MY HOUSE WAS exactly as I had left it. Mimi the cat was lying on the top of the chaise, soaking in what was left of the evening sun. She was so happy to see me, she raised her head from her comfy spot, yawned, and dropped her head back down. Welcome home, Dexter.
In the morning I met my faithful friend and skinny gay photographer, Rachel, at C’est La Vie, a little French restaurant on Main Street. I owed her for taking care of Mimi and keeping an eye on my place while I was gone. But I also wanted an update on the Zavala case.
We sat inside, way in the back of the divided dining room. I didn’t want anyone walking by recognizing me, giving me shit. I ordered the quiche lorraine and a salad. Rachel had an omelet.
She leaned to the side and studied my face. “You’re looking good. Especially the thing in the ear. What happened, you piss off a Mexican?”
I grinned. I appreciated her sense of humor, but I was quickly running out of patience. I had too much going on in my head. “So, what’s going on with Nick’s murder?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and focused on her food. “No one’s been arrested. Jason Kirkpatrick did a brief story about the lack of progress in the case. Quoted Petrillo, mostly. It was all about how it was an ongoing investigation and they were narrowing their list of suspects.”
“Narrowing their list. Nice. That’s cop-speak for we got nothing. Anything on me?”
She spread her arms, fork in her hand. “Why does it always have to be about you?”
“I’m serious.”
“Kirkpatrick said there were no warrants out for anyone. Shit, Dexter, you know how they are. In two years everyone will forget about it.”
“Not Petrillo. Certainly not that other asshole.”
“True. But they need concrete evidence and a decent motive. You know that. The last thing Miller wants is to nab the wrong guy. I think she’s up to here with scandals.” She glanced at my plate. “You going to eat the rest of that?”
I pushed my plate toward her. “You think they know I was gone?”
She picked the crust of my quiche with her hand. “Who, the cops?”
“No, the fucking painters. Who do you think?”
She pointed at me with the crust. “You’re getting paranoid, Dex.”
Rachel didn’t know about my prints on the penis sculpture. Paranoid or not, I was afraid to get snagged by Petrillo at any moment. I had to find Tiffany.
I got a new cell phone and then I took a drive along Bay Shore. I pulled up across the street from Nick’s house. There were no cars, no activity. It was just another peaceful day in the beautiful Sapphire Shores neighborhood of Sarasota. A family rode past on bicycles. In the ocean, between Nick’s house and the neighbor’s place, a couple of small sailboats glided by in the distance. The salty air, the blue sky, the quiet—it was a real change from Mexico City. I rolled down my window and breathed it all in. And what came across my mind was Flor. Beautiful, smart, empathetic.
I started the engine and drove around the neighborhood. Then I got on the North Trail by New College and drove south. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking. I thought maybe I would see Tiffany walking the streets. She didn’t strike me as a prostitute, but if she had no money, had been a runaway, and had nowhere to go, she might be out here looking for a way to make some cash.
I drove all the way to Fruitville Road and back up to the airport and back. I saw a man selling drugs. Probably crack. But no Tiffany. This was crazy, driving like this. It wasn’t methodical. I thought of Flor searching for the axolotl with her team. They had maps, they had grids. They had a plan. They were extremely methodical. I was doing it all wrong. I would never find Tiffany by wandering around the North Trail. That would be coincidence. That wasn’t how it worked. And I knew it.
Then, just as I passed 10th Street, I saw a woman walking alone. I pulled up on 12th Street and waited for her to catch up to me. She was wearing jean cutoffs and a tank top and smoking a cigarette. She looked rough, either a prostitute or homeless. Or somewhere in between.
She came to the passenger side of my car. I opened the window. She leaned in. “What’s up?”
“I wonder if you can help me out,” I said.
“That depends,” she said, and turned to the side and blew the smoke away from my car. “What you looking for, sweetie?”
“I’m looking for a girl. Blond. Her name’s Tiffany.”
She made a face. “What do I look like?” she said and looked over the car at the other side of the street, and then behind her. Then she stepped back. “Cops,” she said and started walking away quickly.
I looked in the rearview mirror. A police cruiser was waiting for traffic to pass so it could turn on 12th. I put my Subaru in gear, took a left on Cocoanut Avenue, and headed north.
Two blocks later, I saw the cop car turn on Cocoanut and speed up behind me. The cruiser’s lights flashed. A blip of the siren. I pulled over and put my hands over the wheel. I wasn’t black, but I was light-brown. To the Sarasota Police it made little difference. I didn’t want to give them an excuse.
I watched the two cops approach my car from behind, each with a hand at their side, resting on the handle of their Glocks.
The one on the driver’s side said, “License and registration.”
I handed him my documents. He was in his thirties, clean-cut, buff, fat neck.
The other cop came around the other side to the front and then to my side. “Can you step out of the car?” he said. “Hands where I can see them.”
I did as he asked. “What’d I do?”
“Turn around and place your hands on the car,” he said, pointing to the roof of my Subaru. The other cop was already back in the cruiser checking my documents on his computer.
I put my hands on the roof of the car. Hot. Across the sidewalk, I saw the faces of two black kids in the window of a house staring at me. I smiled. They didn’t smile back.
“What’d I do?”
“Soliciting a prostitute,” he said.
“What? I was just asking for directions.”
The other cop walked over and immediately placed a cuff on my right wrist and pulled my arm back.
“What the fuck?” It hurt my ribs where I’d received the pounding. “You can’t arrest me for nothing.”
They cuffed my other hand. “Do you have anything sharp in your pockets, needles, knives …”
“No.”
He shoved his hands in my pockets and pulled all the contents out: change, my wallet. They put it in a baggie. The one cop grabbed my arm and walked me to the cruiser while giving me the Miranda Rights.
I sat alone in the back of the cruiser while they searched my car. Then they locked it up and talked, glancing back at me every now and then. After about twenty minutes they got in the cruiser and we drove to the station. They never told me what they’d arrested me for. I thought of what Brian Farinas had said: say nothing. Besides, solicitation of prostitution was difficult to prove. And they hadn’t nabbed the woman. They had nothing. I leaned back in the seat, my hands slightly to the side, the cuffs pinching my skin.
* * *
The Sarasota police station is like a lounge at the airport, clean and comfortable and very modern. They took me to an interrogation room on the second floor. It was small, about six-by-eight feet with fancy metal walls, a pair of new office chairs, a small table, and a video camera in a corner of the ceiling. I sat alone, the cold AC blowing on my face. Twenty minutes later, Petrillo walked in.
“Well, what do you know?” I said. “Did you miss me?”
“We have a warrant for your arrest,” he said and sat on the side of the table, trying to act cool like some badass TV cop.
“For what?” I said. I was sure it was all bullshit, but there was a smidgen of doubt in the back of my head. Either way, I wasn’t going to let on about a damn thing. My lawyer said not to talk. I didn’t.
Petrillo pointed at my cheek. “What happened to your face?”
“I cut myself shaving,” I said. “You going to tell me about this warrant?”
He took in a long, deep breath. “You’re under arrest for possession of child pornography,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I thought of the two uniformed cops searching my car. They could have planted something.
Petrillo gestured toward the camera, the little black dome in the corner of the room. A moment later Frey walked in carrying a MacBook. He set it on the table and opened it. “Is this your computer?”
I recognized my documents on the desktop. “Looks like it.”
“Good,” Frey said. “Let’s take a look at this.” He clicked on a file. In a couple of seconds, a movie started playing. A man and a boy were tying up a girl to a bed. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. The footage was jittery, slightly dark—amateurish. The girl struggled. The man smacked her in the face. Then he ran his hands over her flat chest. The camera moved to the side to get a better angle. The man mounted the girl, covered her whole body like a blanket.
Petrillo leaned past Frey and shut the laptop. “There’s more. A lot more. Some pretty sick shit.”
“It’s not mine.”
Petrillo grinned. “We can put you away for a long time, Vega.”
“You know what they do to pedophiles in prison?” Frey said.
I leaned back on the chair. “It’s not mine.”
“Bullshit,” Frey said. “It’s your laptop.”
“It’s my computer, but those are not my files.” I kept thinking of Brian Farinas: say nothing. But fuck this. They were framing me. Those were not my files.
“And you know what? We found a lot of kiddie porn in Nick Zavala’s house,” Frey said. “Some of it matches what’s on your computer. You two had something going on, didn’t you?”
I shook my head. Then I glanced at Petrillo. “I’m not saying another word until I speak with my lawyer.”
* * *
They walked me across the street for booking and I spent the night in a cell. After my first appearance in front of a judge, they set bail. Brian got me out by the late afternoon.
“It’s bad,” he said as we walked out of the building. “They have the evidence, Dex. How did that shit find its way into your computer?”
We stopped at the hot-dog cart on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. I was starving. I ordered two hot dogs and a Coke. “They stole my computer—”
“Who, the cops?” Brian was a big guy. He wore dark suits that were too small for him. They looked incredibly tight and uncomfortable.
“A couple of weeks ago someone broke into my house. They stole my computer. Someone must have used it. They put those files in there.”
“Did you report the theft?”
I shook my head and took a bite of my hot dog. “I didn’t think they would find it. You know how it is. Ninety percent of robberies go unsolved; goods are rarely recovered.”
“Jesus, Dex—”
“I was busy.”
“So how did Petrillo and Frey end up with the computer?”
“I have no idea.” My mouth was full of hot dog, extra mustard. “But what’s fucked up is that it has the same porn files they found in Zavala’s house.”
“Here’s the problem,” Brian said. “Even if we can prove the files were put in your computer in the last two weeks, or whatever date is written on the files, we can’t prove your computer was stolen. They’ll just say you put the files in there.”
“Maybe they did it.”
“Who, Petrillo and Frey? Give me a break, Dex.”
“Listen.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin and poked him in the chest. “The computer was stolen right after Nick Zavala was killed. Then suddenly it shows up full of kiddie porn in the hands of the cops. That’s too much coincidence.”
Brian stared at me. He shook his head. “You think Petrillo and Frey had this whole thing planned from the start? Shit. That’s saying they were in on the murder.”
“I don’t know,” I said and lowered my voice. “I don’t think it’s them. But something’s going on because that shit ain’t mine.”
Brian paid for the hot dogs and we walked across the street to the parking lot. “You got a lot of explaining. What happened in Mexico? Who worked you over?”
“That’s another funny story,” I said. “You remember that guy who a few years back conned the city into giving him a couple million to bring Hollywood to Sarasota?”
“Yeah, he built a big studio near the airport.”
“Michael Boseman,” I said.
“And?”
“I think he killed Nick Zavala.”
“One thing at a time,” Brian said. We got into his Range Rover and turned up Washington Boulevard to go pick up my car at the pound. “We need to figure out this porn case. The State Attorney won’t let something like that fly. They’re hard-asses with this kind of thing.”
“They stole my computer!”
“Who’s they?”
I turned away, looked out the window. “I don’t know.”
Brian shook his head. I could tell he was worried. It was rare to see him like this. He was usually so laid back, making jokes. He reminded me of Bluto, John Belushi’s character in Animal House.
He cranked up the AC and turned one of the vents toward me. “You have an alibi?”
“What for?”
“For the computer. Did anyone know the laptop was stolen? Anyone who can corroborate your side of the story?”
“Holly Lovett?”
“Yeah, Holly Lovett.”
* * *
When I got home I showered, cleaned the stink of jail off me. Then I called Holly. She didn’t answer, but I left her a voice mail telling her I was back in town and that I needed to see her. “I have a lot to tell you.”
I hung up and thought of Flor. I was not going to mention her to Holly, but it was odd how I couldn’t think about one without thinking of the other. It made me feel queasy.
I put on Miles Davis, an original first press of Sketches of Spain, and lay down on the couch to think.
Mimi hopped on my belly and lay curled up, purring like a kitten. I wasn’t sure what to do next. I needed to know what the cops were thinking. I needed to know what they had. Someone was doing a damn good job of framing me. For all I knew the cops could have found Tiffany in the house and taken her in. Maybe she put it all on me. No. She didn’t even know my name.
Who the fuck stole my laptop and loaded it with kiddie porn?
I couldn’t see Petrillo setting me up like this. He was too smart. He’d been a cop for too long. Besides, despite the fact that we clashed on a lot of things, he wasn’t a bad guy. And he was honest. Frey. That was another story. That motherfucker wanted to speed-climb the ladder. I could see him doing everything possible to build a case, even if he had to do a little dirty work.
After a while, I hopped in my Subaru and headed south toward the grocery store. I needed to pick up some supplies, food, booze; but for some reason I kept driving past the Publix. I didn’t know where I was going. I just kept going, thinking. I figured maybe something would wake up a memory, spring an idea, put me back on track.
A part of me wanted to come clean with Petrillo. I wanted to tell him about Mike Boseman. But now that they had all this other shit on me, it would look like a diversion, like I was trying to slither out of the way. Besides, I had no evidence to link Boseman to Maya, much less Nick.
I drove down to Siesta Key. I had just turned on Midnight Pass Road and was approaching the turn-off for Point of Rocks when the blue Prius in front of me slammed on the breaks. A silver Buick in the other lane screeched. I swerved off the road to avoid the Prius. A green Mustang and a red VW cut across Midnight Pass and sped back toward town. The man in the Prius gave someone the finger. Classy snowbirds.
I parked in front of Boseman’s shuttered house. The silver Jaguar was in the driveway. I sat in my car thinking, but there was nothing to figure out. I knew what I had to do.
I walked to the back, checked the hurricane shutters, every door and window. They were of excellent quality, and all of them were locked.
I went back to my car and took the tire iron from the spare tire kit. I walked around the side again. There was a side door, probably to the kitchen or utility. It was the only one that wasn’t covered by a metal shutter. I used the flat section of the tire iron like a crowbar. I jammed it between the door and the threshold above the lock and pushed.
It’s not like in the movies. The lock didn’t budge. I raised the tire iron a little higher and tried again. A small chunk of the door busted. I shoved the tire iron further between the door and the threshold and pushed. I broke another piece. It was the only way. I slowly tore the door apart. The hinges and locks remained intact. When the hole was big enough for me to slide my hand in, I reached in and unlocked the door.
I listened for the beep of an alarm. Nothing. I checked the wall around the utility room. No alarm. I wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt and made my way through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. The shutters made the house dark. There was very little furniture. I found the alarm panel in the foyer. It wasn’t armed.
I switched a light on and began searching for something—anything. There was nothing personal in the house: no art, photos, papers, clothes. But someone had brought the mail in. There was a stack of envelopes on a chair by the hallway between the living room and the dining room. I flipped through it. Junk mail and advertising flyers addressed to Boseman or current resident. Nothing personal. No letters. No bills.
I went upstairs. The same. No furniture, nothing personal, except the bedroom had a nice four-poster bed with pillows, sheets, and a thick comforter. There was toilet paper in the master bathroom. I checked under the bed and found a pack of Trojan condoms.
I glanced at the large shuttered window. This had to be the room from which Boseman had been looking down at the patio when I first came here.
I went downstairs and looked in the garage. Empty. When I came here before leaving for Mexico, the house had just been shuttered. The Jaguar had not been in the driveway. It could have been in the garage. Someone must have moved it. Or someone was driving it.
Either Boseman was back or he had an accomplice. What I couldn’t put together was why he lived like this, in a house with no furniture.
I went into the kitchen. Checked the fancy Sub-Zero fridge. A plastic gallon of water and an open box of baking soda.
I checked the cupboards and drawers. No plates or flatware, no food.
It was useless. I sat on a chair. Maybe Boseman was getting ready to sell the house. But what about the Jaguar? Maybe it wasn’t his.
I walked out the side door where I had come in and walked toward the front. There was a large plastic trash can and a pair of recycling bins next to the AC unit.
I opened the trash. Two big black Glad bags. I pulled one out and tore it open. It stank of rot—of dead animal. I held my breath and sifted through the shit. I found an electric bill and a receipt from Publix. The FPL bill was in Boseman’s name and totaled $763.42. The invoice was for three months and was demanding immediate payment. The grocery receipt was for a whole roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, two salad bags, a twelve-pack of Corona, and a bottle of Mirassou wine. Dated four days ago.
I checked the recycle bins. Twelve empty bottles of Corona, an empty bottle of Mirassou wine, an empty bottle of Margarita mix. The other bag was worse. The stench was unbearable. The contents had turned to mulch.
I went to the back, rinsed my hands in the pool, and walked around the other side to the front. I placed my hand on the hood of the Jaguar. Warm. But it could be the sun. I placed my hand in front of the radiator. It was impossible to tell. I checked the tires, ran my hands over them to see if there was a key. I knelt down and checked around the front bumper. Nothing.
When I stood up, a white Grand Marquis was pulling up behind the Jag. Petrillo and Frey got out of the car. Frey pulled out his pistol and pointed it at me. “Okay, buddy boy, hold it right there.”
I raised my hands. “I’m unarmed.”
Petrillo waved at Frey to put down his gun. It was his official weapon, a Glock 40 and not that Dirty Harry monster I had seen him packing the other day outside my house. Frey pointed the weapon up but didn’t holster it.
Petrillo approached me from the left side of the Jaguar. “What the fuck are you doing here, Vega?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said.
“Put your hands down,” he said and looked back at Frey standing to the side of the Jag, his Glock pointed up, but ready. “Jesus Christ, will you holster that thing.”
Frey put the gun away slowly and walked around the other side of the Jag.
“I was trying to find Mike Boseman.”
“He a friend of yours?” Frey asked.
“Sort of.” I looked at Petrillo. “What are you doing here?”
“We got a call.”
I looked at the neighbor’s house. It was shuttered.
“Did you break in?” Frey moved closer, his hands resting at the sides of his waist.
I shrugged and addressed Petrillo. “Who called you?”
“Anonymous tip.”
“Right,” I said. “But did they call 911 or did they call you personally?”
“That’s none of your business.” Frey grabbed my arm, turned me to face him. “I asked you a question.”
“I was just looking for my friend.”
He pushed me against the car. “Put your hands on the vehicle.”
I looked at Petrillo. He looked down, kicked the Jag’s tire.
I did as I was told. Frey came behind me and frisked me. Then he took my right arm. The cuff zipped around my wrist. Then he cuffed the other. Two times in two days. Unbelievable.
Frey turned me and sat me on the hood of the Jaguar facing him.
“Now what?” I said.
He put his index between my eyes. “You stay here.”
Frey and Petrillo walked to the back of the house. They were gone for about twenty minutes. When they came back, Petrillo said nothing. Frey grabbed me by the arm and led me to the backseat of the Grand Marquis—didn’t even bother to read me my damn rights.