The Four Corners Of The Sky (45 page)

Annie thought back to how nasty Melissa Skippings had been to her at Golden Days, and then shortly afterwards how furiously the detective had pursued Raffy. Both those things must have happened right after Melissa had given Dan the news that she was marrying someone else, when they’d both been upset. Annie said, “So you hear your ex is getting married and you deal with it by chasing Raffy and me down the street?”

He flexed a fairly perfect bare leg. “And I pull a hamstring. And I get roughed up by the Feds, and I get fired, and I get stupid blotto and chop down my stupid magnolia tree. I told you I’d had a bad couple of days.”

She noticed another uprooted fuchsia in the yard and planted it delicately back in its pot. “Well, Sergeant, I can’t say I haven’t had a day at the beach myself, because I have.” He laughed and, again, as in their first phone conversation, it pleased her that he laughed so genuinely at her humor. She said quietly, “My dad seems to be dying—”

Hart groaned. “My dad’s already dead or he’d be so pissed about this magnolia tree.” He stared out over his small yard. “He died in a high-speed chase. Head-on collision with a utility pole. Long time ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

Hart shrugged a sad acceptance. “I’ve got a mom, nice lady, school librarian in Overtown. By the way, your mom’s not really Claudette Colbert, is she? I mean, there’s a birth certificate at Key West I got pulled, says Claudette Colbert’s your mother, but it’s a joke, right?”

She agreed that it was an instance of her father’s peculiar sense of humor. They were quiet together a while.

He stood, pulled his opened shirt around him. “You want something to eat? I forgot to eat today. Mexican?” He held out his hand to help her up.

Annie looked at the young man then took his hand. “Mexican what? Food, art, architecture, trip?” Why had she said that? She knew what he meant.

“I was thinking food,” he said, letting her hand go, slowly. “Art’s good too. Architecture’s good. I love the music. Furniture.”

She flashed on an image of the blue-painted wooden bed inside his house. Again she blushed. “There’s a restaurant at the Dorado we could go to. Then I could show you the Queen.”

He shook off her suggestion. “I’ve got bad memories of the Dorado. Melissa loves it there. Let’s grab some Mexican at La Loca. But I do want to see the Queen. Is she real?”

Annie shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

“Hang on, I’ll change.”

She gestured at his disordered yard. “Your clothes or your life?”

He laughed. “Stick around. Maybe both.”

B
ack at La Loca for the second time that night, Annie sat with the Miami detective in another of the blue-netted booths. In a retro jazzy shirt and taupe pleated trousers, Daniel Hart looked like a radical makeover of the man who’d been staggering around in his boxer shorts with his eyes glued shut only half an hour earlier.

“You clean up nice, Sergeant,” she admitted.

“Lieutenant, you stay that way. Don’t you ever get a speck of dirt on those white clothes?”

“Nope.”

He smiled back at her, lifting a small clay pitcher. “Have a margarita with me.”

She rested her hand over her empty glass. “Thanks but I don’t handle alcohol very well.”

“That’s just because you don’t practice.” He poured her half a glass.

By now the Coconut Grove nightspot was all razzle-dazzle, neon hot, crowded noise, and frenetic young people who shouted at each other over thumping salsa and clattering dishes. Some of them kissed seemingly random partners in booths, others gyrated, tightly sweaty on the small dance floor. With a bemused shake of his head, Hart gestured at the dancers. “Desperate search for elusive alliance.”

She followed his glance to the writhing couples. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Hook up, unhook, hook up…Am I getting old?”

She thought he’d said he was twenty-six. She hoped that wasn’t old. It was her age.

“That’s just years,” he said. “My mileage is high. I do a lot of skydiving. It takes a toll.”

“Really? You free fall? I’ve parachuted but never a free fall.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “You’d like it. So tell me, why’d your marriage fold?”

Annie had already warned herself not to let her guard down with Dan. She felt like a small plane blown by a strong wind irresistibly toward a wide-open field where he stood. A field where there was no place to hide. She tried to brake, circle back, but instead she heard herself revealing how it had broken her heart when she’d caught Brad having an affair. “His backup excuse was to claim Melody was just a one-night stand. Turned out, their affair had started like a week after we got married.”

Dan nodded sympathetically. “You feel like a fool, don’t you? Melissa claimed Jeffry was just financially advising her. I guess he could think better naked.”

She countered. “I can top that. Brad actually told me his girlfriend had drugged him.”

Dan’s grin was contagious. “Listen to us, competing about loving people who didn’t have the sense to love us back.”

In the next half hour, Annie told Dan almost as much about her breakup with Brad Hopper as Georgette knew—from her jealousy over Brad’s winning their first flight competition at Annapolis to her crying alone in her Chesapeake condo night after night.

They finished their mole and Dan leaned back comfortably in the corner of the booth, his leg bent, arms around it. “Can we go see your dad’s gold statue now?”

“Now?” Feeling out of focus, Annie stared, surprised, at her watch. It was late and she was exhausted; she was in a bar that seemed all too appropriately named “La Loca,” since it was not normal for her to be out at night with strangers in bars. If not at work in Annapolis or at home in Emerald, shouldn’t she at least be asleep in the Hotel Dorado with Malpy beside her, gathering strength to deal with her father in the morning, and—if need be—to trade Jack Peregrine the Queen of the Sea for her mother’s real name? “Tell me you’re not kidding, that the charges against my dad are dropped.”

“I’m not kidding. But Annie, understand. This isn’t a game like it was when you were a kid.”

She said, “If you’re going to warn me my dad’s a real crook, I’ve known it longer than you have. Oh by the way, he says he admires your persistence.”

Dan gave a wry salute. He described how he had spent months gathering proof about a racket of her father’s in which eager Miami investors had been sold revenue-producing ten-hectare parcels of a 500,000-acre Brazilian tree plantation named Cortina de Sueños. This plantation didn’t exist. The man ostensibly selling shares in the venture, Bruno Salvador, didn’t exist either; he was Jack Peregrine. Jack’s attention to detail included providing his victims with official letters about their land purchases, seemingly mailed from Brazil, with elaborate bond certificates, deeds, detailed maps, even glowing articles in (fictitious) magazines about the fabulous profits to be made from Cortina de Sueños.

“I had the evidence on Jack. But when the time came, I had no witnesses.” Dan wriggled his fingers. “My case fell through like rain on a bad roof. Tossed. Your dad walked. Nobody wanted to testify about what morons they’d been, buying land that was pure sueños.”

It didn’t surprise her. Dreams are what Jack sold; he’d boasted of it to her.

“Yeah, Jack was always one step ahead of us.” Hart closed his fist in air. “You think you’ve got him”—he opened his hand, blew the emptiness away—“all of a sudden, poof.”

“Poof,” nodded Annie wryly. “I’d say you just summed up my whole relationship with my father.”

Dan slid his finger through the fish netting, spun the wheel on a miniature white Mustang that sat in a blue martini glass. “So tell me why, when I get close to Peregrine this time, when I get close to you, wham, all of a sudden the Feds shut me down? What gives? Jack’s palling around here in Miami with men like Feliz Diaz and Archbishop de Uloa. I start to hear his name all over the place, but he’s not hanging with the usual con game type associates. These new friends of his are into crime so big they could be the fucking government. Before, he was a sting. Now he’s an operation.”

She wasn’t sure what the detective meant.

“I mean he’s not self-employed anymore. Somebody bigger than he is runs this thing.” Dan used his thumb to add more salt to his margarita. “Look at it. Your dad’s thrown in prison in Cuba, which ought to mean it’s the last place he’d want to show his face again. But apparently he keeps managing to slip in and out of Cuba no problemo. In fact, he’s flying not just there but all over everywhere. Mostly he’s flying to very rich places, Anguilla, Jupiter Island, Caneel Bay. Why? How? Because somebody’s running interference for him. Here and in Cuba both.” He poured her glass full from the clay pitcher.

“He’s flying everywhere? You know this for a fact?” Annie was more interested in the extent of her father’s flying than the cause of it. Plus all these places were islands, so maybe he was making amphibious landings. She was bizarrely proud of him.

Dan’s cell phone went off. It played Oscar Peterson’s “Night Train”; he checked the number but decided not to answer it. “Damn right, he’s flying. And who’s letting him? I think the interference is tied to Feliz Diaz.”

Annie said she’d heard from Rafael Rook that her dad played poker with Diaz.

“This is not just about your dad making powerful pals because he plays high-stakes poker. And it’s not just about Diaz wanting to whitewash his image by giving his local church a pretty little gold statue of the Virgin Mary, though why’s an archbishop mixed up with your dad too?” He smiled at her. “Maybe we could go to your hotel?”

The annoying fact that she kept blushing made her blush more. “Don’t push.”

His smile, unlike Brad’s, had confidence without smugness. “I’m not pushing. But I do want to see this statue. The night’s young.”

She glanced at her watch. “The night’s tomorrow.”

He kept staring at her. “Your ex-husband was an idiot.”

Her blush deepened. “Almost ex.”

“Almost ex-husband was a complete idiot to let you go.” He looked at her without smiling.

The silence went on too long for comfort. “…Do you know why my dad keeps flying to Cuba?”

“No.” Dan poured himself more margarita. “Do you?”

Annie repeated that she had known nothing specific about her father’s activities since she was seven years old.

He flicked at the blue plastic netting above their heads, so a sand dollar rolled up against a starfish. “He’s doing serious people serious favors and like I say, they’re not just favors about a Holy Thorn from the Sacred Crown, although I’m sure Diaz and Archbishop de Uloa plan to showcase the ‘Thorn’ on a church altar.”

Annie stared into her empty glass. “My dad’s a sting artist. He’s got a fake relic and these suckers are buying it from him. I don’t know how he faked it because I saw it and it looks damn real, but he’s scamming them.”

He waited while their waitress set down two complimentary glasses of almendrados. “Want some advice, Annie? Men like Diaz are not suckers. Get your dad out of this thing. Whether he’s really got cancer or not, and frankly I don’t believe it, there’re things he could die from a lot quicker than cancer.” The young man nodded earnestly. “Your dad is a talented, upscale grifter, but just a grifter.”

Annie sighed. “Sort of curiously naïve?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.” Reaching into his jacket, he brought out a folded newspaper. “I’ll bet you my ’57 Thunderbird, and I love that car, he’s got no idea what they’re using him for. Or how dead he’s going to be when they’re done with him.”

The
Miami Herald
he held out to her showed a large photo of cheerful men clapping at a dedication ceremony. Near them the governor of Florida waved his arm in greeting to an off-camera crowd. Among those standing close to the podium was Feliz Diaz, unmistakably the same man who’d stepped out of the Mercedes in front of Golden Days, the man with whom the handsome woman had driven away. Diaz stood next to a white-haired priest whose scornful disdain for his present surroundings was deeply etched in his face. “That’s Archbishop de Uloa,” Dan told her. “These guys are all buddies.”

“Business buddies or political buddies?” she asked.

“Same thing in Miami, especially when you’re talking Cuba.” His phone rang again. This time he spoke briefly with someone. After he finished, he said, “My partner told me that Diaz just sent his girlfriend to Cuba.”

“Helen Clark?”

He shrugged. “She calls herself that.” He oddly added, “Remember William McKinley’s platform when he ran for President in 1896?”

Annie had to admit that she did not.

“There were two big mandates the Republicans had that year—‘Protect American Business’ and ‘Free the People of Cuba.’ Those mandates were the same thing. Freedom was the freedom to keep Cuban resources for American business. Boom! 1898. ‘Remember the Maine!’ 1899. United Fruit Company.” Dan picked up Annie’s Navy jacket, lying beside her on the bench and held it up.

“I don’t want to hear you bad-mouthing the Navy,” she warned him.

“Tell it to Spain. They’d been in Cuba four hundred years.”

Annie said, “You should hear my friend D. K., the guy that taught me to fly. He’s part Algonquin and he’s always talking about how the Arawaks had been in the Caribbean a lot longer than the Spanish. D. K. always says, ‘Instead of waving at Columbus, they should have torched the boats and blow-darted the crew.’”

“I met D. K. I liked him.” Dan drank from his glass of almond liqueur. “I read Spain kept the heart of Columbus in a box in a cathedral in Havana. You know that? They took it home to Madrid after the U.S. Navy sank their fleet in Havana Harbor and Dewey blew them out of the water at Manila Bay. Talk about torching boats!” He saluted her jacket. “So, here we are again in Cuba, your dad stealing their statue. I’m not sure what the agency’s up to, getting involved in this but, Annie, trust me, the Feds will toss your dad like chum to sharks. In a heartbeat. Cuba’s a…” He laughed. “Red flag.”

Annie, who had studied the naval history about which Dan was talking, suggested that if he looked at refueling maps and harbors, he would see why the United States had to take naval control of both the Atlantic and Pacific, which meant getting the Spanish out of both Cuba and the Philippines. “Teddy Roosevelt was already figuring that out as an undergraduate at Harvard.”