Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  I dialed Agent Santos from my car and left a short message: “Any news?”

  Since our phone conversation at lunchtime, I’d heard from neither Santos nor the MDPD homicide unit. It would have been standard investigative protocol to visit Tyla’s apartment and interview anyone who knew her, which should have triggered some kind of update. I double-checked my smartphone for messages while stopped at a red light. None from Santos. Several from J.T.

  The light turned green, but I kept my foot on the brake for a moment, debating my next move. Angelina probably would have preferred that I leave J.T. alone, but she was at a baby shower for a friend—which surely had something to do with our conversation at lunch—and I saw no urgent need to go straight home to an empty house. Thirty days of house arrest without at least one visit a day from someone seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. I hung a right and headed to J.T.’s apartment. He was so glad to see me that I could barely say hello through his bear hug.

  “Thank you, Abe. Thank you for coming.”

  I followed him inside. He was dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt, ready for bed. His mouth was foaming with toothpaste, and the brush was in his hand.

  “I took my medication a little while ago, so I’ll be asleep soon.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home,” he said, brushing his teeth as he climbed the stairs to the bathroom.

  Make yourself at home. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be funny or if he’d simply forgotten that I’d once lived there with his sister. I went into the TV room and turned on the local news. The lead story was the brutal murder of Miami attorney Tyla Tomkins, which immediately sucked me in. Neighbors described her as “the nicest person you would ever want to meet,” but the report also mentioned that Tyla was “just the second African-American woman to become a partner at Miami’s oldest and largest law firm, Belter, Benning & Lang.” The gray-haired managing partner, Brian Belter, spoke of “a brilliant Harvard-educated lawyer who was determined to give back to her community.”

  Tyla’s photograph flashed on the screen again, and I found myself transfixed.

  “Abe, did you hear what I just said?” asked J.T.

  “Huh?”

  J.T. stepped farther into the room. His mouth no longer foamed with toothpaste, but he was still brushing between sentences.

  “Jeez, Abe. Can’t you at least pretend to listen? I’m wasting my breath here.”

  “Sorry. I was focused on the TV.”

  He plopped down on the couch beside me. He was brushing furiously, but there was still no foam.

  “Are you using toothpaste?” I asked.

  “Just water. I’m brushing off the toothpaste.”

  “Why?”

  “Everybody brushes off the toothpaste.”

  “No, they don’t, J.T. And stop brushing so hard. You’re going to make your gums raw.”

  He continued to brush, his gaze locking onto the television screen. “Is that the murder case you’re working on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Know who?”

  “The victim.”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “Why would you work all day and then sit your ass down in front of the TV to hear more about her? I get ESPN, you know.”

  I grabbed the remote and switched the channel.

  J.T. brushed his molars, then stopped. “You still didn’t answer the first question I asked.”

  “You mean the one I didn’t hear?”

  “Okay, I’ll ask again. When we was in court yesterday, why did you have to tell the judge I’m bipolar?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You should have told her the truth, that I have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “J.T., you don’t have PTSD.”

  “So you had to let the whole world know that I’m bipolar, is that it?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone you’re bipolar.”

  “People aren’t stupid, Abe. All those medications I take are for bipolar disorder.”

  “I didn’t mention any of the medications by name.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “No, I really didn’t.”

  “I heard you,” he said firmly, slamming the wet toothbrush down on the sofa cushion. “You told them.”

  I was certain that I hadn’t, but I more than understood how counterproductive it was to argue with J.T. when he “knew” he was right. He’d dig in his heels, get assertive, then get agitated. Then he’d feel the compulsion to walk, and walk, and walk. Sit, stand, walk some more. In the chair, out of the chair, bouncing up and down. Maybe even skip his way across the room, still brushing his teeth and arguing the point. He’d be up all night, maybe two. Maybe jump on a bus for a three-hour ride, J.T. prancing up and down the aisle.

  It wouldn’t end well.

  “I’m sorry, J.T. I should have been more careful.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Abe. We’ve talked about this before.”

  Yes, we had. Countless times, the same conversation over and over again. “Rumination,” was what his doctor called it.

  “I’ll be more sensitive next time,” I said.

  He started brushing again, his bizarre mission to remove every speck of toothpaste, then stopped. “I’m tired,” he announced. “I’m going to bed. Are you staying here tonight?”

  “No. I’m going home to Angelina.”

  “What about tomorrow night?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about the night after that?”

  “J.T., you need to—”

  I started to say what I wished I could say, in the tone I wished I could use, but stopped. This wasn’t J.T.’s fault. But, dear God, it was exhausting.

  “J.T., let’s touch base tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. Oh, one more thing.”

  “What?”

  He came to me, putting his head on my shoulder in an awkward embrace. “Thank you, Abe.”

  “You’re welcome, J.T.”

  “I know it ain’t easy for someone of average intelligence to have a brother-in-law who’s a genius.”

  Again, it wasn’t easy to tell when J.T. was kidding around, but finally he laughed.

  “Had you goin’ for a second there, didn’t I, homeboy?”

  “Good night, J.T.”

  I waited until he was upstairs, then switched the channel back to the local news. The nightly if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage had switched to a convenience store robbery in Hialeah. I settled back into the couch and texted Angelina to see what time she planned to get home.

  Soon, she texted back. 11-ish.

  I texted back but didn’t tell her where I was. I honestly wasn’t sure what would have bugged her more, the fact that I was with J.T. or that I was in the apartment Samantha and I had once shared. We didn’t talk much about Samantha. The name seemed to come up only when Angelina and I were arguing about J.T. Not that a new wife should make the old wife a nightly topic of conversation, but at some point I would have expected at least one meaningful conversation. When was the cancer diagnosed? How long did you know she was going to die? Did you talk about what you would do after she was gone? Do you think everything happens for a reason? I couldn’t really recall any questions of substance that Angelina had ever asked about Samantha, save one. It was late, we were in bed, and I had drifted off to a semiconscious state after making love. I felt Angelina’s arm slide across my chest, smelled the wine on her breath.

  “Was Samantha your only black lover?”

  My eyes blinked open in the darkness. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “I want to know. So it matters.”

  I wasn’t sure why Angelina had wanted to know. Perhaps she didn’t even know why. But her question had been a cold reminder of what a complicated place my head was. Answers were never simple. In high school I used to read the sports pages of the
Miami Tribune before leaving the house each morning. During the O. J. Simpson trial, my favorite columnist wrote a piece on racism. The subtleties of racism, he called it. For most white people, he wrote, it was easier to imagine black people having sex than to imagine them getting sweaty palms at the high-school dance. Later, as an adult, I came to understand what he was saying. As a teenage boy, not at all. All I knew was that whenever I looked at Shawna Jones sitting next to me in tenth-grade homeroom, I pretty much wanted to have sex. The sweaty palms and dancing didn’t come till much later. So all those nights I’d lain in bed alone thinking about Shawna, I bore the double guilt and shame of having sprayed my bedsheets, which only proved that I was, in the eyes of my favorite sports columnist, a racist.

  My cell rang. It was my boss. Actually, my boss’s boss. The call was from Carmen Jimenez, the four-term state attorney who had hired me out of law school and approved every promotion since. It wasn’t often that Carmen called me after ten o’clock at night. In fact, the last time I could remember a call at this hour had been during a street riot.

  “What’s up, Carmen?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Abe, normally I’d say this is none of my business, but I think you know why I have to ask: Were you having an affair?”

  The question threw me, but that was Carmen’s style. Most lawyers would start a deposition by asking a witness where he lived, his employment history. Carmen, in her day, had gone for the jugular with the first question.

  “Was I having an affair?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking,” she said. “Were you?”

  As a prosecutor, I understood better than most that the only way to answer a direct question is with a direct answer. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d stood before a jury and painted a witness as a liar for dodging a question by responding with a question of his own. But there I went.

  “Why would you even ask that?”

  “Say no more,” said Carmen.

  “Hold on a second. I didn’t say I was. I’m not.”

  “Did you know Tyla Tomkins?”

  “Yes. That was a long time ago.”

  “Okay, stop right there, because now I know you’ve lied to me at least once. And when you lie to me, this becomes a personnel matter.”

  “I’m not lying!”

  “Abe, chill, okay? This is not hostile fire. But you are going to have to answer some tough questions, and you need to do better than you just did with me. Victoria Santos has demanded a meeting with us first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “What? Why is the FBI getting involved in this?”

  “It’s her prerogative. And anytime the bureau sticks its nose into my office, I have to go strictly by the book.”

  “I don’t see the big deal. I was going to tell you about Tyla tomorrow anyway.”

  “Good. Let’s leave it at that. I want you to sleep on this, sort it out in your head, and tomorrow morning all will go smoothly. Don’t say things that dig a deeper hole than the one you’re already in.”

  “What hole?”

  “Abe, I can’t coach you. That’s as far as I’m going to take it on the telephone. Santos is one smart cookie. Don’t lie to her. We’ll talk in the morning. My office. Eight a.m.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

  As we hung up, my own words echoed in my mind. Why would you even ask that?

  Why that had been my answer, I’ll never know. Carmen was on my side, and if I’d given her a flat no, she might have gone to bat for me and told Santos to take her list of questions and pound sand. I’d given her no choice but to let the meeting proceed, to “do this by the book.” She hadn’t specified what “this” was, but I wasn’t clueless. It had been a bizarre day, from the bloated and headless cadaver at the medical examiner’s office to my wife asking for a baby within minutes of the official identification of what appeared to be Cutter’s fifth victim. I was operating under awkward circumstances that blurred the lines between personal and professional. But I also knew that Carmen Jimenez wasn’t just being nosy. Of course I would have to answer questions about any relationship with a murder victim, and the state attorney had a right to know if it was old news or a potential flashpoint that could be tomorrow’s headline. I wasn’t quite sure how I would word it, but in substance, I would be answering the question that Angelina had put to me in the privacy and darkness of our bedroom.

  No, Samantha Vine had not been my only black lover.

  I pulled up my calendar on my smartphone and scheduled the meeting for 8:00 a.m. In the state attorney’s office. Top floor of the Graham Building.

  The Boomerang.

  Chapter Nine

  I made a point of being a few minutes early for the 8:00 a.m. meeting in Carmen’s office. She hated to be kept waiting, which was ironic. In my experience, and without exception, a meeting with Carmen would be interrupted in the first two minutes for a phone call that she absolutely had to take, which kept everyone else waiting.

  “Hold my calls,” Carmen told her secretary.

  We were apparently playing by different rules this morning.

  Carmen naturally had the most spacious corner office in the building. Top-floor views of the Miami River and the criminal courthouse stretched behind her tall leather desk chair. I was the fifth person in the room, counting Carmen and the director of human resources, which was what “by the book” meant. I hadn’t expected Lieutenant Riddel—“Rid,” I called him. We’d worked several homicide cases together, and I liked him, too. At one point Samantha and I had double-dated with Rid and his wife, and I still considered him friend enough never to call him by his first name, DeWitt, which he thought sounded like dimwit, and that some really hilarious guys over at the station reconfigured into “dumb shit.”

  Agent Santos was in a chair beside Carmen’s desk, facing me. The American flag was a fixture in Carmen’s office, and Santos had managed to sit directly in front of it, making hers the position of power in the room.

  “Well, we’re a big group,” I said as I greeted each of them with an awkward smile.

  “Have a seat, Abe,” said Carmen. “Before I turn this over to Agent Santos, is there anything you’d like to tell us about Tyla Tomkins?”

  It was a friendly lob, and I took it. “Yes. Ever since I saw Tyla’s name on yesterday’s newscast, I knew I would have to disclose our relationship.”

  “So you admit that you knew her?” asked Santos.

  “A long time ago.”

  Carmen laid a notepad on her desktop, pen in hand. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Abe.”

  “I met her at a job fair convention here in Miami. You sent me to it,” I said, glancing at Carmen. “I had just started working here. Tyla was a first-year law student at the time. She wasn’t interested in a job with the state attorney’s office, but somehow we started talking. We ended up going to dinner together. Kind of hit it off.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “That was it. She went back to school in Cambridge. Tyla was Harvard Law. Very smart woman. Very attractive.”

  “When you say you ‘hit it off’ . . .”

  I shifted in my chair. “This is getting really personal, don’t you think?”

  “My lead prosecutor in a serial killer investigation had a relationship with one of the victims. If I’m even going to consider keeping you on the case, I need the whole picture.”

  I knew Carmen well, and I read between the lines. Either she was going to ask these awkward questions, or I would have to face them from Santos. Better from Carmen.

  “Okay, here’s the poop. I was twenty-seven years old and single, working my ass off and not meeting a lot of women. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not apologizing for it either. A one-night stand was out of character for me, and it was my impression that it was out of character for her as well. But that’s all it was. I never saw her again after she went back to school. That was the beginning, and that
was the end.”

  “That’s it?” asked Carmen.

  “That’s it.”

  “Nothing more recent?”

  “Nope.”

  Carmen sighed, as if wishing that I’d answered differently. “Agent Santos, please show Abe the telephone records.”

  I glanced at Santos, then back at Carmen. “Phone records?”

  Santos rose and handed me a printout. “Detective Riddel found a prepaid cell phone in Tyla Tomkins’ apartment.”

  I caught Rid’s eye. We had just worked a case involving prepaid cell phones. Criminals, especially drug dealers, loved the anonymous dial tone. No name required. No ID check. No billing information. No questions asked. Thirty bucks bought a working phone line that was virtually impossible to trace.

  “Why would Tyla have a prepaid cell phone?” I asked.

  “Maybe you can tell us,” said Santos. “These are the records from the calls made from that phone over the past two months. There are five calls of interest. The highlighted ones.”

  I checked the printout, then froze. “That’s my cell number.”

  “Which is precisely the problem,” said Santos.

  I looked up from the printed page, meeting the accusatory eyes of the FBI. “This isn’t possible,” I said. “I’ve never spoken to Tyla on the phone.”

  I looked at Carmen, who looked away, as if pained to see me in this position. “It is your number, Abe,” she said.

  I took another look at the printout. “I don’t understand this. Honestly, I don’t.”

  Carmen glanced in Santos’ direction, as if deferring to the FBI, no longer able to help me.

  “Our tech agents have already looked into this,” said Santos. “There were five calls in all to your number. The first four were voice-mail messages.”

  “Well, I never got them.”