West Palm: The Complete Novel

by Joss Cordero

  “Is Donny coming back?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “I never liked the son of a bitch.”

  Matthew strolled into the living room. “Let me guess. It’s Sam Spade. I’ll have what he’s having.”

  “Rum and Coke,” said Tara.

  Smoker saw an impeccably dressed young man, handsome in the style of men’s magazines, and concluded, after this brief investigation, that the young man and Tara were just friends and would never be more than friends.

  “Nice bar you’ve got here,” Smoker said.

  “Which one?”

  “This one.”

  “The Casablanca.”

  “See.” Smoker turned to Tara. “Didn’t I say it reminded me of Hemingway?”

  “Wrong Bogart movie,” said Matthew. “The Hemingway one is To Have and Have Not.” He ran his hand across the counter. “Solid oak. It’s rare to find a forties bamboo bar as pristine as this because they were frequently kept outside—”

  “Matthew,” interrupted Tara, “please don’t try to sell your furniture to the private investigator.”

  “The foot rail’s in perfect condition,” Matthew continued, “as are the three shelves in back.” He accepted his rum and Coke and raised it in a toast. “I guess you haven’t cracked the case, or we’d be drinking champagne.”

  “Keep a bottle on ice.”

  “You’re close?”

  “I’m always close.”

  “How reassuring.” Matthew put down his glass, picked up a flowered rag, and wiped a drop of liquid off the counter. Smoker stared at the flowered pattern. It was the scarf he’d bought for Tara. She wore a different one today, and though he couldn’t tell why, he knew it was better than the scarf currently being used as a bar rag. Forcing himself to make nice even though they were using his gift as a rag, he said, “I’m glad Tara’s found a safe place to stay.”

  “Mother’s always on guard.” Matthew waved the bar rag toward the Christmas display. “And Santa Claus, of course.”

  “As neighborhoods around here go,” said Smoker, “Flamingo Park is pretty safe.”

  “Somebody stole my DVD player the other week.”

  “Just the DVD player? They must’ve been in a hurry for their next fix. They could’ve backed a truck up to your door and started their own museum.” Smoker downed the rest of his drink, which should’ve been his cue to leave, but he didn’t want to, so he said to Tara, “You got your color back.”

  “I take complete credit,” said Matthew.

  “You gave her a blood transfusion?”

  “I’ve been giving Tara transfusions since high school.” He sauntered over to a bookshelf and drew out a school magazine and yearbook.

  “You kept that crap?” she asked.

  He made a sweeping gesture at the antiques all around them. “The past is where I live, darling.”

  Spreading the magazine open on the bar in front of Smoker, he pointed to a photo of the girls’ basketball team.

  “How could you be so sadistic?” demanded Tara.

  “I’m not handcuffing you to the bed. That’s tomorrow night.”

  Smoker studied the picture. It was so unflattering he found it touching. A lanky teen not yet comfortable with her femininity, she scowled at the camera as if she wanted to slam-dunk it.

  “The basic ingredients were there,” Matthew said. “But the hair was wrong, the attitude was wrong—”

  “I was playing center, for chrissake.”

  “That’s no excuse for looking like Godzilla.” Matthew opened up the yearbook. “Then she met me, and I gave her a transfusion.” He paged through the portraits. “Read what it says underneath.”

  Smoker read aloud, “Cinderella goes to the ball.”

  It was a remarkable transformation, but Smoker knew that what had backed down Tara’s attacker on the boat was the ferocious basketball player, not beautiful Cinderella.

  “Very impressive,” he told Matthew. “Can you do anything for me?”

  “You’re perfect just as you are.”

  Smoker found himself warming to Matthew, probably because he was gay and therefore not a candidate for the pillow next to Tara’s. Which led to the next question: Am I?

  “Is your office from the Sam Spade era?” asked Matthew. “If not, we can make a perfect replica.”

  “Matthew,” said Tara, “you’re doing it again.”

  “I have a vintage door with a pebbled glass panel just waiting for your name in bold black lettering.”

  Deciding there was only one way to shut Matthew up, Tara took out her cell phone, brought up the Seafarers surveillance photo sent to her by Smoker, and placed it on the bar. “This is the guy who slit my throat.”

  “Why didn’t you show me this before?” demanded Matthew.

  “I was waiting for the perfect moment.”

  He gazed down at the image in the phone. “Just what every mother wants, a good-looking guy with an insane expression on his face.” He turned from the photograph to Smoker. “How are you going to catch him?”

  “We know he’s still around.”

  “Looking for me,” said Tara.

  “He’s active,” continued Smoker, “and when they’re active they come up on the radar.”

  “Our radar couldn’t always detect the smugglers in their go-fast boats,” said Tara. “Now smugglers are using submarines. And that’s what he feels like. Some underwater monster.”

  Matthew picked up the phone and studied the picture more closely. “I hate to say it, but this is an intelligent face.”

  “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”

  Zach spun around, his hand moving toward his knife. But all he saw was an elderly, little red-cheeked man who couldn’t possibly be a cop.

  “We need you for a minyan.”

  Zach looked questioningly at the old man.

  “We have nine men and need a tenth. You’re a Jew, yes?”

  Zach nodded, relieved to see that what he was being drawn into was religious rather than legal.

  “So come . . .”

  Zach walked beside the red-cheeked man, pushing his bike through the clean streets of Palm Beach.

  “I don’t want to hurry you, but they’re waiting.”

  The waiting men were gathered inside a synagogue.

  Despite being dressed for the part, Zach found being in the synagogue unsettling at first. There were no crosses . . . yet there was an atmosphere of solemnity and ceremony with which he could feel at home.

  The man who’d led him to the temple picked up a shawl, praying out loud as he fingered the fringes, and draped himself in it. Zach mumbled as he too wrapped a shawl around his shoulders.

  They walked to the front to join the other eight, who acknowledged him not as a stranger but as one of their own. It had been a very long time since he’d been welcomed soul to soul by anyone.

  He saw they were holding prayer books, so he took one from a bench. He bobbed his head and mumbled under his breath in imitation of the others. He’d been called here for a reason. His path was righteous. He felt the kinship running through the group. He wasn’t completely exiled from the world.

  There was no sermon. The rabbi prayed with the rest of them. Above the rabbi on the wall were a pair of candelabras, and all around were windows, honeycombed and capped by pointed arches. In each arch three petals radiated upward, intricately patterned white and blue and gold. The brassy colors of late afternoon came through the windows, and Zach’s hands were anointed gold as he held his prayer book. In this state, he understood Hebrew. The man beside him was chanting:

  Weird, you’re weird, that phony beard, get out, get out of here.

  Zach’s eyes darted to the old man who’d brought him here, and to the rabbi. Nobody was looking at him.

  He hung on until
the prayers were finished, then followed the others out into the street.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” the rabbi said. “Please join us again.”

  “I will,” said Zach, though he knew he never would. He was the real wandering Jew.

  An unpleasant series of bumps marked the progress of Smoker’s Jetta down the cobbled entranceway of Seafarers Landing.

  He found the only remaining valet, between the second and third condo building.

  “Can I help you unload?”

  “Watch it for a few minutes.” Smoker handed the valet five bucks. He needed to sniff around the place again, quietly on his own, without desperate realtors or musical wine parties sponsored by the harbormaster.

  He headed for the moorings and noticed a huge charter boat he’d seen before—Lady Blue—docked where King Rat had been.

  He went to the end of the pier and watched the crew getting the big yacht ready to leave on its cruise. In the middle of all this activity, a woman was lying on a lounge chair on the sundeck, working on her tan. Smoker was tempted to tell her to hold off sunbathing in her fetching bikini until they lifted anchor and sailed away.

  To the north of the condo complex was Martin’s Marine boatyard. To the south was a breakwater, a welcoming place for a man to sit alone and fish. Smoker made his way there, and looked toward Lady Blue. Staring at the nearly naked woman, he became the stalker.

  Guiltily he backed into the wasteland abutting the jetty, trying to blend in with the tangle of trees. He turned and saw he wasn’t alone. A cat was curled up in the scrub. A typical undernourished feral. Smoker reached his hand down to give it a friendly pat, but the skittish animal jumped away and took off through the bushes.

  Where the stray had been sitting, something glittered in the underbrush. Smoker bent to see what it was: a tiny pointed fragment of fragile painted glass. A slanting ray of sunlight showed him a second crushed piece and a wire filament.

  Tara’s attacker had watched from here, with his string of Christmas lights in his back pocket, and forgetting himself, sat on one of his bulbs. Smoker saw the man’s face in his mind, and it had the look of the cat about it. This wasn’t a man with a job and a family, the proverbial guy next door who secretly goes berserk with the full moon. He was feral.

  Smoker retrieved his car and left Seafarers Landing. Funky tropical motels lined both sides of Federal; some were less safe than others but they all looked festive, especially the Motel of Stars, plastered with gigantic portraits of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart.

  Smoker braked to look at Bogart’s scowling face, checked himself in the rearview mirror, saw no resemblance, and continued driving north. He knew he was truly in Lake Worth when he came to the little park where unemployed philosophers hung out. The town was a microcosm of Palm Beach County with its abrupt changes from beautiful to ugly, from chic to watch-your-wallet. The strips along Lake and Lucerne Avenues boasted outdoor cafés, art galleries, French restaurants, jazz clubs, theaters, and politics so correct that the transsexual city manager was accused of not being sympathetic enough to drag queens. Travel a couple blocks west, and Latino gangs ran the place.

  West Palm . . . Dixie . . . Antique Row . . . Though the ladies with their lapdogs shopped for treasures in Palm Beach, their decorators shopped here, where the stores looked like warehouses and weren’t isolated from West Palm’s seamier side. As Smoker rolled through Antique Row he was aware his car was being videoed over live transmission to a surveillance screen at the police station on Banyan. People could bitch about Big Brother, but because of the town’s thirty-two cameras, two homicides had recently been filmed, the murderers convicted, and given fifty years.

  His own neighborhood was a perfect example of West Palm’s edgy charm, a historic district with houses from the 1920s located in the notorious North Patrol Division One. Old Northwood was a landmark, and when the little mission house on 29th Street came onto the market as a short sale, Dottie swooped in to buy it.

  When he pulled up in front of the house, she was standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. They were very nice hips, topping off very nice legs tightly encased in bicycle knickers. Her bike was leaning against the wall, which meant she’d just come back from her evening ride around the neighborhood, a practice he tried to discourage. Dottie didn’t share his worries about her safety because she’d grown up in a worse neighborhood of West Palm, which gave her, she said, a sixth sense for trouble. What troubled him were the reflective stripes around her knickers, emphasizing the shapeliness of her thighs; her bicycle top was equally tantalizing; he wished she would cycle in something less seductive, say, a suit of armor which would also deflect gunfire. Her dark silky hair was pulled back in a bun for aerodynamics, and her darkly penetrating eyes were looking straight at the roof of his car.

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “The thing on your roof rack.”

  He had been hoping to get it into the garage before she saw it. Above the garage, a light was on in his office, which meant his assistant, Janine, was working late.

  “It’s a Casablanca.” Sensing this was an insufficient explanation, he added, “My Humphrey Bogart bar.”

  “Where are you planning to keep it, Mr. Bogart?”

  “Casablanca bars are often kept outside. I thought we might put it in the backyard.”

  “Why would we want a bar in our backyard?”

  He searched his mind for a plausible reply while the light went off in his office, and a moment later Janine stepped out. In her previous job, Janine had worked with toddlers and she still had the habit of talking to people as if they were three years old. It was a remarkably effective approach. Patient, methodical, and relentlessly cheerful, she steadied the nerves of the most desperate client. Large tortoiseshell glasses gave her an air of reassuring sincerity. And to complete the picture, she dressed like a fairy godmother in flowing, fluttery clothes. Owing to the way her draperies concealed her body, he didn’t actually know what kind of body she had, but he suspected it was good because she was a thirty-seven-year-old vegetarian who practiced something called hot power yoga.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s his Humphrey Bogart bar.”

  “Is it old? It looks old.”

  “From the forties,” said Smoker. “Complete with original bar stools. Perfect shape, not a mark anywhere.” He was untying the bar from the roof rack. “Could one of you give me a hand? I don’t want to scratch it.”

  Janine took the opposite end.

  “Any calls?” he asked as they carried it through the garage out to the backyard.

  “An insurance case. And a background check. Daughter engaged to a question mark, father looking into it.” They set the bar down beside the barbecue.

  Dottie came up behind them with a stool under each arm. “Where did you find this stuff?”

  “I got it from a friend in the business.”

  “What friend?”

  “It’s connected to the Zaratzian case.”

  “Remind me again?”

  “The Coast Guard lady who got her throat cut.”

  “A Coast Guard lady sells bars?”

  “A childhood friend of hers sells them. I’ve always wanted one on the patio.”

  “First time I’ve heard about it.”

  “I just thought it would be relaxing to come home after a hard day’s work chasing embezzlers and have a drink at my Humphrey Bogart bar.”

  “How did you meet her childhood friend?”

  “Is this a background check, Mrs. Bogart?”

  “It improves the property,” interjected Janine. “When a client comes, we can take him out to the patio for a drink and then it’ll be tax deductible.”

  “Thank you, Janine,” said Smoker.

  Dottie was moving the patio furniture around to ma
ke room for the bar. “I admit, it’s got character.”

  To reinforce these signs of improvement, Smoker went in for some bottles and ice. When he came out, Janine and Dottie were seated on the stools.

  “Ladies, what’ll it be?”

  Janine glanced at her watch. “A small Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.”

  “Make it two,” said Dottie.

  Smoker performed his bartending duties, then held out his glass. “As Bogie said in Casablanca, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’ I’ve been wanting to say that for years.”

  “Who was stopping you?” asked Dottie.

  “I needed the right prop.”

  “Tell me again about this Coast Guard lady.”

  He knew he was going to have to describe the amazon carefully, in terms which wouldn’t cause antennae to spring up on either of the women staring at him. “Typical military. You know, tough.” He waited to see if that was going anywhere, realized it wasn’t, and tried again. “She’s in a fragile state.”

  “I thought you said she was tough.”

  “She’s had her throat cut.”

  “Maybe you should invite her over for a drink at our Casablanca bar.”

  “She’s reluctant to go anywhere at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  Smoker brought up the perp’s picture on his phone. “Here’s why,” he replied, setting the phone down on the counter between Dottie and Janine. “This is what’s after her.”

  Janine shook her head. “I’ve had little kids with this expression in my groups. I thought, God help the world when they grow up.”

  “You’ve had little kids with this expression?” Dottie asked.

  “One or two.”

  “Did they turn out okay?”

  “Let’s just say I’m glad they didn’t stay in touch.”

  Smoker congratulated himself on his best move of the evening. He’d gotten their focus onto the frightening maniac, and off the gorgeous amazon.

  Nighttime was when Otis and Rodell did their rounds of John Prince Park. They left the paved roads, which were lit by streetlamps, and made for the darkness of the woods.