Part 17 (1/2)
Mari knew all about my personal issues with Emily because she'd looked me up online. Pepe could have done the same thing with Edith and Mordy, especially if Mari had told everyone the story of their first meeting. And why wouldn't she mention something as dramatic as Edith waving a gun around or Marvin surviving a fifteen-floor fall?
But how had he gotten their pa.s.sports to open the account? Probably faked them, since he'd faked everything else. Or he could have gotten hold of their original mortgage application, since he was friends with all the bankers.
I didn't want it to be Mari. I'd done these sorts of mental gymnastics before back when I didn't want to think Emily would cheat on me. She never had to make excuses because I made them for her all the way up until the undeniable truth was staring me in the face.
Now I was making them for Mari, but I didn't have that nagging feeling that I was fooling myself. It couldn't be her. She just wasn't like that.
The c.o.c.kroach Truck sounded its horn, and my stomach growled in response.
Our roofing crew had already congregated around the truck by the time I walked out, and Bo was laying out from his cooler the feast his wife had prepared. I'd been so absorbed in last night's drama that I never even thought about packing lunch, and since I'd skipped breakfast, it was c.o.c.kroach Truck or nothing.
”You forget your lunch?” Bo asked as he tucked a clean checkered napkin around his collar to keep food off his filthy T-s.h.i.+rt. ”I've got more here than I can eat in a week.”
”I've seen you eat, Bo. Two sandwiches, potato salad, deviled eggs and...what's that, banana pudding? That's just a snack for you.”
He chuckled. ”Maybe I should have said more than I ought to eat in a week.”
”I'll grab something from the truck.”
The instant I stepped off the porch, I caught sight of Mari's white sports car pulling into the s.p.a.ce along the curb where Diaz had been parked only a couple of hours ago. The same rush of adrenaline I got from c.o.c.kroaches surged through me and I wanted to dash back inside.
Grinning and animated, Mari hopped out of her car and waved me over. It was hard to believe someone could hide such deceit behind a cheery face like that.
”I have a surprise for you,” she said, opening a Styrofoam dish to reveal a steaming pile of chicken and yellow rice. ”Arroz con pollo from Versailles. I met Chacho and Talia for a late breakfast and thought about you slaving away over here.”
The fact she may have betrayed me did nothing to diminish the wonderful smell wafting up from her offering, and my stomach made the decision to put my doubt and hostility on hold long enough to eat. ”This looks fantastic.”
”I knew you'd like it. I had to break all your traffic rules to get over here before you ate something else.” She presented me with a plastic fork and urged me to sit on the warm hood of her car.
As the first savory bite woke up all my taste buds, it occurred to me I'd never told her exactly where I was working. That meant she was somehow following me too, which was almost as unnerving as having the IRS watching my every move. ”How'd you know where to find me?”
”Never underestimate my ingenuity when it comes to tracking you down.” She leaned on the fender next to me, leaving enough s.p.a.ce between us to squelch the lesbian fantasies of our volunteers. ”I called Pepe from the restaurant and got him to call Gisela. She gave you up.”
Plausible, but it was still unsettling, especially since it was a team effort between Mari and Pepe.
”Look, I'm sorry about last night...that business with Delores. There was something weird about the whole thing, like it was business, not personal.”
I found that comforting, not weird.
”I tried to talk to her about the files she had taken, and she finally said she was sorry for stealing my client. She wanted to make it all up to me by introducing me to one of her clients. I told her forget it. I don't want to be friends, a.s.sociates...nothing. If I never see her again, it'll be too soon.”
It was Delores! She was the other angle Diaz was working, and I was willing to bet the farm she was the IRS's source for this whole thing too. Diaz said she'd been investigating Mari for nearly a year, which was right around the time Delores got dumped. Vindictive harpy!
I was ready to spill my guts when that bit about five years in prison popped back into my head. Instead, I tried to make rea.s.suring small talk, anything that kept us off the subject of her business dealings. ”It's good to get a clean break. You don't need to be surrounding yourself with people who bring you down.” Or set you up to get arrested...like I was doing.
”All this time I've tried to put that Delores mess behind me, and the whole time I was wis.h.i.+ng I could smooth things over so I'd never have to worry about who showed up at what party or what they were saying behind my back. Now I realize I don't care about any of it. Let people gossip if that's what they want. I have a wonderful family and enough true friends to fill my life.” She leaned sideways and nudged my shoulder. ”And I have you.”
I shoved a forkful of rice into my mouth so I wouldn't have to answer, but since common courtesy called for some kind of response, I nudged her back.
”I've made some stupid mistakes over the past couple of years, but I'm ready to get my life back on track. I was lying there in bed last night and started thinking about Saraphine. Remember her?”
I couldn't eat fast enough to avoid talking altogether. ”The woman in Little Haiti?”
”Yeah, remember how I said your foundation needed somebody to help people manage their money so they could be independent? I could do that. Not for all of them personally, but what if I organized a group of advisors from other investment companies to help out. Everyone gives a little, so no one has to give a lot.”
”That's basically the same sort of thing I do, except I get them to show up here.” It would be supremely ironic to be having this conversation with someone who turned out to be a lying swindler. It just couldn't be true.
”Pepe taught all of us growing up that we can't be just takers. We have to give back too, each one of us. He made us save part of our allowance to give to someone who needed it more, and told us to always try to be the kind of people we wanted as friends and neighbors.”
So if Pepe was behind all this, how did he reconcile teaching children to be kind, and then turn around and steal from his clients? None of this was making sense.
”I lost sight of all that over the last few years. Delores and I used to joke about which one of us would be the first to make ten million dollars. Could anything be more trivial than that?” She sounded genuinely shameful.
Not that I could relate. ”At the rate I'm going, I probably won't even crack my first million till I'm fifty.”
”But you're happy. I know you have it pretty hard with your finances, but you don't let them rule your whole life. While I'm making ridiculous amounts of money moving paper around, you're doing something that matters. You're so good for me, Daphne. I want to get back to being the kind of person I should be...the kind of person I was raised to be.”
There was so much melancholy in her voice I thought for a second she might actually be trying to confess. She'd already admitted the littering arrest was because she'd lost her cool and behaved rashly. These financial hijinks might be just another piece of it, something she'd pulled together to make a lot of money fast so she could rub it in Delores's face. What if she'd never intended to keep the money? Maybe her plan all along was to put it all back with interest once she bested Delores.
And maybe Fidel Castro could throw out the first pitch at a Marlins game.
I was convinced Pepe was behind this scam and keeping Mari totally in the dark. As much as I liked him, I'd been bothered by his overture to Gisela about investing the foundation's money. It was the act of a desperate man, someone who needed to raise money fast, maybe to pay dividends before someone got suspicious. That would also explain why he had taken Michael on as a client after initially snubbing him. Mari had seemed genuinely surprised by that.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that she couldn't be personally involved in any of this. This was all Pepe's doing, and he was dragging her down with him.
”Something wrong?”
I suddenly realized I'd stopped eating. ”No...not a thing.” Just like that, I'd figured everything out to a point where it all made sense.
”Hey, is that Nick Johnson?” she asked.
The policeman was walking toward us.
”You know Nick?”
”I'll say. He arrested me.” Which made it bizarre when she greeted him with a hug and a slap on the back. ”Nick's old partner was Delores's kid brother.”
”And the biggest a.s.shole on the force,” Nick boomed. ”How the h.e.l.l are you, Mari?”
”Great, and staying out of trouble, thanks to my new girlfriend.”
Nick looked at me and nodded his approval. ”Good deal. You've come up in the world.”
”I'll say. We were just talking about the devil herself a couple of minutes ago.” Mari draped her arm around my neck and gave me a jostle. ”If Delores is on one end of the decency spectrum, Daphne's on the other.”
I loved Mari again. This was all a mistake. There was no way she was guilty of the things Agent Diaz said she'd done.