Act of Betrayal

by Edna Buchanan

  The usual drive home took forty minutes instead of ten. Bridges were opening, bringing road traffic to a standstill in order to let high-masted boats through. The roads were becoming a nightmare, and it had only just begun.

  I thought of my hurricane supplies, left untouched from year to year, bottled water and a few outdated cans of tuna. I had plenty of pet food but needed to stock up on candles, batteries, bread, and ice. The Publix parking lot was full but I found a space on the street nearby when another car pulled out.

  I walked into my supermarket and stood still in shock.

  Bedlam reigned. Most counters were already empty. The bread was gone, the bottled water and batteries were gone. They were already out of ice. Frantic shoppers, panic buyers, carts piled high with anything and everything, were rushing through the store, several fighting bitterly over the last few cans of soft drinks. I wanted to grab half a dozen ten-pound sacks of Kitty Litter to sandbag my front door just in case, but it was too chaotic I’d never get out of there.

  I turned and walked out with nothing. Car horns blared, tempers flared, and there were two fender benders in the parking lot. Several drivers were jockeying for my space as I pulled out. I didn’t stay to referee.

  Mr. Goldstein and Seth had nearly all the hurricane shutters in place. Seth was practically giddy with excitement.

  “It’s really coming, Britt!”

  “Not necessarily,” I said calmly. “It could still veer off and bypass us altogether.

  “Are you going to evacuate?” I asked his grandfather. Miami Beach, a narrow island, has no storm shelters. One must go to the mainland and then rely on the “authorities” to decide when and if you can return home. That might be days, if the storm did hit.

  He nodded. “If the next advisory doesn’t show some big change. My wife is packing up some things now. What are you going do about Bitsy and Billy Boots?” he said.

  Shelters do not admit pets.

  “I don’t know.” If there was a crisis, I wanted the animals with me.

  “We’re not going to a public shelter,” Mr. Goldstein offered. “We have a niece at Country Walk, in the southwest section. That’s pretty far inland, a relatively new development. It should be safe. We can take them with us.”

  I hated to send them, but as he had said, it didn’t hurt to be prepared. “I’ll put their carriers by the door along with their food,” I said gratefully.

  I did so, adding Billy’s new catnip toy and a chew bone for Bitsy. I still believed it would not happen, that this was all a drill like every other hurricane season in my memory. South Florida would breathe a sigh of relief at the next advisory and then go on as before, except that the people who sell batteries and bottled water would be a bit richer.

  I filled the bathtub and some water jugs, set the freezer and fridge at their coldest levels, and unplugged all the other appliances. I tossed my flashlight, portable radio, the few batteries I could find, my toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, a change of underwear, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, socks, and a granola bar in a canvas bag. My fire department boots and another pair of Reeboks were already in the trunk of the T-Bird. Bitsy watched, subdued, from beneath a chair but Billy Boots was pacing, agitated and meowing.

  How annoying this whole damn thing was. The timing couldn’t be worse. I wondered about Winslow, the only person who could have filled in the gaps, who could tell me what I wanted to know. Damn, why did he have to be an alcoholic?

  I kissed the Goldsteins, fought off Seth, who begged to go with me, and tossed the bag in my car. This didn’t seem real. I detoured to South Beach for a look at the ocean, as though it could tell me what Mother Nature planned. Perfectly peaceful and placid. As beautiful as always. People were playing Frisbee on the sand as usual. The bearded street preacher ranted on a street corner, arms outstretched. Nothing seemed different or ominous in any way except that something didn’t seem quite right. Something missing. I stood next to my car, squinting in the sun. What was wrong with this postcard-perfect picture? The usual afternoon thunder squalls, a line of low dark gray clouds, lay offshore, to the east, instead of over the Everglades, to the west. Then I saw what was missing. No sea birds, no birds at all. Not a gull in sight. They had all gone.

  The damn thing is really coming, I thought in awe. Shit!

  Reality suddenly sank in. I started the car, made a sharp U-turn, then switched my police scanner to the weather channel. The storm had gained speed and strength in its northward sweep. Drawn by a low-pressure area, it had changed course, veering to the northwest, on a relentless course for Miami. At five, the most deadly category, it was currently 185 miles offshore, with wind speeds clocked at 160 miles an hour and gusts approaching 200.

  Not now, I thought. Dammit. I’m not ready for this.

  Bridges would no longer be raised for boat traffic. Women in the final trimester of pregnancy were being urged to go to the nearest hospital because the extreme low pressure of a hurricane induces labor. Family members, however, could not accompany them because the hospitals were already overcrowded with heart patients and diabetics. Forecasters were voicing concerns about the residents of coastal counties. Ninety percent had never experienced a major hurricane. The last one was in 1965. We were way overdue. Exactly what Lottie had been saying. Shit.

  My assignment was to spend the hurricane at the Dade County Medical Examiner’s office. My job would be to provide the paper with an accurate casualty count. I was issued a cell phone by the city desk and told to tally the storm victims as they arrived. Not as bad a job as some. The brick budding is solid, secure, and elevated, adjacent to the county hospital, directly across the street from the trauma center, and equipped with emergency generators. The morgue can hold 350 bodies and is the last place county officials would allow to go without power. Before leaving the office, I called Alexandria, Virginia.

  Meredith Jessup answered.

  “You don’t know me,” I began, introducing myself. “I’m calling about your father.”

  “You know he’s dead,” she quickly responded.

  “Yes, that’s why I’m calling you.”

  “Finally,” she breathed. “You’ve learned something?”

  “No,” I answered, puzzled. “I wanted to ask you about his work, in Miami, with Cuban exiles, the freedom fighters, thirty years ago.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I really didn’t know him that well. He was never around, always away on assignment, when I was growing up. Florida, Haiti, Central America, Mérida in Mexico. He and my mom got divorced.” She sighed. “I was just beginning to get to know him when he was murdered. That’s what I thought you were calling about. You’re a reporter, so I thought…”

  “What?”

  “His murder. I never believed it was a robbery. Just a fantasy of mine, I guess. I thought maybe you’d uncovered something.”

  A kindred spirit, I thought. Another woman caught up in the mysteries of her father’s past. “What happened?”

  “He moved back up here after he reared. My mother had died. I was getting married and asked him to give me away. He did, and we really hit it off. He had a drinking problem but he stopped. He was getting his life together. He had a lot of regrets. You know, about his work You’re not writing about any of this, are you?”

  “No, I’m trying to find out what happened to my own father. They knew each other. My father was killed when I was three.’’

  There was a moment of silence.

  “The past is always with you,” she said wistfully.

  “No way to shake it,” I agreed.

  “He had a lot to live with, from his work over the years. I’m sure I don’t know the half of it. He had to do things in the line of duty that haunted him later. Contributed to his drinking problem, I’m sure.”

  “Do you know much about what happened in Miami?”

  “I know he was there for several years. When I was in the first and second grade he used to send
me postcards.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A lot of regrets. He would never even vacation there. He wanted no part of Miami.”

  “Did he leave any files, records, journals?”

  “No, when I got his stuff there was nothing. You wouldn’t think he had a past.”

  He should have met my mother, I thought, then I remembered: he had. “It is funny, though. Just before he was killed he mentioned something, just in passing. He’d come over for lunch with me and the baby. He was so happy he had a grandson. He mentioned that he’d seen somebody from the past that he hadn’t seen for many years. I got the impression it was someone from Miami.”

  “A friend?”

  “No, no friend. He didn’t seem upset, just depressed.”

  “What happened?”

  “Two nights later he was shot on the street outside a bar downtown. I was surprised at that. He hadn’t been drinking anything stronger than iced tea for six months, as far as I knew. The police said it was probably a robbery. But they gave me his wallet. Had two hundred dollars in it. And his watch. They said the robber must have been scared off. I never bought it. I thought it had to be something out of his past. The detectives talked to somebody at the Agency, only after I insisted. But they never really looked into it.”

  “Where was he shot?”

  “Twice in the back of the head, just below the ear, as he was about to get into his car on a side street. Small-caliber. I think they said a twenty-two. Never knew what hit him, they told me.”

  A chill rippled across my shoulders, raising goose bumps on my arms.

  “Any witnesses? Anybody hear the shots, see the killer?”

  “No. He’d been dead for a while when he was found. A taxi driver saw him lying there and called it in.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Five years ago last May. May twenty-seventh. I really resented it,” she said. “I never knew him all those years growing up. I was finally getting to know my father, and then he was gone again. This rime, forever.”

  “At least you had him for a while,” I said gently. “Some of us aren’t that lucky.”

  “You’re right,” she said sadly. I could hear a child playing in the background. “How did your dad die?”

  “Executed in Cuba, by a firing squad. Apparently he was on an anti-Castro mission.”

  “At least he died for a cause and you know why. Good luck. Call me anytime. Aren’t you having a hurricane down there? I thought I saw something on TV.”

  “It’s not here yet,” I said.

  A crowd was clustered around the bulletin board reading the latest Hurricane Center advisory. The television monitors overhead were broadcasting infrared satellite pictures of the storm, giant counterclockwise spirals of angry red, the eye pulsating at the core like the beating heart of something alive.

  Lottie strode by wearing a yellow slicker. She would be out in the teeth of the storm, shooting pictures. I was sorry I wouldn’t be with her, in the middle of the action.

  She paused by my desk. “Hell all Friday,’’ she said. “It looks like this is it. The big baboomba!”

  “Watch yourself. I hope this damn thing blows over before the Vera Verela concert,” I fretted. The benefit for the missing boys was only two days away.

  I dialed the homicide detectives. They weren’t in. I could try again from the ME office. My phone rang as I gathered up my things to leave.

  “Montero?”

  “Hola, Jorge.”

  “You must leave that place, a storm is coming. A bigger storm is soon to follow.”

  “What?”

  “The same winds that swept across Cuba have brought us the truth. Antonio’s diario. We have id”

  “Oh puleeze.”

  “Reyes’s own hired criminal came to us after he saw what Antonio had written there. Reyes was a Castro agent. He betrayed all of us.”

  “I hate to interrupt your usual routine, Jorge, but did you know that Frank Winslow is dead? Murdered.”

  “Muerto. Dios mio, I did not know.”

  “You didn’t know he was blown away, up in Virginia, in a murder quite similar to that of Armando Gutierrez?”

  “No, my word to you. Who killed him?”

  “I thought you might know.”

  “Reyes! Winslow knew the truth. So Reyes had him killed.”

  “Sure, and Reyes shot J.R., put the cyanide in the Tylenol capsules, and blew up the Federal Budding in Oklahoma City.”

  “¿Que?”

  “I can’t talk to you now, Jorge. I’m busy.”

  “Si,” he said quietly and hung up.

  The wind was already gusting as I drove to the medical examiner’s office at Number One Bob Hope Road.

  The Cuban capital had been devastated, the radio said, with hundreds of lives lost, buildings collapsed, mass destruction. The minor damage Bravo had inflicted with grenades and gunfire in his speedboat drive-bys was a trifling annoyance compared to the devastation wrought by Mother Nature.

  Cuba, so close and yet so far away. I remembered my Aunt Odalys saying that Cuba is everywhere: in the food we eat, in our prayers, in our hearts, in our daydreams. Why does this small island no bigger than Pennsylvania forever obsess this sprawling and complex city of exiles and contradictions?

  I parked and trudged past the fifteenth-century Spanish cannon up the stairs to the entrance, lugging my bag and a fistful of notebooks.

  The lobby, with its raspberry-colored furniture and soft-patterned carpet, was empty. The chief was not in, but there was “a skeleton crew,” according to Miriam, the motherly chief investigator, who emerged from her office cracking one of her usual morbid jokes. She seeded me in a small conference room near the morgue.

  “Anybody attributable to the storm come in yet?”

  “One dead, two wounded, in a family fight over whether to evacuate, one electrocution.” She ticked them off on her fingers like a housewife with a shopping list. “Homeowner was trying to knock the coconuts off his trees. He touched a hot wire with the metal pole he was using.”

  Ouch. People were already dying, and the storm hadn’t even arrived. Miamians cannot seem to do anything without killing off themselves or each other.

  “And I hear we have two traffic cases on the way. Oh”—she brightened—” here are the detectives on the electrocution.”

  Hanks and Wogan appeared in the doorway and did a double take when they saw me. They wore boots, their hair windblown. “Hey, guys. Just who I wanted to see.”

  They rolled their eyes.

  “Did you get my messages?” I asked.

  “Mucho messages, Britt. Don’t you ever give up?” Hanks said.

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I wanted to ask you about Armando Gutierrez. What kind of silencer was used?” The detectives exchanged glances as Billy sat down at the conference table to write the report on the electrocution.

  “Who you been talking to?” Hanks demanded.

  “Nobody,” I said quickly. “He was shot execution style, two right behind the ear in the middle of the day. Nobody heard a thing. You don’t have to be a genius to think it was a professional hit, with a silencer…”

  “You’re not gonna print that?”

  “Not until you say it’s okay.”

  I had not seen raw potato chunks around the body, ruling out the cheapest, most popular silencer. Firing a pistol through a potato is messy but effective. They may be bulky to carry around, but they have their advantages. Possession of a potato is not a federal offense. Yet.

  “Okay, so there was a silencer,” he conceded, “but I don’t want to read about it in the newspaper.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “He had a contact wound. There was so much blood in his hair that we couldn’t see it at the scene. But when the ME cleaned off the wounds the muzzle mark was bigger, larger in diameter, than the bar
rel of any weapon that caliber. Had to be a silencer, probably a reworked lawnmower muffler with a few extra baffles. Turns the sound down to what sounds like the thud of a car door. Takes the crack right out of it.”

  “The gun was a twenty-two?”

  “Listen to me now, Britt.” Hanks took a seat at the conference table and began to pry the plastic lid off the Styrofoam coffee cup he’d been carrying. “You can’t be printing this.”

  “You know better.”

  “Yeah, a twenty-two. Smaller caliber has less noise to start with, and the barrel can be easily machined to screw on a silencer.”

  Billy looked up from his paperwork. “You got the name of that cousin, the next of kin?”

  “Uncle,” Hanks said. He put down his coffee, opened his small black notebook, and spelled out the name.

  “What did Gutierrez have in his pockets?”

  “Nothing much,” he said, closing the book.

  “What?”

  “One thing you might find interesting. I know we did.” Billy grinned.

  “What?” I looked from one to the other. “I can’t stand it. Tell me. I’ll trade you some information I guarantee you don’t have. Tell me.”

  “You first,” Hanks said. He was grinning now, too.

  I told them about Frank Winslow. Neither changed expression. “So?” Hanks said.

  “Same MO, same connections.”

  “In goddamn Virginia, five freaking years ago.” Hanks looked skeptical.

  “That’s not all that unusual an MO, Britt,” Billy said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”

  “A pro probably wouldn’t keep a piece that long,” Billy said.

  I shrugged. “I thought it was interesting.”

  “Maybe it’s worth a call or two,” Hanks said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “I dunno,” he teased. “You think that was good enough for a trade, Billy?”

  “Give the girl a break.”

  “You promise you won’t…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “Tucked in his shirt pocket, close to his heart,” he said, speaking deliberately, excruciatingly slowly, “the late, unfortunate Mr. Armando Gutierrez was carrying the late, unfortunate Mr. Alex Aguirre’s business card with his home number and his beeper number written on it.”