Death In Paradise

by Carolyn G. Hart

  “Johnnie Rodriguez.” I would not be stopped. My voice was harsh now. I couldn’t help it. “I must talk to him.”

  Her head began to sway back and forth. “Oh, no. You can’t, ma’am. You never can. Johnnie’s dead. Dead and gone.”

  We stood at the end of a rickety pier.

  Gulls squalled. The sun glinted on the huge expanse of lake. A gusty south wind tatted lacy white swirls across the blue surface. A speed boat thrummed past. Water slapped against the pilings. The air smelled like fish and dust.

  The shoreline boasted vacation homes ranging from trailers perched on concrete blocks to elegant multilevel retreats. I noticed the surroundings automatically, my mind cataloging, the beads slipping through my fingers even while I was struggling with shock. Johnnie Rodriguez dead! I’d come all this way. I’d counted so much on talking to him.

  Maria Rodriguez pointed down at the roiled water. “That’s where I found Johnnie.” Her face reminded me of a

  Dorothea Lange photograph, misery and despair and mute acceptance etched in every crease and line.

  “I’m sorry.” The words drifted between us like wisps from a cottonwood. Sorrow freighted the air. Her grief and mine. “What happened?”

  Her skeletal arms folded tight across her body. “Johnnie drank too much.” She said it matter-of-factly. “The deputy said he must have fallen. He was too drunk to swim. So he drowned.”

  A matter-of-fact tone, but a tear edged down her sallow, wrinkled cheek.

  The wind rustled her skirt, stirred my hair.

  I looked back at the small wooden house where Johnnie Rodriguez had lived his whole life, then glanced at the end of the pier. How drunk would you have to be? “I’m sorry,” I said again. “When did Johnnie drown?”

  “Six years ago.”

  It wasn’t the wind skipping across the water that made me feel chilled. I jammed my hands into the pockets of my coat. My fingers clenched into fists. “And the date?”

  “April sixth.”

  Less than a week after Richard fell—was pushed—to his death.

  If I’d had any misgivings about the truth of the poster, I could put them away.

  She faced me. “Why did Miz Ericcson send you to talk to Johnnie?” She lifted a bony hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight.

  I had the space of a breath to decide how to answer. It didn’t even take that long. She’d made the jump, according me legitimacy because I said I knew the Ericcson family. That gave me a lot of room to maneuver.

  Was I willing to play the lie? Of course.

  But I phrased my answer carefully. “Johnnie was working for Belle Ericcson when her daughter was kidnapped. I’m trying to put together the recollections of everyone who was at the house that weekend.”

  She smoothed back a strand of lank hair. “Seems a funny thing to do. To want to remember the bad. Johnnie sure didn’t like to talk about it. It upset him too much. And Miz Ericcson, they say she still grieves something awful. That’s what I’ve heard. She’s never come back, you know. She sold the lake house and the boat to a rich oilman from Amarillo. They say she went off to Hawaii and built a house up on a cliff and she’s never come back to Dallas. Not once.” She turned her gaunt face toward me. “I thought Miz Ericcson knew Johnnie was gone. You’ve come a long way for nothing. There’s nobody here who was at the lake house that weekend except me.”

  “You were there?” I managed to ask in a casual, even tone.

  “Yes’m.” Her voice was tired but obedient. This was a nice woman, a sick woman, but she wanted to be helpful. “I got the call that Thursday to open the house, mop and dust and put on fresh linens and stock the kitchen. That was when I was still working, before I got sick. I had a big list, getting everything ready for Miss CeeCee’s birthday party. The party was going to be Saturday night even though it wasn’t really her birthday until Sunday.”

  Sunday that year was April 1. So April 1 was CeeCee’s birthday. And the day that Richard would die one year later. No April Fool for the Ericcson family or for me. Not ever again.

  I willed a pleasant expression on my face as I looked into dark, patient, sad eyes. “I understand CeeCee drove up from Dallas on Friday afternoon.” I’d done my homework, pulled up every scrap of coverage about the kidnapping.

  Those thin arms slid to her side. The blue-veined fingers of one hand plucked at the ruffled pocket of her dress. “They say she must have come then.” Her voice was low and indis

  tinct.

  “You didn’t see her?” I moved a little nearer.

  “No’m. I finished up about five and I wanted to get home and fix Johnnie’s supper. Johnnie lived with me. All my other kids got families. But Johnnie never married. Maybe…” She sighed.

  “You went home,” I said gently.

  She looked up at a dazzling white house on the bluff. “I walked home. It’s not even a mile if you go through the woods. Johnnie had the pickup. He’d been running errands all day, brought in fresh firewood and plenty of beer for the boat and he’d gone over to Pottsboro for barbecue. So, I left about five. And I locked up real good. I told them that.” She looked up again at the house on the bluff.

  I spoke as if the facts were so familiar and they were. I knew them by heart now. “CeeCee stopped in town for gas. It was just getting dark.” The clerk remembered it clearly when she was interviewed by a television reporter. CeeCee paid for the gas and bought a bag of M&Ms.

  “Josie Goetz was working at the station that night. She said Miss CeeCee seemed tired. She wasn’t as cheerful and friendly as usual.”

  A crow cawed, sharp and strident.

  Maria shivered. “Mighty cold out here on the water. I’ve got some fresh coffee made…”

  We walked slowly—it was an effort for her—back to the house. She brought me a white pottery mug filled with coffee as hot and black as molten tar. She settled into a rocker, then made a hopeless gesture at the dust-streaked floor. “I can’t clean no more. I used to keep everything neat as a pin.”

  Dingy crocheted doilies covered the arms of the easy chair and couch. Handmade wooden soldiers crowded the mantel, the windowsills, a pine bookcase, spots of color in the dim and dusty room.

  She followed my gaze. “Johnnie made them. Pretty, aren’t they?”

  It was easy to see the same hand carved them all. Each blocky ten-inch-tall soldier stood on a two-inch base. The soldiers flaunted cockaded hats and brass-studded coats in vivid scarlet, cerulean, or tangerine.

  Faintly, she began to hum “The March of the Toy Soldier,” her voice sweet and soft, and I knew where Johnnie had gotten his dream.

  “Johnnie loved toy soldiers. From the time he was a little boy.” She picked up a Revolutionary War soldier with a musket. “He never learned to read real well, but all he needed was to see a picture. He spent all his free time carving. This was the last one he made. It was for Christmas.” She held it out to me.

  I put down my coffee mug, took the carving. Gilded letters on the base read: TO MAMA. I handed the soldier back to her.

  Her smile was full of love. She put the carving down gently. “Johnnie was a good boy.” The chair squeaked as she rocked. “And I know he never hurt Miss CeeCee.” She fastened mournful, puzzled eyes on me. “Maybe it was meant, you coming here to ask about Johnnie. I been thinking. If ever I was to tell anyone, now’s the time.”

  The moment stretched between us. I wanted to grab those thin shoulders, grip them tight, shake out the truth.

  “Please tell me.” I spoke as a supplicant.

  Our eyes met and held and we each knew the other had a troubled heart.

  She sighed and it was as light as the flutter of wings. “I growed up telling the truth. My pa said an honest heart was a gift to God. And I’ve grieved ever since because I lied about the night Miss CeeCee was taken. Johnnie was so scared the next week when the call come that the deputy wanted to see him and ask where he was when Miss CeeCee disappeared.

  Johnnie said I had to tell them he
was home that Friday night, like he always was. He promised me he didn’t know what had happened to Miss CeeCee, but he was scared he’d be in big trouble if it come out what they’d done. They’d thought it was all in fun, but it was a trick. But they could never prove it, couldn’t prove anything. He swore to me he didn’t know anything that would help the police find her. And that was all he’d say—ever. But I know he didn’t do nothing bad. Not Johnnie. So I said I was here Friday night and Johnnie and me had supper and he was working on a soldier and didn’t go nowhere. And Johnnie had been working on a soldier, the parts were all out on his table. The deputy believed me because he and Johnnie went to school together and he knew Johnnie’d never hurt nobody. And Johnnie, he got out and searched till he was so tired he was ready to drop and he kept saying Miss CeeCee had to be somewhere.”

  Johnnie joined in the search. Yet, obviously he knew something of what happened on Friday evening. But if he searched, he must not have known where CeeCee Burke was. Or he searched to show he knew nothing.

  I smoothed the doily on my chair arm. “So Johnnie said ‘they’d thought it was all in fun’? They?”

  “Yes’m, he did.” Her tone was sharp.

  Was this really what Johnnie had said? Or was this his mother’s version to lessen Johnnie’s involvement? Or had Johnnie lied to his mother?

  They? Johnnie and who? “Did he say who he was talking about?”

  “No’m. He never said.” There was the faintest inflection on the last word.

  “But you know?” I kept my voice undemanding, casual.

  “Johnnie was working over there that day. It had to be that Mackey, that man who works for Miz Ericcson.” The bones in her face sharpened, and for an instant she had the predatory look of a bird of prey.

  That was a familiar name to me. Lester Mackey was Belle’s jack-of-all-trades. Mackey had served her and her several husbands as a houseman, chauffeur and general dogs-body since Belle’s early days in Japan.

  “That Mackey! I never did like him.” Maria Rodriguez’s mouth folded in a stubborn, angry line.

  “Why not?” I asked mildly.

  Her eyes slid away from mine. “Whenever they come up from Dallas, he always had Johnnie hang around with him. And there was no call for it.” Her bony face was both angry and anguished.

  “If he hired Johnnie to work around the place—”

  “He’d keep Johnnie late. And what for?” she demanded. “Can’t work after dark. But he’d invite Johnnie to his quarters, show him art books.” She stared down at the floor. “I didn’t like it.”

  “But on the Friday that CeeCee disappeared, Johnnie was in and out of the Ericcson place working for Mackey. Is that right? And Johnnie didn’t come home for supper?”

  “No’m. He come in about seven and said he was sorry but he’d had to work late. He was kind of excited.” She finally looked up, her eyes dark with pain. “But I thought it was just because that Mackey was down here. Johnnie always liked to hang around with him. Johnnie was in a real good humor, kept grinning to himself. ’Course this was before we knew Miss CeeCee’d been taken.”

  CeeCee Ericcson had stopped for gas in Pottsboro at a quarter to six.

  No one ever admitted seeing her after that.

  Lester Mackey later told police he’d found CeeCee’s Mercedes a few minutes before seven o’clock on Friday night in the drive in front of the lake house. Mackey said the driver’s door was open and the keys were in the ignition. CeeCee’s purse lay in the passenger seat.

  Mackey moved the car around to the garage. The house was locked. He opened the front door, went inside, turned on the lights. He put the keys in a wooden tray on a side table. He said nobody was in the house. As far as he knew. He didn’t go upstairs, but he said no lights were on.

  It was dark by then.

  Mackey later told police he’d had a few drinks so he went around to his quarters and fixed himself some dinner and watched TV and didn’t think again about the car. He said he figured CeeCee had gone off to dinner with someone else in the family and they’d be coming in later.

  It was a large family with members who came and went, of course, as they pleased. No one had any particular schedule that weekend, no set time to appear at the lake.

  The alarm wasn’t raised until Saturday afternoon.

  Maria reached out for her coffee mug, stared down into the dark brew. “I was there when Miz Ericcson got the letter. On Saturday. It come in a mail truck.”

  Express Mail. The police traced it to a Gainesville Express Mail receptacle. It was processed shortly after 8 P.M. Friday. The return address was a downtown business, an insurance company. No one there had ever had any contact with CeeCee or any of the other family members.

  On Saturday afternoon, Belle was carrying a pile of brightly wrapped birthday presents into the living room of the lake house when the mail truck arrived.

  “I took the envelope from the postman.” Maria hunched over her coffee mug. “One of the boys—I think it was Mr. Joss—said something about his mama never getting away from work. Miz Ericcson laughed and said she did too get away from work, and whatever it was, Elise could see to it. That was her secretary. So I carried the envelope over to Miss Elise. She said, ‘I’ll take care of it, Belle. This is your weekend to enjoy.’ She opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper. Then her smile kind of slipped sideways and she made a gasping noise and said, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God.’”

  Maria put down the mug, the coffee untasted. “It got real quiet in the room. Real quiet. We all knew it was something awful. Miss Elise tried to talk, she opened her mouth and finally, her hand shaking, she took the sheet over to Miz Ericcson.”

  “Who was there?”

  “Miz Ericcson’s husband, Mr. Scanlon. He’d just come in the front door. He was carrying a big white cake box. Miss Gretchen was sitting on a bench by one of the windows, reading a book. Miss Megan was out on the terrace in a hammock. Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Anders were playing checkers. Mr. Joss was picking out a tune on the piano. He can play real well, but he was just doing one note at a time.” Her eyes squeezed in remembrance, and now her voice was cold. “That Mackey, he was bringing in suitcases.”

  “And Stan Dugan?”

  “Miss CeeCee’s young man?” Maria shook her head. “No, ma’am. He wasn’t there.”

  I made a note of that. It surprised me a little.

  Maria Rodriguez shivered. “When it got quiet, everybody looked at Miz Ericcson. She’d been so happy. And she still had that armload of presents. She looked at the paper and her face got old right in front of our eyes, old and pinched. She looked at each one in turn and her voice was as cold as a blue norther. She said, ‘This isn’t funny. This isn’t funny at all.’ Then she looked around, like it would all be all right. ‘Where is CeeCee? Where is she?’”

  But CeeCee was nowhere to be found.

  The note was quite simple:

  IF YOU WANT CEECEE BACK ALIVE, DO PRECISELY AS INSTRUCTED. CALL THE POLICE AND SHE DIES. FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.

  So Belle refused to call the police. Or to reveal the instructions on a folded sheet of paper.

  That came later.

  “Miz Ericcson made each one of us promise not to say a word to anyone. But she asked me to go get Johnnie to help Mackey and the kids search around the place. They’d pieced it together by then that Miss CeeCee had come to the lake the night before, on Friday. Mackey told them about finding her car. I run home to get Johnnie. When I told him what had happened, he shook his head back and forth real puzzled. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. Listen, you wait here a minute. I got to see about something.’ He jumped in the pickup and went off. He come back in about ten minutes and his face was like the ashes in the fireplace. ‘Mama, I got to go over to the Ericcson place.’ I asked him what was wrong, but he said he couldn’t tell me nothing now.

  “He didn’t come home till late that night and then all he’d say was that they hadn’t found no trace of Miss CeeCee and they all w
as wanting Miz Ericcson to call the police but she wouldn’t and she was going to do what the letter said to do and she wouldn’t tell anybody what it said. And she got on the phone and called some man to come and help her. And that made Mr. Scanlon mad.”

  Yes, Belle had called Richard and he’d gone to National to catch the next flight to Dallas.

  “Did you ask Johnnie where he drove in the pickup after you came home to get him? Before he went to the Ericcson place?”

  “No’m.” She made no explanation, no defense. But the limp and sagging skin of her face was a study in fear.

  Denial takes many forms. One is a refusal to ask questions that need to be asked.

  I worried at her pallor. But I couldn’t let her rest. Not yet. “When the deputy called, was that when Johnnie asked you to say he’d been home on Friday night between six and seven?”

  She nodded wearily. “But the truth is he didn’t come in until right after seven o’clock. I fed him then. But he did work most of the evening on the soldier.”

  Funny how you can pick up a little nuance. “Most of the evening?”

  “Johnnie liked to walk out after dark. Sometimes late at night. He liked to find a place and stand real quiet and watch the raccoons. Sometimes a cougar’d pass by.”

  I waited.

  She picked up the last toy soldier her son had made, gently touched the little wooden musket. “Johnnie thought he’d been part of a joke. Her brothers were big to play jokes. And ’specially since Miss CeeCee’s birthday was April Fool’s Day. Oh, they always had big jokes going on. Johnnie might have wanted to know more about it and maybe he went somewhere late that night to see what was happening. And he would’ve just stood quiet and watched. But I know he didn’t see nothing terrible. He would’ve gone to the police if he had. Then Saturday when I come home and told him about that letter, he went back and Miss CeeCee wasn’t there. And he didn’t know what to do.”

  Somewhere nearby.

  “Why didn’t he tell the police?”

  “He was scared.” She pressed her hand against her lips to keep them from trembling.

  “What do you think happened, Mrs. Rodriguez?”