“This is a dream?”
“This is not a dream. I wrestle the lion for I don’t know how long. I roll onto my side and get a look and see that he’s a feline duplicate of me, and then at some point I pass out and wake up later drenched in blood and sweat and with my jeans and shirt torn to shreds.”
When I pointed out that it was hardly conceivable that he or any person could vanquish an actual lion in real life, Wayne asked me how then would I account for the actual blood soaked into the real-life carpet. “This sort of thing has never happened to you?” he said.
I got to Oppenheimer’s in downtown New River before Carlos did. The kid working the register was growing a Johnny Depp-ish goatee and wore these vintage silver eyeglasses with oval lenses. Maybe he was a Civil War reenactor. He’d have to pull his Dickies up over his Family Guy boxer shorts if he was going to carry it off. I grabbed a Journal-Gazette and ordered a coffee. Construction workers had uncovered what might be a Calusa Indian burial ground near the South River. Courts had put a hold on the development of a new mall till archaeologists had a chance to examine the artifacts. Meanwhile the Tequesta Tribe, jumping the gun, perhaps, said the site was sacred to native peoples, and they would protect it at all costs.
Page two: There were now thirty-six active, unsolved missing persons cases in Everglades County, including most recently an eighty-nine-year-old Alzheimer’s victim, who had wandered away from his daughter’s home in Ridgeland, and an eighteen-year-old female who lived alone, went out to the store, and never came back. Thirty-six people here one minute and gone the next.
A golf-ball retriever at Eden Golf Club was mauled by an alligator in the lake near the thirteenth hole. Two golfers went to his aid and beat off the alligator with their clubs, but not before the diver lost an arm. While the rescue was going on, the next foursome played through. Carlos walked in, went behind the counter, poured himself a coffee, and joined me. I folded my newspaper.
For a couple of weeks I’d had a squatter living in my yard. He’d set up camp in the shrubbery along the fence. I’d asked him nicely to leave. He said he had nowhere to go. I said, Try the homeless shelter. He said it was a dangerous place. I called the cops. No one came by. So I told Carlos. “I see this guy in the morning and at night, not every night, but most, especially since he’s taken to leaving his sleeping bag and backpack behind the heliconias.”
“He trusts you,” Carlos said.
“I don’t want him there.”
“Is he hurting anyone?”
“No.”
“What do you have against the guy?”
“It’s my house.” I told Carlos how today I had tried to ignore the guy. I walked straight to my car, and I heard, “What, you’re not going to say hello?” He was sitting in his sleeping bag, leaning up against the fence, reading Harper’s, which he probably stole out of my recycling bin. “Stuck up?” he said to me.
Carlos thought this was funny.
I said, “Would you put up with this?”
“No, but I wouldn’t ask for help, either.”
Carlos slid a gift-wrapped book across the table. “Merry Christmas from Inez.”
She’d gotten me a copy of An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie. I opened to a random page and read to Carlos:
I was walking home alone and the night was still. Suddenly looking up, I saw long white streaks whirling in the wind above my head. It was like the radiance of some invisible hearth, from which dazzling light rays shot out, streamed into space, and spread to form a great deep-folded phosphorescent curtain which moved and shimmered, turning rapidly from white to yellow, from pink to red.
I said, “Give Inez a hug for me.” Inez and Carlos had been married for twenty years or so but separated about every two or three years, for six months to a year each time, and Carlos was worried that one of these days the separation would take. Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I’ve loved her ever since.
My father once told me that he wanted to see the northern lights before he died. He said he slept through them when he was a kid in Massachusetts. “When I got up in the morning, my old man told me what a spectacular show I had missed. I couldn’t believe the dufus didn’t wake me up.”
Carlos said, “The Hallidays were each killed by a single gunshot fired from the same .22-caliber pistol, a Colt Woodsman, which we found in the den along with the bullet casings, beside the open hand of Chafin Halliday at the crime scene. Death was instantaneous in each case. There was no sign of struggle. There were no unusual footprints either inside or outside of the house. There was no damage to vegetation. No unexpected fingerprints were found. There was no sign of forced entry. The neighbors saw no one unfamiliar enter or leave the house.”
“Why would Halliday own a gun?”
“The same reason everyone else does.” Carlos opened his memo pad and looked at his notes. “Halliday purchased the pistol at the New River Knife and Gun Show”— he counted on his fingers—“seven years ago.”
“I don’t own a gun.”
“A random search of cars in any South Florida mall parking lot will uncover handguns stashed in half of all the cars.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Very much.”
“Handguns should be banned.”
“I agree with you, but they are not, and we live in a complicated world. Your naïveté will not make it simpler.”
Our waitress—Bluebelle, her name tag said—freshened our coffee. She had her blond dreadlocks tied back, one green eye, one brown eye. We’d need a few more minutes before we ordered, thanks. “Chili,” she said, and winked her green eye. Outside on Magnolia Avenue, two rotund little men in blue shorts, white socks, sandals, and striped polo shirts walked down the street carrying plastic supermarket bags in one hand and holding white hankies over their balding heads with the other.
“No criminal history,” Carlos said. “No evidence of any drug use. No enemies, none who would want to kill him anyway.”
“Did you speak with Officer Shanks?”
“Taken care of.”
“Was I right?”
“We found nothing funny on Halliday’s computer.”
“What computer?”
“The one in the trunk of his car.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No love notes to secretaries, no porn, no hidden confidential files. Mr. Halliday seems to have been a solid citizen.”
Carlos ordered a ham, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich, and I got the Chili Souper Bowl with atomic salsa. Two iced teas. Carlos said, “What’s that Sherlock Holmes line you’re always quoting?”
“ ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
“Chafin Halliday murdered his family and took his own life. The suicide note seals it.”
Carlos told me that on the evening of the twenty-third Halliday worked late at his office in Melancholy, ordering food for the restaurant, and I said that sounded like a man planning a future. Halliday stopped by the home of a local state rep and dropped off a Christmas bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. He got home at seven, made a long call to a friend in Rhode Island, and Carlos said that sounded like a man saying goodbye. Halliday left the house on the twenty-fourth at six-thirty in the morning as usual and stopped by the restaurant to leave Christmas bonus checks with his manager and then seemed to have spent a couple of hours at the Tropical Mall. He took the family to the movies at the IMAX in the afternoon. They got home around five-ish, and Mrs. Halliday preheated the oven to three-fifty.
“How do you know all this?”
“Receipts, witnesses, neighbors.”
I asked about Mrs. Halliday.
“Born Krysia Plotczyk. A devout Catholic, soccer mom, vice president of the PTA. We’re trying to reach her family in Gdańsk.”
I said, “What was Halliday’s motive?”
“I think he may have felt hopeless. He was in debt and had suffered some recent business setbacks. He used to own Gold Coast Cruise Lines.”
“The gambling boats.”
“He had a gold mine there for years, taking people out past the three-mile limit, plying them with booze, and then setting them loose on very tight slot machines and at the blackjack and poker tables. Halliday ran the largest unregulated gambling enterprise in the country.”
“But then the Silver Palace opened up.”
“Exactly. And the county voted to allow slots, video poker, and Texas Hold ’Em at the racetracks and jai alai. He started bleeding money. Couldn’t pay his bills, laid off dozens of employees. The bank was threatening to repossess the boats. He had to sell, and sell fast.”
“Who bought the business?”
“He wanted to sell to the Tequestas, but they weren’t interested. The lobbyist for the tribe, however, was. He and a partner made an offer that Halliday thought was an insult.”
“Who would want to buy a business with such bleak prospects?”
“These two guys had big plans to turn the boats into VIP floating nightclubs. Nightclubs being a euphemism for brothels. Halliday got no other offers, and he sold for less than he paid. He was still in debt and was likely going to lose the restaurant. And, who knows, maybe his family. And then what? Maybe he thought this was the only way out.” Carlos shrugged. “Anglos,” he said. “Who can tell how they think?”
“Your father’s Irish.”
“No one’s perfect.”
“So who were the buyers?”
“One’s a little shady; the other’s a pillar of the community.”
Mr. Shady turned out to be a disbarred lawyer named Park McArthur, whose mother was murdered in a bungled robbery at her husband’s jewelry store in Queens. Her husband, Park’s stepdad, Artie Berman, put up a sizable reward, but Park, Artie’s lawyer, “borrowed” the money and invested in a chain of adult bookstores in New Jersey. He got caught before he was able to return the cash, and he had to look for a new occupation and a new family. He moved to D.C. and opened an auto dealership, Park’s Cars, and started advertising like mad on local TV and became a celebrity. He would dress up in a straitjacket offering “crazy prices” and “insane deals” until he was subdued by attendants or chased off camera by a man with a butterfly net.
Carlos said, “Around this time he met Jack Malacoda, his eventual partner. Malacoda’s a prominent GOP fund-raiser and an influential K Street lobbyist. He’s on the board of a dozen charitable foundations. Very powerful and connected guy who’s got more money than God. He’s fiercely religious and devoted to his family.”
“There’s two red flags right there.”
“Cynic.” Carlos is a little sensitive on the subject of religion. He’s a fervent Catholic, a deacon at St. Jude’s, and a daily communicant.
“A religious zealot opening a brothel?”
“It’s smart business.”
“Lobbying for gambling?”
“Gaming,” Carlos said.
“Suspects?” I said.
“No motive. No opportunity. They’ve both been marlin fishing off Mexico since the twenty-first.”
Bluebelle brought our lunch. We thanked her. I said, “Carlos, you’re not putting ketchup on the eggs, are you?”
He finished squirting the ketchup, bit into the sandwich, and wiped his lips with a napkin. He stirred and stirred his tea with the straw and stared a hole into his sandwich.
I said, “Carlos, where did you just go?”
“I became a cop to put bad guys away.” He brushed a fly off the rim of his glass. “Turns out there are a lot of very bad guys out there. How’s Myles, by the way?”
“Dad’s good. Thanks for asking. And by good I mean he’s not worse.”
Carlos told me he had to drive out to the Hills after lunch. A seniors-only condo had evicted tenants who didn’t want to leave, a couple who had lived there for thirteen years.
“Why the eviction?”
“They took in their ten-year-old granddaughter after her parents were killed in a car wreck.”
“Bastards!”
“It’s the law, Coyote.”
“What?”
“You and I might not like it, but those are the rules. You break the rules, you suffer the consequences.”
“There’s no room for compassion?”
“There is. This condo board, however, has opted for indifference.”
“Where is the justice?”
“Order is essential. Justice is a luxury.”
“Are you serious?”
“You can’t run a country or a business or a school or a family when there is disorder. Everything falls apart.”
I said, “Maybe we’ve settled for order because it’s easier to get than justice.”
Carlos smiled. He told me not to turn around, and I suddenly had to stop myself from looking back.
He said, “What’s behind you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know, Coyote. You should always know, because what’s behind you may be gaining on you.”
On the way home after work, I drove to the beach and toyed with the idea of dropping in at La Mélange to see if I could learn anything new about Chafin Halliday. I parked on Aviles Street alongside a black Camaro that had THE COSMOBIOLOGY OF I AND I painted on the back window. A redheaded vulture drifted in the wind over my head, leaned back, spread his wings, dipped his tail, and let the breeze carry him over the sea grapes to the beach, picking up speed as he went. He seemed so exhilarated. Three feral cats and I watched him sail, wishing we all could play like that.
Bay called on the cell as I walked along the Boardwalk. I told him some of what I’d learned from Carlos about the Gold Coast boats. He told me the games on the boats were rigged. In the six-deck blackjack dealing shoe, six aces were removed and six sixes were added. “A false shuffle here, a double deal there, and nobody’s any the wiser.”
I said that that sort of thing might make people angry.
“Not angry enough to kill five people,” he said. “The folks that gamble on the boats take the bus from the Gulfstream condos. They pay their $29.50 and enjoy the cruise to nowhere. It’s their social life. Real gamblers don’t ride the boats. An hour and a half out to the three-mile limit, an hour and a half back. Three hours without gambling. Let’s say you have to drive a half hour each way to the boats. Now you’re talking eight hours of your time for four hours of action.”
There were no seats inside La Mélange, so I sat at a small table outside. I ordered galvaude and unsweetened iced tea. I told the waiter that I was sorry about what had happened to his boss. He told me that the boss hadn’t spent much time at the restaurant lately. Came and went. Last time he’d seen Halliday was the day he died, when he stopped by briefly around four to see the manager. But still it’s so sad and so meaningless. You wouldn’t think this could happen to a man who was so conscious of his security like Chafin was, paranoid almost. The guy at the next table was reading aloud to himself from a book. He must have been trying to learn Spanish. He said, “Hoy viene una noticia importante. Puede cambiar su vida.” Or maybe he was reading his horoscope.
The waiter returned with my meal. He said, “Of course, none of us know what’s going to happen with our jobs. Or if we’ll be getting a paycheck on Friday. What a mess.”
I asked him if the police had been by to speak with the staff, and he said they hadn’t. I asked him if there was a typewriter in the restaurant’s office. He said there was not. I got a text message from my friend Phoebe telling me she’d meet me at my house at eight. The man at the next table said, “Hace poco viento pero hace mucho sol.”
When I parked the car in the driveway, I heard, “My name’s Red, not that you cared enough to ask.”
I walked over to Red’s encampment. Now he had a hibachi and a bag of charcoal by his sleeping bag. I said, “Why are you here?”
“Red Soile
au.”
“Why my yard?”
“You seem like a pleasant fellow.”
“Good night, Red.”
“Good night…”
“Wylie.”
“Wylie.”
I saw the light flashing on my answering machine. I pushed the button. The male voice said, “Listen, shithead, keep your nose out of my business, or I’ll shove a black sports watch up your ass.”
I should tell you about Phoebe. We dated in high school, and I was crazy in love with her, and she with me, but I would never promise her the kind of long-term commitment she needed. Her dad was a bad memory, and her mom was a genial inebriate. Phoebe had no siblings. Some nights we’d walk through Whispering Pines Golf Course and lie on the greens and wait for the sprinklers to drench us. How can I tell the future, Phoebe? I would say. Yes, I think I’ll always love you, and I always want to be in love with you, but I can’t know if I will be. I was like a lawyer in love, negotiating a pathetic escape clause. We drifted apart. Eventually, I married Georgia Mears, and Phoebe married Gary Clarke, star quarterback for the South Everglades High Stevedores, and she became a nurse, and he became a cop and also became physically and emotionally abusive to her, and they divorced after years of turmoil, scandal, humiliation, and injury.
Phoebe and I became friends again, and then more than friends, when she was going through hell with Clarke. Georgia had already left me. First I was there for support, then support became comfort, and comfort became passion. And then passion was insufficient for Phoebe, and she married a Norwegian chiropractor, Dr. Kai Pedersen, and they lived a mile or so from me on Eden Lake. Those days we met when we could, and I cared about her more than I cared about anyone. She wanted me to move on with my life. There was little chance of her ever leaving Kai. He was a sweetheart, for starters, and at least for now he was here in the States as a permanent resident on a green card and had a year to wait before applying for naturalization. If they separated before then, it was back to Hammerfest for Kai. Lately she’d been telling me I needed to find a girlfriend I could build a future with. But I ignored her.
I answered the door and asked Phoebe if she’d met Red.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 4