Dead Air: A Talk Radio Mystery (23 page)

After ordering cappuccinos, we sat at a green umbrella table and checked out the scene for a few minutes. Across the street, girls whizzed by on roller blades. A vintage cream-colored Bentley with tinted windows purred by.

It was four thirty, but the sidewalks were already crowded. It was time for predinner cocktails or
cafés con leche
. Everyone looked tanned and beautiful, and a young couple at the next table was having an animated conversation in Spanish. The late afternoon sun splashed the Art Deco hotels with a golden glow, lighting up their Easter-egg pastel exteriors.

It was fun, hip, cosmopolitan.

Mom must have read the expression on my face. “Why don’t you move down to Miami?” she asked softly. “You know you love it here.”

I waited until our server placed steaming cups of coffee in front of us before answering. “Mom, you know my job is in Cypress Grove. I was lucky to get any job at all in radio; it’s a tough field. How many talk radio shows does one city really need?”

“But you’re exceptional. You’re not just a talk show host. You’re a licensed psychologist and you do a terrific job.”

“And I think you might be a tiny bit biased.” I grinned and blew on my coffee to cool it. “I’m not exactly a household name, you know. That’s what it would take to get hired in a major media market like Miami. Big-time visibility. Name recognition. I’m under the radar screen, believe me. There are a zillion people who’d like a job as a radio host. I wish you could see how many audition tapes the station received, just from one tiny ad.”

It’s true. The station had placed a small ad in Media Bistro and had been deluged with applicants. I didn’t even have an audition tape, so I cobbled together a few local radio interviews I’d done. The topics had all been psychological, women’s health, stress management, relationships.

I’d been interviewed once on NPR, which must have caught someone’s attention, because WYME listened to my tape and immediately invited me down to discuss the job. I did a sample audition (with Cyrus Stills playing the part of a call in guest), and they decided I’d be a good match. Big Jim Wilcox came up with
On the Couch with Maggie Walsh
as the name of the show. I resisted the idea at first but finally realized it was catchy and gave in.

“Well, you should be a household name.” She sniffed. “I think you moved too fast when you accepted that job at WYME. You should have held out a little longer and aimed for the top when you moved down here,” she said. “You’re loaded with talent. I think it’s a confidence issue, really.”

“Now you sound like the shrink.” I grinned and held back a sigh. This was old territory, ground we’d covered many times before. I’d grabbed the WYME position because I didn’t think I could take one more New York winter, and who knew when another opportunity would come along? Mom, however, was convinced that I had “settled.”

“Let’s get back to Ray Hicks,” I said, pulling out a tiny notebook. “I know you’re suspicious of him and I’d like to know why.” I was really asking,
What did you pick up on that I didn’t?

“Oh, the hand to the nose. That was the tell,” she said softly. “An easy one, actually.”

“It was?” I stopped with my ballpoint hovering over my notes.

“Didn’t you notice the way he swiped his nose with one hand when he pretended he’d never been to Cypress Grove?”

“No, I hadn’t, actually.” I shivered a little in the warm sunlight. Ever since we’d been to Ray Hicks’s trailer, I’d had the irrational fear that bugs—maybe fleas—were crawling on me. “And then he went on and on talking. That’s what people do when they’re lying, you know—they add a wealth of unimportant details. They make the story even bigger than it has to be, and of course that’s a sure giveaway.”

“You could tell all that from his scratching his nose? What if he has allergies? Or a cold?”

“I don’t think so.” Mom shook her head. “It was classic.”

“He looked me right in the eye when he said he’d never been to Cypress Grove.”

“Easy. Con artists are good at making eye contact when they tell a bold-faced lie.”

She was right. As always.

“What else?” I knew she was holding back and there were probably more things she’d picked up on. Sometimes I forgot that I was supposed to be the expert on human behavior and Mom was just a very observant actress. She picked up on dozens of things that I missed.

“Well, did you notice the way he covered his face when he talked about Sanjay? He pretended to be rubbing his eye with the back of his hand, but it was like he was covering his eyes, almost as if he was shielding them. He was concealing something. It reminded me of someone being blindfolded.” She paused, toying with her spoon. “Or someone who deliberately was pulling down shutters. He didn’t want us to see what his eyes might reveal. All on the unconscious level, of course.”

“I didn’t spot that.”

My cell phone rang and I glanced at the readout. My reporter pal, Nick Harrison.

“What’s up?” I said, after punching the TALK button.

“Just checking in.” I could hear a low buzz of conversation behind him and I knew he was calling from the
Gazette
. I guessed they had just put the paper to bed and Nick was tying up some loose ends before heading out for dinner.

“Any good news?” After our meeting with Ray Hicks, I was ready to hear some.

“I did a little more background checking, and I came up with an R. Hicks who signed the register at the Seabreeze. The car license plate number he gave doesn’t check out. There’s something suspicious about him.”

“Ray Hicks was at the Seabreeze?” My hand jolted involuntarily, and I splashed coffee on the white linen cloth. I glanced across the table, and Mom flashed me an “I told you so” look. “What night?”

“R. Hicks was there the night Sanjay died. Or went to his celestial resting place,” Nick added with a low laugh. “It’s either Ray or a heck of a big coincidence.” I could picture Nick holding up his hand, palm out. “And don’t remind me that Freud said there are no coincidences. What’s your take on it?”

“I just talked to Ray Hicks.” My mind was racing. Had Ray Hicks been lying to me the whole time? This changed everything, and I wished I could rewind the tape in my head and play the whole trailer-park scene again.

“You’re kidding. What did he say?”

“He admitted that he got screwed over in a business deal with Sanjay. He told me a complicated story about a real estate buy and eminent domain. It was pretty much the way you described it to me.”

Nick grunted. “He got screwed over all right. I’d say to the tune of a million bucks.”

“Close enough. First I told him Sanjay was dead; then I had to listen to his rant.”

“What was his reaction to the news?”

“He was certainly glad to hear he was dead.” I glanced at Mom across the table; she was watching me with a laser-beam intensity. She nodded emphatically.

“I bet he was.” Nick gave a mirthless laugh.

“But he insisted he had nothing to do with it, and that he’d never attended the conference. In fact, he even said he’d never been in Cypress Grove.”

“Where did you talk to him?”

“At his home in some awful mobile home park. He actually invited us inside.” I shuddered, remembering the dismal trailer with its smell of decaying cheese and onions.

“Was there a car parked out front?”

I nodded. “A beat-up Ford pickup truck. Black.”

“Did you happen to get the license number?”

My heart sank like a stone. “I didn’t think of it.”
So much for my investigative skills.

“That’s okay. I can get someone to run a background check.” I could hear Nick tapping away at his computer.

“Miriam Dobosh almost did.” I suddenly remembered Mom’s conversation with her. “She said she wanted to, but she didn’t have the cash available. Sanjay acted like it was the deal of a lifetime.”

“Interesting. So he wouldn’t hesitate to cheat one of his own employees.”

“And Miriam wasn’t just an employee. She practically ran the whole show.”
But maybe he wasn’t planning on cheating her
, I thought. Maybe he was going to offer her a cut of his ill-gotten gains. It might be good to chat with her again to see whether she was willing to talk about Sanjay. “The part about Ray being at the Seabreeze is sort of a stretch, you know.” Nick had stopped typing, and his voice broke into my musings. “I can’t imagine him being the sort of guy who’s into New Age conferences.”

I tried to picture Ray Hicks walking into the Seabreeze in his filthy jeans. Wouldn’t anyone have noticed? He hardly looked like one of Sanjay’s well-heeled, if misguided, followers. He would have stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Mom scribbled a note on a paper napkin and passed it to me. “Did this R. Hicks use a credit card to pay for the room?” I relayed the question to Nick and gave her a thumbs-up sign. Good question. Ray Hicks had told us he’d cut up his credit cards.

“He paid cash. Hardly anyone uses cash, and that’s why we missed it. The writing on the register is barely legible. It’s practically a scrawl, like he used his left hand or deliberately was trying to conceal his name. The night clerk asked him for identification but he said he’d left his driver’s license at a gas station a hundred miles back. So they took the cash and told him to write down his license plate number. No one checked, so he could have written down anything he wanted.”

Something nagged at me. “Why would he sign the register with his real name if he didn’t want to be discovered?”

Nick had an answer. “Sometimes criminals, especially the dumb ones, write their real name without thinking. If he’d been a little quicker on the uptake, he would have signed with an alias.” There was a beat while he spoke to the assignment editor. “Did he seem smart to you?”

“I don’t think he was the sharpest knife in the drawer. I’d say he was cunning rather than smart. Sort of a sly type.”

There was silence on the line for a moment while I tried to think of my next move. I had to admit it: I was stumped. “Shall we go back to the trailer park?” I could see Mom wincing at the suggestion.

“Not yet,” Nick said. “There’s no sense in showing your hand. You can always do a follow-up visit when we have more information.”

“What’s going on in Cypress Grove? Anything new with the cops?”

Cops.
I could feel my face flushing a little at the thought of Rafe Martino.

“They’re keeping very quiet. I may pay them a visit tomorrow just to see if they throw me a bone. As far as I know, Lark is still the number-one suspect.” He drew in a breath, and I knew there was more.

And then it came.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, Maggie, but the DA is thinking of convening a grand jury next week. They’re going to put everything they have on the line and see if there’s enough to indict her for Sanjay’s murder.”

“Indict her? That’s ridiculous.”

“They have motive, means, and opportunity. She was obsessed with him, he tried to attack her, and she killed him.”

“All they have is circumstantial evidence.”

“People have gone to jail on less,” Nick reminded me.

The sad thing is, I knew he was right. People have gotten the death penalty for less. Nick promised to stay in touch, and I told him I’d touch base in a day or two when I’d followed up on some more leads. It was a disappointing end to an unsettling conversation.

Chapter 22

Hearing the news about Lark cast a sudden pall over the beautiful day.

Mom, as usual, had the best take on the situation. “They’re thinking of indicting Lark?” She raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. There’s only one thing to do, Maggie. We just have to redouble our efforts,” she said firmly. “What else did you find out?”

I filled her in on the mysterious R. Hicks who had signed the guest register at the Seabreeze, and she thought for a moment. “He could have been there, but why didn’t anyone see him? Surely someone would have noticed. He’s not the sort of man you can overlook, is he?” She gave a delicate shudder. “We can always talk to him again, but I think we should have a plan this time.”

“We need an excuse to get back into the trailer,” I said. But what? My mind had stalled.

Sleuthing was far more difficult than I’d realized. How come those TV cops always manage to wind everything up in a neat hour-long package? Actually, it’s only forty-four minutes, if you subtract the commercials. A nice lineup of suspects, some clever detective work, and bingo, problem solved, suspect neatly placed in handcuffs and whisked away. If only real life could be so simple.

“Oh, there’s a camera crew!” Mom said, immediately arranging her features in a practiced smile. She crossed her legs and tilted her chin up a tad, a trick she said she’d learned from Zsa Zsa Gabor—an instant way to tighten a sagging chin line before facing the cameras. “I think it’s
ET
or
Access Hollywood
,” she whispered excitedly. “Wonder what that’s all about?”

“I heard they’re shooting a new reality show here. Something about the beautiful young people of South Beach. I saw a promo for it earlier on
The Today Show
. They’re probably in town to interview some of the stars.”

“Not another reality show,” Mom groaned. “Why does everyone in the cast look like they’re under seventeen?”

“Probably because they are.” I bit back a sigh. Nothing like a teen reality show to make a girl feel ancient at thirty-two.

We spotted a Lindsay Lohan look-alike, poured into a pair of skintight Cavalli jeans and a Pokémon baby T, doing a stand-up interview with Maria Menounos. A group of middle-aged tourists stood gawking nearby, looking like refuges from a Parrothead tour with their matching Margaritaville shirts. They were elbowing one another, holding up camera cell phones, trying to get a clear shot of the attractive entertainment reporter.