A Killing Night (5 page)

“Now you’re in control, Freeman,” he said. “Now you’re in control.”

CHAPTER 5

W
hen I woke up in the chaise, a pair of small blue eyes was staring into my face, topped by a mop of blond hair. I blinked and focused and when I raised my hand to wipe away whatever look I was holding on my face, the boy from the shower turned and ran.

I took a couple of minutes to orient myself, caught some bits of the dream still behind my eyes and then checked my watch. I’d been asleep two hours. I needed to get on to Billy’s. I shaved and showered, dressed in khakis and a white un-ironed oxford shirt and slipped on my Docksides. The cab of my pickup truck still held the heat of the day so I kicked the A.C. up and pulled out, heading north on A1A. Though the trip to Billy’s apartment building would be faster on I-95, I tried to avoid that craziness of high-speed tailgaters and opted for an occasional glimpse of ocean between the mansions and condos, even at the expense of hitting dozens of traffic lights.

When I got to the twelve-story Atlantic Towers, I pulled directly into the front visitor’s lot. Twenty-four spaces, all of them filled. As I inched down the row, the burp in the pattern of parked Acuras, Lexuses and high-end SUVs was a sedan that had backed into a spot. The driver was sitting behind the wheel. I stopped my truck and looked at the man, wondering if he was getting ready to leave. He pulled down his sunshade and waved me on. I could tell only that he was white, from the hands and thin arms. Maybe middle-aged, with a stubble-darkened chin. There was a long black telephoto lens attached to a camera body wedged on the dash and he turned his face away, searching the passenger seat for something, maybe a snack. I hated surveillance, too, I thought. By habit I filed a quick description of the car into my cop’s head and moved on. I found a spot around the corner where the maintenance people parked and where my F-150 would not seem out of place.

The lobby of the Atlantic Towers was all polished marble and brass and the concierge/manager with the fake English accent was like part of the furnishing. He took a slight, barely perceptible bow when I approached his desk.

“Mr. Freeman.”

I nodded.

“I shall call Mr. Manchester and announce you, sir.” The phone was already in his hand. I again nodded and turned to the brushed stainless door of the elevator without comment. I didn’t like the guy. Too damn frumpy. Plus, I knew he’d been born in Brooklyn and the accent was a put-on.

The inside of the elevator was paneled dark wood and the light on the penthouse button was already on. Seconds later the doors opened onto a private alcove with a handsome set of double oak doors at one end. I raised my knuckles to knock but a turn of the European-style brass handle beat me.

“Max, how wonderful to see you. Come in, come in,” said Diane McIntyre, swinging open the door and then reaching up on her toes to kiss my cheek.

Billy’s attorney friend, and now fiancée, was radiant. Her hair was a glossy and subtle auburn. She was dressed in a loose silk blouse oddly paired with sky blue sweatpants and was padding around in bare feet with a glass of wine in her hand. There was a smile on her pale but slightly flushed face. She was a happy woman.

Billy was on the other side of the huge single room, behind the kitchen counter, working some new magic at the stove.

“M-Max,” he said, over his shoulder and then broke away from the steaming pot. “Y-You are l-looking healthy.”

We shook hands and then he pulled me to him in an uncharacteristic embrace. “G-Good to see you.”

While he got me a beer I sat on one of the stools at the counter and surveyed. I was familiar with Billy’s penthouse, had lived here my first few weeks in Florida before getting settled into the river shack. I’d come and gone often as Billy slowly pulled me into his cases as his investigator. The big, fan-shaped living area was plush with thick carpeting and wide leather sofas. Billy’s eclectic art collection adorned the textured walls and topped the blond wood tables. But I picked up some new, more colorful additions; a delicate ballerina sculpture, a large painting of a field of flowers. A woman’s touch, I thought, as Diane pulled out the stool next to me, sat and took a sip of wine.

“So Max, let me tell you about our trip to Venice,” she said, smiling and anxious like a little kid who can’t hold an exciting tale any longer. I could see Billy grin and then while he cooked an incredible pan-seared snapper, we both listened, Billy only interrupting when he felt it was safe.

She was halfway through a description of a stroll through the Piazza San Marco when Billy said: “I w-was trying to f-find the similarities with Fort Lauderdale, the Venice of America, b-but just the water in the canals d-didn’t do it.”

Diane gave him a “get real” expression while he winked at me.

Billy is a supremely confident man. He is
GQ
handsome, athletically built, although I have never seen him do anything physically strenuous short of captaining his forty-two-foot sailboat. He is a brilliant attorney and had proven to me personally that he could manhandle the markets by investing my police disability buyout and making me comfortable if not rich. His only flaw is the stutter that embedded itself during childhood and has remained. On the phone or even from the other room his speech is flawless. But face-to-face he cannot control the staccato that jams his tongue. The stigma kept him out of the courtroom as a trial attorney, but sharpened his abilities to research and absorb through every other method of communication. And it hadn’t seemed to slow him down when it came to beautiful women.

What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn’t knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.

Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I’d been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I’d ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman’s daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state’s own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they’d broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: “Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?”

She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn’t just because she was gorgeous.

Diane took us all the way through dinner and coffee with descriptions of the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Correr Museum and 2:00 A.M. wine tasting at L’Incontro. When the dishes were cleared, I thought she might continue but she gracefully excused herself with: “I’ll leave you both to business while I go make some phone calls.” Billy and I exchanged looks and took our coffee to the patio.

The dominating feature of Billy’s apartment were the floor-to- ceiling glass doors that made up the entire eastern wall and opened onto the ocean. I stood at the railing and looked to the horizon where there was still a hint of blue.

“Anything n-new on Harris?”

“I’ve been watching him, but the press coverage must have pushed him under his rock for a while,” I said.

Harris was a physician who’d been writing tons of prescriptions for pain pills to Medicare patients in return for kickbacks. Billy had been working the guy for a class action suit by a group of cancer victims. I was logging his movements and interviewing poor patients who had been or still were seeing him. We were doing well until a high-profile conservative radio talk-show personality got busted for feeding his pain pill addiction with illegal prescriptions. In the media frenzy Harris had significantly cut back his operation. But Billy had done his work and we probably had the guy nailed already. One of the radio host’s lawyers had called Billy through the attorney grapevine, but Billy had refused to share any information.

“I’m more worried about the cruise ship guys,” I said. “Rodrigo has been real twitchy the last couple of times I went up to talk with him. He’s worried about his job and I think the others in his crew are telling him to back off getting any kind of legal representation because they’ll all get blackballed from working.”

Billy had me working a line on a dozen cruise ship workers who had been injured in a boiler explosion as their ship was coming in to the port of Palm Beach. The cruise ship business was huge in South Florida with tens of thousands of tourists packing the floating cities for luxury trips to the Caribbean. But the unknown population was the thousands of workers, almost every one a foreigner, who cleaned and catered and served and smiled for those vacationers for wages that those same Americans wouldn’t let their teenagers work for. But the explosion had cast a light on their world belowdecks and Billy had been contacted to represent men who had been mangled and bloodied and burned during the accident. Rodrigo Colon was one of the burn victims willing to talk.

The cruise ship company had paid for their initial medical treatment and was putting them up at a second-rate hotel, but the workers all knew that once they left the U.S., any claims to treat their injuries or compensate them for their ruined bodies would be lost. Their contracts would be ripped up and they would lose all future opportunity to work in the industry. Billy knew he couldn’t change the economics of the world, but he did think he could push the rich American cruise industry to do the right thing for those who had been disfigured and disabled in the explosion.

“It’s w-worth it to k-keep trying, Max.”

“Yeah, I’m bringing Rodrigo in to see you,” I said. “Maybe you can convince him to recruit the others.”

I was watching the blackening ocean. An uneven cloud cover blocked any early stars. Billy was waiting me out.

“Anything else g-going on out there?” he finally said.

I took a long sip of coffee and blew the heat out of my mouth into the sea air and told him about Richards’s call and her request of me to interrogate an old Philly cop I’d worked with.

“That’s w-what she said? Interrogate?”

“Maybe not that specific,” I said. “She asked me to talk to him. Gave me the option. Didn’t want me to think I owed her.”

I was thinking of the dream, of O’Shea digging the gun out of Hector the Collector’s hand. Did I owe him, too? Billy let the silence hang between us. It was not uncomfortable, but I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

“I thought you t-two were through.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “I thought she was through with me.”

Later I turned down the invitation to spend the night in the guest room. Things had changed in Billy’s house. Diane came out of the den to kiss me good night and I was at the door when I stopped.

“Speaking of surveillance,” I said, trying to be amusing, something I should have given up long ago, “I suspect you’ve got some paparazzi in the parking lot shooting film of your fellow residents or their guests.”

They both looked at each other. Billy was first to shrug his shoulders. It was unlike him not to ask for details, but no questions were forthcoming. I backed out.

“Just be careful not to wear anything trashy out front,” I said to Diane, pointing my finger from the blouse to the sweatpants.

“Good night, Max,” she said and smiled, and I turned to the elevator and heard the oak doors lock behind me.

CHAPTER 6

H
e walked in, let his eyes adjust to the low light, and was pleased to see two open stools at the end of the bar—one for himself and the other for quiet. He’d been here before, a neighborhood place the way he liked. A single, twenty-foot real wood bar spanned one wall, its lacquered surface redone enough times to make the deep grain look like it was floating just below the surface. The lights rarely went to half strength, even during happy hour. Tonight there were two groups of drinkers along the bar: Three guys and a girl in the middle, all friendly and chatty. Three more men at the other end by the windows with shot glasses in front of them and colored liquor on ice at the side.

He sat on the stool at the other end and hooked a heel on the rung of the empty one next to him, staking claim on the space. He knew the bartender who was working the shift alone. She was in her mid-thirties and had lost her figure to the years but her face was still pretty. She came his way and stopped at the thigh-high cooler under the bar and pulled out a Rolling Rock, and uncapped it on her way.

“Hi, how are you tonight?” she said with a pleasant smile and put the bottle on a napkin in front of him. Her eyes were brown and clear and he’d determined when he’d met her before that he didn’t like the intelligence he saw inside them.

“Fine, thanks,” he answered, being pleasant himself. He took a long drink and looked into the mirror behind the liquor bottles on the shelves behind her. When he focused he could use the reflection of another wall of mirrors on the opposite side of the room and watch the drinkers all down the line. He liked that aspect of the place, being able to watch without being noticed. A television tuned to ESPN hung in the corner above him. The sound was off and one of the wry announcers was moving his mouth around while photos of boxer Mike Tyson flashed behind him.

Christ, he thought, there’s your problem. If all your sports shows and media would just make a pact never to mention that asshole’s name again, he’d disappear into the fucking alleys or the prison yard where he belonged. Why do they let an animal like that use them?

He tipped his empty at the bartender and then watched the reflection of the girl from the middle group walk behind him and load dollar bills into the jukebox in the corner. He took a drink of the fresh beer and tried to place the first tune, a thing from the past by Journey about a small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world and a city boy born in south Detroit. He thought about Amy. On those late- night dates and long intimate conversations she had confided in him. Her parents in Ohio. Her father a drunk. She’d come to Florida to start fresh, had a girlfriend that was supposedly coming to visit but who had never shown up. She probably told him more about herself than she had any of her coworkers. He was a good listener. Women liked that about him. Christ, if she’d only kept her place instead of trying to run him. Hell, he could have loved her. Shit, she hadn’t even raised her arm to ward him off when he’d shot her in the face.

He hadn’t had to look around or wonder if anyone had heard the report of the .38. The Glades were like that, a few miles out and it was dark and alone. He’d taken a plastic yellow tarp from his trunk and rolled her body onto it and tossed her jeans and shoes on top. Then he’d pulled the load down through the trees and into the wet vegetation some forty yards from the dirt roadway. The moonlight had given him enough light to find a wet depression in the mangroves to leave her. He’d buried the first two and later he wondered why. All that forensics shit you saw on television was useless if they never find a body. And they never did. Other than that old woman running around with the posters of his second girlfriend, no one was even looking.

Christ, had it been a month? Two? He’d stayed out of the bars for a while, especially Hammermills. But he started back, had missed the air, the mix of cigarette smoke and perfume, the subtle sexual electricity—not like one of those strip places where the women were plastic and may as well have sticker prices on their asses. A place like this had real people, girls you could appreciate, women that you could fall for. He’d been growing anxious again, bored with work. The compulsion had come on faster than last time and he didn’t fight it. He was lonely. He needed to own someone.

The song ended and he watched in the mirrors while the bartender greeted a new girl. They were changing shifts. The older one was being managerial, introducing her around to the regulars. She did the foursome at the other end, some of them shook her hand. The new girl was small and seemed slightly self-conscious but had worn a short skirt on her first night. She had good legs. She’d be popular in this place, he thought.

“And this is Lou and Tommy and Liz and, I’m sorry, Absolut on the rocks, what was your name again?” said the bartender, introducing the middle group now. The unknown customer reintroduced herself and actually reached out and kissed the new girl’s hand.

“And down here at the end is Rolling Rock. Except when he’s serious and then he’s Maker’s Mark,” she said and smiled, pleased with herself.

The new girl nodded and smiled. She had blue eyes and curly blonde hair that didn’t have to be streaked to be pretty but was. He gave her his polite smile and said hello. While the other bartender cashed out and gathered her tips he watched the new girl. She had two studs in her left ear. Three rings on her hands, one with a blue stone. Her breasts were not large, but on such a small frame they appeared voluptuous. After the other girl left, she busied herself with rinsing and wiping and setting things up her own way and motioned to the empty bottle in front of him. When she extended her hand, he noted that her nails were bitten to the quick.

“Another one?” she said, and her smile seemed easier.

“Yes, please,” he said. “And a shot of Maker’s Mark on the side.”

I was up at the beach before sunrise and out on the edge of the Everglades by breakfast. Dan Griggs, the park ranger assigned to the five hundred acres designated by the state as a registered wild and scenic area at Thompson’s Point, was cooking eggs.

“I think I got that lunker snook you’ve been trying to hook over to the west side down by the shade turn,” he was saying from the back room.

“Like hell,” I answered. I was pouring coffee from the ranger’s electric maker in the office section of his dockside station.

“Yeah, I hate to say it. That crafty bastard been teasing you more’n a year now, right?”

He would not meet my eyes when he carried the pan of eggs in and pushed them onto two paper plates at his desk.

“Wasn’t my fish,” I said, setting his coffee in front of him and taking one plate. “He’s too damn wise for you, Danny.”

The ranger leaned back in his metal office chair and propped his heels on the corner of his state-issued desk. He was lean and blond and smiling when he dragged the plate of eggs onto his lap.

“He had to be twelve pounds.”

“Liar.”

He grinned and just looked at me over the rim of his cup.

“Catch and release?” I finally said.

“Of course, Mr. Freeman. I gotta leave you something to aspire to.”

Griggs and I had gotten off to a shaky start when he’d taken the job several months ago. He was replacing an old and long-revered ranger who had been killed by a man whose presence on the river had been in part my responsibility. People who knew the story blamed me, and I had not argued the point. Then, government forces had been trying to evict me from the old research shack for which Billy had a ninety-nine-year lease. He was still in a paper fight with them by e-mail and Federal Express at my request. When someone tried to burn me out of the place I had put Griggs at the top of my suspect list, but the young man had spun my suspicion by helping to repair the damage with carpentry skills I sorely lacked. The camaraderie of the project and the guy’s obvious love of the Florida wilds had led to a friendship and an admiration. That, and he liked a cold beer on occasion.

“Been pretty slow. Must be September,” Griggs said, looking up at the clock. He didn’t see me furrow my brow at the odd gesture.

“Some kayakers up your way last few days. A few fishermen out here on the wide. I suppose you’ve been in the city.”

It had long been a practice of mine not to answer rhetorical questions so I stayed quiet at first. He knew that I did P.I. work for a living and romanticized it.

“I stayed at the beach,” I finally said, giving in.

“Pretty girls?”

“Some.”

We both were quiet for a few moments.

“Man. A vacation place at the beach and a residence in the swamp,” he said. “You’re a regular mogul, Mr. Freeman.”

“Yeah, and I’ve got to get out to the mansion,” I said and got up. “Thanks for breakfast, son.”

Down at the dock I flipped my Voyager canoe and wiped out the webs that a golden-silk spider had put up between the struts. I loaded in containers of fresh water and a canvas bag of clean clothes and then floated the bow. Planting my left foot in the middle of the hull and gripping the gunnels on either side in a well practiced move, I pushed out onto the flat river water and glided out. When I’d settled into the stern seat with my paddle in hand, I turned to wave at Griggs, who was standing on the dock with his thumbs in his belt loops, and I knew he was jealous.

The sun was high and white and flickering off the water and I took my first few strokes north and drifted. I moved my weight around on the seat to find the right balance and then put some shoulder into the paddling. The river was wide here and moved strong to the sea when the outgoing tide pulled at it. I kept my course close to the sand banks so I wouldn’t have to fight the middle current, and found a rhythm.

The fumbling city boy who’d come here without a clue for the feel of the water and natural wind and wilderness had morphed into a competent riverman. The hours of hard paddling had earned me technique. I could dig into a purchase of water, pull through a stroke and kick the blade out at the end to send a spiral of water like a spinning teacup out behind me. And I could do it at sixty strokes a minute if I put my back into it. For a mile and a half I worked my way up past the sand pine terrain and then the low mangroves took over. The river narrowed and moved north and west for another mile until finally entering a cypress forest and tunneling into a shady greenness that was truly prehistoric.

My T-shirt was soaked through with sweat by the time I slid in under the canopy of trees. It was several degrees cooler here and I shivered with the change. I let the canoe drift in while I peeled off the shirt and pulled a dry one from my bag. The quiet here never failed to amaze, as if the lack of noise itself was something you could touch. Each time back from the city I could feel it cup over my ears like a changing of air pressure. I let the canoe come to a stop and listened for a full ten minutes before finally dipping the paddle and following the clearing water, which was now leading back to the South.

For a half mile I steered through the cypress knees that broke the surface and around fallen red maples. The hard sun was gone and the shafts that made it through the canopy speckled the ferns and pond apple leaves like luminescent streaks and drops of paint. Two bald cypress trees marked the entrance to my place and I paddled in on a shallow water spur off the main river. Fifty yards into the green my stilted shack stood hidden. I lashed the canoe to a small dock, gathered my things and after carefully checking for any footprints on the moist risers, I climbed the wooden stairs to, as Griggs had called it, my permanent residence.

Inside I stowed my supplies and started a pot of coffee with the fresh water on a small propane stove. The room held a mingled odor of mildew, still swamp air and fresh-cut wood from Griggs’s and my repair work. The northeast corner showed the new honey-colored planks where we’d stopped and the blackened, soot-marked pine that was still structurally sound. Nothing inside was painted, so I’d left the scar. Along the opposite wall hung a row of mismatched cabinets above a butcher-block counter and a stainless slop sink. An old hand pump that might have been installed when the first owner built the place in the early 1900s as a hunting lodge still worked, with the help of some new rubber washers. With a half dozen pumps of the handle I raised water directly from the swamp below and rinsed out my coffee cup.

While the coffeepot burbled, I went to one of the two worn armoires that stood against another wall and searched the bottom drawer. I had not carried much to South Florida that would remind me of my Philadelphia days. There had already been plenty in my head. But I had a small, gray-metal lock box that I now pulled out and put on the big oak table that took up the middle space of the room. I poured a cup of coffee and sat in one of the two straight-backed chairs and slipped a key into the lock. Inside was an oilskin cloth wrapped tightly around my 9 mm handgun. I held the weight of the package in my hands and then set it aside. Underneath I’d tucked important papers: birth certificate, passport, a life insurance policy and three letters I had written to my ex-wife but had never sent.

Under them was an old photograph of my mother, taken when she was a shy Catholic nursing student. With it were her rosaries, which she asked me to keep as she lay on her deathbed. Snapped inside a plastic case was a medal of distinction from the Philadelphia P.D., awarded to my father back when both he and it were yet untarnished. I kept digging until I found the yellowed tearsheet from an old neighborhood tabloid.

It was a photograph of two dozen men, standing in uniform and looking self-conscious. My graduating class from the police academy. I was in the back row, among the tallest, face stern, hair short and swept to the side. I scanned the other rows but finally had to refer to the list printed in small letters below to find Colin O’Shea. He was in the second row, his hair curly and dark and seeming too long for standard requirements. His face was pale, his head slightly tilted as though he were about to whisper something out of the side of his mouth to the man next to him. The paper was faded, yet I thought I could detect a smirk on O’Shea’s face. I took a sip of coffee and twenty-year-old memories came back.