A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  “Wonderful history, Billy. And I appreciate your constant efforts to educate me. But your point is?”

  He waited a few studied beats.

  “The matriarchs, the ones who were forward-thinking and looked to guide and care for their family’s future?” he said, hesitating, letting the leading question hang.

  “Yes?”

  “I think they are being killed.”

  I paddled for more than an hour, east and south toward the sea. The river water had turned a dull blue green and its banks changed from the low tangle of mangroves to sandy banks sprouting skinny pines. I was sweating heavily, but had perfected my strokes so that I could wipe the perspiration from my eyes with a swipe of my shoulder without breaking the rhythm. Since leaving the canopy the smell of brackish water had thickened and the east wind brought in the salt odor of the Atlantic. By the time I swung around the last bend and spotted the boat ramp at the ranger station, the morning sun was full, the dome of blue sky cloudless.

  I sprinted the last 300 yards, digging deep and long, straining muscle and lungs until the blood pounded in my ears, and then I coasted into the graveled edge of land. I sat with my elbows on my knees and waited until my heart tripped down and my breathing eased before I stepped out into ankle-deep water. I pulled the boat up into a worn patch of shaded grass and pine needles and unloaded.

  The dock was empty but for the new ranger’s Boston Whaler tied up at one end. Further down the river I could see a single fisherman in a bass boat working the edges of an outcropping of pine root. I shouldered my gym bag and walked up to the washrooms and showered in hot water for the first time in weeks. I shaved and then dressed in canvas pants, a short sleeved polo shirt and better Docksides. When I came out I stopped just outside the doors and glanced over to the ranger’s office. No one appeared, even though I knew the 24-hour shift man was on duty and had seen me arrive. As I walked back to my canoe and gathered the rest of my things, I could feel eyes on my back. I crossed the parking lot and opened the cab door to my midnight-blue pickup truck to let the heat escape and tossed my bag in. I went back and flipped the canoe under the shade tree, placed a black plastic bag of trash I’d brought from the shack in a nearby barrel and cut my eyes once to the windows of the office.

  Several months ago innocent blood had been spilled on the river. An old and revered ranger and his young assistant were killed. Some of it had been on my hands. I believed it, and I could not blame others if they shared that belief. I climbed into my truck and pulled out of the parking lot, the white shell surface crunching and popping under my tires.

  Twenty minutes later I was climbing the entrance ramp to I-95 and, as always, dreading the traffic and the stench of exhaust in the urban world. Billy had asked me to meet him in his office just south of downtown. I dutifully stayed in my proper lanes, cruising south at the acceptable ten miles an hour over the speed limit, and slipped off the packed interstate onto an equally busy avenue. In downtown West Palm Beach I maneuvered through the one-way streets to a commercial block of high-rises that carried the names of banks and financial institutions on the façades. The buildings were all done in the same sandstone texture with the same contemporary block design. It was like a cookie-cutter Levittown gone vertical.

  When I got to Billy’s building I took the side entrance to the parking garage and stopped at the booth.

  “Visitors spots right there to the left,” the attendant said after checking my name on a clipboard. He’d given me a pleasant enough smile in response when I’d given Billy’s name, but like a trained street cop he’d also let his eyes roam my face and I could almost feel him reciting hair color, eyes, collared shirt and no tie. In my rearview I saw him taking down my tag number. It was a careful building.

  I locked the truck and walked through a tiled passageway to the main lobby. There I ignored the scrutiny of the desk clerks and crossed to the bank of elevators, stepped in, and pushed 15. The entrance to Billy’s suite was unmarked, just a double wood door of solid varnished oak. Inside the carpet was thick and simply patterned in a soft burgundy. There were several fine seventeenth- century English landscapes on the walls of the reception area that surrounded a large cherry wood desk. Behind a computer screen and a multi-button phone was Billy’s secretary.

  “Good morning, Mr. Freeman,” she said, standing to reach over the desk to shake my hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”

  “It is always my pleasure, Allie.”

  “Thank you,” she replied without a flutter. When Billy had first introduced me and told her where I lived and that I would have no mailing address, she’d seemed mildly amused. She was a third- generation Floridian, was creative and cultured and had only a cursory knowledge of the Everglades. The idea that a newcomer would live at its rough edge seemed a curiosity to her. The idea that the most dominating physical feature of an entire state could be ignored seemed to me an equal curiosity.

  “Go right in, Mr. Freeman. He’s waiting,” she said. “I’ll bring coffee.”

  Billy came around from behind his desk when I entered and smiled broadly. He was dressed impeccably in a starched, hand- tailored white shirt buttoned at the throat. His vest was brocaded in a swarm of subtle color. His suit pants were lightweight and charcoal, the matching coat was on a hanger. His shirt cuffs were rolled, carefully, twice.

  “M-Max. Y-You are 1-looking well,” he said in his standard greeting.

  It had taken me some time to get used to Billy’s stutter, and only part of the effort had been because of the incongruity with his appearance and obvious success. But the constant reminder was the way his speech pattern turned on and off. His is a tension stutterer. On the phone, from the other side of a wall, even through a darkened doorway opening, his voice is clear, smooth and flawless. Face-to-face, his words clatter and fall from his mouth. The distinction seems a joke or a deception at first. But I learned early to listen to the words themselves, and judged him only by what he said, not how.

  Billy was the one who’d convinced me to come to South Florida after bailing out of ten years and a family tradition with the Philadelphia Police Department. He was the one who invested my disability buyout into a profitable stock portfolio. He motioned to the leather sofa that faced the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city.

  I considered it a humbling debt to help Billy Manchester in any way I could.

  “I h-h-hope m-my recitation last n-night was n-not too confusing,” Billy said, bringing a stack of legal folders to the coffee table and sitting. “I have g-gathered as m-much information as there is, and it’s n-not m-much.”

  He spread five folders out like a hand of cards. Fanning them with the tips of his fingers. I scanned through them. Each was labeled with a name. Some contained death certificates. Some included paramedics’ run sheets and police reports. The medical examiner’s reports were scant. The one similarity among them all was the cause of death: natural.

  Allie came in with coffee and set the china service on the table and then smiled when she slipped the large, flat-bottomed sailing mug in front of my place.

  “I didn’t forget how much you like your coffee, Mr. Freeman.”

  We both thanked her and Billy uncrossed his legs and poured. I thumbed through the documents again, hiding the growing skepticism I’d been pushing back all morning. All the women named in the case files were elderly. All over eighty. All lived in the same general area west of Fort Lauderdale. All were widows.

  “Not much to go on here, Billy.”

  “I know. And that’s w-what’s wr-wrong. Not w-what’s there, b-but w-what isn’t.”

  He was up now, pacing as if in front of a jury, a place his brilliant lawyer’s mind could make him a star but where his stutter had never let him go.

  “An acquaintance came to m-me after the most recent death, her m-mother,” he said. “At the funeral sh-she saw old f-friends. Longtime folks f-from the neighborhood. Her m-mother was somewhat p-prominent and it brought many of them together for t
he first t-time in years.”

  He was staring out the big windows. Outside the city spread out in the unbroken sunlight. Billy loved high views, and the thing about South Florida from a height was its complete lack of borders. No mountains or hills or even small rises, nothing but the horizon to hold it. Billy always looked out, he never succumbed to the natural urge to look down.

  “The d-daughter c-came to me with questions about the l-life insurance,” he continued. “It had b-been sold. All of them had b-been sold.”

  I refilled my coffee, stacked the files again so each of the names lay exposed on top of one another. Billy had done some homework. The five women, all Florida born and raised, had lived somewhat similar lives, he said. They had grown up in the ’30s and ’40s, had raised families and worked well into their sixties. They had survived in a South Florida that in their time was a predominately Deep South society.

  But all had also done an extraordinary thing. They had each bought life insurance policies for their families, sizable ones for their time, and had paid their premiums like clockwork. Then, late in life, they had inexplicably sold those long-held policies.

  The viatical purchases were legal, Billy said. Each woman had been paid for the transfer to an investment company. Some had brought the women large windfalls. But the purchase price was only a part of the policy’s worth. When the women finally died, the investors would cash in the policies for the full amount and walk away with the profit.

  “All legal?” I asked, looking down at the names.

  “P-Perfectly.”

  “And the twist?”

  “The tw-twist is that the longer the insured lives, the more p- premiums the investors have to p-pay. That is w-why they usually look for medical infirmities, which all these w-women had,” Billy said.

  “But they m-might have underestimated the t-toughness of these ladies. The longer they lived, the more it cut into the investor’s p-profit.”

  Billy was looking east now. In between the high rises, out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the red tile roofs of the beachfront mansions and estates of Palm Beach. I let him stand in silence, the dark skin of his profile a silhouette against the hot glass.

  “You don’t think that’s kind of a shaky motive for murder?” I finally said.

  He turned his dark eyes on me.

  “M-Max. Since when has greed been a shaky m-motive?”

  4

  We walked up Atlantic Boulevard for lunch. The breeze had pulled the temperature down into the mid-seventies. An early lunch crowd was mixing on the street with women in business skirts, office workers in pressed white oxfords and cinched ties, and tourists in shorts and tropical prints floating from one window display to the next.

  As we walked Billy explained how he’d tried to slip his theory in through the back door of the Broward Sheriff’s Office. His contacts were extensive, but his pleadings fell on deaf ears. Drug enforcement, computer crime, demands from every sector to keep kids safe. School resource officers, traffic details in an overflowing maze of urban streets. Rapes, robberies and real homicides. Too much crime, too little time. “Bring me something with substance, Billy. Hell, the M.E. won’t even go out on a limb.” Even his political connections told him to back off. “It’s not a good time to be screaming that they won’t investigate crime in the black community. Not now, not with some theory, Billy. You got to pick your battles.” He’d hired a P.I. who after three weeks came up with nothing: “I know that neighborhood, Billy, and nobody knows a damn thing about old ladies getting killed.”

  The recitation of his dead ends pulled at Billy’s face, but still a knot of jaw muscle rippled in his cheek. When I suggested his suspicions might best be handed off to an insurance investigator, he was, as usual, ahead of me. He had contacted several who worked for the three different companies who insured the five women. There had been little interest. They too had written the deaths off as natural and paid out without question. Only one of the companies, a small, independent firm, had agreed to send out a representative. We were meeting him for lunch.

  “I am s-sorry, M-Max. I’m asking too m-much. But I only want your advice.” Billy said. “You decide. I w-will introduce you and b-be off.”

  Billy was not an ungracious man. I looked at him when he said it. I know he felt my eyes on him.

  “This is w-why I need your help,” was his only response.

  As we approached Arturo’s, one of Billy’s favorite sidewalk cafes, I could see a tall, thick-bodied man pacing the curb in front. From a distance I thought of one of those Russian nesting dolls, rounded at the top and sloping down to a wide, heavy base. Ten steps closer and I thought: lineman. His muscled neck melted down from the ears into thick shoulders and then, like a lava flow, down through the arms and belly, settling in the buttocks and thighs. I had played some undistinguished football in high school at tight end. I knew from unsuccessful experience how hard it was to move such a man off that substantial base.

  Ten more steps and I thought: ex-cop.

  The man had turned our way, his head tilted down, one hand in his pocket, the other cupping a cigarette. He made himself look like someone lost in thought but I could see he was scanning the block, his eyes, in the shadow of his heavy brow, measuring every pedestrian, noting the makes of cars, marking those in parking spaces. Nothing entered his turf without being scrutinized. And that included us.

  A few more steps and he took a final drag, flicked the cigarette into the gutter and squared to meet us.

  “G-Good afternoon, Mr. McCane,” Billy said, stopping short of handshaking distance. “This is M-Max Freeman, the gentleman I t-told you about.”

  McCane took my hand in a heavy, dry handshake.

  “Frank McCane. Tidewater Insurance Company.”

  I nodded.

  He had gray hair cut short to the scalp and looked to be in his mid-fifties. His face had a florid, jowly look. His nose had a broken bend as if from a quick meeting with a bottle. It also held a web of striated veins from a longer association with the same. But his facial features were overpowered by his eyes; pale gray to the point of being nearly colorless. They gave the impression of soaking in all the light that entered their field and reflecting back none. I am six-foot-three, and we were nearly eye to eye.

  I held his gaze long after the appropriate time for a business handshake. Without a flinch of emotion his eyes moved off mine, focused on something behind my left shoulder, and then swung to the other side. Street cop, I thought. Street cops hate to be stared at. They need to know what’s around them. I knew from walking a beat myself. Once a street cop, always a street cop.

  As we stood on the sidewalk, Arturo approached from under the awning of his cafe. He had recognized Billy and knew how to treat an important customer.

  “Ah. Mr. Manchester. Gentlemen, gentlemen. So good to see you, sirs,” Arturo started, talking to us all but looking only at Billy. “May we seat your party please, Mr. Manchester?”

  A gracious host, Arturo had taken Billy’s hand in both of his and was guiding him toward a table.

  “Arturo, gracias,” Billy said. “P-Please take care of m-my guests. But I cannot s-stay.”

  “Of course, Mr. Manchester. I am disappointed but honored.”

  Billy turned to us.

  “I have a m-meeting. Mr. McCane will fill you in, Max. I will sp- speak with you later.”

  I watched as Billy walked away. McCane had not moved from his spot on the sidewalk. When Arturo again extended his palm to an umbrella shaded table, I turned to him.

  “Let’s eat.”

  The big man sat in a chair and then scraped the legs across the flagstone so he could sit at an angle to the glass-topped table. He lit a cigarette and ordered “sweet tea.” I asked the waiter for a Rolling Rock and McCane cut his eyes at me.

  “Ya’ll were on the job somewhere?” he said, the New York cop phrase sounding odd in his southern accent.

  “Philadelphia. Ten years.”

  “Retired?�
��

  “Quit,” I said. “Took disability after a shooting.”

  “I seen that scar,” he said, his eyes going to the penny-sized disc of scar tissue above my collarbone. I repressed the urge to touch the soft spot left by a bullet that had miraculously passed through my neck without killing me. I stared across the street, a flash of sun on the window of an opening door flickering behind my eye where the memory of the pale face of a dead twelve-year-old boy hid. I blinked away the vision.

  “You?” I asked, turning back to McCane.

  “Charleston P.D. for a while. Then over to Savannah some. Retired there. Picked up this investigative work through an old boy I knew for years. Money’s all right. Don’t like the travel much.”

  The waiter brought my beer with a glass. McCane sipped his tea, and refused to look as I took a deep draw from the bottle.

  Out in the street a river of cars filled up the block and then flushed away with a change of the stoplight. It was a bustle, but unlike a fall day in a northeast city. The people weren’t locked onto a destination; the subway, the train station, the office building where they could get out of the cold. Even on a busy downtown street here you can not stand under a blue sky next to a palm tree and be in too much of a hurry.

  “Hard to find P.I. work down here?” he asked, taking another drag on his cigarette.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said, wondering how much Billy had told him about me. “Why do you ask?”

  McCane released a lung-full of smoke.

  “You know. Just figured if you had to work for him,” he said, nodding in the direction Billy had walked, “things must be tight.”

  “It’s a favor,” I said, recognizing now the subtle edge of racism in the man’s voice.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “It all spends the same, don’t it?”

  The waiter came back for our orders. I asked for grilled yellowtail, knowing Arturo’s chef would spice it nicely with a Cuban flavor.