No Right Turn

by A. J. Stewart

  “I never really thought about it like that.”

  “That’s how it is. See, racing’s a tough game. As soon as a team starts winning, the racing bodies change the rules to even things up. NASCAR do it, F1 do it, Indy do it. They want the races close and the championships even closer. No one cares about a one-horse race, do they?”

  Only the winners, I thought. Which made me think about the people who had lost to Dale Beadman, and not just those on the race track.

  We finished our drinks and cleaned up around Lenny. We stood for a moment looking at his headstone. We always did. He was ten years gone and I still found myself turning to ask him things. I suspect Lucas did the same thing. Some people leave an impression like a child scrawling their initials in wet concrete, others leave no more than a gust of breeze. Lenny was concrete, all the way. He had a personality that stuck with you, in a good way for most people. He’d helped a lot of folks on his earthbound journey. I often wondered if I measured up to him that way. I didn’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t my place to say. But it lit an idea in my head. I was looking at all the people that Dale Beadman might have wronged. They were usually good for a motive for any crime. But thinking of Lenny made me consider the opposite option. Who was it that might have been helped by stealing the cars? I’d have to ruminate a bit on that one.

  Lucas and I wandered back to the entrance to the cemetery. I ran my hand along the tailgate of his beat-up old truck, that had once been Lenny’s old truck. It was a marvel of engineering that it was still going. It wasn’t Lucas’s regular ride, but he liked to drive it up when he came to visit Lenny. After a decade, it didn’t smell like Lenny anymore, just like the collection of Lenny’s shirts in my wardrobe. But his essence was still in there somewhere. I knew that thought to be baloney, but I went with it anyway because it helped me get through the day.

  “Got a few things to do tomorrow,” I said. “So probably day after for Daytona.”

  Lucas nodded and opened the door to his truck. “Sounds good. I gotta see a man about a dog tomorrow, anyway.”

  I nodded goodbye and got in my SUV. It was a sedan masquerading as something more. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a Cadillac, but I supposed that nothing new really was. It gave me a vague sense of being a phony. I could neither comprehend nor pin the thought down, so I wrote it off to the melancholy associated with a visit to a cemetery.

  I followed Lucas out and he turned right and I turned left, and I watched him disappear in my rearview. I needed some company of the best kind.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Danielle was in the shower when I got back to the PGA condo. I stepped into the steaming bathroom to let her know I was home. The frosted shower glass left just enough to the imagination, and I considered joining her, but she killed the water as I came in.

  “How’s your day?” I asked.

  “MJ? It was okay. You know. A lot of folks lost their homes. Not great. Can you hand me a towel?”

  I flopped a towel over the glass enclosure and leaned against the edge of the vanity. I watched her fuzzy silhouette drying off.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Went and saw Lenny.”

  “How was it?”

  “The cemetery was in pretty good condition, considering.”

  “How’s Lenny?”

  “Lenny’s Lenny, you know.”

  She stepped out of the shower enclosure wrapped in a towel like a gorgeous burrito. Her hair was wet and dripping and darker because of the water. She gave me the half smile she always gave me. It was an all-purpose expression, good for whenever she was worried about me or thought I had done something stupid. Between the two, that covered a lot of territory.

  “You okay? Really?” she asked.

  “Our home is still standing even if we can’t technically go inside it. And you’re here. So I’m better than most.”

  Danielle looked me up and down the way law enforcement types do, like their eyes are X-ray machines at the airport and they can see what’s going on inside a person just by looking at them. The scary part was she often could. She gave the half smile again and then disappeared underneath another towel to dry her hair.

  “There’s wine in the fridge,” she said from inside the towels.

  I nodded even though she wasn’t looking and wandered out into the kitchen. The counters were granite and the appliances were new and the entire thing was as antiseptic as an operating theater. It wasn’t Lucas at all. But then I figured he didn’t live here and probably never planned to. He wasn’t much of a golfer. I opened the bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and was pouring the second glass when Danielle came out. She was in running shorts and a tight yoga top that did all kind of bad things for me. She was still drying her hair. I’d never had that much hair. I was scruffy enough without long hair. It looked like a lot of maintenance.

  I offered Danielle a glass and we held them up and looked into each other’s eyes. She held my gaze for longer than was necessary. Once again I noted how she smiled with her eyes, and I recalled Missy Beadman and her mouth-only smile. Perhaps that would mean Danielle would end up with all kinds of laugh lines when she was older. I liked the thought of that.

  “Caesar salad for dinner?” she asked.

  “Sure, if there isn’t a burger going.”

  She tapped my belly as she slipped past. “There isn’t. You want to sit on the patio?”

  “Actually I was planning on watching something on television.”

  She stopped and frowned at me. We didn’t own a television. Having one in Lucas’s condo was a novelty.

  “You want to catch up on The West Wing?” she asked.

  “You’re funny. No, I want to check out the security video from the Beadman place.”

  “You got a DVD?”

  “No. Angie Beadman gave me access online. Just got to figure out how to get into it. We have internet access here, right?”

  “There’s Wi-Fi across the complex.”

  I pulled out a laptop computer that I had borrowed from Lizzy. Some people might find it odd that as owner of the business, I had to borrow equipment from my office manager, but not me, and certainly not Lizzy. We didn’t work like that. Back in the day, when we had lost Lenny and then learned that he had gone and left the detective business to me, we had established pretty early on that we were a flat hierarchy office structure. I signed the checks, but I only signed the checks that Lizzy told me to sign. It was better that way. Looking after the minutiae was never my strong suit. Lizzy, on the other hand, always knew the state of things. Like where the equipment was, and who owed us money and the fact there were spare clothes in a closet in the second office. I’m a big believer in playing to your strengths. Sure, you needed to work on the odd weakness—like your knuckle ball or a penchant for peanuts—but mostly successful people focused on their strengths. Pitchers weren’t lead-off hitters for a reason.

  I sat at the coffee table and fired up the laptop and came to a complete stop. I turned to Danielle partly to see if she was watching my ham-fisted attempt at computing and partly for help. She was standing right behind me. I got the half smile again. All-purpose.

  “You do the salad,” she said. I nodded and let her take my seat and dropped the piece of paper that Angie Beadman had given me with the login details on it. I went into the kitchen. I’m better in a kitchen than I am with computers. It’s not that I don’t know how to use them, I just never really have cause to. I have Ron to do the web-based research for cases and Lizzy to plug the stuff in, and I don’t have family on the other side of the country that want to chat online.

  I dropped an egg, some olive oil, a few drops of Worcestershire and a dollop of Dijon mustard into a blender. Recipes often make a big deal of emulsion as a science. I find a blender takes care of the science for me. I whizzed up a dressing and then set about frying some bacon pieces. There would be no croutons. Danielle had declared processed carbs my enemy. I suspected she had her eye on beer as the next battle, but th
at was going to be a fight to the death.

  Danielle worked as I cut up the romaine lettuce. She pulled a cable out of the DVR below the television and stretched it across the room, plugged it into the laptop and then, hey presto, she made the computer’s screen appear on the television. Then she found the site for the security video and logged in. There was a menu that allowed us to select six-hour chunks of time going back for two weeks. Danielle sat back with her wine and waited for me to join her.

  I grated some Parmigiano Reggiano over the dressed salad and brought a plate in for Danielle. Then I returned for my own plate and my wine.

  “What time do you want to look at?” Danielle asked.

  I settled on the sofa with the plate in my lap. “Start the morning of the delivery.”

  Danielle clicked a link and then the television opened up the view of Dale Beadman’s faux-English pub. It was the same scene I had viewed with Angie Beadman in their server room. There was light coming in from the window in the door beyond the bar, but not much. The weather was setting in as the hurricane drove its way up toward the Bahamas. As before, the picture stayed for twenty seconds and then rotated to show the driveway. The rain was hitting the gravel, but the rivulets were yet to form in it. Twenty seconds of nothing happened, and then the view switched to the garage interior. The original ten cars sat in dim light, all accounted for. Then the video returned to the pub view.

  “Now I know why you don’t own a television,” Danielle said.

  “It may not be guns and explosions, but there’s a story in here somewhere.”

  “I like your idea of a good night in on the sofa.” She smiled and stabbed a mound of lettuce. To an outsider, it might have sounded like sarcasm. But that’s how you know you’re sitting on a sofa with your soulmate. When watching a security video of nothing happening is truly a good night in as long as you’re together.

  We ate our salad and watched nothing happen. There was no sound with the video. Most security video was like that. That was partly because audio didn’t add a whole lot, but it was also because, in most jurisdictions, recording audio of someone required their consent whereas video did not. I didn’t know why that was the case, but I recalled Ronzoni mentioning it once. He was a wealth of useless information.

  Danielle took our plates back into the kitchen and returned with the wine bottle. She poured two more glasses and then sat in tight against me, and I put my arm around her. It took an hour of viewing to see anything happen. Then we saw the truck backing up the driveway, and we saw the garage door open and the truck tailgate lower and the driver push the F-88 down the ramp and into the hidden room.

  “What’s with the secret room?” asked Danielle.

  “He says it’s for the vehicles he wants to enjoy alone.”

  “So it’s stolen.”

  “The provenance is disputable.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  The driver cleaned up the floor and Angie Beadman ran away into the rain, and then the driver raised the roller door. Then the truck pulled away. One shot it was there, and the next time around, the outside shot showed nothing but wet gravel. Then regular programming resumed and nothing happened all over again.

  “That’s it?” asked Danielle.

  “That’s it. Then sometime later, all the cars disappear.”

  “But not on video?”

  “Not according to Angie Beadman.”

  “But you’re going to sit here all evening just to make sure.”

  “I am.”

  “We’re going to need more wine.”

  “And that’s why I love you.”

  We watched for hours. The sky got darker and the rain continued. Inside, nothing happened. The storm shutters on the garage blocked out the hurricane. The infrared on the outside camera showed nothing much of anything. There was rain but not much else. As darkness fell completely the outside shot became hard to discern.

  “Nothing to see,” said Danielle. “The infrared picks up shapes, movement. The driveway is just gravel. It just looks like a whiteboard.”

  The only external light making it inside was coming from the storm window in the French door to the pub. It was a code thing. At least one window or door had to be hurricane-proof. You couldn’t put shutters on every window and door, not if you were inside the building. An external floodlight over the outside patio gave a tiny bit of light to the pub. In the reflection on the wall-mounted television, I could see the palapa outside, flapping in the wind like ribbons. It was the only thing moving in any of the video.

  We got to the end of the six-hour segment and the vision ended and dropped us abruptly back to the menu screen. Danielle clicked the next segment and the video resumed. It was more of the same. My eyes stayed on the screen but my mind drifted. I was sure I was going to see what Angie Beadman had said I would see. Nothing. Right up until the power quit.

  “The rain outside doesn’t look so bad,” said Danielle. “Was it?”

  “It was. I was out in it more than I wanted to be and it was coming in sideways where I was. But the Beadman place is on the east side of the island and tucked behind a lot of trees. The hurricane made landfall at Fort Pierce, so the prevailing wind during the night was from north and northwest. Straight down the Intracoastal. They’re pretty sheltered on their side.”

  She had her head nestled into my shoulder and she looked up at me. “I was worried. I wish I had been here.”

  “I was in a luxury hotel, remember?”

  “On the roof, as I recall from Ron.”

  “Only briefly. I’m glad you were in Tallahassee.”

  “You were glad I was in Tallahassee?”

  “Away from the storm, yes.”

  She edged around and looked at me. “What are we going to do?”

  “About what?”

  “About me being in Tallahassee.”

  “When do you have to go back?”

  “A few days.”

  “You’re not going to be there forever, though, are you?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I know. Your academy training is fourteen weeks, right?”

  “And then I’ll get posted somewhere. It isn’t like working for the county. I won’t get a position in West Palm, not first up.”

  “South Florida’s not that big. We’ll make it work.”

  “Might not be South Florida. I might have to stay in the Tallahassee office.”

  “Really?” I took my eyes off the video for the first time in hours. “Tallahassee?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Could even be Pensacola. That’s more than eight hours away.”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  “Maybe we need to think about it. If we’re thinking about getting married.”

  “Thinking about it?”

  “Isn’t that what engagement is?”

  “I thought it was more of a declaration of intention than a think about it.”

  “I’m just saying, how does this work if I get a two-year posting far away?”

  I sat up and tapped the computer to pause the video. “It’ll work however we make it work, that’s how. I don’t know the particulars. Not yet. Maybe you do get posted to West Palm. Maybe you’re in Miami. I don’t know. I can’t plan for what I don’t know. There’s no point worrying about what pitch I’m gonna throw until I know who the batter is.”

  “Baseball metaphor, really?”

  “Sure. That’s who I am. You know that. And you should know something else. You’re my home. Not a waterlogged ranch house on the Intracoastal. You. So we’ll work it out. You might end up far from West Palm, but you won’t end up far from me. I guarantee it.”

  She frowned at me. I wasn’t sure if she was considering my words or if she was x-raying my insides again. Then she nodded and settled back into my shoulder. I kissed the top of her head and glanced at the television as I made to press the key to start the video. Then I stopped. The shot was of the pub. Nothing was happening. There was no movem
ent. I realized it wasn’t just because the video was paused. I looked at the darkened reflection in the television on the wall. Nothing had been moving in the pub for hours. Except something had. The palapa outside Dale Beadman’s pub room. It had been flapping in the wind, reflected in the television.

  I hit the key and sank back into the sofa and let Danielle snuggle in and get comfortable. The video continued on, nothing followed by nothing, except for a palapa flapping in the breeze.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The guy looked like a builder, or even a guy dressed like a builder for Halloween. He wore pressed overalls and had a flat pencil tucked in behind his ear. His t-shirt bulged at thick biceps as he got out of his pickup. He was younger than I had expected him to be, and I wondered if maybe Sally had done him a favor when he was a kid.

  “Miami?” he asked as he stepped up to my house.

  “That’s me,” I said. “Thanks for coming. It’s Rucci, right?”

  “Rucci,” he said. “Danny Rucci.”

  “You must be busy right now.”

  “If I could get more lumber and more workers I’d be busier.”

  “Let me show you the mess.”

  I ushered Rucci inside and he wandered around, looking at the bones of my house. He didn’t seem to pay much attention to the damp floor, but he was awfully interested in the ceiling. He bounced up and down on the kitchen floor and then wandered out the back. He looked at the speedboat that still lay on the side of its hull on my back lawn.

  “Your boat?” asked Rucci.

  “No. No idea who owns it. I reported it to the cops, but no one’s called yet.”

  “Out-of-towner. Probably doesn’t even know it’s gone yet.” He turned back to the house and looked at the roof. “How do you know Sal?” he asked as he frowned at the roof tiles.

  “How does anyone know Sal? I did him a favor once, and ever since he’s done a thousand for me.”

  “Sounds like Sal.”