You Only Die Twice (13 page)

“Onnie, if you had to flee, disappear forever, change your identity and start over, where would you go?”

“Trouble with the desk?” she asked breezily. “Come on, Britt. Nothing's that bad. It's that bitch Gretchen again, isn't it?”

I explained what I wanted and we brainstormed, agreeing that Kaithlin would probably run as far from Miami as possible. Onnie said she'd start checking West Coast newspapers, California, Washington, and Oregon—and Colorado—then work her way east.

“She was probably smart enough not to go to a resort city,” I said, recalling a homicide I'd covered. The victim, on the witness protection plan out of New York, insisted on opening a small bar in South Beach, ignoring the feds, who warned that Miami was too high-profile and he'd be seen and recognized. They were right. He was shot dead two weeks later.

Kaithlin didn't need the feds; she had created her own witness protection plan. It kept her safe for ten years, until something went wrong.

“Try to get somebody else to handle routine requests from the newsroom,” I said. “Fred wants to give this priority.”

“We're swamped and short-handed as always,” she said, “but I'll do my best. So you saw R. J. Jordan, today, huh? How'd the man look?”

“Not bad for a guy past fifty. Lottie thinks he's still a stud.”

“Hey, that's not old. Look at Newman, Redford, Poitier, Sean Connery.”

“Yeah, but this guy's only talent is trouble.”

“Talking talent,” she said lightly, “you got yourself a new sweetie you didn't tell me about? Heard you went AWOL in Daytona.”

“Have to hang up now, talk to you later,” I said, and turned south on Alton Road.

I had been gone for only twenty-four hours. As I parked outside my apartment, it seemed longer. It was already dusk. Mrs. Goldstein, in a heavy sweater and gloves, was watering her banana trees. Her face lit up. “I just saw you on TV! They showed the press conference at the airport.” She dropped the gurgling hose into the grass and hugged me. “You looked so tired, I made you some soup. Where's your bag, Britt?”

“I don't know,” I murmured, then surprised us both by weeping on her soft shoulder, big snuffling sobs and scalding hot tears.

She walked me into my apartment, heated the soup, brewed tea, and listened. Slumped in my favorite chair, Billy Boots purring in my lap, I told her that McDonald was out of my life and recounted the frightening moments on the plane.

“I thought he was the one,” she said sadly.

“So did I.” I sniffled, hugging Bitsy, who sat up, eyes concerned, her eager paws on my knees.

“I'm glad you're home safe,” my landlady said kindly. “No wonder you're upset, after such an experience. You're having a delayed reaction. You need to eat something good, take a shower, and go to bed. Then tomorrow take a book and go lie on the beach—”

“I—I can't.” I hiccuped. “I have to go back to work tonight.”

Shocked and indignant, she castigated my bosses as
“insensitive and unreasonable” men who constantly take advantage of my loyalty and good nature. It wasn't true, of course. I am a willing volunteer when it comes to trouble. But I needed kind words and sympathy from someone who cared.

“Take a shower,” she instructed, “and I'll bring you a bite to eat. Oh, honey,” she said at the door. “I bought you a new toothbrush, too. I saw yours when I came to take the dog out and change Billy's sandbox.” She shook her head. “You should replace it every six months, at least.”

“They don't make them like they used to,” I said numbly.

By the time I'd showered and dressed, she had brought a plate of warm beef flanken with horseradish and potato latkes.

The food, comforting and sustaining, didn't fill the empty place where my heart should be, but it was fortifying. I put on warm clothes and filled a thermos with strong Cuban coffee. I felt stronger as I drove back to the paper through the chilly night, as though I'd found my second wind. Who needed sleep? How did the words of the song go?

I'll sleep when I'm dead.

“How novel. A great argument,” Jeremiah Tannen said. The former boy wonder from the public defender's office was the first person I called. Now in successful private practice, he specializes in criminal law. “But it wouldn't work,” he said, “and I'll tell you why.

“You can't be tried twice for the same crime. That's double jeopardy. But a man wrongfully convicted of his wife's murder the first time could, indeed, be charged with her recent murder. It's not the same crime. It's a different murder, at a different place, on a different date, in a different jurisdiction.

“However,” he continued, “it would be fascinating, if he was convicted, to try to persuade the court to grant him credit for the time he served for the first crime, the one that never happened.”

 

R. J.'s anger at Kaithlin's mother haunted me, as I cleared my desk of mail and messages. Why did he detest Reva Warren so? After all these years he was still furious at a sad senior citizen, now dead, whose only sin seemed to be working all her life to raise the woman he had once loved.

Did she do more than meddle? Was it because she had testified against him?

I called my mother, who had left multiple messages.

“Britt, darling. Were you out of town? Someone said something about a plane…?”

“Yes,” I said, “but it all turned out fine. Mom, when you worked for Jordan's—”

“I just heard the news, dear. R. J.'s free!”

“I know, I was there.”

“I can't believe it! I was shocked. Did you see what Eunice was wearing? Chanel! She looked like an absolutely different person. She's worn nothing but black since it all happened.”

“I guess it was sort of a celebration that she has her son back. Mom, did you—?”

“Eunice always had style,” she said, “but no business sense. Con was brilliant, generous to a fault. He led everyone to believe she was an asset, when in reality she was nothing but a self-centered clotheshorse.”

“Mom, I'm at work, trying to piece it all together. Maybe you can help. Did Kaithlin ever discuss personal problems with you, the animosity between her mother and R.J?”

“That was all very long ago,” she said, suddenly less talkative, “and I'm just on my way out. Nelson and I are attending a cocktail party for the Dade Heritage Trust;
then we're off to dinner.” I tried to place Nelson. She'd had frequent escorts since she began dating after only recently, belatedly, coming to terms with my father's death.

“I won't keep you,” I promised, “but there are so many theories, so many possibilities, and I have to work fast. I need some direction.”

“What are they saying?” She sounded wary.

“Oh, a thousand and one stories.” I pulled out the witness list and flipped open the thick trial transcript.

“People are even speculating that there was another child, that Kaithlin wasn't the—”

“Maybe that's not so far from the truth,” she broke in.

“What? You mean there was—”

“Darling, I really can't say any more.” She seemed instantly to regret saying as much as she had. “There's the doorbell. Got to go. Love you.”

“Mom, wait—” She hung up.

I pushed the redial button. Her number rang and rang. I hung up, hit it again, and it rang some more. Even her machine didn't answer.

In the course of my job, I can often draw out intimate, even damning information from reluctant, even hostile strangers. Why then can't I connect with my own mother? Did R. J.'s sudden freedom shock her because she knew something more, something important?

I scanned the witness list again and highlighted a name: Amy Hastings, Kaithlin's childhood friend, one of the last people she spoke to before the murder that didn't happen.

I drew more bright yellow highlights through the
names of Dallas Suarez, the mistress who had testified against R. J., and the Jordans' live-in housekeeper, Consuela Morales. The housekeeper had testified through an interpreter about the couple's domestic strife and R. J.'s rages. She said she once saw him push Kaithlin against a glass table, and she witnessed another quarrel when he slapped her until she sobbed. The housekeeper said she had applied ice to Kaithlin's bruised cheekbone so she could attend an important business meeting the following morning. She had also testified that she so feared R. J. she would have quit her job but was afraid to leave Miss Kaithlin alone with him. She, too, had wept on the stand.

No wonder the jury wanted to hang him.

The housekeeper was fifty-one at the time, her name common. I suspected that if still alive and working in the United States, she would probably be in the same neighborhood. Non-English-speaking household workers are usually hired via word-of-mouth by employers who are acquainted with one another.

I found the blue book, the city cross-reference directory, and began with the house on Old Cutler where the doomed marriage of Kaithlin and R. J. fell apart.

A precocious child answered, then gave up the phone to his harried mother, who said she'd never heard of Consuela Morales. Neither did the next-door neighbor, who had recently moved in. But a longtime neighbor on the other side thought she remembered the woman.

“I believe she's somewhere over on the next block now, working for a doctor and his wife.”

I found her on the tenth call.

“I would like to come and talk to you,” I told her in Spanish.

She was too busy, she protested. When I persisted, she reluctantly agreed to see me in an hour and a half.

Until then, I searched the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database. No current driver's license for Amy Hastings. Her old license, issued at age seventeen, gave me her date of birth and physical description. Records revealed that, in 1993, Amy Hastings had renewed her license as Amy Sondheim. Bell South showed no Amy Sondheim, listed or unlisted. I called the apartment complex where she had lived at the time. The manager did not remember her but gave me the names of four longtime residents. The second said Amy had divorced and moved to Baltimore. No phone listing there. Maryland driver's license records showed she had renewed her license and changed her name to Tolliver. New residents at her old address said she had moved to San Jose, California, in 1997.

Was it to be near Kaithlin? I nearly called Onnie to suggest she focus on central California, but Amy wasn't listed in San Jose. Her trail dead-ended. Then I managed to tap into a credit bureau report, not the confidential file, only the header on the top page that identified the individual in question. Amy had been busy: divorced and apparently remarried once more. Her new address? Miami. She had returned in late 2000, now using the name Salazar.

I should have known. An itch afflicts natives who leave this place. Live elsewhere, as I learned to my dis
may in college, and an uneasy sensation nags, as though you went to bed forgetting to brush your teeth. Suddenly wide awake in the dead of the night, you sit up, slap your forehead and say, Oh, yeah, I forgot something today. I forgot to go home, to go back to Miami.

Her number didn't answer. If she'd been reading the newspaper, I wondered why Amy hadn't called me. I hoped no other reporter had found her first.

I checked the time. I only had fifteen minutes to meet Consuela Morales.

 

No wonder R. J.'s fury had made Consuela cower. She stood less than five feet tall, petite and solemn with huge spaniel eyes. We talked in her room, a sparsely furnished cubicle with a private entrance, surely smaller than some closets in the big house where she now worked. She would not like her current employers to know of this, she said. There was no trouble here. It was an excellent position.

She had been afraid but had testified despite threats, pleas, and even offers of money and lifelong employment from Eunice Jordan. She testified for Miss Kaithlin, she said, an angel who had helped the rest of her family emigrate from Guatemala, sponsored them herself, and found them jobs. It had been difficult to work for the couple. They loved each other passionately, their housekeeper said solemnly. They fought. Always. It grew worse and worse, until she was afraid R. J. would kill Miss Kaithlin. Though she had detailed his rages for the police and lawyers, no one ever probed into what triggered his anger. The prosecutor didn't
need to and the defense didn't want more on the record about R. J.'s bad temper.

Consuela's English was not good then; it wasn't now. But one thing she understood. Always, when they fought, it was for the same reason.

R. J. would shout, demand, and curse. He even wept. Always the same thing:
“¿Dónde está mi hijo?
I want my son!”

“They had no children,” I said.

“I know.” Consuela shrugged and rolled her dark eyes, as though the peculiarities of her employers were not her business.

“You're sure that's what he was saying?”

She was. Kaithlin often called her mother during arguments, she said. R. J. would shout. Sometimes they struggled over the phone. “He very mad,” she said in English.

She had never seen Kaithlin pregnant, never saw a child or even a child's photo.

The medical examiner said that Kaithlin had given birth. But if she and R. J. had had a baby, where was it?

 

Back at the office, I called R. J. He wasn't home, and Eunice was “unavailable.”

I dialed Amy Salazar. This time she answered. “You're the former Amy Hastings,” I announced flatly, giving her no opportunity to deny it. “I need to talk to you about Kaithlin Warren.” Then I identified myself.

“How did you find me?” She sounded soft and girlish, though she had to be at least thirty-six or thirty-seven.

“It wasn't easy.”

“What about Kaithlin?”

“I guess you're aware of the story about her recent death and R. J.'s release.”

“Yes, but you're all wrong,” she said cheerfully.

“Kaithlin isn't dead. She wasn't dead then. She isn't dead now.”

“What do you mean?” I gasped.

“I don't like to talk on the telephone,” she said slowly.

“I'll come out there,” I said. “Right now.”

 

She lived in Coconut Grove, a historic Miami suburb of small houses, big trees, and narrow streets named Avocado, Loquat, and Kumquat. The address was difficult to find: a cottage scarcely visible from the street, dwarfed by towering oak and poinciana trees. It looked dark, but luminous eyes watched from the porch as I carefully picked my way along a fern-lined path. Several cats retreated into the anthuriums as I approached the wooden steps. Clove and cinnamon scents from night-flowering plants perfumed the air, and water splashed against stone somewhere nearby. The interior light was so dim that I shivered, hoping she was still there.

Her almost musical voice responded to my knock. “It's Britt Montero,” I called, and she opened the door.

She was barefoot despite the chill, her hair and clothes loose and flowing. White candles burned as she ushered me into the living room, where wind chimes and planters hung from the ceiling. The furniture was
wicker and the floor Dade County pine. The flickering candlelight glinted off a crystal suspended from a ribbon around her pale throat.

“Is the power out?” I asked.

“Oh, no.” She laughed and switched on a brass lamp in the corner. “I prefer to meditate by candlelight.”

I sat on a canary-yellow sofa and declined her offer of a fruit drink. She sat in a wicker rocker opposite me. She was thin, with a wide, generous mouth and thick dark eyelashes.

“You startled me when you said that Kaithlin isn't dead.”

“Of course she isn't,” she murmured confidently, her smile benevolent. “There is no death, only change.”

I stared, not sure whether to laugh or cry. “If it is only change,” I said, “you must admit, it's a pretty drastic one.” What I had hoped was a major break in the story was nothing but new-age babble.

“The soul never dies,” she said serenely. “Kaithlin lives on in spirit.” She gazed around the room. “I feel her presence often.”

“So do I,” I said, surprising myself, emotions mixed. “I wish she could tell us what happened, enlighten us about her last ten years. Did you ever hear from her in all that time? In real life? Did you know she was still alive on this plane?”

“No.” She looked hurt. “When I testified at the trial I believed every word I told them. I believed she was in spirit. I felt like I'd lost a true sister.”

“Were you and she always close?”

“We met in kindergarten.” She smiled. “Miss Pe
ters's class. We had a fight the first day and wound up in a hair-pulling match. I can't remember why, but Miss Peters had to pull us apart. We were both crying and in trouble. From that moment on we were inseparable. Like, I was her shadow. Kaithlin led, I followed. I was totally shy and backward. I adored her. She was smarter, ran faster, and told better jokes than anybody else in school.

“We shared all our secrets. We were always together,” she added, twirling a lock of her long hair, “until she met R. J.”

She suddenly bounded over to join me on the couch, tucking her bare feet beneath her, skirt billowing. She had bounced up so abruptly that the chair she vacated continued to rock, as though occupied by an agitated ghost.

“We were sixteen,” she said softly, eyes aglow. “From the moment their eyes met, it was all fire, passion, and excitement. It was the most romantic thing we'd ever experienced. First love for her, and on his part, I think, a rediscovery of innocence. She wasn't allowed to date, but we had done a little experimenting with boys our own age. R. J. was different. Like, he kept coaxing and teasing her. On their first date, when she was supposed to be studying at my house, he drank too much—so she walked out and took a bus home. He didn't see her go, didn't even know her phone number. He showed up, furious, the next time she worked at the store. But she was good, God, she was good. Like, she turned it around so he was furious at himself.” She leaned on one elbow, hand in her hair, eyes dreamy. “From that moment on, he was hooked; he had to have
her. Kaithlin knew how to get what she wanted. She wanted R. J. and she got him.”