Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  Such people often take offense at an innocent word or phrase. On my beat, a story may solve a crime, capture a fugitive, or make a cop look heroic. But are cops ever happy? No. Some high-ranking paper shuffler sees the name of one of his troops in the newspaper and is jealous. He chews out his lieutenant, who browbeats his sergeant, who bawls out the street cop, who abuses the reporter. Shit tends to run downhill and spread out.

  A positive trait is that cops don’t hold grudges forever. They know life is too short. What about Reyes? I wondered. All I usually worry about is fairness and accuracy. But if the story somehow pissed Reyes off, would he hold my father’s diary hostage? Nonsense, I thought. No friend of my father’s would do that.

  Back at the paper I tried my mother again. She was out, a receptionist said, but expected back in the office shortly. So she was all right.

  I dug into the story about Hal and his night visitor. The cops leaned toward justifiable homicide, but the State Attorney’s office would make the final decision. Meanwhile, I learned that the dead burglar had a buck knife in his belt, cocaine in his system, and an extensive rap sheet. The largess of Florida’s early-release program had recently allowed him to walk free after serving six months of a five-year prison sentence. Not a pleasant person to meet for the first time at 3 A.M. in your living room. I suspected that Hal would call me. I almost hoped he would.

  I hit the SEND button, moved the story into the editing system, and called Charles Randolph’s parents. After the print and television coverage, Crime Stoppers had offered a thousand-dollar reward and Vera Verela’s manager had announced that the singer would post a five-thousand-dollar reward for information that led to Charles’s safe return.

  “Detective Soams called,” Cassie said, excitement ringing in her voice. “He’s following up some leads. He’s interested in the case again.”

  Publicity does tend to spark official interest, I thought cynically.

  The Randolphs recognized none of the names, parents, or addresses of the other boys. What I needed was a common denominator, a place, time, or individual the boys’ paths had crossed. Establishing a link might start to make some sense of their disappearances—but I had nothing.

  Eagerly I called Soams about the leads that had so excited the Randolphs. The tips he was checking looked lame, he admitted. There were unsubstantiated sightings from a number of people, mostly teenagers, who all claimed to know someone who had seen the boy since his disappearance. But when pressed to produce the actual witnesses each person would refer him to someone else, to another and then another and finally to nothing. The trails all evaporated, as though young Charles Randolph had become one of those will-o’-the-wisp urban myths never traceable to a source.

  Edwin Clower expected my call and we arranged to meet. He sold and serviced business machines. His secretary greeted me and showed me to his office. I will never understand men, I thought. Why would he dump Vanessa for this round little woman with a dour mouth and sensible shoes?

  Ruggedly handsome, with reddish-blond hair, gray eyes, and a firm handshake, Clower wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a tie. His suit jacket hung behind the door.

  There was a framed family portrait of him, Vanessa, and their children, on his desk. Had he placed it there for my benefit?

  “Lets grab some coffee,” he said, and we strolled out onto the sun-blasted pavement and into a small luncheonette two doors away in the same strip center.

  He ordered decaf as we slid into a plastic-covered booth.

  “Drinking messed up my stomach for a while there,” he explained, patting his midsection. “Got so I can’t even tolerate more than two cups a day. I’m in AA now.” His eyes fastened on the notebook I had removed from my purse. “What made you get into this now? I’m surprised you’re interested after all this time.”

  “Your ex-wife. She called after the story on the Randolph boy.”

  “That’s Vanessa,” he said with a sad pride. “She refuses to give up on David. Gave up on me a long time ago, but she won’t quit on him. She’s one helluva good mother.”

  “She said you’re a good father.”

  “She said that?” He looked interested. The waitress delivered our coffees and he stirred sugar into his. “What else did she say?”

  “That David got angry and took off after you two quarreled. That his disappearance went unreported for two days because she thought he was safe with you and you thought he’d gone home to her.”

  “That’s about it,” he said grimly. “I had been promising him a canoe trip, a long weekend, just the two of us upstate, along the Peace River. We got into it when I told him we had to postpone ‘cuz I had other plans.”

  “Doing what?”

  He leveled a pained gaze. “Guess Vanessa told you I was seeing someone.”

  “Your secretary?”

  He nodded. “Janine. We were planning a ski trip instead, to Colorado. David got really pissed. We had just gone through our first Christmas since the divorce. It wasn’t pretty. The kids were having a tough rime adjusting.”

  “Have you remarried?” He wasn’t wearing a ring.

  “Hell, no.” He looked alarmed at the thought.

  “Are you and she…?”—I tilted my head back toward his office—” still…?” One of the secret pleasures of reporting is that you can ask questions other people are too polite to ask.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “You thought—? That’s not Janine. That’s Sue Ann. Janine quit, got a job over at South Florida Motors. Last I heard she had a serious thing going with the owner. We busted up not long after David disappeared. The woman has no kids. Pity ’em if she ever does. Totally self-absorbed. Couldn’t understand why I was so upset. Raised holy hell every time I talked to Vanessa. Even accused David and his mother of faking the whole thing to get my attention.” He smiled ironically, shaking his head. “I would have given anything if she’d been right, that Vanessa and David had made the whole thing up. What a laugh. Neither one wanted any part of me at the time. I screwed up bad. Drinking, my business suffered, had to down-size.”

  I leaned forward, wanting him to focus. “Do you recall what David said before he left that night? Anything that might give us a clue as to exactly where he was going?”

  “I’ve been back over it all a thousand times.” He ran his fingers through his hair, teeth on edge. “It’s all my fault. If it hadn’t been for me, we wouldn’t have been divorced. If only I had stopped him from leaving that night…”

  “You can’t keep beating yourself up.”

  “Why not?” He shrugged hopelessly. “Vanessa will never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself. I keep saying, keep praying, he’s alive and that he will come home. Then maybe I can start to make amends. If we never see him again, if he’s gone for good, so’s my only chance.” His face started to collapse in on itself.

  I averted my eyes, pretending not to see his painful struggle for control. “There might be something you didn’t pick up on at the time, some small thing he said that could be relevant.”

  Clower gulped a deep breath and cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice was strained but strong, with a hint of the irate. “Said I wasn’t his father anymore and he never wanted to see me again. And this was a kid—” His face colored with anger. “I had Dolphin tickets on the fifty-yard line for the two of us on Sunday afternoon. That’s what he walked out on.”

  “Did you go to the game?”

  “What?”

  “Did you use the football tickets? Did you go?”

  He stared into his cup. “Took Janine. She didn’t like sports much.”

  “What did David take with him?”

  “Nothing. He left everything, his overnight bag, his toothbrush. Even a schoolbook his mother had sent with him. He was behind in history. You have to understand, all this happened in the heat of an argument. He tore out the door, slammed it so hard the walls rattled. I was mad as hell, yelling at him to come back. Last I saw,
he was crying, running toward One hundred and seventy-first street. We hadn’t had dinner yet. We’d sent out to Little Caesar’s for one of their giant combo pizzas. I figured he wouldn’t want to miss that and he’d be back. After it came I kept it warm in the oven for a couple of hours. He never showed, so I assumed he’d caught the bus and gone home.”

  “You didn’t call? It’s a long trip back to Surfside. He would have had to change buses twice.”

  “I know, I know. It was a chilly night and he didn’t even take his jacket. He was hungry. But he was a big boy and he’d made the trip over by bus once, with his sister, to surprise me. How was I to know he didn’t have any money in his pocket? His mother didn’t tell me until later. I shoulda called but I was in no mood. Vanessa had been after me to spend more time with the boy. It was another failure in my cap. I was in no mood to hear about it. Did Vanessa tell you about the reward?”

  I told him she had. “She say anything else about me?” He looked like a heartsick teenager. His eyes had the appearance of someone whose constant companion was misery.

  His ex-wife believed his story. So did I.

  I drove down to Clower’s house and parked the T-Bird in his empty driveway. No one was home. I walked to the front door and stood there for several moments, then stepped off the porch and headed toward 171st Street the way the missing boy did that night, looking around at what he saw, trying to see through his eyes, except that he was tearful, angry, running through a dark and chilly night four years ago and I was squinting through scalding sunlight on a brilliant summer day. The street, lined with modest homes, looked as though it hadn’t changed substantially in the past four years. No one would have heard the boy’s cries if he had been dragged into a car on that cold night when most people had their windows closed. But he could have been accosted or picked up anywhere between here and Surfside. I wondered if the detective had canvassed the bus drivers on duty that night. Probably too late to do any good now.

  I gazed up at a sky full of low, fast-moving clouds as though for a sign. “Where are you, David?” I murmured aloud. “Where did you go?”

  10

  The drive to Coconut Grove took twenty minutes. Emily and Michael Kearns operated a small plant nursery from their home. She was small and dark-haired, with a nervous tic that reminded me of myself under deadline pressure. Balding and overweight, with small mean blue eyes, he looked like a beer drinker to me. Tension crackled across their living room. It quickly became clear that Emily had interceded with her husband, a strict disciplinarian, to allow their boys to attend the carnival in the Grove the night they vanished. Now she had to cope not only with the disappearance of her sons but with the enduring animosity of their father.

  As we spoke she reached down to absently stroke a cat the color of smoke who rubbed against her ankles as though sensitive to her mood. When the animal warily approached, sniffed at my shoes, and stared up with huge golden eyes, Kearns muttered, “Will you git that rodent out of here? Can’t you see he’s bothering her?”

  “Oh no,” I said quickly. “He smells my cat, Billy Boots. It’s all right. I love animals.”

  Kearns looked disgusted and mentioned once more that his boys “never would have run off” had their mother listened to him. “She let ’em run wild. Spoiled, that’s what they are,” he said.

  The older boy, Michael, thirteen at the time, was described as outgoing and friendly, and idolized by his younger brother, William, who was shy and close to his mother. They had left that night, youthful spirits high, ten dollars each in their pockets. When they failed to return by ten-thirty, as promised, their father drove off to find them. He had no luck, though he did locate some of their friends who had seen them earlier, hurling baseballs at one of the game booths. Willie had been determined to win a teddy bear for his mother. At 1 A.M. the parents called the police and were instructed to call again if the boys failed to return by dawn. At dawn, the cops pointed out that kids having fun often lose track of time, stay out too late, and fear facing the music. They suggested that the parents check with other relatives and the boys’ friends.

  The carnival had left town by the time anyone in authority took the case seriously, if they ever did. Official theory was that the boys had probably run off in search of adventure and would return in their own good time.

  A missing-persons detective did catch the carnival in Atlanta, by phone. No one remembered the boys.

  “My back’s gone bad on me and there’s nobody ‘round here now to help with the heavy lifting,” their father complained. “Know how much shrubs weigh in those twenty-gallon containers? We was planting a hammock under the canopy of that tamarind tree out back, gonna edge it with wildflowers. It’s getting overrun now, still waiting till my back heals up or those boys come home.”

  The grim set of his jaw and a hint of malevolence around his eyes when he looked at his wife made me wonder if they had run away. If he was my father, I might.

  Emily Kearns followed me out to the T-Bird and stood hugging her arms as though cold, despite the temperature simmering in the upper nineties.

  “Do you have children, Ms. Montero?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “When you do,” she said, “never miss a chance to give ’em a hug. There is no security in this life, no way to know if you’ll get the chance to do it again.”

  She studied the ground. “I keep thinking of so many things I wish I had told them that evening. Find a policeman if you get lost. Don’t talk to strangers. When they talk to you, just turn and walk away. Horrible things pop into my mind.” She looked embarrassed. “I’ve got a very vivid imagination.”

  She leaned toward the car, her eyes bleak as I turned the key in the ignition. The last thing she said before I drove off was, “My boys didn’t run away.”

  Andrea Vitale was in uniform, ready to leave for work when I arrived. She lived in a southwest section complex called Bramblewood Park. A maze of small identical town houses surrounded a pool, playground, and tennis court. Each unit had its own tiny patio and two assigned parking spaces. What did they do when somebody threw a party? The narrow streets, with speed bumps, tight turns, and unexpected dead ends, were imaginatively named after letters of the alphabet. I soon realized, to my frustration, that the letters were not in sequence. Andrea Vitale lived at 402-B on D Street. But C Street was followed by G. Where the hell was D? Where the hell was I? There was no H, and I found myself rolling south on M. What a great hideout. No process server, stalker, or SWAT team could hunt down a quarry here. I drove around and around, gallumping over speed bump after speed bump, cursing the madman who had designed this maze and stopping periodically to plead with ball-playing children for directions. They shook their heads sadly and looked puzzled. They lived there. What hope was there for a stranger?

  A woman, in white shorts and carrying a tennis racket, got out of a Subaru with two girls about eleven or twelve. I tried a new approach. “Do you know where Butch Beltrán lived?”

  The youngsters stared, wide-eyed. “He’s not coming back, is he?” The woman’s voice rang with concern. Without waiting for an answer, she hustled the girls into the house. His neighbors did not seem ready to offer reward money for Butch Beltrán’s safe return.

  At long last, I stumbled upon D Street, purely by chance, and found 402-B. My relief was tempered by the fact that I had no idea how I had found it and prayed I would never have to come back.

  Andrea Vitale was in her late thirties, attractive, solidly built, with warm, sherry-colored eyes and luxuriant light brown hair. She looked slightly worn around the edges but obviously possessed a smart-aleck streak. “Any trouble finding it?” she asked pertly.

  “No, not at all,” I lied. What I wanted to say was: No wonder Butch hasn’t come home. He’s scurrying around out there somewhere in the maze like a confused rodent, trying to make his way through the alphabet.

  A framed photograph of the boy, missing since March, sat on a natural woo
d bookcase. T-shirt, baggy shorts, and a black baseball cap worn backward. Caught forever in motion, arms extended for balance, face set in concentration, he affected the scissored body language of a surfer, hurtling through space on a skateboard.

  The smaller school photo excited my interest. Gleaming blond hair, blue eyes, so like the others.

  I accepted her offer of coffee. She positioned our cups and a plate of oatmeal cookies on the coffee table between us. “His favorites,” she said, perching on a beige tweed sofa. “I still buy them every week, and wind up eating them myself. I keep cooking for two. Force of habit. He better come back soon, my clothes are all too tight.” She laughed, her eyes roving the empty room. “I miss him,” she said flatly. “We don’t always get along, but we’re the two musketeers. We’ve been through a lot together. I’ve been both a father and a mother, by necessity. It’s hard to be both a tough taskmaster and a loving mother to a high-spirited kid like him.” She smiled fondly. “He’s got a pure wild streak, like his dad, but I think he’s smarter, or will be as an adult. If I can just get him through adolescence in one piece,” she said, groaning.

  “Any chance he’s with his father?”

  She shook her head, her look certain.

  “He’s on the NASCAR circuit, occasional driver, mostly mechanic. Two summers ago when Butch was driving me crazy I sent him to spend some time with his dad. An absolute disaster. Butch even appreciated me, briefly, after he came back—three weeks early, by the way. Sure messed up my summer romance. Butch is always good at that.” She sighed good-naturedly. “I’ve spoken to his father, in Vegas, twice since Butch disappeared. He hasn’t heard a thing. We divorced nearly ten years ago. I got married again right away but it only lasted about a year. Butch has never had a steady male influence on a regular basis. It’s just the two of us.”

  “What happened when he disappeared?”

  “I’ve been working nights at Coral Reef Hospital, in ICU. I took a late shift for the pay differential. We needed the money. Butch is your typical gimme, gimme, gimme All-American kid. I try hard to do right by him, you know, since he hasn’t got a father and all. So it’s always something, a one-hundred-seventy-dollar Planet Earth skateboard here, a hundred-dollar pair of Air Jordan Nikes there. I dread the day he’s old enough to drive.