Sacred (20 page)

My lawyer, Cheswick Hartman, had caught a flight from Boston an hour after my phone call at six in the morning.

When he arrived at St. Petersburg Police Headquarters on First Avenue North at noon, they played dumb. Because the entire incident on the bridge had happened in a no-man’s-land between Pinellas County and Manatee County, they sent him to Manatee County and the Bradenton PD, feigning ignorance over our whereabouts.

In Bradenton, they took one look at Cheswick’s two-thousand-dollar suit and the Louis of Boston garment bag in his hand, and dicked around with him some more. By the time he got back to St. Pete, it was three. It was also boiling hot, and so was Cheswick.

There are three people I know who should never, and I mean never, be messed with. One is Bubba, for obvious reasons. The other is Devin Amronklin, a Boston homicide cop. The third, however, is Cheswick Hartman, and he may be more dangerous than either Bubba or Devin, because he has so many more weapons in his arsenal.

One of the top criminal lawyers not only in Boston but in the country, he charges something in the
neighborhood of eight hundred dollars an hour for his services, and he’s always in demand. He has homes on Beacon Hill and the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and a summer villa on the island of Majorca. He also has a sister, Elise, whom I extricated from a dangerous situation a few years back. Since then, Cheswick refuses to accept money from me, and he’ll fly fourteen hundred miles for me on an hour’s notice.

But it screws up his life to do so, and when his time gets wasted even further by yokel cops with bad attitudes, his briefcase and Montblanc pen turn into a nuclear weapon and an ignition switch.

Through the grimy window in the interrogation room, I could see the squad room through even grimier venetian blinds, and twenty minutes after Jefferson left me alone, a commotion erupted as Cheswick burst through the scattered desks with a legion of police brass in tow.

The cops were shouting at Cheswick and each other and calling Jefferson’s name and the name of a Lieutenant Grimes, and by the time Cheswick threw open the door of the interrogation room, Jefferson was in the crowd, too.

Cheswick took one look at me and said, “Get my client some water. Now.”

One of the brass went back out into the squad room as Cheswick and the rest filed in. Cheswick leaned over me and looked at my face.

“This is good.” He looked over his shoulder at a sweaty white-haired man with captain’s bars on his uniform. “At least three of these facial cuts are infected. I understand his shoulder blade might be broken, but all I see is a bandage.”

The captain said, “Well—”

“How long have you been here?” he asked me.

“Since three-forty-six in the morning,” I said.

He looked at his watch. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.” He looked at the sweaty captain. “Your department is guilty of violating my client’s civil rights, and that’s a federal crime.”

“Bullshit,” Jefferson said.

Cheswick pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket as a pitcher of water and a glass were placed on the interrogation table. Cheswick lifted the pitcher and turned to the group. He poured some water onto his handkerchief, and the spillage splashed on Jefferson’s shoes.

“Heard of Rodney King, Patrolman Jefferson?”

“It’s Inspector Jefferson.” He looked at his wet shoes.

“Not once I get through with you.” Cheswick turned back to me and dabbed the handkerchief against several of my cuts. “Let me make this clear,” he said to the group, “you gentlemen are fucked. I don’t know how you do things down here and I don’t care, but you kept my client in an unventilated box for over twelve hours, which makes anything he said inadmissible in court. Anything.”

“It’s ventilated,” a cop said, his eyes on fire.

“Turn on the air conditioner, then,” Cheswick said.

The cop half turned toward the door, and then stopped, shook his head at his own stupidity. When he turned back, Cheswick was smiling at him.

“So the air conditioner in this room was turned off by choice. In a cinder block room on an eighty-six-degree day. Keep it up, gentlemen, because I already have a lawsuit in the mid six figures. And climbing.” He took the handkerchief from my face, handed me a glass of water. “Any other complaints, Patrick?”

I inhaled the entire glass of water in about three seconds. “They spoke to me in a rude fashion.”

He gave me a tight smile and clapped my shoulder just hard enough to make it scream. “Let me do the talking,” he said.

Jefferson stepped up beside Cheswick. “Your client shot a guy three times. His partner blew out the throat of another guy. A third guy was rammed off a bridge in his car and died upon impact with Tampa Bay.”

“I know,” Cheswick said. “I’ve seen the tape.”

“The tape?” Jefferson said.

“The tape?” The sweaty captain said.

“The tape?” I said.

Cheswick reached into his briefcase and tossed a videotape onto the table. “That’s a copy,” he said. “The original is with the offices of Meegan, Feibel, and Ellenburg in Clearwater. The tape was sent to them at nine this morning by private courier.”

Jefferson picked up the tape and a thin drop of sweat slid from his hairline.

“Help yourselves,” Cheswick said. “The tape was recorded by someone heading south on the Skyway at the time of the incident.”

“Who?” Jefferson said.

“A woman named Elizabeth Waterman. I believe you arrested her boyfriend, Peter Moore, on the bridge last night for DUI and a bunch of other things. I believe he gave a statement to your officers corroborating the events on the tape, which you chose to discount because he’d failed a Breathalyzer.”

“This is bullshit,” Jefferson said and looked for support from the rest of his colleagues. When he didn’t get it, he gripped the tape so hard in his hand, I was sure it would shatter.

“The tape is a little blurry because of the rain and the videotaper’s excitement,” Cheswick said, “but most of the incident is on there.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said and laughed.

“Am I the coolest, or what?” Cheswick said.

At nine that night, we were released.

In the interim, a doctor had examined me at Bayshore Hospital, a pair of patrolmen standing ten feet away the whole time. He cleaned up my wounds and gave me antiseptic to ward off any further infections. His X ray revealed a clear fissure in my shoulder blade, but not a full break. He applied a fresh set of bandages, gave me a sling, and told me not to play football for at least three months.

When I asked him about the combination of the cracked scapula with the wounds my left hand had received from my battle with Gerry Glynn last year, he looked at the hand.

“Numb?”

“Completely,” I said.

“There’s nerve damage to the hand.”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, we don’t have to amputate the arm.”

“Nice to hear.”

He looked at me through small, icy glasses. “You’re taking a lot of years off the back end of your life, Mr. Kenzie.”

“I’m beginning to realize that.”

“You plan on having kids someday?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Start now,” he told me. “You might live to see them graduate college.”

As we walked down the steps of the police station, Cheswick said, “You messed with the wrong guy this time.”

“No kidding,” Angie said.

“Not only is there no record of Cushing or Clifton working for him, but that jet you told me you took? The only private jet to leave Logan Airport between nine in the morning and noon on the day in question was a Cessna, not a Gulfstream, and it was bound for Dayton, Ohio.”

“How do you silence an entire airport?” Angie said.

“Not just any airport, either,” Cheswick said. “Logan has the tightest, most admired security system in the country. And Trevor Stone has enough pull to bypass it.”

“Shit,” I said.

We stopped at the limousine Cheswick had hired. The chauffeur opened the door, but Cheswick shook his head and turned back to us.

“Come back with me?”

I shook my head and instantly regretted it. The majorettes were still practicing in there.

“We have a few loose ends down here to tie up,” Angie said. “We also have to figure out what to do about Trevor before we return.”

“Want my advice?” Cheswick tossed his briefcase into the back of the limo.

“Sure.”

“Stay away from him. Stay down here until he dies. Maybe he’ll leave you alone.”

“Can’t do it,” Angie said.

“I didn’t think so.” Cheswick sighed. “I heard a story once about Trevor Stone. Just a rumor. Gossip. Anyway, supposedly this union organizer was causing trouble down in El Salvador back in the early seventies, threatening Trevor Stone’s banana, pineapple, and coffee interests. So Trevor, according to legend, made a few phone calls. And one day the workers at one of his coffee bean processing plants are sifting through a vat of beans and they find a foot. And then an arm. And then a head.”

“The union organizer,” Angie said.

“No,” Cheswick said. “The union organizer’s six-year-old daughter.”

“Christ,” I said.

Cheswick patted the roof of the limo absently, looked out at the yellow street. “The union organizer and his wife, they never found them. They became part of ‘the disappeared’ down there. And nobody ever talked again about striking at one of Trevor Stone’s plants.”

We shook hands and he climbed into the limo.

“One last thing,” he said before the driver could shut the door.

We leaned in.

“Someone broke into the offices of Hamlyn and Kohl the night before last. They stole all the office equipment. I hear there’s a lot of money in hot fax machines and copiers.”

“Supposedly,” Angie agreed.

“I hope so. Because these thieves had to shoot Everett Hamlyn dead to get what they wanted.”

We stood silently as he climbed into the limo and it snaked up the street and turned right and headed for the expressway.

Angie’s hand found mine. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “About Everett, about Jay.”

I blinked at something in my eyes.

Angie tightened her grip on my hand.

I looked up at the sky, such a rich dark shade of blue it seemed artificial. That was something else I’d been noticing down here: This state—so ripe and lush and colorful—seemed fake in comparison with its uglier counterparts up north.

There’s something ugly about the flawless.

“They were good men,” Angie said softly.

I nodded. “They were beautiful.”

We walked over to Central Avenue and headed north toward a cabstand the duty officer had grudgingly told us about.

“Cheswick said they’re going to come back on us with gun charges, discharging firearms within city limits, shit like that.”

“But nothing that’ll stick,” she said.

“Probably not.”

We reached the cabstand, but it was empty. Central Avenue, or at least the section we were on, didn’t look like a real friendly place. Three winos fought over a bottle or a pipe in the garbage-strewn parking lot of a torched liquor store, and across the street, several mangy-looking teenagers eyed potential prey from a bench in front of a Burger King, passed a joint, and gave Angie a once-over. I was sure the bandage around my shoulder and the sling under my arm made me look a bit vulnerable, but then they took a closer look, and I locked one of them in a weary stare until he turned his head and concentrated on something else.

The cabstand was a Plexiglas lean-to and we sagged against the wall in the liquid heat for a moment.

“You look like shit,” Angie told me.

I raised an eyebrow at the cuts on her face, the half shiner beside her right eye, the gouge in her left calf. “You, on the other hand…”

She gave me a weary smile and we leaned against the wall for a full minute of silence.

“Patrick.”

“Yeah?” I said, my eyes closed.

“When I got out of the ambulance on the bridge, and they walked me to the cruiser, I, ahm…”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”

“I think I saw something strange. And I don’t want you to laugh.”

“You saw Desiree Stone.”

She came off the wall and slapped me in the abdomen with the back of her hand. “Get out of town! You saw her, too?”

I rubbed my stomach. “I saw her, too.”

“You think she’s a ghost?”

“She’s no ghost,” I said.

Our hotel suites had been trashed while we were gone. At first I thought it had been Trevor’s men, maybe the Weeble and Cushing before they came after us, but then I found a business card on my pillow.

INSPECTOR CARNELL JEFFERSON,
it read.

I refolded my clothes and placed them back in my suitcase, pushed the bed back into the wall, and closed all the drawers.

“I’m starting to hate this town.” Angie came into the room with two bottles of Dos Equis and we took them out to the balcony and left the glass doors open behind us. If the room was bugged by Trevor, we were already high on his shit list anyway; nothing we said was going to change his mind about dealing with us the way he’d
dealt with Jay and Everett Hamlyn and was trying to deal with his daughter, who didn’t have the decency to die easily. And if the cops had bugged the room, nothing we said would change what we’d told them at the station because we didn’t have anything to hide.

“Why does Trevor want his daughter dead so badly?” Angie said.

“And why does she keep popping up alive?”

“One thing at a time.”

“Okay.” I propped my ankles up on the balcony rail and sipped my beer. “Trevor wants his daughter dead because somehow she found out he killed Lisardo.”

“And why did he kill Lisardo in the first place?”

I looked at her. “Because…”

“Yes?” She lit a cigarette.

“I don’t have a clue.” I took a hit off her cigarette to quell the adrenaline that had been chewing through my blood since I’d shot from the car twenty hours ago.

She took her cigarette back and looked at it. “And even if he did kill Lisardo and she found out—even
if
—why kill her? He’d be dead before a trial, and his lawyers would keep him free till then. So what’s the big deal?”

“Right.”

“This whole dying thing, too…”

“What?”

“Most people are dying, they’re trying to make their peace—with God, with family, with the earth in general.”

“But not Trevor.”

“Exactly. If he really is dying, then his hate for Desiree has to run so deep it can’t even be measured by most human minds.”

“
If
he’s dying,” I said.

She nodded and stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s consider that for a second. How do we know for sure he’s dying?”

“One good look at him.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue, then closed it and lowered her head to her knees for a moment. When she raised her head, she flipped the hair back off her face and leaned back in her chair. “You’re right,” she said. “Dumb idea. The guy’s definitely got one foot in the grave.”

“So,” I said. “Back to square one. What makes a guy hate anyone, but particularly his own flesh and blood, so much that he’s determined to spend his last days hunting her down?”

“Jay suggested a history of incest,” Angie said.

“Okay. Daddy loves his little girl way too much. They have a conjugal relationship, and something gets in the way.”

“Anthony Lisardo. Back to him again.”

I nodded. “So, Daddy has him whacked.”

“Not long after her mother died to boot. So Desiree goes into her depression, meets Price, who manipulates her grief and enlists her in the theft of the two million.”

I turned my head, looked at her. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would Price enlist her? I’m not saying he wouldn’t want her along for the ride for a bit, but why would he let her in on the plan?”

She tapped her thigh with her beer bottle. “You’re right. He wouldn’t.” She raised her beer and drank. “God, I’m confused.”

We sat there in silence and chewed on it as the moon bathed Tampa Bay in pearl and the fingers of rose in the purple sky faded and eventually disappeared. I went
back in and got us two more beers and came back out onto the patio.

“Black is white,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You said it yourself. Black is white. Up is down on this case.”

“True. Definitely true.”

“You ever see
Rashomon
?”

“Sounds like a movie about a guy’s athlete’s foot.”

I looked at her from under hooded eyes.

“Sorry,” she said lightly. “No, Patrick, I never saw
Rash-o-whatever.
”

“Japanese film,” I said. “The whole movie shows the same event told four different times.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s a rape and murder trial. And the four people who were there tell four completely different accounts of what happened. And you watch each version and have to decide who’s telling the truth.”

“I saw a
Star Trek
like that once.”

“You need to watch less
Star Trek,
” I said.

“Hey, at least it’s easy to pronounce. Not like
Rash-aweed.
”

“Rashomon.”
I squeezed the top of my nose between my index finger and thumb, closed my eyes. “My point, anyway.”

“Yes?”

“Is that we might be looking at this all wrong. Maybe,” I said, “we accepted too many things as truth at the beginning and were wrong.”

“Like thinking Trevor was an okay guy and not a homicidal, incestuous nutbag?”

“Like that,” I said.

“So what else have we accepted as truth that we
might be looking at from the wrong angle?”

“Desiree,” I said.

“What about her?”

“Everything about her.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and looked through the bars of the railing at the bay below, at the three bridges cut across the placid water, each one fracturing and distorting the shafts of moonlight. “What do we know about Desiree?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“Right. How do we know that?”

“Oh, jeez,” she said. “You’re turning Jesuit on me again, aren’t you?”

“Humor me. How do we know Desiree is beautiful?”

“From pictures. From even a short glimpse on the bridge last night.”

“Right. Our knowledge, seen by our own eyes, based on
our
personal experience and contact with the subject and that one aspect of her. And that’s it.”

“Come again?”

“She’s a beautiful woman. That’s all we know about her, because that’s the only thing we ourselves can testify to about her. Everything else we know about her is hearsay. Her father tells us one thing, but he feels completely different. Doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So is what he originally told us true?”

“About the depression, you mean?”

“About everything. Lurch says she’s a beautiful, wonderful creature. But Lurch works for Trevor, so we can pretty much figure he was full of shit.”

Her eyes were lighting up now. She sat forward. “And Jay, Jay was obviously wrong when he told us she was dead.”

“Exactly.”

“So all his perceptions about her could have been wrong.”

“Or blinded by love or infatuation.”

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“If Desiree didn’t die, whose body was that with Jay’s sweatshirt and a shotgun blast to the face?”

I grabbed the phone from the room, brought it out to the balcony, and called Devin Amronklin.

“You know any cops in Clearwater?” I asked him.

“I might know someone who knows someone.”

“Can you see if they’ve ID’d a female shooting victim found in the Ambassador Hotel four days ago?”

“Give me your number.”

I did, and Angie and I turned our seats until they were facing each other.

“Assume Desiree’s not all sweetness and light,” I said.

“Let’s assume even worse,” she said. “Let’s assume she’s her father’s child and the acorn never falls far from the tree. What if she put Price up to the robbery?”

“How’d she know the money was even there?”

“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that one later. So she puts Price up to the robbery…”

“But Price figured after a while, ‘Hey, she’s a bad seed. She’ll screw me over as soon as she gets the chance,’ so he ditches her.”

“And takes the money. But she wanted it back.”

“But didn’t know where he hid it.”

“And Jay comes along.”

“A perfect foil to put some pressure on Price,” I said.

“Then Desiree figures out where the money is. But she’s got a problem. If she just steals it, not only will her father be looking for her, but so will Price and Jay.”

“So she has to get dead,” I said.

“And she knows Jay will settle up with Price.”

“And probably go to jail for it.”

“Could she be that devious?” Angie said.

I shrugged. “Why not?”

“So she’s dead,” Angie said. “And so’s Price. And then Jay. So, why show herself to us?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

Neither did Angie.

But Desiree did.

She stepped out onto the balcony with a gun in her hand and said, “Because I need your help.”