Dead in Boca

by Miriam Auerbach

  I was about to stand and remind the group of my presence when the Babe screamed, “Oh my God! Look! The wind!”

  All eyes turned toward the plate glass window. The fronds on the palm trees outside were whipping around wildly. The glass shook as it was blasted by bursts of choppy air.

  The guests sprang out of their chairs and rushed to the front door. Kravitz led up the rear. He stopped when he saw me.

  “Oh, Mrs. Holloway,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I think we’ll have to discuss the seawall another time.” He glanced over his shoulder at the gale. “I think we should all attend to our safety now.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. The others were already gone. We headed to the door, which was wide open, banging against the wall from the force of the wind gusts coming in.

  “I agree totally,” I said, in all honesty for once. “Thanks for your hospitality. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Okay, I’ve got to pack up and go,” he said, closing the door on me.

  I hurried over to my Hog. The sooner I could get off this little strip of sand and onto the mainland, the better. But another rain band was passing through. I didn’t want to get soaked. Riding in the rain is a real bitch. So I huddled under the carport until the shower stopped.

  When it did, I heard a whirling noise overhead. I stepped out from the overhang and looked up. A TV station’s helicopter hovered low. Oh my God—that choppy air had been created by a chopper. The media was stirring up a storm before the actual one arrived. It was just as Richard’s T-shirt had said: The News Is Lying.

  Shaking my head, I started the Hog, put on my helmet, and rode—all of two blocks. Traffic on the Intracoastal bridge heading inland was bumper to bumper. And the drawbridge was up. No one would be going anywhere for a while.

  I tried to keep a lid on my patience as I sat there idling. Patient and idle are not my strong suits. To calm myself, I mulled over the murder.

  I thought about Kravitz and his klatch of kvetches. Their oblivious babble had unearthed a treasure trove of new leads for me. Any one of them could have had a reason to off Junior. Kravitz was a maniacal control freak. If he’d thought there was any possibility of losing the case against Junior, he might have tried to seize control by killing him. Garvin, the treasurer, was apparently cooking the books. Junior might well have known that, since he had a mole in the organization. Embezzlement was always an enticement for blackmail, which in turn was a good motive for murder. The vice president, who’d accused the treasurer of financial finagling, could well have been Junior’s mole, since he was facing foreclosure and therefore in need of a cash infusion. In that case, he’d be indebted to Junior, which might make him want Junior gone. As for Dr. Diamond, the secretary, he seemed to be a little insecure in his manhood. What if Junior had made a move on Mrs. Doctor . . .

  Oh hell, this was all wild speculation. My brain was buzzing. Clearly, my calming strategy wasn’t working. So I decided to try the opposite. Instead of diverting my mind with thoughts, I’d divest it of them.

  There was only one way to do that: the motorcycle mantra.

  I tuned in to the rhythm of the Hog. Rat-tat-tat-tat, Rat-tat-tat-tat. Soon my heart beat in time with the pistons. My breath came in on the upstroke and went out on the downstroke. The tension flowed out of my mind, into the machine, and from there into the ground.

  And that’s when it happened: when the anxiety went, the answer came.

  Chapter 18

  I KNEW WHO KILLED Junior. And I wished I didn’t. I wished I’d never heard what I had today, that echo from the past. Now I had to take action, and I didn’t want to. This case had been a moral morass from the start. I’d thought I could maneuver through the minefield, but I’d been mistaken. Now I faced the biggest dilemma of my life.

  I wanted to ride away to my swamp hideaway. I’d deal with this later. After the storm had passed. The outside storm. Not the one inside me.

  The killer wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, it was almost as if he’d wanted me to catch him.

  I’d finally inched my way across the Intracoastal after the drawbridge came down. When the traffic reached I-95, most of the evacuees headed north on the interstate. I continued west, going under the highway. The overpass was a stark manifestation of the linchpin that brought this case together. Wanting to escape its cruel connotation, I roared on through Boca then lit out full throttle on the open road to the edge of land. By the time I got out onto the swamp in my airboat, twilight had come. There I hovered—between land and water, day and night, right and wrong.

  The rain had started again, but I stayed dry under the boat’s canopy. As soon as I reached home and tied up the vessel, I headed straight for the Hennessy. I filled my glass to the rim, took it out to the porch, sat, and took a swallow. It was harsh and grating, like broken glass, as it went down my throat. Its coarseness was all the more pronounced by the contrast with the high-end version I’d had earlier. But I didn’t care. It was almost painful, and I welcomed that. That pain might block out the painful choice that lay before me.

  Girl, get crackin’, a familiar voice said, dragging me into the here and now.

  Lana lurked six inches from the side of the porch. Her eyes bulged. Of course, they always did. She’s a gator, for chrissake. But she looked particularly agitated tonight. For a minute I thought she might crawl right up onto the porch.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

  Word on the swamp is the storm is almost here. And it’s a big mother. You better put those shutters up. Pronto.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I took another hit of Hennessy.

  What’s the matter with you? she mimicked.

  I let out a big sigh then let her have the whole sad story. When I was done, she floated in silence for a long time. Guess she was as ethically torn as I was.

  “I should never have let those conning Castellanos suck me in,” I lamented. “Finding Miss Lil’s Sweetheart Scammer was one thing. After all, I’m a ScamBuster. That’s my business. But when it came to finding who dropped Junior, I should have dropped it. Should have left it to the cops.”

  Now wait just a minute. Hold on, sister. Don’t you go blaming somebody else for your decisions. Nobody made you take this case. I seem to recall you sermonizing about pursuing the truth to its final conclusion, about justice not being done until the killer was found.

  Damn her. She was right. If there was anyone to blame, it was my Inner Vigilante.

  “Well, that’s exactly the problem now, isn’t it?” I asked. “We’ve found the killer. But can there be any justice?”

  I took a swig of swill.

  You better slow down there, Lana said. At least until you put those shutters up. That’s gonna take some balancing. Wouldn’t want you falling into this swamp. There’s some dangerous beasts out here. I can’t be held accountable for what some of my fellow species members might do.

  “Oh, all right. Fine. I’ll put up the shutters before I’m totally wasted. There’s just one thing I want to do before that.”

  I pulled out my cell phone. When I looked at the display, I saw that Lior had left a message. Again. He must have called when I was on my Hog, because I hadn’t heard the phone ring.

  I didn’t want to deal with him. I deleted the message, again without listening. Then I called Enrique.

  “Whatever it is,” he answered, “make it quick, girlfriend. This place is a zoo. I’ve gotta get all the guests out by midnight, when the evacuation order comes down. And they’re not happy that a hurricane has dared to ruin their vacations. They’re all threatening to sue.”

  That was wealthy Boca visitors for you, with their sense of entitlement. Who were they going to sue—Mother Nature?

  “Then I’ve got to get this place secured and get out myself,” Enrique said. “So what is it?”

  “The surveillance
video from the night Junior was killed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know Reilly took the disks for evidence, but do you have backups?”

  “Please. Don’t insult me.”

  “Okay. Sorry. Can you e-mail me the video files before you leave there?”

  “Yes. Goodbye.”

  The line went dead.

  The video files were too large to download to my cell phone. But I’d still have time in the morning to go to the office and view them on the computer then get back home before the hurricane hit at high noon.

  I already knew what I’d see on there. I was just hoping against hope that I was wrong. That somehow I’d misheard or misinterpreted something.

  I looked down at my glass. It was half empty. I dumped the remainder into the swamp and rose. I put my biking gloves on then got the aluminum shutters out of their wooden storage box at the side of the porch.

  The cabin had only four windows, two on the front and two on the sides. It was fairly easy to mount the front shutters, since I could stand on the porch. I hung them on the large screws that framed the windows, then tightened the screws with a manual Phillips head. The side windows were a little trickier, since the porch didn’t extend around the cabin. I had to maneuver the airboat to reach the right spots.

  In the end, I didn’t fall into the swamp. I guess it was a good thing that I’d heeded Lana’s warning and hadn’t guzzled all the booze.

  I turned in, only to awaken throughout the night as the rain bands pelted the cabin and my misgivings pelted my conscience.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning I checked my phone and saw that Enrique had sent the video files at three a.m. I headed into town. Although dawn had come, the sky was dark. The swamp was spookily still, and once I got to land, the roads were eerily empty. As I rode, I was periodically assaulted with wind gusts that shoved the bike over inches at a time. I had to use all my mental concentration and physical prowess to keep from going down, adjusting my body weight to flow with the shifting forces.

  It struck me that riding in these conditions was a really stupid idea. My consuming desire to view the video footage in the desperate hope that I was wrong about the killer had overtaken my judgment about my own safety.

  But now that I was on land, I might as well follow through.

  When I got to my office, I saw that the building’s owner had tacked up some cheap plywood over the plate glass window in the front. This jerry-built protection did not inspire my confidence. This was not where I wanted to be when the storm hit. All I had to do was get in, watch the footage, and get back to the safety of my cabin.

  I unlocked the door and sat down at my computer. I logged onto my email and viewed the video files, skipping to the parts I was looking for.

  I hadn’t been wrong. I saw what, deep down, I had known I would see. The evidence didn’t outright incriminate the killer, but when put together with everything else I now knew, it did implicate him.

  Still hoping to find something that would prove me wrong, I checked out one other insight I’d gotten last night as I’d sat there on my Hog. I Googled “Overtown.”

  A list of websites came up, and I clicked on the first one. It read:

  Overtown, a historically Black neighborhood on the Miami River, was formerly called Colored Town. During the Jim Crow era, black residents of Miami were segregated in this part of the city. The area was rich in culture and community, considered by many to be the “Harlem of the South.” The community had its own schools, businesses, and churches. It was alive with clubs and theaters. Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday were among the world-renowned entertainers who performed there. The leading Black intellectuals and writers of the time, including W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, stayed in local hotels. In the 1960s, much of Overtown was razed to make way for the I-95 Interstate. Within a few years, the population declined by 80%. The area has never recovered economically, socially, or culturally.

  A series of old grainy black-and-white photos of neighborhood street scenes accompanied the text. There were landmarks like the Lyric Theatre, Mount Zion Baptist Church, and Booker T. Washington High School. There were storefront businesses, like Sammie’s Barbeque Pit and Freeman Dry Goods. And Harrison Barber Shop. And Miss Harrison’s Home Cookin’ restaurant.

  A map showed the original locations of each place in the photos. I printed it out. Then I went to MapQuest and entered “Miami.” A map of the present-day city popped up. I zoomed in on the Overtown area, sized the map to match the scale of the other one, and printed it out. I laid the sheet with the old map atop the new one, and held them both up to the fluorescent ceiling light. I lined up the Miami River in each map, so that everything was geographically juxtaposed. The theater, the church, and the high school were still there. But where the businesses had been, I-95 now stood.

  My insight had been right.

  I leaned back in my cheap, plastic chair and took a long deep breath. I so did not want to deal with this. But I had to. And I’d better do it before the storm took out the phone service.

  I called the killer.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied. “Where are you?”

  “At my office.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “Wait! I didn’t mean we should do this right now! I meant after the storm!”

  But I was talking to dead air. The killer had already hung up and was on his way.

  Chapter 19

  I WANTED TO FLEE. Not from the killer, but from my own conscience. Of course, I could just leave the premises, leave the predicament for another time, another place. But I’d already set the events in motion. My Inner Vigilante had taken over yet again.

  Knowing the killer as I did, I doubted that I was in danger, but you could never fully predict how someone would react when confronted with their crime. Just in case, I took my Magnum out of my boot and laid it on the desk.

  Then I sat and listened to the sounds of the storm outside. The wind gusts intensified, rattling the makeshift plywood shutters. Raindrops started to fall fiercely, sounding like the clatter of horses’ hooves across the roof.

  Suddenly I bolted upright in my seat. My Hog! I couldn’t leave it out in the storm. It could end up ten blocks away. Or on the rooftop. Or smashed to pieces.

  I put on my leather jacket and opened the front door. It was nearly black outside. The rain was coming down in sheets. I strode to the bike, almost toppling over from the wind. With my foot, I retracted the kickstand, then muscled the bike through the doorway into the office. It barely fit, but I managed to wedge it up against the side wall. A puddle started to form beneath it.

  I walked to the small bathroom in the back, grabbed a bunch of paper towels and returned to wipe up the water. I removed my jacket and wiped a towel over my wet hair. Then I resumed my seat behind the desk.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, not moving, just listening. Then something banged against the door, startling me from my stagnation. The wind must have picked something up and flung it—a tree branch, a palm frond.

  But the banging continued. Slowly, understanding penetrated my consciousness. It wasn’t something banging on the door, it was someone. The killer.

  This was it. There could be no more hesitation, no more indecision. I was a seeker of truth and justice, and this was my moment of truth—although I wasn’t sure I knew what justice was.

  I rose and, holding my gun up, walked two steps to the door and opened it to the known and the unknown.

  Lior stood there.

  His whole bodily essence assailed me all at once. His black hair was damp, curling around the edges. His jaw was shadowed with beard stubble. Water droplets were spattered across his broad shoulders, darkening the silver short-sleeved knit shirt he wore.

  His gaze traveled
to my gun then to my eyes. His were cloudy, unreadable.

  “Lior . . . oh my God. I thought you were . . . someone else.” I let out a long breath, took a step backward, and lowered the pistol.

  “Someone dangerous?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’ve taught you how to defend yourself.”

  Yes, he had. To the death, if necessary.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Since you wouldn’t answer my calls, I had to see you,” he said, moving forward, filling up the space I’d created between us. “Can I get out of this rain?”

  “Yeah.” I stepped aside. He entered and locked the door behind him.

  He glanced quickly around the room, taking in the Hog. Then his gaze came back to me. We stood a few inches apart, eyes locked.

  “Don’t screw up my case,” he said.

  His case? What the hell was he talking about? This was my case.

  “I have to fill you in,” he said. “The stakes are too high.”

  Say what? Call me confused.

  “I had a reason for being at Raquel’s.”

  “Oh my God,” I said with a sigh. “Don’t tell me you’re here to make excuses.”

  “I’m not. I’m here to make explanations.”

  I turned away and stepped toward my desk. He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t touch me. He knew better than that.

  “I was undercover,” he said.

  I stopped midstride.

  “I don’t have time for bullshit,” I said, turning around.

  “Exactly. Neither do I. That’s why I’m here. Can I sit down?” He gestured to the client chairs in front of my desk.

  Yeah. Okay. I wanted the truth. I’d hear his story then make my own assessment.