You Only Die Twice (3 page)

“So that ain't natural, from the sun? Humph.” The detective peered more closely at the dead woman's hair. “What else? She healthy, doc?”

“No signs of disease, prior injuries, surgeries, or
chronic conditions,” the chief answered. “But there is one other thing that might help. She was a mother.”

“She has children?” I was startled. “How can you tell?”

“She had some stria—stretch marks—on her abdomen, and the cervix of her uterus showed an irregularity. The nipples tend to be a bit darker, as well.”

“How many kids?” the detective asked. “More than one?”

“No way to know.” The chief shrugged. “But she'd experienced at least one pregnancy. Possibly more.”

Somewhere there was a child, or children, without a mother. Why does no one miss her? I wondered, as we left. As birds sang in the sunny parking lot outside and traffic thundered along the nearby expressway, Rychek filled me in on what little he knew. The condition of the body indicated a time of death four to five hours before she surfaced, placing the murder at between 5:30 and 6:30
A.M
.

“More likely closer to six, when that elderly jogger saw her,” I told him. “He's probably right on target about the time. He's a creature of habit, a good witness. I see him every morning that I run. I can set my watch by him.”

Rychek gave me two black-and-white five-by-seven photos: a close-up of the earring next to a small ruler, to demonstrate scale, and a head shot of the corpse. “Think you can get these in the paper?”

“The earring, sure. On the other…I'll try,” I said, frowning. My editors have an unreasonable prejudice against pictures of dead bodies in the morning paper,
when readers are at breakfast. “They probably won't go for it,” I warned.

The last time I talked Tubbs into using a morgue shot, it was an absolute success. Readers quickly identified the corpse, a college student dead of a drug overdose in a motel room. Instead of praise, we received reprimands. He still had not forgiven me.

The argument I had used to persuade him was that the overdose victim didn't look dead, he might have been sleeping. The woman in this photo was definitely dead.

It wouldn't matter, I thought, if the right message was waiting for me in the newsroom. Rychek had had no calls. That didn't mean I wouldn't. Some people will talk freely to cops but not reporters—and vice versa.

Unfortunately, none of my messages were in response to the morning story. The sole new clue came from an unlikely source: my mother.

I had comp time coming for working on my day off and had arranged to meet her at La Hacienda for lunch.

 

Her white convertible was parked jauntily outside, the top down. At age fifty-four, she looked stunning in cool ice blue. I basked in her bright and bubbly chatter about her burgeoning social life, her career in high fashion, and the new winter cruisewear, grateful that she was not criticizing my clothes, my job, or my love life.

I enjoyed a delectably seasoned crisp-crusted baked chicken with
moros
and green plantains. Lunch was relatively uneventful until I fished through my Day Timer for my credit card and the photos, tucked inside, fell out.

“Oh,” my mother chirped cheerfully, as she picked one up to study before handing it back. “Those are my favorites.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “You recognize this earring?”

“Of course, the Elsa Peretti open heart. Exclusively for Tiffany's.” She shrugged. “
Everybody
knows that.”

“You're sure?”

She stared, as though I were not her only child but some alien creature from a third world planet.

“Of course. They're a signature design for Tiffany's.” She snatched up the second photo.

“Good God!” She squinted at the image. “Is this woman…alive?”

“No,” I murmured unhappily. “Not anymore.”

She slapped it face down on the table like a playing card, shoulders quivering in an exaggerated shudder.

“What
happened
to her? No, no.” She held up one hand like a frazzled traffic cop. “Please. Don't tell me. Spare me the details. I don't want to know.”

She studied me in pained silence for a long moment, her expression one of suspicion. “What on
earth
would you be doing with a thing like this?”

I realized again what a disappointment I am to her. Most women my age happily share baby pictures, while my handbag reveals close-ups of corpses.

Appetite gone, I pushed away my caramel flan and fortified myself against the usual barrage with the dregs of my
café con leche
.

Instead, she turned up one edge of the photo with a beautifully manicured fingernail for another peek, her expression odd.

“Gruesome.” She grimaced as she turned the photo face up. “I swear, something about this poor creature…who is she?” Her questioning eyes rose from the photo to me.

“You think you know her?” I leaned forward. “She's the unidentified woman who drowned at the beach yesterday.”

“I saw your story,” she said pointedly, as if the tragedy had somehow been all my fault. She stared at the photo, closed her eyes for a moment, studied it again, then pushed it toward me. “I guess not,” she whispered. “Her own mother wouldn't recognize her now, I'm sure.”

“You know,” I said quickly, “it's entirely possible that you do recognize her. You meet so many people: the fashion shows, the models, the buyers, your clients. She may have moved in those circles. Here, take another look,” I urged. How ironic, I thought, if my mother could help solve this mystery.

“No!” She shook her head emphatically, refusing to look at the picture again. “It was just a passing thought.” She was strangely silent as we walked to her car. A quick hug and she was gone, flying out of the parking lot at an uncharacteristically high rate of speed, tires squealing as she floored it.

 

The Bal Harbour shops sit near the sea, a short drive across the Broad Causeway, light-years away from newsroom deadlines, inner-city woes, the county jail, and the morgue. Who would believe that during World War II this site was a swampy mosquito-infested Ger
man prisoner-of-war camp guarded by barbed wire and armed men? Today, beautiful people sip wine and cappuccino at outdoor tables, surrounded by the swank shops and boutiques of Chanel, Gucci, and Versace, as strolling models strike poses in designer fashions.

My eyes lingered on the silk scarf worn by the elegant woman who greeted me at Tiffany's. It was draped perfectly, tied just so, a coveted knack I have never mastered. Her eyes lingered on my wristwatch, registering dismay. The little Morris the Cat number was a gift of sorts from Billy Boots, who obligingly consumed enough cat food to acquire the necessary labels.

The earrings, she said, could have come from any one of more than one hundred and fifty Tiffany stores in both the United States and such world capitals as London, Paris, Rome, and Zurich. Or they could have been ordered from the store's glossy catalog, which for some reason had never found its way to my mailbox.

I could not bring myself to flash the morgue photo in this posh emporium where everyone spoke in hushed and genteel tones. I would leave that to the cops. Feeling seriously underadorned, I thanked the sales associate, took a catalog, and drove back to the
News
. I called Rychek on the way and told him what I had learned at the store.

I showed Bobby Tubbs the earring photo, which he agreed to run with the story if we had the space. “I've also got a picture of the victim,” I said cheerfully.

His head jerked up, eyes narrowing. “Is she dead in the picture?”

“It's not that bad,” I said. “We can touch up the nose a little.”

“I don't want to see it. Ged it the hell outa here!” He spun his swivel chair and turned away, fuming.

“Putting it in the newspaper may be the only way to reunite her with her loved ones….” I was pleading with the back of Tubbs's head.

“Don't even think about it!” he barked. He did not look up from his editing screen.

Of course I thought about it. Missing people intrigue me. Perhaps because my father, lost on a mission to liberate his Cuban homeland, was missing for most of my life, or because human beings lost and never found baffle me. “Everybody's got to be someplace.” That punch line, from a long-dead comedian named Myron Cohen, says it all.

I turned in my story, dropped a handful of business cards in my pocket, told the desk I was taking comp time, and departed for the day. At the beach, I parked ten blocks south of where the dead woman was first spotted and began to canvass, trudging from one hotel lobby to the next, inquiring about any female guest or employee who might be missing.

I could have done the job faster by phone, but I like to look people in the eye when I ask a question. And I like being out of the office. Nothing excites me more than picking up the scent of a good story, and I had begun to believe this was one. I could feel it in my bones.

I pressed my cards into the hands of desk clerks, managers, and bartenders, asking them to call if they heard anything.

I stopped ten blocks north of where she was found. Which one? I wondered, my eyes roving the pastel skyline of hotels, condos, and conversions—aging hotels
updated, renovated, and converted into high-priced apartments. If you were here, I whispered to the woman from the water, where?

I beeped Rychek at sunset. We met, shared drinks, ate a pizza, and compared notes.

Our victim matched no missing persons reports, county, state, or international. The detective had checked on cars towed or ticketed for overtime parking near the beach since her final swim. Two were stolen, one from Miami, the other in Chicago. The first had been used in an armed-robbery spree; two pounds of marijuana, a sawed-off shotgun, and a cemetery headstone were found in the other. Neither appeared linked to a missing woman.

The detective had visited Tiffany's too. I imagined him, with his smelly cigar and unpretentious swagger, bombarding the staff with blunt questions. No one recognized the dead woman's picture. Copies were faxed to other stores, but that was a long shot. She probably didn't buy the earrings herself.

“She looked like the kinda broad guys buy presents for.” He sounded wistful.

I sipped red wine and wondered about his marital status. For as long as we had known each other, he had never mentioned his personal life.

“Want to bet that the call will come tomorrow?”

“From your lips to God's ears, kid.” He raised his glass.

 

Tomorrow came and went. So did the next day and the day after.

“Every right turn I make is a dead end,” Rychek
complained at our next strategy session a week later. “It's like she dropped outa nowhere.” Her fingerprints had come back NIF, Not In File. No criminal record. “It's like she came to Miami to die,” he said. “Why she hadda do it on my watch, I dunno. What the hell did she have against me?”

“Maybe she's foreign, a tourist, and the folks back home haven't missed her yet. What did Wyatt say?”

Dr. Everett Wyatt, one of the nation's foremost forensic odontologists, sent one of the nation's most savage serial killers to Florida's electric chair by identifying his teeth marks, left in a young victim's flesh.

Rychek shrugged. “He says her dental work looks like it was done in the States.”

Like the jail, the streets, and the court dockets, the morgue was overcrowded. Rychek said the administrator at the medical examiner's office was talking burial.

“We don't come up with answers soon,” the detective said, “they're gonna plant her in Potter's Field.”

The prospect made me order another drink.

Backhoes dig trenches twice a month and prisoners provide free labor as Dade's destitute and unclaimed go to their graves in cheap wooden coffins. Stillborn babies sleep forever beside impoverished senior citizens, jail suicides, AIDS victims, and unknown corpses with no names and no one to mourn them. Their graves are marked only by numbers at the county cemetery, otherwise known as Potter's Field, in the hope that a John, Jane, or Juan Doe will one day be identified by a loved one eager to claim and rebury the body. That rarely happens.

“No way,” I said.

“Right.” The detective's jaw squared. “Somebody must miss her.”

He took it personally. So did I.

 

Rychek left and I wandered back to the beach, contemplating endless horizon and big gray-and-green sky, over a wine-dark sea. Who are you? I asked her. Who wanted you dead?

She appeared in my dreams that night, trying to answer, eyes alight with desperation, pale lips moving beneath sun-splashed whirls of blue water. I reached out to her, over and over. But the water, like something cunning and alive, kept her just out of my grasp.

 

“How can somebody like you and me just get lost?” I groused to Lottie the next day. She straddled a chair she had pulled up to my desk after deadline for the first edition.

“Maybe she wasn't like you and me,” she said, thumbing idly through my Tiffany catalog, with its sterling silver baby cups, jewelry, and crystal.

“Well, if she shopped there regularly,” I said, “she wasn't. But rich people are missed quicker than the rest of us. And there's a child out there somewhere with no mother. Where the hell are her relatives, neighbors, coworkers, her boss, her best friend? Hell, you'd think her hairdresser would report her missing, if no one else. She looked like high maintenance.”

“Dern tootin'. By now, she's due for a touch-up, a manicure, another bikini wax. The works.”

 

A much-anticipated evening with the man in my life, Miami Police Major Kendall McDonald, began with
promise but ended badly. He smelled good, looked
guapismo
, and greeted me with such an ardent embrace that I discerned that he was not wearing his beeper. Hormones slam-dancing with the neurochemicals in my brain, I deliberately left my pager behind, too. Tonight would be for us alone.