CHAPTER TWO

The curving driveway swept me right up to the porte cochere.

Both sides of the front entrance were planted with topiary, and the young valet who opened the door sported a fade haircut, possibly designed by the same landscaper who had shaped the shrubs. He took control of my old red LeBaron convertible.

Less professional valets, many of whom could be found in Miami, sometimes sneered at my aging wheels. But that didn’t happen here. Maybe the Ritz Carlton marched its aspiring valets through used car lots until they acquired tolerance. However it was achieved, the Ritz had seemingly instilled its car jockeys with noblesse oblige.

Another attendant opened the front double doors for me, and I entered the hotel.

The lobby was about four stories high, with an enormous arched window, floor to ceiling, overlooking the back gardens. The view stretched all the way to the bay and encompassed more royal palms, large, round fountains with water cascading and stone lions’ heads with jets of water streaming from their mouths to fill limpid pools.

During my days in the Intelligence Unit of the Miami PD, I had once been dispatched to Paris to pick up an extradited prisoner. A French detective had taken me on a brief visit to Versailles. This was a kind of flashback.

Indoors, the motif was all white marble floors and walls, accented with pink roses. In fact, right in front of me stood a marble-topped table, and on it was a large metal vase colored with verdigris and stuffed with what had to be two hundred long-stemmed roses.

I figured that many roses had to be fake, so as I walked by, I ran my finger over one of them and a real rose petal came off in my hand, as soft as flesh. I looked around to make sure no one had caught me and slipped it into my pocket. I couldn’t take me anywhere.

Just off the lobby was a smaller sitting room with white brocade walls, a silver samovar on another marble table and a loveseat and chairs overlooking the gardens. It was there that I found Señora Carmen Vickers de Estrada.

She was standing at the window when I walked in, and I saw that she was unusually tall, probably five ten. About sixty-five, she had dark red hair and large, lustrous brown eyes. Her dress was a dark green and was accented by a strand of pearls that appeared to be of the first water.

She had apparently done little to avoid the sun over the years, and her face showed her age. But it was still an extremely attractive face. In fact, she looked to be a lady who had only grown more beautiful with time.

She held out a long elegant hand to me. On one finger, she wore a gold ring mounted with an exquisite blue emerald. That was elegant too.

“Mr. Cuesta, thank you very much for coming,” she said and led me to the loveseat.

As I had noted over the phone, her Spanish was particularly precise, but with a touch of an unspecified accent. It made me squint, and she noticed.

“What you hear is mostly my homeland, Colombia, and also the English boarding school where I was sent by my father. My family, the Vickers, are descended from British seamen who came to the coast of Colombia in the eighteenth century. Some people say we are descended from pirates.”

“Are you?”

She shrugged. “My great grandfather took the secret to his grave. But I’ll say this, Mr. Cuesta. My family—and especially the family of my late husband, the Estradas—have done very well in Colombia. My husband’s ancestors built a fortune as cattle ranchers, coffee planters and bankers, and that, you might say, is the source of our troubles today.”

To the lady, her loot may have been a problem. But to me, working on a day rate, the word “fortune” sounded just fine. I sat down next to her.

As I did, a waiter approached and placed a drink in front of her.

“One banana daiquiri,” he said.

Given that it was ten o’clock in the morning and she was already on a rum concoction, maybe she did have pirate blood. She asked me if I wanted a drink, but I told her I’d wait a while. Like eight hours or so. But I did order a coffee. I needed it.

I serve as chief of security at my brother Tommy’s nightclub, Caliente. It is—in my unbiased estimation—the hottest salsa venue in Miami. Most nights it goes very, very late. I had arrived home a little after four in the morning. When it rang that morning, the phone had at first sounded like a predatory bird coming at me out of the jungle canopy. Consequently, I was in need of caffeine.

She waited for the waiter to return. Once he did, I quaffed my coffee, and she daintily sipped her daiquiri.

“First I must give you a bit of background, Mr. Cuesta,” she said. “Two years ago, my husband, Mario Estrada, was killed at our hacienda outside Medellín when he resisted guerrilla kidnappers. He refused to become a commodity, a person who could be stolen and sold back to his family, and it cost him his life.”

I winced in consolation, but she wasn’t finished.

“Then about a year ago, my son José was kidnapped as he drove from our home in Medellín to a nearby town, where he was to visit one of our branch banks. He’s my only child. I had begged him never to resist if they came for him, and he didn’t. I paid a large ransom right away, but even then they held him for seven months before releasing him.”

She shrugged. “Of course, we were fortunate. Other families have paid plenty only to find their loved ones lying dead on some muddy roadside.”

I nodded. I had read the stories. Colombia was the kidnapping capital of the planet. Colombian guerrillas and the criminal gangs they sometimes did business with snatched hundreds of victims every year. Abduction for profit was a major industry there, from Cali to Medellín, from Bogotá to Barranquilla. Colombia was probably the only country in the world that could list “ransom payments” as part of its gross domestic product.

I sipped. “So what is the problem I can help you with now?”

“The problem is this,” she said. “I’m afraid someone may try to kidnap my son again. We are in need of added security.”

“I see. So you would like me to go to Colombia.”

She frowned. “No. There is no need for you to travel to Colombia.”

“Then where is your son?”

“He’s here in Key Biscayne. We are living with my brother-in-law, Carlos Estrada, at a house not far from here. What I’m worried about is that someone will try to kidnap him right here.”

That stopped me. I’d never heard of Colombian kidnapping gangs working the Miami side of the Caribbean. In fact, that was why rich Colombians like the Estradas had moved to Miami in droves over the past two decades: to escape the kidnappers. What she was worried about was highly unlikely.

It wasn’t, however, the first time I had heard someone raise the issue in Miami. I once briefly dated a Colombian woman who I liked very much. At one point, she expressed fears of kidnapping, and I chided her that there was really no need to fret in Miami. She became extremely upset with me for not taking her concerns seriously.

“You can make believe you live in paradise, but I cannot,” she said.

Very shortly afterwards, she broke off the relationship. Her name was Susana, and I still thought of her. I didn’t want to make the same mistake with my new client.

“Why do you think your son is in danger of being kidnapped here on the Key?”

“Recently, moments have occurred that have made me worry.”

“What moments were those?”

She put down her daiquiri. “The first was when I overheard my son and his girlfriend themselves discussing the possibility of a Colombian being kidnapped here on Key Biscayne. They were saying that so many of the wealthy families from our country had moved here that it only made sense for the kidnappers to come here too. When I interrupted and asked them about it, they tried to tell me they were just joking and that they considered the idea preposterous.”

She shook her head sternly. “Some joke.”

Then, she tapped my knee with a blood-red fingernail. “The truth is many new Colombians are here these days in Miami, not just the wealthy. We have no idea who they are or what they’re doing here. I have even heard my own servants say that kidnappers might as well come here.”

She paused for dramatic effect.

“And the other moments that made you worry?” I asked.

“On several occasions recently, the phone has rung and when we pick it up, no one is there. Then several nights ago, around sunset, I happened to look out the window of our house here and saw a silver car crawl by very slowly, as if someone were watching our property closely. A minute later, it came by again in the opposite direction at the same decreased speed.

“Finally, yesterday, a very dangerous-looking individual—a man wearing a shirt with bright flowers, with long, black hair and a scar across his face—came to the front gate and asked who lives in the house. When nobody would tell him, he just walked away. You see what I mean, Mr. Cuesta? I believe they have their sights set on us again.”

I nodded in commiseration and didn’t say what I was thinking. Her fears were based mostly on a bit of idle conversation, servants’ gossip and the kind of aborted phone calls that everyone receives now and then. As for the cars cruising by, the real estate market in Miami was always active despite economic downturns, and people were constantly out perusing neighborhoods. They were looking to make a killing, but not the kind Doña Carmen feared. As for the guy with the scar, who knew? Maybe he was selling magazines.

No, I didn’t dare say that to her. I had been around long enough to know you don’t simply talk a mother out of her fears for her children. I could have told her that in Colombia, kidnappers go to prison. In the U.S., in some cases, kidnapping is a capital crime. You could end up laying on a table, getting jabbed with a lethal injection. Snatch someone Stateside and you might be buying into “The Big Sleep.” But I didn’t think telling her that would calm her worries either.

“How long has your son been here?” I asked her.

“About a month. I had been trying to convince him to come ever since they released him last year. He said he refused to be run out of his own country by outlaws. He added bodyguards and went right back to work at the bank in Colombia, which my late husband’s family has run for decades. Finally, though, we were able to convince him to come here.”

“He listened to reason.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t so much me who convinced him. It was his girlfriend. She has been with him only a few months, but she already has more influence on him than I do.”

Mention of the new girlfriend brought a distinct edge to her tone. I couldn’t help but notice. My eyes narrowed, and so did hers.

“I won’t tell you I’m happy about this match, Mr. Cuesta. I’m not a snob, but Catalina—that’s her name—is a girl from the countryside. She’s very beautiful, but I don’t think she and José have enough in common.”

Her eyes welled with emotion. “Believe me, I want nothing more on this earth than for my José to marry and give me grandchildren. I dream of it and I’m running out of time. But in a family as wealthy as ours, you have your suspicions about young women who suddenly appear at the side of your son. The fact that she convinced him to abandon Colombia and come here counts for something, but I still have my suspicions.”

“And now you’re afraid she and José may not have run far enough.”

She fixed on me. “I know you must be thinking that I am a crazy old woman who worries at every person in proximity and every car she sees. Please, try to understand me. You can call me crazy, but you are not Colombian. You have not lived what we have lived these past decades. You haven’t had a husband killed. You haven’t had your only child kidnapped. You haven’t stayed awake thinking maybe you were the mother of a corpse. And now I am worried that they may try to take him a second time.”

Again, I wasn’t about to argue. It was true the Colombians had been through hell. In fact, they had their own Colombian corner of it. What Doña Carmen feared was outliving her only child, and for a mother, that just might be the deepest depth of hell.

“So what is it you want me to do, señora?”

“I want you to protect my family, in particular my son.”

“Not you?”

She shook her head. “Me they can have, although they probably wouldn’t want me. I have a reputation for being very difficult when I need to be. They would end up shooting me just to shut me up and never see a dollar for their efforts.”

“And your brother-in-law?”

“They have even less use for him. Carlos is overweight and has a bad heart, a bad liver and high blood pressure. He would never survive a kidnapping and a hike to some mountain hovel. He would probably die the first day.

“My son, however, is a different matter. We have a watchman at the house, but that isn’t enough. I want you to provide security whenever José leaves the property. Since Catalina is with him almost at all times, like his shadow, you will, in effect, be protecting her as well. I want you to be their bodyguard, on call seven days per week.”

I rattled off my usual day rate and overtime charges.

She didn’t blink. “That’s fine. I’d like you to start today.”

There must be some big cows on those cattle ranches of hers.

“I’ll take you to the house and introduce you to José and Catalina, and I’ll warn you right now that José is not happy about this. He doesn’t like the idea of someone being around him all the time.”

I told her I was sure we could work something out.

As we stood up to leave, the stone lions attached to the fountains outside suddenly spurted water from their mouths.

It was a jungle out there.