The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  “Rafael, please!” Too upset to sit still, Annie slipped into the aisle and started up the exit. The Cuban hurried after her.

  “Come back here!” Annie turned to see Buchstabes staring reproachfully at her. Jackie was pointing her out to the family, no doubt as the evil young woman who’d stolen Coach Ronny’s affections and was planning to grab his estate from the rightful heirs.

  Jackie’s brothers grabbed her stout arms. Other Buchstabes grabbed the brothers’ arms. Bursting out of the middle of this huddle, Jackie ran screaming at Annie, “I want my mama’s sterling coffeepot back! And her diamond solitaire! I know you took them!”

  The teenaged girl on stage stopped playing the keyboard, the singers stopped harmonizing, just stared with their mouths open. The teenaged boy slapped his hands in air. “Keep it real, Jackie! Fuckin’ A!”

  With a grunting noise Jackie charged down the middle aisle after Annie, her thick Buchstabe hands reaching out in an angry twitch as if to grab her. She was not nearly fast enough.

  Chapter 45

  The Lady Lies

  The wet Florida heat steamed from the asphalt of the parking lot. Feeling nauseated, Annie borrowed Raffy’s cell phone. (“I don’t want to know where you got this phone!” she told him.) She reached Georgette, who was between patients. “Georgette, you didn’t tell Sam that Dad was dead, did you? It’s the guy whose name Dad stole, Coach Buchstabe, that’s dead.”

  Georgette made a phht phht laughing noise. “No, I didn’t tell Sam anything. Frankly I wondered if you were still drunk.”

  “Drunk? When was I drunk?”

  “Phht phht!” repeated the young doctor. “Now you don’t make any more sense than the rest of us. I love it. Where’s your detective, Sergeant Hart?”

  “I left him asleep at the hotel.”

  “Um hmm. Seriously, Annie, you need to come home. Your friend Trevor called. He said you’re not answering his messages. He says to stay out of your father’s problems. Chérie, je m’excuse, but are you involved with Trevor—I hesitate to say ‘too’ but…too?”

  “Trevor?” Annie snorted, which made her teeth hurt in a way she’d never before experienced. She watched Raffy, who’d run back to Rest Eternal and given his arm to Coach Ronny’s elderly sister, Clara Louise, widow of McGreb Wholesale Plumbing. It vaguely occurred to Annie that Raffy might be lifting the old woman’s wallet out of her large embroidered purse. “Georgette, please, it’s 110 here and that’s just the humidity. I’m hung over in a parking lot at a cut-rate funeral home in Miami with a criminal Cuban that I was kissing a few days ago and I’ve got a headache and last night I went windsurfing and had sex with a cop who wants to arrest me.”

  “Because of the sex? Was it while you were windsurfing? Damn, I’m proud of you.”

  “Georgette, stop, why do you and Clark always have to be funny?”

  “We succeed?”

  Annie tried not to laugh; it was painful.

  Georgette felt she needed to ask one little thing. “Did your dad tell you who your mother was?”

  Annie said, “No. He told me he wouldn’t tell me.”

  Georgette sighed loudly. “Okay. Now, at the risk of sounding like a therapist, how do you feel about Daniel Hart?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Just blurt it out. The truth. Whatever comes to mind.”

  Annie looked at the braid on her military jacket cuff, at the asphalt, at the sky, at the cheerful alligators on Rafael Rook’s shirt off in the distance as he chatted with Mrs. McGreb. All right, she told Georgette. The truth? The truth was that last night she’d had the best conversation, the most fun, the greatest sex, the easiest time with a man in her adult life. And it terrified her. The truth? Loving and being loved was scarier than landing a jet plane on a rolling ship. But if you did it right, how wonderful. She was unable to stop thinking of Dan Hart even now, in midst of, frankly, chaos.

  Georgette was silent a moment. Finally she said, “Chaos is good. For you, it’s good.” She added, “What about Brad?”

  Unconsciously, Annie looked around the parking lot as if Georgette might be going to warn her that Brad was in it somewhere. All she saw was Jackie Stump pulling her elderly aunt away from Raffy and shoving the old woman into the long white limousine. Annie repeated, “What about Brad?”

  “Just a second…” Georgette put Annie on hold. “Sorry, apparently I’ve got a patient naked in the cafeteria. Brad, your husband, who’s looking for you all over Miami.”

  “Why does everyone keep calling Brad my husband?”

  “Isn’t he?”

  Annie just wanted to point out that her life was none of Brad’s business.

  “Um hmm. So where is Brad this morning?”

  Annie assumed that he was still asleep at the Dorado.

  “Brad and Dan both. Um hmm.”

  “Georgette, please stop saying um hmm.”

  “That’s what psychiatrists say. It takes a lot of training not to say anything more than um hmm.” Georgette took another call; a patient with agoraphobia was going to be late again because it was so hard for him to leave his house. “Annie, à bientôt. Please lock yourself in your room and get some rest. For God’s sake, you’re having sex with a stranger on a windsurfer. Don’t cops have partners? Maybe I could fly down tonight and meet him.”

  It was Annie’s impression that Dan had had a partner before he’d gotten fired but she really didn’t know that much about him.

  Georgette suggested wryly that she shouldn’t bother learning at this point. “It’s too late to start getting to know somebody after you’re already in love with him. Just go with the flow.”

  Annie gave her puff of disgust. “I’m not in love. You think I’m in love?”

  It certainly sounded that way to Georgette.

  “You’re right,” Annie suddenly admitted. “I don’t even know him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”

  “That’s what I call going with the flow! Okay, I’ve got to see about this naked patient. But did you happen to find out from your dad if that woman who looked like my aunt Ruthie was my aunt Ruthie?”

  “No, that was just a stupid idea of mine.” Annie explained that she’d learned from Rafael Rook that the woman she’d seen at Golden Days was named Helen Clark and she was the mistress of a Miami racketeer. Thinking she could be Ruthie Nickerson had been a crazy idea. It was just an odd resemblance. “Why, did you find out something else about Ruthie?”

  “No, nothing. A tout à l’heure.” Georgette felt very guilty for not telling Annie what she’d learned from Sam. But she’d decided she should honor Sam’s wish that she wait until Annie herself brought up the subject of Ruthie’s being her mother. On the other hand, obviously Jack had told his daughter nothing about Ruthie, because no matter how bad Annie’s hangover or how alluring Sgt. Daniel Hart, if she had had any idea that her best friend’s aunt might be her mother, she would have mentioned the fact. On the other hand, surely Annie should be able to count on her best friend to tell her what Sam had said. On the other hand…

  ***

  In the parking lot, Raffy glided up to Annie. “I apologize,” he murmured.

  “I could have killed you,” she admitted, handing him back the phone. “I just went through thinking my dad was dead and turns out he’s fine.”

  Raffy’s dark eyes flickered away from her. “Annie, ‘fine’ could be a stretch in regards to Jack. I don’t know what it is lately about his personal karma, because when I met him, he was A Man Loved by the Gods, but these days…?”

  Grabbing his chin, Annie shook it. “Just nod at me. Is Jack still hiding out at Golden Days?”

  Rook used his free hand to hitch up his trousers. “No. Annie, here’s the thing. He’s gone.”

  She jerked the small man to her so hard he wobbled. “Don’t tell me he is dead because I don’t believe it.”

  Rook frantically waved his hands. “Ms. Skippings found out Jack was there and that’s when she fired Chamayra.” />
  “Skippings threw my dad out?”

  “In a sense. He left in her car.”

  “Chamayra’s car?”

  “Ms. Skippings’s. Could you quit that for a second?” Annie let go of him; she felt awful.

  He caught her as she stumbled, off-balance. “You look green.”

  “It’s the heat. I think I’m going to throw up.”

  Hurrying her across the parking lot into the log cabin restaurant, Good Mornin’, he rushed to a restroom on whose door was painted a picture of Betty Grable in a bathing suit.

  Ten minutes later, he led Annie gently to a rustic pine table beside a window that squinted grimily at Rest Eternal. “Drink this tomato juice. Take these.” He held out aspirin. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “More than you know,” muttered Annie as she swallowed the pills. Something in his look made her blush and she added, “At least I was hoping it was more than you know.”

  “You and Daniel Hart, who could predict it? ‘Clubs could not part them.’” He confessed that last night he had seen her, soaking wet, arm in arm with Hart, going up into the hotel elevator and not coming down. He had seen this from the Dorado bar where he’d been waiting for her, while keeping a watch over Brad Hopper, who was also in the bar.

  Annie dropped her head into her hands. “Brad was in the bar? Great.”

  The slender man nudged the coffee cup at her. “Forgive my bluntness. If you’re worried that your husband saw you kissing Sergeant Hart, he missed it completely.”

  Annie looked out at him through her fingers. “We’re getting divorced.”

  “In my opinion, all things considered, a wise plan.” Raffy tapped pepper into his tomato juice.

  The coffee, which Annie tried to drink, was both too hot and too weak. “I can’t think about that now. Where did Dad go?”

  “Poor Jack.” He spoke with sympathy. “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’ and your papa took it. When the bastard Miami police showed up at Golden Days with—my best guess from their shoes—FBI agents, Jack stole an SUV from the parking lot. Which—it must be admitted—turned out to be Ms. Skippings’s Lexus.”

  “He stole Skippings’s car?” She laughed but quickly stopped because of the pain when her scalp moved. “So, where’d he go?”

  Surprisingly, Raffy seized her hands. “Annie, I heard on the radio coming here—but, as we know, there’s no reason to believe the press.” After a pause, he hurried ahead. “They found her Lexus in the bay. But there could be many explanations—”

  She pulled her hands away.

  Raffy dropped his eyes to his coffee, shaking the mug as if he were reading his fortune in it. “The car went off the causeway, through the crossrail, and they found it on the bottom of the bay. They sent out divers.”

  Sun splintering through the dirty window blinded her. “Was he in the car?”

  The Cuban vigorously shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no. And its windows were open. But his jacket was caught in the front seat, with his wallet in it. His driver’s license. Jack Peregrine, West Palm Beach.”

  Slowly, Annie thought about this. “A driver’s license in his real name?”

  Raffy sucked wistfully at his coffee. “The cops think he tried to swim to the surface but didn’t make it. It’s not easy water.”

  She thought further, motionless.

  Raffy gently reminded her that her father wasn’t at all well. “Prison wasn’t for such a man. Take it from me. He would rather be dead.”

  Annie sat up firmly. “He’s alive. It’s a con. He planted the coat and wallet. He sank the car as a decoy.”

  Raffy searched her eyes. “You think so? I mean, I know you hope it but do you think it?”

  She nodded. “I think it.”

  The Cuban raised his eyes for a long moment as if his imprisoned past were painted in the ceiling and he wanted to study it. “Late at night in our cell, Jack used to tell me stories of the great stings. Like Ponzi. ‘A con’s a work of art,’ he’d say. ‘If it’s not,’ he’d say, ‘you might as well stick a .45 in a man’s back and steal his wallet.’” Raffy’s thin shoulders lifted his yellow rayon shirt in an apologetic shrug. “In regards to which, your papa did steal Miss Napp’s wallet…Well, he took her whole purse. Which Miss Napp claims had three hundred dollars in it, but that’s a shvindel, in my humble opinion.”

  Annie asked him why, if her father was so successful a con artist, was he so hard-pressed for cash that he had to steal the purse of the receptionist in a cheap convalescent center and flee in another woman’s car? Why did he live so constantly in danger of the thing he said he hated most—imprisonment?

  The small man pointed both forefingers at her like pistols. “I never said Jack was ‘successful.’ Because there were times when to be honest I didn’t think he was necessarily thinking things through. What I said was, and this is as true as truth,” Raffy brought the two pistols together and kissed the tips, “he was pretty gorgeous…I mean, artistically speaking.”

  For a while they sat in the noisy restaurant, both thinking about Jack Peregrine. It had never occurred to her before—the way things don’t occur to children about their parents—that her father had style but he didn’t really have brains. She laughed at the realization. In fact, he’d been lucky that he’d survived all these years. After all, she’d had to come to his rescue when she was only five and six and seven years old.

  She asked Raffy where he thought her father might have gone into hiding after ditching the Lexus SUV in the bay.

  The Cuban bit at his soft lips. “I don’t know. He always tells me, don’t worry, Raffy, mi amigo, I’ll be in touch, vaya con dios. If he’s alive, he’ll get the word to us, that I know. Meanwhile, I am myself a wanted man—”

  She interrupted. “I’ll talk to Dan Hart and see what he can do for you.”

  “Oh Annie, Annie. ‘Therefore is wingéd Cupid painted blind.’” Raffy dramatically strummed an imaginary guitar. “That’s the wisdom of the Swan. Love is blinding you from the fact of the matter. Which is this above all: Never trust a policeman! If there’s one thing I learned from the street, because I never had the opportunity for a college education, it’s the son-of-a-bitch cops will say anything to close a case and the Miami police, in particular Miami Vice, well, they are not sincere individuals.”

  The mournful sweetness of Raffy’s dark eyes as he offered this warning about Daniel Hart rattled her. What did she really know about the man she’d just slept with? What if Hart had been using her, making a fool of her? As doubt rushed like heat through her body, she felt sick.

  “Eat something.” The Cuban slid a plate of toast closer. “But I’ll be honest. I didn’t care for your husband either.”

  “We’ll be divorced in a week.” She squeezed her neck. “No. I promised him I’d wait a month.”

  He asked her why she’d done that.

  She rotated her neck side to side. “So Brad would lend me the plane to get to Miami to see Dad.”

  Raffy smiled at her. “Ah, I told you, didn’t I tell you? With familia, you cannot take it or leave it. Not if you’re human, which you definitely are.” He poured milk in his coffee but it didn’t seem to help the taste. “Last night at the Dorado bar, your husband gave a one-dollar tip to my cousin Juan at the piano, a man with a large family to support, one dollar. As the Bard tells us, nothing can come of nothing. Not to mention he left the place with Skippings, pardon me, forgive me, but, well the word sounds like balabuster, if you know what I mean. She always treated Chamayra like gum on her shoe—”

  Annie rubbed her fingers at her temples. “Wait a minute. Back up. Did you say Brad left with Melissa Skippings?”

  Rafael nodded vigorously. “Yes! La puta who fired my Chamayra from Golden Days. But I have to be honest, it could be your husband was only waiting with her for valet parking.”

  “I doubt it.” Annie burst out laughing, which hurt. “Melissa Skippings. Did you know this? She was married to Dan. I’m serious. They
’re divorced.”

  “Skippings and Hart, you’re making a joke!” The news stunned him. “Wait’ll I tell Chamayra, if she’ll stop hanging up on me. All the world’s a stage, Annie, or possibly more precisely, cable television. Coffee?”

  She was struck once more by how oddly restful it was, talking with Rafael Rook, despite her horrible headache. With a comforting pat of her arm, he offered her more aspirin. “What with all the whips and scorns and fardels of life, even the extra-large bottle of Tylenol from Costco is insufficient. Such a world we live in. Such a world. Grandpapa Simon Rook died for what he thought was America but it turned out to be only the same old bowties and wingtips piling their fortunes on our backs.”

  Annie tried to finish the piece of toast but she wasn’t hungry. She had faith that her father had sunk Skippings’s SUV without drowning in it. But where was he now and how would he reach them? What should they do to help him?

  Pouring salsa on his scrambled eggs, Raffy danced his fork above his plate. “Look at it this way: That your papa ditched her Lexus is infinitely superior to the alternatives.”

  “True.” She sipped slowly at her tomato juice.

  “But zindik nit, we have to look at all rational possibilities. It’s possible he was shuffled off. It’s possible Diaz grabbed him and wants to trade him. Jack’s enemies,” sadly suggested the Cuban, “the rotten bastard sons of bitches, if you ask me how much of the milk of human kindness is in them? Not this much.” He held up the heavy brown mug of coffee. “But it’s also possible, and let’s believe it, he just swam away.”

  A memory came to Annie. “I used to dunk him in the pools. At the motels where we stayed. He always said he would never drown. I didn’t know this at the time, it had to do with his brother Johnny dying in the family pool. Dad said it wasn’t possible to drown him. He said he could float for a hundred years.”

  “Like Mark Antony, dolphinlike.”