‘Events take their toll,’ Magda had said. ‘On everyone.’
‘Except the bad things last year hardly happened to me, did they?’
‘They happened to people you love, so of course they happened to you,’ Magda said. ‘You’re being way too hard on yourself, Grace.’
Which was one of the reasons Grace had decided, a while back, that it was high time she went back to doing what she was best at. Namely thinking of others, specifically her patients. The children she could be helping.
Plenty more psychologists on the beach.
True enough, but still, it was what Grace had spent years training for and many more years than that practising, and she was good at her work, she was too honest to deny that much.
Except that she’d also been having to come to terms with the fact that returning to practice would mean having to find someone to help out again; not exactly a replacement for Lucia Busseto, her former office manager – because frankly, Grace could not imagine ever again feeling able to entrust her young patients’ confidential files to any other person.
I’d be entrusting Joshua to another person.
That thought struck fear into her again now, as it always did when she and Sam discussed getting any kind of help in the house.
Which was, in itself, she thought, not entirely healthy.
‘Beeba,’ Joshua said from his high chair in the kitchen, right on cue.
‘You said it,’ Grace answered.
David and Saul – Sam’s twenty-two-year-old adoptive brother – had both offered to take care of Joshua any number of times, and Lord knew she and Sam would trust either of them to the ends of the earth. But this was not so much babysitting as a long-term lifestyle decision, one that she was going to have to come to terms with as determinedly as any other working mom.
Still, right now, Claudia was here. Had flown thousands of miles because apparently she needed her sister, and whether that was for shelter or a shoulder to cry on, or for something else entirely, then Grace knew it was time to give herself a sharp kick in the rear and simply be here for her.
Sam called at eleven thirty to tell Grace he was on a new homicide investigation.
Which meant, as she knew, there was no telling when he’d make it home.
‘We have a visitor,’ she said.
Claudia was upstairs, settling herself in Cathy’s room, and Grace had called their daughter in Sacramento a half-hour ago, and Cathy had assured her that she had no problem with that.
‘I like thinking of my room being used,’ she said.
‘Want us to take in a lodger?’ Grace asked, deliberately light.
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Cathy said, sounding merry, then sent them all hugs, especially Joshua who she said she was missing like crazy and could not wait to see again, all of which had made Grace feel a whole lot better.
She told Sam now about how Claudia was looking.
‘Something’s definitely not right with her.’
‘You’ve known that for a while,’ Sam said. ‘And it’s good she’s come to you.’
‘Even if it might mean she’s walked out on Daniel and the boys?’
‘Especially if that’s what’s happened,’ Sam said. ‘No one better than you to help her fix things.’
‘You think?’ Grace was wry.
‘I know,’ Sam said in his deep, rich voice.
Nice to have a husband with such faith in her.
Grace wished she could feel as certain.
7
Not a day went by when Sam did not remember how lucky he was to have his family, to be alive and free and still a Miami Beach detective.
It might all have been so different. He might have lost his job or worse, but the investigators into last year’s nightmare had accepted that Cathy’s life had been in immediate danger, and Sam’s punishment for acting out of his jurisdiction and worse besides had been decided by a discipline committee of Majors and Captains, and he had been suspended for eighty hours. He might have been demoted or even transferred out of the Detective Bureau. As it was, he was still doing what he loved.
Even if sometimes – on a day like this one – that love seemed a little bizarre.
‘So,’ Martinez said to him just after noon as they walked down 11th towards Ocean Drive, Sam holding a bag containing two Cuban sandwiches and a bottle of Manischewitz for Mildred, his own Starbucks cup of Tazo iced tea balanced in his other hand. ‘Your gut telling you anything useful yet?’
‘Not a damned thing,’ Sam said.
‘Mine neither,’ said Martinez.
The only thing that had come out of Sanders’ office to date was confirmation that the tiny threads he’d found in the strangulation indentations were white cotton, the kind you’d find in the cords of mass-produced towelling robes.
‘Common as shit,’ Martinez had said.
Which was why they’d been reduced to trying to zero in on their own gut reactions out here on the hot, humid South Beach streets, asking themselves the usual questions.
‘So, OK –’ Sam went first as they crossed over Collins – ‘what do we figure happened to our John Doe?’
‘Not a domestic,’ Martinez said. ‘Not marital, at least.’
‘Robbery gone bad?’ Sam said, since rage, they’d learned through experience, could be triggered by almost anything, and for all they knew, their victim might have been a rich guy with a wad in his wallet and a diamond-studded Rolex on his wrist.
Before person or persons unknown had strangled the life out of him, brutally raked his flesh and then poured a still unidentified chemical all over his wounds.
‘Drugs or sex or both,’ Sam said.
‘Sex,’ Martinez chose. ‘Gay encounter gone bad.’
The destruction of body and face spoke of deep, raging violence, and the detectives had learned from experience that murders with a homosexual element could sometimes be unusually violent.
‘The strangling aside,’ Sam went on as they turned right on to Ocean Drive, ‘this was an assault on his skin.’
The music was already thumping out of the restaurants, pretty waitresses standing on the sidewalk peddling their wares, proffering menus and cut-price lunches.
‘But after death,’ Martinez said, ‘which speaks against sadism.’
‘Could be race then,’ Sam said.
Race crimes made him depressed as well as sickened.
‘Race and sex,’ his partner said. ‘Who the fuck knows?’
‘We’re supposed to know,’ said Sam.
Mildred was not hungry.
The news on the streets that a man was horribly dead had killed her appetite.
‘I apologize,’ she told Sam, when he offered her a sandwich.
It was just the two of them, Martinez having returned to the office. For safety’s sake and common sense, the detectives rarely went anywhere alone, but there were exceptions to the rule, and Mildred was such a one. For one thing, she was trusted, and for another, if she did have some significant information, they knew she was less likely to pass it over as uninhibitedly if Sam was accompanied.
‘Nothing personal,’ she had told Martinez once, when he’d come along with Sam to meet her. ‘I just have this thing for Detective Becket, you understand.’ She had winked then, her sharp blue eyes knowing, and her lined, weather-beaten face had crinkled with her smile, and Martinez had taken a chance and kissed her age-spotted hand, and Mildred had laughed and seemed pleased enough, but then she’d still waited for Martinez to take off anyway.
There was something stately about the lady, Sam had thought as he’d approached their usual rendezvous and seen her, a hostess waiting for her guest, sitting surrounded by her worldly goods on the palm-shaded turquoise-painted bench near the children’s play area not far from Ocean Drive and 6th Street. This was her patch, the place where she slept at night, held court for the privileged few, and though Sam had caught occasional glimpses of her on Washington Avenue and on the beach itself, he had no idea where sh
e spent the rest of her days.
She invited him to sit, turned down the sandwich, but accepted the wine. Sam knew better than to suggest she keep the Cuban for later, because it was June and the cheese and ham and butter would be rancid in no time without refrigeration, and Mildred Bleeker, he knew, had standards.
‘May I offer you a drink, Samuel?’
Since Judy Becket, his adoptive mom, had passed away, no one else in the world had called him that, but Mildred believed that names from the good book should never be messed with, had reminded him that his late parents had chosen it for a reason.
Now she held out the bottle, label facing out, almost like a wine waiter in a fine restaurant. It was a ritual she seemed to enjoy, even though Mildred knew perfectly well that Sam would decline because he was on duty.
He thanked her as always, raised his cardboard cup of tea.
Time was, Sam Becket had been a real coffee aficionado, had been pretty much addicted to fine espresso, but one of the after-effects of last year’s traumas was that he doubted if he’d ever be able to so much as sip coffee again.
‘So,’ he said now, peaceably. ‘Is this purely social?’
‘You know I wouldn’t waste your time, Samuel,’ Mildred said. ‘Especially not when you have such serious work to do.’
‘I wish that weren’t so.’ Frankly, homicide aside, Sam could think of any number of worse ways to while away an hour than talking to this lady. ‘And before I forget, Grace sends her best.’
She and Grace had never met, but they knew about each other, and Grace had told Sam she suspected she’d enjoy the experience if they did have the opportunity.
‘And mine to her,’ Mildred said.
Sam took a sip of his tea, waited a moment.
‘So what’s up?’
‘That poor man, of course,’ she said.
‘Mildred, did you see something?’ Sam came right to it.
‘I’m not a witness to the crime, thank the Lord.’ There were people around, lazing on the grass behind them, strolling on the promenade and, beyond, on the beach, but no one was close enough to hear her, yet still Mildred lowered her voice. ‘And what I have seen – who I have seen – most likely had nothing at all to do with it.’
‘Try me,’ Sam said, gently.
‘I saw a stranger,’ she said. ‘Someone new.’
Mildred spoke slowly, thoughtfully, and though she had been mulling this over at length, it went against her principles to pack trouble on to someone else’s shoulders when they might not be in the least deserving of it.
‘Now I know, same as you, this place is always filled with strangers – and I use that word advisedly, Detective – but this young man just gave me a bad feeling.’ She screwed up her face, wrinkling her nose so that for a moment she looked almost pug-like. ‘And I’m hoping it wasn’t just his appearance, because I try not to set store by that kind of thing.’
‘I know that,’ Sam said.
Mildred shook her head, her salt-and-pepper hair long but pinned up tidily – and Sam had never seen it otherwise, had often admired that as well as the lady’s ability, against all the odds, to keep herself clean-smelling. ‘He was nothing more than a boy, really, and maybe just another poor soul selling himself to keep from joining the likes of me on the streets. But still, there was something about him that made the skin on my back creep, and it was a whole lot more than the way he was done up.’
‘How exactly was that?’ Sam was intrigued.
‘He was . . .’ She gave a small shrug. ‘He was silver, all over. But not exactly flashy, he was more delicate than that; more like mother-of-pearl or the scales of a fish.’ Mildred nodded. ‘That’s what I thought to myself, at first: that he was like some gorgeous silver-scaled dead fish on a slab in the supermarket.’
Sam waited until a man, wheeling a trolley half-filled with coconuts, had passed them by. ‘His clothes were all silver?’
‘Everything was silver,’ she said. ‘From his hair all the way down to his toes – he had those terrible shoes that make people look like they’re walking up on the mezzanine instead of the first floor, you know?’
‘Sure, I know.’ Sam smiled, because listening to Mildred Bleeker was often a pleasure in itself; and he’d have been interested in knowing if she’d received her education from some fine school, or if perhaps she’d been self-taught, but since Mildred wasn’t one to speak much about herself, chances were he’d never find out.
She shook her head again. ‘But then I realized he wasn’t a bit like a dead fish, because this boy was all life, all movement. He was more like some beautiful dragonfly, shimmering in the night, and I wanted to smile because he looked so good, almost like a skinny angel without wings, but instead my heart started thumping and I got these goosebumps.’
‘Did you see his face?’ asked Sam.
‘I did,’ Mildred answered, ‘and that was silver, too, but that aside, I couldn’t tell you anything much that would distinguish him from any other skinny young man, though he looked . . .’
Sam waited a moment. ‘What? He looked at you? Did he see you, Mildred?’
‘He did not look at me at all, Detective. He was too inside himself to do that, I thought.’ She smiled. ‘He seemed to me like a young man ought to look in the midst of lovemaking.’
‘In the midst,’ Sam asked, ‘or at the height?’ Which was the most genteel way he could think of to try to ascertain if the stranger might have been climaxing, just possibly because of what he might recently have done, or have been about to do, to their John Doe.
‘You mean was he having an orgasm?’ Mildred grinned. ‘No, sir, not yet. But he was most certainly having a heck of a time.’
‘Was he high, so far as you could tell?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mildred replied. ‘I’d say not, but of course I had no way of knowing that for sure.’
‘So where was this? And when?’
Down to business.
‘Not last night,’ Mildred said. ‘It was early yesterday morning, around two a.m.’ She wore two wristwatches, one with a pale blue band on the right, one appearing to be gold, old and tarnished, a narrow bracelet with a small face, on her left wrist. She had told Sam in the past that she valued punctuality. She was, he had found, a reliable witness.
Early Thursday morning. His happy demeanour not likely, therefore, to be immediately connected to the homicide. Unless he had already been planning the crime and relishing the anticipation.
Probably just a stranger.
‘And where did you see him?’ Sam asked.
‘On the promenade,’ Mildred said. ‘Just along from here, near 7th.’
Three blocks from where the rowboat had been pulled ashore.
It could – almost certainly did – mean nothing, and they both knew it, except that Mildred Bleeker was not given to seeing psychos around every corner.
This afternoon, with South Beach alive and pulsing, people out and about enjoying themselves in the hot, muggy sunshine, ignoring building clouds and forecasts of more thunder and rain, it was hard to picture silver oddballs high on possible dreams of murder.
But Mildred was nobody’s fool.
‘I asked myself afterwards,’ she said, ‘and then again this morning, when it kept coming back to me: why exactly did he make me feel so afraid?’
‘Did you find an answer?’ Sam asked.
‘I did,’ Mildred replied with certainty. ‘He made me feel that way because I realized it wasn’t just any ordinary skinny angel he put me in mind of, wings or not.’
Sam knew before she said the next words.
‘He put me in mind,’ Mildred went on, ‘of the angel of death.’
Sam looked down at her beside him on the bench, a surge of protectiveness sweeping him. She was a small woman, no more than five foot one, and most probably, he thought, slightly built beneath the layers of clothing.
‘We’re going to be putting on extra patrols in the area,’ he told her, ‘for the next few nights at
least, but I’m not sure I like the idea of you staying out here alone.’
Mildred looked up at him. ‘Planning on arresting me, Samuel?’
‘No, ma’am,’ he said.
‘This is my home.’ She gestured around them, at the grass and trees and the sandy promenade and dunes and the beach beyond. ‘This is my freedom.’
‘I know that,’ Sam said.
‘I can’t endure walls,’ Mildred said. ‘Not since Donny.’
She had said as much before, though never expanding on it, and Sam had no reason not to believe her, nor the slightest wish to disrupt her, let alone cause her distress.
‘Would you do me one favour?’ he asked.
‘If I can.’
‘If I give you a cell phone with my numbers programmed into it, will you promise to use it?’
‘You mean if I see him again?’ Mildred asked.
‘And if you’re ever scared again,’ Sam said.
She smiled again. ‘Where am I supposed to charge this thing?’
Nobody’s fool, Mildred.
‘I could get it charged up at the office,’ Sam said.
‘I wouldn’t be using it much, I guess,’ Mildred said.
‘We could arrange to pick it up every few days.’
‘That would mean you’d be having to know where I am.’
‘It would,’ Sam agreed. ‘Sometimes.’
Mildred thought for another moment.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I could live with that, Samuel.’
8
‘I wish,’ Grace said, towards evening, ‘you’d tell me what’s happened.’
‘I told you,’ Claudia said. ‘I needed a break.’
‘And?’
‘And I wanted to see my sister and her family.’
‘And we’re happy to see you,’ Grace said. ‘Or Sam would be if he were here.’
The baby was asleep up in the nursery, and they were back in the kitchen. Outside, the storm that had been threatening all afternoon was blowing the palms and flowers and soaking the land, but in here an aromatic fish stew was simmering on the stove, and the sisters were at the big old oak table, sipping a good red Chianti and eating olives. Other than the playpen in one corner and the toys scattered around the room – and the doggy door installed last year after Woody had developed a bladder problem – little had changed in here since Claudia’s last visit. It was still a room with a rustic, homely feel, warm wood and copper pans, comfortable, richly woven cushions on the chairs and family photographs on the walls.
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