Page 100 of Nobody's Fool

Something made Victoria call her brother that night.

Something made her leave the party.

What?

What could have led a seemingly well-adjusted girl from a well-to-do family from celebrating the new millennium with rich high school friends to running low-rent cons on naïve tourists in the Costa del Sol?

“I remember when the Belmond girl was found,” Osorio says to me. “It was in a restaurant or something?”

“Yes, a diner.”

“So how can I help?”

“We need to find Buzz.”

“Twenty-two years later?”

“A guy like that,” I say. “I probably wasn’t his first mark or his last.”

Osorio sees it now. “You think he’s in the system.”

“I think there’s a good chance. We start back at that summer. I can give you a general description. White guy. I’d say one meter eighty,maybe ninety-five kilograms. I’m guessing around forty years old then. He had a Dutch accent, and I remember Anna telling me he was from Amsterdam. Don’t know if that’s true or not. When I met him, he had purple spiked hair and a nose ring. He said he worked as a DJ.”

Osorio writes this all down. “Did this Buzz say where he worked?”

“No.”

“Twenty-two years ago,” Osorio says. “That won’t be in the computer. We didn’t start digital storage until 2008, so they’ll be in physical form.”

“Like mug shot books?”

“Yes.”

“Can we access them?”

“They’re in a warehouse in Málaga.”

“How long will that take?”

“Can you come back in two hours?”

“Sure.”

I rise to leave.

“It was cruel,” Osorio says. “That con. You were just a kid, and you thought you’d done something terrible. It’s haunted you.”

I say nothing.

“That’s what I should have seen, but I wasn’t much more than a kid either. Like I said, I didn’t have your phone number. But I could have found it. I should have. I should have called you and told you the truth. I’m sorry about that.”

I don’t trust my voice, so I nod what I hope is a thanks and head outside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I head to the beach and take off my shoes and socks. The sand is hard, gritty, crushed-shell-like. The Jersey Shore is much better. Sorry, it is. Better waves too. I don’t stay long. I get my shoes back on and walk over to the Discoteca Palmeras. I stare up at the façade. I don’t feel anything because I don’t think I ever saw the place’s exterior in the daytime. I can’t tell whether it’s changed in the past two decades. Have you ever stayed in a nightclub until closing when they turn the houselights on and it’s like a totally different experience? It’s a sobering sight when a nightclub is scrubbed of its makeup and mood lighting, when it is exposed to the harsh morning glare.

I am focused on the case—on finding out the truth about what happened to Victoria Belmond and to a lesser degree me—but I can’t help thinking about the financial windfall that has risen me up like that church song about angels’ wings. I don’t want it to matter. I don’t want to let money change me or any of that. But I feel a lightness in my chest, and I know Molly does too. I’m not sure we consciously understood the burden that debt had placed upon our shoulders—what the heavy weight was doing to us physically, mentally, emotionally. I wanted to be that old Loggins and Messina song about even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you, honey, but the truth is far more complex.

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