The Cardinal's Sin

by Robert Lane

  “What’s your story?” I wanted to return to Renée but knew I couldn’t afford an unhealthy obsession with her if I was to gain his confidence.

  “My son,” he said, and took another quick drink. “Lost him about seven years ago this coming May third.”

  “I’m sorry.” About seven years ago this coming May third. Bet he knew the hour.

  He waved his hand. “I’m fine with it. That’s what we’re told to say when we realize that we’ll never be fine with it. That things will never be the same, and we have accepted that and can move on. What do you think of that?”

  “I’ll defer to your judgment.”

  “Then you think that’s total bullshit. Thick and deep, and once it’s in the tread of your shoes, it never comes off.” He reached for his mug but drew his hand back, although he kept his eyes on it. I had to say something, so I threw out, “Traffic accident?” even though I couldn’t imagine how it would lead him to join WAP.

  “What?” He glanced up at me.

  “What hap—”

  “No.” He waved his hand. “Benny, name was Benjamin, had…some troubles. Good kid, bad crowd. Shitty timing.” He didn’t deny himself this time and picked up his mug. “That is a wicked combination. Yes, sir. A wicked combination.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t—”

  “Oh, hell.” He looked up at me. I wondered if I would be out in time to catch standby on the earlier flight. “I don’t mind. He peddled child porno. Lot of money in that. He got caught, did time. Embarrassed himself to hell. Couldn’t hardly look at his sister, let alone his mother.” Rondo stole a glance out the window. “He gets out,” he came back to me, his eyes tired behind the crooked glasses, “doing fine, you know. Got a job. One day he’s busing tables, and some big birthday party walks in. One of the moms, she stops cold in her tracks and demands to see the manager. Pulls him over and pounds holy hell into the man, right there in the middle of the restaurant, yelling at him that he had a pedophile working there.

  “Turns out one of the pictures Benny had was of her daughter. Someone had set up a camera inside a girls’ locker room at a gymnastics studio. This lady recognized Benny from his trial. She goes balls-out ballistic on the manager. Acts like she’s King Fuckin’ Tut. Creates a scene. Patrons start to peel out. He fires him. Believe that? Fired him on the spot. On the way out the door, the lady, she’s screaming at him—this is just what people tell me, I wasn’t there—calls him a threat to society.”

  “I’m—”

  “Hung himself a week later. My wife found him in the coat closet when she went to get the vacuum because I spilled potting dirt. Before she opened that door, she was pretty ticked about the mess. Not so much afterward. No, sir, not much at all.”

  I looked out the window and wondered what I was doing with my life and couldn’t understand why that thought hit me at that time.

  “Anyways.” He brightened up. “Didn’t mean to pee on your snow cone, but it happens. My wife and I joined WAP. Good group—not good enough to save the marriage, though—but I suppose the whole sorry-ass thing just revealed problems that were already there. They told us a tragedy like we went through could bury us, that we needed to find and remember who we really were. Problem was, who we really were wasn’t much in the first place.

  “Those words,” he stole a glance out the window and quickly came back at me, like he didn’t like what was out there, “stripped me of everything except my mortgage. They killed my son and torpedoed my marriage. Did more harm than anything he ever had on his hard drive. Think those pictures ever killed anyone? Think they put that lady in jail? Brought her up on charges? Think that bitch even feels regret? And I’m told to remember who I am. Fuck that, man. Yes, sir. You can fuck that.”

  I didn’t think there was a question in there that expected an answer. I let Joseph Vizcarrondo come out of his thoughts on his own. I’d lost control of the conversation. I wondered again what my odds were for standby on an earlier flight.

  “That,” he said, as he picked up his mug and tilted it toward me, “is my story. Some people have constipation of the mind and diarrhea of the mouth. And they’re killers, my friend, just like the kind we put in jail. Sorry you asked?”

  “No. I—”

  “Sure you are. Renée? Her story was her mom. Said her mom was verbally abused as a young girl, ten, twelve, whatever. Not cuss words, she said. Not loud words. But soft and gentle words, that’s what she said, ‘soft, gentle words.’ Those words eventually took her down. Her mother committed suicide as well. We talked about it, but not much. No sense having a cry fest every time you meet someone in the organization.”

  “How did you select her for your panel?”

  “She called me, lobbied to be on it. Said it was her hometown. Chance to see her dad.”

  Donald Lambert had lied to me. No way did his daughter lobby for a gig in her hometown and not drop in on Dad. I should have challenged him on that.

  “Do you have any means of contacting her other than her cell and e-mail?” I fondled my beer. “She’s not responding to either.”

  “Nothing.” He farted. “Excuse me.”

  “Never married, right?”

  “Not that I know of.” He gave me an appraising look. The waiter dropped by. I glanced at Rondo, but he waved the man off.

  “Boyfriends? You said she was a head turner.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Was she with a man that night? Muscular, short hair?”

  “I wouldn’t…there was this guy. Where’s your shed?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “West coast. Saint Pete Be—”

  “And you came here to talk to me?”

  “Yes, sir. We—”

  “Bullshit.”

  Busted.

  “She’s missing.” I shifted my weight. “I’ve been retained by the family to locate her.” No need to tell him that Renée’s father bled out that morning on his kitchen floor, reaching for his mop bucket while a great white egret mourned the loss of its food source.

  Rondo leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him do that. “I thought,” he said, and bobbed his head up and down like an oil pump, “when I saw you strutting toward me, tall and fast, like you owned the world? No way, I thought, someone like him is working for some outsource poll-taking firm. You play ball?”

  “No.”

  “Really? Whatja do?”

  “Army.”

  “How was that?”

  “Three meals a day.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Tell me about the man.”

  “Yes, sir. I knew.” He bobbed his head some more. Guess he wasn’t done with his self-congratulatory accolades. “The second you made those top two steps in one stride and took the corner, I knew.”

  He tented his hands in front of him and leaned in. “Came in late.” He picked up his pace. “Hustled her out. Not friendly, but not unfriendly. Like they knew each other, you know?”

  I did. It was the same record that Adam, the bartender at the Valencia, had played for me. Benny Mardones’s hit single, also his single hit, came over the speakers, and I hoped Rondo didn’t catch it. I pushed my beer aside and waved away a gnat that displayed curiosity in my barley and hops. Rondo and I locked eyes.

  “Did you overhear anything, see him before, catch a name?”

  He sucked in his lower lip and shook his head. “He said he wanted to explain. I was heading to the bar, and I overheard as I brushed past them. He said something about some other guy not wanting to hurt her…no, that wasn’t it, more like he would never hurt her. He had her by the elbow and was saying this other guy just wanted a chance to talk to her. Said to give him a chance, that after all they’d been through, he deserved at least that.”

  “Must have been a slow brush,” I said.

  He nodded his head in approval of my observation. “I hung around the bar and eavesdropped. What else yo
u gonna do?” He shrugged. “Go back to the room, turn on the tube, and watch a bunch of tattooed cooks get cardiac arrest in a kitchen? You gotta see this lady. It wasn’t just that she was a stunner. She had a normalcy that belied her appearance. Just a real nice girl, you know? Usually it’s the ugly ones that got the great personality, God’s little joke on men—you know, my man, exactly what I’m talking about—but from the little I hung with her, she’d make any father proud. Speaking of,” he tilted up the sagging side of his glasses with his right hand, “is he worried?”

  “Who?” But I knew.

  “Her father.”

  “Doing OK.”

  It appeared the only thing I was going to get out of Rondo was a sad story. I stole a glance at my watch. Should be able to make standby for the earlier flight. I was anxious to hear what Garrett and Morgan had unearthed, as well as PC and Boyd. Certainly someone had something.

  I shifted my weight and closed my notebook. “Anything else?”

  “About it.” He gave a light shrug of his shoulders. “He did mention something about a disc. She said she didn’t know what he was talking about. He got a little peeved at that. Said the sun disc was missing. We had an afternoon free, and they bused us to the beach. I didn’t know whether he was referring to a paddleboard, WaveRunner, or—”

  “What about the disc?”

  He nudged up his glasses. “I think she said she didn’t know what he was talking about, said she didn’t take it, but really? It was loud, you know? That’s really it.”

  “Did he accuse her of having the disc?”

  “I’m not—”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  He leaned back. “I don’t know. Hey.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Wish I did. It was like he was accusing her of something.”

  I stood, thanked him for his time, and gave him my card. He made me promise to keep him informed. I turned to leave when his voice came from behind me.

  “You never touched it.” He nodded to my beer.

  I shrugged. “Guess I didn’t.” It’s a game I play sometimes. Put the devil in front of me and walk away. You owned me once, but not now.

  “Mind?”

  “All yours.”

  “That bitch?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The bitch. Squealed on my—”

  “Right.”

  Joseph Vizcarrondo picked up my mug of beer and tossed the golden liquid out the second-floor window and onto the sidewalk below. He placed the mug back on the table with a thud.

  “She can rot in hell. That’s how I deal with it,” he said. “That’s who I am.”

  I strutted out the door.

  CHAPTER 18

  “I think Renée Lambert stole a SanDisk USB flash drive from Paretsky,” I announced to Garrett over the phone.

  I’d made the earlier flight and was into my second beer at an airport bar, squeezed between a woman in a navy pinstripe business suit who buried her head in a laptop and the Marlboro Man: long coat, boots, sequined shirt, handlebar moustache, Stetson on the counter, and a face that was a living testament to Wyoming winters and the long-term hazards of ignoring skin moisturizers. If my bar mates copulated, their offspring would ride horses and use Google maps.

  Garrett said, “Vizcarrondo tell you that?”

  “Not in so many words, nor can I be positive. He overheard talk about a disk and the sun. Lambert’s place was trashed this morning. Most—”

  “Easy thing to hide. Tough to find unless you squeeze a guy for hours, even days.”

  “The Guardian didn’t have the time to torture and search the house. I would have done what he did: shot the guy in the knee, let him get a taste of real pain, and spend as much time as possible searching for what I came for. Head shot on the way out the door.”

  Business lady gave me a cursory glance and then sank back into a pie chart. “We can look,” Garrett said, “but there’s no way of knowing whether the Guardian already located it.”

  “I’ll go with this: Lambert told me that he hadn’t seen his daughter in close to six months. I think he lied. His daughter was in town more recently than that. If Renée stole the disc, it had to be during the last two, three weeks, tops. Paretsky wouldn’t be pulling off those previous hits if he thought his information was compromised. I think she was in contact with her father and went underground after he was murdered.”

  Lights out for business lady. She packed up her toys and bolted. She landed about eight stools down, around the ninety-degree angle of the bar. Her perfume stayed behind, as if she now occupied two seats.

  “If she has a disc,” Garrett said, “and if that disc contains information on Paretsky’s group, bank accounts, and clients, then she’s more valuable than Paretsky.”

  “No wonder Paretsky and his buddy are on her trail. What did you find?”

  “Zilch.”

  “Prefaced with a ‘nearly’?”

  “No.”

  We disconnected. I hit Morgan’s number. It went to voice mail, and I left a message. If he was on I-4 on his Harley racing back from Winter Park, I wouldn’t get to him before I got home.

  PC was next. No boat rental business reported renting to a single man or having a boat stolen. No one in the neighborhood had reported a stolen boat. I hung up and picked over a salty mix of bar snacks, selecting sesame-seed sticks and peanuts. I tossed them in my mouth and followed them with a swig of beer.

  “What’s your story?” Cowboy asked.

  I gave him a glance. You could take a Weedwacker to his eyebrows, but his eyes were as blue and clear as any I’d ever seen.

  “Domestic dispute.”

  “Didn’t sound like that to me.” He leaned over and peeled back his coat with his left hand. He had a holster that bulged with a cannon-sized revolver that Lee would have forked over his family farm for at Gettysburg. And a badge. A big, brassy, badass badge.

  “Federal marshal,” he said. He removed his hand, and his coat closed like a stage curtain. If he blinked while looking at me, I missed it.

  “No kidding.”

  “No, sir.”

  I reached back into my wallet, extracted my card, and handed it to him.

  “Beach bum,” I said.

  “No kidding.”

  “No, sir.”

  I introduced myself, told him I’d served five years in special ops, and was a Florida PI. You never know when you’re going to need a federal marshal on your side. He handed me his card, but I didn’t read it.

  “Wayne.” He stuck out his hand. “John Wayne.”

  I tried not to smile but couldn’t help myself. “John Wayne?”

  “Yes, sir.” He tilted his head and curled up the left side of his lip. “Dad wanted John, and my mom wanted anything other than John.”

  “How’d he take that hill?”

  “Bought her a pink AMC Pacer. Made her heart spin.”

  “That’s painful, John. It was an ugly car the day it was born and a better world the second the production line was shut down.”

  “I know,” he replied, without a hint of a smile.

  “Listen, I have no idea when I might need a federal marshal from Wyoming, but if I do I’ll give you a call, and if I can ever be of assistance, don’t hesitate to dial me.”

  “Wyoming?”

  “Just a guess. What brings you here?”

  “My mother’s not well. Flew in to see her.”

  “Pretty long trip.”

  “Yes, sir.” He took a sip of water. “Pretty long trip from Wyoming.”

  I got up, took a few steps, and then spun around. “Your mother.” He raised his eyes to mine. “She going to be all right?” He certainly realized that although my question was directed at him, my body was already leaning away, but after Rondo’s beer toss, I felt—hell, I don’t know what I felt.

  He didn’t answer right away but seemed to be appraising me for the first time. “I believe she’s going to be. I thank you for asking.”

  I hustled to my gat
e and promptly saw that the plane was delayed by fifteen minutes. Morgan hadn’t gotten back to me. PC, Boyd, and Garrett all whiffed. And I? Maybe Renée Lambert took a USB flash drive from Paretsky. Other than that, the day was a bust. I glanced at John Wayne’s card before I stuck it in my wallet.

  Edward Jonathan Wayne

  United States Marshal, Northern District of Florida

  A Tallahassee prefix. Pretty long trip from Wyoming. John Wayne had had a little fun with me. I thought of the words the colonel had spoken at the end of my dock. God’s waiting room has some real cowboys up in Tallahassee.

  If only he knew.

  CHAPTER 19

  There was no sign of Garrett or Morgan when I entered my house. They had cleared out, and I saw why. Kathleen sat on the end of the dock. Leave it to a woman to scatter your buddies like a gas blower on dry fall leaves.

  I didn’t want to face her, mainly because I held delusions that everything was fine. Delusions and hopes are often my best friends. When they disappoint me, they’re easy to rekindle. I grabbed a bottle of red, two glasses and headed down the dock.

  Good thing I brought supplies, as she had nothing to drink. As our bare feet dangled over the edge, I poured two glasses. I didn’t know whether to be glib, serve up a humorous comment, or gush a sincere apology.

  I said, “I don’t know whether to be glib, serve up a humorous comment, or gush a sincere apology.”

  Her hair was pulled back so tight it looked as if it were threatening to secede from her forehead. She wore beige shorts and a red, sleeveless top that I didn’t remember seeing before. I ran my hand down the side of her neck. She turned, and the slightest of smiles formed.

  “I’m a major screw-up,” I jumped in. “My mistakes, I’m sure there’ll be more. You know I hold no malice or intention of hurt. To the contrary, my actions—perhaps driven by irrational thoughts—nonetheless, were construed to protect you—”

  “The man you were supposed to kill?” Thank heaven she interrupted me. My bumbling and rambling speech was nothing more than incoherent parts, like notes that didn’t make a melody.

  “Paretsky?” I took a sip of my wine. No idea where she was coming from. I lowered the glass halfway and brought it back up for a second offering.