I asked to see the open missing-persons files, wondering how far back to check. Some of the cases that filled two file drawers were older than Causey, in his twenties and much more enthusiastic about his off-duty security work for movie crews on location than in tracking lost people.
“Most of ’em are not lost,” he said cheerfully, leaning back in his chair, hands locked behind his head. They know where they are, but we don’t”
He laughed at his own joke, as I arbitrarily decided to go back five years.
Seated at an empty desk, suspecting that this was a silly waste of time, I flipped through file after file. Two possibilities: Samuel Lifter, thirteen, and Derek Malone, eleven.
The Lifter boy: reported missing three years ago. The report on the Malone youngster was a year older. Both were tall for their ages, fair-haired and blue-eyed.
Lifter had threatened to run away because he hated to take his medication. He was epileptic. The day he disappeared he had been swimming with friends, over at Crandon Park Beach on Key Biscayne. When it came time to go home, they couldn’t find him. The Malone boy had had an altercation with a teacher at Nautilus Junior High and hadn’t returned home from school that day. There were no notations in the files that the cases had ever been resolved.
I dialed the Lifter number, wondering if the family still lived there.
A woman answered.
I introduced myself. “I’m calling about your son, Samuel.”
Her voice became cold. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” I assured her. “I wanted to find out if you’ve heard from him, if he’s come home.”
She gasped. Samuel Lifter had been found, drowned in the surf, the day after he was reported missing. The official theory was that he had skipped his medication, suffered a seizure and drowned unseen during the beach outing. A strolling honeymoon couple had stumbled upon his body in the water the next morning. Samuel Lifter had been resting in the family plot at Shalom Memorial Gardens these past three years while still listed in the Miami Beach Police Department’s active missing-persons file.
Apologizing profusely, I shot a look to kill at Officer Causey, oblivious at his desk, telling someone on the phone about how he had been this close to Sharon Stone during shooting for the big new action flick on location in South Beach.
I dialed the Malone home with more trepidation.
A teenager answered. “Hi,” I said, “I’m calling from the Miami Beach Police Department. We’re updating our files and I wondered about the status of Derek Malone. He was reported missing four years ago.”
“Derek?”
“Yes, is he still missing?”
“Christ, no.” The boy laughed. “I think I remember that. My brother got sent to the vice principal’s office by his teacher, got scared, and took off. Hopped a bus to my grandmother’s in Hallandale that night. She brought him home the next day. That was four freaking years ago. I love it! The cops are still looking for him! Duh.”
“Thank you,” I said sweetly, “and my regards to Derek.”
I flipped both files onto Causey’s desk, convinced that the only way he would spot a missing person was if one wandered across a movie set.
“You owe me,” I said, picking up my things. “I just cleared two cases for you.”
“Thanks, Britt.” He put his palm over the mouthpiece and beamed boyishly. “Wanna stay and do a few more?”
I drove eight miles north to Surfside, a tiny eight-block-long oceanfront municipality that stretches from Eighty-eighth Street north to Ninety-sixth and from the Atlantic Ocean west to Biscayne Bay.
Huge equipment blocked Surfside’s main drag, narrowing traffic to one lane. Signs warned that a twenty-mile-an-hour speed limit was strictly enforced. No problem. I crawled along at eight miles an hour, the top speed possible in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The desk sergeant at the twenty-one-man department adjacent to the Town Hall did not recall the Clower case, but the lone detective in the building obligingly dug it out for me. Had it been a murder the county would be handling it, the file would be unavailable, and the cops tight-lipped, but missing persons are a routine nuisance.
I scanned David Clower’s file. His mother had reported him missing on Monday, after calling her ex-husband to find out why he had not returned the boy. Assuming father and son were bonding, sharing quality time, she had been reluctant to interrupt sooner. David had been gone since about seven o’clock Saturday night when he slammed angrily out of his father’s place in South Miami. I wondered aloud if there were independent witnesses to the boy’s departure. Did the father have a record? Was he a drinker? Was there was a history of violence between father and son?
“Gawd, Britt,” the detective said. “You’re a suspicious woman.” He knew nothing about the case. The file was sparse and had been referred to Metro-Dade because the boy had apparently disappeared in county jurisdiction. No way to know if he had ever made it back to the Beach or to Surfside.
There was a picture. His mother was right. David Clower was a dead ringer for Charles Randolph. They could have been brothers.
No other cases fit the profile. Most people who get lost in Surfside are ancient wanderers, confused senior citizens unable to find their way home because their memories have short-circuited, convincing them it is 1954 again and they are back in Brooklyn, or they are elderly desperadoes who march off in protest, angry at their current caretakers or living arrangements. Spunky, elusive, and evasive, they are eventually rounded up and trundled home, like it or not.
The Clower house was just a few blocks away. In Surfside everything is just a few blocks away. I rejoined the traffic jam to drive by on the chance someone would be there. The house was painted white, a neat one-story bungalow with a one-car garage.
I rang the bell and waited as a bright yellow front loader groaned by just a dozen feet away from the small front porch. A tarp covered what looked like an old metal love seat. After a delay, a masked woman inched open the door. She wore a mask.
Her nose and mouth were covered. The only people I have seen wearing similar masks, other than medical personnel, are homicide detectives dealing with badly decomposed corpses.
“Hi,” I said uncertainly, introducing myself. “Did I interrupt something?” Was she performing surgery on her kitchen table? Or something worse?
She pulled down her mask. “Come in,” she blurted, hustling me inside as though a posse were hot on my heels. “Quick!” She slammed the door shut behind us with a sigh of relief. “Whew!” She sucked in a deep breath and rubbed at her reddened eyes. “That roadwork coats everything with dust. They’ve been at it for three months now and my allergies are driving me crazy. It’s impossible to keep it out of here. The dust and the fumes filter in through every nook and cranny.”
She swallowed another gulp of air and smiled. “Thanks for coming.” Like her missing son, Vanessa Clower was fair-haired and blue-eyed. In her late thirties, she was slim-hipped, wearing blue jeans and a paint-spattered, faded blue T-shirt. An artist. She worked at home.
The inside of the house shone, sterile and shiny, no rugs, doilies, or heavy drapes, as though she had cleared the decks to better combat the clouds of powdery dust and grit churned up by the equipment outside.
“The only relief is when it rains,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “There are still months to go, they’re replacing the town’s entire sewer system and not a minute too soon. You should see the standing water when we have a shower. Come on out here. I’ll just be a minute. I’m working on something.”
I followed as she padded barefoot to a Florida room at the rear of the house, far from the din in the street. Two large canvases rested side by side on the floor, a carpet of newspapers beneath them. One was blank, the other had been sprayed with glossy black enamel. She hunkered down over the black one and began to squeeze lines, blobs, and squiggles of rich, vivid color directly onto the canvas from big thick white plastic tubes mark
ed Mars Black, Naphthol Crimson, Quinacridone Violet, Yellow Ochre, and Raw Sienna. I itched to try it. It looked like fun, like the finger-painting I loved in kindergarten until I got in trouble for taking off shoes and socks and winding up with paint between my toes, on my knees, and all over my clothes.
She added shades of Burnt Umber and Permanent Green Light at the bottom, liberal amounts of Cobalt Blue across the top and Indo Orange Red, streaming like sunlight across the center. Then she carefully placed the second canvas face down on the first, took a heavy wooden rolling pin and rolled it out as colors squished out the sides, like mashing down a burger loaded with catsup, mustard, and mayo.
I watched, fascinated, as she expertly peeled apart the canvases, now fascinating mirror images of riotous color. She added a rapier-blade slash of white across the face of each, then picked up what looked like a large corrugated drop ceiling panel, a network of tiny open plastic windows, aligned it atop the first canvas, and, still barefoot, stepped carefully onto the panel. She walked back and forth several times, pressing it evenly onto the canvas. When she peeled away the panel, the canvas was imprinted with a mosaic-screen-like finish. She completed the same process on the second canvas.
“That’s it,” she said, smiling, wiping her hands on a rag. “You have to work fast before it dries.”
“What do you call this?”
She cocked her head. “Abstract expressionism.”
“No, I mean this technique.”
She shrugged. “Just something I evolved on my own. Everybody has their own style. I’m getting these ready for the Labor Day Taste of the Arts show in Fort Lauderdale.”
Nice, though my taste in art is more traditional. I never understand people who pay big bucks for canvases daubed by chimps or performing elephants who wield paintbrushes with their trunks. She must have read my look. “Several new office complexes are using these companion pieces together. They sell for about twelve hundred dollars a set,” she said casually. “Seven fifty when they’re sold individually.”
I was impressed.
“Would you like a glass of orange juice?”
I followed her into the kitchen. The appliances were gleaming chrome, the only personal touch a child’s drawings posted on the refrigerator along with a color photo. She, her son, and a little girl about four, their smiles captured at a beach picnic.
“My daughter,” she said, pouring orange juice from a glass pitcher. “She’s eight now, in school today. I always loved working at home when the kids were small. Now I wish I had someplace to go.” We sat in her breakfast nook as she repeated the details of her son’s disappearance.
“We’ve tried everything,” she said softly. “We’re absolutely baffled.”
She knew exactly where I was going, taking no offense when I began to question her ex-husband’s story.
“I believe him,” she said simply. “For all his faults, Edwin is not a violent man. We broke up after he started something with the new secretary he’d hired. She knew we’d been having problems and moved right in on him. That was just the final blow to a shaky relationship. I blame him, as he does himself, for letting David walk out.
“He’s a good father, but it was the macho factor. They are so alike, those two. Neither one likes to admit he’s wrong. He thought David would be back. When he wasn’t, he assumed he’d come home. The games people play.” Her curly shoulder-length hair bounced as she shook her head.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She glanced at the happy photo on the fridge. “He’s out there somewhere and I don’t see how he could be alone. He’s not a resourceful boy, he couldn’t live off the land. It’s been so long, now. Would you like some tea?”
She got up quickly, poured bottled water into a stainless steel teakettle, switched on a burner, and sat down again.
“I was struck by your story and that other boy’s picture in the paper. The resemblance. And I admit that I was jealous that he got the press and the attention when nobody seems to care that David is missing.”
“You should have called. I didn’t know.”
“I tried to contact the media. I called a TV station once, when they had all the publicity about that Miami college girl who disappeared in Atlanta. But if it’s not a tiny child or a beautiful young woman, they’re not interested.”
“You think he hitchhiked?”
She shrugged and sighed. “He had no money with him. I think he may have done it before, although I had warned him.”
“Is he street smart? Could he handle himself if somebody picked him up … and got weird?”
Gingerly, she touched her tongue to the corner of her mouth as though it was painfully tender. “To a degree, the way most kids are street smart these days. If the person was a criminal with a gun or a knife … no. My son was only twelve when he was taken.”
“You don’t think he ran away?”
“No,” she said, as the teakettle began to whistle. She went to a shiny white cabinet, removed two mugs and a tin of tea bags. “Initially I entertained that possibility. He was disgusted and angry about our divorce. So was I. My husband had dumped me for the new secretary he’d hired. He was mad as hell at his dad that night—but he would never stay away this long. And he wasn’t mad at me.” She placed a steaming mug in front of me and resumed her seat. “He loves us, he likes his school, and he gets along well with his sister. And he likes his creature comforts, his bike, his video games, his own TV in his room, his favorite foods in the fridge. What’s to run from?”
She looked at me, her eyes hopeful, as though I might provide the answer. I had none.
She stirred her tea and put her spoon down carefully. “It’s a constant pain, like a knife twisting in my heart every time the phone or the doorbell rings. I always think it’s him, or about him. It’s odd, I developed all these allergies, at my age, since this happened. My work has become very dark.” She gazed toward the Florida room.
“The innocence is gone,” she decided, nodding, then raised her eyes to mine. “The worst possible truth is better than being left in limbo like this.
“I’ll offer a reward,” she said briskly. “Edwin and I have discussed it. We can offer five thousand dollars.”
We finished our tea and her wide eyes followed as I got up to leave. “When are you coming back?” she asked matter-of-factly, as though it were a given.
“Soon,” I promised, hesitating. “I’ll call you.”
I escaped the dust storm, traveling at a crawl until traffic began to move at Seventy-ninth Street, then drove west to the new Metro-Dade police headquarters near the Palmetto Expressway. There I found the case of Lars Sjowall, age fourteen, slender, blond, blue-eyed. A dozen Swedish exchange students had visited Miami for a week before returning home after a year in this country. The night before their departure, Lars wanted to see a horror movie playing at a multiplex within walking distance of their motel. None of his companions wanted to join him, so he went alone.
They never saw him again. Police theorized that he didn’t want to leave this country and had run off to see more of America. He left behind his passport, money, clothes, his toothbrush, and all the gifts and souvenirs he had planned to take home to his family in Sweden. Neither they nor his host family in Indiana ever heard from him.
That was two years ago.
I also checked out Butch Beltrán. Still missing. The detective had recently spoken to a family member who had called for information. Butch had run away before, but had always returned in days. This time it had been five months.
I made a pit stop at the office to write the German tourist story. The fugitive and his key to the city were long gone.
Then I went to Miami police headquarters and found two more. William and Michael Kearns, twelve-and thirteen-year-old brothers, missing for nearly a year. Both slender, fair-haired, blue-eyed. Went to a carnival in the Grove. Never came home. Runaways, the cops assumed.
Something prickled at t
he back of my neck as I looked at their pictures.
Dade County sprawls over 2,109 square miles. Two and a half million people live in Greater Miami, which has a vast unincorporated area and twenty-seven municipalities. Most have their own police departments. All take missing-persons reports.
I still had twenty-one police departments to check.
5
I passed through the guarded gate and cruised the shaded stretch of Garden Drive where Charles Randolph was last seen. Golden afternoon sunlight splashed through a lush canopy of foliage. Serenity reigned behind the walled estates of the rich and powerful. The only people visible were a uniformed nanny pushing her tiny charge in a pram, and some yardmen at work removing coconuts and cutting back the branches of top-heavy trees. The property owner had probably been spooked by weatherman scare tactics. One tabloid-style TV show even plays the theme from Jaws when reporting the formation of tropical storms. Every year forecasters solemnly announce that South Florida is overdue for the Big One since we haven’t been hit by a hurricane since 1965.
I ignored my incessantly chirping beeper. Gretchen. That woman did not know when to quit. She paged me again, over and over and over, until I finally yanked the damn thing off my belt and flung it into the backseat. Whatever she wanted could wait, I thought, hoping it was only her usual annoying petty antics and not some major breaking news story that I was missing. There was no urgency in the routine chatter on my police scanner, except for an overturned truck that had spilled an entire load of roofing nails across the fast lane on the big curve of the Palmetto Expressway. Another rush hour from hell.
The more I brainstormed about the missing boys, the more I kept arriving back at square one. Apparently they didn’t know each other, attend the same school, belong to the same scout troop, or live in the same neighborhood. Charles Randolph was cheerful and industrious. David Clower was angry about his parents’ divorce. Butch Beltrán apparently had a troubled past and a history of running away. Lars Sjowall was alone, six thousand miles from home. I knew little about the Kearns brothers.
Act of Betrayal Page 7
