A Thousand Bridges

by Michael McKinney

  A Thousand Bridges

  Michael McKinney

  ISBN: 9781618423764

  ONE

  It was too damned hot to work, so Sheevers and I had sat on the sofa, close but not touching. She had been drinking from a large glass of iced tea, making little movements with her wrist that caused the ice cubes to swirl and tinkle, then opened the first two buttons on her blouse and rubbed the moist glass across her chest. I remember she handed it to me and when I put my lips on the rim I could taste her perfume. I made a face and she laughed, lifted the glass from my fingers, and stood up.

  "I'll get us a refill," she said, and I watched her until she disappeared through the doorway to the small kitchen.

  The morning paper lay unopened on the coffee table and I leaned forward with a groan, lifted it, and fell back against the cushions. We'd had a long night, partly working but mostly celebrating. Patty Sheevers was my new silent partner in the private investigations business I'd been building for almost three years in Palmetto Bay, Florida. It would still be called McDonald Clay Investigations, but now we were together at work as well as at home. She thought the two of us would be like the Thin Man, and I was beginning to believe it, too.

  A breeze slipped through the screen door as I unfolded my newspaper, and a cloud obscured the sun. The air felt cooler and I wished for rain. I heard Sheevers singing in the other room. The headlines told, for a second straight day, about a recent multiple murder at a local swimming hole. The press and police were calling it the Limestone Creek Murders.

  "Something's not right here," I said, looking at the color photograph of the scene. Sheevers sat on the coffee table, folded the paper down, and looked at the picture, grinning.

  "How can you say that?" she asked. "It looks like an ordinary murder to me.

  It didn't look right. I should have examined it more thoroughly, taken more interest, but we were so wrapped up in our first case together, so pleased with the confidence the state attorney had shown in hiring us to investigate Tommy Lovett, that it didn't seem important. And it wasn't, at the time.

  Sheevers handed over a full glass of tea and made off with the Local/State section of the paper. This was her town. She sat across from me in the chair, stretched out her legs, and propped her bare feet up on the coffee table. I sipped my tea.

  "Are we going to get any work done today, Mac?" she said when she finished reading. I glanced around at the notes and copies of articles that overflowed my desk and spread like the Andes across the carpet, past Sheevers' lighted aquarium to the corner of the sofa.

  "Yeah,"I said reluctantly, not really wanting to get into the case of Tommy Lovett on such a hot day. The state attorney had hired us, off the record, to gather enough evidence on Lovett to send him away forever, and Sheevers wanted nothing short of that. I didn't know that much about him when I'd started the investigation, except that he owned a large pool hall downtown called Tommy's and hung around with some very important people.

  It didn't take long to find out how powerful he was. We hadn't been on the case a week when word got out to him that I was checking him out. When I drove down to my office the next day, I found all my filing cabinets turned over in the middle of the floor and the files flung from wall to wall. That is, all except the ones on Tommy Lovett. They were gone. From that day on we kept duplicates of his case at home, and that's where we began to work each day.

  Tommy Lovett personally hired the young girls who racked the balls at his pool hall. Through the years he had selected some of these girls, usually around sixteen years old, to discreetly "entertain" visiting dignitaries at the locally famous Sunset Hotel downtown. The ornate heart of Palmetto Bay for almost a hundred years, the Sunset was a pinnacle of old money and power, the register a roster of legends from around the Florida panhandle. Sports heroes and politicians, men whose names were the names of streets and hospitals and schools - and Patty Sheevers hated them all.

  I'd met her two years before at my lawyer's office out on the beach. She'd been sitting beside him on a small deck that faced the water, her blond hair whipping around in the erratic wind. She looked up at me when I reached the table, and pulled the twisted golden strands from her eyes. She smiled. Mark introduced us politely, but I don't think he wanted me to stay.

  I've never been able to take a hint. She and I started talking about politics and religion and life and death, and the next thing I knew Mark Thornton had gone inside, and the next thing I knew Patty Sheevers and I were living together and I was madly in love.

  She had been trying to sell me on the idea of her being my partner since we met, but until this thing with Tommy Lovett my business hadn't exactly been lucrative. It paid the bills and, every once in a while, left us with enough money at the end of the month to go out for dinner. Her job kept us afloat. The job with the state attorney was our turning point, not only because the money was good, but it was too much work for one person to handle. Finally one morning, after months of preparation, we decided there was enough information to take to Tallahassee. That night Sheevers and I sat in bed under a single sheet that billowed like a sail each time the oscillating fan swept by, , whispering how the old names in town were going to be nailed like hides to a barn wall and cured by the state attorney. Her eyes flashed excitement in the yellow glow of the hall light, and as she waved her arms, her small, perfect breasts swayed, hypnotizing me like a snake in a basket.

  I spent the next day in town wrapping up the case by interviewing frightened teenage girls and their angry parents. None of us wanted to be there, and because Tommy's men had been everywhere before me, it turned out to be a waste of time. I hated working downtown. My first decent lung full of air came as I was headed home, turning past the marina toward the north side. Shrimp boats made their way back to the docks under swirling clouds of seagulls, shimmering white confetti that dipped and dove for scraps in the wake of the boats. Red and green lights winked along the dark channel of the bay, and pink street lamps flickered to life on the far shore. A salt breeze rattled palm fronds outside my open window as I waited at the intersection for a break in traffic.

  I heard a man shout, "Hey, asshole!" and I turned my head to see if he was talking to me. I'd answered to that name before. A white Lincoln Continental had eased up alongside, and I saw Tommy Lovett grinning at me from the back seat. He winked.

  "You think you're gonna get me busted, ace?" he shouted across the space between us. He looked freshly scrubbed and pampered, black hair wet and brushed back against his narrow head. A beautiful young woman sitting beside him laughed and shook her head, her butterscotch curls melting over the shoulders of a milk-white dress.

  Lovett snorted. "Jesus, you're a stupid fucker." He shook his head and tapped the driver on the arm. His car cut in front of mine and darted into traffic while I sat there trying to think of something witty to say. A dozen things came to mind as I drove home. The French have a word for it, something to do with 'the wit of the staircase.'

  I parked beside Sheevers' car and rolled my window closed, suddenly tired and irritable. I sat with the door open for a few seconds, exhaled, and watched dusk capture the sky. Her sunshade had fallen across the steering wheel, and I pushed it back up. The morning sun would be toasting that windshield long before we were ready to leave for Tallahassee.

  We had a lot of finishing up to do on the case, and work wasn't on the agenda for the evening. There were two bottles of cheap wine sharing the refrigerator with a crab salad and a bowl of boiled shrimp, so I shook off the mood as I walked across the yard. I stepped onto my small porch, opened the screen door and stepped inside, loosening a new tie Sheevers had insisted I wear to the day's interviews. She said it would give me an aura of authority, but it hadn't helped. I tapped
on the open door to let her know I was home and smelled tea brewing on the stove.

  "Hello?" I called out as I walked into the kitchen, but she wasn't there. I turned off the burner and picked up the teapot. She'd let the water steam out, and the bottom of the pot was glowing red. It wasn't the first time that had happened, but it was usually I who did it. I put it down and walked back into the living room, past my cluttered desk to the lighted aquarium, glancing at her bright, quick tropical fish as I stepped into the hall. The bedroom lamp was out, but a seam of white light leaked from the closed bathroom door. I turned the knob and pushed but she was holding it closed, so I laughed, put a shoulder into it and shoved hard enough to win entrance.

  I jumped sideways through the opening before she could shut it, and my black dress shoes slipped in a viscous puddle of darkening blood. Sheevers lay on the bathroom floor with her blouse ripped open, her hands tied behind her back. She was bleeding from so many knife wounds that a whole box of Kleenex couldn't stop them all, and even as I crawled around on the sticky, stinking floor begging to a silent God, I knew she was dead.

  My screaming roused the neighbors from supper, and they called the police. Someone found a ski mask and a knife in the jasmine beside the porch, and Sheevers' watch on the lawn. Sheriff Hall stood in my doorway and said, "She musta' interrupted a burglar," and someone said, "Yeah."

  "Goddamn you!" I shouted at them, and when the Sheriff nodded toward me they put me in cuffs and dragged me to the patrol car, pushing my neighbors off the sidewalk as they folded me into the back seat.

  "Why?" a neighbor asked.

  "We have to make sure it wasn't him," a deputy said as I sat in the back seat of the police car and slammed my body against the inside of the door. "He's acting strange."

  I was placed in isolation; a small, soundproofed cell with a solid, seamless door. For three days they kept me in that tiny room with no radio, no visitors, no sounds but my own. There was one bright, bare light bulb shielded with wire, set in the ceiling out of my reach. Three days with one memory. Three days of thinking I should've known something was going to happen.

  That was five years ago and I'd been ambitious, and had a good reputation. It's not that I have a bad reputation now. The fact is, I have no reputation. I've sold out so many times and for so many reasons that I'm like the white boxer brought in to fill the card, not because he's a contender, but because he's such a good bleeder. I make the other guy look good.

  I'm not ashamed of it. The bleeder gets paid after the fight, too, he just never gets to wear the belt. Besides, this is a small city and I like living here. I have memories in Palmetto Bay.

  It didn't take long to go downhill from the jail cell. When they let me out it was like a metamorphosis. The butterfly that spread its wings in the blazing sun was as empty as the cell he'd just left. Vacant. When people touched me and said, "I'm sorry," I cried.

  They had buried her that morning and let me out in the afternoon. Somebody drove me home and a policeman let me in. I ran to the bathroom and it was cleaner than we'd ever kept it. It smelled like ammonia and soap. There wasn't even a hair in the sink to show where Sheevers had been. I ripped the medicine cabinet from the wall and the front door clicked open, the policeman peeked inside, and the door closed again.

  The house had been carelessly ransacked and our things were everywhere. The vein in my temple pounded so fiercely it was like being slapped. I yanked the manila envelope from my jacket and tore it open, pulling the keys and wallet from a pile of loose articles the police had collected from my pockets.

  I let myself out and didn't acknowledge the cop. My car had been rifled and the back seat was popped up where they'd left it after their search. Patty's car was gone. I didn't bother straightening any of it out, just cranked up and aimed the car toward the cemetery.

  It wasn't hard to find her grave. This place is big enough to be called a 'city,' but not big enough to get lost in. Not so big that a freshly dug grave doesn't stand out in a flat, ten-acre field of manicured grass and low markers and a giant statue of a resting Jesus. There she was, covered with dirt for eternity, and all I could do was stand around looking goofy with tears pouring down my cheeks, blinking like mad to see the little plastic marker pushed into the ground. Someone with poor handwriting had scrawled her name on the marker with a grease pencil. 'Patricia Sheevers.'

  I drove away dangerously. Alert, gracious drivers made room for me as I wheeled from the somber gates and back onto the road, oblivious to the world. I stopped at a convenience store and bought a copy of the day's newspaper, where her's was still a front-page story, but on the lower right side. Below the fold. It had surely occupied a more prominent position the previous two days.

  The article mentioned she was a local woman and her parents were "distraught."

  I was said to have been a "possible suspect" but was being released for lack of evidence. The state attorney couldn't be reached for comment. The Sheriff did say the crime rate in our area was up and that drugs make "ordinary kids" do things like this, though there were no leads. He said they'd probably never know.

  As I sat in my car reading the article, I thought I was experiencing an eclipse of the sun. There, just before three o'clock on an early September afternoon, a darkness fell on me layer by layer until I had the newspaper just inches from my face, trying to read it. I looked up, shocked, and the world around me was darker than midnight. I could see shapes and movements and hear muffled voices, but I couldn't tell where I was and it scared the hell out of me.

  I pushed the paper away and fumbled for the key, slamming my knuckles into the dash as I felt a blind panic numbing me. I looked around helplessly in the dark but saw no one there, nowhere to run.

  Suddenly, fiercely, a terror shook me and I scratched at the door, opening it and pushing it away from me as I bent out and began throwing up in the small parking lot. My fingers gripped the wheel and the seat as I leaned out, knifing pains tearing at my stomach as I heaved my insides onto the concrete. It finally stopped, and as I hung from the car I heard someone say, "Jesus Christ!"

  People began pulling away from the store. I heard a man shouting and I looked up, wiping my face on my sleeve. An older man in a white shirt and a little blue vest had pushed open the market door and held it as he stood on the sidewalk. "Get the hell out of here!" he almost screamed at me as his lost business hurriedly cranked their cars and raced from the store.

  I squinted up at him in the direct sunlight, now brilliant again. I straightened up, still aware of the pains in my stomach, and closed the door. When I managed to get my car started, shaky fingers squeezing the key, I backed out, not looking at him as I drove away.

  That's when two things hit me. The first was I couldn't get mad at anyone. I was no longer capable of anger, my emotions neutered in the isolated jail cell. After that day, any time anything bad happened, or someone I didn't like did something I didn't like, I simply felt empty and blank, like a man with a concussion trying to remember how he got cracked on the head. It just wasn't there.

  The second thing was the similarities between Sheevers' death and the Limestone Creek Murders. Not that they were connected, but the coverage was the same. Both stories were simply reported and settled on the spot. Not one detective on the force said, "It couldn't have happened that way," or, in the Limestone Creek Case, "What the hell was a black hustler like Renaldo Tippit doing up in redneck country at night on a three-wheeler?"

  No reporter questioned his sources, no outside agency stepped in to snoop around. The stories were just filed as stated, nothing more. Business as usual.

  That's what bothered me the day Sheevers and I read the story about the three killings at Limestone Creek. It just wasn't right for a crime to come fully solved right from the factory. There were always loose ends and surprises, even in open-and-shut cases.

  I knew Patty's murder was doctored and I knew why, but the other one bugged me. It looked simple enough - a drug deal gone bad. A forty year-old ma
n and a teenage boy and girl were shot to death at a remote creek in the far end of the county during a drug buy. The dealer, well known to the local police for his drug activity, raced away from the scene on a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle and turned onto a two-lane blacktop directly into the path of an eighteen-wheeler driven by a man from Alabama. There was very little left of Renaldo or his four-wheeler. That was the story.

  But, it wasn't the truth. It couldn't have been. I knew Renaldo and he wasn't such a bad guy, as drug pushers go. He operated almost exclusively from an area of town known as "The Supermarket." It was a much-publicized part of the blighted core of Palmetto Bay's 'black side' of town, and even though more dope was sold out of beach condos in a weekend than The Supermarket moved in a month, it was what people pictured in their minds when drug deals were mentioned in the press.

  I knew Renaldo Tippit because we met so often at the courthouse. I was always bumming cigarettes from him. One day he laughed and told me he was going to get me started selling dope for him so I could buy my own "damned smokes."

  He was one of the two people who shamed me into quitting the habit, Sheevers being the other. I can't say I really liked him, but I can't really say I like most people I meet.

  The thing is, like most blacks in the county, Renaldo knew his boundaries. He was aware of 'the way things were.' Not that this is peculiar to the South. The average blacks who worked hard and raised their families and tried to achieve the American Dream winced when they passed The Supermarket, and wished Renaldo and company would go elsewhere, but knew there was nowhere else to go. Like the tourist-trap Indians surrounded by Chinese blankets along the roadside, inner-city blacks were expected to put on a show.

  That's why the image of Renaldo Tippit making a dope deal in the woods on an ATV should've set off alarms all along the law-enforcement ladder. The fact that it didn't was what made my bell ring, but I never had a bridge to use to solve the puzzle. And now, after five years, there wasn't enough left of me that still wanted to try.