by Ron Base
Tree did not want to say that he encountered Chris’s wife with the Ray Man, that he knew about the Naples house and took a wild guess. Instead, he said, “That’s why I’m a detective.”
Chris gave him a crooked grin. “But Dad, you’re not a very good detective.”
Tree let the insult wash off him. “Good enough to find you,” he said.
“I guess you are at that,” Chris agreed. “After all, here you are.”
“Where’s Kendra?” Tree said.
For a moment, Tree wasn’t sure Chris had heard him. Then his son waved his hand and said, “Gone, finito. Finished.”
“What? You and Kendra split up?”
“Kendra did the splitting, man. But that’s Kendra, isn’t it? Last in. First out. That’s my baby.”
“I’m sorry, Chris.”
Chris put his sunglasses back on. “I don’t think you and Freddie ever liked her.”
“That’s not true.”
“Everyone else liked her. Everyone wanted to sleep with her. Men and women. Didn’t make any difference—not to them, maybe not to Kendra either.”
He took a long swig of his beer.
Tree said, “Is she with Aksel Baldur?”
Chris looked at him sharply. “How do you know about him?”
“Is that where she’s gone?”
“She’s afraid of Aksel. I don’t think she went back to him.”
“Why is she afraid of Aksel, Chris? Why are the two of you afraid of him?”
“Because he is evil, and we were stupid and gullible, and we should never have got ourselves involved with him or rather, Kendra shouldn’t have.”
“But Kendra did.”
“She thought she could twist him around her little finger like she did every other guy she ever met. To a certain extent she could—but then she couldn’t and that’s when the trouble started.”
“The two of you were in business with him.”
Chris finished his beer. “I need another beer,” he said. “And I need to get out of this sun.” He squinted up at Tree. “You gonna stick around, Dad?”
“Sure.”
“Detective Dad, huh? Well, don’t think for a minute you can help me. I’m good and screwed. Better stay away from me.”
“Let’s go up to the house,” Tree said. “We’ll get you another beer.”
“Sure, Dad. Let’s have a beer. Father and son. Oh, wait. You can’t have a beer. You don’t drink. Perfect dad.”
Tree thought of the days when he did drink. Not so perfect then.
Chris dropped the empty beer can to the sand, pushed himself to his feet and began to take uncertain steps toward the house. Tree bent down, picked up the beer cans, and then followed him across the beach, up the steps to the terrace. The sliding doors facing the pool were open. By the time Tree entered the kitchen, Chris already had the refrigerator open and was drawing out another beer.
In the dimness, Chris appeared like a dark brown question mark. Tree had never seen him so tanned. Skin cancer, he thought. But maybe that was the least of Chris’s problems.
“What are you going to do?” Tree asked.
Chris brushed past, snapping the cap open. He swayed a bit as he disappeared from the kitchen.
“Chris?” Tree called. No answer.
Tree found him by the window in a low-ceilinged sitting room, holding the beer, staring out at the ocean.
“Chris? Did you hear me?”
Turning, Chris appeared to see his father for the first time. “What’s that, Dad?”
“I asked you what you’re going to do.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“How long can you stay here?”
Another shrug. “As long as I want to, I suppose. Ray doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Ray Dayton doesn’t mind?”
“He’s a friend.” As though the Ray Man was a friend to all.
Tree leaned forward and plucked the beer can from Chris’s fingers. That produced an unexpected flare of anger. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Tell me about Aksel Baldur, about being in business with him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why a wealthy clothing designer would be interested in a small Chicago online dating service.”
Chris gave him a smirk, as though Tree should know better. “Kendra.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t a real dating service.”
Chris blinked a couple of times. “What would it be, then?”
“A front? For supplying young women to Baldur and other wealthy clients?”
Chris didn’t say anything.
Tree said, “Who’s Sasha?”
Chris’s face dropped in surprise. He said quietly, “Dad, don’t get mixed up in this.”
“I’m already mixed up in it,” Tree said. “Who is Sasha?”
“Sasha Itsov. Aksel’s man.”
“What about a guy named Tony Dodge?”
Chris looked blank. “I don’t know him.”
“How about Elizabeth Traven, do you know who she is?”
“Yes, of course. She started all this. She’s the one who knew a couple named Reno O’Hara and Dara Rait,” he said.
Tree knew them, too—bad actors involved in the body parts business. Before that, Dara and Reno had been in the sex trade.
“Reno and Dara are dead,” Tree said.
“Yes, but the network they established remained pretty much in place. Elizabeth restarted it. Baldur was looking for women, so were some of his friends. He introduced Kendra to the mix. He had met her when she was working for Playboy. She became his local conduit. Elizabeth brought the women up from Mexico. Kendra made sure they were taken care of in Chicago. Red Rose. That’s what they called the business. High-class sex. Very lucrative.”
Tree took out his wallet and extracted the card he had found near Traven’s body. “Is this your business card?”
Chris peered at it. “The card Elizabeth and Kendra use, yeah.”
Elizabeth should have known better, he thought. But she had said she would do whatever was necessary. Trafficking women was necessary, apparently.
“What about Elizabeth’s husband?” Tree said.
“Brand? I hear he was furious when he got out of jail and found out what Elizabeth was up to. That’s the reason she killed him, I suppose.”
“How deep are you in it?”
He shrugged. “Deep enough. By the time I realized what Kendra was up to, it was too late. Or I convinced myself it was too late. I don’t know. Kendra is hard to resist once she decides on something.”
“Except everything seems to be coming apart.”
Chris lowered his head and muttered, “Baldur’s crazy. A psycho. He gets these ideas in his head and he won’t listen to anyone.”
“What about Ray Dayton?”
“What about him?”
“How does he figure in this?”
Chris shook his head. “Like I said, he’s a friend.”
Some friend, Tree thought.
28
Tree, you can hardly move,” Freddie said as she helped him across the terrace and into a chair near the pool.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“No you are not. You’ve got to get to a doctor.”
“I haven’t had time,” Tree said, arranging himself so that he was more comfortable.
He told Freddie about his afternoon encounter with Chris. He did not tell her Chris was staying at Ray’s place in Naples. He left out the parts about Red Rose and Chris and Kendra’s involvement in the high-end sex trade. What Freddie did not know could not put her into a compromising position if the police came around.
By the time he finished, Freddie had armed herself with a glass of chardonnay. Now she leveled a hard stare at him. “There’s a whole lot here you’re not telling me. I don’t like it when bad things are happening to you, but I like it even less when you don’t tell me.”
“Listen, I’ve got an idea, why do
n’t we talk about what’s happening in your life for a change. You haven’t told me how things are going at work for a long time. That used to be the main topic of conversation around here.”
“Before you started getting into trouble.” The hint of a smile.
“Come on, Freddie. Tell me about your day.”
A frown replaced the smile. “Well, let me see. I’m worried about the business, and I’m concerned about Ray.”
“What’s Ray doing?”
“It’s what he’s not doing. He’s not there a lot of the time. When he is, he’s distracted. His marriage is in trouble.”
“I heard something about that.”
“You did?”
“Are they splitting?”
“I think he’s on the verge of doing something crazy like that, yes.”
“It seems to me Ray’s always on the verge of something crazy. Remember how he carried the torch for you—maybe he still does.”
“No, I’m old news. There’s a new love in his life, I believe.”
Tree said carefully, “Any idea who it is?”
“No, but there’s someone.”
Freddie was right, of course. There was someone. It did not take much to guess that Ray’s new love was his own daughter-in-law.
________
Lying in bed later that night, Tree heard something in the other room. Someone was moving around out there.
He slipped out of bed and, bones aching, limped out to the living room. A figure came into view, a tall, heavy-set cowboy, imposing in the gloom. He wore faded jeans, scuffed and dusty cowboy boots, and a dark blue cavalry blouse with yellow buttons. His craggy face appeared drawn and tired. He held a wide-brimmed Stetson.
The cowboy nodded when he saw Tree and gave a crooked smile. “There you are,” he said in a lazy drawl. “Wondered if you were gonna show up.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Just passing through. Heard you were in trouble, thought I’d see if I could help out.”
The cowboy lowered himself into an armchair, stretching out his left leg. He placed his hat on the floor beside him.
“I’m not sure what you can do,” Tree said.
“Well, I happen to know a thing or two when it comes to getting out of a tight spot,” the cowboy said.
“I suppose you do at that,” Tree agreed. “But I’m not sure how that applies to me. I’m nothing like you.”
“No, you’re not, and I suppose the kind of rugged individualism I represent is out of fashion. But listen, Tree, I’ve had plenty of family problems, too. No matter how tough you are, no matter how much you refuse to back down from things, family can still mess you up.”
“Boy, you’ve got that right,” Tree said. “My son is in terrible trouble, and I blame myself for that. I was a lousy father. I should have been home taking care of him and my other kids, but I was working or leaning against a bar somewhere. If I’d been around more, things might have been different, and he wouldn’t have gone so wrong.”
“Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference,” the cowboy said. “Who can say? You do your best, and the chips fall where they fall, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.”
“That’s it?” Tree said. He felt his anger rising. “‘The chips fall?’ That’s the best you can do?”
“Listen, sooner or later, the kids have to make their own way in life, like the rest of us. What? You had a great father?”
“No, he wasn’t so great,” Tree admitted. “Still isn’t so great. But that’s no excuse. I should have done better.”
“Maybe you should have, but you didn’t. So what are you going to do now?”
“You’re the hero,” Tree said angrily. “You tell me.”
“Heroes save the day, shoot the bad guys, overcome the odds. You notice they don’t have much to do with families.”
“No,” Tree said.
“That’s because where families are concerned, there ain’t no heroes, son. No heroes at all.”
Tree jerked awake. Freddie stirred beside him. She laid her hand gently on his arm. “Are you all right?”
“I was talking to him just now,” Tree said.
“Who were you talking to?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it was John Wayne.”
“John Wayne’s dead, Tree,” Freddie said in the calming voice she employed at times like this. “Go back to sleep.”
29
HOT pasta!” cried Rex Baxter, sweating profusely as he lugged a steaming metal pot into the Sanibel Community Center kitchen.
Kiwanis Club members wearing white aprons, moved quickly out of the way as Rex passed. Rex was notorious for spilling pasta at past Kiwanis spaghetti dinners.
Rex grunted and sweated his way into the main hall where early arrivals crowded rows of trestle tables. The wait line already snaked out the door and across the parking lot. Kiwanians served eager customers plastic plates piled with spaghetti and meatballs prepared by cooks toiling beneath a marquee in the parking lot. Tree was one of four Salad Guys fixing shards of lettuce dusted with croutons, soaked in a balsamic dressing and presented in white plastic tubs.
Tree was tasked with garnishing the croutons on the individual salads, the final, crucial part of the salad process, Tree noted, and not to be taken lightly.
“Everyone doing all right in here?” Rex, having delivered his pasta, reappeared in the kitchen, teeth clenched, as if he was leading a police raid on the place. Everyone said they were doing fine. Rex disappeared outside.
“I thought Ray was in charge again this year,” Tree said to Todd Jackson.
Todd said, “Ray hasn’t shown.”
“Ray missing the chance to run something? He must have been hit by a truck,” said Mitch Traynor, another of the salad guys, a lawyer when he wasn’t emptying lettuce into plastic bowls set out on metal trays.
“I doubt Ray was hit by a truck,” Todd said. “Maybe hit by something else, but not a truck.”
An hour later, word came back to the kitchen that the wait line now stretched out through the parking lot as far as the roadway. The Salad Guys picked up the pace. Rex sweated more, and yelled “HOT pasta!” even louder than before. The heat was definitely on.
“We’re running out of salad!” Todd announced as he set more plastic bowls on a tray.
“What?” Rex was back in the kitchen, eyes bulging.
“Looks like we’re almost out of salad, Rex,” Todd said.
“Damn!” roared Rex. “Who ordered the salad? Ray was supposed to look after that. Where the hell is he, anyway?”
“Missing in action,” Mitch the lawyer said.
Todd chuckled knowingly. Tree looked at him. Knowingly about what?
Rex continued to glare. “He said he’d be here. Ray told me he had everything taken care of. Not to worry.”
Tree opened the big stainless steel refrigerator behind him. It was stuffed with salad bags.
“More salad here,” he called out. Everyone looked relieved. Rex’s eyes stopped bulging so much.
“Good work, Salad Guys!” he shouted. Todd made a face at Rex’s back disappearing out the door.
Two hours later, the hall was still filled with eager spaghetti eaters, but the lineup had disappeared. The Salad Guys were ordered to cut back. Tree leaned against the counter sipping a Diet Coke, talking to Todd Jackson.
“Best year yet,” Todd said. “It’s because you’re here, Tree. People like the way you sprinkle those croutons.”
“I think it’s because Ray isn’t here,” Mitch said coming over, beer in hand. “It runs much more smoothly with Rex yelling and screaming, than it does with Ray screaming and yelling.”
“I bet I know why Ray isn’t here,” Todd said.
Everyone looked at him.
“Well, you know don’t you?” Todd said.
“I don’t know,” Tree said.
“The rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“That Ray’s off the reservatio
n,” Todd said.
Tree looked at him. “What’s that mean?”
“What do you think it means? It means Ray is being a bad boy.”
“You mean he’s fooling around?” Mitch said.
“Some hottie half his age, I hear.”
“You sure about this?” Tree said.
“One of the guys who works with me, Ace Crosby. He was cleaning carpets at 1822 Woodring Rd. yesterday. Ace was packing the equipment into the truck when who comes out of the house across the street but the Ray Man and his babe. A real hottie, according to Ace. I heard Ray grumbling a while back about a house on Woodring he had to kick his tenants out of. Maybe that’s the place.”
Tree looked out the window over the sink. It was nearly dark. He now he had a pretty good idea where Kendra was.
And who she was with.
The anger rose again, red hot this time. Not like him. But then nothing was like him these days.
“You okay, Tree?” Todd Jackson said.
Tree started to take off his apron.
30
When you thought you could not go further once you turned onto Dixie Beach Road from Periwinkle Way, there was Woodring Road snaking to the left along a thin strip of land poking between San Carlos Bay and Ladyfinger Lake. The road was unpaved and unlit, and for a time Tree didn’t think there were houses along this stretch. Then he passed a wood-frame bungalow. Beyond it was a ramshackle, two-story structure with weather-beaten wood siding. The house stood across the street from eighteen twenty-two.
Tree parked in the drive beside a Dodge Durango and got out. He went along a gravel walkway to the entrance. The door was ajar. Tree pushed it further open and eased inside. A narrow passageway led into a sitting room.
Chris slumped in an easy chair at the far end of the room. For a terrible moment, Tree thought his son was dead. But as he approached, Chris’s head moved so that the light shifted off his glasses. He opened bleary eyes and gazed up at Tree.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.”
Tree bent over him. “Where’s Kendra?”
Chris’s face crumpled, and he began to sob.
“Chris. Tell me where Kendra is.”
“Upstairs,” Chris said.
