by John Lutz
Ho entered the building carrying the briefcase, then returned to his car about five minutes later, still with the case.
He drove over to Egret Avenue and made a similar visit to a small, vine-covered house. Then it was all the way to the other side of town for another brief stop at an apartment building. He headed east then, toward the ocean.
Carver followed, but he was getting worried. Ho was driving at the speed limit, not behaving in any way unusual, but he wasn’t the sort anyone could follow indefinitely without being seen. Carver hoped the little assassin’s dark glasses obstructed his vision enough to take the edge off his awareness.
It wasn’t until Ho had parked and climbed up out of the Porsche again that Carver realized where they were. At the motel where he’d last seen Mandy Jamison after her date with Reverend Devine. The place she seemed to call home.
He took a chance and let the Olds’s idling engine ease it down the street so he could see where Ho was going.
The little man limped directly to Mandy’s cabin. He rapped on the door with the crook of his cane, as Carver might have done. Mandy opened the door. Carver caught a glimpse of her, wearing jeans and an oversized blouse and looking ghostly pale without makeup, as she moved back to let Beni Ho enter.
Ten minutes later, Ho hobbled outside and back to his car. He drove over to Ocean Drive, then south. Turned right on Wellington. There wasn’t much traffic now, so Carver had to stay even farther behind the Porsche. At one point he even cut over to run parallel to Ho in the next block for a while, sneaking looks at the black Porsche at intersections, guided at times by only the throaty roar of its powerful engine.
The neighborhood began to decline. Run-down office buildings, some of them boarded up, lined the streets. Here and there stood a desolate house or apartment building with despondent-looking old men or women on the porches or stoops. More of the businesses on the street seemed to be permanently closed than open.
When Carver cut back to the next block to fall in behind the black Porsche again, he was surprised to find that the neighborhood looked familiar. He was on Gull Avenue.
Then the Porsche’s brakelights flared. Carver slowed the Olds and pulled to the curb.
Ho parked across the street from Shellie’s Lounge and limped inside.
Carver drove past, then parked around the corner. He walked back to Gull and found a spot near a bus stop where he could stand back in the doorway of a boarded-up shoe store and not attract too much attention. Passersby would take him for a man waiting for a bus, or for a wino or junkie seeking shade.
He settled back, sweated, and waited.
Ho was inside Shellie’s for almost half an hour. When he returned to the Porsche and drove away, he didn’t have his briefcase.
Carver stood watching the Porsche travel north on Gull Avenue, gliding fast and shiny like some huge beetlelike insect working up nerve to test its wings.
He watched it until, as it flashed past a line of parked cars, he noticed a red plastic rose taped to an antenna.
Maggie Rourke’s car was parked at the curb.
38
Carver paused just inside the door. It was dim and cool as a cave inside Shellie’s, and the low-volume sound system was playing something forlorn and slow by Eric Clapton. There were about a dozen customers scattered around, four or five of them at the bar. The TV above the bar was tuned soundlessly to a cable channel showing jai alai from Miami, but nobody was paying attention except for the bartender, not the stocky woman today but a fat man with sandy hair and a white shirt.
Maggie was seated on a stool at the end of the bar, a drink in front of her and the briefcase lying at her feet like a weary pet she’d been walking. Her clothes were casual-baggy red tee shirt and skin-tight black shorts that came down almost to her knees. She was wearing black sandals, letting the left one dangle so loosely from her toes that it seemed an instant away from dropping to the floor and subtly changing everything in her world.
When Carver approached, she looked over at him with a flash of surprise and then careful disinterest.
“Still sick?” he asked, sliding onto the stool next to her, not glancing down at the briefcase.
“Why should you care?”
“Is this the woman-scorned act?”
“Don’t overestimate yourself.”
She was working hard to get him to leave. He didn’t blame her. The bartender sauntered over to them, never taking his eyes off the TV. Carver asked for a Budweiser. It was set before him, half of it poured into a glass, all without a word from the bartender. Carver wondered if he had a bet down on the jai alai match.
“Listen,” Maggie said, turning toward him, “excuse my bad manners. I’m a little drunk, early as it is.” Since he wasn’t leaving, she’d apparently changed her tactics.
“Going into work when you leave here?”
“Huh?” She smiled. “Not a chance. Why would you ask that?”
“Your briefcase. I thought maybe you stopped here on your way to work.”
“Actually I was in early this morning and picked up some papers to take home and study.”
“What kind of papers?”
“Information on an initial public offering. Savings and loan going public. You interested?”
He smiled. “Nothing to invest.”
“Damn, damn, damn!” the bartender said, reacting to something on television. Clapton began crooning achingly about love lost forever.
Maggie took a sip of her drink, then rested her hand on the back of Carver’s. Her fingers were cool from being curled around her glass. “Last time we were here you offered to drive me home.”
“I thought you were drunk then. You’re not drunk now.”
“Nice of you to think not. You’re a gentleman, Ferd.”
“That’s Fred. I’ll be glad to carry your briefcase out to your car for you, gentleman that I am.”
Her eyes picked up the light from the TV and glowed with alarm and lucidity. “No, thanks. I’m not leaving yet. Not for a while.”
“Me either, I guess.”
She was quiet for a moment, staring into her drink. Then she said, “You still think Mark’s death was murder?”
“Yes.”
“Any proof?”
“Not yet.”
“If it was murder, Fred, I’d like to see you catch the bastard who did it.”
“You’re not convinced anymore it was suicide?”
“I’ve found it hard to stay convinced of anything since Mark died. The world keeps shifting on me, meaning one thing then another. I turn around and everything’s changed.” Her sandal dropped to the floor, and she absently lowered her foot and snagged it with her toes without looking. “It scares the shit out of me.”
She didn’t sound scared, even though she should have been. Carver remembered the mutilated doll in her bed. He thought maybe she really was feeling the effects of the liquor.
“Everybody’s scared from time to time,” he said.
“Even big bad Fred?”
He said, “You scare me, Maggie.”
“I scare a lot of men. Then they try to prove to themselves they’re not scared. It’s a pattern.”
“Life’s full of patterns, only sometimes they’re hard to see. Like those optical illusions that are one thing then another, depending on how you look at them.”
“That’s your job, I guess. Seeing the patterns, the real shapes of things in the fog.” She sounded sad.
Maybe she sensed what he was thinking, what had emerged from the fog. Maggie, Beni Ho, Carl Gretch-they formed a tighter and tighter pattern. He knew now they were all connected in some meaningful way with Nightlinks. Mark’s lover, Donna’s lover, and a killer. And Donna and Mark and Gretch were dead. Maggie should be more frightened than she was. She should be scared sick.
He could think of only one reason why she wasn’t. He swiveled on his stool and stood up. Laid some ones on the bar to pay for the beer he’d only sampled.
“Thought you
were gonna hang around,” she said.
“Changed my mind. Work to do.”
“Don’t mention to anyone at Burnair and Crosley you saw me here, okay?”
“Sure. There’s not much chance I’d run into someone from there anyway.”
“Well, you never know.”
“I’m trying to change that.”
“Fred!” she called, as he was leaving. When he turned around she was smiling at him.
“You scare me, too,” she said.
He returned to the shoe store doorway across Gull and waited less then five minutes before Maggie came out of Shellie’s, blinked at the sunshine, then strode to her car.
She was walking a straight line and didn’t seem the least bit drunk. Maybe she’d been scared sober.
She was carrying the briefcase.
He hurried to the Olds and climbed in and followed her, first to the Florida Federal Bank of Del Moray on Blue Heron Drive, then to Burnair and Crosley.
39
Carver drove to his office and fielded phone calls and correspondence until almost four o’clock. It was cool and quiet and peaceful there. The view out the window was of the wind off the sea ruffling the tall palm trees beyond the buildings on the other side of Magellan so they looked like towering, absurdly thin women shaking their heads so their hair flew. The only sound was the soft, monotonous hum of the air conditioner doing full battle with the relentless heat and winning for the moment. He almost would have resented a prospective client walking in.
He sat staring at the glaring view beyond the window, thinking about how he seemed to be learning more about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Donna and Mark Winship, and about how little of what he’d learned was sufficient proof for an indictment. A sharp attorney would call most of it circumstantial, hearsay, and assumption. The sharp attorney would be right.
But that same attorney would have difficulty explaining the relationships of the people involved, the dead and the survivors. Somewhere in those relationships lay the impetus for suicide and the motive for murder, if only it could all be reasoned out.
Explaining it wasn’t a job for an attorney, Carver had to concede. It was his job. And he was sure that if he didn’t do it well, there would be at least one more murder.
He hated all violent death, but especially homicide. Hated the arrogant presumption, the loosing of chaos, and then the ruins that inevitably spawned more tragedy, that were always pieces of the puzzle of murder. He hated the sudden transformation of someone alive into something no more animate than a piece of furniture. He hated the death of beauty and the return to dust.
Another thing he didn’t like was the workable parts of his lower body falling asleep. His pelvis and the base of his spine were numb from sitting too long in his chair. He stood up, leaning first on the desk and then on his cane, and waited for the tingling of returning circulation to stop and full feeling to return to his lower extremities.
He was standing that way, staring across Magellan at two potbellied elderly men in white slacks and pastel golf shirts talking animatedly with each other, maybe arguing, when the phone rang.
He didn’t move, letting the answering machine pick up the call after the fourth ring.
Beep!
“Beth here, Fred. When you get a chance call me at the cottage. Or if you happen to be in the office-”
He lifted the receiver and sat back down in his chair simultaneously, cutting in on the machine to speak direct: “I’m here, Beth.”
“Seen the evening edition of the Gazette-Dispatch?” she asked. The Dispatch was the newspaper of choice in Del Moray, after the Miami Herald, which covered much more than the Dispatch’s regional news.
Dreading what she might tell him, he said he hadn’t read a paper since this morning. Across Magellan, one of the elderly men was emphasizing a point by rhythmically poking the other in the chest with a forefinger. The other man stood calmly with his hands at his sides, like a fixed object in a flooded wild stream, waiting patiently for the water to recede.
“You were right about who hired that photographer, Fred. Looks like it was Cindy Sue, and she didn’t waste any time. She filed for divorce from Reverend Devine this morning. She must have been waiting to move as soon as the film was developed.”
“Were the photographs mentioned?”
“No. Cindy Sue claimed incompatibility. No details. It’s a small item on page six of the front section, a sidebar to a story about Reverend Devine and his flock obstructing entry into a high school that was scheduled to show a sex-education film titled Sex in and out of Marriage.” Beth paused, then chuckled with satisfaction. “Don’t you just love irony?”
“Unless I’m the one getting ironed.”
“Well, even a hypocrite’s private life should remain private, unless he or she makes a hypocritical public issue of it. Then the rules change. Reverend Devine is getting what he deserves, and I hope his wife makes those photos public.”
“You’re an uncompromising woman.”
“Way I feel about it, Fred.”
“I think I’ll always be honest with you.”
“Wisest choice.”
After hanging up, he went outside to buy a newspaper from the vending machine on the corner. He inserted a quarter, wrestled a Gazette-Dispatch out of its blue steel enclosure, then carried the newspaper back to the office to read.
The news item was as Beth had described. And there was a photo of Devine that had been shot at some sort of protest demonstration. A man and two women behind him were leaning angrily toward the camera with their mouths open, snarling something at the photographer. The man and one of the women had what looked like stick handles of signs resting on their shoulders. In the photograph’s background was a parked car and a blurred flurry of activity involving several people moving fast in the same direction. Devine looked younger than he had the night Carver had glimpsed him at the motel, a sternly smiling man with a slightly bulbous nose and the gaze of a crusader. There was also a photo of Cindy Sue, a round-faced brunette who was attractive despite a hairdo that resembled a Buckingham Palace guardsman’s tall headgear.
Carver folded the newspaper in half and laid it on the desk.
He understood now what Nightlinks was really all about. Something so simple, even if devious, that it was a miracle it wasn’t done more often. Or maybe it was, and only some of those involved were aware of it.
Carver now understood why Donna and Mark had died, and why Gretch had been made to follow them in death.
And he knew what his next move should be and didn’t like it. Not completely.
After using his cane to slide the phone across the desk to him, he called McGregor at Del Moray police headquarters.
He felt like a man reaching into a hole for a snake.
40
“Odd,” McGregor said, “you phoning me. Usually I’ve gotta run you to ground and yank conversation outa you like it was back molars.”
Outside the office window a huge motor home lumbered past on Magellan. There were suitcases and bicycles strapped to its roof and it was towing a small car whose windows displayed clothes and boxes stuffed inside. Florida attracted people who found it impossible to travel light.
“We had a deal,” Carver said, turning away from the window. “I’m honoring it.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“No surprise there.”
“I mean about the honor part. That’s the kinda word politicians toss around like Frisbees. I do understand why you’re making good on what I forced you to agree to; it’s because you know for sure I’ll skin you slow and hang your hide out to dry if you don’t. You might be stupid, but you are yellow.”
“You’re not making this easy,” Carver said.
“Life’s never easy. It only seems like it sometimes, just before the bottom falls out. What have you got to tell me, dick-head? Go ahead and unburden yourself.”
“Harvey Sincliff.”
“The human cesspool that
owns Nightlinks?”
“The very cesspool.”
“If you’ve got something that’ll stick to Harvey Sincliff, we definitely can talk a while. We’ve been after him and his escort service for years, but he knows the ropes and always wraps them around our necks. Yeah, we can sure have a chat about Sincliff. Him and his fucking high-price lawyers are a disease.”
“You can be the doctor who finds the cure,” Carver said. “I can give him to you.”
He knew how McGregor must be salivating. Not so much over collaring Sincliff and shutting down Nightlinks as over the inevitable news coverage and celebrity status for the police officer who got credit for the investigation and arrest. He’d be a hero. Heroes got kisses and prizes. Heroes got promoted.
“Sincliff’s into prostitution and everybody knows it,” McGregor said. “He’s been turning out his escorts for years. Thing is, he’s set up so it’s impossible to prove.”
“You can arrest him and make it stick like Superglue. I can give you the names of employees and clients who engaged in prostitution, along with the names and addresses of the Johns. Beth and I will back it up with our testimony, and some of the Johns are sure to break and cooperate with the prosecution.”
“Goin’ after the Johns too, huh?” A note of caution now. Here was something that wasn’t usually done. The sound of McGregor’s brain working might have been audible over the line.
“Why not the Johns? Prostitution’s a crime that takes two to commit.”
“Still, some of ’em might have toes too important to step on.”
“There are no toes like that connected to the names I’ll give you. Except maybe for Reverend Harold Devine’s.”
“Devine? The family-values turd that’s always yammering on TV and picketing?” There was unmistakable delight in McGregor’s voice. “So that’s the reason his wife filed for divorce; the good reverend was getting a little pussy donation on the side. I never seen it to fail with them praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-collection-plate assholes. They all got sexual problems, or they wouldn’t be so high on telling everybody else not to have fun.”
