops thinking it was me who killed that homeless woman in the trunk of the car.”

  “That went nowhere,” said Jack. “We know it was Falcon who killed her. So just put away the gun before you end up facing a real murder charge.”

  “Just shut your trap! If you didn’t go sticking your nose where it didn’t belong, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Theo was suddenly a blur diving across the cabin. His shoulders hit Felipe in the midsection, and the two men tumbled to the deck. Felipe somehow managed to land on top. They were locked in a struggle when the gun went off and shattered a window.

  “Theo!” Jack shouted as he dived behind a club chair. Theo finally broke free and grabbed Felipe’s gun hand, but in the fight, another shot cut through the cabin.

  The mayor went down.

  Theo had Felipe in a hold that nearly broke the man’s arm, and the gun dropped to the floor. Jack hurried to the mayor’s side.

  “Hold on, Mayor,” said Jack. “We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  The mayor coughed up blood, and a mirthless chuckle followed. “I am the doctor,” he said in a fading voice.

  Jack felt chills as he watched the mayor-the doctor-draw his last breath.

  chapter 66

  J ack was having a hard time understanding Alicia’s grandmother, and the language barrier had nothing to do with it.

  The rumors surrounding Mayor Mendoza’s death were scandalous even by Miami s
tandards. The high-octane ingredients were all in place: a cash-stuffed briefcase and a scuffle on the mayor’s yacht, a dead politician and his pistol-packing bodyguard, a death-row survivor and the son of a former governor-all on the heels of a dramatic hostage standoff. Walt the Weather Wizard was the happiest man alive. Just when it seemed that the media couldn’t get enough of his sex-for-hire disaster, he was suddenly yesterday’s news.

  Officially, the cause of the mayor’s death was under investigation. The police department was in its tightest “no comment” mode, and details about what was said that night on the yacht were not generally known. The mayor still had many friends and supporters, however, both inside and outside the police department. They were actively spinning the cause of death as an “accidental shooting.” They dismissed all leaks about the mayor’s alleged link to Falcon and the Disappeared as the senseless ranting of a delusional homeless maniac. Jack did nothing to educate the press or the public, though standing mute was not a decision he had come to on his own. Nor was he minding the homicide detectives’ concerns that he not comment on an ongoing investigation.

  Jack was simply honoring the wishes of Alicia’s grandmother.

  To be sure, Alicia’s family history was complex. Jack didn’t even pretend to understand the depths of the tragedy, though his own experiences surely framed his perspective. Jack’s grandmother had spirited her teenage daughter away to Miami when Castro came to power in Cuba. Sadly, Abuela wasn’t able to escape Cuba for another forty years, long after Jack’s mother died in childbirth. In a manner of speaking, Jack and his mother had been stolen from Abuela, and when his grandmother landed in Miami nearly four decades later, she latched onto Jack with the heartfelt intention of never letting go, even if he was a grown man in his thirties. Jack would have expected the same sense of urgency from Alicia’s biological abuela, now that she had the DNA and other proof she’d longed for. He was wrong.

  “Yours is a completely different situation,” the old woman told Jack.

  “I realize that. My mother wasn’t murdered.”

  “And even though she was driven out of her native country and died so young, you always knew who your real mother was.”

  “But you have all the proof you’ve ever needed. You have every right to push forward on this.”

  “It’s not a question of my rights,” she said. “For any parent or grandparent, it’s always a question of what’s best for the child. Even if that child is grown.”

  Jack wished for a better answer, but anyone who knew the biblical story of King Solomon could understand the old woman’s reasoning. The real mother would never cut the baby in half-physically or emotionally-to serve her own maternal needs and desires. Neither would the real grandmother. After years of searching, she finally heard from Falcon, who told her exactly where to find her granddaughter. Right then, she could have ambushed Alicia with accusations if not evidence against Mr. Mendoza. She could have gone to the newspapers. She could even have gone to court, though at the time the Argentine judiciary did not have a history of siding with mothers of the Disappeared who reached out to lost grandchildren, no matter how much the child looked, walked, or talked like his or her dead mother. The point was that forcing the issue would have earned her nothing but Alicia’s contempt. Instead, she gave Alicia the soft sell, starting with that first face-to-face visit when Alicia was in college. As difficult as it was to exercise emotional restraint, she simply planted seeds and, on occasion, dug them up to see how they were growing, knowing that she and her granddaughter could never have a future together unless Alicia followed her own heart.

  Jack, however, was of the view that even the hungriest of hearts needed a nudge now and then. And when Alicia’s phone number showed up on his caller ID, he was certain that his slightly more aggressive strategy was about to pay off.

  “Thanks for returning my call,” said Jack. He was on his cell phone, standing somewhere in the middle of a very ill formed line at the walk-up counter of a sidewalk espresso bar called La Cabana Havana. Little hole-in-the-wall joints like this one were a Miami staple, part of a ritual that brought together everyone from lawyers to street cleaners for an afternoon jolt of caffeine Cuban-style.

  “You mean calls, don’t you?” she said coolly. “Five times in three days is borderline stalking.”

  “My apologies. It’s just very important that we talk. First of all, I wanted to say how sorry I am about your father.”

  “Thank you. But any discussion that begins with ‘first of all’ also includes a ‘second of all,’ and invariably the ‘second of all’ is the real point of the conversation.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jack.

  “I know what this is about,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to see her.”

  Jack stepped away from the busy espresso counter and found a little privacy beneath a shady oak with gnarled roots that had long ago outgrown the allocated square of dirt in the sidewalk. He was struggling to strike the right tone in his response, trying not to sound argumentative. “I wish you would reconsider.”

  “I can understand how you might feel that way. But you have to see this from my side, too.”

  “I’m trying hard to do that, and pardon me for saying this, but it just seems harsh.”

  “There’s no easy answer.”

  “To me there is. So maybe it would help to hear it in your own words-your own take on what’s driving this decision.”

  “You want the honest truth?”

  “When all else fails, it usually comes down to that.”

  Jack could hear a sigh on the other end of the line. “The truth is,” she said, then stopped, seeming to collect herself before continuing. “There are things I don’t want to know about my family.”

  “Alicia, I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but some bad things are going to come out anyway. It’s inevitable. Mayor Mendoza was a public figure. His secrets won’t die with him, no matter what decision you make.”

  “I’m not talking about that family,” she said. “I’m talking about my biological family.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother and father disappeared in a secret detention center for subversives.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of that,” said Jack.

  “What if it turns out that they were leftist extremists-terrorists who killed or maimed innocent people? What good would it do for me to know that?”

  Jack was suddenly reminded of something Alicia’s grandmother had told him about the blind eye of a nation-friends and neighbors who watched teachers, journalists, and housewives taken by force from their homes and did nothing about it, except to nod in agreement when someone at a cocktail party shrugged and with a dismissive wave of the hand remarked, “They don’t take people away for no reason.” Jack said, “Somewhere between eighteen and thirty thousand people disappeared in the Dirty War. Many of them were completely innocent.”

  “Exactly. And right now, I can count myself among the lucky ones who have that consolation. My biological parents are dead. They were the innocent victims of a terrible dictatorship. My adoptive father may or may not have been part of that hellish regime, but I still have the only mother I’ve ever known. She loves me unconditionally, and she has no one’s blood on her hands. For me, that’s the only happy ending to this story.”

  A city bus rumbled past him, and Jack stepped away from the gritty black cloud of diesel fumes at the curb. “What about your grandmother? How does this end for her?”

  “I’m not numb to her suffering. I realize that she has to find some kind of closure.”

  “You’re the only one who can give it to her.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Then please, do something about it.”

  She paused, seeming to consider it.

  Jack said, “People have gone to a lot of trouble to bring you two together. Innocent people have died.”

  “You can’t mean Falcon.”

  “No. He was the
one who tipped off your grandmother as to your whereabouts, but I didn’t mean him. I mean people like the midwife who delivered you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mother was a numbered political prisoner with a hood over her head when you were born. But she shouted out her real name during the delivery. The midwife had a conscience. She tracked down your grandmother and told her about you.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Yeah. And then the midwife went missing. She’s among the Disappeared.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Listen to what your grandmother has to say. She knows.”

  There was another long pause, and Jack sensed that he was getting through to her.

  “All right,” said Alicia.

  “Do you mean it? You’ll see her?”

  “Yes,” she said, clearly struggling. “I mean-no. I can’t. I can’t do it.”

  “But you agree that she needs closure, don’t you?”

  “I’m so confused. Can’t you see what a mess my life is? The Mendozas are either a bad joke or a terrible tragedy, depending on who you talk to. My mother needs me now more than ever.”

  “Isn’t there something you’d like to say to your real grandmother?”

  “Of course. But I want you to do it for me. Please. Just tell her…tell her that I love my mothers. Both of them.”

  “After all she’s been through, do you really think that’s enough?”

  There was silence on the line, and after several long, contemplative moments, her reply came in a barely audible voice. “It’s the best that I can do. I’m sorry.”