Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  “I got home at one A.M. that night, as usual, but he wasn’t up watching TV or in bed. I always bring him home a snack and we sit up and talk for a while. But he wasn’t here.” She shrugged. “After the fact, the neighbors told me that every night after I left for work, he’d go out, then scoot back in just before I got home. Had it timed right down to the minute.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “Hanging out at Cutler Ridge Mall, at the video arcade, the movies, playgrounds, friends’ houses. I found some kids and the manager who had seen him at about ten that night at the arcade. Nobody saw him leave. He just didn’t come home.”

  “Would have been more neighborly if they had clued you in before he disappeared,” I murmured.

  “Well, we aren’t too popular around here. He was in some trouble last year. I think they hoped he’d get in another jam before I found out what he was doing.”

  I thought of the woman in shorts and her reaction at the prospect of Butch’s return.

  “They wrote a story about Butch in your newspaper,” Andrea said brightly. “But you couldn’t use his name because he was a juvenile.”

  “What kind of story?” What was the name of this place? I thought. Bramblewood?

  “They charged him with arson.” She tossed out the word casually, as though it had been nothing more serious than a parking ticket. “But we got it all straightened out. That was more than a year ago.”

  “The bombs?” I said, with a sudden revelatory flash.

  “He never intended to hurt anyone. He’s a very curious boy, very bright.” She went to the sideboard, rummaged in a drawer, and handed me a folded clipping. BOY BOMBER TERRORIZES NEIGHBORHOOD.

  It was from the News. I had been on vacation at the time, on Florida’s west coast, in the arms of Homicide Lieutenant Kendall McDonald. Another reporter wrote the story.

  Butch had blown up a neighbor’s air-conditioning unit on Fourth of July weekend. It was no mindless bombing; he’d had a reason. His mother had complained that it was too noisy and kept her awake. The unit was totally destroyed, as was one wall of the town house. When police investigated, neighborhood children tipped them about Butch’s other incendiary concoctions.

  The entire town-house complex had been evacuated. Bomb-sniffing dogs led their handlers to three pipe bombs in Butch’s bedroom.

  He was eleven at the time.

  The news story quoted a neighbor who had forbidden her children to associate with Butch after she caught her six-year-old halfway out the door with a clock. The child explained that Butch needed it “to build a time bomb.”

  “The incident,” as Andrea Vitale referred to it, “didn’t make us too popular in the neighborhood, but Butch was adjusting very well.”

  “What happened in Juvenile Court?”

  “We had to go to family counseling, group sessions at Jackson. After two or three times they said we didn’t have to come back. He’s been fine since,” she insisted.

  Sure, I thought, sneaking out every night to do who knows what, missing five months now, but otherwise, he’s absolutely fine. The memory of Alex Aguirre’s smoldering car made me see Butch’s stunts as more than childhood pranks.

  Her eyes had drifted to the photos. “I’m just so damn mad at that kid for not calling to let me know he’s okay. When he does turn up, I’m gonna give him a humongous welcome-home hug, then shake him till his teeth rattle.”

  “So you feel he’s all right? He has run away before?”

  “Yeah.” She bit her lip and tension crept into her voice. “But this time it’s different. He’s starting to scare me.”

  “How is it different?”

  “There was no argument, like the other times, nothing to trigger it. Everything was fine. Things were good in school, they had put him in some classes for gifted students so he wasn’t as bored. And he was in no trouble that I know of. What scares me most,” she said, brushing cookie crumbs off her uniform, “is that I have no idea what he’s up to this time. He was never gone more than a few days before. Even then, he couldn’t resist calling or sneaking in and out, playing games, when I was at work. He’d always call, you know, ‘Look at me, Ma.’ What he’s always wanted most is attention. He got none from his father. I gave what I could, but I was always busy supporting us. Every time the phone rings I expect to hear him say, ‘Miss me, Ma?’ But it’s not happening and that’s odd. Some people around here are probably glad he’s gone. But nobody realizes that this boy is gonna be somebody some day.” She smiled. “I wish you could meet him. This kid has really got what it takes.”

  She reached for another cookie. “One other difference. He didn’t take any of his toys this time. The only thing he may have had with him was his Swiss Army knife. You know the kind, it’s also a nail file, scissors, a can opener. He got it for his twelfth birthday and it’s not here anywhere. He probably carried it during his after-dark adventures, for protection. He’s totally nonviolent but he’s savvy, aware of the danger out there. I was always straight with him about that.”

  She looked up at me, puzzled, as she munched. “Butch is not the kind of kid who simply disappears and is never heard from again.” She sighed. “He should have come to somebody’s attention by now, if you know what I mean.”

  She reached absently for another cookie and chewed thoughtfully.

  It was easier to find my way out of Bramblewood than it was to find my way in. I didn’t even notice the speed bumps. My mind raced, stringing the facts together in my head. When I got back to the office I checked my messages. None from my mother. Had she joined the missing boys in Never Never Land? I pictured her lost in Bramblewood, with Butch.

  Was she settling up with me for usually fading to return her calls promptly? I left her another message.

  Phone checks of all the smaller police departments turned up no other cases. As I worked on the story, I thought about asking if the art department could put together a locator map marking where each boy was last seen. Had it revealed a pattern, it might have worked, but I tried it on the big map of Dade County mounted on the wall above my desk, placing pins at each vanishing point. Nothing. Then I tried a yellow pin at each home address, a blue at each school. Nada. No geographic pattern, rhyme, or reason. The carnival cases were on a Thursday night. Charles Randolph vanished Saturday morning, David Clower, Saturday night. Lars Sjowall walked off the map on a Tuesday afternoon, and Butch Beltrán sneaked out for the last time on a Wednesday night. No bodies or belongings found, no ransom demands made. No parents wealthy enough to pay any substantial sum. The only common link was physical appearance. That was what it boiled down to: age, general description, and the feet that they had vanished as completely as footprints in melting snow.

  My doubting editors resisted. What sold the story was the pictures. The lost boys looked so remarkably alike.

  Side by side, their young feces stripped across Sundays local page, they resembled brothers, or cousins. WHERE ARE THEY? the headline asked. “No Trace of Missing Boys” said the subhead. The special section on Cuba, an insert, ran the same day. Lottie’s color photo of Reyes at the helm of the Libertad was out front along with the first few grafs of my story, which jumped to the inside.

  Not a bad day’s work.

  11

  I spent the early morning eluding Seth Goldstein, who seemed bent on becoming my shadow, and pursuing my mother, who was apparently eluding me. Her machine now recorded messages. If she ever played them she would hear half a dozen from me, ranging from cute and coy, to hurt and bewildered, to angry and demanding that she return my call. Then I covered a story and my problems faded by comparison.

  While I was fuming about my mothers failure to return my messages, a man named José Caliente was experiencing real live horror. Bumper-to-bumper traffic ground to a halt, trapping his small ice cream truck on the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. When signals sounded and warning lights flashed, he leaned on his horn. Nobody moved. The Cadillac in
front of him was hemmed in. The bus on his bumper had no way to back up. The train whistle shrilled. The bus driver screamed, “Jump! Run!” Caliente hesitated, probably hoping to save his truck, his sole means of support for his wife and four children. He did jump, too late. The oncoming train hurled him seventy-five feet.

  His overturned truck was dragged even farther. Strangers ran, but not to help. They swarmed over his truck, fighting over the cash box. Others stole all the ice cream. Those with stronger stomachs stripped what remained of José Caliente of his wallet, wrist-watch, and the medal of the Virgin worn on a silver chain around his neck.

  Age forty-five. He could have been any of us, caught in this urban jungle. Had I not been deadline pressed and impatient for reader reaction to my story on the boys, I would have been numbed. Instead, I barreled down the expressway like a battering ram, exceeding the speed limit. Striding into the newsroom, intent and focused, composing the lead in my head, I gasped. My desk was all but obscured by orchids, lavish, sexy white catdeyas, sprays of yellow cymbidiums and tiny oncidiums emerging like butterflies from a basketful of curling willow and bamboo. My mouth dropped. McDonald. How did he always know the right thing to do when I needed him most? McDonald. I did miss his square-jawed cragginess and gentle touch.

  “Is it your birthday, Britt?” Ryan asked eagerly from his desk behind me.

  “Nope.” I smiled slyly. “There are other reasons for flowers.” Every eye in a newsroom full of snoops was riveted on me. I was centerstage.

  “Britt’s got a new boyfriend!” Howie Janowitz sang out.

  A crowd clustered. “Who are they from?” demanded Barbara DeWitt, a no-nonsense reporter who covers the city commission.

  “Yeah,” Lottie said wistfully, “check out the card.”

  Gretchen and Ron Sadler elbowed closer.

  I plucked the small square envelope from a slender branch. He spent so much, I thought, eyes swimming as I tore it open. He shouldn’t have.

  He didn’t.

  “You make the Montero name proud,” it said. Juan Carlos Reyes had signed the card.

  Stunned, I slipped it into my skirt pocket. Too late.

  A cry of triumph from Ron Sadler. “Reyes! Juan Carlos Reyes sent them!” He cocked an expressive eyebrow at Gretchen as if to say, “I knew it.”

  “I can’t believe he did this,” I murmured, face ablaze, as Reyes’s name rippled across the newsroom.

  “It appears he liked your story,” Gretchen said archly.

  “He liked something,” another voice crowed.

  What could I say? Avoiding their eyes, I shoved the basket aside, along with a promising stack of messages I had no time to answer, and drew up my chair in businesslike fashion. “I’m on deadline,” I said. “I’ve got to get this story done.”

  The curious began to wander away when I ignored them. The funereal fragrance of the flowers seemed eerily appropriate as I began to translate my notes about José Caliente into a story.

  Had McDonald sent the orchids, I would have been thrilled. Reyes’s taste, like his clothes, home and manners, was exquisite. There was no ignoring the breathtaking arrangement. Copy boy to publisher, all paused in passing.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Birthday?”

  “Somebody likes you.”

  And more directly, “Who sent those?”

  I finished my story and tried to conceal the basket and its protruding branches beneath my desk. Faithful readers regularly bombard me with crank letters, hate mail, death threats, subpoenas, and Santerfa curses. Flowers were rare. If this signaled a trend, I would know I had lost my touch.

  “Told ya about Reyes.” Lottie chorded. “That hombre’s sure got the hots for you.”

  “Not you too,” I groaned. “You should have seen Ron and Gretchen.”

  “Ran into him in the lobby last night.” Her expression was quizzical. “Could have sworn the man was wearing blusher.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  She perched on the edge of my desk, wearing black Wrangler jeans, a ruffled shirt, and handsdtched leather boots. “You’ve got admirers of all ages lined up and panting: Reyes, Seth.”

  “Sure, one old enough to be my father…”

  “He might be,” she said.

  “… and the other a twerpy twelve-year-old. You haven’t heard about the ax killer yet.” I told her about Hal.

  “Sounds charming,” she said. “Speaking of which, Stosh has a big trial coming up and wants to know if you’ll cover it.”

  “Oh no. He’s back?”

  She grinned sheepishly. “The funeral arrangement was a misunderstanding, a mixup. He was so embarrassed and apologetic. In fact, he’s buying me something. A big-deal present, top secret.”

  “What do you think it is?” What else could he steal from a cemetery? I wondered.

  Smiling, she shook her head. “No clue.” I liked seeing her happy. Maybe she could transform the Polish Prince. They were certainly a striking couple, he tall and blond, she tall and red-haired. But he’d have to be hog-tied and branded before I’d believe it.

  “I told him you probably wouldn’t cover it,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a civil case. You wrote the initial story. Remember LaFontana Pierre? That Haitian woman who burst into flames on her birthday?”

  “The one who survived.” I nodded; who could forget? I had covered four identical cases in a year. “A civil suit?” I was puzzled. “Who is she suing, and for what? The woman accidentally turned herself into a human torch during a voodoo ceremony.”

  Lottie shrugged. “The landlord, the gas company, the stove manufacturer.”

  “But how…?”

  “Stosh says she lit her kitchen stove at midnight to warm up some milk and a defective burner spit out a two-foot flame that set her nightgown on fire. Burnt it right off.”

  “Lottie! She was taking a lucky bath! Everybody knows that.”

  The lucky bath, a ritualistic cleansing ceremony, is performed at midnight on one’s birthday to guarantee good fortune in the year ahead. The celebrant chants a prayer, provided by a Haitian houngan, or priest, while bathing in perfume, surrounded by lighted candles. The flames, the chant, and the fragrance are to lure the spirits, who will answer prayers to win the lottery or a husband with a good job.

  LaFontana Pierre had done as the priest instructed. Squatting hopefully inside a circle of candles, she poured perfume over her naked body at the stroke of midnight on her twenty-fifth birthday.

  Instantly her luck changed—from bad to worse. Before she could even chant the magic words, she was enveloped in flames. The oil-based perfume was eighty percent alcohol, and the candles ignited the vapors. Alcohol burns at a higher temperature than most flames.

  She ran screaming into the street. Burned over forty percent of her body, she was lucky. The first three victims had died.

  Lottie shrugged. “She says it was the stove.”

  “Please. The stove happened to malfunction at midnight? On her birthday? What about all that candle wax on the floor? Lord, Lottie. How’d she get Americanized so fast? Where did she learn about frivolous lawsuits?”

  Why did I wonder? The Polish Prince must have been drawn like a moth to the flame. Now he was trying to improve her luck—along with his own.

  “Bathing in perfume on your birthday is a damn sight more civilized than decapitating chickens’ heads and splashing blood all over. It might even work. Who knows? My birthday’s next month,” she said speculatively.

  “Lottie, don’t you dare!” I yelped. “Don’t even think about it!” I ignored her obvious reference to my Aunt Odalys and her practice of Santerfa, something I had shared with Lottie after we covered the Miami murder of a South American drug dealer whose local stronghold resembled Satanism Central, littered with palo mayombe voodoo icons, buckets of blood, and animal entrails.

  “I thought Stosh tried only crimina
l cases,” I said.

  “He knows the victims family, represented her cousins on murder charges,” she explained. “Wants to expand his horizons. Says if he can try complex criminal cases he can try complex civil cases. Nothing wrong with tackling new challenges.” She sounded defensive. “He says it’s a clear case of prejudice; nobody would even mention voodoo if his client were from Utah. Maybe there really was a defective burner.”

  Lottie’s loyalty is a sterling quality, but misplaced in the case of the Prince. Love is blind. I almost wanted to cover the trial, to see him and his client try to sell that story to a jury of Miamians.

  I was in a rush to return my messages. Would there be word from Charles, David, Michael, William, Lars, or Butch? We were now on a first-name basis. But first, the orchids.

  Calling to thank Reyes would give me a chance to ask about my father’s diary. I felt an anticipatory tingle as I reached for the phone. At that moment it rang.

  “Somebody here to see you, Britt.” The lobby security guard sounded like he was confronting some disreputable character.

  “Oh shoot,” I said impatiently, when he identified my visitor. “Does he know I’m here? Okay, send him up.” I sighed.

  Reyes obviously did not hate my story about him. But somebody did.

  Jorge Bravo hobbled toward my desk leaning on a cane, his gait painfully slow. His right hip and leg had been shattered by a grenade during one of his abortive commando raids on Cuba. Typically macho, he always derided it as a wimpy, maricona grenade, because it failed to kill him.

  His clothes were inexpensive, clean, and neatly pressed. He wore dark glasses. Balding, with a fierce mustache, he was shorter than the image he projected in pictures. But despite that and his handicap, he carried himself with a dignity belied by his simple work pants and cotton guayabera. He also wore an expression of outrage. He’d been wearing it since the Bay of Pigs invasion failed in 1961.