by Robert Lane
As he walked away, Escobar heard a distinct squeak from Henriques’s left shoe every time that foot hit the ground. Escobar couldn’t suppress a smile. I know that’s just killing him, he thought. He relit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.
The letter, Escobar thought. That’s my ticket out of this squeeze.
Escobar didn’t think much of Alejo’s claim one night when he, Elvis, and Alejo were sitting around the fire pit and draining a bottle of fifteen-year-old Havana Club Gran Reserva rum. The romantic old Cuban, with his surprisingly good English, saying he knew that government secrets were buried within the outside walls of some old church in Pass-a-Grille. Wouldn’t say how he knew, just “I heard it’s behind the big stone that sticks out on the northwest corner, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Don’t know why anybody put it there; bad weather always comes from that way.” Elvis poked fun at him until Escobar told Elvis to shut the fuck up and go take a look. I’ll be damned, Escobar thought the next morning when Elvis placed an old tackle box next to the eggs on the table under the red umbrella.
He had no idea what was actually in the envelope, but he called the IRS in hopes that it could strengthen his position. He thought it might be good for an extension, or maybe half off. He told them he could just send it to the New York Times, but brokering a deal seemed a more capitalistic path. He informed them that he hadn’t even bothered to open it, but gave them the date and outside print on the 8½” x 11” envelope: “For eyes only, Allen Dulles to Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara.” They’d countered that they needed to confer with other government agencies and to sit on it.
But it wasn’t the IRS that called Escobar back. Negotiate with the IRS, the blocked call said. Really, whatever makes you happy. But open that letter and you die. That was over a week ago.
Raydel Escobar didn’t necessarily believe the man on the phone, and there was no way for that man to know if he peeked or not until the letter was returned. But if an unopened letter packed all the ammunition he needed, why run the gamut? The envelope remained sealed.
He kept Mendis and Henriques in the dark about the letter. If they thought that picture gave me leverage, they don’t know what league I’m in. Hell, maybe I can get more than the IRS off my back, maybe I get years of protection.
This time, Escobar thought, I don’t give up control. I run the play.
CHAPTER 7
“You want us to do what?” PC asked me in his machine gun cadence. The guy spit out words faster than Nashville spit out awards ceremonies.
We were standing on a black asphalt parking lot of a beach bar. I didn’t know if the sun was in the sky or under my feet. I had called PC when I left the restaurant and told him I had another job for him.
I had tripped over PC and his sidekick, Boyd, when I needed a car trailed that held a pair of Outfit hit men. They delivered and I kept their number. You never know when you may need the service of a pair of scruffy beach bums. I wanted some closeup pictures of the front of Escobar’s place, but didn’t want to show my face. Not yet. PC and Boyd, with their youthful cockiness, were game for anything.
“Just go up to the door and tell them you’re collecting for the NBS, National Bird Society, it doesn’t really matter—” I said.
“Look, dude, we got that part. What do you want us to do?”
“Pictures. Lots of pictures, but don’t let them see you taking them. Maybe one of you can—” I never finished. With PC and Boyd, I was capable, at best, of only blurting out partial sentences.
“I think we can handle it. What do you think, Boyd?”
“NBS?” Boyd asked.
“I was just suggesting—”
“I like it,” Boyd said. His laid-back persona provided a natural counterbalance to PC. “Let’s make it the National Bible Society, though, you know, like those Amish that have to take a year off to spread the good word.”
“That’s the Mormons, man, and it’s two years they sojourn without family,” PC said.
“Listen, guys, make it the National Banking Society, I could care less. Just don’t get caught, it’s not worth it. Be careful, they got cameras and—”
“You feeling it, Boyd?” PC asked.
“I’m diggin’ this whole Bible thing, man. Let’s do a few other houses first, you know, to drop in the roll.”
“I’m with you,” PC said.
“Want to carry them?” Boyd asked.
“That is so good, man.”
“Jake, where do we buy Bibles? They even make them anymore?” Boyd asked.
“Don’t get caught.” I kept it short, which increased my chance of speaking a complete sentence.
“Do they?” Boyd didn’t do rhetorical.
“It’s a perennial best seller. Check under general fiction,” I said.
PC said, “Whatever happened to those guys you had us follow, the hit men, you said, who were crowding your girl?” He nailed his eyes to mine. It was his intensity that had impressed me at our first chance meeting. I had also told him a small lie, and he instantly called me on it.
“You have a bad habit of hesitating when you avoid the truth,” he said.
“They are no longer a threat,” I said.
He waited and when nothing came said, “They are no longer.”
“That is right.”
“You’re the good guys, right?”
“Straight up with you, buddy.”
“Let’s roll, Boyd,” PC said, picking up the pace. “We’ll text you the pictures and call with anything of interest. That’s what you said you wanted, wasn’t it? See if we noticed anything of interest?”
“Look for details and get pictures,” I said.
PC and Boyd got in their ’74 black Camaro with chrome wheels, a red flame on the side, and “Endless Summer” plates. PC drove, and he rolled out of the parking lot with the zip of a sleepy turtle, his turn indicator on a good twenty feet before the entrance. PC was a fast talker and a slow driver, and that incongruity struck me.
Kathleen and I decided to have dinner that evening at the Rusty Pelican.
The place was jammed. Whatever happened to the off-season? I slapped a few guys on the back, served up my top smile, and managed to shift a few people to free up two adjacent bar stools. Fine with us. We’d take high barstools over a table any day. Kathleen wore a peach summer dress and draped her white sweater over the stool. The initial reaction from walking into an air-conditioned restaurant from a ninety-plus-degree Florida parking lot was that you’d made a wrong turn and ended up in a South Side Chicago meat locker in January. The number of sweaters you see women in Florida carry in the summer never ceases to amaze me.
My stool was uneven, and whenever I shifted my weight, I rocked. I looked around for an unused stool at the nearby high top tables, but every one had a pair of cheeks planted on it.
Michelle arranged two black napkins with corners facing us to serve as tablecloths. Michelle’s hair was the color of lemons. Last time we were in, it was the color of black olives. A 2007 Frog’s Leap Cabernet stood proud and erect over my filet mignon and Kathleen’s hog snapper. We ate off of each other’s plates as if they were one.
“How was your day?” she asked as she took a piece from the middle of my soft pink filet. She didn’t eat much beef, but when she did she preferred to kill it slowly with her own teeth.
“I went to the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum. It’s right next to the Gulf Beaches Future Museum.”
“You did not.”
“I did. Furthermore, I guarantee that when and if I ever lie to you, it will be over a much more serious offense.”
“You went to a museum?”
“Blows your mind, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve been there. Offer me one thing as proof.”
“There’s a one-armed docent.”
“Every museum has a one-armed docent. Did you talk with Frederick? He’s a fascinating person.”
“Who’s Frederick?”
“The docent.”
&nb
sp; “Ah, the man with one arm named Frederick. And what was the name of his other arm?”
“Please,” she gave me that look, “did you see the man in front of you or did you just see what wasn’t there?”
“Did you just see what wasn’t there?” I repeated it slowly. “What makes you think I run that deep?”
“Why were you there?”
“It was a pleasant morning on the promenade and—”
“Straight and neat.”
I leaned in on the counter and my stool rocked forward. “Someone hacked away on the exterior stone and took a document that has evidently been resting within those stone walls for years. Decades. Your government, Ms. Rowe, would greatly appreciate having that letter back, so if you have it, cough it up because—”
“This is related to Dorothy Harrison, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps.” By limiting myself to one-word replies I had a sporting chance.
I glanced up at a display of liquor bottles behind the bar. A soft backlight created an amber glow as if the rum itself was generating warmth. There were five rows of bottles arranged from top down: 12, 8, 9, 9, 13.
I checked out Michelle. Two arms. Count them. One. Two.
“How do you know about Dorothy?” I asked.
“Everybody knows about Dorothy. What are you going to do about finding the letter?”
“I worked on it all day. And don’t lay that ‘everybody knows stuff’ on me.”
“My question stands.”
“Would you like more wine?”
I reached for the bottle of liquid trapped since 2007. It was put into the bottle when the world was right and released after a faceless beast had clenched the financial world—society’s blood—in a death roll. The world stopped breathing, and only a faint, dissipating pulse remained when the beast suddenly vanished as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared. It left a dazed planet wondering what it was and if it would ever return. I refilled Kathleen’s glass with the innocent wine.
“We think a guy in your neck of the woods has the letter,” I said. I leaned forward, slightly more than I should, and the damn stool tilted with me. I gave everything to her straight. Kathleen knew what Garrett and I did; the run-in with her past and my desire to love—or to at least test my capability to love—one woman in the universe, and for her to be that woman, required a full confession. Miraculously, she never flinched. Never looked away. Still, I harbored reservations about whether I was cut to drop my intensity on one soul and in return have enough room in my life for another person to do likewise. Only a fool whistles down an uncharted path.
“Knock on his door,” Kathleen said when I’d finished.
“He’d simply deny everything. I think I’ll get a couple of old fishing boats and blow them up outside the house in the middle of the night, cause a serious diversion, then hop the fence and break into the house.”
“Well, that can go wrong on so many levels that you need to bring it up just to get it into the shadow of good.”
“I like that,” I said as I pushed away my plate. I didn’t tell her that wasn’t my real plan. She might inquire what my intentions were and I was still figuring out how to infiltrate Escobar’s life.
“Blowing up boats?”
“Especially that, but I was referring to your ‘shadow of good.’”
“I always thought if I could bring something up from bad into the shadow of good, then I had a chance.”
“But still not terra firma with good. A purgatory position in which sliding down is easier than climbing up.”
“That’s right, I suppose. But the chance, the opportunity, is there. And Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t over think this—I was usually referring to color combinations.”
I swirled the ruby cabernet around in the glass as her words sloshed around in my head. Kathleen struck up a conversation with a guy next to her wearing a black shirt. I settled the tab, but hesitated just a bit on whether to stay and take on another bottle and to tell black shirt to keep his eyes on his own girl. I stood, gave my stool an unnecessary shove, and walked away like I was vacating a nagging marriage.
The restaurant insisted on using valet parking, and I presented my ticket to the attendant. He retrieved my truck, all of three spots away, and gave me a sheepish grin when I palmed him a five. I retracted the moon roof, lowered the windows, and shut off the air. We rolled down Gulf Boulevard in 5,700 pounds of steel. The warm, heavy, moist night air invaded the truck and arranged the loose ends of her hair so that they danced around her neck and shoulders. I went through three satellite stations and killed the music. That is not something I do lightly.
“How do you know about Dorothy?” I asked again. I was trying to convince myself that I was not enchanted by the lady in the photographs whom I would never know. Yet the lady in the faded red dress towered over my thoughts. Kathleen didn’t answer.
“My question stands,” I said.
“She had a gorgeous old deuce and a quarter, Jake. Put this truck to shame.”
“I like my truck.”
“It’s not the vehicle, it’s the road it travels and the people it carries.”
“Can’t split those words.”
I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling, nothing triumphant at all, but sat looking straight through the windshield as if we were driving into the past. Which, I thought, would be a neat thing to do.
We entered through the white gate of the picket fence that had gray dolphins on it and sat in the two chairs on the museum’s porch facing the park across the street. Moths danced under the park’s lights and farther down under the moths, a group of senior citizens played shuffleboard. A large man must have gotten the puck close to a high-scoring area, for he shouted, “Who-wow!” as if the cavalry had arrived.
“I want to hear your voice,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then, “I wonder if from this spot all that much has changed in fifty years. I wonder why people don’t have front porches anymore.”
“What the hell is a deuce and a quarter?” Another “Who-wow!” came from the park.
“A Buick Electra 225 with enough steel to get Youngstown rolling again.”
“That’s a lot of steel.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“And you know this because?”
Kathleen Rowe did not answer.
“You’re anonymous, aren’t you?”
“Why, thank you. You create quite an impression yourself,” she said and glanced over at me. When she did, the light from the park caught the soft corner of her mouth where her thin lips formed a small smile and gave way to her smooth skin that was just starting to show her age. It was those lines around her lips, crafted by time, which possessed me.
“You support the museum. Top level is twenty-five dollars, and they go undercover after that.” Over $25 was a hiccup for her. Life insurance and her deceased husband’s business interest left her a cat’s hair under eight million. She had no indulgences met by monetary means. Maybe earrings. She had a lot of earrings. And books. A repository of books.
Damndest thing is she had been preparing to divorce Donald Cunningham before the Outfit saved her attorney fees and six months of litigious hell. Instead of half, she received all his business interest plus life insurance proceeds. Her delay in filing for divorce, coupled with the Outfit’s habit of permanently silencing dissenting opinions, had netted her an additional four.
“They’re good people who run this place, but they could be a bit more aggressive in their fund-raising,” she said. “They’re having their annual fund-raiser next week. I’ll drag you to it. Turns out her car sat in a garage for years after her death and now it’s the property of the museum. Just in gorgeous condition. Every year at the fund-raiser they park it on the street directly in front of the museum.”
“I recall seeing the annual gala announcement when I was there. They never had any children?” At least I didn’t recall seeing any su
ch pictures.
“That’s correct. Her husband died tragically years before she did.”
“She died tragically?”
“You know what I mean.”
“An article mentioned that he died in a plane crash. Any other information?”
“Not really. I believe he was on some sort of diplomatic mission. There’s just not a lot of information about him.”
We were quiet for a moment and I wondered if that was what was in store for me. A diplomatic mission followed by no photographs.
Kathleen said, “It’s hard to imagine any problems when sitting on this porch. Tell me, Jake, that all my problems are in my head and that my life is a sun-bathed path unfolding before me.”
“Keep your face to the sunshine and you will not see the shadows.”
“I forget who that one comes from.”
“Helen Keller,” I said.
“That’s right. Anything else I need to know?”
“It falls apart when the sun goes down.”
“Ah, but then we can see ourselves running with the stars,” she said.
“‘Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.’”
“Language peaked early with that one. The Romans, I believe.”
“Marcus Aurelius. Or maybe a martyr right before a lion gutted him. It was a long time ago.”
“Running with the stars.” She sang it more than said it, and I imagined the words floating out over the park and joining the moths.
I couldn’t shake the lines on the soft corner of her mouth. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.
I took her hand and we strolled around to the back. It was the dark side of the property, and an untrimmed hibiscus crowded the side of the old church where the discarded stones still lay. I led us up tight against the stone wall and the wild bush and pressed into her. We wrapped our arms around each other’s bodies and, on a hot, sultry night so thick you could fold it like clothing and pack it in a suitcase, froze the position. The sea breeze gently touched her hair, and I thought that even when you don’t move there are things that move you. I wondered where the wind started its journey and what it brought.