“Which he was going to do anyway.”
“Right. So Kent says, ‘Sure neighbor, happy to help.’ Maybe Juan offers to pimp for Southeast to his luxury homebuyers. So Kent denies your claim and Juan swoops in to make the sale.”
“That didn’t quite work out.”
“Still might be an offer there.”
“I’m not moving, Ron. Now more than ever. I’ll pitch a damned tent if I have to.”
“But you still don’t have the insurance money.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“Still thinking.”
Ron shook his head again and downed his beer. “I must get home to the Lady Cassandra. We have tickets.”
“For what?” asked Danielle.
“No idea,” said Ron. He slipped off his stool and blew a kiss at Danielle and then tipped a cap he wasn’t wearing to me. Then he walked out.
“I love watching you two talk,” said Danielle.
“Me, too,” said Muriel. “It’s like two sides of one dysfunctional brain.”
Danielle smiled. “I was going to say a ventriloquist and his dummy.”
“But which one’s the dummy?” I asked.
“I know,” said Muriel.
“So do I,” said Danielle. “So do I.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The regulars were starting to make their way back to Longboard Kelly’s. There were two groups of clientele at Longboard’s. Those who sat inside and those who sat outside. They were all fine people in my experience, but the two groups didn’t really understand each other. But on balance, the inside people were back and the outside people were not. The courtyard sat empty but for Danielle and me, and Muriel got nice and busy in the inside bar. We turned around on our stools and looked at the evening light dropping long shadows across the courtyard.
“How are you getting on with your case?” Danielle asked.
“You know how these things go. I feel like it’s moving forward, but you never know if the thing you’re pulling on is the thing that will close the case or if it’s just a loose thread.”
“Where were you today?”
I thought about telling her about Dwight Eckhardt. Danielle knows I walked the line a little closer to the other side than she does. She knows that Sally is no boy scout. But she also knows that he doesn’t deal in drugs and he does a lot of good for kids in his community. On balance I think she’s comfortable with the fact that none of us is perfect, even in the eyes of the law. But I didn’t think she would be so comfortable with Dwight Eckhardt. Vehicles of disputable provenance were one thing. Grand theft auto was not such a big leap from there, despite Eckhardt standing up for his own honor. Me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much. And any investigation of Eckhardt would affect Dale Beadman and I knew from what I’d seen that the scale definitely tipped in his favor. By my measure, anyway.
“Beadman has a rival,” I said. “Turns out it’s pretty bitter and it’s been going for decades. There’s a possibility the rival might have been involved in the theft.”
“If I can’t have it, you can’t either?”
“Something like that. These guys have a funny way of keeping score.”
“Race wins not enough?”
“Not by a long shot. You won this race, I won that one. Are we one-all or is one race worth more than another? And then you ended up winning the championship but I ended up on television and being famous? You’ve got a small plane but I’ve got a lakeside mansion. You’ve got a car collection and I want it. Or as you say, maybe I don’t want it, but I just don’t want you to have it.”
“The world pines for a man who is a grown-up,” she said.
I nodded. No argument from me.
“Why do men end up like that?” she asked. “I mean, how does it get started?”
“A woman,” I said.
Danielle slammed her beer down. “Why is it that men always feel the need to blame a woman for something they didn’t do?”
“I’m not blaming a woman. Any more than I blame Mount Everest for people who die trying to climb it. The mountain didn’t make that decision. Had nothing to do with it. In the grand scheme of things, the mountain would probably prefer people stay the hell away. But people climb and some of them die. It happens because of the mountain, but it isn’t the mountain’s fault.”
“That’s a very philosophical argument, MJ. But it smells like hokey baloney.”
I shrugged.
“Who is this woman?”
“Missy Beadman.”
“Really. Haven’t they been married forever?”
“More than forty years. But this thing goes way back. Turns out she was dating someone when she met Dale. This guy took her to the race track, and she met the love of her life there.”
“Who was the guy?”
“Ansel Brasher.”
“The rival.”
“Right.”
“So Dale gets the girl and this Brasher stews on it for the rest of his life?”
“More or less.”
“Sounds primitive.”
“We are that. No doubt. There was plenty of fuel added to the fire over the years, but that was the spark, as far as I could tell.”
“Isn’t Brasher married, too?”
“He is. Almost as long, I think.”
“So his wife isn’t the love of his life? That bites.” Danielle frowned.
“I don’t know. Maybe she is. Maybe he got over Missy but he never got over the slight. We can look at these things however we choose.”
“He needs to choose another way to look at it.”
“Maybe choose is the wrong word. We see things as we allow ourselves to see them. Some folks win the lottery and complain about the taxes.”
Danielle took a sip of her drink. “So Dale lives in Charlotte?”
“No, he lives in Palm Beach.”
“He has a house in Palm Beach. It doesn’t sound like he lives there. He’s at the workshop most weeks, at a race track somewhere most weekends. When is he in Palm Beach? Thanksgiving and Christmas? Doesn’t sound like such a great marriage. Sounds lonely.”
“They seem happy.”
“Do they?”
I put my beer to my mouth but didn’t drink. On recollection, they didn’t seem happy. Missy seemed distant, and her first conversation with me covered a lot of ancient territory. She had told me how she’d met Dale. I didn’t know how most couples met that I had known for years. I knew how my parents met, or at least the version they had developed over the years, and I knew how I had met Danielle and I knew how Ron had met the Lady Cassandra because I was there. Otherwise, I had no idea. But I knew Missy’s story, and I had only met her once. It was like she was living in the past, or wanted to be.
Danielle asked the question I didn’t want to ask. “Could Missy be cheating on Dale?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe with this Brasher character?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t think so or no you don’t want it to be so?”
“Motive and opportunity. They’re not there. Missy spoke to me about Dale. She wasn’t angry or even indifferent to it. The opposite. Talking about her early days with Dale was the most human I saw her. The motive just isn’t there. And the means. Brasher is in the Charlotte area just like Dale, but Missy is pretty much a permanent fixture in Palm Beach. She’s in the Post society pages doing charity stuff all the time.”
“It was just an idea.”
“Yeah.”
We both stared into middle distance with our thoughts. Then Danielle said what I knew she would say.
“What if that’s us?”
“That’s not us.”
“We’re apart now.”
“We’re at Longboard’s now.”
“You know what I mean, smarty. And I’ll be posted somewhere not here.”
“Didn’t we talk about this already?”
“And you said you’d hunt me down.
Which is cute and all, and it’s why I love you, but is it realistic? I mean, think about now? When I’m not here? Do you miss me?”
“Of course I do. All the time.”
“So how do you cope?”
“I keep busy. I work, I come here to Longboard’s. What about you?”
“The same. I’m at the academy. I don’t get a lot of downtime. I stay busy, too. So is that how Dale and Missy do it?”
“Maybe.”
“Is that what you want? To have a busy life apart and then come together sometime toward the end?”
“Dale and Missy haven’t come together at the end. He’s still in Charlotte.” The words came out of my mouth before I had time to process them in my brain. But once they had, they caused a lightbulb to go off in there. And then the lightbulb exploded.
“I don’t want that, MJ.”
I slipped off my stool. “Me, either.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait. It’s not a lifetime, it’s a few more weeks. And then we find out where you get posted. And I’ve been thinking about Lucas’s place.”
“What about it?”
“We could get an investment condo. Wherever you get stationed. And I can take cases anywhere. The Palm Beaches aren’t the only place with stuff that needs to be solved.”
“You’ve got it all worked out, then.”
“Nope. Not by a long shot. But I know as sure as this state is built on a swamp that I don’t want to be apart from you any more than I have to be. That’s all I need. I know we’ll find a solution. Because we want to.”
I slammed the last of my beer and pulled my keys out.
“Are you going somewhere now?” asked Danielle.
I nodded.
“You have an interesting sense of timing.”
I shook my head.
“Big speech about not being apart and now you’re leaving.”
“You’re coming.”
“Where?”
“We need to go see Missy Beadman.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The sun was nothing but a faint glow at the top of the atmosphere when we arrived at the Beadman estate. I wound down the window of my SUV and leaned out toward the intercom. Through the gates, I could see the darkened silhouettes of men. It took me a moment to comprehend what I was seeing. Then I realized that the guys were finishing up the driveway. They were throwing the last of their equipment into the back of their pickup, and as they did, the headlights burst to life and lit us up like one of the artifacts in Dale Beadman’s museum. The pickup started up and then rolled toward us, and the gate opened. The guys in the cabin waved to us as they drove out, and we waved back.
I drove in through the open gate and pulled around to the front of the house. The driveway had been tamped down and didn’t even crackle under the tires. I parked behind the Camaro as I had before. Danielle and I wandered up to the front door. The house was quiet. I could see lights burning in the end room. Angie’s office. Hard at work, as ever. The rest of the house was dark. I knocked softly. I didn’t want to disturb Angie. Mainly because I didn’t want to talk to Angie.
There was no response, so I put my hand on the latch and opened the door. I pushed it open and made to step inside.
“There’s a doorbell,” whispered Danielle.
“I know.”
“You can’t just walk in.”
“Sure I can.”
And I did. Danielle followed me and closed the door behind her. Then she flicked the nib to lock the door.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I asked. “We’re not cat burglars.”
I wandered into the great room. It was darker than the three-quarter moon outside. A lamp was on in the kitchen. I checked it out. It was under-cabinet lighting. Maybe a night-light in case someone got a hankering for a midnight snack. At eight in the evening.
I turned back through the great room to the entrance and looked down the corridor.
“What’s down there?” Danielle asked.
“The computer room and Angie’s office.”
I looked upstairs. The staircase wasn’t grand by Palm Beach standards, but it wound up to a landing that overlooked the mandatory chandelier. I started up the stairs.
“MJ,” said Danielle. “What are we doing?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have a response. I had wanted to speak with Missy. I preferred to do it without Angie in the room. The rest I was making up on the fly. I reached the landing and broke right. I found three bedrooms, one of which must have been the master. It was huge. I didn’t get it. What did people do in their bedrooms that required so much space? A big living room I understood. Even a big kitchen. Everybody ended up in the kitchen at a party. But a big bedroom? It was for sleeping. Did they take tea in there? Bake bread? Practice their cartwheels?
I left the bedrooms and walked past Danielle and headed across to the other wing. The corridor was dark and the only light was coming from a door that stood ajar. I pushed that door open just enough to poke my head in.
It was a media room. At least I thought that was what people called them now. A home cinema. There was a screen that took up the entire wall at the far end from the door. Three rows of seating, four seats per row. The chairs were large recliners that looked like sleeping bears. They had cupholders and little tables between the armrests to put your popcorn on.
Missy Beadman wasn’t eating popcorn and she wasn’t reclining. She was sitting in the second seat from the end in the front row. Her elbow was on the armrest and her hand was held high, balancing a wineglass between her delicate fingers. She was watching home movies. I watched for a moment and reconsidered. They weren’t movies. They were photographs. It was like a slideshow that my father used to do when I was a kid. Once or twice a year, he would get a hankering to revisit my parents’ pre-me lives and our family vacations, so he’d pull out his carousel projector and load it up with slides, and we would have to sit through the click and clack of a slide show that was only remotely more interesting than a science slide show at school, at least to a small boy. I had no idea what had happened to the slides or the projector after my father died.
But Missy wasn’t watching slides. Her projector was attached to the ceiling at the back of the room and looked like something that might be found in a proper movie theater. There was no click or clack, and the photographs transitioned softly from one to another. It was a hell of a setup. If I ever bothered to watch movies, I could have given up half a bedroom to make space for a room like this.
The photos didn’t seem to be in any kind of chronological order. They jumped from color to black-and-white and back again. There were people in seventies costumes that ought to have been illegal and then Angie in her graduation gown and then back to a guy standing on the top of an old-model stock car.
Danielle knocked on the door. I glanced at her and she gave me a look like there was something wrong with us watching Missy watching her memories. Missy didn’t jump at the noise. Perhaps she thought it was Angie. She glanced over her shoulder and saw me in the glow of the screen.
“Mr. Jones,” she said. “What an unexpected surprise.” In certain circles they would have called her well bred. Her good manners were so ingrained that even when she was surprised by strange people appearing unannounced in her darkened home, she was welcoming.
“Missy,” I said. “Sorry to disturb.”
“Not at all. Come on in. I’m just looking at some old pictures.”
I stepped into the room and Danielle came in behind me.
“Hello, ma’am,” said Danielle. Her manners were also pretty ingrained. Law enforcement agencies and the military tended to drum those in if a recruit’s parents hadn’t done it already.
“Why, hello,” Missy said, looking back to me.
I got the hint and introduced Danielle as my fiancée, not as a member of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Missy stood and put her drink
into the cup holder on her chair. She looked Danielle over.
“Oh my, aren’t you a beauty?” She stepped forward and put her hands on Danielle’s cheeks the way older women sometimes do. Then she gave Danielle a kiss that might have landed somewhere near her ear or might have been an air-kiss. She stood back to take us both in.
“You are a handsome couple,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said, as if I was in any way responsible for us being a handsome couple.
“Can I offer you a drink? Some wine?”
She moved toward the side wall, and I noted her movement wasn’t as fluid as it had been. It wasn’t her first glass of wine for the evening. She stepped to a cabinet I had not seen in the darkness and opened a small bar fridge. She pulled out two glasses and a bottle of something white. She poured and handed us glasses and then she filled her own and picked it up.
“Cheers,” she said.
We saluted but I didn’t drink. I just held the glass.
“This is quite the setup,” I said.
“Why, thank you,” she said. “We have a high-definition projector. She’s a beauty.”
“The photos are in it?” I asked.
“No. I digitized our old photographs and stored them on our server. The projector is linked via Wi-Fi to the server, so I can watch whenever I want.”
“All sounds like black magic to me,” I said.
“He’s a bit of a technophobe,” Danielle said.
“My Dale is the same way. He can fix a car to go two hundred miles an hour, but I have to work the remote control. I’m sure you’re the same.”
Danielle tipped her head. I had nothing to say.
Missy caught me looking at the screen and turned. It was a shot of her, Dale and Angie. Angie must have been two or three years old and was sitting on her daddy’s shoulders. They were leaning up against a car. Beadman green.
“Talladega,” Missy said. “Dale’s first win there.”
“Darlington this week,” I said.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Darlington.”
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