Half Court Press

by A. J. Stewart

  “I don’t need one, either.”

  I shrugged.

  “You think if I was going to throw a brick through Aunt Camille’s car, I would do it right after arriving? I might not be some college genius, but I’m not that stupid.”

  I didn’t respond. I was thinking. Or more precisely, random words were bouncing around my mind, like heated molecules, flying aimlessly, crashing and colliding until finally they met another molecule with an opposite charge and began to stick together, forming compounds that started to resemble something.

  College, brick, window, genius.

  “I assume you’re staying?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  I stood. “Okay. Don’t let anyone in.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t bother. The family can look after her.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking: All evidence to the contrary.

  The patio door slid open, and Ronzoni came inside, leaving Camille alone.

  I nodded toward the front door and he met me there.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  We stepped outside. It was dark, but the warmth hung on the air. Summer was doing it’s warm-up exercises, getting ready to come on in full force.

  We stood next to Camille’s car. The windshield was a spiderweb of smashed glass with a hole in the center.

  “So was it a brick or a rock?”

  “It was concrete. A lump of concrete—the sort of thing you jackhammer out of the sidewalk.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I hate to say it, but I tend to agree with Crozier. It’s the sort of thing that a kid would do, a tantrum. Or maybe it’s being made to look like that.”

  “It’s a new MO, compared to the other threats.”

  He nodded. “Maybe an escalation.”

  “You think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m paying you to think, too, you know. What do you think?”

  “In order of events, we have a graffiti message on a locker, then a typed letter, then a text message sent in an app that was designed to destroy it after it was read, and then a rock, or a chunk of concrete into a windshield. Something doesn’t fit.”

  “Or someone is getting desperate.”

  “Before you got desperate for the money, wouldn’t you try explaining how the mark was supposed to send it to you?”

  “Amateurs.”

  “Even then, it’s not rocket science.”

  “Crime rarely is.”

  I looked at the windshield. I had arrived at Camille’s giving serious consideration to Tania being behind all this. The smashed windshield supported that theory. If Sheryl had been in the bathroom, then Tania would have been alone. In theory, she could have dashed outside and thrown the concrete, and then rushed back in before being seen. It would explain why the guard at the gatehouse didn’t have any record of anyone unknown coming into the community. But there was a problem with my theory.

  Tania had told me she was ready to play. Ready to take the China offer so she could get the cash and make the threats stop. I couldn’t see any way where that gelled with her being behind everything. Cousin Sheryl had good answers but wasn’t above suspicion. It was even possible that Camille had done it. She’d been out back and could have gone around the side of the house and back without being seen. But there was something about what she had said on the phone: She didn’t like what had happened but was willing to take advantage of it to get Tania to do what she thought she needed to do. It didn’t sound like she was behind it, and there was nothing criminal about being an opportunist. It made me think about something else she had said, about mothers doing what they do. I thought about mothers and fathers, and I thought about moms and dads and mamas and papas, and the intricate web that forms between them and their children. Sometimes the bonds were unbreakable, sometimes they were as fragile as fine china. Which made me think about the one loose end I hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of.

  “Tell me about Draymond,” I asked Ronzoni.

  “What about him?”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Pretty well. I’ve been helping at the Boys and Girls Club for quite a few years, and he’s been around for most of that time.”

  “With Tania.”

  “Yes. Are you suggesting he has something to do with this?”

  “I’m eliminating suspects. Isn’t that what you cops do?”

  “Yes, but you’re barking up with the wrong tree with Draymond.”

  “Am I? What do you know about the drinking?”

  “The divorce was rough. He didn’t react well.”

  “It sounds like it. So he lost access to his daughter. You didn’t notice him missing at the club?”

  “I got to know him as he was trying to put his life back together. Yes, he drank and Camille probably overreacted some, but it was her kid so you can see how she might.”

  “I don’t think she overreacted. A drunk father is no kind of father at all.”

  “You talking from experience?” The look on his face suggested it was a throwaway line, but I answered it anyway.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ronzoni’s face dropped. “Oh, sorry.”

  “You didn’t do it. But Draymond did.”

  “He did, no excuses. But he’s clean now. He’s heading in the right direction.”

  “Is he?”

  “I think so.”

  “But he did the wrong thing for his daughter once. Is it possible he might have done it again?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  That was my experience. Anything was possible, and it happened more often than not.

  I said farewell to Ronzoni and climbed in my SUV. I followed him this time, out to the gate where I waved to the guard, but didn’t receive one in return.

  But I didn’t speed away. As I moved forward from the gatehouse, I saw a somewhat familiar shape laboriously making its way along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road. It was Tania’s cousin, Rami, her midriff rolling like an ocean swell, her Miami Dolphins fanny pack holding the tide at bay. She walked through the pedestrian gate and onward into the community.

  I backed up to the gatehouse and stopped by the window. The guard frowned down at me.

  “You can’t reverse here.”

  I ignored his protest. “The pedestrian gate over there,” I said. “Is that locked?”

  He turned to look at the sidewalk and then back.

  “It will be, if you stop bothering me.”

  “But is it locked during the day?”

  “No, sunset to sunrise.”

  That was often the case with gated communities.

  “Do you watch who comes in and out on foot?”

  “No,” he said. “No one comes in and out on foot.”

  I didn’t bother mentioning that someone had walked in moments before. I just smiled and thanked him and took off.

  I considered heading back to Longboard’s, but I was on Blue Heron Boulevard already, so like a homing pigeon I headed across the bridge to Singer Island.

  My house was dark and hollow. I checked the fridge knowing I had no beer, and I glanced at the bottle of tequila on the counter. I wasn’t going down that path again, so I put on my running shoes and walked out to City Beach. The bars were doing a good trade, and I stopped to check the noticeboard at one to make sure the loggerhead turtles hadn’t started laying on the beach. They weren’t in town yet, so I jogged onto the beach.

  The only light on the beach came from the high-rise apartments sprouting along the shoreline. I jogged down low on the compacted sand, the waves lapping at my feet.

  Even though I’ve done it most of my life, I’m not a natural runner. My frame is too large and my shoulders too wide, and I heft around muscle in all the wrong places. But running keeps me fit, or as fit as someone who spends so much time on a barstool is ever likely to be. I wasn’t a gym junkie—even back in college I had pumped t
he bare minimum of iron—and preferred to exercise outside. In a place like Florida, I couldn’t understand doing it any other way.

  The mild ocean air filled my lungs, and I began to feel better than I had in I couldn’t remember how long. In the darkness, there was very little to look at, so I let my mind wander wherever it chose to go. It was a sort of meditative state, a way of thinking without purposefully thinking. Put another way, it was a method for getting out of my own way.

  I saw Tania Bryson on the basketball court, and I saw words scrawled on a locker. I saw a typed note like a business letter, and I saw a mother who cared, but maybe a little too much. I saw text after text after text, messages with numbers and emojis and no vowels. I saw a smashed windshield, a combination of anger and threat. I saw words and numbers and numbers as words, and I saw grammar and syntax.

  I saw Cousin Rami walking into the community, having at some earlier point clearly walked out. I thought about who might come and go in that manner, more or less unseen because they weren’t in a motor vehicle.

  As I turned at the south end of MacArthur State Park, I had the kindling of an idea. By the time I jogged up over the sandbanks and past the stores and restaurants at City Beach and onto the quiet residential streets on the Intracoastal side, I had a plan. The pieces of the case that didn’t fit were starting to come together, but in a completely unexpected way—like a Venn diagram. Some events were in one circle, and a separate set of events were in an entirely different circle, and instead of thinking of all the events as linked, I needed to focus on where those two circles intersected, where a handful of elements connected to all the others.

  And there was one person at the center of those circles who, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, connected all the others.

  I reached my house and strode around to the backyard. I bypassed the patio and stood right on the seawall, letting the breeze coming in off the water cool me down some. Things were moving, and I hoped that I could keep them under control.

  I stripped off as I walked inside. The water in the shower felt good, and I stayed there for longer than was necessary, and then wrapped a towel around my waist. I was a little hungry but a lot lazy so I just lay in bed and closed my eyes with a face in my mind.

  I needed a good chat with Draymond Bryson.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I woke up in a completely different part of my Venn diagram, thinking about a very different face. I got up and wandered into the living room. The day was pleasant and mild, so I put on a shirt with little surfboards and wood-sided wagons on it, and a pair of khaki shorts. Nothing had magically appeared in the fridge, so I headed over to one of the coffee joints at City Beach and had a coffee and a breakfast sandwich. When I was refueled, I went cruising in my SUV.

  At some point during the night a thought had popped into my head that probably should have occurred to me earlier: I wondered where Tania’s cousin, Rami, had been coming from when I saw her walking back into Crescent Lakes the previous evening.

  It occurred to me that she didn’t have a car, so wherever she had gone was probably close by. I considered the possibility she had made herself scarce after dispensing of a concrete block into Camille’s windshield. I had another explanation for the smashed windshield that I liked better, but my subconscious had planted a clue in the functional part of my brain, and I felt like I needed to at least pay it lip service.

  I drove out to the edge of where Riviera Beach gave way to Palm Beach Gardens. Slowly but surely, almost imperceptibly, everything felt newer. The roads were laid with fresh blacktop not sun-baked gray, the houses were post turn of the century not postwar, and the shopping options became large malls with cinemas and anchor stores rather than strips with Chinese restaurants and insurance offices.

  I did a wide loop of the area around Crescent Lakes and saw nothing of interest, despite having no idea what I was looking for. Then I passed by the community gate and headed north. I ran into a tangle of similar communities, some developed in the previous decades and some still swaths of grass pockmarked by the concrete slabs where the building would start.

  I turned around and headed south, where the outer reaches of the Everglades spilled east and kept humanity from concreting all the way across to the Gulf of Mexico. There were no gated developments in this direction, but older streets with tar-topped ranch homes in need of a good coat of paint.

  I looped back past the gatehouse where I had seen Rami, and having achieved nothing, decided to head back toward home. There were few roads headed east-west from the community, so I took the nearest one, which I knew to be Northlake Boulevard. I passed the little strip mall where Keisha and I had stopped for soft serve, and then I drove on for about a half mile, focusing on the stores that lined the road. This was the kind of place where a girl might wait for the heat to dissipate after committing vandalism. I kept a lookout for bars, but also for fast-food joints, where someone could sit unmolested for a good amount of time, even without buying anything.

  Nothing I saw sparked my Spidey senses. I went about a mile more, and then concluded that Rami was not the kind of girl to wander this far from home. Not on foot anyway. I’d perused the south side of the boulevard well enough, and decided for the sake of being thorough that I might as well do a pass on the other side. It was as much meticulousness as it was having nothing better to do, since my objective for the day was to chat with Draymond Bryson and I had it on Ronzoni’s word that he wouldn’t be at his workplace until later in the day.

  I pulled a U-turn and headed back from whence I had come, watching the sandwich joints and gas stations drift by. I started to wonder why we needed so many strip malls populated by essentially the same businesses.

  Then I saw a business that I hadn’t yet seen and all sorts of bells and whistles and klaxons went off in my head, and Venn diagrams started filling and random thoughts made sense, and I resolved to pay more attention to my subconscious mind even when I had no idea why it was dragging me in a particular direction.

  I pulled off the road and parked right in front of a store. It wasn’t the kind of place where a person would while away the hours. It was the sort of place someone would go if they had something very specific to do.

  It was a pawn shop.

  Not a fast food joint or a bar or an ice cream parlor. Not a place to hang out and wait but a place to transact. I hadn’t felt good about Rami for the concrete brick in the windshield, but suddenly I had a working theory for why she had disappeared when all the action was going down.

  I wandered inside, and an electronic buzzer signaled that a customer had entered the premises, although I didn’t see anyone who seemed to be in charge. What I saw looked like a pawnshop, and I knew a thing or two about those. There were racks of discarded guitars and saxophones, and a case of cell phones and a cabinet of handguns. There were laptop computers and flat-screen televisions going for pennies on the dollar. At the rear of the store was a glass cabinet with watches and rings and brooches.

  From behind the rear cabinet, a door opened and a man stepped out. He wore a trucker hat emblazoned with the name of an oil company, and the peak of it hid the tops of heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes. He was thin—one of those guys who doesn’t seem to have taste buds, and to whom all food is nothing more than gasoline is to a car.

  He nodded in greeting and I wandered over, taking my phone from my pocket. There were two ways I figured things had gone down, if they had gone down at all, and I liked option one a lot better than option two. It was easy enough to check. I looked at my phone and then bent down and perused the cabinet.

  “Looking for something in particular?” asked the guy.

  “You could say that,” I said. “You the owner?”

  “I am. You buying or trading?”

  I didn’t answer his question, instead pointing at the cabinet.

  “Can I see that one?”

  The guy sniffed, and then pulled out a large ring of keys and opened the back of the
cabinet. He slid out a shelf and picked up the item I had selected and then set it on a felt board placed on the glass cabinet top.

  I looked at my phone and then at the necklace, and then I flicked to the next photo and moved along the cabinet. I selected two rings and asked to see them, too.

  “You don’t want the necklace now?”

  “Oh, I do.”

  He sniffed again and then pulled out the two rings and placed them next to the necklace. He was probably a nervy guy even on a good day, and having so much expensive merchandise out at one time was causing him to twitch like a flea-ridden mutt.

  I pointed at a brooch and a couple of other items and watched his unease grow.

  “I got a gun under the counter here,” he said.

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “In case you’re thinking of a smash and grab.”

  “Only on leftover night,” I said with a less-than-committed smile.

  He finally pulled out all the items I had photos of, and I stood back and looked at the loot. Option one had been my preferred option, and it seemed I was right. I smiled a more authentic effort. Rami hadn’t disappeared because she’d perpetrated the smashed windshield, but because she was up to a different crime.

  There are two ways these things go down. If the pawnshop owner sails close to the wind, then he might be inclined to knowingly handle stolen goods, which is what Rami would have brought in. Option two would have meant I wouldn’t find Camille’s jewels on display. Rather, they would have been fenced after hours, moved in shadows, and sold on a market that didn’t open to the general public.

  Option one was exactly what I found. The pawnshop owner had followed the letter of the law and got Rami to sign a document swearing she was the legal owner of the items, and once he checked her ID, his legal requirements were discharged. He wouldn’t have asked her too many questions. Rami hadn’t put the items in hock. She’d sold them straight out, and here they were: In the cabinet, ready for sale.

  I looked at the jewels for a moment, and the owner twitched like he was receiving little electric shocks.