“I wonder who they learned that from?” Riley said.
“And look at you…”
“Yeah, me,” Riley said quietly. “Spinster with a gun…”
“Spinster?” Salazar nearly spit up a fork full of romaine. “Are you crazy? Did you date that studly FBI agent Conrad Douglas yet?”
Riley looked wistful. “No, he came by my office the other day. He’s a nice guy. We had coffee and shot the breeze about some investigations. But I just can’t. Not yet.”
“You knocked his socks off.” Salazar reached across the table and squeezed Riley’s hand. “Time’s a wasting, Kath. You may not find another Kendall McDonald. But you’ll find another man just as choice in his own special way.”
“He was the one, Jo, since elementary school. I still expect to see him at the station, around the next corner, or on the elevator. I expect to hear his voice when the phone rings. It’s so hard to believe he’s really gone.”
“Probably that damn closed-casket funeral. They give no sense of closure, you don’t really get to say good-bye.”
Riley bit her lip.
“Sorry, Kath. I’m just saying you can’t stay off the market forever. Life goes on. Hey, here comes the pizza!”
“You’re sure they said to paint it red?” Burch squinted at the fire-enginered walls.
Connie nodded. “The Feng Shui consultant, the bagwa, said it’s the room best positioned for passion and love.”
“But it’s the goddamned laundry room.”
“I know.” She frowned. “Architects are not in tune with the elements. The bagwa used the Tibetan Divination system. I added crystals and live plants in the bedroom and rearranged the furniture, but unless we change rooms with Jennifer…”
“What’s Jennifer’s room got to do with it?”
“The bagwa said it has the highest sexual energy in the house.”
“Crap.”
He’d been worried about that. “Where are they?” he asked, looking around.
“Jenny went to a movie with Lindsey and Heather. Craig Jr. is at softball practice under the new lights at the park, and Annie is at a sleepover at her new best friend, Tara’s, house.”
“We have to start keeping better tabs on them.” He followed his wife into the kitchen. “They’re growing up too fast. Man, I hate summer. This is the most dangerous time of year for kids. Do we know Tara’s father? Is he a stepfather? Who is this guy?”
“I think you had a beer with him at the block party last year. Did you miss lunch?” she said. “Poor baby, are you hungry?”
He nodded.
She ladled her homemade mushroom gravy onto the meat loaf and popped his plate into the microwave.
“Summer,” he told her, “is when most teenagers have their first sexual experience. No school. Time on their hands. Slam-dancing hormones, and the next thing you know…”
“I think our kids are trustworthy,” Connie said.
“Were we?”
She hugged his neck as he sat at the table. “We turned out okay, didn’t we?”
The microwave beeped and she placed the steaming plate in front of him.
“That outfit Annie had on this morning, those little shorts and that top that shows her belly button. We can’t let her walk around looking like a prosti-tot. She’s only eleven.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you really think?” Connie smiled coyly from across the table. “Have you noticed that we’re home alone for a change?” She cocked her head, smile fading. “What are you working on? What kept you so late?”
“A case, Con, a cautionary tale of what can happen to little girls, even at home with the parents who should protect them, much less out among total strangers.
“They’re so smart,” he agonized, “with cell phones, computers, and electronics, so sophisticated that it’s scary—but they’re still little kids.” He buttered a roll, sopped up some thick gravy, and savored the taste. “Ahhh, this is great, Con.”
“I know something even better.”
He put his fork down as her bare foot caressed his thigh. He caught her instep and caressed her toes.
“I can’t help worrying about the kids,” he confessed, “especially after a day like today. Why do they call them the echo generation? I don’t remember anything like it in the past. No surprise that their pop star icon has the initials B.S. I want that poster out of Annie’s room.”
“Think inspirational thoughts about a happy, healthy, and fulfilling evening, sweetheart.”
“What’s this?” Shiny pistils and stamens bristled from planters in every corner of their bedroom.
“Remember?” she said. “I told you I rearranged some things. The kids helped.”
“But where’s—”
“Bedrooms should be kept free of clutter, so the chi can flow freely.”
“I don’t even want to know what that means. Why is the bathroom door shut? And why’d you move the bed?”
“If a doorway and the head of the bed share the same wall, it can make you restless and disturb your sleep. If there’s a door to the bathroom, it should be kept closed.”
“Nothing’s disturbed my sleep so far. But walking smack into the bathroom door in the middle of the night just might do it.”
“You’re still unenlightened, sweetheart.” She pulled her sunshine-yellow T-shirt off over her head. “From now on we are all about living in harmony with nature. You’ll see. Relax and feel the vitality. Would you rather try the utility room?”
“No way.” He watched her unbutton her shorts.
Jennifer returned home shortly before midnight and went straight to the refrigerator. Her dad joined her for Oreos and a glass of milk.
“How’s your summer been so far, sweetie?”
“Swell, Daddy,” she said.
“Good. Jen,” he said. “Tell me, what kind of things are you thinking about sex these days?”
“Euuuuw, Daddy!” She made a face and fled to her room.
CHAPTER 7
“What this place needs is more green plants.” Nazario eyed the few limp specimens in the homicide office. “The place would be healthier, less stressful.”
“Eu tu?” Burch said. “What the hell is this?”
“Green is good,” Corso agreed. “Your wife would agree, I’m sure. How’s Connie doing?”
“Baked her homemade meat loaf last night with the mushroom gravy. I swear, it’s better than sex.”
Stone grinned and shook his head. “Sarge, my grandmother makes grits into little hand-molded dumplings. The crackling brown coating on her Southern fried chicken is beyond belief. So are her biscuits and corn-bread, her sugar snap peas, her corn and scallions with butter, and her hush puppies with tomatoes and corn, but none of them are better than sex.”
“Yeah, showing your age, Sarge, or maybe your sex life needs a little boost,” Corso said.
“I’m about to give you a little boost, right out that window. ‘Better than sex’ is nothing but a goddamned figure of speech.” Burch frowned. Corso had been in the lieutenant’s office again, their heads together, when he arrived that morning. What the hell was it with those two?
“Ever tell you ’bout how I made Officer of the Month?” Corso was regaling Stone and Nazario with his war stories. “I made it twice. My ex-wife stole the plaques.
“See, right out of the academy you have to do a year in uniform, it’s mandatory—unless they need a fresh face in Narcotics. I did eighteen months in Narcotics. Drinking and buying dope every night. We worked undercover six P.M. to two A.M. What a life! They’d give us three hundred dollars, city money, and tell us to go hang out on the strip. The hotel owners loved us. They wanted us there. We’d drink in the hotel bars. We were supposed to nurse one drink all night, but the bartenders knew who we were and kept pouring us more.
“The security guard at the Holiday Inn was an old geezer, a retired Baltimore cop. ‘Pops,’ we told ’im, ‘anytime you need anything, call us. Anytime.’ We never should a said th
at, ’cause he called us every god-damned night. One night he says he can smell marijuana smoke in a couple’s room. Wants us to come kick down the door and arrest them. So we knock, then kick down the door. The toilet is flushing fast and furious.
“‘Where’s the marijuana?’ we ask. ‘There is no marijuana,’ this smart-ass punk says. All we find is residue in the toilet, that’s all. He keeps giving us lip. So we grab ’im and hang him over the eleventh-floor balcony by his heels. ‘See that pool down there?’ we tell ’im. ‘We’re gonna drop you in it. Maybe you’ll survive, if you don’t hit your head on the bottom.’
“He’s screaming bloody murder.
“We hear a call go out on the radio, a possible suicide, somebody threatening to jump off a balcony at the Holiday Inn. They’re dispatching uniforms. I jump on the radio. ‘We’re in the neighborhood,’ I say. ‘We’ll handle it.’”
“So,” Stone said. “What happened?”
“We handcuff the guy, Baker-Act ’im, and commit ’im to County for a three-day psych evaluation.
“The hotel manager writes the department a letter of commendation. I get called in, honored for pulling the guy off the balcony and saving his life. I made Officer of the Month.
“Loved that gig. But one night, we’re drinking and shooting at the statues in the garden at the Tahiti Motel and a new sergeant shows up. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he says. ‘Gimme your guns.’
“‘Wait a minute,’ we say, and keep shooting till they’re empty. ‘Okay,’ we say, ‘you can take ’em now.’
“He didn’t turn us in. But we were cocky. Got more aggressive and nasty. Kept throwing chairs through lobby windows. We would say it was part of our cover.” He shrugged.
“The inevitable finally happens. I land back in uniform, taking orders, all that nitpicking shit. They kept saying, ‘Write more tickets. Write more tickets.’ So I set up a roadblock right across the street from headquarters. Wrote thirty, forty tickets a day. Defective equipment, driving too slow, no blinkers, no inspection stickers, dirty license tags. Wrote one guy four tickets, one for each balding tire. Citizens’ groups start marching on the station, demanding to see the chief.”
Corso smiled fondly at the good memories.
“Enough,” Burch interrupted. “Now that our role model has inspired us to achieve greater heights in police work and public relations, let’s get down to it. We’re under the gun on Nolan.”
“The ME said they took DNA samples from the infants’ femurs,” Nazario said.
“Good, but I gotta say,” Burch said, “if it turns out to be what it looks like, I have little to no sympathy for the victim. Those girls were his own goddamn daughters.”
“I know how it looks, Sarge,” Nazario said. “But what I hear from Kiki and read in the old news accounts, and the original reports, the victim was straight arrow.”
“Aha,” Corso said. “Now it’s Kiki.”
Nazario ignored him.
“You got another explanation for what was in that house? Let’s hear it,” Burch said. “In this business, the most logical explanation is usually the right one. I’m not saying we don’t give it our best shot, but it won’t make my day to charge some female with shooting her rapist, or her daughter’s rapist, forty-plus years ago. So, before we step into that mess, let’s go through Stone’s case and see what we find.”
They settled into the conference room and passed around copies of the file.
Stone sat stoic, rereading reports already seared in his memory. He watched the others study the photos and the medical examiner’s report and wondered if they would reach the same stomach-churning conclusion he had.
Corso finally broke the silence. “I’m thinking that this wasn’t no robbery.”
“I agree,” Nazario said solemnly.
“Right,” Burch said. “The wounds make you think of one word—and it sure isn’t robbery.”
“Ejecutados,” Nazario said. Executions.
The others nodded.
“After they were hit and down, there were additional head shots,” Burch said.
“The coup de grâce,” Corso said. “Two different guns.” He cocked his head at Stone. “Wazup, dawg? What was your old man into? Making book on the side? Bolita? Doing a little loan-sharking? Was he into loan sharks? Prostitution? Did Pops have a rap sheet? What?”
“No.” Stone sat stony faced. “I’m not bullshitting you. He was a small businessman, an entrepreneur. He and my mother worked long hours, seven days a week, trying to build a business, a future.”
“Girlfriends? Boyfriends? Love triangle? Come on, dawg, hadda be something,” Corso went on.
Stone’s eyes flashed. “They were always at work or at home, together. Churchgoing people. They met young, up in Mississippi, on some freedom march or something. You know, a civil rights thing,” he said, recalling stories he’d heard as a child. “They were hardworking, God-fearing solid citizens.”
Burch planted his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Where do you want to start, Stone?”
“I’ve thought for years about the police officer who delivered the death message to our house that night. He said he was first at the scene, but it was too late, nothing could be done for them. Reports in the file confirm that he found them.
“That man is why I’m sitting here today. It was raining and dark. This cop knocks at the door. My grandmother lost it. She started screaming. I was a little kid. He picked me up. Held me. Said everything would be okay. I always remembered him. Big and strong, a kind man. A good guy, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I saw him again at the funeral. He smiled and gave me a little salute. He’s the one who made me want to be a police officer, to go to the academy someday. I couldn’t remember his name. After I graduated I expected to find him here. Looked for him every day my first six months on the job. I knew I’d recognize him when I saw him, even though it was twelve or thirteen years later. But I never did. He must’ve retired.
“Ray Glover, badge number seven thirty-eight, it says in the file. According to Personnel, he quit seven months after the murders. I think it makes sense to sit down with him first. See if he agreed with the original detectives who attributed the murders to a pair of armed robbers who were hitting small businesses back then. Were those stickup artists ever caught? If so, were they cleared in this case? Were they involved in any actual shootings? How many cases, if any, did they cop to?”
“I can do that,” Nazario said. “What’s your grandmother think?”
“She’s all hinky. Doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Bad walk down memory lane? Or does she know something she won’t say?” Burch asked.
“I’ll find out for sure.” Stone’s words rang with a certainty he didn’t feel.
“Do that. Try to find Glover today. Nazario will check out those old robbery cases. Me and Corso will work Nolan, talk to witnesses.”
“I was with Pierce Nolan the night he was killed.”
The detectives were seated in the living room of Richard Temple’s palatial Coral Gables home.
“It was at the Dupont Plaza Hotel,” Temple said. “A dinner meeting of the Fine Arts Association. Pierce was hell-bent on bringing more culture to Miamuh.” The retired bank president chuckled. “I’m sure his wife, Diana, had some influence there. Not that Pierce didn’t have a taste for the finer things in life himself. That was how the two of them met. He supported the Opera Guild, was eager to see Miamuh have its own ballet company, philharmonic, and symphony hall. He’d be pleased at the cultural climate we have heah today. Would have been achieved years sooner had that man not been cut down in his prime. After the meeting we retired to the hotel bar for a drink as usual. He always drank Scotch.”
“Anything controversial come up at the meeting?” Corso asked.
“Not at all.” Temple rested his hands on his cane. “We said good night, Pierce took off his jacket, threw it into the front seat of that big Buick he drove, and went off. Never saw him alive aga
in. An assassin waited. What a tragedy. Pierce had nowhere neah achieved his full potential. He had an uncommon knack for bringing people together, could have gone on to accomplish anything. His killin’ turned this town on its ear, a terrible loss to the community. The man was a local hero.”
“Yeah,” Burch said. “Heard he had quite a reputation.”
“How many drinks did you two have in the bar?” Corso asked.
“One, as was our custom. Mainly an excuse to talk. I’m not even sure Pierce finished his.”
“Any arguments in the bar?”
“No.” He waved away the question, dismissing it with a clawlike arthritic hand. “The original investigators asked the same things, covered it all pretty thoroughly. I spoke with them often, trying to assist. Apparently I was the last known person to see him alive. A large reward was offered but it brought in no useful information.”
“Was he the sort of man who would argue with another driver in traffic?”
Temple frowned at Corso. “You have to remembuh that the term road rage didn’t exist in that Miamuh. Back then, we had no rush hour, no traffic to speak of. You could drive anywhere in Dade County, from one end to the other, in twenty minutes. It was a different Miamuh and Pierce Nolan was a gentleman.”
“You mentioned the wife, Diana. Any trouble in the marriage?” Burch asked.
“Oh no, not at all. I’m sure Diana felt stifled down heah from time to time, but the loving relationship they shared more than compensated, I’m sure. She was raised in New York and Paris, a beautiful woman, educated at the Sorbonne, a vibrant socialite, debutante of the year when she came out. She was well traveled, played the harp, spoke several languages. She and Pierce met during one of his New York trips. She was one of the most sought-after young women in New York. He was a handsome, dashing fellow, an athlete and a war hero, interested in bringing the latest plays, dance troupes, and fine arts to Miamuh. I understand it was love at first sight. But he was wedded to Miamuh, his roots were heah. In those days, for a woman like her, this was a cultural wasteland. Not even a place heah to find the designer clothes she was accustomed to wearing. She and the girls, when they were old enough, took shopping trips to New York and Paris several times a year.”
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