Rough Draft (2 page)

“What you mean is, you think this could be your ticket to the big time. The
Post
, the
Times
.”

“Well, yeah, sure, it's got big-time potential. But the point is, your father, he's going to be the key guy on this. And he won't return my calls.”

“You're amazing, Tom. Dad spent an entire year digging up the evidence he needed to put Fielding away, and you, in one stupid, greedy, me-first story, shoot the whole thing down. And now you expect him to talk to you, give you an inside track?”

“If you asked him, he would. Come on, Hannah. I know you're mad at me at the moment, but, hey, we're on the same side. I want to see Fielding captured, your dad wants to see him captured. If I can do this story right, it might help.”

“Bullshit, Tom. Bullshit. I'm not doing it. You want to talk to my dad, you'll have to find some other way.”

She headed on down the corridor. Tom called out, a last pleading. But she kept on going.

Back at her office, Gisela Ortega was sitting in her chair, grinning at her as she entered the room.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?” Gisela said.

“That grin. What happened, somebody ask you to get married?”

Gisela was wearing a pale yellow dress with small roses printed on it. One of the quietest outfits she owned. She had short black hair and bright green eyes. She'd been working as Public Information Officer for six years, an old-timer by Miami PD standards. Showed Hannah the ropes two years ago when she transferred in from homicide.

“Nobody asked for my hand,” Gisela said. “I'm grinning about you, not me.”

“Oh, you heard about my little show downstairs?”

She shook her head. Grinning wider.

“Okay, so what is it, Gisela? Tell me. Don't do this. I hate guessing games.”

“You got a phone call.”

“Yeah?”

“Some guy, he was very nice. He sounded young. Very hip.”

“He saw me on TV and wanted a date.”

She shook her head. Really pleased with herself.

“He said he had good news for you, and I told him you were busy and I was your best friend so it was okay to tell me. I am your best friend, aren't I, Hannah?”

“You won't be much longer if you keep doing this.”

“The guy's name was Max Chonin. Does that ring a bell?“

Hannah looked at the far wall. A photo of her mom and dad on a cruise they'd taken last summer. Both of them wrapped in sheets for some goofy shipboard toga party.

Hannah shook her head.

“Never heard of him.”

“Literary agent. New York City.”

Hannah smiled.

“Oh, that guy,” she said, feeling her pulse jump. “What? He wants to represent my book?”

“No,” Gisela said. “Guess again.”

“Gisela, stop it. Just tell me.”

“He sold your book.”

“What?”

“He sold your book,
First Light”.

“He couldn't have. I just sent it to the guy two weeks ago. He was going to look at it, tell me what he thought.”

“He got it, gave it to some hotshot publisher he knows, and the guy wants to buy it. That is, of course, if you're interested.”

“Really!”

Gisela kept on grinning. “Really,” she said. “Really, really, really.”

“My God. I don't believe it.”

“And that's not even the best part,” Gisela said.

Hannah stepped over to the visitor's chair and sat down. Her knees were mush. She'd sold her goddamn book. Her novel about a female police officer who does secret after-hours crime fighting. A year of writing it in the early morning before Randall got up and went to school and she headed off to work. Using her police stories, the droll talk, some of the macabre events that were the daily reality around this city.

“Okay,” Hannah said. “I'm ready, I'm sitting down. What's the best part?”

“Well, he didn't tell me the exact figure, but he said he didn't think you were going to need to keep taking shit from reporters anymore unless you really wanted to.”

Hannah was stopped at a light on Bayshore. Dialing her mother for the fourth time and for the fourth time getting no answer. She'd already called her father's office and was told he hadn't come to work that morning.

It was noon and the traffic was light through Coconut Grove.

She went back to her driving, heading up the steep hill into the heart of the Grove, then down the long shady avenue past the big stone churches and private schools and Mediterranean villas.

Ed Keller had probably decided to take the day off, still reeling from Berry's article and disgusted by the information leak in his office that had cost him a year's work. He and Randall would no doubt be snook-fishing on the bay. For
the last month since school let out, her six-year-old son had been spending his days with his grandparents while Hannah was at work. “Club Granddad” is what Ed Keller called it. He was happy as hell to take charge of the boy, spoil him any way he and Martha could dream up. They'd been covering Hannah's day-care needs since her marriage broke up six years ago. Her Prince Charming turned out to be a child molester. First year of marriage, the son of a bitch was caught in the backseat of a car raping a fifteen-year-old high school girl. So much for Hannah's good judgment in men.

She pulled into the driveway of her parents' Gables-by-the-Sea ranch style and parked. Her father's Buick was still at the curb. Her mother's fifteen-year-old Mercedes was in the garage, the door up.

Hannah was shivering. Her hands were cold even though it had to be near ninety degrees. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been so excited. Maybe when Randall was born, holding him that first time. But that was the only time even close.

She hadn't called the agent back yet to get the details. She wanted to save that, do it in front of her parents. They'd be whooping with excitement. That's who they were. They rooted for her at every step. Her biggest fans. And both of them were book lovers. Big-time readers. It's where she'd caught the fever, a kid growing up in this very house. Bedtime stories were her earliest memories,
Jack and the Beanstalk,
her father playing the parts, doing voices. Her mother's quiet melodious voice reading
Black Beauty.
When she told them the news, Ed would drive off to the liquor store, buy the most expensive bottle of champagne they had, and the family would sit around on the deck all afternoon howling over Hannah's triumph. Middle of the day, it didn't matter. That's who they were, parents of a daughter who could do no wrong. And boy did they love to celebrate.

The kitchen door was open. Hannah stepped inside and saw immediately that something was wrong. A burner on the gas
stove was fluttering its blue flame. A pan of grits had tumbled onto the floor and spilled across the tile. They looked as hard and cold as white rubber.

Hannah came around the breakfast counter and called out for her mother.

Then she stumbled hard against the refrigerator, nearly went down. Dressed in white linen, Martha Keller was sprawled in front of the stove. There were three bullet wounds in her upper torso. Chest, lungs, stomach. The bloodstain against the white dress had taken the shape of a large, disfigured butterfly.

Hannah stood for a moment, staring at her mother's body just as she had stared at hundreds of other corpses in the last five years. Countless gunshot victims who had come to rest in the same eerie, inert pose as Martha Keller.

Hannah dropped her purse and stepped close to her mother's body and kneeled down to feel for a pulse. But there was none. The flesh was cool and her mother's eyes were open, her face holding a look that was neither frightened nor angry nor in any distress at all. She looked composed. A quiet calm, as if she were simply daydreaming there on the Mexican tiles.

Hannah rose and turned to the kitchen window. She could see her father's fishing skiff still tied to the dock in the wide canal.

She whirled around and called out her son's name. And called it out again.

She snatched up her purse and drew out her Glock nine.

She was a police officer now. Not the daughter of the deceased.

She edged to the swinging door that opened onto the living room. She pointed the pistol upward and slung aside the door and stepped across the threshold.

Twenty feet away she saw her father's legs, his body hidden by the green corduroy couch. He was wearing his blue seersucker trousers, part of an ensemble he'd worn hundreds of times before. White shirt and his blue tie with sailboats
printed on it, blue-striped seersucker suit coat. His plantation owner's look.

Hannah inched across the room, panning the pistol back and forth as she moved past the two couches and overstuffed chairs. Her heart was numb, her breath tight in her lungs. Some essential muscle in her soul had short-circuited. She was only dimly aware, seeing the room as if through some weirdly distorted lens. An undersea vision, cloudy and wavering.

“Randall!” she called, and swung around to aim her pistol at the empty bedroom doorway. “Randall!”

She stepped forward, around the end of the couch.

And the pistol nearly fell from her hands. She gasped, staggered forward.

Her father was lolling on the Oriental rug, one arm trapped behind his back at an obscene angle, the other arm extended across the rug. In his hand he gripped the chrome Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, the one pistol in his collection he kept loaded. His white shirt was punctured in three places and the blood had pooled around his left armpit.

His face was hidden by a glossy photograph.

She inched forward, aiming her pistol at the doorway to the den. She crouched down, blinded by tears.

“Randall!” she screamed “Randall!”

The killer had used a blue pushpin from the bulletin board in her father's study to fix the photograph to his face. He'd gouged the thumbtack into the flesh of Ed Keller's forehead to hold in place the eight-by-ten glossy of J. J. Fielding, banker, money launderer, fugitive.

“Randall!”

She pushed herself back upright and edged across the room toward the bedroom. She hopped through the door, swinging the pistol from side to side. The bed was made, the room tidy. Light streamed in through the French doors that opened onto the patio.

“It's me, Randall. It's Mommy.”

At the foot of the bed, the green and gold throw rug was
askew as if Ed Keller had come running from the bathroom at the sound of the shots, kicked it awry. Hours ago. Breakfast time.

She moved to the bathroom, stepped inside, slung the shower curtain aside, and pointed the Glock at the bare porcelain.

She turned and went back into the bedroom and halted.

It wasn't a noise that stopped her or a scent or anything out of place. It was some disturbance in the air, some barometric flutter her sensors had detected.

“Randall?” she said quietly. “Is that you, Randall?”

She drew aside the folding louvered door and stepped into her parents' closet. There at the back under a pile of Hannah's own laundry, clothes she'd brought over to her mother's because her own washer had broken down, there beneath her jeans and blouses and underwear, in the heavy-scented mass of work clothes and after-work clothes, she saw Randall's bare foot.

“Randall?” she whispered.

The pistol dropped from her hand.

“Randall?”

She fell onto the pile of laundry, throwing aside the cotton jerseys and denim. And Randall looked up at her with the dull, unfocused flatness of the blind. His unruly blond hair was damp with sweat. His white skin flushed, the freckles on his cheek seemed to be glowing.

“I was fishing,” he said, his voice empty.

“Randall, are you all right?” She inspected his limbs, his torso. Then drew him to her, hugged his small, perfect body against hers.

“I was on the seawall,” he said, his mouth near her ear. “I was fishing.”

“Don't,” she whispered. “We can talk later.”

“I saw them go in the kitchen door. Three men.”

She relaxed her hold on him. He lifted his head, stared up at his grandparents' clothes hanging above him.

“Two short men and one tall,” he said.

He drew out of the embrace and spoke as if in a trance. A few words, a pause, his eyes detached.

“They had on white pants. White shirts. And white hats. Like painters. Like house painters. I thought they were doing work for Granddad. Then I came inside and I found them lying on the floor. There was blood all over. They're dead, aren't they, Mommy? Granddaddy and Nana are dead.”

She nodded.

“But you're all right, Randall. You're going to be just fine.”

“I was fishing,” he said. “There were three of them. They looked like house painters.”

“It's okay, it's okay, Randall.”

His body was rigid. Face slack, eyes filmed over, Randall stared off at some invisible spot in the air, his lips pursed as if he were blowing bubbles of silence.

And those were the last words he spoke. For days he did not utter a sound. Those days stretched into silent, agonizing weeks. Hannah rarely left his side. For long hours, he curled up in her lap and the two of them rocked. His eyes were disengaged. He sat in the living room and gazed out the window. He lay in bed beside her and peered up at the ceiling. He sat motionless in the bow of his skiff while Hannah steered them up and down his favorite mangrove canals and pointed out the great blue herons, the ospreys. Sometimes he turned his head in the direction she pointed, but his eyes were empty.

He ate little, slept not at all. His blood pressure fluctuated wildly. The first psychiatrist Hannah took him to prescribed a mild antianxiety drug, but it had no effect. The next two psychiatrists told her that she should simply stay on her present course, give Randall as much love and reassurance as she could. Keep talking to him in normal tones, touch him gently and often. Be there for him when he was ready to speak. This was a trance that only he could break and only when he was ready.