The Silent Hour

by Michael Koryta

  Rocky River. There was Keith Appleton, a sweet kid who'd been one of the first members my gym had and was murdered before his high school graduation, and Alex Jefferson, my onetime nemesis, and Julie and Betsy Weston, mother and child, long gone from this city and still present in my mind every single day.

  It stacked up on you.

  That afternoon I got out the CD Ken had burned for me and played it for the first time: Something I need that I just can't find. Is it too late now— Am I too far behind—

  I heard those lyrics, and I thought of Ken, chasing Alexandra twelve years after she'd left, and of Dunbar, pursuing Sanabria two decades after he'd missed a chance to stick him in prison, and I wondered why they no longer felt like colleagues to me, like comrades.

  Now there's a whole new crowd out here, and they just don't seem to care. Still I keep searching through this gloom…

  I wouldn't keep searching through the gloom. Because you couldn't catch them all. Look at Dunbar. A full career behind him, and years after retirement he was still consumed by Sanabria, still hungered for him every day—and if he got him, finally— It wouldn't mean much. There'd be another to take his place. Every detective had his white whale. I wondered how many of them ever lifted their heads long enough to see that the seas were teeming with white whales.

  I took the CD out and put it back in its case and put it away, and when Amy came by that night I asked her if she could take a few days off. I wanted to go to Florida, I said. I wanted to see Joe.

  "What about the funeral—"

  "I don't know anybody he knew, Amy. It'll be a roomful of strangers, maybe strangers who won't want to see me there. He was working with me when he got killed."

  "Still, it's a gesture."

  "One he's gonna see—"

  She didn't answer that, and I said, "Amy, I need to talk things out with Joe. I need you with me."

  She nodded. "I'll call my boss."

  I went to the Hideaway alone that night. I drank a beer and a bourbon and I toasted to a dead man. Scott Draper, used to dealing with the emotions of the drunk or the emotion-drunk, left me alone until I waved him over and launched into a debate about the prospects of the Cleveland Browns. He saw the forced nature of it, but he asked no questions, and I was glad. I had one last bourbon before calling it a night, muttered a toast to Sam Spade, and then spun the whiskey glass back across the bar. It was done for me now. It was absolutely done for me.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  We left two days later, took a direct flight from Cleveland to Tampa and then rented a car. Even in the airport parking garage, among the shadows of cold concrete, you could feel the intensity of the Florida summer heat, opening your pores and baking into your bones. I put our bags in the trunk of the convertible Amy had insisted we rent—if I'm going to sweat, I might as well get tan—and then tossed the keys to her. I didn't want to drive. Felt more like riding.

  We took 1-275 south out of Tampa and drove over the Howard Frankland bridge toward St. Petersburg. A few miles past the bridge, I pointed at a sign indicating "gulf beaches," and Amy turned off the interstate. Joe was staying in a place called Indian Rocks, one of the hotel-and-condo communities that lined the beach from Clearwater to St. Pete. The last time I'd been on the gulf side of Florida, I was nineteen and on a spring break trip. We'd been much farther south then, too, so none of this was familiar to me. I could understand why Joe had enjoyed it during the winter, but now, with the unrelenting sun and humidity that you felt deep in your chest, enveloping your lungs, his motivation for staying seemed a little less clear. This Gena must be one hell of a woman.

  We hit a stoplight just outside of Indian Rocks and watched an obese man with no shirt and blistered red skin walk in front of the car, shouting obscenities into a cell phone and carrying a bright blue drink in a plastic cup. Amy turned to me, her amusement clear despite the sunglasses that shielded her eyes, and said, "Think Joe's turned into one of those—"

  "I'm sure of it."

  Joe had told me to call when we got to the little town, so now I took out my cell phone and called, and he provided directions to the condo that had been his home for the past six months. We drove slowly, searching for the place, a different collection of oceanfront granite and glass everywhere you looked. When I finally saw the sign for Joe's building, I laughed. Trust him to find this one.

  Squatting beneath two of the more extravagant hotels on the beach was a two-story L-shaped building that looked as if it had been built in the late 1950s and tuned up maybe once since then—perhaps after a hurricane. The old-fashioned sign out front boasted of shuffleboard and a weekly potluck.

  "Oh, no," Amy said. "It's worse than I thought."

  We pulled into the parking lot and got out and stretched, and then Joe appeared, walking toward us with an easier stride than I'd seen from him in a long time, some of his old athlete's grace coming back.

  "Trust LP to wait until it hits ninety-five before he brings you down," he said, going first to Amy, who hugged him hard. He looked good. Some of his weight was back, and the pallor he'd had when he left Cleveland in December was gone, replaced by a tan that made his gray hair seem almost white. He stepped away from Amy and put out his hand, and I liked the strength I felt in his grip, the steady look in his eyes. It was a far cry from the way he'd looked when he left. These months had been good to him.

  He let go of my hand but continued to search my eyes. We'd had a few talks since Ken had been killed, but nothing at length. I'm not a big fan of phone conversations.

  "Please tell me you don't play shuffleboard," Amy said.

  "No. The place is better than it looks, really."

  "What's the median age of the occupants—"

  "There are some kids. One guy just retired from Visa, can't be more than sixty."

  He led us out of the parking lot and around the building, past a sparkling pool with nobody in the water and up the steps to a corner room with a view of the ocean. Now that we were out of the car, the heat was staggering. Even down here on the water the humidity settled on you like lead. There were maybe fifteen steps going up to the second floor, and I felt each one of them the way I'd feel an entire flight of stairs back home. I've never been so happy to hear the grinding of an air conditioner as I was when Joe unlocked the door and let us in.

  His room was larger than I would've expected, and bright, with all that sun bouncing in off the water, palm trees rustling just outside. Not a bad place to spend a winter. Also, tucked inside here next to the AC unit, probably not a terrible place to spend the summer. Just don't open that door.

  We spent the afternoon in or around his hotel, talking and laughing and generally doing a fine job of pretending this visit was a carefree vacation. He wasn't fooled, though, but he waited, and so did I. We'd get our chance to talk soon enough, but we needed to be alone for it.

  In midafternoon I left them in the room and wandered outside and down to the beach and the blistering heat and called the office to check my messages. Nothing new from Graham or Harrison or anyone else. I had an old saved message, though. I couldn't stop myself from playing it again.

  Lincoln, I think we've got something. You got us there, we just needed to see it. Last night, I finally saw it. I'm telling you, man, I think you got us there. I'm going to check something out first, though. I don't want to throw this at you and then have you explain what I'm missing, how crazy it is—but stay tuned. Stay tuned.

  I played it three times, as if listening to it over and over would reveal something I had missed.

  You got us there, we just needed to see it.

  I'd gotten us nowhere. In the entire course of our investigation, we had interviewed a grand total of three people beyond Harrison: John Dunbar, Mark Ruzity, Mike London. What had he seen— What could he possibly have seen—

  It didn't matter. I told myself that with a silent vigor—it did not matter. I was out of it, and needed to stay out.

  * * *

&nb
sp; Chapter Twenty-nine

  That night we got to meet the much-heralded Gena. Of course, she hadn't been heralded at all—that wasn't Joe's style—which had only made the anticipation greater. If I'd expected someone like Ruth, I was surprised. Gena was about a foot taller, for starters, brunette when Ruth had been blond, blue eyes instead of green, from Idaho instead of Cleveland. She was younger than Joe, too, probably by ten years, and Ruth had been significantly older than him. She was, in almost all ways, the polar opposite of his longtime wife, but that didn't make her any less likable. She was attractive and witty and intelligent, and Joe's eyes lingered on her in a way that made me continuously want to hide a smile.

  We left the beach and drove all the way into St. Pete to go to a restaurant Joe liked called Pacific Wave. The food was outstanding, and Amy and Gena ran away with the conversation. Joe hadn't found himself a journalist, but something close. She was an attorney who'd become an advocate for public records and government access, and with those credentials it didn't take long for her to endear herself to Amy. I also began to understand why Joe was still here in the summer but hadn't made any remarks about a permanent relocation. Gena was in Florida only temporarily, as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a renowned journalism center in St. Petersburg. She'd come down on a grant, and that grant would be up in September.

  "Then it's back to Idaho—" Amy asked.

  She nodded, and I saw Joe take his eyes off her for the first time while she was speaking.

  "How'd you meet, anyhow—" Amy asked. It was a classic female question, I thought, and one that guys never seemed to ask. They'd met, that was all. Wasn't that enough knowledge— It's no surprise that some of the best detectives I know are women.

  "One of my colleagues at Poynter has a time-share up here," Gena said. "I came to a party there, got bored, and went for a walk. Joe was sitting on the beach in his lawn chair. Not so noteworthy, you might think, but this was at ten o'clock at night. It stood out."

  Amy looked at Joe, and he shrugged. "There were always a bunch of people out during the day. They got annoying."

  "We got to talking a little, and he was explaining why palm trees are so resistant to wind, even in hurricanes," Gena continued, and now it was my turn to look at Joe.

  "You learn a lot about palm trees growing up in Cleveland—"

  "I did some reading."

  "Evidently."

  Gena smiled. "After a while I realized I'd been gone too long, and I had to get back, but I also wanted to see him again. He didn't seem to be picking up on that—"

  "You can imagine what a great detective he is," I said.

  "Well, that's what I finally had to use. By then I knew what he'd done, and he knew why I was here, so I told him I needed to have someone with police experience come speak at one of my seminars. Talk about public access and the back-and-forth with the media, things like that. It ended up being a fine idea, but I'll confess it hadn't been part of the original plan."

  "You spoke to students—" I said to Joe. "To journalism students—"

  He nodded.

  "Tell them about the good old days, when there were no recorders in interrogation rooms and every cop's favorite tools were the rubber hose and the prewritten confession—"

  "I might have held a few things back."

  After dinner, we drove back to Joe's building. He mixed drinks for the three of us and grabbed a bottle of water for himself, and we went out to the patio as the heat faded to tolerable levels and the moon rose over the gulf. It was quiet here, and I thought of Gena's story, of Joe on his lawn chair alone on the dark beach, and I realized that it had probably been a hell of a good choice for him to come here, to be away from the things that he knew and the people that knew him, for at least a little while. We all burn out, time to time. Some people never find that dark beach and that solitary lawn chair, though. I was glad that he had.

  At one point, as the conversation between Amy and Gena became more animated and I thought my absence would be less noticed, I got up and walked down to the water and finished my drink standing in the sand. After a while a light, sprinkling rain began, and I realized the voices from the patio had faded. When I went back up, Amy and Gena were gone. Joe was sitting alone, watching me.

  "They go inside—" I asked.

  He nodded. I took the chair next to him again. It wasn't really raining yet, just putting forth a few suggestions.

  "Amy was telling us about your friend," Joe said. "Ken."

  "Friend— I'd known him about a week, Joseph."

  "That make it easier, telling yourself that—"

  I didn't answer.

  "I'm surprised you're here," he said. "Right now, I mean. Something like that happens… the guy working with you gets killed, I just assumed you'd dig in."

  "When your partner gets killed, you're supposed to do something about it, that what you mean— The classic PI line— Well, I don't have it in me anymore. So try not to get killed."

  "Understandable. Sometimes it's good to take a few days—"

  "No, Joe." I shook my head. "I don't need a few days, and when I say I don't have it in me anymore, I don't mean to go find out what happened to Ken. I should do that, I know. I should be back in Cleveland right now, working on that."

  "I didn't say that. I'm just surprised you're not, because it seems to be your way."

  "Sometimes your ways change. Or get changed."

  He was quiet. The sprinkling rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing harder, and there was no longer any trace of the moon through the clouds.

  "Are you coming back—" I said. "It's why I'm here, and you know that. I need to know if you're coming back."

  "To Cleveland—"

  "No. Well, yes, I care about that, too, but I mean to work. Are you coming back to work with me—"

  He said, "I got a call from Tony Mitchell two weeks ago. You remember Tony—"

  "Sure. Good cop, good guy. Funny as hell. What this has to do with anything…"

  "Tony's retired from the department, too. I expected he'd become a Jimmy Buffett roadie, but evidently that didn't work out, because he got himself a job doing corporate security for some big manufacturing firm. Place is constantly hiring new employees, taking in hundreds of applications a month. They've had some problems with bad hires in the past and want to put a preemployment screening program in place. Tony called me, asked if we'd be interested in running it. Would be real steady work."

  "Screenings," I said.

  "I'd be willing to do something like that," he said. "Make some money, keep busy. The street work… I've done it for too long, Lincoln."

  "So you're coming back, but you don't intend to do any street work."

  "That's about it, yeah."

  "Where does Gena figure in—"

  "I don't know yet."

  I nodded.

  "What do you think—" he asked.

  "That maybe it's time to fold it," I said and hated the sound of my voice. I'd gone for detached and gotten choked instead.

  He didn't answer.

  "I don't want to be in this business alone, Joe. I'm not sure I even want to be in it at all anymore, but I don't want to go at it alone. Hell, you're the one who dragged me into it. I was running the gym and—"

  "And losing your mind. You were so miserable—"

  "That was a different time. I'd gotten fired, I'd lost Karen… things were different."

  "This job gave you something back. Did it not—"

  "Sure," I said. "It gives, and maybe it takes away a little, too. You're proof."

  “I’m sorry?”

  "Look at yourself. You're happy down here. Are you not—"

  "Generally, yeah. It's been good. I'm not sure how—"

  "You had to go fifteen hundred miles to separate yourself from it," I said. "From the work. The work was you, and you were the work. I saw it every damn day."

  "I could take that comment the wrong way if I wanted to."

  "You didn't hav
e anything else, Joe. Nothing."

  "I know I could take that one the wrong way."

  "It was all you were," I said. "Being a detective didn't define you, it devoured you, and you know it. Why else did you have to leave, to go so far and for so long— You did it because if you stayed any closer you knew you'd go right back to the job, and you were scared of that. Scared, or tired."

  "You seeing a therapist or just reading their books—"

  "Tell me I'm wrong," I said.

  He shifted in his chair, shook his head. "I won't argue it. I could, but I won't. Certainly not tonight."

  I didn't say anything, and after a while he spoke again, voice low. "I thought the biggest headache would be getting you to let me step aside. Didn't figure you'd be racing me for the door."

  "I'm tired of the collateral damage."

  "Meaning what—"

  It came out in a rush. For a long time, I spoke, and he listened. Never said a word, didn't look at me, just listened. I talked about watching Joe in the hospital when he'd been shot, about John Dunbar's frightening fixation on a case he'd lost, about the way I felt every time I heard that new security bar click into place at Amy's apartment, and the uncomfortable pull my gun had on me while I drove to Dominic Sanabria's house.

  "I've seen a lot of people around me get hurt," I said. "You, and Amy, and now Ken Merriman. I'm always untouched, but—"

  "You're untouched—"

  I nodded.

  "Really—" he said. "Because you don't look that way right now, Lincoln. Don't sound it, either."

  We let silence ride for a while then. The rain held off, and once I heard a door open and then close again after a brief pause, and I was certain without turning to look that it was Amy, that she'd walked out onto the balcony and seen me down here with Joe and gone back inside.

  "So what will you do—" Joe asked.

  "I don't know yet. I've still got the gym. Maybe put some of Karen's money into that. Get new equipment, do a remodel, try to expand. Help you out with the employment screening thing, if you need it."