We left the beach and drove all the way into St. Pete to go to a restaurant Joe liked called Pacific Wave. The food was outstanding, and Amy and Gena ran away with the conversation. Joe hadn’t found himself a journalist, but something close. She was an attorney who’d become an advocate for public records and government access, and with those credentials it didn’t take long for her to endear herself to Amy. I also began to understand why Joe was still here in the summer but hadn’t made any remarks about a permanent relocation. Gena was in Florida only temporarily, as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a renowned journalism center in St. Petersburg. She’d come down on a grant, and that grant would be up in September.
“Then it’s back to Idaho?” Amy asked.
She nodded, and I saw Joe take his eyes off her for the first time while she was speaking.
“How’d you meet, anyhow?” Amy asked. It was a classic female question, I thought, and one that guys never seemed to ask. They’d met, that was all. Wasn’t that enough knowledge? It’s no surprise that some of the best detectives I know are women.
“One of my colleagues at Poynter has a time-share up here,” Gena said. “I came to a party there, got bored, and went for a walk. Joe was sitting on the beach in his lawn chair. Not so noteworthy, you might think, but this was at ten o’clock at night. It stood out.”
Amy looked at Joe, and he shrugged. “There were always a bunch of people out during the day. They got annoying.”
“We got to talking a little, and he was explaining why palm trees are so resistant to wind, even in hurricanes,” Gena continued, and now it was my turn to look at Joe.
“You learn a lot about palm trees growing up in Cleveland?”
“I did some reading.”
“Evidently.”
Gena smiled. “After a while I realized I’d been gone too long, and I had to get back, but I also wanted to see him again. He didn’t seem to be picking up on that—”
“You can imagine what a great detective he is,” I said.
“Well, that’s what I finally had to use. By then I knew what he’d done, and he knew why I was here, so I told him I needed to have someone with police experience come speak at one of my seminars. Talk about public access and the back-and-forth with the media, things like that. It ended up being a fine idea, but I’ll confess it hadn’t been part of the original plan.”
“You spoke to students?” I said to Joe. “To journalism students?”
He nodded.
“Tell them about the good old days, when there were no recorders in interrogation rooms and every cop’s favorite tools were the rubber hose and the prewritten confession?”
“I might have held a few things back.”
After dinner, we drove back to Joe’s building. He mixed drinks for the three of us and grabbed a bottle of water for himself, and we went out to the patio as the heat faded to tolerable levels and the moon rose over the gulf. It was quiet here, and I thought of Gena’s story, of Joe on his lawn chair alone on the dark beach, and I realized that it had probably been a hell of a good choice for him to come here, to be away from the things that he knew and the people that knew him, for at least a little while. We all burn out, time to time. Some people never find that dark beach and that solitary lawn chair, though. I was glad that he had.
At one point, as the conversation between Amy and Gena became more animated and I thought my absence would be less noticed, I got up and walked down to the water and finished my drink standing in the sand. After a while a light, sprinkling rain began, and I realized the voices from the patio had faded. When I went back up, Amy and Gena were gone. Joe was sitting alone, watching me.
“They go inside?” I asked.
He nodded. I took the chair next to him again. It wasn’t really raining yet, just putting forth a few suggestions.
“Amy was telling us about your friend,” Joe said. “Ken.”
“Friend? I’d known him about a week, Joseph.”
“That make it easier, telling yourself that?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” he said. “Right now, I mean. Something like that happens . . . the guy working with you gets killed, I just assumed you’d dig in.”
“When your partner gets killed, you’re supposed to do something about it, that what you mean? The classic PI line? Well, I don’t have it in me anymore. So try not to get killed.”
“Understandable. Sometimes it’s good to take a few days—”
“No, Joe.” I shook my head. “I don’t need a few days, and when I say I don’t have it in me anymore, I don’t mean to go find out what happened to Ken. I should do that, I know. I should be back in Cleveland right now, working on that.”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just surprised you’re not, because it seems to be your way.”
“Sometimes your ways change. Or get changed.”
He was quiet. The sprinkling rain had stopped, but the wind was blowing harder, and there was no longer any trace of the moon through the clouds.
“Are you coming back?” I said. “It’s why I’m here, and you know that. I need to know if you’re coming back.”
“To Cleveland?”
“No. Well, yes, I care about that, too, but I mean to work. Are you coming back to work with me?”
He said, “I got a call from Tony Mitchell two weeks ago. You remember Tony?”
“Sure. Good cop, good guy. Funny as hell. What this has to do with anything . . .”
“Tony’s retired from the department, too. I expected he’d become a Jimmy Buffett roadie, but evidently that didn’t work out, because he got himself a job doing corporate security for some big manufacturing firm. Place is constantly hiring new employees, taking in hundreds of applications a month. They’ve had some problems with bad hires in the past and want to put a preemployment screening program in place. Tony called me, asked if we’d be interested in running it. Would be real steady work.”
“Screenings,” I said.
“I’d be willing to do something like that,” he said. “Make some money, keep busy. The street work . . . I’ve done it for too long, Lincoln.”
“So you’re coming back, but you don’t intend to do any street work.”
“That’s about it, yeah.”
“Where does Gena figure in?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I nodded.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“That maybe it’s time to fold it,” I said and hated the sound of my voice. I’d gone for detached and gotten choked instead.
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t want to be in this business alone, Joe. I’m not sure I even want to be in it at all anymore, but I don’t want to go at it alone. Hell, you’re the one who dragged me into it. I was running the gym and—”
“And losing your mind. You were so miserable—”
“That was a different time. I’d gotten fired, I’d lost Karen . . . things were different.”
“This job gave you something back. Did it not?”
“Sure,” I said. “It gives, and maybe it takes away a little, too. You’re proof.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Look at yourself. You’re happy down here. Are you not?”
“Generally, yeah. It’s been good. I’m not sure how—”
“You had to go fifteen hundred miles to separate yourself from it,” I said. “From the work. The work was you, and you were the work. I saw it every damn day.”
“I could take that comment the wrong way if I wanted to.”
“You didn’t have anything else, Joe. Nothing.”
“I know I could take that one the wrong way.”
“It was all you were,” I said. “Being a detective didn’t define you, it devoured you, and you know it. Why else did you have to leave, to go so far and for so long? You did it because if you stayed any closer you knew you’d go right back to the job, and you were scared of that. Scared, or tire
d.”
“You seeing a therapist or just reading their books?”
“Tell me I’m wrong,” I said.
He shifted in his chair, shook his head. “I won’t argue it. I could, but I won’t. Certainly not tonight.”
I didn’t say anything, and after a while he spoke again, voice low. “I thought the biggest headache would be getting you to let me step aside. Didn’t figure you’d be racing me for the door.”
“I’m tired of the collateral damage.”
“Meaning what?”
It came out in a rush. For a long time, I spoke, and he listened. Never said a word, didn’t look at me, just listened. I talked about watching Joe in the hospital when he’d been shot, about John Dunbar’s frightening fixation on a case he’d lost, about the way I felt every time I heard that new security bar click into place at Amy’s apartment, and the uncomfortable pull my gun had on me while I drove to Dominic Sanabria’s house.
“I’ve seen a lot of people around me get hurt,” I said. “You, and Amy, and now Ken Merriman. I’m always untouched, but—”
“You’re untouched?”
I nodded.
“Really?” he said. “Because you don’t look that way right now, Lincoln. Don’t sound it, either.”
We let silence ride for a while then. The rain held off, and once I heard a door open and then close again after a brief pause, and I was certain without turning to look that it was Amy, that she’d walked out onto the balcony and seen me down here with Joe and gone back inside.
“So what will you do?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’ve still got the gym. Maybe put some of Karen’s money into that. Get new equipment, do a remodel, try to expand. Help you out with the employment screening thing, if you need it.”
“And stay away from case work.”
“Yes. Stay away from case work.”
He was quiet again, then said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out better for you, Lincoln. Like you said, I’m the one who brought you into it. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. You were a detective. That was as natural and deeply ingrained in you as in anybody else I’d ever seen. I thought it would be good for you, but more than that, I thought you needed it.”
That night, when we were alone in our hotel room, I told Amy about my conversation with Joe. I was sitting in a chair by the sliding glass door, she was on the bed and outside the rain fell in sheets. I thought she might make some arguments, raise some of the same points that Joe had, remind me that when we’d met I was trying to make a living off the gym alone and I was a generally unhappy person. She didn’t say any of those things, though. When I was done talking she got to her feet and walked across the room to me and sat on my lap, straddling me, her hands on either side of my face.
“If you can’t do it anymore, then there’s no decision to be made,” she said. “You just need to step back. Don’t feel bad about it, just do it.”
I nodded.
“One rule,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You can leave the job. You can leave the city if you want to. You can leave damn near anything, but you better not leave me.”
I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”
“I’ve invested way too much into this ill-advised Lincoln Perry rehabilitation plan to give up now.”
“If anybody ends this, it’ll be you.”
“Remember that,” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me before moving to rest her head on my chest. We sat like that for a long time, and then she stood and took my hand and brought me to the bed.
When she was asleep and the rain was gone, sometime around four in the morning, I sat on the balcony with a pad of the hotel stationery and tried to write a letter to Ken’s daughter, the one who’d loved TV cop shows. I wanted to apologize for missing the funeral, tell her how much I’d thought of her father, and explain that he’d been a damn fine detective and that his work had mattered, that what he’d been doing on the day he was murdered had an impact on her world. I sat there for more than an hour, wrote a few poor sentences, and then crumpled the pages in my hand and went back inside.
30
__________
A my and I stayed for a week. We hung out with Joe and sometimes Gena, ate seafood, had drinks of fruit juice and rum, bitched about the heat. All the things you’re supposed to do in Florida.
I checked the office voice mail daily. There was no word about Ken. Many days, I played his last message again. I listened to words I already knew by heart, and I tried to imagine what had provoked them. I had no luck. You rarely do with that approach to detective work. The way it gets done is out on the street. I stayed on the beach.
On the day before we left, I ended up sitting on a chair outside Joe’s hotel, alone, while he and Amy made a run to the store. Gena was coming by for an afternoon cocktail before dinner, and she showed up before they got back and came down to join me. We made small talk for a bit. I found out that while she had lived in other states and, for one year, in Europe, she always came back to Idaho in the end. Both parents were still alive, and she had two sisters; all of them lived within a fifteen-minute drive.
“So are you going to move to Cleveland or make him move to Idaho?” It was supposed to be a joke, but her pause told me it was a discussion they’d actually had.
“Maybe either, maybe neither, maybe something completely different,” she said.
“Egypt?” I was still trying to keep it light, because I was caught off guard by the idea that they were this serious.
“One person moving to join the other is the obvious option,” she said, stretching out on the chair beside me and kicking off her sandals, “but there’s an element of it that could feel selfish either way, you know? We both have our own lives at home, so to have one person make the sacrifice seems unfair. So we’ve talked about a compromise. Moving somewhere new to both of us.”
“Oh,” I said. Can always count on me for insight.
She looked over at me, sunglasses shading her eyes. The wind was fanning her brown hair out. “Would I like Cleveland?”
“Probably not.”
“Really?”
“You live in a college town in the mountains, right? Well, the city’s a change. Most people head the other way. Leave the city for mountains.” I waved out at the water. “Or a beach.”
“I lived in New York for seven years. Never minded being in a city. Of course, I was twenty-five then, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Either way, it won’t be happening overnight,” she said. “Joe’s not the sort of person who rushes into things.”
That made me laugh. “No, he’s not.”
She smiled but looked away from me. “He’s worried about you.”
“Doesn’t need to be.”
“I couldn’t speak to that. I don’t know you well enough to say. I do know that he’s worried. He’s afraid that the way he left was unfair to you. That you’re carrying guilt about it when you shouldn’t be.”
“I got him shot, Gena. Seems to warrant a small dose of guilt. But that’s really not the issue, not anymore. He’s happy again, and I’m glad of that. Thrilled.”
“You’re not. Happy, I mean.”
“Happy,” I said, “seems like a hell of a subjective thing. I’m working on it. So is Joe. So is everybody. And I can tell you this—you’re good for him. I can see that so clearly, and you have no idea how nice it is. He’s been alone for a long time.”
“Had you, though.”
“Yeah, but he never liked my hairstyle as much as yours.”
She smiled. “There’s one thing I’d like you to know.”
“Yeah?”
“When we’ve talked about moving,” she said, “and the things that we’d miss the most, just hate the idea of being away from, I talk about my family. Joe talks about you.”
A call from Graham came later that night, and the message he left offered no sense of progress but so
me news—Joshua Cantrell’s family had won a preliminary legal motion to claim the house on Whisper Ridge.
31
__________
Life, or the lack thereof, always seemed to me like something that had to be established medically, not legally, through beating hearts and functioning brains rather than notarized paperwork. That’s not always the case. The judge had ruled that the Cantrells were entitled to post legal notice of Alexandra’s presumed death, which would run in a variety of newspapers, and there would be a ninety-day period to contest the claim. Either Alexandra herself could appear, proving it wrong while welcoming the approaches of police, or someone else could bring forward proof of life. If those ninety days passed without either occurrence, the Cantrells could begin maneuvering to claim their share of the estate. Graham’s understanding was that they’d have to split the estate with Dominic Sanabria.
“He probably killed their son,” I said when I called him back the next morning, “and now they’re going to have to share the money with him?”
“That’s what the law seems to say.”
When we got back to Cleveland, I bought a paper in the airport and flipped through it to the public notice section while we stood beside the luggage carousel. There was the first notice of Alexandra Cantrell, buried amid pages of fine-print legalese. It seemed too quiet a way to announce the end of a life.
“You should do an article,” I told Amy. “If anything’s going to produce Alexandra or proof she’s alive, it won’t be this notice. It’ll take more publicity than that.”
She agreed with me, and a day later so did her editor. The story appeared on the following Sunday, front page and above the fold. The TV news picked it up by that evening, and several Associated Press papers around the country ran shortened versions of the “missing, presumed dead” story in the days to come. The story never gathered the national steam I’d hoped for—CNN, talk show features, that sort of thing—but for several weeks, Graham, the newspaper, and the Cantrell legal team were flooded with tips. I called Graham to see if anything was coming of it. Just the tips, he said, most crazy, none credible. If Alexandra was still alive, there was no sign.
The Silent Hour lp-4 Page 21
