by Robert Lane
“You can’t have four dead bodies in the sand in a beach town.”
“I never said they were on the beach,” Dangelo said.
“I read the papers.” I passed the front door and with my right hand turned the deadbolt. I kept circling. The distance between us shrank. Time and distance.
“They were good men. One of them was our best. They must have encountered someone who was highly trained, a professional, and not acting alone either.”
We paused. I wasn’t going to lead. At that point, I could do more harm than good—and already had. “There was a lady involved.” Dangelo said it cautiously and in a different tone, as if we had entered the demonic final movement of a musical score. My neck stiffened. My hand tightened into a fist. “Tragically she died on that beach.” His eyes rested on mine. A car honked. “Did you read that as well? In the papers?”
“I seem to recall something about that.”
“We…how shall I put this? We possibly overreacted. We thought at one time that the deceased lady might have knowledge of certain nonpublic aspects of our business. In retrospect, she probably had no knowledge at all. Our judgment was rash, but not nearly as bombastic as our adversary’s.”
Dangelo waited, but I remained silent, until the silence was self-incriminating. I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“After your sophomoric theatrics at the Winking Lizard, I had you followed. The car you were driving—”
I was on him in two steps and slammed him into the wall. His head snapped back with a thud then bounced forward so his forehead struck mine. A half-eaten cashew flew out and landed on my shirt. I choked his throat with my right hand. His neck was fat. I wanted to rip off a chunk and stuff it in his mouth. The door behind me rattled.
“What about the car?”
Dangelo took a second to get his breath. He smelled like cashews. The last time I smelled him, it was Swiss cheese and ham. “It’s double-parked, Mr. Travis.” His voice was tight. I loosened my grip. “Find my money, and you were never here tonight. This conversation never took place.”
I dug my fingers into his neck. “What about the car?”
“N-nothing.” I eased up even more on the pressure. “We thought—that is, my associate thought—he might have recognized it from the around the neighborhood.”
“Are you threatening me?” I was ticked that I’d been followed. I should have been more alert. Too bad for Dangelo. I swung him around and pressed his face against the window. “Because I’ll drop you through this window right now. Do you understand that?” His eyes widened in the reflection of the glass. I leaned into his ear and repeated what he’d told me at the deli. “Look elsewhere, Joe. The beach scene wasn’t me.” I gave the lie my best conviction. I like lies. Judiciously applied, they can help your cause more than a standing army. “And,” I continued, “here’s the new plan: find your own goddamned money.” I gave him a shove and stepped back.
“Certainly,” he started and then paused to catch his breath, although he tried not to show it. “Certainly you understand that if we had our money, we would be inclined to fully—no, permanently—support any decision made for the benefit of tourism. Whether or not, or not, you…um—”
“Save it. I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not making any deal with you.”
“We say such things in times of—”
“The man you had lunch with the other day—he give you the script tonight?”
“No.” He regained his posture far faster than I’d thought he would. Dangelo might have been all dressed up, but he clearly had spent some of his youth on the street. “I’m not the puppet you seem to think I am, and spying on me certainly won’t advance your cause. Your reaction, Jacob, was totally uncalled for. All we’re—all I’m saying is that perhaps you can help us out. I didn’t mean to imply any threat. I apologize if you took my comments in that manner.”
But he knew. And he knew that I knew that he knew. Still, his earnest conciliatory tone caught me off guard. I couldn’t get a read on Joseph Dangelo—perhaps, though, through no fault of my own.
Regardless, I’d blown it. It wasn’t my first mistake and wouldn’t be my last. He had no way of knowing my elephant gun was loaded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything else—I’d already behaved foolishly. Dangelo called off the dogs, and I marched out of the room.
“Lewis Carroll would be proud of your career choice,” I said to Tweedledum as he handed me my gun.
“You mean Charles Dodgson?”
Screw this guy.
CHAPTER 33
I left at 2:45 a.m. with Garrett and Morgan. I had taken Kathleen’s car back to my house and sent her a text. A phone call was too much work. I thought of my comment to her about failing gloriously and decided that the first word carried so much weight that it rendered the second meaningless. Some words should never cohabitate. Moral victory. Small hurricane. Casual sex.
I pulled up in the alley behind the Winking Lizard. Garrett and I retrieved a four-foot piece of piling out of the back of the truck. When I’d scoped the place, I’d noticed the back door was like the pine trees at Camp Tecumseh. Beefy. It also had two commercial deadbolts. I wasn’t worried about the interior door, as it appeared to be standard hardware fare with a generic padlock. Although a camera was trained on the cash register, I hadn’t noticed any other security system. Like the Visigoths, the three of us rammed the waterlogged piling, and the back door splintered. Morgan stayed back with the truck as our lookout. Garrett and I crossed the kitchen toward the interior door. Halfway there, I dug in my heels. My Maglite illuminated an open door. The lock was off, and the door was splintered.
I hit the lights at the top of the stairs. As I took the stairs two at a time—far more difficult to accomplish going down that it is going up—I nearly lost my footing and resprained my left ankle. I did a quick scan with my beam. The room was empty. Garrett was beside me.
“Do you think she was even here?” I asked more to myself than to Garrett.
“Someone busted the door. There’s got to be a reason for that.” He swept his beam across the room. “Let’s see what we can see.”
Garrett and I worked the room, but it held nothing other than a hodgepodge of discarded bar equipment. There was couch large enough to owe real estate taxes. An oversize white sink was against the wall. I remembered the Colemans’ garage. My Maglite swept the walls, then the floor. When I first saw it, nothing registered. The floor drain was high, and the floor had accumulated dirt that extended in a one-foot radius beyond the drain. I crouched and brought the Maglite up close.
“Here we go,” I said.
Garrett got down on one knee beside me. “Four, one, two, nine,” he said. “She’s dropping bread crumbs.”
The numbers were barely legible, and the nine could have been mistaken for a four, but we knew what it was. I didn’t spot a tool; Jenny must have scrawled it with her fingernails. I crunched a piece of drain dirt between my fingers. I rose to my feet, and my left knee emitted its usual series of cracks. “Did I give her up today?”
“They’ve got a key, right?” Garrett ignored my question and focused on what was important. “Why would they bust down their own door? This is someone new.”
“Or they lost the key, had no time to find the key, dropped the key down the storm drain—there’s an unlimited number of key possibilities.”
“There’s no way of knowing if your actions led to his,” Garrett said, coming back around to my question. “If you didn’t come in, you never would have found the basement. We know Dangelo’s other locations, and they—”
“We already eliminated them,” I said. “He has her. We—”
“We don’t know that. We’re fairly certain that he’s the one who snatched her from the Colemans and that he had her. But just as he did unto them, someone may have grabbed her from him. Your key theories are a stretch, not the most likely scenarios. You don’t break into your own house. I’m hitting the front door.”
He vaulted the stairs. He was right. Even if Dangelo had decided to move her, why bust up your own place? I followed him up the wooden steps but then veered off to the restrooms. Both were empty, but I noted, as I had earlier, that you could park a car in the ladies’ room. Easy place to set up camp until the business locked up for the night. Garrett and I met at the bar and avoided the camera’s angle.
“Unlocked,” he said. “Next time, we should try walking in the front before storming the gate. I think that eliminates Dangelo’s crew. It’s too far a stretch to think they unlocked the front door, broke the interior door, then left without locking up.”
I switched off my Maglite, and Garrett did the same with his. We were at the front of the Winking Lizard now, and even though it had dark windows, there was no need to take unnecessary chances. The barstools were upside-down on the bar, and the added floor space enlarged the room. “Someone was already in the building,” I said. “The last person to leave. They busted the basement door then waltzed out the front.”
“The pertinent concern isn’t how, but who and—”
“And we don’t have a clue. There’s a third party, and we’re in the cold.” I was fed up with the whole failure routine. It was a routine. We were chasing Jenny, and I had no clue whether we were even closing the distance. “Let’s get out of here before the blue flashers show up.”
“No Jenny?” Morgan commented as an apparent fact when we hauled our gloomy attitude like overweight luggage into the truck. Neither Garrett nor I responded. Morgan fired up the engine, and after two lefts, we were on 275 south.
“We’re further from her than when we started,” I said to the window as the night rushed by. “We can’t even pretend to be close to her.”
“We can change that,” Morgan said. “You’ve got the tape, right? I’d like to hear her voice. I think it’ll help us.”
“Why not? This night’s no good for sleep.”
“Let’s grab three hours,” Garrett said. “It’ll afford us the opportunity to see tomorrow as a new day, put this one behind us. We need that more than sleep.” That seemed more like my line than his. Maybe that’s why I liked it.
A love song was on. I wanted to tell Morgan to turn it off, but I didn’t want to hear the sound of my voice. A blur on a fat-wheel bike scorched us as if we were standing still. I thought of my confrontation with Dangelo. Did he recognize Kathleen? Had he known her late husband? Should I show her a picture of Dangelo? And then what? Ask her if her ex (ex-ex, now that he was dead) ever had him over for drinks? Maybe they fired up the grill. And what purpose would that serve? Confirm her worst fears that she would never be free, even with a new identity? That at all moments she must keep a vigilant watch?
What would I do—who would I become—to shield her from all that?
It was a lot of questions, and they came with a smorgasbord of nebulous answers. At the minimum, Dangelo was certainly suspicious, and my overreaction confirmed those suspicions. My pursuit of Jenny was slamming me back into the past; the game was jeopardizing Kathleen’s safety. It was never meant to be this way—escalating into warfare. Trouble followed me with the consistency of a duck’s wake on a glass pond. I always had done well, performed best, when I embraced that truth, reacted accordingly, and never shied away from an unpleasant answer. I just needed to keep reminding myself of that.
CHAPTER 34
At six fifteen, after thinking I’d never fall asleep only to wake feeling as if I could sleep forever, we gathered on my back porch. Hadley III condescendingly perched on top of the grill, her wide eyes taking in the blinking red channel marker that hadn’t yet clocked out for the day. She cut me a glance and meowed. She must have eaten the year’s worth of food I’d given her a few days ago.
I placed the tape recorder on the glass table next to my Tinker Bell alarm clock. I hit the “play” button, and Jenny’s voice filled the dawn. Her youthful voice energized me and lightened my mood. Morgan listened with his chin in his left hand and his left elbow resting on the arm of the chair. He stared at the floor. Morgan has a theory that all the senses are related and that you can elevate one by gearing down the others. He claims that’s how he located Kathleen on the deserted beach where her kidnappers had taken her. I had a theory that the pulsating red channel marker was mocking me and thought that one day I might just have to squeeze off a few rounds at the son of a bitch.
Jenny’s irritation over Rutledge’s hang-up with Sherman was even more obvious the second time around. I glanced at my watch. PC hadn’t gotten back to me yet. I assumed he hadn’t been able to talk to that many people at the apartment complex last night and hoped he had remembered to hit it early. Some people leave for their jobs by seven, or even earlier. I texted him and reminded him of that. I was upset that I hadn’t explicitly given him directions as to what time to be at the apartments. I knew I was berating myself to kill time, to pretend I was moving forward as I sat and did nothing. PC immediately texted back that he was already on the site. I remembered that, to my knowledge, Jenny’s photo was still tacked to the Laundromat bulletin board. That hook hadn’t registered a nibble. Maybe I’d have PC take it down.
Jenny said, “Eric, right?” and Morgan nodded. A little later, Rutledge gave the time—6:17 a.m.—and names and location. The birds sang, and the tape went silent. I glanced up at the bay as a flatboat with a fishing tower cleared the end of my dock. A man rode the tower like a pelican gliding over the waves. His buddy was down below, his hand on the wheel, hair flying behind him. I spent too much time watching men in boats go by and not enough time in my own boat. When you live on the water, you’re constantly a fan to someone experiencing that special day they’ve looked forward to.
“Can you rewind it?” Morgan asked. “To the part where he says, ‘Then what?’” He had paid no attention to the boat, which was an incredible feat. Just as a man watches a woman as she leaves an elevator, it’s nearly impossible, living on the bay, for a man not to glance up when a boat goes by.
“Any reason?” I asked, as I punched the rewind button. I hit “play” again and came in during the Sherman exchange. That was close enough. Morgan didn’t acknowledge my question but instead shrank back into his Rodin pose.
“There,” he exclaimed, and popped out of his position like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. “Did you hear that?” He knew my hearing was poor on my left side. Between my bad ear, creaking left knee, and now bum left ankle, if I were a boat, I’d be listing badly to the port.
“Tell us,” Garrett said.
“Tape’s been cut.”
“How do you know?” I asked. Another boat approached from around the bend. Serious fishermen are early risers. I kept my attention on Morgan.
“The osprey. You hear them—there are two—in the middle of the conversation, but they really pick up their distinct screech, or chirp, toward the end. I clearly hear where their call is interrupted—cut. Play it again. It’s right before Rutledge coughs.”
I hit the end of the Sherman sequence again and listened. I couldn’t detect a damn thing. The osprey does have a distinct cry that is a series of short, high-pitched blasts. Rutledge coughed. Jenny said, “I was on top of him before I knew it.”
“Hear it?” Morgan asked.
“I caught it,” Garrett said.
“Not me,” I added.
“Plus,” Morgan said as he gained steam, “I think this is a recording of a recording. I think someone recorded the playback then cut it right before Rutledge asked, ‘Then what?’ His cough, more like clearing his throat, was inserted later.”
“What if he’s right?” Garrett asked. “What if Jenny’s answer to Rutledge wasn’t that she was on top of him? What if she said something else first?”
“But who would splice it?” I asked. “How many people had access to the tape before we finally received our copy?”
“Again,” Morgan said. I fiddled with the recorder, and for the third time, Jenny’s irritated voice sparred with Rutled
ge over General William Tecumseh Sherman. We listened without comment until the end. Outside of Rutledge’s cough, nothing seemed out of rhythm.
“You met Rutledge, right?” Morgan asked me.
“We did.”
“He cough much? Loud? Like on the tape?”
I glanced at Garrett as every conversation I’d had with Detective Eric Rutledge raced through my head. Garrett’s stare was waiting for me.
He knew.
“No coughs,” I said. “Think Rutledge tampered with it?”
I also knew. Everyone in the world knew. Like a boat’s swelling wake out on the bay rolling toward me—a motion that nothing in the heavens or the universe can halt—I knew where the conversation was going long before it got there. Part of my mind had already disengaged and was waiting onshore, bracing for the tsunami.
Garrett said, “Zach’s alleged phone call to Jenny.”
“Rutledge said Jenny’s phone didn’t show any such call,” I said. “But what if it did? I never did think that was a point the Colemans would lie about. Rutledge suggested they might have physically abducted her and used the phone story as a ruse to possibly lighten charges against them, saying that she came voluntarily.”
“He suggested, meaning he planted it in your mind,” Garrett offered.
“Maybe Rutledge never bothered to check her phone, and he’s just covering his ass for a job he didn’t do. Or he’s been lying all along. Jenny must have told him about the money and—”
My phone rang, and I snatched it off the table.
PC said, “Bingo, baby!”
“What’ve you got?” I stood, and Garrett did likewise. I put the phone on speaker and placed it back on the table next to the pink recorder.
“Guy on the second floor—I was talking to him when I sent you the text. He sets up the rental stand, you know, the paddleboards and stuff, on this end of the beach. Early bird. He takes a cup of coffee—three cubes of sugar—on his patio every morning before he hits the sand. Said he saw a car crawl down Estero that morning. Creeping, he said. Moment later, it returned from the other direction. It pulled in, you know, into that pygmy public parking lot across from him. He said from his angle he couldn’t see if another car was parked there. But this guy definitely went in; his rear end stuck out a little. No biggie, right?”