Ms. Thompson's house had a southern exposure and the sun was bright on the front windows. As I walked up I couldn't see any movement behind them. The front door was closed tight and I stood there for a second, listening. I instinctively reached down to my hip but my 9mm had long been retired. After the ranger shootings the gun had been retrieved from the river and bagged as evidence. I had never asked for its return.
I knocked. It was quiet. I knocked a second time and this time I heard a shrill but composed answer come from around the corner.
"Round back here. On the patio," came the old woman's voice.
I passed through the open carport and found them there, McCane and Ms. Thompson, sitting at a wrought-iron table, cups of coffee before each of them. An old photo album was opened between them.
Ms. Thompson looked at me and I could tell from her eyes that she was searching to recognize where she had seen me before. McCane saw it, too.
"Well, Mr. Freeman. What a pleasant surprise," he said, pushing his chair back. "Ms. Thompson, this is Mr. Max Freeman, an associate of mine. I believe you two may have met the day of your very unfortunate situation."
He smiled up at me, showing his big, blocked teeth. I could imagine it had been a false smile seen by many clients and inmates in the past.
"Why yes, I do believe I recall now," said Ms. Thompson, who had lost some of her rough exterior in McCane's presence. "Would you care to join us, Mr. Freeman? Mr. McCane has stopped by to discuss an insurance policy I have with ya'll's company, but we have been a bit sidetracked on this lovely day."
"No doubt," I said, looking from one to the other.
"May I get you some coffee, Mr. Freeman?" she said, starting to get up.
"No, please, don't bother yourself," I said, but she was already motioning me to sit.
"It is never a bother to be a gracious hostess, sir," she said, moving slowly toward her back door."
"Thank you, ma'am."
I continued to stand, putting my back to the house and facing McCane. He crossed his thick ankles and did not look up.
"Y'all didn't do much of a job interviewing Ms. Thompson here," he started, slipping back into his good ol' boy cant. "You and your detective girlfriend ought to learn how to lay on a little sugar when you're trying to get something out of these folk."
"Do tell," I said.
"Specially the old ones. Trick is to get them using their memories to kind of loosen their stopped-up brains a little. Oh yes, we been reminiscin' 'bout old times, all her pickaninnies and her poor deadbeat husband.
"Hell, she even pulled out the old pictures here," he said, touching the photo album with the blunt tips of his fingers. "Showed me the one of her mother sittin' at a nightclub in Overtown with Cassius Clay long before he become the droolin' and shakin' poster boy for the Olympics."
The adrenaline had soured in my mouth and been replaced by a warm anger that was spreading into my neck. Still he did not look up.
"So the old lady didn't see a damn thing the night her boyfriend. got his throat crushed. But she did recall smelling something, Freeman. You've got to remember all the senses in this line of work, bud," he said.
"She smelled the garbage can in her bedroom after he left is the way she put it. And a man's hand pushin' down on that pillow that had to be the size of a big 'ol catchers mitt how it fit over her entire face and head.
"That fit with anybody you and your girlfriend been trackin'?"
I was counting to myself again, swallowing a growing rage.
"You've been tailing us, McCane. You see anybody that you were hoping we'd lead you to?" I said.
He continued to smear his fingers on the plastic cover of the album.
"No. I didn't think so," I answered myself. "If you had, you wouldn't be here."
Richards had been right getting Hammonds to call in an overtime squad to step up the BOLO on Baines while she and Billy tried to get a lock on the doctor's hard drive.
Ms. Thompson reappeared and McCane stayed quiet. She put a cup down in front of the empty chair and said, "Oh mercy I have forgotten our milk, Mr. McCane. Please, please, sit down Mr. Freeman. I'll be right back."
McCane took a long sip of his black coffee while the woman tottered away.
"You ought to know by now, Freeman. These are just simple minds you're dealing with."
"And you ought to know how to manipulate them, Milo, considering the practice you've had," I said, holding his eyes and watching the twitch behind them at the mention of his old prison nickname. He sat quiet for a minute, glancing out toward the alley.
"I see your boy Manchester been busy checking my past," he. said, trying to sound unfazed.
"And your boy Marshack's, too," I said. "You have some interesting coffee hours up at the Georgia state pen?"
He surprised me with a short laugh that came from deep in his chest.
"Ol' doc, he never was one for small talk, always pullin' that philosophical shit on you, trying to impress how smart he was. But the boy just could not hold a job," he said. "You know how far a guy gotta tumble to end up being a shrink in a prison?"
"I wouldn't know, McCane, but the good doctor sure did know how to keep some damned immaculate records. And if they tie you to it, McCane, the cons at Moultrie are going to throw an interesting homecoming."
My words stole the smugness from his face. I could see his knuckles whitening around the coffee cup. Again he cut his eyes to the hedges along the back lawn where some movement seemed to have caught him.
"Well, gentlemen. Excuse my absence," Ms. Thompson said, stepping carefully onto the patio. She froze when she saw the look on our faces.
"Get your ass back inside, old woman," McCane snapped, pushing his chair back and standing.
The words were like a slap and a warning that I had gone too far. Don't put him in a corner, I thought.
"Well, I never," Ms. Thompson spouted, starting to get her feistiness back. But I looked in her eyes and she saw a warning there. Shed seen enough in her years to keep from getting between two angered men. She turned, hissing, and retreated back into her house.
I watched McCane pulling himself back down, the flex of the hand, the loosening of the jaw. He started to chuckle.
"Freeman, Freeman, Freeman. You are some kinda big city detective, bud, with all this conspiracy talk. Hell, I thought I was just helpin' you boys out down here, and now you all cookin' up this wild-ass conjecture."
He was shaking his head. The ol' southern boy perplexed by it all.
"Hell, if that's the way it is, Freeman, I will be glad to get on back to the home office and leave this all to you smart folks," he said, getting up with a bemused look on his face.
"I'm glad you can find the humor in it, McCane. You may very well be right," I said, moving past him toward the side of the house, hoping he would follow me into the open.
"I'm sure you've got all your financials in shape. Money in, money out. Your salary from the insurance company will match up with all your expenditures. You know how these things go, McCane-follow the money."
"But you haven't done any of that yet, have you, Freeman?" he said, moving up behind me. I could feel his closeness, hear the heavy shoes shuffling in the blades of grass. "And your boy can't get that kind of information without a subpoena, and you don't get that without an official investigation. And from what I seen, you're far from official, bud."
"It would probably be a hell of a lot easier on you, McCane, if it didn't get that official."
I'd turned to him and was walking backward now, holding his eyes as we came around the corner of the house to the front lawn. Then I saw his face change.
When I looked around, the three street guardians were leaning up against the rental car. The leader in the middle, his head turned down, watched our approach from under the edge of a Marlins' ball cap. He was poking at his teeth with a toothpick. His friends had their hands in their pockets. While I hesitated, McCane stepped past me.
"Get y'all dusty asses off my
car, niggers," he said, striding toward the group.
Without a word all three of them nonchalantly flexed their leg muscles and bent forward, bouncing their rumps off the fenders and taking one step forward. Their eyes followed McCane as he passed them and walked around to the driver's side.
McCane got in, started the car and pulled around my truck, driving slowly and with as much dignity as one could in a tiny rental. We all watched him turn the first corner and disappear.
"Tell me that cracker cop ain't workin' wit you, G," said the leader without turning to me, his words directed in the direction of McCane's car.
"He's not working with me," I said.
"Then what's he doin' round Ms. Thompson's?"
It was my turn to hold a response.
"I think he's looking for the junk man," I finally said.
The leader was quiet while he poked at an upper tooth.
"Ahh," he said, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. "A unified goal."
"You call me if you find him," I said, climbing into my truck.
Eddie was out in the street. He couldn't wait under the bridge forever. He had two more days to wait out Mr. Harold, and the ache in his veins was too much. He needed his heroin.
He had waited in his concrete corner through the daylight hours, listening to the cars overhead, trying to ignore the twisting in his stomach and the ache in his muscles. Just after nightfall, he heard the voices of the homeless men nearby, and their tone sounded oddly satisfied. He uncurled himself and approached them. He could smell gravy.
Three men were crouched in a huddle with white Styrofoam boxes in front of them. They looked up when Eddie came close. The light from the overpass lamps kept his face in darkness and cast a shadow large enough to cover them all.
"You can go down to the Salvation Army yonder and get you some," one offered, pointing to the east with a plastic fork.
Eddie stood silent. He had never gone to the feeding programs anywhere in the city. He'd seen the men, sometimes women and kids, lining up when the traveling kitchens stopped in the park on the west side. But he stayed away, his momma's voice in his head: "We ain't no welfare case, an' we don't take nothin' that ain't our deservin'." Eddie didn't try to figure why then she mostly took her dinner at the church in the last few years. "That's from God," she would say, bringing home leftovers. "And we are all deservin' from God."
Eddie determined that he was hungry now, and took a step closer to the men. When the headlights of a tractor-trailer swept through the bushes and momentarily lit his face, the three men got up and backed away, leaving their meals behind.
After he had eaten Eddie sidestepped his way down the steep embankment to his cart. He still had a hundred-dollar bill deep in his pocket, and he needed his bundle. One bundle would get him through, he convinced himself. Just one until Mr. Harold came again.
The thought of the heroin had warmed his veins and set him to pushing up the empty street toward the train station that was always empty at night. From there he could slip into the neighborhood, where he would again be invisible. And now he was out in the street.
31
Someone had put Springsteen on the jukebox. Billy was drinking a bad Merlot. Richards was sipping on a glass of white wine and I was studying a green bottle of beer that had long ago lost its soggy label. On Richards's suggestion, we were sitting in a booth at a cop bar named Brownie's.
I'd spent the day on the streets looking for the dark shape of Eddie Baines. I tried to think like him, a man who could hide himself out in the open, someone who worked in the corners of a neighborhood where he both belonged and didn't belong. The crime scene guys at the Baines house had found signs that someone had been there. Food crumbs that were new, scuffings on the dusty floors that showed the drag of a heavy boot. What was in a man's head who could bind his mother and leave her in a closet to rot?
With no authority and carrying the obvious white man's presence in a racial community, I'd poked through an abandoned bus depot near the interstate. I had introduced myself to an ancient man with a face creased and dry like dark and weathered leather at the local recycling shop. I walked the edges of the park and pulled up at the rear of the small local groceries, studying the knots of men with yellowed eyes who looked up first with anticipation and then turned away, waiting for the sound of my door opening and the yelp of some command. When I got out and showed the booking photo of Baines to a group of men playing dominoes at a corner park, they simply stared through the square of glossy paper and shook their heads. Three times during the day and into the night I'd crossed paths with patrol cops doing the same thing I was. Word had been passed at their shift briefings that I was a P.I. working the case independently. At dusk the one called Taylor crossed me at a four-way stop, pulling his cruiser into the middle of the intersection where he sat for several seconds, blocking my way, looking with a blank face into my windshield before slowly moving on.
With Billy feeding her insurance information and his own list of computer acquaintances, Richards and a BSO computer-crime expert named Robshaw had spent the day looking for someone who they could muscle into admitting they'd downloaded a stolen hard drive for a big, drawling ex-cop looking for anonymity.
Everyone was exhausted by our collective lack of success.
"We did six guys in Miami, eight here in Broward and at least that many in Palm Beach," Richards said. "Hell we've got as many ex-con hackers as we've got bank heist guys."
"One of our 1-leads is living in a two-story b-beach house overlooking the Gulf in K-Key Largo," Billy said, keeping his voice purposely low in a public place.
"A man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun," I said to no one in particular.
Richards's eyes grinned with recognition of the song lyric. Billy just frowned.
"Don Henley, 1989," I said. My friend just shook his head.
"Diaz and his guys already confiscated a dozen computers from the local pawn shops trying to find some crackhead who might have done Marshack, but the chances are slim on that side," Richards said.
Her eyes were red-rimmed and the irises had faded to gray and I tried to catch them with my own when she locked onto something over my shoulder.
I turned and saw Hammonds making his way to the bar. Several of the officers in the place instinctively turned away from him, all of them losing two inches of height as their necks disappeared into their shoulders. It was nearly midnight, but the chief was still in his suitcoat. The knot of his tie had not been loosened.
"Give me a couple of minutes," Richards said, sliding out of her side of the booth.
I watched her move across the room and stop at Hammonds's side, and the two of them stood at the bar and leaned into their elbows for a guarded conversation.
"You know the history b-behind this p-place?" Billy said, and I shook my head, knowing he did. There was age in the wood of the long, standard bar. The ceilings were low and the wall paneling knotted and lacquered.
"In the 1930s there was a live band performing every Saturday in the back," he explained, tipping his head to a door that opened up onto the parking lot. "It w-was an open air d-dance floor and drew a young crowd. S-Some of the old-time attorneys tell about s-seeing Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald here. At the t-time, black performers were n-not allowed to play at white d-dances in Dade County. To m-make the trip worthwhile the traveling acts would book p-places like this."
I looked around. On this night the ethnic mix looked pretty broad. But I could tell from the body language, haircuts and conversation that most of them were the same color: blue. I had spent a lot of nights in the same kind of bars in Philly.
Richards came back and slid in next to me.
"The chief says Robshaw has a lead on a hacker in Miami. Guy got busted a couple of years ago on a case where some CEO type had dipped into the corporate piggy bank to buy some expensive artwork, then later reported it stolen and tried to collect the insurance. He hired the hacker to do
some eraser work on the company computers.
"Hacker flipped on the CEO but still had to do some time. They're trying to track an address on him now."
I turned to get a look at Hammonds but he had already disappeared, a full glass of beer left untouched on the bar where he'd been standing.
When I looked back at Richards she held my eyes.
"He's also opening investigations on our elderly women. He's sending crime scene teams back out to their homes with explicit instructions to check the metal jalousie tabs for any stress bends."
Billy leaned in.
"I m-might help you w-with the insurance connection. You can get the file on this hacker?"
"I told him that and he said you're free to call Robshaw and coordinate with him," Richards said.
Billy flexed his fingers and his eyes started to dart. I'd seen him get cranked before with the possibility of a challenge.
"If you w-will excuse me, f-folks," he said moving to get up. "I must go b-before they start p-playing Jimmy Buffett.
"I will be up," he said to me. "Just call."
A fresh beer had appeared and I filled half of my glass. Richards finished the wine.
"You stink, Freeman," she finally said.
There was a pull at the corner of her mouth.
"You are correct," I answered. I had been wearing the same clothes for two days, slept and sweated in them.
"How about a shower and a couple hours sleep?"
"Deal," I said, putting money on the table and following her out the door.
32
I followed her to her house and was sitting on the same steps in her backyard, watching the light from the pool dance in the tree leaves and holding a warm cup of coffee. The night was windless and still.
I closed my eyes for the fourth time in ten minutes and chastised myself for letting my head drift back to Philadelphia. Time after time I had questioned why I'd followed my father's path into this kind of work, knowing that something would happen to make it all feel like a bad mistake. When Richards came back out onto the patio, I realized my fingers had gone to the scar on my neck, and I dropped my hand.
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