by Tim Ellis
‘What’ll it be?’ a small pleasant-looking black woman asked him.
Even though he was famished, none of the food appealed to him. ‘Just a coffee, please.’
He sat down at a table next to a window that looked out over the Matanzas River, nursed his coffee and watched the small pinpricks of light from the ships bob up and down. Absently, he recalled that Matanzas meant “killings” in Spanish.
There were about ten people in the cafeteria, but only three of them were alive. The other seven were trapped between staying and going, light and dark, love and hate – they needed guides to complete their journeys, but there didn’t seem to be any available.
Was Rae’s abduction simply a warning? If it was, it seemed to be clear what they were saying: We can take you from your apartment anytime we feel like it. The next time, you won’t be coming back. And was the hold-up at the Casablanca restaurant a similar warning? If he hadn’t been there it could have been so much worse. He probably would have come back from Staten Island to find the hotel closed down. It was their way of telling him to walk away now while he still had a life.
So, the question was: Should he walk away? Should he let them get away with abducting his partner? With killing Manuel Alvarez? John Doe? Abducting at least twenty children, but probably a lot more? That would have been like letting Curtis Polk get away with hitting his daughter – he wasn’t the type of man to walk away.
He thought about calling Mona, but she’d laugh all the way back to the station. This side of reality, what did he really have that would stand up in a gentle breeze? There was John Doe with a brush used for stencilling packing crates, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with its strange code and Rosalind Winter’s unlisted telephone number on the last page, the dry-cleaning tags that might connect him to Maurice Stern and Alpine Dry Cleaning, and an ornate loupe hidden in a pair of slippers.
Then, there was Joseph Fowler who was murdered by Tony Dreyfus – an employee of Maurice Stern who owns Alpine Dry Cleaning that uses similar dry-cleaning tags to those found on John Doe’s clothes; and he also had the ramblings of Stuart Trigg – a crystal meth addict – who said there was a warehouse used by Maurice Stern on Chemical Lane in Staten Island with packing crates full of live children. Trigg said he’d opened up one of the crates and seen the children for himself, but it could just as easily have been a drug-induced hallucination.
And, of course, there was the missing Roger Harrison with Rosalind Winter’s non-existent crash report written by Police Sergeant Neville van Dalen that identified one fatality, Blanche Rainey who had died of old age, a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank, the clandestine meeting with someone from Greiner, Tibbs & Myrick – attorneys at law, and the book of airport codes.
There might be gossamer threads that connected some parts to other parts, but they were tenuous to say the least. If he was being honest – after six days he still had nothing. It would be easy to simply walk away, and tell Barbara Harrison that he’d tried and failed to find her husband. A PI was only as good as his last case – and maybe that was the nub of it all. Maybe, he should stop pretending he still had what it took, stop fighting the ravages of time and accept retirement in all its idle and decrepit glory.
That was certainly an attractive option, but first he should go and talk to ex-Police Sergeant Neville van Dalen in Lake View Nursing Home on North Rodriguez Street and find out what the crash report was all about, and who the fatality was.
Mary Lou would have something for him tomorrow . . . he looked at his watch – it was quarter to four on Sunday morning, which meant it would be today – on Blanche Rainey. Then, on Monday, Laura was due to ring him about the gold loupe and who the American collector was who had bought it. There was also the dry-cleaning tags, the code from the book and Lillian Taylor breaking into a laboratory to test out a theory.
If he had nothing after that – then he’d walk away. The problem, of course, was that it wasn’t just about finding Roger Harrison anymore. It was about finding the children, and he had the feeling that the two were inextricably linked.
He threw back the dregs of his coffee, hooked Rae’s rucksack over his shoulder and made his way to the Emergency Care Centre.
‘Butterfly Raeburn?’ he asked a pretty nurse he accosted in the corridor who – according to her badge – was called Janet Thompson.
‘Butterfly?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Yes, I think the name suits you.’
He tried to smile, but gravity had other plans for his face. ‘It’s a bit early in the morning for humour, isn’t it?’
Her smile worked much better than his. ‘For you it might be early, but I’m living in a different time zone.’ She pointed along the corridor. ‘Third door on the right.’
‘Thanks.’
He sat down in a chair next to Rae’s bed and held her hand. ‘Come back to me Rae,’ he said.
Now that he’d stopped moving, the adrenaline had ceased to pump into his bloodstream. The caffeine was beginning to wear off, and he was about to hit a metaphorical brick wall. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the bed. Sleep dragged him into the darkness. He didn’t fight it, but as he went his last thoughts were of Rae’s tablet and cell. Whoever had taken them now knew what they knew, and without Rae he had no idea how to contact Lillian Taylor.
***
‘Hey?’
No, no, no. He wasn’t ready yet. Professor Lidenbrock needed him. They had just crossed the vast underground sea and were now hacking their way through a dense prehistoric forest with giant mushrooms, insects and mastodons . . .
‘Mr Gabriel?’
‘Hello?’ He tried to lick his parched lips, but his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Somebody shook him. ‘Wake up, Mr Gabriel.’
He sat upright, opened his bleary eyes and said, ‘There should be laws about mistreating old people.’
‘There are.’ It was the pretty Nurse Thompson from earlier.
‘In which case, I have no doubt you’ll be taken into custody imminently.’
‘As long as they let me sleep, they can take me to Devil’s Island for all I care.’
‘Why did you wake me up?’
‘It’s eight-thirty in the morning, and this isn’t a rest home for old people . . . and I don’t think you’re that old anyway. Yes, you have a baggy face as if your skin was stretched all out of shape and then didn’t go back to how it used to be, but otherwise you’re in pretty good shape.’
‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How’s Rae?’
‘Drifting in and out of consciousness as we’d expected. She mumbles things, but they don’t make a lot of sense. If I were you, I’d go home and get some rest. I’m sure that if you come back later, she’ll be awake and you’ll be able to talk to her.’
He stood up and stretched. ‘Seems like excellent advice. Have a good day in bed yourself.’
She smiled. ‘That’s certainly my plan.’
He took a last look at the wounded butterfly lying in the bed, and then made his way out of the hospital to the car park.
Going home was certainly an option open to him. He could definitely do with a shower and a change of clothes, but if he went home he had no doubt that Allegre would want to discuss what had happened in the restaurant with him, and he really wasn’t in the mood for picking over the bones. It was his fault that Manuel had been killed. The sooner he got some answers, the sooner he could decide what to do.
Lake View Nursing Home had been converted from a family house over a number of years by extending upwards, sideways and backwards. The modifications were like tree rings, and could be used to assist in dating each extension. The lake, from which the home derived its name, was fifteen feet wide and supported three adult black ducks and seven ducklings. There was also a grey cat named Lavender who was responsible for vermin control, and a black and white American Bulldog called Bazooka who had a bandana – that someone had fashioned from a stars and stripes – hanging round his neck and he wa
s in charge of security.
He rang the bell.
A thin black woman in her early thirties with long corkscrew hair and faraway eyes opened the door. ‘Hello?’
He held out his ID card. ‘I’d like to see Neville van Dalen, please.’
‘Are you a relative?’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘I knew Neville in the police force,’ he lied.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Does he get many visitors?’
‘No.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt to let me see him then, would it?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose not. It might brighten him up.’
‘Apart from being old, what’s wrong with him?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you said you knew him in the police force.’
‘A long time ago.’
‘He was shot in the line of duty in 1992. Since then, he’s been paralysed from the waist down. Recently, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘So, your visit will probably cheer him up.’ She stood to one side and let him in.
He followed her upstairs. She knocked on a door half-way along a hallway, and then opened it.
‘Neville . . .’
‘When there’s no fucking answer it means I don’t want you to come in. You fucking bitches should learn some manners. Now, fuck off and leave me alone.’
‘Good morning, Neville. You have a visitor. Thomas Gabriel – he says he knows you from your time in the police force.’
‘Never fucking heard of him.’
‘I’ll leave you two together then, shall I?’ she said. ‘Fifteen minutes, Mr Gabriel, and then we’ll have to come in and get Neville out of bed.’
She left and shut the door.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ van Dalen said. He had pasty washed-out skin, tufts of grey hair sprouting from his scalp and looked at least a hundred years old, but Tom knew he was only seventy-two.
‘As the nurse said – Tom Gabriel.’
‘I don’t know you.’
‘No. I was a Detective Sergeant in the force towards the end of your time, but we never met. I’m a PI now.’
‘So, what the fuck do you want?’
‘I have an original crash report dated July 4, 1984. You filled it out following a crash involving Rosalind Winter, which resulted in one fatality.’
He grunted. ‘I wondered when that fucking thing would come back to bite me in the ass.’
‘You admit it?’
‘What the fuck? Why not? There’s nothing anybody can do to me now except kill me, and that would be the icing on the cake.’
‘Why didn’t you submit it?’
‘Clarence Winter gave me half a million reasons not to.’
‘You took a bribe?’
‘Sure. Why not? It was meant to be for my retirement, but as you can see – that didn’t work out too well.’
‘His granddaughter killed someone.’
‘I reported it as a hit-and-run.’
‘Why didn’t you just rip the crash report up?’
‘Winter wanted to keep it. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other. He couldn’t use it to blackmail me without implicating his own granddaughter, so I let him have it. How come you’ve got it now?’
‘I found it in the safe deposit box of a man who’s gone missing.’
‘And how did he get hold of it?’
‘I have no idea. What about the fatality?’
‘A seventeen year-old boy called Bruce Effron.’
‘What about the parents?’
‘A mother.’ He shrugged. ‘You know yourself that hit-and-runs happen all the time. People die. The world continues to turn. It wasn’t changed in anyway by what I did. A mother still lost her son. Bruce Effron was still dead, Clarence Winter carried on trucking, his granddaughter’s life was destroyed by what she’d done, and I had half a million dollars for a comfortable retirement. I learned to live with my guilty conscience.’
‘You realise I might have to report you?’
‘Do what you have to do. As I said, there’s nothing anyone can do to me anymore. Call it poetic justice, but my life was destroyed on January 7, 1992. I walked in on a drug store hold-up and took a bullet in the back – been paralysed ever since.’
‘The nurse said.’
‘So, what’s it all about?’
‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.’
‘I’ve told you all I know.’
‘Well, thanks for your time, Neville.’
‘As you can see, time is not really my problem.’
The door opened.
‘Can’t you fucking bitches knock?’ He turned to Tom. ‘Even paralysed people dying of cancer deserve a bit of privacy.’
‘I can see Mr Gabriel has really cheered you up, Neville,’ the nurse said.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Have you finished, Mr Gabriel?’
‘Just.’
Chapter Nineteen
He sat in the Nitro outside the nursing home and thought about what van Dalen had told him. He’d been hoping for a piece of the puzzle that might have simply slotted into place and help him make sense of all the other disparate pieces, but in the end it was just a sordid tale about a hit-and-run victim called Bruce Effron, a grieving mother and a dirty cop.
Would he have taken half a million dollars if anyone had ever offered it to him? No, he didn’t think he ever would have. It all came down to the type of man you were, and he was a black and white type of person. No grey areas, no doubts, no sitting on the fence. He was who he was, and being clear about the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark defined who he was.
Now what? He could go to Mona with the crash report, but what would that achieve? It was too late for van Dalen – justice had been served already. A good attorney would shoot the report full of holes after all this time and Rosalind Winter would never see the inside of a courtroom. Bruce Effron was dead – nothing would ever change that; and a mother had lived a lifetime grieving a lost son. Van Dalen was right – the world would keep turning. And none of the information helped him to find Roger Harrison, the missing children, or who John Doe was.
His phone vibrated.
‘Hello, Mary Lou.’
‘Good morning, Tom. I saw you on the news – you’re a hero.’
‘Hardly. Killing two young men doesn’t make me a hero.’
‘Have you killed a lot of people?’
‘I was in Vietnam. Yes, I’ve killed a lot of people. Why? Are you compiling a list?’
‘No.’ She sounded sad. ‘I didn’t mean to bring any bad memories back, but you did save those people.’
‘I wish there’d been another way, but there wasn’t. What can I do for you?’
‘It’s what I can do for you.’
‘Oh?’
‘You asked me to find out about Blanche Rainey.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘She was born in a small town called Quincy in Tallahassee. Her maiden name was Blanche Tumba. At twenty-three, after a few years of working in a furniture store in Tallahassee, she married a man called Mathew Effron who was an insurance investigator. They had one son called Bruce, and moved to St Augustine in 1978 because of Mathew’s job. In 1984 . . .’
‘. . . Bruce was killed by a hit-and-run driver?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Never mind. Carry on.’
‘Well, her husband died of pneumonia shortly afterwards. In 1989 she married a local businessman called Peter Rainey . . .’
‘ . . . And she died a month ago?’
‘Yes. Was that helpful?’
‘It was – thank you, Mary Lou. I have two more names for you.’
‘For tomorrow?’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t dream of asking my employees to work for free on a Sunday.’
‘I’m gl
ad. There are strict laws against that type of thing, you know?’
‘Maurice Stern, Tony Dreyfus and Alpine Dry Cleaning in Staten Island.’
‘Okay. Will you be in the office tomorrow?’
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘There’s a couple of things still to organise, but essentially we’re up and running.’
‘That’s great. I look forward to seeing how you’ve spent my money.’
‘There wasn’t much change.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
He ended the call.
Now he knew how Blanche Rainey fitted into the puzzle – the grieving mother of the hit-and-run victim, but it didn’t move him any closer to providing answers to the main questions.
Was it simply a coincidence that Roger Harrison was using a scrap of paper with her telephone number on as a bookmark? And that he also had the crash report detailing the accident that had killed Rainey’s son? How was Harrison involved in all of that? And where the hell was he?
As much as he tried to make sense of it all, the answers still eluded him. Was he looking, but not seeing? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. There were still pieces missing, but he had the feeling that he already had what he needed. Three separate investigations appeared to have merged into one. It wasn’t about the disappearance of Roger Harrison. It wasn’t about the enigma of John Doe. Now, it was all about the missing children.
He switched the engine on, and headed back towards King Street and the police station. He had a statement to make about the restaurant hold-up, and he wanted his revolver back.
***
In Zero’s Diner he ordered coffee, pancakes with maple syrup, the full works and then some more coffee in that order as he filled up his shrivelled stomach.
Once he was satiated, he walked along to the police station and took the stairs two at a time. At the top he was hardly out of breath. Was he getting fitter?
Staring at Mona’s empty seat, Gubner said from behind him: ‘She’s not here.’
He turned. ‘Oh! I was hoping . . .’
‘Yeah, that’s probably why she’s not here. She told me to take your statement.’