by C I Dennis
“No, you can’t,” she said. “Come on, confess. The full story.”
We were standing in the lobby of the Seminole Rehabilitation Associates building, flanked by the receptionist’s desk and a half a dozen clients in the waiting room in various states of disrepair. Megan took me by the arm and led me through a door to her workroom.
“Shirt off,” she said. “Your neck and torso are all tightened up. I need to see what’s causing this.”
I removed my shirt, and she ran her hands across my chest. “I don’t get it. You’re like a brick. What did you do to yourself?”
“I got tasered by somebody,” I said. “It makes you feel like you’ve been mummified.”
“Tasered? How did that happen?”
“Work-related injury,” I said.
“I thought that you were retired.”
“Temporarily back on the job,” I said. “I need to help out some friends.”
Megan pointed to her massage table. “Pants off, dude. Lie down. I’m going to work out those kinks. You’re a stress mess, and my next appointment just canceled, so you’re getting a freebie today. And I want you back here tomorrow, too.”
She started by working on my neck, and as she dug her fingers deep into the tendons and muscles, I began to float off into the ozone. It wasn’t just Megan’s fabulous technique—it was because I trusted her, and I had worked with her long enough that I completely gave myself up to her talents. The relationship was not unlike having a lover, although Megan was a professional and I was a married man who knew where the lines were drawn. Just relax, I told myself. She knows what she’s doing. You’re safe.
“It’s not just the Taser thing, is it?” Megan asked, as she began to work her hands down my spine to my lower back.
“Beg pardon?” I said, my words muffled by the pillow on her massage table.
“Something else is happening. You’re very upset.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I managed to say between grunts.
“Tell me about it,” she said, making her hands stop. She rested them at my sides, and I could fell the warmth of her skin from the friction.
“Barbara. You two really know each other? You never said so.”
“She and I kind of trade. She lets me take free classes, and I do her bodywork.”
“Oh.”
“Oh what?” Megan said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s…what we were talking about yesterday. I’m involved in an investigation. Not because I necessarily want to. It’s for some very important friends. Barbara doesn’t like that, but I don’t really have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” Megan said.
“You don’t understand.”
Megan stopped the massage again and leaned her face down to where her lips were right behind my ears. I could feel the warmth of her breath, and for a second I wondered—what the heck was she doing?
“Yes, I do understand, Vince,” she said, in a half-whisper.
I waited for her to resume the massage, but it didn’t happen. She was expecting me to say something in response. Nothing was going to continue until I spoke.
“I probably ought to get going,” I said.
“Then go.” She stood up and walked out of the therapy room, closing the door behind her while I dressed.
*
My appetite finally came back after not having eaten a thing since yesterday’s breakfast before Sonny and I flew to the Keys. It was only eleven in the morning, but I knew what I wanted: red meat. That was a rare delicacy at home, since Barbara had all but banned it from the menu. I went to the reddest, meatiest joint I knew, which was Five Guys Burgers on the Highway 1 strip. The place was already full of people getting a jump on the lunch hour, and I stood in line trying to decide between the “little” cheeseburger and the regular one; I decided to go with the less humongous of the two. I was planning to take a beach walk afterward to clear out my thoughts, and hoped I could burn off some of the 550 calories, according to the nutritional information on the wall, plus another 526 calories from the “little” fries that I would inevitably order as an accompaniment to the burger. Sure, these things would eventually kill me, but when I go, I want to smell like a cheeseburger and not a bag of kelp chips.
I worked the phone while I sat at a table to enjoy my potentially fatal lunch. I had already texted both Gustavo and Lilian several times since daybreak, with no response from either of them. I was kind of annoyed that Gustavo would instruct me to take care of Roberto, and then wouldn’t even text me back. Annoyed, and also worried. There was no reason that I could think of for him to ignore me. I’d given both of their cellphone numbers to Bobby Bove, who would try to locate them electronically and had promised to call me if he did.
I tried to compose an appropriate message to send to Barbara. You only get so many words in a text, so you have to make them count. I hadn’t heard a thing from her, nor would I, as whenever we fought it was usually up to me to make the first overture toward reconciliation. No way would she back down first—that was just how she was, and I was used to it, even if I didn’t like it.
Can we have a talk? I wrote.
If it begins with an apology, she sent right back.
Not necessary, I’ve already forgiven you. Haha. Needless to say, I didn’t get a response. Where’s Royal? I wrote.
At the sitter, she texted back, after a long wait.
I’ll go get him. I just went 2 Sheriff’s office. Turned it over 2 them. Not investigating this anymore.
That’s not an apology, she sent back after another lengthy wait.
Bite me, I typed, and I came dangerously close to sending it. Instead, I slid the phone back into my pocket. Barbara was pushing my buttons, and I wasn’t going to rise to it. I would pick up Royal, get in a beach walk, collect Roberto after school, and take some chicken wings out of the freezer when we got home. I would grill them over charcoal later tonight, and they would be crisp and succulent by the time that Barbara got home. Health-nut or not, my wife was powerless before my chicken wings, and I would thereby resume my role as her master and provider, and our argument would be quickly forgotten, right?
Tanzi’s Tip #3: Women forget nothing.
Half an hour later I had Royal strapped to my back in an aluminum-framed carrier and we were crossing the warm sand of South Beach from the parking lot toward the water’s edge. The surf was calm, and the afternoon was shaping up to be another hot one. By this time in May most of the snowbirds were back up North, and the natives had reestablished their presence on the beaches—real Floridians didn’t go swimming during the “winter” months, but they were out today, and I passed several people who I knew. Royal and I trekked north to the Riomar golf course, which had sometimes surrendered big chunks of fairway to storms and erosion but had survived this year. Royal cooed and gurgled on my back while I navigated carefully across the sand, looking for the firmest path to support my uneven gait. The Vinny Shuffle had made beach-walking twice as much work, but I had 1,076 calories to burn off, my son was happy, and I began to relax for the first time in days. Megan’s massage had helped, although she had thrown me something of a curveball at the end. I’m at the stage of life where young women look right through me as if I were invisible or potentially obscuring their view of a more suitable mate. I still have all of my hair, I’m not fat, I’m tall for an Italian American, and I keep myself well-groomed, but I have no illusions of being hit on by a thirty-something female, especially one who was pretty god-danged hot, like Megan Rumsford.
Nevertheless, it had been awkward when she’d said yes—I understand—and had practically kissed the back of my neck. That didn’t feel like professional encouragement, or friendly affection.
It felt like a hit.
If that was what it was, I told myself, I should let it lie. Accept it as innocent, well-meaning flattery, and leave it at that. You’re married, and oh-by-the-way, your marriage needs some work, and you are damn lucky to have what you have, so don’t g
et distracted.
I could feel Royal getting antsy in the backpack, and I recognized the little leg-kicks that he does when he has a full diaper. I stopped near the surf’s edge and put him down on the sand. There were extra diapers in the pocket of the pack. I had him wiped and changed in under a minute. If there was a diaper-changing event at the Olympics I just might take home a medal. I lifted him back into the pack and prepared to load it onto my back, when he pointed at a dark, oval-shaped object that was sitting in the shallow water a few feet from us.
The object was a deer cowrie. A spectacular, fist-sized shell, mottled with brown and white speckles across the top like a fawn. Cowries used to be fairly common back in the days when Vero Beach had been a sleepy Florida retreat, but they were rare now. I picked up the shell and handed it to Royal, who promptly put one end of it in his mouth.
When Glory and I had walked the beach, she would occasionally find a beautiful shell, and she would say that it was a gift from her dead relatives. Maybe this one was a gift from my deceased wife to my son. Glory and I had tried for children, but it hadn’t been in the cards. The cowrie shell was Royal’s now, and he cooed happily as he mouthed the salty brine from its surface while we made our way back to the car. I would find a safe place for it at the house, and I wouldn’t allow it to become lost. I had lost enough already.
*
I was in the mommy line outside the entrance to St. Edwards School, waiting in a queue of vans and SUVs for Roberto. Royal was dozing in his car seat after polishing off a bottle of defrosted breast milk with the all the gusto of a parched tourist at Oktoberfest. I had my knitting gear out, but I kept making mistakes and was afraid that my cussing might wake the baby, so I put it back in the bag and surfed on the phone while we waited. There were several articles on the news about the Pimentel shooting, but they didn’t tell me anything that I hadn’t already heard from Tal Heffernan, except for one that had speculated about Pimentel’s shady past and if the shooting was the start of a Cuban Mafia “war”. I knew nothing about the mobster factions or rivalries in Miami-Dade County, except that with the Mariel boatlift of 1980 Fidel Castro had effectively emptied the jails of Cuba and had dumped twenty-five-hundred miscreants on our shores, to his eternal hilarity. There were lots of good folk who had come over during that exodus, but there was also a preponderance of bad actors and their offspring who had kept the Miami-Dade authorities busy ever since.
Roberto opened the door and got in the passenger seat before I’d even noticed him approaching. He didn’t acknowledge me, and he wore the face of someone older than his years.
“I’ve got the Sheriff’s people on it now,” I said. “They know what to do. They’ll find them.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“You holding up OK?”
“Barely,” Roberto said. I had never heard him say anything like that. Roberto seldom expressed his emotions, not even to me.
“You want to go do something fun? Go for a swim?”
“I want my parents back,” he said. “I’m scared, Vince.”
Damn. I was scared, too, but agreeing with him wouldn’t help.
“You drive,” I said. That would distract him. “I’ll pull over at the corner.”
“Royal’s in the back. Your wife would go crazy.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I—have a lot of homework.”
“No problem then. We’ll just go home. And your mom and dad are going to be OK, all right?”
“Yeah,” Roberto said, just as Royal woke up and began to cry.
*
I had forgotten that Thursday nights were when Barbara taught Pilates at her club. So much for seducing her with my chicken wings. She had returned home from school, made a quick health shake, and had taken off again, barely acknowledging that I had moved back in with Roberto in tow. It appeared that we had a truce and that Roberto could stay, so I made up the sofa bed in my study for him before retiring to my own bed.
I lay awake wondering about what if any success Bobby Bove and Tal Heffernan might have had so far in finding Roberto’s parents. I would check in with each of them in the morning. The longer these things went on, the more likely it was that they would end badly. I hoped that they had some good leads and they just hadn’t gotten around to telling me.
Barbara was usually home from her class by ten, but ten o’clock came and went, as did eleven. First, I figured that she was trying to punish me, in her passive-aggressive manner that always bothered the hell out of me. Why not just sit down, hash it out and move on?
As the clock on the bedside table approached twelve, I started to worry for real. It was now two hours after her usual return time. She had school in the morning, and she’d need to be out the door by seven. I thought about casually checking in with the dispatcher at the Sheriff’s, just to make sure that nothing bad was on the log. If Barbara was in a ditch somewhere…
The front door opened, and noises began coming from the kitchen: wife-noises, not intruder-noises, thank God. Barbara was home, and I was relieved—and seriously pissed off at the same time.
I heard her in the bathroom a few minutes later and rehearsed my opening line for when she got into bed next to me. I’m sorry that you felt it necessary to stay out so late. That would be the right combination of a sideways apology from me and a chastening for her misbehavior. Hell yeah, I can do passive-aggressive with the best of them.
I never got the chance. I heard the door to the baby’s room close, just after the hall light went out. She would be sleeping with Royal again, not with her husband.
The truce was over, and the war would drag on.
FRIDAY
Nobody ever gets a phone call at three thirty in the morning with good news, unless you happened to know someone who was expecting a baby. When I saw SHERIFFS DEPT on the caller ID, I prepared myself and reluctantly picked up the receiver.
“They found him,” a tired-sounding Bobby Bove said. “Heffernan just called. Gustavo Arguelles is in the trauma unit at South Miami. They’re putting his face back together, and one of his lungs is collapsed.”
“Car accident?”
“Nope,” Bove said. “No car, no accident. An ambulance driver saw it. He got dumped at the entrance of the E.R., out the side door of a black van. Nobody got a plate, but Heffernan is all over it, looking for those two guys.”
“No word on Lilian?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m going to go down there. I need help with the boy. He’s going to need a ride from my house to St. Ed’s in the morning.”
“I’ll take him myself.”
“I owe you, Bobby.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “I tell you what. I don’t like gangbangers screwing with people from Vero Beach. This isn’t that kind of town.”
*
You do what you think is best, because that’s what you’re going to do anyway. Those had been Barbara’s only words when I had awoken her to explain what was going on. She pulled the covers back up, and I left the nursery shaking my head, realizing that I was strictly an amateur in the passive-aggressive department. I wiggled Roberto’s shoulder before I left and told him that his dad had been in an accident, and that he was going to be OK, and that I would get him home from the hospital, all of which had just barely enough truth in it to not be total bullshit, but I doubted that Roberto would get any more sleep, no matter how I tried to spin it.
The drive to Miami is a grind in normal traffic, but at this time of the morning I could make it in two hours. The Beemer likes to cruise along at around eighty on the highway, and the Highway Patrol guys left me alone—they were too busy pulling over the various carloads of kids who would fly past me at a hundred-and-something in their jacked-up compact cars. Where the heck did they get the money for a $400 ticket, not to mention the points? At that age you don’t think about those things until it’s too late, because you are invincible.
The dawn began to lighten th
e eastern sky as I passed through Fort Lauderdale, and by the time I parked on the top level of the South Miami Hospital garage, a fat, liquid sun began to wobble above the rim of the horizon. Another beautiful day in South Florida, unless you happened to be lying in a hospital bed with the shit kicked out of you.
I made my way to the trauma unit and negotiated with a sleep-deprived nurse at the desk about the visitor’s protocol: you had to be immediate family, and you needed the doctor’s permission, period, no exceptions. I would have continued to haggle, but Lieutenant Tal Heffernan came out into the lobby and met my glance with his piercing grey eyes. I tapped him on the shoulder and extended my hand.
“I’m Vince Tanzi.”
He squinted as he examined me. “You—”
“Look different?” I said. “I got shot since the last time you saw me. I’m missing a few pieces.”
“I read about that.”
“You’re up late,” I said. His fair complexion was streaked red with the telltale broken capillaries of someone who enjoyed his evening cocktail.
“Another all-nighter. My wife says I’m a vampire.”
“So, how is he?”
“He can’t talk, but he’s awake. They have his jaw all wired up. I got him to blink yes or no, and I asked him a few questions, but he’s pretty far out there on the pain meds.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“Not really,” he said. “I asked him if it was the Iturbe brothers. Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
“And?”
“And, he didn’t blink.”
“He doesn’t want to say?”
“Hell if I know,” the lieutenant said. “Nobody’s volunteering anything on this case. A well-known rich guy gets gunned down in broad daylight, and nothing, not from his kids, not from any of our regular sources. His daughter’s missing, the son-in-law gets the crap beat out of him, and even some nosy P.I. gets his knuckles rapped.”
“Can you get me in to see him?”
“Sure,” he said. “I can use all the help I can get.” He took out a card. “My cell’s on there. Call my office if you want a look at the file. And please don’t text me anything, I don’t do that.”