“Yeah, it’s not going to get you any captain bars,” I said, getting petty by matching the dig.
“Oh, the jealous good ole boys’ club got your ear already,” she said.
“Hey, you’ve always been a multitasker, Meg. You find out what happened to your girl and get promoted for it, more power to you,” I said, letting her lead the way out.
On the sidewalk the drizzle had stopped but it felt ten degrees colder. Meagan waved at a taxi that was parked across the alley in front of the Walnut Street Theatre. I opened the door for her and again she put her hand on mine.
“I was kidding with that trade comment, Max,” she said.
“I know,” I lied, knowing she had only been half kidding.
“It really was good to see you,” she said and took a strand of her hair and carefully pulled it behind her ear and smiled. “Will you call if you get anything more from O’Shea that will help us, you know, with the girl?”
“You’ll be the first,” I said, and this time the kiss did not surprise me. It felt dry and perfunctory and did not even leave a warm spot on my chilled cheek. The next morning I flew back home to Florida.
CHAPTER 13
He was in her apartment, lying back on her bed, his work boots on the thin chemise bedspread, watching her get ready for work. Her face moved in and out of the mirror on top of her cheap dresser as she crimped her eyelashes and applied shadow and took particular care with liner. She caught him in the reflection and said: “What?”
“I’m just amazed at the work you put into all that when your eyes are already so beautiful.”
“Yeah? How do you think we keep them so beautiful? We cheat,” she said, smiling at him without turning around.
The few weeks they’d been together had been good. Sure he was kind of private, didn’t like to stay and hang out with any of the other regulars at the bar when her shift was done. Didn’t like to talk much with the other patrons and had pointedly asked her not to let anyone else know he was a cop. He said he had to be careful because it was like that situation with that prison asshole who scared the shit out of her that night in the bar when she saw him flash his badge. He said it should be a secret between them because he could get caught up in off-duty stuff like that and then he’d end up being liable and it made sense the way he explained it.
“If I let that other pencil dick get his ass whipped and then his fucking lawyer gets onto it and starts saying: You’re a cop, why didn’t you step in and stop it?
“Then the department attorneys get on me: Why are you getting involved when you’re off duty? Was the guy a physical threat to you or others?”
Better to just scare the guy off, he said. He’d catch that idiot on the street someday and he’d be glad to do some ass-kicking when he was in uniform and it was his turf.
She liked that about him, too. He wasn’t like the wimpy guys back home or the bar clowns who were all mouth. He told her some stories about suspects who fought him on the streets. He was aggressive in bed, too. But she wasn’t complaining. They’d had sex here in her apartment the first time and she was a little frightened by how intense he was, but she’d had an orgasm like nothing she’d ever had in the past. He was strong and bold in the way he took her. It was exciting. After that they’d done it at night on the beach, once in the pool after he’d slipped the lock to the utility room and turned the underwater lights off. They’d even done it in the backseat of his car one night out somewhere in the Everglades where there weren’t any houses or traffic.
She looked at him now, stretched out on her bed. She didn’t like the boots on her spread but she knew better than to say anything. She found her perfume among the mess on the bureau and dabbed some on. She found him in the mirror. He had that way of kind of dominating a space when he was with her. Like the time he was getting beer from her fridge while she was letting the shower water warm and she heard him punch on her message machine and listen to the whole tape. Or the time he walked into the apartment before her and scooped the mail off the floor and went through each letter before putting it on the counter. Yeah, it was all junk, but she called him on it anyway.
“What? You afraid I’m going to see something from your boyfriend in Minneapolis?”
“That would be a trick since I don’t have a boyfriend in Minneapolis,” she’d said, and it was the truth.
“You’d better not,” he’d said and then slipped his hands around her from behind and nuzzled her ear just like he was doing now.
She looked at him in the mirror. It did feel good to be wanted. Then he slipped his hands up from her waist and cupped her breast over her blouse.
“Come on, baby. You know I gotta get to work,” she said.
“Yeah?”
He put his mouth on her neck and started unbuttoning her top button.
“If I’m late again Laurie’s gonna kill me.”
“No she won’t,” he said, working on the next button.
“No? She fired Roxy just last week. Though it was probably because she was always drunk by the time her shift ended.”
“So let her fire you,” he said, and now he had himself pressed up against her from behind and she could feel him getting hard against her. “You don’t need to work there. I’ll take care of you.”
“Oh, you’re gonna keep me barefoot and pregnant?”
He was unfastening the front snap on her bra and she put her hands on his to stop him and he did that cop thing where he suddenly spun his wrists and grabbed hers and in a split second he had her arms locked up behind her. With her shoulders pulled back, the bra snap gave way and when he pulled her elbows tighter together her breasts came out of the fabric. In the mirror both of them could see that she was now excited, too, and she thought: OK, I won’t fight it. Just this once.
CHAPTER 14
My flight landed at Palm Beach International and I found my truck deep in long-term parking. When I opened the door, a wash of stale air spilled out. It was eighty degrees in the sun. Compared to Philly, the humidity felt like it was at ninety percent. Welcome back.
I tossed my travel bag into the passenger seat and then rolled up the new coat and stuffed it behind the seat where it might stay for another twenty years. I rolled down the windows and headed east, my cell phone in my ear and feeling anxious to talk with Billy. When I got to his office and he opened the door I realized that I looked like a slob, but then next to William Manchester, Esquire, most men fell to some level of slobdom.
Billy was dressed in a two-thousand-dollar Armani suit that was a dark, deeply woven color. The fabric contained shades of black and gray and held a textured shadow that could only be named subtle money, or unmistakable class. His short-collared shirt was such a brilliant white against his mahogany skin that the contrast was like a razor cut. I sat down on the leather couch in my blue jeans and crossed my legs like a gentleman, exposing the sweat socks tucked into the newly scuffed work boots I’d bought at the Army/Navy store in Philly. I balanced a saucer and cup of coffee on my knee and watched him move like I’d fallen into a damn magazine ad. My mouth may have been slightly open.
“D-don’t stare, M-Max. I’ve seen you l-look that way at a b- blue heron out near the Glades and it’s very discomforting.”
“Ain’t no bird got nothin’ on you, partner,” I said, almost whistling.
“We have b-been invited to a p-political fund-raiser downtown this evening,” Billy said, snicking up the fabric of his trousers by the sharp creases as he sat across from me.
“Ah,” I said. “If you can’t beat them, join them?”
“No. As Diane would s-say: You beat them by joining them.”
“The woman’s got smarts,” I said.
“We shall see.”
Billy picked up a file and opened it in his lap. He was done explaining himself.
“OK, M-Max. While you were away, I ran the t-two individuals who attacked you in the alley,” he said, clipped and businesslike. “A David and Robert Hix. S-Small-time thugs and n
-not very g-good at being criminals.”
“Brothers?” I said.
“Yes. David just g-got out of Glades Correctional on a r- robbery jolt that looks like it was probably a drug rip-off. He’s on six years p-probation after d-doing three. Brother Robert has done c-county time in b-both Palm Beach and Broward. Check k-kiting, burglary and identity theft. W-with all these cross references, it l-looks like they travel as a t-team, but Davey does the h-heavier work.”
Billy passed me the folder and I scanned the booking photos that he had downloaded off the Department of Corrections Web site.
“Did you show these to Rodrigo yet?”
“I’ve called him twice. B-Both times he’s been short, almost whispering and asked for you. He says he’s all right, but I could hear the fear in his voice,” Billy said. “Hard to see how a Filipino middleman gets these two as leg breakers.”
“It’s a global village, Billy. We learned the hard way that the criminals have cell phones and Internet sites, too. If their job recruiter in Manila gets squeezed because his people are making noise about legal representation on work problems, he makes a call to a fellow shit-heel in Miami, who farms it out,” I said. “I’ll talk to Rodrigo. Can I take these mug shots?”
Billy flipped the backs of his fingers and stood up.
“While I w-was asking around, I also t-talked with a prosecutor friend in Broward about your Mr. O’Shea.”
He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out toward the ocean. Though we were twelve stories up, he never looked down over the edge and into the streets. Billy never looked down.
“He tells me he’s had to t-turn Sherry down on filing a probable cause on O’Shea t-twice. He t-told her all she has is circumstantial evidence, even with the Philadelphia incident. No b-body. No forensics. Just a couple of witnesses willing to say they saw him with two women who m-may be missing.”
“As far as I know, he’s right,” I said.
“She’s also all alone on th-this according to him. Her p-pursuit of these cases in general and O’Shea in p-particular is causing hard feelings with her b-bosses and at the state attorney’s office.”
“Your friend say what they’re going to do?”
“G-give her some slack for now b-because of her past record. Nobody’s telling her she’s wrong. They all know the kind of investigator she is. B-But she needs some substance.”
“I wish I could help her.”
“Nothing fr-from Philadelphia?”
“Nothing of substance,” I said, thinking of the portrait of Faith Hamlin on the wall of the store, of tears in O’Shea’s ex-wife’s eyes, the smell of whiskey and the guffaw of old cops and their younger, too confident brethren. “I doubt you’d like the changes, or the lack of them.”
“I have n-no intention of ever experiencing them, my friend.”
Billy looked at his watch.
“I need to m-meet Diane.”
“Good luck with the Romans,” I said.
“Et tu, b-brother,” Billy said. “Et tu.”
I spent most of the next day on the beach, letting the sun seep into my bones where the twenty-three-degree Philadelphia gray had chilled the marrow. Your blood does get thinner down here. It has to be a proven, scientific fact. Somewhere there’s a university study working on a government grant to tell us all a fact that we all know.
I ate breakfast in the bungalow and then called Richards. When I got her answering machine I hung up before the beep. I spent an hour out on the sand and then stretched out and took an easy two- mile run. The sun was hard and white in a blue sky. The salt cream of big breakers caught my shoes. The wind was still blowing out of the east and the tallest palms along the shore leaned into it, their fronds blown back like the long hair of women with their faces into the breeze.
Back at my chair, with my heart still thrumming, I pulled off my running shoes and shirt and hurdled into the waves. When I was thigh deep I dove into and under an oncoming crest, dug my fingers into the ocean floor and then pulled while bringing my feet up under me, and then drove forward and up. With my arms spread in a butterfly stroke I burst to the surface, grabbed a lungful of air and immediately dove forward and down to the bottom to repeat the motion. It was a technique I’d learned from the summer lifeguards in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we escaped as teenagers from the hot asphalt streets of South Philly. It was called dolphining and it was exhausting but twice as fast as swimming to get through the shallow surf. Once out past the breakers I turned inland and bodysurfed a wave to the beach, and then dolphined back out. After five trips I was done, arms heavy and lungs aching from gulping and holding air. I sat heavily down into my beach chair. When my breathing returned to normal I reached into my small cooler and uncapped a bottle of Rock, took a long drink and turned my face into the sun.
I came awake when a shadow changed the light on the back of my eyelids and I fluttered them open. In front of me was the passive round face of the same small boy who had caught me unawares on my porch. Again he was staring down at the longneck bottle I’d unconsciously wedged in my lap and the notion flashed into my head that I was breaking the law by consuming alcohol on the beach. Maybe a look of consternation came into my face because the boy looked into my eyes, turned and ran. When I turned to see who the kid would run to, to report me, my cell phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“Freeman?”
“Hey, Sherry,” I said, not quite out of the blur of sleep. “What’s up?”
“You tell me.”
Ahh. The beauty of caller ID. Even if I hadn’t left a message on her machine, the detective’s calls would all be digitally recorded, giving her the option to at least know who had tried to reach her.
“I thought we could get together again on this O’Shea deal,” I said. “I took a side trip to Philly, maybe something you should hear.”
I heard her hesitate and wasn’t sure how she was going to take the word of my nosing around in Philadelphia without her knowing.
“Is this information that’s going to help me, or hurt my investigation, Max? Because right now I’ve got another girl missing and I’m about this close to locking up your friend.”
“Another one?”
“Susan Martin, Suzy. The missing persons unit is funneling anything they get with earmarks of my guy’s M.O. to me. I have another frantic mother who’s been everywhere, talked to a dozen friends of her daughter’s, the girl’s landlord down here and nobody’s helping.”
“Bartender?”
“Yes.”
“When did she quit showing up?”
“Six weeks ago.”
“Knew O’Shea?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to question the bar manager now.”
“I’ll meet you,” I said, taking a chance.
“Kim’s Alley Bar during the eight o’clock shift change. You know where it is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there before.”
Kim’s is an oddity in the present-day city of Fort Lauderdale. It’s a neighborhood bar tucked in one corner of a landmark shopping center. The land was once occupied by Clyde Beatty’s Jungle Zoo. In the 1930s the site was a training and birthing facility for the big cats of the circus; lions and tigers, predators all.
The present-day center holds restaurants and antique stores, a funky bookstore and a Laundromat. Across the street to the west is the Gateway Theatre which in 1960 held the premiere of Where the Boys Are and changed the atmosphere of Fort Lauderdale for the next twenty years.
But only half of Kim’s changed since it was established in 1948. Once a true alley bar with a small entrance obscured in the shadows, it was later split into two separate rooms by its layout. On one side is a modern place with pool and Ping-Pong tables and dartboards and a small uninspired bar top. But down a narrow, dim hallway, on the parking lot side of the shopping center, is a treasure. In this room is an ancient bar-back crafted in rich African mahogany by artisans from a different century who knew intricate s
crollwork and woodcraft. The cabinetry is old school, built in Baltimore in 1820 and then dismantled and moved to New Orleans. Kim’s owner purchased it there and moved it to Fort Lauderdale in 1952. Without knowing its final destination, the proud head of a lion had been carved high in the center of the scrollwork, somehow a testament to the land’s history. I had been inside a few times and never once drank a drop in the gamer’s side.
I arrived just before seven and half the stools at the bar were taken. I took an open one at the close end near the windows and the door. A Steve Winwood CD was playing on the juke and the manager, a pretty woman with shoulder-length brown hair who I knew as Laurie was gathering receipts while a younger woman was refilling ice. Laurie looked over first.
“Hey, stranger. Haven’t seen you in a while.”
I nodded my hello.
“Rolling Rock, right?”
“Perfect.”
Laurie turned to the other girl who pulled a cold bottle from the cooler and set it on a napkin in front of me.
“Hi,” she said. “Run a tab?”
“Hi. No. Thanks,” I answered, putting twenty on the bar top. “I’ll pay as I go.”
She had a clean, pretty face. Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota came to mind. She was bringing my change back when Richards came through the door. Determined.
She was wearing jeans and a collared blouse and her hair was pulled back and twisted into a severe bun. I turned away once she spotted me and looked down the length of the bar and my eye caught movement. A man at the opposite end got up faster than most comfortable drinkers would and started for the dim hallway. Guy just recognized a cop walk in the room, I thought, a grin pulling at my mouth. I marked him at about six feet tall, lean, clean trimmed dark hair from the back, and I would have let his image slip right through my head but for the look that the young bartender had on her face when she did a double take. First on the man, then back on Richards as she made it to my elbow and then back to the man disappearing into the hallway. There was a touch of confusion in her eyes that had melted into suspicion when she turned back to us. Richards said something to me but I was watching the girl as she walked down to the vacated place at the other end, picked up the money the man had left and the half-drunk bottle of beer. It was my brand.
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