by C I Dennis
And then I noticed from above what I had missed from below. A man’s shape was curled up on the floor of the bass boat, wedged in between the control console and the seats. The alligator was nosing at the side of the boat, hoping to draw it closer, but the sleek craft was fastened to the dock with two mooring whips, keeping it just out of the ugly beast’s reach. So that’s what the gators had been doing there: hoping to come aboard for an evening snack.
I went back into the house and found an oar, which I used to poke at the alligator from the steps until it slid off and swam away. I didn’t see any motion in the boat, and when I got down the steps and climbed aboard, I confirmed that he was dead: part of his skull was gone, and a pool of dried blood had spread across the dark green carpet under the helm. The man’s face was turned upward, and I saw his bloated features, frozen in death.
I was looking at the male version of Lilian Arguelles—just bigger, and with several days of razor stubble on his chin, and I knew that this was her brother. Segundo Pimentel was gator bait, and he wouldn’t be telling me a thing.
*
Bobby Bove’s theory was that the victim had been shot from above, and he was positive that the ballistics report would bear him out. The blood spatter pattern was right, and so was the position of the entry wound. Pimentel had been hiding on the floor of his boat while somebody had been upstairs, and they had seen him just as I had—down there, curled up into a ball. It was a homicide, not an accident or a suicide, and it had the hallmarks of a pro hit, or at least the work of somebody who was a damn good shot.
We were in the parking lot next to Middleton’s, and the medical examiner was packing up. He told Bobby that he would have an autopsy and a report by the morning, but he could already say that the body had been there for at least twelve hours, which put the time of death sometime in the early morning before dawn. Other evidence was corroborating that: the police divers had found a flashlight in nine feet of water near the end of Pimentel’s dock while looking for shell casings, so the killing had been done in the dark.
I had offered to drive Megan home, but she insisted that she was all right and had gone home soon after they’d taken her statement. She had been shivering under the lights of the parking lot even though she had dressed back into her clothes and the evening was warm. I made a note to call her when I got to my house, just to make sure that she was OK. She hadn’t seen anything directly except for Segundo Pimentel’s shrouded body being loaded into an ambulance, but just being in the vicinity of a sudden, violent death was a bad shock to people who weren’t used to it, and even to some of us who were.
I wasn’t in shock. I was angry. Segundo Pimentel had been my best lead to Lilian, and he was now on the way to the coroner’s fridge. I decided that I wasn’t going to wait for Bobby Bove or Tal Heffernan to dribble out information as they found it, as if they were doing me a favor. I was the one who had discovered the body. I was the only one who was getting anywhere at all, even at a frustratingly slow pace. To hell with those guys.
I drove east on Highway 60, back toward Barbara, Royal, and Roberto. Royal would be asleep, which was too bad because it meant that I would miss him—I was planning to be up and on the road well before he woke up. I knew exactly where I was headed—back to Coral Gables, where I would be seeking out Mrs. Chloe Heffernan. I could have called her husband and had him ask the questions for me, but I had told her that I would protect her as a source, and I don’t renege on my promises. Tomorrow was a Saturday, and it might be tricky finding her since she wouldn’t be at the office, but I would take my chances because I didn’t want to give her advance notice of my visit. I didn’t want to give her time to come up with some kind of story—I’d heard enough of those already.
And if I failed to find her, I had a back-up plan. I would locate Javier Pimentel, and this time I might just do what his sister had suggested earlier in the day.
*
“You were on the eleven o’clock news,” Barbara said, as I closed the front door. “You missed it.”
“I wish I’d missed the whole goddamn thing.”
“Oh, Vince,” she said. “You look awful.”
“It’s been a crazy day,” I said. “And I have to go back to Coral Gables first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Are you any closer to finding Lilian?”
“Yes and no. I think I’m starting to narrow it down. Or maybe it’s being narrowed down for me. The dead man was one of her brothers.”
Barbara was dressed in her workout clothes and was sitting on the floor on a rubber mat like the one that Megan had rolled up on her paddleboard. Barbara liked to work out in front of the TV before she went to bed. I liked to lie in my chair and watch: her, not the television. My forty-four-year old wife was one of those spectacular human beings who makes the rest of us look like factory seconds, although everybody has a few nicks in the finish whether they are visible or not.
“I’m going to bed,” she said. “I wanted to wait until you got home.”
“OK.”
She rose from the mat and kissed me on the forehead. “‘Night.”
“Megan Rumsford has been hitting on me,” I said. “In the spirit of full disclosure.”
Barbara’s eyes widened. “She was on the news, too.”
“I may have to change physical therapists.”
Barbara turned her head and looked away, down the hall toward Royal’s room as she spoke. “Megan has helped you a lot, Vince. She’s really good at her work.”
“I know that.”
“I was going to sleep in Royal’s room again,” she said. “But I don’t have to. I just thought you might want the rest. You look exhausted.”
“The truth is, I’m—”
“I know,” she said.
But she didn’t. She turned away, walked down the hall to the baby’s room, and quietly let herself in, carefully shutting the door behind her while I wondered what was going to happen to the two of us. I hadn’t been trying to say that I was exhausted. Nor was I unwilling to sleep in the same bed with her. I just hadn’t been allowed to complete my sentence.
The truth was that something was starting to go very wrong in my marriage, and I had no idea how to fix it.
*
The skin of my back was freezing cold, but I couldn’t do anything about it, because I was unable to move. I couldn’t open my eyes, or even make them twitch. It was like someone had turned off the switch that controlled all of my muscles. I couldn’t even feel my heart beat.
Maybe I was dead.
The cold, hard sensation under my back and legs must be a mortuary slab. Somehow my number had come up without me even knowing it. Damn. I wasn’t even close to being ready to check out. I still had to find Lilian. And I had the sweater to finish for my sister. Is this really how it works? You’re just—gone?
I felt the hands on my chest. Warm, with a light touch, but strong. Massaging my pecs, and then working out to the deltoids, then slowly down my arms and underneath my sides and torso.
If this was death, it wasn’t half bad.
The hands were behind my lower back now, kneading, gaining intensity, and they slowly worked their way up around my waist and moved down toward my crotch.
Now I could feel my heart beat, goddamn it. It was pumping the blood through my veins like someone had opened up a fire hydrant, but I still couldn’t move an inch.
Barbara? Is that you?
I jerked convulsively under the bed sheet, and my eyes popped open.
I was at home in my own bed, alone. Just your basic horny dream, with a little weirdness thrown in. It had been weeks since my wife and I had made love, and when we’d had gaps like that before, my subconscious would sometimes treat me to a sideshow. I was still aroused, and I thought about waking Barbara, but it was late, and she wouldn’t appreciate it even though we were way overdue.
Leave me alone, dreams. Please. I have enough on my mind already.
SATURDAY
This time I was going to
take everything I had.
I gathered up my collection of listening devices, GPS trackers, and cameras with long-range lenses, my cellphone reader, my locksmith’s tool bag, my knitting, my trusty MacBook Pro that Roberto had kitted out for me, both of my Glocks, the sawed-off, and plenty of shells and ammo, and loaded it into the trunk of the Beemer in the wee hours before anyone was awake. I wanted to get on the road by six, and maybe catch Chloe Heffernan in her housecoat, sipping coffee and surprised enough by my sudden appearance to tell me everything that she knew.
I had already decided that I would keep it under eighty on the way down to Coral Gables, because if I got stopped and they looked in my trunk, I would be detained, concealed-carry permit or not. I could storm the Bastille with the stuff that I’d packed—but it was a long drive down there, and I didn’t want to have to come back to Vero just because I’d run out of bullets.
I was outside of Fort Pierce and was just getting onto I-95 when Roberto popped his head up from the back seat, causing me to swerve two lanes to the left and almost go off the highway. He looked sleepy-eyed, and a blanket covered his shoulders. I hadn’t noticed him back there when I had been packing my gear into the trunk in the semidarkness of my garage.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I fell asleep,” he said.
“In the back seat of my car? I can hardly fit a bag of groceries in there.”
“It’s not so bad if you curl up.”
“I’m turning around. Damn. This is an hour out of my way.”
“I’m going with you,” he said. “I heard you talking last night. I wanted to go see my father, so I got dressed and crawled in here.”
“You can’t Roberto. Things have gotten—bad, OK? I can’t take you along.”
“Just drop me at the hospital. I’ll stay out of your way, I promise.”
I groaned, but my stowaway was right. I could drop him off and go about my business. “All right. But first you have to earn your keep. I need to find out where someone lives.”
“You can do that on your smartphone.”
“She’s a cop’s wife,” I said. “They don’t list home addresses.”
“And?” he said. “Give me the phone.”
Smug little bastard. I couldn’t help smiling, despite the fact that I’d hardly gotten any sleep and had awakened in a grumpy mood. Roberto had a way of erasing all that.
*
Lieutenant Talbot Heffernan’s place in Coconut Grove had frontage on one of the canals that led out the Coral Gables Waterway to the ocean. Not bad, on a detective’s salary plus a paralegal’s. Maybe there was some family money—Talbot sounded like a boarding-school name.
I had left Roberto at his father’s bedside, after coming clean about Gustavo’s actual condition on the trip down. The doctors had taken him off the coma-inducing drug, and he had acknowledged us when we arrived—in fact, I saw a definite spark of joy in his eyes when he saw his son, and it gave me hope that he was on the mend. Bringing Roberto had been a good thing, I realized. I hadn’t said a word to him about his dead uncle, but I wondered if he’d already seen the news on the Internet. Probably. Roberto didn’t miss much.
I had made the drive from the hospital to Coconut Grove in a few minutes, as the traffic was sparse. The shops weren’t open yet, and the doctor’s offices and banks were closed for the weekend, keeping much of the usual morning traffic off of the road. If you were Floridian and of a certain age, you checked in regularly with both your doctor and your broker. I mean, what good was it to be rich if you were sick? Or healthy if you were broke? These philosophical matters were pondered daily at the Aquacise classes and bridge tables, and in a few years I would be pondering them myself, but for now my philosophy was simply to stay alive, and not bounce any checks if I could help it.
Chloe Heffernan met me at the door. She wasn’t in her housecoat. She was fully dressed, and she looked awake and properly caffeinated.
The house was one of those open-plan jobs furnished with glitzy, Pier One-type decorations that had the longevity of a mayfly. Mrs. Heffernan showed me to a blue wicker couch with a thinly-padded seat that would keep any guests from lingering. That was fine—I planned to be in and out as soon as I could, as long as I was getting the straight story.
“Your husband?”
“In bed,” she said. “He finally got some sleep last night. What are you doing here?”
“You heard about Segundo?”
“What?” Her face changed suddenly from that of a woman ready to start her day to someone who had had a brick dropped on her toe. I hated to say what I had to say next.
“He was killed yesterday.”
She buried her face in her hands and began to make noises that sounded like she was going to be sick to her stomach. I rose from my chair and tried to put an arm around her, but she pushed it away. “What do you want to know?” she said, gasping for breath.
“Take your time.” I waited, while she alternated between labored breathing and stifled sobs.
“Just—tell me what you need to know. I knew this would happen.”
“That he would be killed?”
“He was a good man,” she said. “Not like the other two.”
“You mean Javier? And his father?”
“I—I don’t know everything. Just—”
A bedroom door opened beyond us, and Talbot Heffernan entered into the big living room, dressed in a plaid bathrobe. “Vince? Something wrong?”
“Segundo Pimentel got shot,” I said. “He was at his weekend place. Blue Cypress Lake, outside of Vero.”
“Dead?” Tal Heffernan said.
“Yes.”
“I’d better get to the office,” Chloe Heffernan said. “The phone will be ringing off the hook.”
“Stay here,” her husband said. “We’ll have to seal it off. We’ll be getting a warrant, for sure.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “The court will appoint an attorney to take the practice over. That’s how it works.” She had quickly composed herself and was looking directly at her husband.
“This is a murder investigation,” he said. “It was a homicide, right Vince?”
“It looked like a pro hit. Sometime the night before last.”
“No one’s going through his files, Tal,” she said. “You know that. They’re confidential.”
“Chloe, whose side are you on here? The man just got killed. He was your boss.”
I watched the husband and wife go back and forth, but she was right. A lawyer’s practice records are laden with client confidentiality issues, and in this case there would be some give-and-take between the cops and the courts. Ultimately, the chief judge of the Superior Court would make the call.
“I’m going,” she said. “At the very least I need to clean up. I left files open all over the place.”
She left us, and the detective turned to me. “You came down here to tell me this?”
“I’m going to make a few more stops,” I said. “Javier, and maybe the sister.”
“Javier’s gone,” Heffernan said. “We were looking for him yesterday afternoon, after you saw him. His secretary said he’d left on a trip, but she didn’t know where.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. “We’re starting to run out of Pimentels.”
“I should probably put someone on the sister,” he said.
“I’ll take care of her,” I said. “I’m headed there next.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. Lieutenant Heffernan hadn’t seen it, but his wife had given me a head fake from the hallway just before she’d left. I didn’t think it was because she thought I was cute. She was sending me a message, and she didn’t want her husband to know:
Follow me.
*
Now I might make finally some progress, I thought. Chloe Heffernan had just handed me the family jewels.
I was in the car, crossing over the Rickenbacker Causeway toward Key Biscayne with a slim, new-looking tablet compute
r on my lap. I didn’t dare put it down on the seat next to me—it wasn’t going to leave my hands until I saw Roberto and we got the slender little machine to spew forth the things that Segundo Pimentel had most wanted to keep hidden.
These aren’t client files, she’d said when I had met her at his law office. This was for his personal correspondence. He kept it in his safe. It has a password, so you’ll have to find a way to open it.
No problem, I’d said. I had tried to get her to answer a bunch of questions. What did Segundo do for the Pimentels? Any legal work? Did he have enemies? Drink a lot? Was he a risk taker? A Don Juan? Did he owe people money? But she wouldn’t say anything.
Just take it and go, she’d said. With one condition. If there are pictures of me on it, I want them deleted. I don’t want to see them on the Internet.
Pictures? I suddenly remembered the stack of women’s magazines that I had seen next to the coffee table at the Moonshiner’s Camp.
She had shown me out of the lawyer’s office and watched as I got into the BMW. I knew exactly where I would go from there: across the bay to pick up Susanna, and then back to South Miami Hospital to collect Roberto. From there, the three of us would return to Vero Beach. Susanna would stay at my house and could sleep in the study with Roberto—I had quite the refugee camp going. I would greet my wife and child, and then Roberto and I would sit outside at the back patio table drinking Cokes while he hacked into the tablet.
Chloe Heffernan had actually answered one question for me, just as I was going out the door. I had paused at the threshold to ask her how long she and Segundo had been together. She’d looked me in the eyes, and for a moment I thought that she would come completely apart.
Nine years, she had said. And she had understood that I wasn’t asking her how long she and Segundo had worked together. I was asking her something else.
*
“Backgammon?” I asked Susanna Pimentel as we passed through South Fort Lauderdale on the interstate. This time I was taking the coastal route, and we had traveled in silence while she finished her yoghurt. I had grabbed a quick calzone from Au Bon Pain at the hospital, and my stomach was now doing a triple salchow, followed by a double axel. I don’t speak French, but I’m guessing that au bon pain means: this is gonna hurt.