by Alex Segura
“If anyone knows the symptoms of someone trying to quit drinking, it’s me. My dad drank nonstop until he died. But it’s not like he didn’t try to stop, once or twice.”
Kathy’s dad, Chaz, had been a newspaper columnist for The Miami Times. About a year ago, he’d asked Pete to find Kathy, who had gone missing. What Pete didn’t know at the time was that Kathy had been kidnapped and that Chaz was just a small part of a bigger puzzle, one that had links to the Miami underworld and eventually led to the deaths of Chaz and Pete’s best friend. Still, he had found Kathy alive. Kathy wrote a best-selling book with Pete’s help. Because of that, he could afford to live off Kathy’s overly generous consulting fee and his pittance of a salary at the Book Bin while he figured out what to do next, if anything.
Pete nodded, waiting for the moment to pass. He’d told no one, aside from Emily, that he was going to meetings for his drinking. He liked Kathy. Even considered her a friend. But they weren’t there yet. He gave her a dry smile in response.
Kathy looked up at one of the many TVs set up above the bar at Kleinman’s, checking the time on the all-day CNN newscast. She turned to Pete.
“So, what’s the big favor you couldn’t ask me over the phone? I have to head back to the newsroom in a little bit. I owe them a column.”
“I need to find out some stuff about a person that works with Rick Blanco.”
“Emily’s Rick?”
“Yeah.”
Kathy finished the rest of her gin and tonic and slid the glass toward the opposite end of the table.
“Why, pray tell, do you want to investigate Emily’s husband? Is this some weird guy thing?”
“Guy thing?”
“Yeah, guy thing. Where you somehow delude yourself that you, through whatever weirdness you’ve concocted, can win Emily back.”
Pete took a deep breath. “It has nothing to do with that,” he said, sipping his Diet Coke. “I just had a weird run-in with him today, and he said something that I can’t get out of my head.”
“Did he say this while threatening to kick your ass for sleeping with his wife?”
“We’re not sleeping together.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Then why… Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Kathy let out a chuckle. “Just because you’re not sleeping with her doesn’t mean you don’t want to be, or that her husband—who, from what little I can tell, is a jealous dude—doesn’t think you are. But yeah, I know very well you’re not.”
“How do you know that?” Pete said.
“That’s not the point,” she said, playing with her fries. “So, OK. Rick shows up. Then what?”
Pete looked at his hands. What was he doing? He should be at a meeting. Or at work. Or trying to find better work. His savings were running out, and even though his father’s house was paid for, there were other bills to pay. Still, something gnawed at him about the encounter with Rick, so he did what he’d always done: he dug around until he found something. It was an instinct he’d honed as a reporter, before alcohol and the death of his father had sent him spiraling to what he now referred to as “the bottom.” It was the instinct that had helped him find Kathy the year before.
“Then what?” Kathy said, pulling Pete back to reality. “I have to get back to work.”
“Right,” Pete said. “Then he started asking about Emily.”
“OK, so far this sounds amazingly predictable, dear. What a shocker that Emily’s husband, with whom she is no longer sleeping or living with, came to you, her ex-fiancé, with whom she is now apparently living, to find out about his wife. When does your story—which, mind you, is far from worth this watered-down drink you bought me—get interesting?”
Kathy always got to the point, in every aspect of her life. Her father may have been a deadbeat dad and an alcoholic, but he was a hell of a reporter once, and it had stuck with his daughter. She knew how to sniff out a story, and when to realize there wasn’t one.
“Well, he just looked off,” Pete said. “I’ve known Rick for a bit, and he’s always been very, well, I dunno—clean-cut? Never a hair out of place. Always dressed to impress. This time he looked like he’d just come out of a bar. And he smelled like liquor.”
“That’s just your AA mind projecting.”
“I don’t think so,” Pete said, no longer trying to keep up the appearance that he wasn’t in recovery. “Trust me, he looked off. Dave had to pull a gun on him.”
“Ah. Dave. The paunchy weirdo,” Kathy said. “Anyway—you were saying? Rick was looking rough and asking about Emily? Like I said, not a shocker so far.”
“Then, after Dave forced him to back off hurting me, he told me to mention someone named Alice to Emily,” Pete said. “That she would know what he meant.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Mention this Alice person to Emily.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “Alice was the woman Rick cheated on her with. Rick said she was missing and might be dead.”
“Well, that last part is weird,” Kathy said. She checked the time on the CNN screen again. “Fuck. I’m late. What else can you tell me about Alice?”
“She worked with Rick; he does construction in Homestead. Blanco Properties—I think that was the name of his company. That’s a start.”
“Got it,” she said, making a mental note. “Why do you need me to do this?”
“You’ve got access to The Times. I don’t.”
“Right. You’re stuck with Google like everyone else these days.”
“I wouldn’t go back there if they paid me,” Pete said, nodding in the general direction of his former workplace.
“That’s the thing,” Kathy said. “They wouldn’t.”
She got up, but not before sliding the check over to Pete’s side of the booth.
“Thanks for dinner, darling,” she said, kissing him on the cheek before walking to the exit.
Pete watched her go. She was an attractive woman. Smart. In good shape. She kept Pete on his toes when they sparred. He replayed their conversation in his mind. His eyes wandered toward the bar. He reasoned with himself. He was only checking to see the bottles Kleinman’s had stocked. For old times’ sake.
He dropped two tens on the table and drained his Diet Coke. He nodded to the bartender as he walked out into the hot Miami evening.
***
The call came a few hours later. Pete was home, trying to read his book. He picked up his phone and checked the display. Kathy.
“Hey.”
“Hola,” she said. “So, it turns out your story is more interesting than you made it out to be.”
“How so?”
“Lady’s name is Alice Cline,” Kathy said. “Ring a bell?”
It did. Alice Cline had been one of Pete’s earliest clients in the aftermath of the last year’s chaos. Although not licensed or very experienced, Pete had muddled his way through a few small-stakes cases, even before he had decided to quit drinking. The cases consisted of Pete sitting in cars and following spouses around to see if they were being unfaithful.
Alice Cline’s case was a little different. Back then, she’d been engaged to Jose Martinez, the youngest son of a prominent Miami politician. When they’d broken things off, the younger Martinez couldn’t handle it. He showed up at Alice’s apartment, called her constantly, and started harassing her friends. It was a relatively easy case, as far as these things went. Pete met Martinez’s father—City Councilman Miguel Martinez—in the parking lot of Casa Pepe restaurant on Bird Road and handed him a manila envelope that included a mini-drive loaded with his son’s voice mails, a printout that included a list of local reporters Pete had in his Rolodex, and a few black-and-white photos of his son acting the fool. Jose didn’t bother Alice again. Last Pete heard, he’d moved to New York to join a prestigious law firm.
That Alice ended up being Rick Blanco’s mistress was a strange coincidence. He felt the pieces start to click into place—fo
rming something that Pete could almost see. But was Pete starting to look into this—and enlisting Kathy’s help—because he was just that good a guy? Because he needed something meaningful to do? Or did the idea that maybe Emily’s picture-perfect husband was a bit tarnished hold some appeal? He tried to prevent his mind from wandering down that path.
“Yeah, actually,” Pete said. “I worked on something for her almost a year ago.”
“Yeah, according to what I could dig up, she was tight with Jose Martinez,” Kathy said. “And then, suddenly, she wasn’t. You have anything to do with that?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, looks like after all that went down, she needed some cash,” Kathy said. “So she took a secretarial—excuse me, executive assistant—job in Homestead, working for Rick.”
“Any idea how long she’s been missing?”
“Not sure. I made a few calls,” Kathy said. “She lives near Sunset Place, with a roommate. No family in Miami. They’re all in Philadelphia. No siblings, parents divorced. A few traffic infractions, but beyond that, her record’s squeaky clean.”
“That’s all you got?”
“You realize the Internet is not a magic genie bottle, right? There are limits to what I can dig up, even misusing my work database.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “You got a home address?”
“I do,” Kathy said. “But before I pass that along, can I ask what it is you’re doing here, Mr. I-don’t-do-PI-work?”
“I’m curious.”
“Is that a synonym for stupid these days?”
“Are you going to give me the address or not?”
“On one condition.”
Pete sighed. “What?”
“Let me help,” she said. “And if we find anything worthy of press, I call dibs.”
Pete thought about it for a second. “Sure, that’s fair. I don’t imagine we’ll stumble across Atlantis or anything remarkable by just talking to a missing girl’s roommate.”
“You never know,” Kathy said. “The cops have probably talked to her, though.”
“The cops are clueless,” Pete said. His track record with the police was spotty at best, despite his pedigree as the son of a lauded homicide detective. “And I have a condition of my own, if we’re going to do this.”
“Oh? What?”
“You don’t hold out on me,” Pete said.
“Excuse me?”
“Keep me in the loop,” Pete said. “You have sources. You know things. And I can tell you’re only giving me part of the story. What else did your calls dig up?”
Kathy was silent on the other end.
“Rick’s been asking around for her,” Kathy said. “Her roommate, her old job, her family.”
“Doesn’t sound like something a murderer would do,” Pete said.
“Right, which makes it the perfect thing for a murderer to do,” Kathy said.
“Are you free now?” Pete said.
“I have to file my column, but that’s close to final,” Kathy said. “I hate writing these feel-good pieces. This one’s about a kid who discovered his grandmother’s stamp collection, which apparently helped his family keep their house. Nice, but a dime a dozen.”
After the death of her father and her eventual reinstatement at The Miami Times following the Silent Death case, Kathy now held her father’s old job: local Miami-Dade columnist. The hours were flexible, the work was easy, and the pay was good, so Kathy tolerated it. But the parallels to Chaz’s life did not escape Pete. He could tell she was bored.
She rattled off the address to Pete.
“Meet me at her apartment in an hour?” he said.
“Make it forty-five.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sunset Place, a once-proud mall and haven for hoity-toity shops that had faded into a series of empty storefronts and chain restaurants, was about a half-hour drive from Pete’s house in Westchester. Shoehorned between South Miami and Coral Gables, Sunset Place—and the surrounding bars and restaurants—was cluttered with University of Miami students looking for fun and South Miami residents looking for the perfect crib for the baby’s room.
Pete turned the volume up on his car’s shitty stereo. Mick Jones sang about being lost in the supermarket. Pete nodded to the beat for a few seconds. It was happening again, he thought. That weird instinct that told him he had to be involved in something. Except it was electric, not like before, clouded and muffled by alcohol. No, this reminded Pete of his days covering sports teams and investigating the next big enterprise piece. The coach who lied on his resume. The player who had somehow hidden his DUI arrest. He could sense there was a question that needed to be answered. He just wasn’t sure what it was yet, or if he’d like the answer once he figured it out.
Alice Cline’s apartment was a few blocks north of the central Sunset Place stores, off US1 and across the street from Fox’s Lounge, a dive bar that served a great French onion soup but had seen better days. Pete pulled into a guest parking space adjacent to the small four-story apartment building and noticed Kathy’s silver Jetta a few spaces over. She was in the car, earbuds in and oblivious to the world outside. Pete got out and walked over, rapping his knuckles on her driver’s side window. She reacted with a start. She yanked the buds out of her ears.
“You’re here early,” Pete said, as Kathy’s window slid down.
“Does it surprise you that I didn’t want to stay a second longer at that place?”
“Can’t blame you.”
“What took you so long?”
Pete checked his phone.
“Impatient much?”
“Not at all,” Kathy said. “Just bored. All I had in the car to listen to was Amy’s Pixies playlist, which—apologies to Kim Deal—gets boring on the hundredth listen.”
Pete didn’t comment. Amy, like Mike, had been murdered by the Silent Death—a final casualty before Pete confronted the killer and uncovered his true identity: Pete’s high school friend, Javier Reyes. Amy had been Kathy’s best friend, and they’d all worked together at The Miami Times—Amy as the Books editor. She was tough, smart, and her help had been integral to finding Kathy. It had been over a year since her death. Kathy rarely mentioned her.
She got out of the car, slid her bag over her shoulder, and closed the door before turning to Pete.
“The roommate’s name is Janet Fornell. Her parents are Cuban, like you and everyone else in this godforsaken town,” she said. “She works down the street at Fox’s Lounge, a bar—”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“Oh, right. Of course you are.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” Kathy said. “You seem different. It’s nice.”
They started to walk toward the elevator, located in the middle of the first-floor lobby, which was empty and dilapidated. Pete didn’t notice much activity, either. There were a few cars in the lot, but he’d yet to see an actual person.
“It’s amazing what not drinking a bottle of vodka a day will do for your disposition,” Pete said. He pushed the UP button on the elevator.
“How long has it been?”
“A while. A few months.”
“That’s something.”
They stepped inside the elevator and Pete pushed the button for the third floor, exchanging a concerned look as the old elevator creaked to life. He let out a breath as the doors opened on Alice’s floor. They made a left toward the building’s west side, where the apartment was located—3H. Kathy knocked a few times and backed up, waiting for what was inside.
“Who is it?” a soft voice on the other side of the door said.
“Ms. Fornell?”
“Yes?”
“My name’s Pete Fernandez. I was wondering if you’d have a few minutes to talk about your roommate.”
They hadn’t discussed strategy beforehand. Pete hoped Kathy would follow his lead.
The door didn’t open. Kathy crossed her arms.
&
nbsp; “Are you with the police?”
“Not exactly,” Pete said. “I’m a…I’m a private investigator.”
Pete didn’t have to look at Kathy to see she had a smirk on her face.
They heard the latch and another lock turn, and watched as the door opened. Janet Fornell smiled as she backed into her tiny apartment, a signal for Pete and Kathy to come in. She was wearing sweat pants and a Voltron T-shirt, but they couldn’t hide her fit body and simple but strong facial features. Pete reminded himself to focus. Being smitten this early in the game wasn’t healthy.
“This is my colleague, Kathy Bentley,” Pete said.
“You write for the newspaper, no?”
Kathy nodded. “Yes, but that’s not why I’m here.”
Pete noticed that Janet’s expression had gone from somewhat welcoming to concerned.
“She’s a friend,” Pete said. “This isn’t for a story. She helps me on cases when she’s not working on the paper.”
“Sounds like bullshit, but OK,” Janet said. “Everything here is off the record. So, don’t go quoting me anywhere. I’m not some balsero that just came ashore.”
She walked them over to the apartment’s tiny living room. Pete and Kathy took a seat on the IKEA loveseat and Janet pulled up a chair from the dining room set that filled out the rest of the space. The kitchen, also connected to the living room, was off the main hallway. Pete didn’t notice many pictures, but one caught his eye: on a small table to his right and next to the couch was a framed photo—taken at a bar, Pete guessed, based on the giant mugs of beer Janet and Alice were hoisting up. They seemed happy. Alice’s dark brown hair flailed around wildly, and both of them wore a variety of beads. He pointed at it.
“Mardi Gras?”
“Right, but not in New Orleans,” Janet said, rubbing her palms on her sweatpants. “We just went down to Titanic, that UM bar a few miles from here.”
“I know it,” Pete said. “They do craft beers and burgers?”
“I think so, yeah. So, we were there,” Janet said. She looked at Kathy, then at Pete. “Tell me, what can I do? Are you trying to find Alice?”
Kathy turned to look at Pete.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I know Rick, Rick Blanco.”
