A Visible Darkness mf-2

by Jonathon King

  "Thirty years and it'd be back to the high tide line," said one.

  "Hell, fifteen," said another.

  "No more'n ten."

  The argument went on but not one of them ventured that it couldn't be done.

  Billy lived in a new beachfront high-rise. I'd stayed with him there during my first few weeks in South Florida. His penthouse apartment was spacious, decorated in expensive natural wood and hung with collected art. His pride was the curving wall of glass that faced out over the Atlantic. The wide porch was always bathed in fresh salt air. The only sound was the low hum of wind nibbling at the concrete corners and the brush of breakers on the sand below. It was the exact opposite of everything Billy had grown up in.

  I parked my truck in a visitor's spot out front. Inside the ornate lobby, Murray greeted me at the desk. Murray was a trim, balding man who always dressed in a suit and tie and spoke with a clipped and efficient English accent. Billy once did a computer dossier on him and discovered Murray had been born and raised in Brooklyn. But if quizzed, he could give you the specific walking directions from London's Hermitage to the Suffolk House and estimate the time it would take to get there based on the gait and stride you used crossing his lobby. He was a sort of concierge and security man for the building. The residents paid him well.

  "Good day, Mr. Freeman."

  "Murray. How you doin'," I said.

  "Mr. Manchester has called ahead. Please do go up, sir. I shall unlock the doors electronically."

  "Thanks for the lift, Murray."

  Ever since Billy had told me about the Brooklyn thing I'd had to stifle the urge to mock his accent. Instead I'd just try to get a rise. It never worked.

  At the twelfth floor the elevator doors opened onto Billy's private vestibule. The double doors to his apartment were of dark wood. The carpet was thick. The flowers in a vase against the wall were fresh. I heard the electronic snick of the lock and went in. The air was cool and sanitized. The place was immaculate and like always I found myself moving through it like a visitor in a museum. I went straight to the open kitchen and started coffee brewing. Then I slid open a door to the patio and stood at the rail, my nose into the wind.

  The sun was high and white and the wind had set down a corduroy pattern on the ocean surface. From this height the varied water depths showed in shades of turquoise, cerulean and then a cobalt blue that spread to the horizon. The narrow strip of beach had shrunk since the last time I'd visited. The tide and wave action had eaten away at least fifteen yards. I didn't relish the idea of doing three miles in that soft sand. The thought of it made me lean into the rail and stretch my calves. But some of my best grinding came while I was running or paddling, and it was going to take some grinding to determine where to go with Billy's dead women.

  I went to the guest bedroom, found some running shorts, a T-shirt and the running shoes that Billy held here for me. I changed and poured another cup of coffee, and carried it to the rail. The wind was stiffening. I swung a heel up on the rail and stretched. Bent. Counted. Swung the other leg up.

  Would someone kill old women for money? Of course.

  How would he know who to kill? Inside job. List of names.

  Do it himself, or contract it? Money guys don't do the dirty work.

  How does the racial angle fit? It might never fit.

  I still wasn't sold on the whole premise and now I was bringing Richards into it. It was how conspiracy theories were started. Look out Oliver Stone.

  I put my palms on the floor, propped my toes on the seat of the chaise lounge and did fifty pushups. The blood was singing in my ears when I stood up and exhaled. I took a deep swig of coffee. Time to plow the sand.

  10

  Eddie felt the cop car turn around. He'd watched it pass, keeping his head down, pushing his cart, willing himself invisible. But after the green and white prowl car had passed by he heard the wheels slow and then crunch the stone, first on one shoulder and then the other. He heard the U-turn and now he thought he could feel the heat of the engine on his back.

  The chrome bumper pulled even with him, then the green fender, then the white, smiling face.

  "Hey, junk man," said the young officer in the passenger seat. Eddie said nothing.

  "Wassaaaaap?" the officer wailed, his tongue sticking out, his partner grinning.

  Eddie had heard the blatting before, followed by laughter. He wondered why only white people did it.

  "I do not know," Eddie answered and stopped his pushing.

  The prowl car stopped with him.

  "What you got in the cart today, junk man? Anything in there you shouldn't have?"

  Eddie had talked with the police before. Most of the time they left him alone. They never hurt him. The one time he'd been arrested was for burglary when they found a half dozen potted plants in his cart. He'd just picked them up out of someone's carport. He was planning to sell them but the police stopped him and said they were stolen. They took him in when he said he didn't know where the plants came from but promised to put them back. He had no money for bail, so he spent sixty days in the county jail.

  Eddie didn't mind jail. The food was good and after a few days they put him on a special floor the guards called the forensic unit. That's where Eddie met the doctor. They'd had some good talks. The doc had taken care of him.

  All the guards were good to him and he did whatever they told him. One day a prisoner had broken a toilet and a work crew came to bust up the porcelain and chip out some of the concrete. They filled a huge trash can and the guards laughed when two of the workers couldn't drag it away.

  "Eddie," the guard called out. "Come carry this out into the hall for these gentlemen."

  Eddie put down the mop he'd been using and walked over. He bent and gripped the sides of the can and hefted it up onto his chest and walked it to the hall while everyone stared. He'd lifted heavier things. The guards smiled and were even nicer to him.

  Another day a prisoner started screaming in his cell, crazy like, threatening to burn up his mattress with a pack of matches. He was strong and wild. The guards told him to throw the matches out but he spit at them through the bars instead. Two of them looked at each other and then the one said:

  "Eddie."

  It was the guard that was always asking Eddie for help. "Go in there and get the matches, Eddie."

  The guard sat at his desk and listened to the heavy thumping, the sound of bone against bars and thick muscle against concrete. Eddie came back out with the matches and put them on the desk.

  "Thank you, Eddie."

  "Yessir," he said. Eddie had crushed the bones of a strong man's hands before.

  "You don't have anything in that cart from Sue and Lou's Restaurant, do you junk man?" The young white officer was still talking, but neither he nor his partner had gotten out of the car, and Eddie knew if they didn't get out of the car it was going to be alright.

  "Because somebody helped themselves through the back door over there last night," the officer said.

  Eddie knew. He'd been through that alley and saw the busted lock on the door but he had pushed on by. No need to get caught up in all that now.

  "I do not know," Eddie said.

  "You do not know, huh?" the young officer repeated. "That might be the truest statement I've heard today."

  The officers looked at each other, proud for some reason of their words. "You be cool, junk man," said the partner as they pulled away.

  Eddie watched until the taillights disappeared and then pushed on.

  "I know lots of police," he whispered to himself. "I talks to them all the time."

  Eddie reached deep into his pocket and fished out the watch that he never wore on his wrist. He checked the time. Now he was late.

  He turned down Twenty-ninth and quickened his pace. The cart rattled over the rough macadam. At Sunrise Boulevard he scanned the busy street. Rush hour. Working people leaving downtown on the east side heading west to their nice homes out in the suburbs. They kept t
heir eyes on the cars in front of them. They stopped only when the red lights held them. It was like a train moving through an ugly patch of landscape and no one on board cared about the view.

  Eddie's eyes were on the Bromell's Liquor Store across the street. It had been there since he was a child, sitting back off the main road, a broad parking lot on two sides. Even when they repainted the outside of the building some new yellow or purple color, the walls always seemed dingy, the dirt and grease somehow seeping back through the fresh color like a weeping wound through a bandage. Its present color was an odd orange, like a Mexican cantina, Eddie had heard someone say.

  The young ones were hanging in their usual spot next to the pay phones. Yapping. Calling each other nigger and laughing at whoever it was today that had to be picked on. The older men pulled up in their Buicks or the Cadillacs with the sprung bumpers, limped in and came out with bottles in paper bags. The working men arrived in pickups with the shiny toolboxes in the truck beds. Eddie remembered when white boys with a Confederate flag pasted in the rear window were the only ones who drove such trucks. The world had changed.

  Finally Eddie let the front wheels of the cart down off the curb and pushed his way across four busy lanes of traffic. No one honked. No one jammed on their brakes or cussed out the window. Eddie was invisible.

  At the far edge of the parking lot he stood in the shade of a sprawling willow and waited. Without looking up he saw everyone who entered and left, matched them with cars, noted their clothes, paid particular attention to their hands: big or fine boned, stuck down in pockets or dangling at their sides.

  When the bronze-colored Chevy Caprice pulled in, Eddie watched the man get out, sweep the area without stopping his eyes at the willow, and then stride into the store. Once he was inside Eddie moved.

  The Caprice was an old model but flawless. Not a rust spot or a dent. The paint was unblemished. The chrome sparkling. The whitewalls brilliant and unstained. The license plate was multicolored and decorated with stick figures of playing children and said, "Choose Life."

  Eddie took up a position on the sidewalk in front of the car and leaned against Bromell's cantina wall. The young ones paid him no mind, an ol' trash man.

  While he waited, Eddie watched another car pull in and park in the back of the lot, near his willow tree. The car looked like a cheap rental. The white man backed into the space, the way a cop might. Eddie kept his head down, peering up through his eyebrows. The ones at the phone nudged each other and under his breath, one hissed "Five-Oh." Eddie knew it meant they'd spotted a cop on the street. Their voices got softer but they didn't move. One of the pay phones rang and they let it jangle eight times before it stopped.

  Eddie watched the new car. The outline of the man's head looked huge and Eddie thought he could almost see his eyes. Then he watched the man lift a bottle wrapped in a paper bag to his lips and take a long drink. It wasn't a cop. Just another drinking man.

  Eddie's own man came out of the store. He was wearing a short- brimmed touring cap. A package was under his arm and as he passed, Eddie watched his hands. The fingers were pale and thin and cupped. Eddie unfolded his own massive palm and the man dropped a tightly rolled package into it and Eddie's hand snapped shut like a jaw. The man got into his car and only tried to make eye contact after he was behind the wheel. Eddie kept his brow down and pushed away as the Caprice backed out.

  No one noticed the exchange or no one cared that a white man had dropped some change into an old black junk man's hand. Eddie jammed the roll down into his pocket next to the watch and moved north, across Sunrise, up Twenty-third and through an alley. He did not hurry, but he did not break stride until he reached the old warehouse where they used to park the city buses and where the mechanic crews had left the packed dirt black and flaky with spilled oil and engine fluids. Back behind a rusted dumpster, he stopped, swung his head north to south, and satisfied he was alone, dug out the roll and loosened it.

  Three hundred-dollar bills and the white notebook paper, the kind with the blue lines and the thin red stripe on one side. Typed in the middle of the page: Mrs. Abigail Thompson 1027 NW 32nd Ave.

  Eddie knew Ms. Thompson from years past. She may have even gone to church with his mother. He also knew the alley behind her house. Eddie knew all the alleys.

  11

  Billy poured himself another glass of Merlot. I took another swallow of coffee. Both of us had had enough shrimp fried rice. I was ready for a prowl car tour of the area where Billy's women had died.

  The beach run had been painful. The humidity of surfside Florida teamed up with the soft sand to make my three miles a fine torture. Most of my life my regular runs had been done on Philadelphia streets, several blocks east to Front Street and then north along the Delaware to Bookbinders and back. I was used to cruising on hard concrete, slapping a rhythm, dodging through intersections. If I went down the shore, I'd do miles on the Ocean City beach at low tide when the sand was wet and brown and hard. Here it was slogging, half your energy used digging out of each footstep. My lungs were burning but I'd sprinted the last hundred yards down in ankle- deep water.

  The shower afterwards was always a treat. Out at my shack all I had was a rain barrel above my porch that was fed by water flowing from the eaves and fitted with a hose and nozzle.

  Billy filled me in on his paper trace while we ate. His women had come to South Florida at different times and they'd bought their insurance policies at different ages but all within a close time period. They probably knew one another because of their era and proximity, but it would have been on a social basis. None was in business with the other. There were no family connections. No shared churches in the recent past.

  "Has McCane been any help to you?" I said.

  "He has accessed s-some dates and m-medical questionnaires on the policies his company h-held."

  "You talking with him?"

  "Only on the phone."

  "I'll check with him tomorrow. Maybe I should have asked him along tonight."

  We traded sideways glances.

  "Maybe not," I said, and we both relaxed.

  I pushed the plate away. I'd already bagged my things, planning to get back to the river afterwards. I'd dressed in jeans and a dark polo shirt and black, soft-soled shoes.

  "How is Sherry?"

  "Looks good," I said.

  "W-When are you two going to quit d-dancing around each other?"

  Billy was trained to be forward and blunt. But he rarely took that step with me.

  "She's still got a ghost in her head."

  "She's the only one who's b-been able to p-pull you off the river."

  "Liar," I said, fishing out my keys.

  "Well, I d-don't count," Billy said.

  I drained the coffee and tipped the cup at him.

  "Yes, you do."

  When I got to the sheriff's office I parked my truck near the front entrance and was starting across the lot when a spotlight snapped on me. When I raised a hand to shade my eyes, the light went off. Richards was backed into a spot and was behind the wheel of a green-and-white. I opened her passenger side and climbed in. She was in uniform. Starched short-sleeved white shirt and deep green trousers with a stripe down the leg. Her hair was pinned up. Her 9mm in a leather holster at her side.

  "Regulation," she said. "Got to wear the whole rig if you're driving a squad car," she said in greeting.

  "I remember," I said.

  She slid a clipboard over to me with a form on top.

  "Absolves the office if you get hurt. Sign the bottom."

  "I think you've got the wrong impression of me and my propensity for getting hurt," I said.

  "No, I don't," she answered, grinning as she shifted into drive.

  We pulled onto the street and headed west. The strip centers were single-story and second-rate. A carpet outlet. A fish market. "Jiggles" nightclub with "Girls, Live Girls."

  We turned north onto a side street and a block and a half off the main thoroughfare
we were into residential.

  There were no sidewalks but street lamps were set every two blocks. At this time of night cars were parked in most of the driveways, some on the grassless swale. Richards punched off the headlights and swung onto another cross street. Two houses in she twisted the handle on the door-mounted spotlight and snapped it on. The beam caught the black maw of an open doorway and she swept across the windows that were boarded up with plywood.

  "Crack houses," she said. "We try to keep them boarded up. But they rip the stuff down faster than we can get it up. The owner who lives god knows where won't keep it sealed even if it is the law."

  She flashed back over the doorway and the light picked up some movement inside.

  "You arrest them for trespassing or possession and they're out by Friday."

  She flipped off the spot and pulled the headlights back on and kept going. As a patrolman in Philly I'd done the same thing. It was exactly the same neighborhood only one-story instead of two. Less brick. More trees. Same despair.

  "Your husband work this zone?" I asked and immediately wondered why the question came into my mouth.

  The dash lights gave her jawline a sharp edge. Her nose held a small but not indelicate hump. A touch of mascara showed at the corner of her eye, which stayed focused ahead.

  "Sometimes," she finally said. "But he preferred the eastern zones. He wasn't much for the action. He worked a lot with kids in the Police Athletic League."

  And got shot by a kid, I silently finished the sentence for her.

  She turned another corner.

  We rolled through an intersection and Richards slowed again to a crawl. Every city has a dope hole and this was theirs. Nearly eleven o'clock and there was a busy nonchalance that showed in the slow spin each man did as the green-and-white slid by. Drag from a cigarette. "I ain't give a shit about no cop," but the cupped hand helps hide the face. The older ones sitting on empty milk crates, elbows on knees, something too interesting to stare at in the dirt but proud enough to raise their jaws in defiance as the back fender glides by. The young ones who don't hide. They goof and throw signs with twisted fingers and pull at the loose fabric in their crotch and their eyes say "Ain't no big thing" and their justification is "All I'm doin' is bidness."