Night? It was only nine-thirty in the morning. She needed to see Hart sooner than that. The desk officer was sorry, but could do nothing about it.
He connected her with another Vice detective to whom she gave the basic facts about the fraud case that Hart was pursuing, although she did not give him the details of her father’s whereabouts or the whereabouts of the statue of the Queen. This detective didn’t appear to be much interested but he agreed to pass along her information to Hart. Clearly the capture of Jack Peregrine was not an urgent priority here at MPD, nor was the current location of Sgt. Daniel Hart.
She headed back onto the expressway, making slow progress through the morning’s rush-hour traffic. As she drove, she called Golden Days. They had no Dr. Parker on their staff, or at least wouldn’t admit to it. When she asked to speak to Coach Ronny Buchstabe, they tried to put her through to their administrator, Ms. Skippings. Annie hung up. She didn’t want her dad arrested until she could set up an amnesty arrangement with Hart. Better just to leave him resting at Golden Days. She called Sam in Emerald to fill her in on her latest encounters with her father, including a report of Jack’s weak condition in the hospital. She also described the discovery of the gold statue in the courier case and Rook’s endless tales of Jack’s criminal past. But it was Jack’s current health that Sam most wanted information on.
Hearing that he might really be dying of cancer, Sam made a sudden sobbing noise but stopped herself quickly with a sharp laugh.
“I don’t know what to think,” Annie told her. “Is it true? Is it a con? What do you think?”
The truth was that Sam thought her brother had terminal cancer, but she quickly reassured her niece that “Jack’s pulling our leg. But it’s a very, very bad joke.”
Annie agreed that it wasn’t funny. Meanwhile it seemed likely that, even if terminal, Jack’s condition wasn’t immediately critical; when she’d seen him yesterday he wasn’t even in intensive care. But she would definitely speak with a doctor at Golden Days as soon as possible and would insist that they move her father to a better hospital, even if it meant returning him to prison. As soon as she found the elusive Daniel Hart, she would sort it all out.
“Poor Jack,” sighed Sam. “He got mixed up with a bad crowd.”
“Right. Poor dad. This Feliz Diaz must have corrupted him.”
Sam said, “Listen, if I’ve heard of Feliz Diaz, he’s a kingpin, because you know I never watch that junk TV news and I don’t read the right-wing rags.”
“Sam, you think Newsweek and the New York Times are right-wing rags.”
“Bought and sold, baby.” Sam urged Annie to collect Jack and fly him home on one of Brad’s Hopper Jets so that Clark could get him admitted to the hospital in Emerald where Sam could watch over him.
“I can’t keep borrowing Brad’s jets. I’m divorcing him.”
“Are you sure? I just want you to be happy.”
“Come on, Sam. Were you happy? Like Clark says, who’s happy?”
Sam claimed that she was much happier than she’d used to be. The older she got, the less she cared about crap that made you unhappy, like what anybody else thought of her, and how much money she had, and what she might have, could have, should have done better in the past. Like that double-fault serve in the ’83 national first round that had haunted her for ten years. She just wished she could help Annie not waste these years of her youth that Sam herself had wasted.
Annie said, “Sam, don’t get philosophical on me. I’ve heard enough of that from Raffy Rook today.”
“Raffy?”
“Rafael Rook. By the way, he told me Dad said my mother’s name was Kay Denham. Think that’s possible?”
There was a long pause. Then Sam said, “Sweetie, Kay Denham is the name of the character Claudette Colbert played in I Met Him in Paris.”
“Goddamn him!” Annie made her exit turn so fast her tires squealed. “Why would he even tell Raffy that?”
“Leave well enough alone,” suggested Sam.
Annie said that she had left well enough alone for decades. It was Jack Peregrine who had hauled her back into his life. “So too bad. No way I’m dropping this, Sam. Bye.”
Annie followed the exit back to South Beach and the Hotel Dorado where she answered all her Annapolis emails and sent her uniform in a rush order to be dry-cleaned. Okay, if she had to wait till tomorrow morning, she’d wait. Maybe that was her challenge; she hated waiting and so she was forced to do it. She hated not working and never took vacations. She had so much unused leave that the Navy had told her to use it or lose it. How long had it been since she’d answered to no schedule? Not since she’d started elementary school. All right, today she’d win the war of waiting. Maybe she’d even go shopping. Maybe she’d go to a bookstore and buy a book and sit by the Dorado pool and read it. She could do anything she wanted. That would be the hard part.
***
Late that afternoon, Annie was swimming laps at the hotel pool. As she swam, methodical, classic form, she determined that if she had a mother out there anywhere alive, she would somehow get that woman’s real name out of her father and would track her down and…why…?
What would she even want from the woman at this point, besides asking her why she had ever left her baby behind with a man like Jack Peregrine? Maybe it was only that. She would ask her that one question.
Annie thought about how her first Navy flight instructor had yelled at her in the cockpit as they’d sat in the jet on the rainy deck of the USS Enterprise. “You gotta go, Goode! You women wanna join the Navy, you gotta fly a Tomcat not a pussycat. Commit to go, damn it!” And she had forced herself to set aside both his remark and her fear. She had taken a long breath and then shot her jet forward off the deck of that rolling ship in what the instructor had admitted after they’d landed was a goddamn 90 percent perfect takeoff. Afterwards, he’d made her repeat the takeoff to get the other 10 percent right. And Annie had done it again. And again.
If she were asked to claim a single virtue in herself, it would be that she didn’t quit. She had never failed to cross a high school track meet finish line, however much it hurt. She had never failed to crawl over the last wall of the Annapolis obstacle course, however bigger, stronger male midshipmen mocked her. And in a month she would break a record testing a new jet. Or if she failed, she would try again. She wouldn’t quit.
Swimming faster, Annie’s hand touched the pool’s end; she neatly flipped herself and headed back in the other direction in her smooth steady crawl. Lap forty-eight.
Forty-nine.
Fifty.
As she climbed out of the pool, reaching for her towel, her glance caught sight of a woman at the other end of the large long rectangular pool, standing near the diving board. To look at the woman, Annie had to face into the blinding dazzle of the sunset, so all she really could see was a flame of dark-gold hair and the glint from oversized sunglasses and flare from a gold bracelet. Annie toweled water from her face. When she looked again, the woman was gone. The woman she’d seen at Golden Days.
Annie hurried around the pool edge to the diving board. There was a cigarette crushed in the hotel’s black ashtray on a table. It was a Chesterfield, a small lipstick smear on the end of the paper. It was warm. Who would smoke unfiltered cigarettes anymore? Except her father and this sun-shadowed woman in his life.
***
At the same time, back in Emerald, Sam was instructing the high-school movie fan who worked for her at Now Voyager to “woman the store.” Sam retired to the editing room where she was supposed to be transferring old Super-8 films to DVD for a client. But what she actually did was to sit there in the dark, watching a film called “Annie.”
Over the years she’d been adding material to this loop, reorganizing its sequence of clips a dozen times. The movie now began with some poorly lit footage that Jack had shot decades ago on that surprise month-long visit to Pilgrim’s Rest with his one-year-old daughter. Anne Samantha Peregrine.
Th
e first clip showed Sam running after the baby Annie who crawled at an amazingly fast pace over to the screen door, which she tried to push open with her head. Sam, laughing, opened the door and let her pull herself out onto the porch. In the next, Annie was careening along the hallway in a bright yellow plastic learning walker that Sam had bought her. It had a steering wheel, horn, radio buttons, a headlight, and turn signals. Annie was laughing in delight.
The next clip, shot at the end of the month’s visit, showed Sam on her knees in the morning room. She held her arms out to Annie a few feet away, standing unsteadily in little red overalls. Spike-haired, round-faced, irresistibly smiling, she held her arms tight around a table’s leg—the table on which, years later, the puzzle of the blue sky would sit. In the silent film, Sam kept calling to Annie to come on, come on, walk to her.
Suddenly letting go of the table, laughing, tipping, staggering in a joyful unbalance, Annie ran fast across that vast space between risk and safety and fell into her aunt’s outreached arms.
Alone in the editing room, Sam clicked the “Annie” DVD forward to later footage, shot with a camcorder sixteen years after those first steps of Annie’s. This footage had sound. It opened with a long shot of the Emerald High stadium as the school’s marching band came onto the field, playing “Johnny B. Goode.” Annie had just won the National Youth Speed Race, urging the King of the Sky to a speed of which D. K. Destin had not thought it capable. On the football field the band formed the shape of an airplane, while the bandleader stood on a platform beside cheerleaders who sang into a mike:
Her mama told her someday, though you are a girl,
You will be the fastest in the big old world.
Saying Annie P. Goode tonight.
Go Go
Go Annie Go
The camera then zoomed to a closeup shot of Clark, seated right beside Sam. Clowning, he pulled his bright green Emerald High tasseled ski cap down over his head. Then the camera zoomed back to Annie as she walked out onto the field, waving and smiling. She held up the trophy, and shook it at the sky.
In the edit room, Sam paused the film on the teenaged Annie’s face. She looked very much like the young woman who had so long ago broken Jack’s heart. Or so at least he’d claimed to his sister.
Sam studied the shot of Annie’s face until it went off “pause” and the screen turned as blank blue as the puzzle of the sky.
Chapter 39
Tonight Is Ours
That evening, taking the MPD desk officer’s advice, Annie drove to the bar named La Loca to look for Daniel Hart. A bartender there told her that Hart was indeed a daily, usually showing up around sunset. She promised to point him out when he arrived.
Half an hour passed. Young people arrived by twos, threes, dozens. Their voices grew quickly louder at the crowded bar. None of them was the Miami detective.
Annie moved to a booth where she ordered a salad and a bottle of flat water. The waiter looked disappointed by her Spartan choices. Above her head hung blue fish netting in which large neon blue plastic martini glasses tangled with starfish. Barbie dolls in bathing suits lay in the net against G.I. Joes and model cars.
She phoned Trevor in Maryland, describing her visit to her father at Golden Days, the strange call from the woman telling her to stay away, her surprise when Rafael Rook and she opened the case in which they’d found something that resembled the gold Queen of the Sea (which was now locked in her hotel room). She gave Trevor Sergeant Hart’s phone number and the license plate number of the black Mercedes she’d seen outside Golden Days: Was it in fact the racketeer Feliz Diaz’s car? Could Trevor also find out anything about Diaz’s girlfriend, Helen Clark?
Trevor grouchily told Annie that he didn’t work for her, he worked for the U.S. government.
“Support your troops,” she reminded him.
“Go to bed. I’ll call you in the morning,” he promised. “By morning I mean like ten, eleven o’clock.”
“Trevor, you’re sleeping your life away.”
He laughed. “How can I with you calling me all the time?”
A well-muscled man Annie’s age—with expensive beachy clothes—leaned in, took a crayon from a basket, and wrote a big green question mark on the paper tablecloth. “Waiting for a boyfriend?”
She didn’t reply. He grinned in what he clearly hoped was a winning way. He had better teeth than anyone could honestly come by; they were as white as a sink. “Tonight is ours, could be. How ’bout I sit down, buy you a drink?”
Glancing up, Annie said, “How ’bout you don’t?”
“Large mistake,” he told her.
“Chance I have to take.” She smiled with an insincerity he couldn’t miss.
He picked a tomato slice out of her guacamole salad and sucked it between his teeth in a belligerent reply. Annie grabbed his wrist, compressing nerves with an accuracy that the Navy had taught her. “Don’t put your hands in my food,” she advised him, her mouth tight. When she flicked his arm away, he cursed her but left.
A short voluptuous Latina woman wearing the requisite La Loca turquoise T-shirt with pedal pushers and stacked-heel sandals, strode through the crowd. As she approached the booth, Annie recognized her as Chamayra, Raffy’s helpful friend from Golden Days. She glared at Annie suspiciously. “Are you spying on me?”
Surprised, Annie asked, “Aren’t you the nurse at Golden Days?”
“Nurse technician. I fill in here late nights. I already told Raffy I can’t do nothing for you two till tomorrow.” Placing small strong hands on the table—Annie noticed a snake bracelet and a gimmick ring with a little pink blinking heart—she demanded to know, “You not trying to get Raffy in trouble, are you?”
“No, I’m doing everything I can to help him!”
Chamayra didn’t like this answer either. “Why? You know he’s seeing me, almost a year now?”
“He’s all yours.”
“He gave me this.” The waitress pulled an ornately worked heavy gold necklace out from under her tight La Loca T-shirt.
“That’s a lot of gold.” Annie made a whistling sound.
“His mama made it.” She slipped the necklace back under her shirt, shook herself so it would fall into place. “I want to help Raffy but your daddy is trouble for him. Me, too, if I lose my chance at Golden Days. I’m subbing.”
Annie nodded. “I understand. I just want to keep my father out of prison while I look for some decent health care for him.”
Chamayra made a face. “Don’t look in this country.”
“Listen, have you ever heard of a Sgt. Daniel Hart? Miami Police. I was told he comes in here every night.”
Overhearing the question, another waitress, African American, big, good-looking, thrust herself at the booth edge. “You Melissa? ’Cause if you are, you beat it, you hear me?”
Taken aback by the woman’s hostility, Annie stood up. “Excuse me?”
“You wasted a nice guy. Just leave the man alone.” She leaned sideways to get a better look. “Oh, you’re not Melissa. I saw her picture.”
Upset, Annie snapped. “Did I say I was Melissa?”
The waitress rocked back and forth. “No, but Danny told me Melissa was a bitch, so I made the mistake.” She huffed away.
Sliding back into the booth, Annie said to Chamayra, “Let’s start over.” Daniel Hart, she explained, was investigating her father. She wanted the detective’s help but he kept blowing off appointments he’d made with her. How ill was her father? Shouldn’t he be in a good hospital? To her astonishment, Annie found herself tearing up.
Softened, Chamayra turned sympathetic. “Be easy, hey.”
“I’m sorry. It’s exhaustion, that’s all.”
Chamayra sat down in the booth, put her arm around Annie. “I lost my mama last summer. She’s asleep in her bed, just don’t wake up. I grab her arm; it’s like a tray of ice. She’s dead. I walk out in our backyard and go down on my knees and I’m making weird noises loud as I can. My son runs out and makes m
e come back in the house, says I’m setting off dogs up and down the block.”
Annie blew her nose. “I’m sorry about your mother’s death.”
“La muerte. It comes to us all,” sighed the nurse, apparently under the influence of the philosophical Rafael Rook. She stood again, wiping the booth with an automatic efficiency. “Sometimes, face it, life sucks. I got two kids, my ex-husband gets laid off, eighteen years on the same job, you believe that? He can’t help with money for the kids no more. Aw yeah, what you gonna do? You want my advice for the world?”
Wary, Annie nonetheless nodded yes.
Thumbs and forefingers together, Chamayra pantomimed positioning a rectangular sign in air. “Hang out the Love sign and do what you can.” She flipped the invisible sign upside down. “Hang out the Closed sign when you gotta put your feet up.” She took the imaginary sign from its place in the air and tossed it over her shoulder. “Yeah, I know Dan. He’s not here now.”
“Sergeant Hart?”
“We’re open six nights; he’s in here six nights. Raffy can’t stand him but I think Dan’s a good guy. He was good to my little boy.”
“Well, I wish he’d answer his phone.”
The plump waitress spun her finger beside her head. “Right now Dan’s a stress case. His marriage busted up.”
Annie asked, “Today?”
“No, no. Two, three years back. Sit still. I’m gonna locate him for you.” She took away Annie’s soda glass. “I’ll bring you a mojito.”
Annie said she didn’t drink.
“You ain’t drank my mojito.”
Annie’s white Navy jacket was lying on the bench with her Navy hat. Chamayra gestured at them, made a face. “I got a brother joins the Army. I’m like, don’t go, Luis. He’s like, ‘Hey, you know, it’s better’n laying asphalt in this neighborhood, and I like get myself popped in some fuckin’ Haitian drive-by.’ I go, you know what? You’re right, it’s a living. So what happens? His jeep rolls over and he like loses a leg. Fuckin’ Kuwait. I’ll be back.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 33