A Killing Night (22 page)

CHAPTER 27

I
sat with both hands on the steering wheel at ten and two o’clock. I didn’t know what Morrison might have called in, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Make no quick moves and keep your hands in full view. I watched the three cops in front of me huddle at Morrison’s trunk, talking and cutting their eyes to me. It was Morrison’s meeting and I watched him, trying to match him up with the figure I’d seen briefly at the bar. He hooked his thumbs into his polished leather belt, turned his face to me a couple of times for emphasis. It was the same face as in the photo. They talked for a full two minutes and I did not move my hands, not even to turn off the engine.

Finally, the two other officers nodded and started toward me, one moving to the left, the other to the right of my truck. Morrison leaned back against his trunk and crossed his arms and stared into my face. His eyes felt much closer than they physically were.

“License and registration, please,” said the cop who came to my open window.

“What, uh, seems to be the problem, officer?” I said, truly interested in what they were going to come up with.

“License and registration, please,” he repeated.

The other cop was at the passenger window, looking into the seat and on the floor and checking what he could see in the bed of the truck.

“May I go into the glove box?” I asked before leaning over to turn the knob.

“Sure,” said the cop. “Turn off the ignition first, please.”

I shut down the engine and then reached in and got my registration and insurance card. I asked if I could get my wallet from my back pocket. Again he agreed, but I noticed that he had flipped off the strap on his 9mm holster and was resting the web between his thumb and forefinger on the butt of the gun.

I handed him the documentation and he said: “I’ll be right with you, sir.”

He was a younger man, sandy blonde hair and skin that was too fair for the semitropics. He was wide in the shoulders and narrow in the hips and the short sleeves of his shirt were too tight to fit comfortably around his biceps. He nodded at the other one over the hood and then walked my paperwork back to Morrison.

We were a good forty feet apart and maybe I could feel his sneer more than actually see it. Morrison was cupping his elbows now, looking nonchalant, but there was something misshapen about his mouth that gave the effect that his whole head was tilted. He took the documents from the other one’s hands and stared down at them. I got the sense that he could memorize the pertinent facts and did not write them down. In fact I doubted that he wrote anything down with the exception of work-related reports that were mandatory. He was a man whose secrets would all be filed inside his head.

After another minute, the two men nodded in affirmation and as muscle boy walked back toward me, Morrison turned and got back into his squad car.

I watched him do a three point turn as the younger cop approached my window and said: “Mr. Freeman, step out of the car, please. We are going to have to conduct a roadside sobriety test, sir.”

As he drove out and past me, Morrison did not meet my eye. He stared straight ahead and did not acknowledge me at all, as though I were something not worth his time or effort. He was leaving my detention to other, less important persons while he attended to something more pressing. He knew who I was now. But for the next twenty minutes, while I went through a small humiliation, I would shed an entire layer of doubt about his involvement in something ugly. And that, I promised, would not be a good thing for Kyle Morrison.

If they had tested me a few hours later at Billy’s penthouse apartment, the cops might have actually been able to hold me. I was working on my third beer and it had been no struggle at all. Billy was sipping from his crystal wineglass and his fiancée was out for the evening, “clearing her head.”

On the drive back north I’d called O’Shea and told him that our tail had called in his backup to make a bogus DUI stop and then split, ending any further chance of surveillance. He would be watching now, and he was no slouch when it came to paying attention. I had figured he’d be too caught up in Marci’s story to notice what was happening around him and I had been wrong. I wouldn’t underestimate him again.

“Sorry I had to leave you like that, Freeman. But you know my circumstances. Brushing up against rogue cops isn’t what I need right now,” O’Shea said. “So I figured if I got dealt out of the cop chase, I’d make myself useful and go back and set up on the girl.”

It was the smart thing to do. O’Shea had to be given credit, but even when I did it it felt like begrudging credit.

“You’re smarter than you look, O’Shea. Are you good to stay on her when she leaves?”

“Fuck you, Freeman. And yeah, I’ll hang with her. If you want, I’ll tail her to her apartment and babysit all night.”

Maybe he was just being a smart-ass, but I quickly agreed and told him I’d get back with him later. But before he could disconnect, I asked him one last question.

“You know what this is, don’t you, Colin?”

“I’m not stupid, Freeman. You’re figuring this cop for the abductions and ponytail is his next victim.”

“No, you’re not stupid,” I said. “You’re deductive.”

“I’m not deductive,” he answered. “I’m experienced, Freeman. I’ve seen this before, remember. But even if you’re as wrong on this guy as they were on me up in Philly, I’m still willing to help you find out this way instead of sticking the guy’s face into the official IAD toilet where innocence don’t mean jack.”

This time he was quicker on the button and the connection went dead. I might not like his attitude, but O’Shea was right. We were both hanging it out there. But I also took some peace knowing he was looking over Marci’s back. He would call me if Morrison showed up. And I’d spell him in the morning.

When I called Billy it was late but he invited me over and I launched into the story of my botched plan to follow the cop on the long shot that he might lead us to something worth more than speculation. When I got to the part about the DUI trap he winced. We were on the patio with the black, colorless ocean out in front of us. He listened intently, like he always did, before offering a question or opinion.

“So you d-don’t think they were in on anything t-together, this Marci girl and M-Morrison?”

“She doesn’t strike me as a user,” I said, shaking my head. “Or someone who’d get into the drug thing. She comes across too smart and too proud. When he raped her, he made one hell of an enemy.”

“But you said she was s-scared of Morrison.”

“Scared and pissed at the same time. She said she wouldn’t press charges, that she knew she’d lose because he was a cop and she hadn’t struggled enough.”

We were quiet at the thought, looking out into a sea we could only hear and smell. The wind rustled the palm fronds and a crinkle of laughter from some balcony below found its way on the breeze up to us.

“W-What’s your next move?” Billy finally said.

“Don’t know.”

He waited a moment.

“Liar,” he said.

“OK. I’ll have to talk to her again. Try to get something out of her we can use. Some detail she doesn’t know she has that can trap this guy.

“It will be difficult. M-Maybe someone else should be the interviewer?”

“Richards?”

“It would m-make sense. Woman to woman.”

I sipped at the beer, thought about the possibilities.

“Sherry is going to l-listen to a woman in pain, M-Max. No matter what.”

I brought the bottle down.

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” I said.

“You can do it from here,” Billy said and I could tell by his tone that he was leading me. I looked over at him and raised an eyebrow.

“S-Stay here in the guest room tonight,” he said.

“No thanks. You know? You guys deserve some guest-free living.”

“Diane w-went back to her place,” he said.

This time I swung my legs off the chaise and faced him.

“Besides, I g-gave your bed away at the b-beach.”

I’d just be wasting my time if I asked why his fiancée was sleeping away from the penthouse. He would tell me if he wanted me to know so I kept my mouth shut while he got up and went inside. When he returned he handed me a manila envelope and started to explain while I went through the contents.

“We got this two days ago, no p-postmark. It was somehow dropped on the front d-desk without anyone noticing.”

The front of the envelope said simply: Manchester. The name was written in block letters with some kind of black marker.

I pulled out a sheaf of five photos. One shot was of Billy and Diane, in front of the apartment building, both dressed for work in business suits. Another was a single shot of Billy in front of the West Palm Beach County Courthouse, carrying his briefcase, heading inside. Another single shot was of Diane, exiting her car in the federal courthouse parking lot only a few blocks away. Another was of her sunbathing on the beach, one knee raised as she lay on a blanket. Her skin was moist with lotion and her straw hat was placed over her face.

The final photograph was of a woman I did not recognize. She appeared to be of medium height and build and was also in business attire and coming out of a small shaded residence built in the old style of South Florida in the 1950s.

“When you told us the other day that you had s-seen someone outside with a camera, we weren’t exactly sure whether to tell you,” Billy said. “Diane had n-noticed someone on the b-beach taking photos in her direction, but didn’t mention it until I brought up a concern. The p-political hierarchy was m-making noise about our marriage, the race issue. I had considered that s-someone was taking pictures to put up on some Internet site or d-distribute them another way to influence those of a like mind to second-guess Diane’s judgeship.”

I started to say something when Billy stopped me with a raised hand.

“I was b-being paranoid,” he said and then handed me a typewritten note sealed in a plastic bag. “This came with the pictures.”

I held the bag by the corners, laid it smooth on my thigh and read:

GET OFF THE CRUISE WORKERS CASE OR ALL THREE OF YOU LAWYER FUCKS WILL BE GATOR FOOD

“Eloquent,” I said. I glanced at the evidence tag that was stripped and dated on the corner of the bag.

“Brody come up with anything?” I said, guessing at the precise tag markings.

Brody was a former FBI forensics expert who had quit the agency when his entire government lab was smeared as incompetent by the general accounting office a few years back. He’d moved to South Florida and opened his own private lab and did uncompromising work for a variety of attorneys, investigators and the occasional freelance operator who needed his services with no questions or paperwork.

“I assume the stranger is a lawyer?” I said, holding up the photo of the single woman.

“Sarah O’Kelly,” Billy said. “I know her, but I was unaware that she was doing work with cruise ship workers from the Port of Miami.

“She lives in Fort Lauderdale and when I called her, her secretary said she had been traveling in Panama doing research on the cruise cases and had been gone for ten days. The assistant had not opened her mail, but nothing unposted or of similar size to this one had arrived at her office.”

“If she got it, it’s probably at her house,” I said.

“If our new friends are c-consistent.”

I turned the photos over and scanned through them again. The shot of Diane seemed uncomfortably pornographic, knowing someone had stalked her and taken it without her knowledge with the purpose of a threat.

“The Hix brothers?” I said.

“I can only imagine,” Billy said. “I asked O’Kelly’s assistant to pass on my number as soon as she contacts her and preferably before she gets home. She said she’s due in tomorrow.”

I put the photos and letter back into the envelope and handed them back.

“You tell Rodrigo about this?” I said, thinking of the scared man and his decision to go home.

“That’s w-why you’ll have to stay here tonight, M-Max,” Billy said. “He’s out of the hospital, b-but I gave him your bed down at the Flamingo.”

“Hiding?”

“For now.”

“And Diane?”

“She is not the k-kind of woman who is used to threats,” Billy said. “I asked her to st-stay at her place because it is g-gated and secured and she did not argue.”

I wasn’t sure what it was in his voice: Disappointment? Guilt? All I did know was that I wasn’t going to probe there. Not without an invitation.

He was still standing, leaning against the railing now and, unlike the analytical and focused man I had always known, he was preoccupied. I gave him space and looked out where I knew the horizon was, where dark sky met dark water, and searched for the light of a trawler or overnight fisherman, something to give the blackness a reference point. I finally found one far to the south, winking on and off with a rhythm that I knew had to be the roll of the swells.

“So what’s the plan?” I finally said. “Do we take this to the authorities as a written threat and let them handle it?”

“Huh?” Billy flinched and looked down as if just discovering the glass in his hand and stepped back from the slosh of wine that had spilled to the deck.

“I’m sorry, M-Max,” he said and looked embarrassed. “I, uh, well, certainly that’s an option. B-But I think I would rather wait until we get the chance to t-talk with O’Kelly. I’d like to s-see if she too has b-been contacted and what her take on all this is. If I recall correctly, she is an amiable and thoughtful lawyer and I w-would think we’d want her opinion since she is obviously intimately involved.”

“Spoken like a true attorney,” I said, razzing him for his quick little soliloquy, spit out with style even though it had been far from his thoughts.

He smiled and raised his glass. “I have been threatened b-before. This will wait. I think you have more p-pressing matters at hand. Let’s go over your scenarios with a true attorney’s perspective on all of this.”

CHAPTER 28

T
he smell of wet green earth and the sound of rain pattering through high trees woke me and I was startled in the way you are when you can’t register where the hell you are. I blinked the dream away and pushed my hands up into my face and realized I was already sitting up on the edge of a bed.

Billy’s, I recalled, noting the deep ivory color of the wall in front of me and the chill on my bare shoulders from the air-conditioning. I was in his guest room. I was still wearing my canvas pants and looked around to see that I had not pulled the bed covers back and had simply fallen asleep atop them. I rubbed my eyes and again caught the smell of turned and rotted soil on the palms of my hands and stared stupidly down at them. Clean.

I pushed myself up and walked into the bath and stood at the basin and splashed water up into my face and the odor disappeared. When I was a child my mother described how my dreams had seemed so vivid and my recollections of them so detailed that it made her uneasy. She said she would walk to the Italian Market in South Philly or to church and half expect to come around the corner and see the shear cliffs or talking dogs or some falling child that I had foretold from a dream the previous night. There were times now that I fell back into that vividness when dreaming or daydreaming of past experiences. As a cop who saw too many ugly scenes I often considered it a curse. Still, they were dreams. I had never had them portend the future before.

I dressed and went out to the kitchen where I found the coffeemaker loaded with fresh grounds and ready to flip on, and a note from Billy:

“I have gone to check on Diane and will he in my office later. I will call O’Kelly and contact you. I checked on Rodrigo and he is fine. Can you stop in to see him?”

Even though we’d stayed up well into the morning hours, Billy was an early riser. He would have consumed the
Wall Street Journal
and that horrid fruit and vitamin concoction of his and then been out the door dressed in Brooks Brothers before seven.

I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. When the coffee was brewed I took a cup out onto the patio. There was a nor’easter starting to kick in. The water was gray-green and moving like an enormous blanket being shaken from four corners at the same time, waves of varying sizes swallowing each other and an uneven chop strewn with foam. The sky was overcast and tightened down and the wind was blowing hard enough to snap the single American flag that the faux British manager had raised at dawn. Before my first cup was empty I could feel a film of warm, clammy moisture on my skin. I went back inside and my first call was to O’Shea. He gave the same report he had when I called him at three in the morning, before I passed out: Marci was in her apartment. No sign of Morrison.

“How you doin’?” I asked.

“You ever trying sleeping in a Camaro?” he said

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, I’m a security guard, Freeman,” he said. “I can handle security.”

My next call was to Richards’s office number. Her answering machine was on and I left a message telling her I had more information about Morrison and one of the bartenders who we had recently met who might know more than was offered. I hoped at least the bartender reference would cause her to call back.

I finished the coffee and left, pulling Billy’s apartment door closed and checking the automatic locking mechanism before taking the elevator down. Outside in the front lot I instinctively scanned the cars, looking for one backed into a spot with signs of a cameraman. Now I wished I had confronted the guy the first time.

I took A1A south and traffic was light. It wasn’t a beach day and the tourists and regulars would stay inside or inland somewhere out of the wet wind. The grayness gave the dunes and seaside mansions a look like old antique oil paintings, the colors dimmed and the landscape lonely. I was pulling into the Flamingo Villas when my cell phone rang.

“Yeah.”

“It’s Sherry, Max.”

“Hey. You got my message?”

“No. I haven’t been into the office yet. What did you need?”

If she was calling me unsolicited, I immediately wondered why. To offer me something? To ask for help? If I let her go first, it would put me in a better position to state my own case. I hesitated, then realized I was playing the info-for-info game and shook my head like I could just toss off a million years of human social behavior like a bead of sweat.

“I uh, wanted to get with you and tell you about a conversation I had with the bartender,” I said. “Marci, at Kim’s. The younger one who is fairly new.”

“OK. Has this got anything to do with patrolman Morrison?” she said.

“Yeah, it does. How’d you know?”

“Well,” she said, and now it was her turn to hesitate, and maybe for the same reason I had.

“I understand that you two had a bit of a face-to-face yesterday,” she said. “I know that’s your method of operation, Max. And I’m interested in what that finely tuned perceptive gut of yours told you when you looked him in the eye. But wasn’t that a little outside the envelope, trying to tail a cop while he’s in his squad car?”

There was a bit of a lilt in her voice, like she was smiling when she said it, and not a smile that held a comeuppance.

“Yeah, I suppose it was. But how did this information come to your attention?”

“O’Shea called me,” she said, flat and matter-of-fact.

“You’re kidding,” I said, spinning the conversation I’d just had with O’Shea.

“He was concerned about you. He thought you were working something that was going to get you into trouble on his account and he said he didn’t want to be responsible. He said he figured that I should know the truth before the facts got twisted around to suit the uniforms.”

“The truth?” I said.

“Meet me over in the covered parking lot at the Galleria at two, under the west side,” she said. “It’s raining like hell down here.”

I told her I would be there by two, as soon as I checked on another client.

It was still only gray here. The clouds were heavy and had not yet opened up but I could hear the surf beginning to slash at the beach as the wind increased. The fronds of the rubber plants and white birds of paradise that sheltered each bungalow were clacking and the smell of salt and flotsam was thick in my nose when I came around the corner and stopped.

The door to Billy’s hideaway was standing open. There was a light glowing somewhere behind the front window. Probably the one over the sink in the kitchen, I thought, putting the layout together in my head while I squinted and tried to pick up any movement inside. I stepped closer to the sea grape tree next to me and knelt with one knee in the sand. The wind swung the door a foot more and I could now see a bar stool on the floor and the small dining area light was missing from its spot suspended above the table, only a bare cord left hanging in the air. I was unarmed. My 9mm was back at the shack, wrapped in its oilskin cloth where I had retired it.

Don’t jump to conclusions, I told myself, and then got up and took a couple of steps closer, listening through the rumble of the ocean and wind. There was still no movement from inside. I looked around for neighbors but the weather had sent most people indoors.

On the flat concrete stones that started a path in front of the patio I picked up on a trail of dark droplets and one didn’t have to be a CSI to recognize blood, and that’s when I moved faster. At the door I peered around the corner. The front room had been tossed and glass and half a bulb from the hanging light lay shattered in one corner. The blood trail led to the couch and joined a stain there that formed the shape of Italy in the fabric. I was about to step all the way in when the panicked voices of women came from behind me in the wind.

“Help! Somebody help him!”

I turned and jogged toward the beach and saw three women, one with children huddled into her skirts, waving their arms and pointing out to sea.

I had my shirt off by the time I hit the railing of the bulkhead and then used the top rung to swing over and down. I kicked my Docksides off after landing in the sand and I was honing in on a splotch of yellow that was bobbing fifty yards out. The shape expanded at the top of a crest to something human and then disappeared on the backside of the wave and a prayer seemed to bring it back to the surface again.

I hurdled the first three waves and then launched myself like a spear down into the next one, grabbed a handhold of the bottom sand, pulled myself into a crouch and used my legs to launch again. Each time I dolphined I tried to catch a breath and a glimpse of the yellow shirt. Sometimes I got one, sometimes the other.

When it got too deep I started to freestyle, looking forward each time a wave picked me up to the top of a crest. It didn’t take long to close in on the shirt. When I got to within ten yards I could see it was Rodrigo, one side of his face a pale white, the scarred half an angry red. But his eyes were still wide and he was flapping with one arm, trying to stay on top in the oxygen while the white water tried to drown him. I went to a breast stroke and got into the same swell with him and yelled his name. There was no recognition in his face but he saw hope and grabbed for it.

I’d learned enough about water rescues to keep a struggling swimmer off your body. If you let them get a choke hold, you were both going down. I grabbed his wrist when he reached for me and held him at arm’s length.

“OK Rodrigo!” I yelled. “You’re OK, you’re OK!”

I was looking to find his other arm when a wave broke over both our heads. While we were under I reached for his other arm and held it. When we both cleared the white water Rodrigo was screaming in pain like he’d been hooked with a sharp barb and I realized the arm I’d grabbed was hanging limp.

“Broke, Mr. Max! Broke, broke,” he spit out, his face twisted in agony and I let go of the arm.

“OK, OK. Let me pull you, Rodrigo. Let me pull!”

He may have understood me or maybe he went into shock but I was able to hook him under the pit of his good arm and turn his back so it was on my hip and I began sidestroking for shore. The waves had no rhythm and in the white water it felt like all I was doing was pulling at air bubbles and getting nowhere. I was breathing heavily and trying to scissor kick each time a wave pushed us, and then I’d rest when it left us bogged down in the swell. It seemed like thirty minutes and I started counting strokes to give myself a goal.

In the middle of my second count to fifty I felt my right foot touch the ocean floor and the next wave pushed both of us onto solid sand. I struggled with Rodrigo’s sudden weight and then heard yelling, “We got you, man! We got you!” and we were suddenly surrounded by hands and arms and other bodies in the water around us.

“Watch his arm, watch his arm, it’s broke,” I said as two men took Rodrigo from me and I felt another strong arm around my own waist.

“Oh, shit, man and his leg, too, watch his leg, man!” another voice said.

On the beach there was a red-and-white rescue truck with a red gumball light spinning on its roof and the lifeguards lay Rodrigo down in the lee side out of the wind and had me sit beside him. The little Filipino had an unnatural lump in the side of his arm where his bicep should have been and from the thigh of his left leg a stark white splinter of bone was protruding, blood trickling from the gash and mixing with the water and running a spiderweb of red down through the hair on his leg. One of the guards wrapped a blanket around the leg and someone draped one over my shoulders.

While my heartbeat tripped down I heard the sound of a siren growing and two of the guards brought out a backboard, strapped Rodrigo onto it, and then carried him to the street end, where an ambulance was backing up to the bulkhead. After they took him away a guard crouched down next to me. It was Amsler, the guard whose chinning bar I used.

“You want a ride to the E.R., Mr. Freeman? Let them check you out?”

“No,” I said. “I’m all right. Swallowed a little salt water is all but thanks, thanks for helping out. You, uh, know what hospital they’re taking that guy to?”

“Probably North Broward,” he said. “Man, I’ve never seen anyone break bones like that in the surf. That guy was messed up.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he was.”

When I stood I could see up over the Royal Flamingo’s bulkhead where the group of women whose call for help had set me off was talking with a uniformed Broward sheriff’s office deputy. One of the women pointed to me and the cop looked up. I didn’t recognize him. He was writing on a pad that looked like a reporter’s notebook and the pages were flapping in the wind. I started toward the bottom of the stairs as he passed out cards to the women and by the time I reached the top he was heading for me.

“Excuse me, sir.”

I stood near the shower and waited.

“Excuse me, I’m Deputy Cardona. You are the rescuer?”

He was a young man with a tight Spanish accent but his English pronunciations were careful.

“Sure,” I said, offering nothing more and looking down at my soaked pants, now covered with a crust of sand from sitting wet on the beach.

“The ladies there,” he said, tipping his pen back toward the group, which had not moved. “They say they were calling for help when they saw the gentleman in trouble and then you came flying in from nowhere and into the water.”

“Yeah, a real Superman,” I said, not really meaning to be a smart-ass but coming off that way while I was trying to piece together the sight of the smashed bungalow, Rodrigo’s broken bones and whether I wanted to talk about any of it with this cop.

“OK. First of all, I will require a name, sir,” the officer said and raised his pen to his pad.

“Max. Max Freeman. Look, do you mind if I shower this stuff off?” I said, dropping my fingers to my pants and nodding at the shower. He said, “Not at all, please,” and stepped back to the windward side and let me turn on the water.

I let the stream run over my head and kept my eyes closed while I thought of what I was going to say to the guy. I rinsed the sand off my pants as best I could and when I couldn’t stall any longer I cranked the valve shut. The cop stood patiently by, looking out to sea and then to the bulkhead, and if he was perceptive enough he would pick up the deep impressions that my landing on the beach had made and then follow my running footsteps leading back to the bungalow. The door was still wide open.