Suspicion of Deceit (38 page)

Gail had already told him about the suitcase from Costa Rica that Thomas Nolan had allegedly picked up for Miss Wells. The suitcase full of flowered shirtwaist dresses and sensible shoes and large-size women's cotton underwear, no doubt. And Bibles, since the lady had gone down there to do missionary work. But now it appeared that Miss Wells, and maybe the suitcase, didn't exist.

"Where does that leave you?" Anthony asked.

"Bothered. Annoyed. I hate it when people play games, and that's what he's doing." She leaned her head on her knees as Anthony rinsed her back. "Oh, that feels wonderful." Her voice was muffled. "And in related news, Lloyd Dixon told me that he's given up his Cuba investment plans. He says he doesn't know what Octavio is doing."

Gail sat up straight. "I was looking over the copies from Dixon's appointment book today. There's an entry for this Thursday, Reyes. Then an address in south Hialeah. I looked it up. Sun Fashions. They make women's apparel. Since when does your brother-in-law have an interest in ladies' clothing—or maybe you know something about him I don't."

The sponge swept over her skin. "I saw the entry," Anthony said. "The owner is Cuban. Dixon's group was probably going to talk to him about investments. If Dixon isn't involved in that anymore, I'm going to forget about it. And you don't do anything on your own," he added firmly.

"Me? Like what?"

"Like driving to Hialeah to see what you could see."

"It hadn't crossed my mind. I was just mentioning it." Gail winced when Anthony hit a tender spot on her back.

"Sorry." He bent over and kissed it. "Your bruises look better."

"No, they don't. In the words of my daughter, they're yucky."

Anthony took a sip of his drink, then set it on the bath mat. "Did she say that?"

"Unfortunately, Karen has been taught not to lie." Gail scratched a fingernail down his right forearm, the muscle hard under pale golden skin and smooth, dark hair. There was a gold bracelet on his wrist. He wore a man's diamond ring, nothing feminine about it. "I have heard," she said, "that Cubans like jewelry because they never know when they might have to go into exile again, and you can always carry what's on your body."

He laughed. "No kidding. I didn't know that. You think it's too much?"

"Not at all." She held his hand and looked at the ring on his little finger. "It's perfect. It's you. I love it."

The diamond sparkled when he moved his hand over her breasts, making the points tight as rocks. Glittered for a brief instant in the water before it disappeared under the bubbles.

"Anthony—"

He laughed softly, an exhalation against the back of her neck. He closed his other hand around her hair' and eased her head back. His mouth opened, covering hers, more breath and heat than flesh. His tongue moved inside.

"Oh, God."

He pulled back. "Want me to stop?"

"No." She made a ragged laugh. "I could have sworn ... I wasn't in the mood for this." Her fingers tightened on his arm. "Oh, my God—"

"Shhhh."

Finally she sagged against his arm, her forehead on his shoulder. Anthony took off his ring. "Give me your hand. Let's see if it fits." He slid it onto her third finger.

Still languid and loose-limbed, she blinked and focused on it. "Too big. Anyway, it's a man's ring."

"But it's a nice stone." When she agreed that it was, he said, "What do you think? An engagement ring for you? A solitaire?"

"No! It's yours."

He held the ring up between them. "But this one will have memories."

She smiled and looked away.

He dropped the ring into his shirt pocket. "Marry me," he said. "This weekend. Tomorrow, if we could do it."

"What?"

"I'm afraid to let you out of my sight." He held her face. "I almost lost you."

If there was a better opening for her to suggest that he move in, Gail did not know what it could be. She kissed him. "We agreed it's better for Karen if we wait." Someone in the back of her brain screamed,
Coward!
She leaned over and lifted the drain to let the water out. "Help me up."

He held her terry-cloth robe for her, then picked up his scotch. Gail tied the sash and walked into her bedroom.

Anthony followed. "They found Felix's van today in a canal west of the airport. I heard it on the news driving here. His girlfriend was inside. Tied up. She was probably alive when it went in."

"Oh, no." Gail turned around, searching his face. She knew that Anthony had hoped, against all logic, that someone with a political agenda had planted evidence in Felix Castillo's house. That hope was fading. She said, "No sign of Felix?"

"No."

Gail sat on the end of the bed and pulled Anthony down to sit with her. "I remember, when I was talking to Felix on Fisher Island, how careful he was. He was smoking, and he held his cigarette so the ember wouldn't show. When he finished he buried it in the sand. So . . . why did he leave so much evidence in his house?"

"You're thinking like a defense lawyer," Anthony said.

Gail loosened his tie. "How was lunch with your grandfather today?" Over the weekend, the Reyes family had moved in. Anthony was pretending he didn't care, but he had made sure that Octavio was at work before going to the house.

He seemed to smile into his glass before he took another sip of scotch. "Well, we discussed Felix Castillo."

Gail said, "Oh, no. Octavio has been telling him what good friends you are with a Castro agent."

"He's probably more subtle than that. Ernesto asked me how I had met Felix Castillo, and didn't I know what he was." Anthony rolled his glass slowly between his hands. "I said Felix had fooled me. I said I'd met him in Camagiiey when I was a kid. It's what I told the family when Felix showed up in 1982 from Mariel, wanting a job. What else could I say?" Anthony leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "I don't know if he believed me or not."

Gail wondered how soon it would be before Anthony started believing in Felix's guilt, too, because it was easier that way. She pulled him around by his shoulder. "You have to tell your grandfather what happened. Everything. Everything you didn't tell him when you got back from Nicaragua twenty years ago."

As if she had pulled open a pit and expected him to jump in, Anthony rose to his feet and walked a few steps away. He drained his glass. "Go ahead and get dressed. I'll fix one more of these, then let's have dinner."

The door closed behind him.

She stood up to go to her closet, but her legs were too weak. Shaking, she sat back down on the bed, her hand clenched on her lap. A good effort, she thought. She had made a damned good effort to forget about Los Pozos, just as Anthony had. But it had failed. She knew that sooner or later she would ask him again. There was no choice. Even if Felix Castillo had done what he said, had put two bullets into Emily Davis's brain, Anthony was still carrying the burden of her death. The weight was starting to crush them both.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The last time Gail saw Felix Castillo, that night on Fisher Island, he had been using a miniature camera and zoom lens. With a few phone calls Gail located something similar downtown at the Spy Shop. After a hearing at the courthouse, she picked it up, a sophisticated little machine that set off warning bells on her MasterCard.

Anthony had gone back to his own place after a night at hers, so Gail had time to get familiar with the new toy. A couple of hours later she could aim and shoot without fumbling at the tiny controls.

At just past three o'clock on Thursday, Gail looked through the viewfinder at Sun Fashions, Inc., and pressed the shutter.
Click-whine.
The building was like dozens of others in this part of Hialeah—a flat-roofed, windowless warehouse. Gail had been lucky to find a visitor's space at a business across the street, her view obscured only by the trucks and step-vans clattering past.

From this angle she could see both the side of Sun Fashions with its open loading bays and the front entrance, which sported a phony mansard roof that overhung a glass door decorated with a yellow sun. To judge from the thickness of the grass, the only spot of green on this narrow, dusty street, business at Sun Fashions was good. The monotony of the long white facade was broken by the name of the company and two flagpoles. One flew the U.S. flag, and the other the flag of Cuba.

A few drops of rain hit the windshield. The flags lifted in a sudden breeze. Gail prayed that the clouds would pass over.

The entry in Lloyd Dixon's appointment book had put Octavio Reyes's initials by this address in Hialeah at 3:30 p.m. She was not sure what it would mean, exactly, if he showed up, or what she would do about it. She had given herself several good reasons to stay away, but none could overcome her anger. Rebecca Dixon and Seth Greer were dead. Gail did not believe that Felix Castillo had killed them. They had died for something they knew. Something that Felix might have found out. Felix was probably dead, too. And in all her dreams the dark face of Octavio Reyes appeared.

She despised him for what he had done to Anthony. She had no fear, only a humming alertness. To reduce the possibility of being recognized, she had put on the brunette wig and a pair of her mother's reading glasses. She felt capable of anything.

As Gail held the camera in her lap, a lunch truck— a roach coach—turned off the road, its horn playing the first two lines of "La Cucaracha." The driver got out and raised a panel on the side, making a little roof. At the same time, a dozen or more women came out the side door of the building and down a short flight of concrete steps—seamstresses on break. Gail could hear their voices, the quick patter of Spanish, as they clustered around to buy sodas and snacks.

Hialeah was a blue-collar grid of small streets on a relentlessly flat landscape. Its garment factories provided jobs where new immigrants could sit at sewing machines eight hours a day at cheap wages. As Gail watched, more seamstresses came out of the building and walked through the gate. She noticed a pickup truck waiting for them to move out of the way. Gail stared at it, a dark blue Ford 250 with tinted windows and a CB antenna. There was a small American flag on the bumper sticker. The pickup backed toward the loading bays and vanished, blocked by the women and the lunch truck.

Without hesitation Gail locked her car and walked across the street with her jacket draped over the camera. She had noticed the bus route sign attached to a concrete utility pole. A heavy middle-aged woman sat on the bus bench, arms crossed. She watched without much interest as Gail set the camera on the back of the bench, checked the viewfinder, then draped an arm over it and put her finger on the shutter.

The man getting out of the truck was not Lloyd Dixon. She was surprised by this, then recognized him as an employee, the mechanic she had seen on the scaffold at the Dixon Air hangar. Hispanic, around forty, brown slacks, windbreaker. She got him stepping up to the loading dock, then speaking to a man in a suit who came out of the building. The second man was older, mid-fifties, the type who would drive the Mercedes in the reserved spot by the front door.

Then a dark red Lexus with gold trim turned in from the street. The women were going back through the gate, and the car moved slowly, nosing up to the building. Gail rechecked the focus and pulled back the lens for a wider angle. She pretended to look in another direction and pressed the shutter, hearing the soft
click-whine
of the advance. Got Octavio Reyes coming out of the car. Straightening the jacket of his gray suit. Reaching back in for a small black gym bag. Up the stairs. Handshake with the man who had come out earlier. The driver of the pickup truck lighting a cigarette, not really part of this. But his eyes watched the street.

Seven seconds. Gail had already calculated how long it would take to walk casually across the street, get back into the car, and start the engine. Less time than it would take any of those men to spot a camera lens, jump off the loading dock, and come over to ask her what she was doing.

Reyes walked inside with the older man. Drops of rain hit the sidewalk, making dark circles in the dust. The last of the seamstresses hurried inside, and the driver of the lunch truck closed the side panel, got back in, and went on down the block. The woman on the other end of the bus bench popped open an umbrella.

Gail stayed where she was. Counted off four minutes on her watch. Five. Rain was coming a little faster, but not enough to send her running.

A forklift appeared in the open bay door, its metal arms holding a pallet with a blue plastic tarp wrapped tightly around a rectangular shape underneath. The driver from Dixon Air jumped off the dock and lowered the gate on the pickup truck. Reyes and the other man came back out. Watched the forklift roll forward and place the pallet in the bed of the truck, which rocked, then settled on its springs.

Gail wrapped her jacket around the camera and ran for the car as the rain started falling in ragged gray sheets.

Dixon Air Transport shared a parking lot with a neighboring hangar. Gail found an empty space near the other building and put the VISITOR sign on the dashboard. The guard at the gate had given it to her when she showed her business card and said she had an appointment with Lloyd Dixon. She had noticed, last time she was here, that the guard had not called to get an okay. The main terminal entrance was through a gate some half-mile distant, where most of the private airplanes came and went on runways not shared by the cargo carriers on this side of the field.

Gail turned off the engine and sat for a few minutes listening to the rain tick on the roof. She had escaped Hialeah just before four o'clock, when workers started pouring out of the factories, locking up traffic. The pickup truck couldn't have been so lucky, but it would arrive soon enough. She had no doubt of its destination. And as for what was under the blue tarpaulin— not ladies' dresses, not the way that truck had settled under the weight. She didn't believe it was sewing machine parts, either. A routine pickup of cargo would not have been jotted down in the CEO's personal appointment book. She guessed that the CEO himself would be the pilot. Dixon in his leather bomber jacket. He had winked at her on his way out of the rehearsal hall after speaking with Tom Nolan.
Some fun, huh?