Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,29

remains had been found. The death was definitely a homicide, though the cause had yet to be confirmed.

“Then how do you know it was murder?” Chase asked.

“Because her body had been concealed under fresh cement,” Jerry Crosby replied.

Muted gasps followed.

Chance raised his right hand to say: “Maybe Mother tripped and fell in. The McMarmots said she was heavy into the Don Julio that night.”

“I thought it was Tito’s,” his brother cut in.

“This wasn’t an accident. I’m sorry,” said the chief.

Fay Alex Riptoad arrived, dressed for tennis and ruddy-cheeked from her sunrise lava scrub. When she noticed the Cornbrights sniffling, she folded her sunglasses and demanded a recap from Crosby. Immediately his eyes began to well up, not from the circumstances but rather from Fay Alex’s noxious choice of perfume.

“Jerry, what kind of monster would do this!” she cried. “Kiki Pew didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll catch him.” Crosby spoke with more certainty than was warranted. His town had a lower murder rate than Antarctica’s, and consequently his staff lacked the experience of most South Florida detectives, for whom heinous homicides were a routine occurrence.

“What on earth was the motive?” Fay Alex said. “For God’s sake, we need answers. We’re suffering here, Jerry. We’re mourning, and you’re not helping one damn bit.” She grabbed a Kleenex box and forcibly passed it among the Cornbrights.

The chief told the group about the hotline tip that led to the discovery of Kiki Pew’s body at the residential construction site near the Par-3.

Fay Alex said: “Isn’t that where the crazy Nicaraguan is building that ghastly house? He’s probably mixed up in all this.”

“The property owner is Venezuelan,” Crosby noted, “and he won’t be back from Caracas until April.”

“How convenient.”

“The hotline caller identified a suspect, Mrs. Riptoad. Every officer from here to Key Largo has his name and mug shot. It’s only a matter of time before we find him.”

“Well, who is he, Jerry? Who, who, who?” Fay Alex brayed.

“A convicted narcotics dealer. All of you will be the first to know when he’s in custody.” The chief turned to the Cornbright sons. “Unfortunately, in the meantime I need someone to come with me and I.D. your mother’s body.”

Chance said, “How come? I mean if you already know for sure it’s her.”

“We need a family member to make it official.”

Chance shook his head no. Chase did the same. Their wives simultaneously paled and declined.

Fay Alex Riptoad spoke up. “I count as family, Jerry. I’ll do it.”

The offspring of the late Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons gratefully approved the proxy. On the ride to the county morgue, Fay Alex complained to Crosby about the lack of a makeup mirror on the passenger-side visor. He told her to prepare for a difficult experience.

Fay Alex said, “I sat in on my first husband’s vasectomy. How could this possibly be worse?”

“Why would you want to watch that kind of surgery?”

“To make sure the horny bastard went through with it. By then he’d already knocked up our Lamaze teacher.”

Crosby thought: This is what I get for asking.

He said, “Mrs. Riptoad, what you’re about to see won’t be anything like that.”

And it wasn’t.

The layout of the Venezuelan’s future mansion was expansive, but the police who’d searched the construction site were guided by a distinctive stench that led them to a Z-shaped crack in a rectangle of recently poured concrete. As it turned out, Tripp Teabull was wrong—the footers were not deep enough to permanently entomb a decomposing corpse, even a diminutive one.

Before entering the autopsy room, Fay Alex was given a hospital mask and protective glasses. Crosby expected her to break down at the sight of her dead friend, but Fay Alex remained stoic and upright, her whitened fists clutching the steel table for balance.

“Mrs. Riptoad, is that the person you know as Katherine Fitzsimmons?”

“Yes, it’s Kiki Pew,” she said, her voice thin but unbroken. “Dear God, what’d they do to her?”

“The medical examiner took preliminary X-rays. Most of her ribs are broken. He believes she was grabbed around the chest and asphyxiated by someone extremely strong. The lineal patterns of small punctures from her head to torso—he’s not sure what caused those. He says he’s never seen wounds like that before.”

“When is the autopsy?”

“This afternoon.”

The chief waited for Fay Alex to back away, now that the gruesome task was completed. Instead she leaned closer to her friend’s body. “Where’s her damn jewelry, Jerry?”

“I, uh…what jewelry?”

“An absolutely breathtaking conch-pearl necklace, and those diamond earrings Mott gave her