A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  “I do not know,” he said to the doctor.

  “Eddie, there’s a problem,” Marshack said, patting the big man’s hand again. But the hand stayed.

  “What? I did my job. I need my money,” Eddie said. “I did what we said. I need what’s mine.”

  The psychiatrist was quiet, thinking over the possibilities that might be running through his former patient’s head.

  “The woman’s not dead, Eddie. She’s still here. The old man’s gone but Ms. Thompson is still alive. The police came, Eddie. She isn’t dead.”

  Eddies first reaction was to think “liar.” They always lied to him. But his second reaction was to replay the night in his head. The pillow on Ms. Thompson’s face. The old man coming out of the bathroom. Eddie’s hand on his throat, feeling the bones fold. He’d made sure, damn sure, that the old guy was gone and then laid him out on the bed. Ms. Thompson did not move. She was gone, too. He was trying to see it in his head. No one could lay that still, that quiet, specially the old ladies.

  He could feel the doctor’s eyes on him.

  “I do not know,” he finally said. “But I need my money, Mr. Harold.”

  The doctor could feel the pressure on his arm. The big man’s grip tightening with tension.

  “OK, Eddie, sure. It was a mistake. We’re still friends, right?” He worked his free hand into his jacket pocket and came out with his wallet. He opened the fold and riffled the bills inside with his thumb. In the dim light Eddie could see the corners of twenties flashing.

  “Hundreds,” Eddie said, his tone gone flat. “I got to have hundreds.”

  The big man’s hand tightened again when he said it. His blunt fingertips had found the artery running under Marshack’s biceps. They cut off the flow of blood, and the doctor was losing feeling down in his hand.

  “Sure, Eddie. Sure. What was I thinking? In the glove box, the envelope, like always.”

  Marshack tried to move his arm, to reach for the passenger side. Eddie let his grip loose and the doctor reached over and twisted the lock.

  24

  I found Richards’s house, rolled slowly past and pulled a U-turn at the intersection and parked across the street. It was a quiet neighborhood of small bungalow-style homes built back in the ’40s in what was then a small southern town growing up at the mouth of a river to the ocean. The older houses were mostly wood clapboard with enclosed screen porches and they all sat up on short pilings to get them up off the moist ground. I could smell the oleander in the air and could make out the shapes of live oak canopies backlit by moonlight.

  It was almost eleven. I’d been here before. I’d convinced her I was a restaurant idiot and taken her to dinner, her choice. We’d gone to movies she suggested. There was the one with the kid who sees ghosts. The ending had made her quiet afterward. Finally, while we were sitting in a coffee shop afterward, she asked if I believed in such things. “Everybody’s got ghosts,” I’d said. Brilliant, Freeman. When I’d dropped her off her good-bye caught in her throat.

  A few weeks after I’d been late making it in from the river and we’d missed the start of a show she had tickets for. But she didn’t seem to mind and we ended up sitting here on the back porch, talking about the past. The cop stuff was inevitable, but she avoided the subject of her husband and I stayed away from my family. Part of the wall was mine. Part was hers.

  I rapped lightly on the screen door and waited. Nothing. I knocked a bit harder but it sounded like a hammer in the quiet. Through a window I could see soft light in a back room, so I stepped off the porch and found the wooden gate to the yard. I flipped the metal latch to make some noise and followed a path of flagstones. I could see the glow of aqua light before rounding the corner, and then her silhouette against the light of the pool. She was running an aluminum pole with a net on the end over the surface and was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.

  “A little late for maintenance,” I said.

  My voice made her jump, but only a little.

  “I thought you’d stood me up, Freeman,” she said, turning her head but keeping a grip on the pole. “Figured why waste a good wine buzz.”

  She made a final pass with the net, capturing a few more leaves that had dropped from the oak that dominated the yard, and then laid the pole aside.

  “You’re ahead of me,” I said.

  “I only offered coffee, Freeman. But I’ll let you indulge.”

  She stepped up onto the wide, wood-planked porch and headed toward a set of French doors. When I started to follow she turned quickly and said, “I’ll bring it out.” I had still never been inside her house.

  Her yard was thick with tropical plants, broad-leafed banana palms and white birds-of-paradise. The pool reflected up into some Spanish moss hanging from the closest oak limbs. Few of the plantings were native, but the effect was a soft, green, isolated place. The porch included a huge woven hammock stretched across one end.

  In a few minutes she came out with a bottle and two wineglasses.

  “Hey, it’s not your wilderness,” she said, reading my appreciation. “But it isn’t bad for the city.”

  She filled the glasses and sat down on the top step, stretching her legs and putting the bottle next to her.

  “Diaz doesn’t think much of your theory, but he likes you,” she said.

  “Is that good?” I said, sitting down.

  “Sure. It means he won’t bring your name up to Hammonds for a while.” She was looking into the pool.

  “Hammonds approved the stepped-up patrol in the zone?”

  “Yeah. But I’m not sure if he was shamed into it or if it was politics. The black city commissioner has been rattling the cages, and the newspapers are finally starting to run stories about ‘A pattern of unsolved rapes and homicides in the minority community,’ ” she said with a pretty credible television news anchor’s voice.

  “I don’t read the papers,” I said.

  “What? No delivery on the river?”

  She was smiling and the space inside the circle it always created felt comfortable. I took another swallow of wine and leaned back, propped myself on my elbows and looked up through the oak. Night-blooming jasmine was on the air, mixed with a slightly sharp odor of chlorine.

  “How’s the leg wound?” she said, and I felt her hand on my thigh where a killer’s bullet had caught me on a ricochet. She had been there when they found me bleeding in my shack.

  “It’ll hold up,” I said, reaching up to curl a loose strand of her hair and letting the backs of my fingers brush her cheek.

  She tilted her head into my hand and then leaned down and kissed me, the scent of wine and perfume spilling into my mouth and my breath catching in my chest.

  The aqua glow caught just the edges of her hair and lit them. But her eyes were in shadow and I couldn’t see their color.

  25

  An electronic warble pulled me out of a half sleep and Richards was up and out of the hammock before my eyes could clear. I just caught a slip of fabric and a flash of blonde hair going through the French doors as I lay there swinging, back and forth, with the force of her leaving.

  It was still dark but there was a hint of dawn in the east. I could hear her voice, low and curt. Paged, I thought. A cop who is always on.

  A light went on somewhere inside and a couple of minutes later she came out on the deck in a robe. Her hair was brushed and her eyelashes were wet from splashing water onto her face.

  “They’re calling detectives in on an overnight homicide,” she said. “Some shrink who works in the jail was found with his throat cut.”

  Behind my eyes the dry sponge of a wine hangover was dulling both my eyesight and my brain synapses.

  “He worked for you guys?”

  “Not officially. We run the jail but the medical staff is contracted through a private company. But it doesn’t look good having even a subcontractor get hit in your own jurisdiction.”

  I could see her head spinning the scene already. Motive and
opportunity.

  “Shit. We’ll be chasing patients the guy’s seen for years who are out on the street. They’re going to want this one quick.”

  She came closer and put her hands on my shoulders and bent to kiss me. I was about to say something witty about duty calling when she twisted away.

  “I gotta go. Call me,” she said, moving to the doors and closing them behind her.

  I spent the rest of the morning at Billy’s. When I came through the lobby, Murray gave me a few more seconds of eye contact than usual and I thought I could see a slight grin playing at his mouth. I know it’s just locker-room humor that people can tell, but how the hell would he know where I’d spent the night?

  Billy had long since gone to his office and the apartment was immaculate. He had left a note on top of two large manila envelopes:

  Max. This is the Thompson file, including a full dossier and confirmation that she did indeed have a viatical policy through a company other than McCane’s and sold it to the same investment group as the others.

  The other file is a full dossier on Dr. Harold Marshack, our possible middleman.

  Let me know when you get in.

  I showered and changed and started a pot of coffee. While I waited I started leafing through the Thompson file. The woman had purchased an inordinately large life insurance policy in 1954 and had been paying loyally for decades. She obviously liked the idea of tucking such death insurance away that in the late ’70s, she bought yet another policy that gave her nearly $100,000 in coverage. But four years ago she sold both to the investment group for $40,000. They had required a medical exam, but when they found she had been diagnosed with cancer and had refused surgery, they didn’t hesitate.

  Different figures, but pretty much the same pattern as the others. I poured myself a cup of coffee and took the other file to the patio. Out on the ocean there were a dozen fishing boats strung out past what I knew was the third reef line. The water was flat and a huge freighter was southbound on the horizon, the visibility so clear I could see the lump of a wave being pushed by the prow of the big vessel. I sat in one of the patio chairs and opened the file on Marshack.

  The doctor, who was fifty-two, had taken his degree from a small college in Louisville. The résumé listed internships and hospital privileges in both Kentucky and Tennessee. A few years were then unaccounted for, but a license and three different business addresses in North Carolina made me think he must have been struggling to find a steady practice.

  It was all pretty undistinguished stuff until I got to the address listing in Moultrie, Georgia. The work address was for the State Penitentiary. His title there had been head of prison psychiatric services. He had worked there for four years. There was another lapse in time before his next official work record for Health and Prison Services of Florida. His current address was in Golden Beaches, just as McCane had said.

  What McCane had not said—except to a bartender he was probably trying to hit on at Kim’s—was whether he had ever been in Moultrie. I put the file down and stared out at the sun flashes on the small shore break. Coincidence that McCane had worked in the same Georgia prison as the middleman who might be killing Billy’s women? Was the old cop chasing down a lead he wasn’t filling me in on? How well did these guys know each other?

  I was getting more coffee when my cell rang.

  “Billy?” I answered.

  “Richards,” she said, her voice professional and with an edge.

  “Hey. What’s up? They call you off the homicide?”

  “Freeman. Didn’t you tell me at Lester’s that your partner the insurance investigator was trailing some middleman?

  “Yeah, he was doing surveillance on the guy’s place and trailed him to the liquor store.”

  “Said his name was Marshack?

  “Yeah. A psychiatrist named…”

  “Dr. Harold Marshack,” she finished my sentence. “Max, you better get down here.”

  I called Billy and filled him in on the homicide of Dr. Marshack, McCane’s middleman and the county jail psychiatrist. Billy jumped ahead of me.

  “And the Moultrie prison psychiatrist. You’re thinking they knew each other?”

  “Let’s get the paperwork before I call McCane,” I said, getting up to leave. “Call me.”

  When I found the address along A1A in Golden Beaches, I again pulled into a lot filled with squad cars and a couple of unmarked units parked alongside. A team of crime scene guys was going over an old-model Caprice in a spot nearby.

  As I got out I could see Richards and Diaz, standing next to their boss. Hammonds cut his eyes toward me and then turned back to say something to his detectives before walking away. Richards met me halfway across the lot.

  “We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” she said, but the joke had lost some of its humor. “The boss man is hot again.”

  I nodded, tried to catch the color in her eyes, but gave up when Diaz joined us.

  “Hey amigo. Told you we would meet again,” he said, the smile undiminished. “You want to tell us again how your private investigation somehow involves the stiff we got upstairs who works for us?”

  “Good to see you too, Vince,” I said, before running through the case again, only leaving out the Moultrie connection. No use throwing that in the mix until Billy had it nailed down.

  “So what’d you tell Hammonds?” I asked when I was through.

  “Told him everything we’ve got,” Richards said. “The five naturals. The theory on the insurance scam. Marshack’s name coming up as a possible middleman in the deal.”

  “And?”

  She said nothing.

  “And she got her ass chewed for not puttin’ all that in the report on the killing at the Thompson house,” Diaz said.

  I looked again at Richards, who was shaking her head like it was no big deal.

  “What’s passed is passed,” she finally said. “You’re in, Max. Let’s go upstairs and take a look.”

  “Come on, let’s take a look,” said Diaz, when I didn’t move. “Enlighten us once again, Mr. Philadelphia.”

  I started to follow them to the entrance door of Marshack’s building when Hammonds called out my name. He didn’t move. I had to go to him.

  He was a thin man, in his late fifties, and he carried the kind of attitude in statement and action that came from years of giving orders. He was in a suit, the knot of his tie cinched up tight against his throat. Our previous encounters had not been genial. He had resented what he considered my interference in his domain.

  “Mr. Freeman,” he said when I got close. “Bad things seem to happen around you.”

  No question was asked, so I didn’t feel an obligation to respond.

  It was an uncomfortable standoff that he finally broke. “If you plan to keep showing yourself around the county, I suggest you at least get a P.I.’s license.”

  Again, since a question had not been asked, I only nodded my head.

  “Go take a look,” Hammonds said. “And I’d rather not have you holding back on us this time.”

  I rejoined Diaz and Richards and shrugged. All three of us turned and continued to the front entrance.

  Marshack’s two-bedroom condo had been tossed. Badly. Books off the shelves. Cushions and mattress flipped. Drawers emptied and blood on the kitchen floor.

  “They come up with a murder weapon?” I asked.

  “Sharp end of a broken bottle,” Richards said. “Hennessy Cognac.”

  We traded looks. I thought of McCane’s suggestion of getting a warrant and searching the place. When Richards had given me the name I’d paged the insurance investigator to ask if he’d been on surveillance or just drinking last night. He hadn’t called me back.

  The desk against one wall of the living room had been pried open. The computer monitor was flipped on its side and the keyboard shoved aside. The hard drive was gone.

  “Some old lady down the hall called nine-one-one when she heard a ruckus but she stayed behind her own lo
cked door until the first uniform guys got here. Didn’t see a thing,” Diaz said.

  “Print guys got a lot of latents but could all be the doc’s. No jewelry that we could find, and the guys wallet and wrist watch were missing.”

  “The outside doors are buzzed open after ten and the condo door wasn’t jimmied or forced,” Richards added. “Makes it look like he let the killer in, put up a fight, might have even broken the bottle of booze himself for protection but got it taken away and jammed in his own neck.”

  It was the first impression, but I wasn’t going for it.

  “Then the guy goes through the drawers, the files, the closets and runs out the door with what?” I said. “The wallet, okay. The jewelry, sure. But the hard drive?”

  Diaz shook his head.

  “How you gonna figure some psycho from the cuckoo’s nest if he comes to pay back the doc for puttin’ him up in Chattahoochee for a few good years of his sexual prime?” Diaz said and Richards rolled her eyes.

  “And what, Vince? He goes through the files and takes the hard drive to get his name off the nut farm list?”

  “Like I said,” shrugged Diaz. “Cuckoo’s nest.”

  A burglary gone bad, or a bad job of making it look like a burglary, I thought. There wasn’t much to look at.

  Richards put the crime scene tape back over the door when we left. In the elevators she said the M.E. was giving a preliminary time of death of 4:00 A.M., which matched up with the 911 call.

  When we got outside, Hammonds was still talking with the crime scene supervisor, going over the Caprice. When Richards shook her head he never blinked, just went on.

  “The trunk lid was popped with a ball peen hammer, just punched it through,” Hammonds said to all three of us when we walked up. “But it looks like he missed the false bottom in the glove box.”

  He held up a plastic evidence bag that held a white, printed bank envelope.