by Rick Murcer
I lowered the kayak into the water, sat on the edge of the dock, and held the vessel steady with my feet. I lowered the beers into the little hatch behind the seat, then lowered my ass into the kayak.
I pushed away from the dock and paddled out into the middle of the Estero River.
The river had become quite a surprise for me. In Michigan I’d spent most of my time in powerboats roaring across vast stretches of lake, usually for a destination, never just to enjoy the water itself.
Now the tide was going out, so I was naturally pulled away from the dock toward a large, sweeping bend in the river.
I glanced over my shoulder; the large house was still visible over the top of the mangroves lining the bank. It looked especially impressive from the river.
Wind ruffled the surface of the water and bent the tall reeds back toward the river bank.
I popped off the cap of a beer and drank half of it in one long pull, set it between my legs, grabbed the paddle, and leaned forward.
The kayak shot ahead with smooth, balanced power. I paddled all the way down to where the river opened up onto the Gulf of Mexico. The trip took me twenty minutes. I celebrated by draining the rest of my first beer and opening the second.
I took a more leisurely paddle on the way back, upstream, aided by the fact that the tide had stopped going out and the water was in a relatively neutral state.
My second beer was only half-finished when I came around the bend in the river. The house I was watching still loomed high above the mangrove plants.
I steered the kayak into a little area of backwater surrounded by tall grass to finish the rest of my beer before I loaded the kayak back onto the dock.
There wasn’t a stitch of breeze in this little protected spot.
I rested the paddle across my thighs, casually checked for alligators. (I’d been told there really weren’t any around this area anymore, but I refused to take anyone’s word for it.)
The beer came to my lips, and I saw a glow of white off to my right. I emptied the beer and put it back into place on the floor of the kayak.
I put the paddle back in the water and gently stroked the still water, sending the kayak toward the glow of white.
There was the possibility it was a turtle shell; I’d heard they show up from time to time and are valuable.
As I got closer, I realized it wasn’t the shell of a turtle.
It was a woman.
Or at least, what was left of her.
I stopped the kayak from getting any closer, but a small wave I had created pushed up against the corpse, and she lolled slightly toward me.
A ravaged face turned toward me.
The sight froze me, sent a shaft of ice through my insides.
Not because of the horrors of death. And not because of the ravages inflicted by death, time, and the river.
The face shocked me for a very simple reason.
It was a face I knew.
2.
I had no choice but to leave her there.
Like anyone associated on some level with crime, cops, lawyers, and all of the bullshit that goes with it, I knew from experience that irrational decisions could lead to some pretty horrible results.
The fact was I desperately wanted to free her from her soggy grave, even though I knew it was a terrible idea. But in my business, you have to be able to shut off emotions like you’re blowing out a candle.
So that’s what I did.
I didn’t feel good about it. In fact, I felt like a piece of shit. But she was already dead. Her dignity . . . well, not much left of that either.
Instead, I paddled back to the dock, got out, tied the kayak to its mooring rack, carried my empty bottles inside the apartment, and put them in recycling.
Next, I left the apartment and did a perimeter walk of the property. It was my job now, after all. But I really did it because it gave me time to think. And because I also couldn’t help but wonder if there were any other surprises nearby.
The stairs from the pool led up to the second-floor lanai. I checked all of the sliding doors and the little pass-through to the kitchen. Everything was locked up tight.
Back down the stairs, I used the screen door off one end of the pool area and stepped into the yard. I walked the property from the river all the way down the long, rectangular lot to the street. Then I returned on the other side of the property.
Nothing was amiss.
I let myself back in via the screen door on the other side of the pool, then sat in the white plastic chair outside the sliding door to the apartment.
The girl’s face I had instantly recognized. No doubt about it.
I knew her.
In fact, I had known her quite well.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and held it in my hand.
The screen was clear, just a hint of reflection from the water in the pool.
I took a deep breath.
Then called the cops.
3.
There wasn’t a whole lot to Estero, Florida. It didn’t have an actual “downtown.” Or a Main Street. It was essentially a stretch of road along and just off of Highway 41.
Because it was unincorporated, the law enforcement agency responsible for Estero was the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.
One of their cars pulled up the driveway.
“Afternoon,” the cop said. “Nice place.”
There was a look of not-so-subtle skepticism on his face. He knew instinctively that I didn’t own the house or the property.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You live here?” he asked.
“I’m staying in the apartment,” I said, nodding my head toward the back of the house.
He nodded back.
“Did you call about a body?” he asked.
Before I could answer, paramedics in a Lee County vehicle roared down the driveway.
“Yeah, I called 911,” I said.
The paramedics screeched to a halt.
“You’re not going to need them,” I said.
“Show me what you saw,” the cop said.
“You’re going to need a boat.”
“Got one coming,” he said.
“All right, this way,” I said and turned back toward the house. I skirted the main building, cut through the grass, and walked around the pool to the dock.
I walked out onto the dock, went to the far right corner that looked out over the river.
The little backwater area was barely visible. I pointed toward it.
“See that little offshoot of the river over there? Looks like it goes back into a lagoon or something?” I said.
The cop looked along the direction of my finger.
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s where I saw a body, looked like a woman, about twenty minutes ago,” I said. “I was kayaking.”
On cue, a Lee County Sheriff’s boat putted around the bend in the river. The cop thumbed the little mike on his shoulder.
“Adam, stop; go into that little backwater right there. That’s where the body supposedly is.” The cop shot a little sideways glance at me, letting me know he assumed there was a fairly good chance I would turn out to be full of shit.
Not a bad assumption, actually.
“You been drinkin’ today, sir?” he said.
“Sure have, Officer,” I said. “I had a few of my friends from Holland over.”
He just looked at me.
“Heinekens,” I explained. “Just a few, sitting by the pool.”
“Any while you were out on the water?”
I wasn’t sure what the rules were in Florida for that kind of thing. Lying to the cops is something I’ve certainly done my share of, but it’s not first on my list.
Nonetheless, I said, “No, sir.”
He nodded, clearly not believing me.
A blast of static erupted from somewhere on his uniform or belt; I couldn’t tell where.
I did understand the message that followed, though.
Homicide.
4.
I sat in the interrogation room, euphemistically labeled a “conference room.” Two guys, one old and tan, the other young and tan, sat with me. We were having our own little “conference,” law-enforcement style. We’d gone over my story several times. Why I was in Florida, who I was, and how I’d found the girl.
“Pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?” the young one said. He had sunglasses, Maui Jim’s, pushed back onto the top of his head. He had a peach-colored goatee that was so thin I almost felt sorry for him.
“What do you mean?” I said. Young & Tan shot a look to Old & Tan.
“Well, you move into that apartment, and bam, we got a floater,” he said.
I just shrugged, perhaps a bit too dismissively because his face got flushed, and I could see the skin turn pink underneath his Noatee.
“Tell me again what brought you here,” Old & Tan said.
“A job.”
“And you do what for a living?” he said.
“I’m a security consultant.”
“Yeah, right,” Young & Tan said, scoffing it out of his mouth like a hairball.
“What were you hired to do?” the old one said.
“Security on the estate where I’m currently staying.”
Young & Tan rolled his eyes. His hand went to his sunglasses like he wanted to drop them onto his nose, but then he remembered he was indoors, so he scratched his girl-stubble instead.
Old & Tan spoke again. Clearly, he had wanted the younger one to lead the interview, but that hadn’t gone very well; so he finally just took over.
“Tell us again why you were on the river and how you managed to find the body,” he said.
By now, telling the story again felt like reciting a poem I’d had to memorize in elementary school. I repeated it the same exact way I’d told it the first seven times.
Young & Tan looked at the ceiling, clearly bored with me.
“Know a girl named Crystal Stafford?” Old & Tan said.
I thought for a moment. “No.” If he was talking about the girl in the river, well, I knew her all right. I just didn’t know her as Crystal Stafford.
O&T tapped a pen against a blank pad of paper. Clearly, my answers hadn’t been worthy of a lot of note-taking. I took a little bit of pride in that.
“When is this security project expected to end?” he said.
Y&T laughed outright at that one. “I don’t get how you can say shit like that with a straight face,” he said to his partner.
“He’s a good cop; that’s why you don’t understand it,” I said.
Y&T almost stood up like he was going to throw a punch at me, but the older one waved him down.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said to me.
5.
I grew up in a world without religion. In fact, when I was younger and perfecting my skills at hurting people, I was always somewhat amused when they called out for God to help them. Begging for Jesus. Praising Allah, etc. As far as I could tell, those benign beings never helped out any of them.
Maybe they didn’t want to mess with me.
So even though I’ve never set foot in a church my whole life—except that one time to kill a pedophilic priest, which probably doesn’t count—I felt a little guilty doing so much lie-telling.
Because unfortunately, the correct answer to the detectives’ question would have been, “I don’t know Crystal Stafford, but I sure know who that girl in the river is.”
But they hadn’t asked me that, in those exact words. Nor did they tell me not to leave the area.
Which explained why I was on Delta Flight 1419 as it touched down at Detroit Metro at about seven o’clock. By eight, I was in a rental car headed for a strip club called the Bermuda Triangle on the infamous 8 Mile Road.
Okay, continuing on the religion theme: I have a confession to make.
My relationships with women have been exclusively transactional in nature. Why? Generally speaking, a few reasons, I suspect. A lifetime with virtually no permanent address. Instead of friends, a loose network of less-than-prominent lawyers, bail bondsmen, and other employers in the field of fugitive apprehension. And a need for some form of environmental isolation to help identify the approach of those harboring ill will toward yours truly.
So escorts and strippers. Which are usually one in the same.
I thought of this as I left the rented white Chevy Malibu with the strip club’s valet, an ambitious young man in a white shirt and tie. I then went inside, got a booth, and a bucket of beer.
I felt nothing of the somewhat relaxed state I had been in during my stay in Florida. I was back in Detroit. Where people knew me. And knew the things I’d done. Maybe even the things I’d done recently.
It was a dead feeling inside me. This is where I’d met “Crystal.” It was all coming back to me, even as the waitress took away my first empty, and the first girl slid in beside me.
She looked like Gwyneth Paltrow with a weak chin.
“What time did you get here?” she asked me. Strippers always ask this so they can gauge how much you may have had to drink and how desperate you are for some company, and to get an idea if other girls had taken a shot at you.
“Ten minutes ago,” I said, as I polished off my first beer. Nothing makes me want to drink like airplane travel. I hate it.
It would have been nice to dispense with trying to get some questions answered, but the club had very little privacy. The booths were right next to each other, and there was even an elevated walkway behind the booths. You never knew when someone might be listening.
So when she offered to take me back to the VIP rooms, I agreed.
She led the way to a section of the club guarded by a bouncer. He nodded to us as we passed him. The dancer guided us past at least a dozen small booths with black curtains pulled across their entrances. She went to a booth at the very back of the space, pulled the curtain aside. I sat on the leather bench as she closed the curtain.
I held onto my beer as she took off her top, kicked off her giant, clear, plastic stripper shoes, and sat on my lap.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. She started grinding out of habit.
“Did you ever know a girl whose stage name was Kiki? Her real first name was Kristen.”
The girl looked at me. “Sounds familiar. What did she look like?” As she said this, she turned around, bent over, and shook her ass in front of my face.
I looked past her butt cheeks.
“She had short brown hair, muscular legs, a little tattoo of a butterfly on her lower back.”
She stood up and turned back to me, shook her head. “No, but you should ask Viv. She’s been here forever and remembers everyone. She’s kind of the House Mom around here, always taking care of the younger girls.”
The song ended, and I stood up. I gave the girl a fifty—twice the cost of a lap dance.
She thanked me, and when we emerged from the VIP section, I had her point out Viv.
Viv looked to be of Arabian descent, with big black hair, a hawk nose, and barbed-wire tattoos coming out of her panties.
She turned and smiled at me as I approached. Beautiful teeth, and I could just make out crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, buried beneath an inch of pancake.
“How about a dance,” I said to her.
She smiled like she hadn’t been asked that in a long time.
Viv hooked her arm through mine, and we found another VIP room.
“First time here?” she said.
“No, I’ve been here a couple times, mostly to see a girl named Kiki. Know her?”
“Kiki! Sure I knew her,” Viv said. “She left here a few weeks ago, not sure why. Never said goodbye to any of us. Sometimes that happens, but I wouldn’t have expected it from her.”
By now, Viv was rocking back
and forth on me, and she wasn’t petite by any means.
“How can I find out where she went?” I said.
Viv narrowed her eyes at me. She stopped gyrating.
Old strippers, man. They can see a lie from a mile away.
I pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet.
Viv raised an eyebrow.
She snatched it out of my hand.
“Juju would know,” she said. “He’s over at the main bar, in the yellow baseball cap. He runs a lot of the younger girls. Don’t tell him I mentioned his name, though. It’s not a good idea to get on his bad side. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“You’ve been warned.” She got off my lap and left.
After a minute or two, I walked out and found the main bar.
Juju was an Albanian guy. I’d never met him, but I knew who he was. His love of Ralph Lauren clothes was obvious. He always wore Ralph Lauren khakis, Ralph Lauren shirts, and he was never without a Ralph Lauren baseball cap just to make sure you noticed the logo.
“Are you Juju? The manager?” I asked. Albanian mobsters were infamous for imitating their Sicilian counterparts, right down to the goofy nicknames. I had no idea what Juju’s real name was. Probably Juhitsigov Markozuliac or something like it.
“Is there a problem?” he said.
“Yeah, I don’t see Kiki around.”
“Who?” He had a bored expression on his face. He had already pegged me as another desperate loser, a sucker who’d fallen for one of his employees.
“Kiki. She’s a dancer,” I said. “Really nice-looking girl, athletic body, short brown hair, muscular legs.”
Juju laughed and spread his hands out wide. “That’s half the girls who work here, man. Are you kidding me?”
“Oh, gosh darn it,” I said.
But Juju was lying. I suddenly had the idea that it would be a lot of fun to take an actual polo club and bash Juju’s teeth in.
He may have sensed it.
“What can I tell you?” he said. “Lots of pretty girls here for you. Take your pick.” He turned his back on me.
“Maybe I will,” I said as he walked away. I went back to my booth. The waitress had refilled my bucket. I drank two beers in four minutes and had another idea.