“Can I talk to you?” I said, walking toward him.
“Stay where you are!”
I stopped a few feet away. Slowly I lowered myself into a crouch. We were at eye level, but in the shadows beneath the table, his face was barely visible.
“Your friend says you sold a diamond ring this weekend.”
“She’s not my friend.”
No disavowal of the sale. “Can you tell me where you got the ring?”
“Can you go fuck yourself?”
Jerko was indeed a jerk. “Look, pal. I’m not a cop. I’m not here to make trouble for you. I just need some information.”
He didn’t answer, and I still couldn’t read his face. He was shrouded in total darkness beneath the table, the trees overhead.
“Just tell me how you got the ring,” I said. “I’ll pay you for your help.”
“How much?”
I was running out of cash. “Twenty bucks.”
“A hundred.”
“I don’t have that much on me.” I wasn’t lying.
“I’ll take your phone.”
“I can’t give you my phone.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
Patience, I told myself, but the anger was working its way up from somewhere deep inside, unstoppable. “Tell me where you got the ring,” I said. It was a voice so threatening that I barely recognized it as my own. It was fair warning to him, even if he couldn’t see the anger in my eyes.
“Hand over your phone,” he said.
“I don’t have one.”
“Everybody has one.”
I opened my wallet, dug out all my cash. “I’ll give you sixty dollars.”
“And your phone.”
On another night, I might have played his game, or at least called for a squad car and done this by the book. But my wife was missing, and after Tyla’s murder, J.T.’s house arrest, and a mountain of aggravation from Agent Santos, something snapped. I lunged at him, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him from under the table. He was much smaller than me, and in no time I had him facedown, under control. I was sitting on his kidneys, my hand at the base of his skull, pushing his forehead into the ground.
“Don’t hurt me!” he said, pleading.
I grabbed his greasy hair and jerked his head back. “You want my phone?” I said in a harsh voice. “Here’s my phone. Look, you son of a bitch. Look at this picture!”
I held his head still, the phone in my free hand. Angelina’s head shot was right before his eyes. “Look at her! What do you know about this woman?”
It was a demand, not a question. He didn’t answer. I shoved his face into the ground, then yanked his head back far enough to see Angelina’s photo again. “What do you know?” I shouted.
“That’s her,” he said.
“That’s who?”
“That’s the woman who asked me to pawn the ring.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying! She said if I went inside the pawnshop and sold the ring for her, I could keep fifty bucks.”
“That’s a damn lie.”
“It’s the truth.”
His body was shaking beneath my weight. I tightened my grip on his hair. “Don’t you dare lie to me!”
His body was no longer shaking. These were seismic undulations, the difference between 5.0 and 7.0 on the Richter scale. He was crying uncontrollably.
“I’m not lying! It was her. That’s the lady!”
I felt my grip loosen and his hair slip through my fingers. His chin dropped, and he was crying into the dirt. I climbed to my feet and stood over him, not knowing what to think.
“If I find out you hurt that woman in the picture, I will—”
“I never touched her! I just sold a stupid ring.”
I wanted to call him a liar, a bald-faced liar, but my head was spinning, and the accusation wouldn’t come. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet.
“What are you doing, man?”
I kept a tight hold on his shirt, forcing him to walk with me. He was half jogging to keep up as we crossed the vacant lot to the hole in the fence. He was too scared, too tired, and too much of a wimp to resist.
“Where you taking me?”
I didn’t answer, but we were less than two blocks from Pawn 24. I’d seen Manny through the window earlier, so I knew he was working the early a.m. shift. It took less than a minute to get there, even while dragging Jerko along with me. I rang the bell outside the entrance. Manny came to the door, but I didn’t wait for him to unlock it. I shoved Jerko’s face against the glass, and with the other hand I showed my badge. Manny seemed startled for a moment, but he recognized me from that morning.
“Is this the guy?” I shouted. “Is this who sold you the ring?”
Manny studied the man’s face through the glass. Only a few seconds were needed. Then he nodded.
“I’ll give the money back to you,” said Jerko. “Just don’t hurt me, okay?”
I pulled him away from the door and forced him to sit on the sidewalk.
“Don’t you move an inch,” I said, dialing Rid’s number. “We’re gonna find out what the hell is going on.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Jerko sobbed and cried, begging me to let him go, right up until the Miami-Dade police arrived and put him in the back of the squad car. I followed in my car to the station. Rid met us there, but he immediately took me out of the loop. I found a bench in the hallway and waited outside the interrogation room while Rid and another detective did their teamwork. Just before 1:00 a.m., the door opened, and Rid came to me.
“Jerko has no idea what happened to Angelina,” he said.
It was hard to know if that was good or bad news. “Are you sure?”
“There are older detectives here, Abe. But I’ve been doing this a while. Long enough to know. But don’t get me wrong. This guy is a piece of shit.”
“Tell me.”
“He’s a registered sex offender in the state of New York. That was his last known address.”
“What was his offense?”
“Multiple acts of sexual misconduct. Apparently he’s a huge fan of high-school girls’ soccer. So long as he can stand on the other side of the fence and jerk off.”
Finally a definitive explanation for the name Jerko. It hardly put me at ease. “But if he’s a sex offender, doesn’t that make him even more of a suspect?”
“Abe, here’s the situation. Your wife, and Samantha’s ring, went missing, but there’s no sign of any break-in at your house. One possibility is that the perp was someone she knew, and Angelina let him in.”
“Or he lived there,” I said. “Agent Santos’ theory.”
“Right,” said Rid. “Or he was a stranger and had a key. That’s why we’ve been checking every conceivable place Angelina may have valeted her car for the last month, to see if anyone copied her house key. Jerko doesn’t exactly fit the profile of someone who could get his hands on a key to your house, much less someone who’d manage to find Samantha’s ring and make your wife vanish, all without leaving a shred of evidence.”
“Then how did Jerko get the ring?”
“I don’t know.”
“He said he got it from Angelina.”
“That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it,” said Rid. “He’s obviously lying, covering for a friend, or afraid to name names.”
“Is it really obvious that it’s a lie?”
“It is to me.”
I walked to the bench, tried to sit, but my mind was racing. I went right back at Rid. “Isn’t it possible that he got the ring from Angelina?”
He sighed, exasperated. “Abe, I just walked you through the likely scenarios: someone she knew or a stranger who had a key.”
“What about the unlikely scenarios?” I paused, careful to deliver this properly. “What if she just left?”
“Just took off? Middle of the night. Poof. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Why in the hell would she do that?”
“To teach me a lesson.”
Rid scoffed. “Abe, you need some sleep.”
“I’m serious, Rid. Hear me out. It’s always bugged Angelina the way I hung on to Samantha’s memory. Suddenly she disappears, and the only thing missing from the house is Samantha’s jewelry, including her engagement ring, which is hocked at a Little Havana pawnshop for a fraction of its value. Isn’t that sending a message: ‘Get this worthless thing out of our house’?”
“Abe, it’s been a long week. You’re really tired.”
“And to top it off, Angelina’s ring was left sitting right on the dresser. What thief would climb all the way up to the top shelf in the closet for Samantha’s rings but leave the low-hanging fruit right on the dresser?”
“It’s odd, okay, I give you that. But there has to be a better explanation than Angelina trying to teach you a lesson.”
“Not one I can think of, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. She even said it herself one time—that I’d miss her when she was gone. That’s when I’d appreciate her.”
A couple officers walked by us in the hall. Rid waited for them to pass, then shook his head at me. “Abe, drop this. You’re hoping your wife is alive and safe. That’s natural. And the thought that Angelina up and left you is a lot better scenario than some of the other possibilities that must be going through your mind. But don’t go sharing this theory with anyone but me.”
“Why are you so closed-minded?”
“Because if you weren’t shell-shocked and sleep-deprived, I’d say it’s the most egotistical thing any man has ever said.”
“What are you talking about?”
“First off, it’s fucking crazy to say your wife went missing just to make you appreciate her more. I know Angelina has a temper, and she even popped you in the nose when you left her for Samantha, but unless there’s some really abusive shit going on between you two—”
“There’s not,” I said.
“Fine, there’s not. But for argument’s sake, let’s say Angelina is the nuttiest fruitcake on the block and has a mile-long mean streak. You saw Angelina’s parents on TV tonight. I know you saw her mother practically falling apart in front of the camera. The idea that Angelina would do this to her own mother and father just to teach you a lesson is—Abe, it’s . . .”
I could have waited for him to finish his thought, but it wasn’t necessary. “Unthinkable?” I offered.
“That would be my word for it,” said Rid.
Mine, too. Maybe I did need sleep. “Okay. That’s valid. But the fact remains that Jerko ended up with the ring. I showed him the picture of Angelina on my phone. He admitted that he got it from her. He told you the same thing.”
“Yeah, he did. But—”
“But what?”
He took me by the arm, pulling me toward the interrogation room. “Come inside with me.”
“What for?”
“You want to know why it’s bullshit that Jerko got the ring straight from your wife? I’ll show you.”
He opened the door, and I followed him inside. Jerko was seated across the table from another Miami-Dade detective. He recoiled at the sight of me, the memory of our earlier “discussion” still fresh. I stood in the corner by the door. Rid crossed the room and leaned on the table, staring Jerko down. There was a manila file on the tabletop. Rid opened it. I couldn’t see what was inside, and until he put his question to Jerko, I didn’t know it was a photograph.
“Is this the woman who asked you to pawn the ring?” asked Rid.
Jerko nodded quickly, nervously. “Yeah, that’s her. That’s the woman.”
Rid tucked the photograph into the file and brought it with him as he led me back into the hallway, the door closing behind us. Then he showed me the photograph.
I blinked, confused. “That looks like Charlize Theron.”
“It is Charlize Theron. Jerko said the same thing when we showed him Reese Witherspoon fifteen minutes ago. And Kirsten Dunst ten minutes before that. They’re all beautiful blond women, just like your wife in the picture you showed him, and they all asked him to pawn the ring.”
Whatever remained inside of me quickly drained away—all the excitement of a solid lead, all the hope of a break in the investigation. “But clearly he got the ring from somebody.”
“From somebody. But not from Angelina. Not if you ask me.”
I checked the clock on the wall. Almost 2:00 a.m. “It’s late,” I said.
“Get some sleep,” said Rid. “You have a polygraph exam in seven hours.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Yeah. Maybe this time I should study.”
Chapter Fifty
I slept for three hours, but no more. I could have stayed in bed and stared at J.T.’s ceiling for the next two hours. Instead, I got up, showered, and drove to Sunny Garden Nursing Home.
Luther was an early riser, and each passing year pushed back the hands on his internal alarm clock. Six a.m., no problem. Hell, it was practically his lunchtime. When I walked into his room, he was sitting in a chair by the window, wide awake and dressed, his flannel shirt buttoned all the way up to his Adam’s apple. Even better, he was himself.
“Well, shut my mouth, it’s Mr. Lincoln.”
“Don’t get up,” I said.
“Don’t worry.”
I smiled as if there were nothing wrong, and in Luther’s mind, there wasn’t. I hadn’t said a word to him about Angelina, and he was the antithesis of a news junkie. If it wasn’t on ESPN, it didn’t exist.
I pulled up another chair. “How are you, old man?”
“Old. That ’bout covers it.”
It just about did. Half of the time he couldn’t remember that I had remarried, so even under the best of circumstances, any mention of Angelina was confusing to him. A conversation about her disappearance would surely have gone off the rails. After Samantha died, I’d wondered how long it might be till the next funeral, thinking it would be Luther’s. I sure as hell didn’t think it would be for my second wife.
There was a noise in the hallway, right outside the open door to Luther’s room. I craned my neck for a glimpse and saw the paramedics wheeling a gurney out of the room across the hall. A white sheet covered the body. I went to close the door, but Luther stopped me.
“We lose someone?” he asked.
“Looks that way. Across the hall.”
“Oh, that’s Barbara. Sad, sad, sad. Not her time.”
“How old was she?”
“Ninety-four.”
I looked away, then back. “No offense, Luther, but she was ninety-four years old. Not her time?”
“I know what you think. She’s old. She’s ready. But she wasn’t. Ready, I mean.”
“Did she want to make it to a hundred?”
“No, no. Barbara wished herself to death fifty years ago.”
“She did what?”
He leaned forward and looked me in the eye, even if he did have that one eye that kind of pointed off in another direction. “Pay attention, boy. There’s a difference between wantin’ to die and bein’ ready to die.”
I thought about it, and decided he was making sense. “Why wasn’t she ready?”
“Same reason she wished she was dead. Broken heart.”
“How did her heart get broken?”
He sat back, arms folded. “I ain’t got a clue.”
“Then how do you know she had one?”
“I’m as old as Noah. I know a broken heart when I see it. Yes, sir. That heart stopped beatin’ last night. But Barbara died a long, long time ago.”
“That’s sad.”
“Nothin’ sadder.” Again he leaned closer, this time raising a finger to make his point. “You know what I always say, don’t you, Abe?”
I nodded. “Ain’t no shame in dyin’.”
And then Luther finished it: “But it’s a cryin’ shame to die of a broken heart.”
I coul
d have slipped away right then, let my mind drift back to the first time I’d heard Luther tell me about broken hearts. But I refused to go there.
Luther pointed at the pitcher on the tray. “Pour me some water there, would you?”
“Sure.”
I got up and filled his cup. The sound and sight of it made me think of the tab he’d run up at the National Sugar Corporation, as recorded on seventy-year-old task sheets and pay stubs I’d seen earlier at the warehouse. The company had charged him for water that wasn’t too dirty to drink, part of the nineteen dollars he owed at the end of the first week of cutting cane.
I handed him his cup and returned to my chair. “Luther, have we ever talked about your days of cutting sugarcane?”
He steadied his cup and sipped from it. “Probably not.”
“You mind if I ask about it?”
“What you wanna know?”
“I found a box that Samantha kept. It had some old things in it from when you cut cane.”
His eyes brightened a bit, not from the memory of the cane fields, but from my mention of his daughter’s name.
“Samantha said that stuff belonged in a museum. I guess she never got anyone interested in havin’ it.”
“I guess not. It’s all still there,” I said, pausing just a second before getting to the real point. “All except the machete.”
“My cuttin’ knife not there?”
“No. Everything else. But not the knife.”
“Damn, I paid a buck-fifty for that knife. Another fifty cent for the file.”
It made me think of J.T.’s remark: He paid for it, he was gonna keep it.
“Luther, I want you to think very hard. When is the last time you saw that knife?”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
“Was it after you cut cane for National Sugar? I just want to know if you’re sure you brought it home from the camp.”
“Oh, I’m sure. If there was anything worth keepin’, it was the knife.”
“Okay, that’s helpful. Now think about this before you answer: Did you keep the knife with all the other things from your cane-cutting days?”
“I ain’t seen that stuff in years, Abe.”
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