Blood Relations Page 5

  “Not yet.”

  “Had you even planned to?” She laughed. “Of course not. She should have known better.”

  “Yes, I plan to speak to the girl,” Sam said, trying not to show his irritation. “If it’s a good case, I’ll file it. If it isn’t, I won’t.”

  A flush of red had risen in Dina’s cheeks. “You can’t. You’re stuck in a system that has no connection to justice, only to expediency, or to whoever has the most money or power. Oh, you’ll say it isn’t that way, but it is. Men with money can rape a young woman and nothing will be done about it.”

  Sam leaned heavily against the framed opening of the gazebo. Shadows stretched across the grass. On the other side of the fence the sprinklers slowed, then stopped. When he looked at Dina again, she was twisting the clippers through a handful of stems.

  “Is this girl from a good family, Sam? You should find out. Do her parents know what happened to her? I almost want to call them myself. We should have a support group. Parents of Children Ruined by South Beach, what do you think?”

  “Dina, for Christ’s sake. Matthew died because he got drunk and crashed his damned motorcycle.” Sam could feel his neck getting hot. “He did it to himself. There was nothing you could have done to prevent it, and even less you can do about it now. How long do we have to go over and over this?”

  She pulled back as if he had struck her.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “I didn’t mean to yell at you. Why don’t we go in? Melanie made dinner.”

  “Sam, do you suppose we’re being punished for something?”

  “By what?”

  “God. Eternity.”

  “No.” Sam rested his forehead on his fists. “I don’t believe in that.”

  “Strange thing for a lawyer to say.” The clippers made metallic clicks. “The universe has laws, doesn’t it? And laws imply judgment. You know that well enough. If someone suffers, there has to be a reason. A system of laws must be rational. If one is punished, the next question is, what is the punishment for?”

  The breathlessness of her voice made him look at her. She was crying. Tears were spilling down her cheeks.

  Sam picked up her straw hat. He said gently, “Come on, honey. Let’s go in.”

  “I’m not finished. I want to finish this before it gets dark.”

  He stepped down to the walkway, holding Dina’s hat out to her. Then he saw her left hand. She was still clipping off the last few branches, and blood ran down her arm in bright streaks, soaking into the rolled cuff of the white shirt.

  He knelt and grabbed her wrist. “Dina! What—” The clippers clattered to the bricks.

  There was a gash in her left thumb between the first and second joints. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said wonderingly. “Isn’t that funny? It doesn’t hurt at all.” The blood was dripping onto her slacks now and spattering the walkway. Sam let go long enough to pull his T-shirt over his head. He wrapped the hem of it around her thumb and pressed.

  “This is deep. You’ll need stitches.”

  “No.” She struggled to pull her hand away. “No, I don’t want to go to a doctor. Not for this.” Her head sank onto his chest. “You fix it for me, Sam. Please.”

  With an arm around her back, he lifted Dina to her feet and took her inside.

  Sam bound the cut with gauze and tape while Melanie watched, grimacing. He said he would check it in the morning, and if it looked bad, she would go to the doctor, no arguments. Melanie hovered until Dina told her to please stop. She was all right, for heaven’s sake.

  Now Dina lay in bed. She had taken a pill, and her eyes were nearly closed. “I cause so much trouble,” she whispered. “Poor Sam. I’ve worn you out.”

  “No. Go to sleep.” He smoothed her hair, which lay in unruly tangles on the pillow.

  “I won’t dream tonight,” she said. “When I take these pills I don’t dream. But this week he’s been in my dreams every night.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  She nodded. “Very bad. Do you ever dream of him, Sam?”

  “No.” He noticed that the silver cross lay upside down on the nightstand, its chain jumbled. “You took it off.”

  She laughed sleepily. “The pills work better. I think I was having a flashback to my childhood. Put it back in my dresser, will you? Throw it out, I don’t care.”

  He opened the drawer of the nightstand and dropped the cross inside.

  “Sam? Lie down with me.”

  “Sure. Scoot over.” He put an arm under her neck, kissed her forehead, then gazed out the window at the darkening sky while her breathing deepened.

  They had met when he was twenty-two years old, just out of the army. His father had died the year before in Winter Haven, where he had owned an orange grove. Sam went to settle some matters with the estate, then drove up to the University of Florida in Gainesville to see about enrolling. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, but he had some GI benefits and enough pay saved to get through four years if he was careful. He picked up a catalog from admissions, then strolled around the leafy old-brick campus. He was wearing his green T-shirt, and his hair was regulation short.

  A pack of hippies began to trail him. Tie-dyed, bell-bottomed freaks. One wore an army jacket with a black armband. They shouted at him. How many babies had he killed in Vietnam? Hey, soldier-boy, did you bomb any villages? How many women did you rape? Did you get off on it?

  Sam’s hands went into fists. He waited for them to make a move, wanted them to. He was six-two, two hundred twenty pounds, and ready to break some bones. Then he heard another voice. A dark-haired girl with books in her arms pushed through, shouting for them to stop it, leave him alone. They stared at her long enough for the mood to break.

  Sam followed her and asked why she had done that.

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t fair. They don’t know who you are.”

  “Neither do you. Maybe I did kill people over there. Maybe I liked it.”

  Then this dark-eyed girl stopped walking. She studied him. “No. I don’t think you liked it.”

  Sam knew he couldn’t let her just walk away, vanishing into the crowd of students.

  Her name, she told him later, was Constandina Pondakos. And then she laughed. “Dina for short, okay?”

  It was still dark outside when Sam woke up. He lay in bed for a while, then swung his feet over the edge, trying not to wake Dina. He went around to the other side and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. She didn’t stir. Sam put on slacks and a T-shirt, then went downstairs to make some coffee. The refrigerator hummed, and a tree frog croaked in the backyard.

  Police reports on the Alice Duncan sexual battery case were in his briefcase. He pulled out the folder, lay it on the kitchen table, and flipped it open. He put on his glasses and sat down. The ten pages included a summary by the lead detective, along with supplemental reports by two other men in the Personal Crimes Unit and the four uniformed officers who had secured the premises, gathered evidence, and interviewed witnesses at the scene.

  Sipping his coffee, Sam scanned the report. Victim stated that Fonseca forced her to engage in sexual intercourse with him and then with Lamont. Fonseca and Ruffini then restrained victim while Ruffini sodomized her with the neck of a champagne bottle.

  Sam skipped ahead. After the premises were secured the following items were taken into evidence. The sordid list included ladies pantyhose; a used condom; a .22-caliber double-shot pistol; a crack pipe; two hypodermic syringes; several forms and varieties of drugs in vials, plastic bags, pills, rocks, capsules; and rolling paper. Everyone in the room must have tossed their pockets when the police came in.

  Victim was transported to the Rape Treatment Center by a friend, W/F Caitlin Dorn, 35 (see attached witness list).

  Sam stared down at the name. Took a breath, let it out. Felt the blood squeeze through his chest.

  The last time he had seen Caitlin Dorn she was wearing a jade-green silk bathrobe with nothing underneath. He had gone to her apartment, but i
t was to tell her that he wouldn’t be back again. Their affair was over. When he tried to explain, to tell her he was sorry, Caitlin grabbed a lamp off a nightstand and hurled it at him, missing his head by inches.

  Sam turned the report over on the kitchen table as if the woman to whom the name belonged might otherwise float up from the page.

  chapter four

  Caitlin Dorn had set up her camera pointing north. It was attached to a fat telephoto lens, and the lens was mounted on a tripod. A beach umbrella shaded Caitlin, the camera, and a cartful of photographic equipment.

  Through the viewfinder she could see a backdrop of sparkling ocean, golden sand, and white hotels, all converging at a misty blue point. The sand sloped gently to the shoreline, where the turquoise water broke into frothy waves, a continuous shushing sound. Puffy clouds floated lazily in the perfect blue dome of the sky, and seagulls wheeled and dipped. Slightly to the left, waiting for a signal to begin, stood a family of idealized tourists. Woman in sun hat and flowery dress, sandals dangling from her hand. Man in khaki pants rolled to mid-calf, shirt hanging open. Some chest hair, not too much. And a little boy, five years old, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. All of them with medium-brown hair, an all-purpose ethnicity.

  The idea was that they had just escaped to Miami Beach from the frigid blasts of Chicago or New Jersey or Montreal, had taken off their shoes, couldn’t wait to feel the tickle of surf on their toes. This shot would go on the cover of a brochure for potential investors in a new resort designed to lure families down from Disney World and Universal Studios to the international playground of the chic and beautiful, safely across the bay from dark, urban, crime-infested Miami.

  Caitlin stepped aside to let her assistant take the shot. Tommy Chang was a student at the local community college, working mostly for the experience, which was about all Caitlin could afford to pay him. He had a bandanna for a headband, sunglasses, a collection of silver pendants around his neck on cords, a water bottle at his waist, no shirt, baggy shorts, and Velcro-strapped sandals. She had never seen a photographer’s assistant dress much differently.

  Tommy pulled out the proof. This camera held instant film so they could check the lighting and composition. She raised her sunglasses to look at it while Tommy changed cameras. They would shoot three or four rolls of 120-millimeter film, 30 exposures per roll.

  Caitlin had been a model till a few years ago. She had picked up photography as a hobby in New York, but on South Beach it had become a way to survive. Getting this job had been a stroke of luck: her boyfriend knew the man in charge of the project. Caitlin knew she was good at what she did, but nobody was down at her end of the beach kissing her ass, as they did with most photographers. The two girls in swimsuits she had finished shooting earlier were hanging out on weathered, wood-slatted beach loungers, smoking. They had showered the salt water out of their hair in the production van, which was parked in the metered lot next to the beach. They sipped water out of bright containers with plastic lids and bendable straws. Caitlin could hear bits of chirpy conversation. The van owner sat in a folding chair reading the paper, a fishing hat to keep the sun off his bald spot. It was his kid playing the son in the tourist family.

  The art director, a blond woman named Uta, was fussing unnecessarily with the female model’s skirt. The model smiled at her. Yes, kiss the art director’s fanny, Caitlin thought. Everybody did that.

  Tommy took off down the beach to hold a reflector and passed Rafael Soto, the hair and makeup designer, coming the other way. Rafael trudged through the sand in high-top red canvas sneakers.

  Stopping under Caitlin’s umbrella, he dug a lighter and cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one. The flame reflected in his big round sunglasses. He asked, “How’s her hair look? I sprayed the hell out of it.”

  She told him it looked fine. Caitlin had last seen this model half-dressed in a magazine ad for a South Beach lingerie boutique, but Rafael had made her look like a Girl Scout troop leader from the suburbs.

  Holding a meter to the light, Tommy called out the exposure. “Eight-five, eight-two. Wait. There’s a cloud. Just a second. Okay, coming out. Eight-eight. Eleven. Blue sky, here we go.”

  The camera whirred and clicked at two frames per second. The models walked along the same few yards of sand again and again, backing up, going forward, pretending to have a fabulous time. Swinging the little boy by the hands. Laughing. Kicking up the surf.

  The art director yelled to the man not to get his trousers wet.

  Rafael gossiped with Caitlin while Tommy reloaded the camera, marked the film canister, and sprinted back to the models. Tommy scooped up a reflector and tossed it up and caught it, a giant silver circle. Caitlin took her cap off for a minute to redo her hair into a ponytail.

  “Uh-oh. Your roots are starting to show,” Rafael scolded, standing on his toes to look. “Want me to fix it for you sometime?”

  “Yeah, do me a new head.” She looked longingly at his cigarette. “Let me have a drag. One?”

  “No! You told me not to.” He held it out of reach.

  “Selfish. You should quit, too, you know.”

  “Why? Everyone needs at least one vice in order to remain humble.” Rafael smiled, putting the cigarette to his lips. He inhaled greedily.

  Sighing, Caitlin peered through the viewfinder again. “What the hell?” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Tommy!” He looked around. “Tell him to take off his nipple ring! Every time the wind opens his shirt, I can see it.”

  “He wore that to a shoot?” Rafael laughed.

  “Better than the time that girl showed up with a spider tattoo on her butt, and we were doing swimsuits, remember that?”

  “God, yes. I had to put on the Dermablend with a putty knife!” His laughter trailed off into a muttered “Oh, shit.”

  Caitlin turned to see what he was staring at—a man standing by the production van, a tall blond in loose khakis and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled up. Caitlin recognized him: Charlie Sullivan, one of Ford’s top male models. British, but living in the States. She wondered what he was doing here. It wasn’t for this gig, not playing Mr. Middle America. If Sullivan were on a beach, he’d be lying half-nude in the surf, pulling an equally stunning female slowly up his torso, his mouth pressed to her throat, the sun bouncing off every well-defined muscle in his body. She had seen his model composite, a variety of poses and outfits. A tux. Tweeds. Business attire. A cashmere coat over an Italian suit. Or nothing but low-slung jeans and rippling stomach muscles. He was big time now, double-page editorial shots in Details and GQ.

  Caitlin glanced at Rafael. Under the big sunglasses his mouth was compressed into a tight line. She said, “You want me to tell him to get lost? I could say it’s a closed set.”

  “No, forget it.”

  She touched his arm. “You all right?”

  “Peachy.”

  Until a few months ago, Rafael had been staying at Sullivan’s beachfront condo, keeping the place neat, even paying the mortgage. Sullivan returned from a trip to London and kicked him out. Caitlin had tried to warn Rafael, but he’d been deaf and blind.

  She went back to her camera. The man and woman and child filled the viewfinder. The boy had a little Miami Marlins cap on now. Cute kid. Rosy cheeks, round tummy.

  Draping an arm over the telephoto she shouted, “Uta! Did you get a release from the Marlins?”

  Uta yelled back, “For what?”

  “The hat.”

  Uta put her hands on her hips, then trotted back toward the water. She had long, tanned legs, and her blond braid bounced on her back. She motioned for Tommy to take off the boy’s hat. He sailed it toward her in an arc and she ran to catch it one-handed. Coming back up the slope, Uta caught sight of Sullivan and held out her arms. Caitlin heard her voice sliding down the scale. “Hi-i-iiii.” They kissed lightly, and Sullivan left his arm around her shoulders.

  “Such a whore,” Rafael said.

  “Which one?”

  “B
oth of them. I saw them at Follia last night with their hands all over each other. Where was her husband, I’d like to know?”

  “Sullivan’s in his hetero phase,” she said. “Next week it will be dogs or something.”

  Rafael said, “If he comes over here, I’m leaving.”

  But when Sullivan headed in their direction, Rafael didn’t move. The two swimsuit models trailed along behind him, one barefoot, one in thongs. One from a town in Alabama, the other a light-skinned Haitian whose father, according to rumor, had fled to Paris with a big chunk of the island’s treasury.

  Sullivan sat on a wooden beach lounger a few yards away from the umbrella. The sun gleamed on his dark blond hair. “Hello, everyone.” He smiled, showing his perfect white teeth.

  One of the models dropped down beside him. “Comment ça va, mon cher? When did you get back?”

  He gave her a peck on the lips. “Forever ago. Two weeks, at least. I was in Oslo, where I nearly froze my bum off.”

  The American girl bumped his shoulder with a hip. “I heard something about you.”

  “Should I ask?”

  “You’re the runway feature model in Milan for Dolce-Gabbana’s winter collection.”

  “Yes, my agent called last week, and I’m still in shock.”

  Rafael said coolly, “And here you are, slumming on a shoot for a resort designed for the bowling-alley crowd.”

  “I came to watch your hair-spray technique.”

  He glared down at Sullivan through his sunglasses. “By the way. You still have several of my CDs. I would like to come pick them up.”

  “Whenever you like. I’ll leave them downstairs with the doorman.” Sullivan smiled.

  Rafael spun around and headed up the beach.

  Caitlin said, “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea, your being here. It’s upsetting Rafael.”

  “Everything upsets Rafael. Actually, it’s you I came to talk to.”

  “What about?”

  “The thing at the Apocalypse last week, what else?”