Swimsuit Page 6

  There was a man in the video, his back to the camera, and when he half turned, one of the Alliance members said, “Henri.”

  Henri was naked, sitting on the edge of the tub, the clear plastic mask obscuring his features. He spoke to the camera. “You see there is very little water, but enough. I don’t know which is more lethal for Rosa. Whether she will choke or if she will drown. Let’s watch and see.”

  Henri turned and spoke in Spanish to the sobbing child, then translated for the camera. “I told Rosa to keep her legs pulled back toward her head. I said if she could do that for another hour, I would let her live. Maybe.”

  Horst smiled at Henri’s audacity, the way he stroked the back of the child’s head, soothing her, but she cried out, clearly a great effort when she was so tired of trying to live.

  “Por favor. Déjame marchar. Eres malvado.”

  Henri spoke to the camera. “She says to let her go. That I am evil. Well. I love her anyway. Sweet child.”

  The girl continued to sob, gasping for air every time her legs relaxed and the rope tightened around her throat. She wailed, “Mama.” Then her head dropped, her final exhalation causing bubbles to break the surface of the water.

  Henri touched the side of her neck and shrugged. “It was the ropes,” he said. “Anyway, she committed suicide. A beautiful tragedy. Just what I promised.”

  He was smiling when the video faded to black.

  Gina spoke now, indignant. “Horst, this is in violation of his contract, yes?”

  “Actually, Henri’s contract only says he cannot take work that would prevent him from fulfilling his obligations to us.”

  “So. He is not technically in violation. He is just freelancing.”

  Jan’s voice came over the speakers. “Yes. You see how Henri looks for ways to give us the finger? This is unacceptable.”

  Raphael broke in. “Okay, he is difficult, but let’s admit, Henri has his genius. We should work with him. Give him a new contract.”

  “That says what, for example?”

  “Henri has been making short films for us like the one we just saw. I suggest we have him make… a documentary.”

  Jan jumped in, excited. “Very good, Rafi. Wall-to-wall with Henri. A year in the life, ja? Salary and bonuses commensurate with the quality of the action.”

  “Exactly. And he’s exclusive to us,” said Raphael. “He starts now, on location with the parents of the swimsuit girl.”

  The Alliance discussed terms, and they put some teeth into the contract, penalties for failure to perform. That phrase provided a light moment, and then, after they had voted, Horst made the call to Hawaii.

  Chapter 26

  THE McDANIELSES AND I were still in the Typhoon Bar as dusk dropped over the island. For the past hour, Barbara had sweated me like a pro. When she was satisfied that I was an okay guy, she brought me into her family’s lives with her passion and a natural gift for storytelling that I wouldn’t have expected from a high school math and science teacher.

  Levon could barely string two sentences together. He wasn’t inarticulate. He just wasn’t with us. I read him as choked up with fear and too anxious about his daughter to concentrate. But he expressed himself vividly with his body language, tightening his fists, turning away when tears welled up, frequently taking off his glasses and pressing his palms over his eyes.

  I’d asked Barbara, “How did you learn that Kim was missing?”

  At that, Levon’s cell phone rang. He looked at the faceplate and walked away toward the elevator.

  I heard him say, “Lieutenant Jackson? Not tonight? Why not?” After a pause, he said, “Okay. Eight a.m.”

  “Sounds like we have a date with the police in the morning. Come with us,” Barbara said. She took my phone number, patted my hand. And then, she kissed my cheek.

  I said good night to Barbara, then ordered another club soda, no lime, no ice. I sat in a comfortable chair overlooking the hundred-million-dollar view, and in the next fifteen minutes the atmosphere at the Typhoon Bar picked up considerably.

  Handsome people in fresh suntans and translucent clothing in snow-cone colors dropped into chairs at the railing while singles took the high-backed stools at the long bar. Laughter rose and fell like the warm breeze that gusted through the wide-open space, riffling hairlines and skirt hems as it passed.

  The piano player uncovered the Steinway, then turned sideways on the piano seat and broke into an old Peter Allen standard, delighting the crowd as he sang “I Go to Rio.”

  I noted the security cameras over the bar, dropped several bills on the table, and walked down the stairs and past the pool, lit now so that it looked like aqua-colored glass.

  I continued past the cabanas, taking a walk that Kim might have taken two nights ago.

  The beach was nearly empty of people, the sky still light enough to see the shoreline that ringed the whole of Maui like a halo around an eclipse of the moon.

  I pictured walking behind Kim on Friday night. Her head might have been down, hair whipping around her face, the strong surf obliterating all other sound.

  A man could have come up behind her with a rock, or a gun, or a simple choke hold.

  I walked on the hard-packed sand, passing hotels on my right, empty chaises and cockeyed umbrellas as far as I could see.

  After a quarter mile, I turned off the beach, walked up a path that skirted the Four Seasons, another five-star hotel where eight hundred bucks a night might buy a room with a view of the parking lot.

  I continued on through the hotel’s dazzling marble lobby and out to the street. Fifteen minutes later I was back sitting in my rented Chevy, parked in the leafy shadows surrounding the Wailea Princess, listening to the rush of waterfalls.

  If I’d been a killer, I could’ve dumped my victim into the surf or slung her over my shoulder and carried her out to my car. I could’ve left the scene without anyone noticing.

  Easy breezy.

  Chapter 27

  I STARTED my engine and followed the moon to Stella Blues, a cheerful café in Kihei. It has high, peaked ceilings and a wraparound bar, now buzzing with a weekend crowd of locals and cruise ship tourists enjoying their first night in port. I ordered a Jack Daniel’s and mahimahi from the bar, took my drink outside to a table for two on the patio.

  As the votive candle guttered in its glass, I called Amanda.

  Amanda Diaz and I had been together for almost two years. She’s five years younger than me, a pastry chef and a self-described biker chick, which means she takes her antique Harley for a run on the Pacific Coast Highway some weekends to blow off the steam she can’t vent in the kitchen. Mandy is not only smart and gorgeous, but when I look at her, all those rock-and-roll songs about booming hearts and loving her till the day I die make total sense.

  Right then I was aching to hear my sweetie’s voice, and she didn’t disappoint, answering the phone on the third ring. After some verbal high fives, and at my request, she told me about her day at Intermezzo.

  “It was Groundhog Day, Benjy. Rémy fired Rocco, again,” Amanda said, going into a French accent now. ‘What I have to say to you to make you think like chef? This confit. It looks like pigeon poop.’ He put about twelve ooohs in poop.”

  She laughed, said, “Hired him back ten minutes later. As usual. And then I scorched the crème brûlée. ‘Merde, Ahmandah, mon Dieu. You are making me craaaaa-zy.’ ” She laughed again. “And you, Benjy? Are you getting your story?”

  “I met with the missing girl’s folks. They’re talking to me.”

  “Oh, boy. How grim was that?”

  I caught Mandy up on the interview with Barbara, told her how much I liked the McDanielses and that they had two other kids, both boys adopted from Russian orphanages.

  “Their oldest son was almost catatonic from neglect when the police in Saint Petersburg found him. The younger boy has fetal alcohol syndrome. Kim decided to become a pediatrician because of her brothers.”

  “Ben, honey?”
<
br />   “ Uh-huh. Am I breaking up?”

  “No, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

  “Totally.”

  “Then listen. Be careful, will you?”

  I felt a slight burr of irritation. Amanda was uncommonly intuitive, but I was in no danger.

  “Careful of what?”

  “Remember when you left your briefcase with all of your notes on the Donato story in a diner?”

  “You’re going to bring up the bus again, aren’t you?”

  “Since you mention it.”

  “I was under your spell, goofball. I was looking at you when I stepped off the curb. If you were here now, it could happen again —”

  “What I’m saying is, you sound the same way now as you did then.”

  “I do, huh?”

  “Yeah, you kinda do. So watch out, okay? Pay attention. Look both ways.”

  Ten feet away, a couple clinked glasses, held hands across a small table. Honeymooners, I thought.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  “I miss you, too. I’m keeping the bed warm for you, so come home soon.”

  I sent a wireless kiss to my girl in L.A. and said good night.

  Chapter 28

  AT SEVEN FIFTEEN Monday morning, Levon watched the driver pull the black sedan up to the entrance of the Wailea Princess. Levon got into the front passenger seat as Hawkins and Barb got into the back, and when all the doors had slammed shut, Levon told Marco to please take them to the police station in Kihei.

  During the ride, Levon half listened as Hawkins talked, telling him how to handle the police, saying to be helpful, to make the cops your friends and not to be belligerent because that would work against them.

  Levon had nodded, grunted “uh-huh” a few times, but he was inside his head, wouldn’t have been able to describe the route between the hotel and the police station, his mind fully focused on the upcoming meeting with Lieutenant James Jackson.

  Levon came back to the present as Marco was parking at the mini–strip mall, and he jumped out before the car had fully stopped. He walked straight up to the shoebox-sized substation, a storefront wedged between a tattoo parlor and a pizzeria.

  The glass door was locked, and so Levon jabbed the intercom button and spoke his name, saying to the female voice that he had an appointment at eight with Lieutenant Jackson. There was a buzz and the door opened and they were in.

  The station looked to Levon like a small-town DMV. The walls were bureaucrat green; the floor, a buffed linoleum; the long hallway-width room lined with facing rows of plastic chairs.

  At the end of the narrow room was a reception window, its metal shutter rolled down, and beside it was a closed door. Levon sat down next to Barbara, and Hawkins sat across from them with his notebook sticking out of his breast pocket, and they waited.

  At a few minutes past eight, the shuttered window opened and people trickled in to pay parking tickets, register their cars, God knows what else. Guys with Rasta hair; girls with complicated tattoos; young moms with small, bawling kids.

  Levon felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes, and he thought about Kim, wanting to know where she could be right now and if she was in any pain and why this had happened.

  After a while, he stood up and paced along the gallery of Wanted posters, looked into the staring eyes of murderers and armed robbers, and then there were the missing-children posters, some of them digitally altered to age the kids to how they might look now, having disappeared so many years ago.

  Behind him, Barbara said to Hawkins, “Can you believe it? We’ve been here two hours. Don’t you just want to scream?”

  And Levon did want to scream. Where was his daughter? He leaned down and spoke to the female officer behind the window. “Does Lieutenant Jackson know we’re here?”

  “Yes, sir, he sure does.”

  Levon sat down next to Barb, pinched the place between his eyes, wondered why Jackson was taking so long. And he thought about Hawkins, how he’d gotten in very tight with Barb. Levon trusted Barb’s judgment, but, like a lot of women, she made friends fast. Sometimes too fast.

  Levon watched Hawkins writing in his notebook and then some teenage girls joined the line at the front desk, talking in high-pitched chatter that just about took off the top of his head.

  By ten fifteen, Levon’s agitation was like the rumbling of the volcanoes that had raised this island out of the prehistoric sea. He felt ready to explode.

  Chapter 29

  I WAS SITTING in a hard plastic chair next to Barbara McDaniels when I heard the door open at the end of the long, narrow room. Levon leapt up from his seat and was practically in the cop’s face before the door swung closed.

  The cop was big, midthirties, with thick black hair and mocha-toned skin. He looked part Jimmy Smits, part Ben Affleck, and part island surfer god. Wore a jacket and tie, had a shield hooked into the waistband of his chinos, a gold one, which meant he was a detective.

  Barbara and I joined Levon, who introduced us to Lieutenant Jackson. Jackson asked me, “What’s your relationship to the McDanielses?”

  “Friend of the family,” Barbara said at the same time that I said, “I’m with the L.A. Times.”

  Jackson snorted a laugh, scrutinized me, then asked, “Do you know Kim?”

  No.

  “Have any information as to her whereabouts?”

  No.

  “Do you know these people? Or did you meet them, say, yesterday?”

  “We just met.”

  “Interesting,” Jackson said, smirking now. He said to the McDanielses. “You understand this man’s job is to sell newspapers?”

  “We know that,” Levon said.

  “Good. Just so you’re clear, anything you say to Mr. Hawkins is going directly from your mouths to the front page of the L.A. Times. Speaking for myself,” Jackson went on, “I don’t want him here. Mr. Hawkins, have a seat, and if I need you, I’ll call you.”

  Barbara spoke up. “Lieutenant, my husband and I talked it over last night, and it comes down to this. We trust Ben, and he has the power of the L.A. Times behind him. He might be able to do more for us than we can do alone.”

  Jackson exhaled his exasperation but seemed to concede the point. He said to me, “Anything out of my mouth has to be okayed by me before you run with it, understand?”

  I said I did.

  Jackson’s office took up a corner at the back of the building, had one window and a noisy air conditioner; numbers were written on the blue plasterboard walls near the phone.

  Jackson indicated chairs for the McDanielses, and I leaned against the doorframe as he flapped open a notepad, took down basic information.

  Then he got down to business, working, I thought, off a notion that Kim was a party girl, questioning her late-night habits and asking about men in her life and drug use.

  Barbara told Jackson that Kim was a straight-A student. That she had sponsored a Christian Children’s Fund baby in Ecuador. That she was responsible to a fault and the fact that she hadn’t returned their call was way out of character.

  Jackson listened with a mostly bored look on his face before saying, “Yeah, I’m sure she’s an angel. I’m waiting for the day someone comes in, says their kid is a meth head or a slut.”

  Levon sprang to his feet, and Jackson stood up a beat after that, but by then Levon had the advantage. He shoved his palms into Jackson’s beefy shoulders, sending him backward into the wall, which shook with a loud crack. Plaques and photos crashed to the floor, which is what you’d expect when 180 pounds or so was used as a wrecking ball.

  Jackson was the bigger and younger man, but Levon was mainlining adrenaline. Without pause, he reached down and grabbed Jackson up by his lapels and threw him against the wall again. There was another terrible crashing sound as Jackson’s head bounced off the plasterboard. I watched him grab for the arm of his chair, which toppled, and sent him down a third time.

  It was an ugly scene even before Levon crowned the moment.

&
nbsp; He stared down at Jackson, and said, “Damn, that felt good. You son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 30

  A HEAVYSET FEMALE OFFICER BARRELED toward the doorway as I stood there like a stump, trying to absorb that Levon had assaulted a cop, shoved him, thrown him down, cursed at him, and said it felt good.

  Now Jackson was on his feet, and Levon was still panting. The woman cop yelled, “Hey, what’s going on?”

  Jackson said, “We’re fine here, Millie. Lost my balance. Gonna need a new chair.” And he waved her off. Then he turned back to Levon, who was shouting at him, “Don’t you get it? I told you last night. We got a fricking phone call in Michigan. The man said he took my daughter, and you’re trying to say Kim’s a tramp?”

  Jackson straightened his jacket, his tie, righted his chair. His face was red and he was scowling. He jerked the chair around, then shouted back at Levon, “You’re crazy, McDaniels.

  You realize what you just did, you stupid fuck? You want to be locked up? Do you? You think you’re a tough guy? You want to find out just how tough I am? I could arrest your ass and have you put away for this, don’t you know that?”

  “Yeah, throw me in jail, damn you. Do that, because I want to tell the world how you treated us. What a yahoo you are.”

  “Levon, Levon,” Barbara was up, begging her husband, pulling at his arm. “Stop, Levon. Control yourself. Apologize to the lieutenant, please.”

  Jackson sat down, rolled his chair up to his desk, said, “McDaniels, don’t ever put a hand on me again. Due to the fact that you’re out of your fucking mind, I’ll minimize what just happened in my report. Now sit down before I change my mind and arrest you.”