A Killing Night

by Jonathon King

  “Diane w-went back to her place,” he said.

  This time I swung my legs off the chaise and faced him.

  “Besides, I g-gave your bed away at the b-beach.”

  I’d just be wasting my time if I asked why his fiancée was sleeping away from the penthouse. He would tell me if he wanted me to know so I kept my mouth shut while he got up and went inside. When he returned he handed me a manila envelope and started to explain while I went through the contents.

  “We got this two days ago, no p-postmark. It was somehow dropped on the front d-desk without anyone noticing.”

  The front of the envelope said simply: Manchester. The name was written in block letters with some kind of black marker.

  I pulled out a sheaf of five photos. One shot was of Billy and Diane, in front of the apartment building, both dressed for work in business suits. Another was a single shot of Billy in front of the West Palm Beach County Courthouse, carrying his briefcase, heading inside. Another single shot was of Diane, exiting her car in the federal courthouse parking lot only a few blocks away. Another was of her sunbathing on the beach, one knee raised as she lay on a blanket. Her skin was moist with lotion and her straw hat was placed over her face.

  The final photograph was of a woman I did not recognize. She appeared to be of medium height and build and was also in business attire and coming out of a small shaded residence built in the old style of South Florida in the 1950s.

  “When you told us the other day that you had s-seen someone outside with a camera, we weren’t exactly sure whether to tell you,” Billy said. “Diane had n-noticed someone on the b-beach taking photos in her direction, but didn’t mention it until I brought up a concern. The p-political hierarchy was m-making noise about our marriage, the race issue. I had considered that s-someone was taking pictures to put up on some Internet site or d-distribute them another way to influence those of a like mind to second-guess Diane’s judgeship.”

  I started to say something when Billy stopped me with a raised hand.

  “I was b-being paranoid,” he said and then handed me a typewritten note sealed in a plastic bag. “This came with the pictures.”

  I held the bag by the corners, laid it smooth on my thigh and read:

  GET OFF THE CRUISE WORKERS CASE OR ALL THREE OF YOU LAWYER FUCKS WILL BE GATOR FOOD

  “Eloquent,” I said. I glanced at the evidence tag that was stripped and dated on the corner of the bag.

  “Brody come up with anything?” I said, guessing at the precise tag markings.

  Brody was a former FBI forensics expert who had quit the agency when his entire government lab was smeared as incompetent by the general accounting office a few years back. He’d moved to South Florida and opened his own private lab and did uncompromising work for a variety of attorneys, investigators and the occasional freelance operator who needed his services with no questions or paperwork.

  “I assume the stranger is a lawyer?” I said, holding up the photo of the single woman.

  “Sarah O’Kelly,” Billy said. “I know her, but I was unaware that she was doing work with cruise ship workers from the Port of Miami.

  “She lives in Fort Lauderdale and when I called her, her secretary said she had been traveling in Panama doing research on the cruise cases and had been gone for ten days. The assistant had not opened her mail, but nothing unposted or of similar size to this one had arrived at her office.”

  “If she got it, it’s probably at her house,” I said.

  “If our new friends are c-consistent.”

  I turned the photos over and scanned through them again. The shot of Diane seemed uncomfortably pornographic, knowing someone had stalked her and taken it without her knowledge with the purpose of a threat.

  “The Hix brothers?” I said.

  “I can only imagine,” Billy said. “I asked O’Kelly’s assistant to pass on my number as soon as she contacts her and preferably before she gets home. She said she’s due in tomorrow.”

  I put the photos and letter back into the envelope and handed them back.

  “You tell Rodrigo about this?” I said, thinking of the scared man and his decision to go home.

  “That’s w-why you’ll have to stay here tonight, M-Max,” Billy said. “He’s out of the hospital, b-but I gave him your bed down at the Flamingo.”

  “Hiding?”

  “For now.”

  “And Diane?”

  “She is not the k-kind of woman who is used to threats,” Billy said. “I asked her to st-stay at her place because it is g-gated and secured and she did not argue.”

  I wasn’t sure what it was in his voice: Disappointment? Guilt? All I did know was that I wasn’t going to probe there. Not without an invitation.

  He was still standing, leaning against the railing now and, unlike the analytical and focused man I had always known, he was preoccupied. I gave him space and looked out where I knew the horizon was, where dark sky met dark water, and searched for the light of a trawler or overnight fisherman, something to give the blackness a reference point. I finally found one far to the south, winking on and off with a rhythm that I knew had to be the roll of the swells.

  “So what’s the plan?” I finally said. “Do we take this to the authorities as a written threat and let them handle it?”

  “Huh?” Billy flinched and looked down as if just discovering the glass in his hand and stepped back from the slosh of wine that had spilled to the deck.

  “I’m sorry, M-Max,” he said and looked embarrassed. “I, uh, well, certainly that’s an option. B-But I think I would rather wait until we get the chance to t-talk with O’Kelly. I’d like to s-see if she too has b-been contacted and what her take on all this is. If I recall correctly, she is an amiable and thoughtful lawyer and I w-would think we’d want her opinion since she is obviously intimately involved.”

  “Spoken like a true attorney,” I said, razzing him for his quick little soliloquy, spit out with style even though it had been far from his thoughts.

  He smiled and raised his glass. “I have been threatened b-before. This will wait. I think you have more p-pressing matters at hand. Let’s go over your scenarios with a true attorney’s perspective on all of this.”

  CHAPTER 28

  The smell of wet green earth and the sound of rain pattering through high trees woke me and I was startled in the way you are when you can’t register where the hell you are. I blinked the dream away and pushed my hands up into my face and realized I was already sitting up on the edge of a bed.

  Billy’s, I recalled, noting the deep ivory color of the wall in front of me and the chill on my bare shoulders from the air-conditioning. I was in his guest room. I was still wearing my canvas pants and looked around to see that I had not pulled the bed covers back and had simply fallen asleep atop them. I rubbed my eyes and again caught the smell of turned and rotted soil on the palms of my hands and stared stupidly down at them. Clean.

  I pushed myself up and walked into the bath and stood at the basin and splashed water up into my face and the odor disappeared. When I was a child my mother described how my dreams had seemed so vivid and my recollections of them so detailed that it made her uneasy. She said she would walk to the Italian Market in South Philly or to church and half expect to come around the corner and see the shear cliffs or talking dogs or some falling child that I had foretold from a dream the previous night. There were times now that I fell back into that vividness when dreaming or daydreaming of past experiences. As a cop who saw too many ugly scenes I often considered it a curse. Still, they were dreams. I had never had them portend the future before.

  I dressed and went out to the kitchen where I found the coffeemaker loaded with fresh grounds and ready to flip on, and a note from Billy:

  “I have gone to check on Diane and will he in my office later. I will call O’Kelly and contact you. I checked on Rodrigo and he is fine. Can you stop in to see him?”

  Even though we’d stayed up well into the morning ho
urs, Billy was an early riser. He would have consumed the Wall Street Journal and that horrid fruit and vitamin concoction of his and then been out the door dressed in Brooks Brothers before seven.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. When the coffee was brewed I took a cup out onto the patio. There was a nor’easter starting to kick in. The water was gray-green and moving like an enormous blanket being shaken from four corners at the same time, waves of varying sizes swallowing each other and an uneven chop strewn with foam. The sky was overcast and tightened down and the wind was blowing hard enough to snap the single American flag that the faux British manager had raised at dawn. Before my first cup was empty I could feel a film of warm, clammy moisture on my skin. I went back inside and my first call was to O’Shea. He gave the same report he had when I called him at three in the morning, before I passed out: Marci was in her apartment. No sign of Morrison.

  “How you doin’?” I asked.

  “You ever trying sleeping in a Camaro?” he said

  I didn’t answer.

  “Hey, I’m a security guard, Freeman,” he said. “I can handle security.”

  My next call was to Richards’s office number. Her answering machine was on and I left a message telling her I had more information about Morrison and one of the bartenders who we had recently met who might know more than was offered. I hoped at least the bartender reference would cause her to call back.

  I finished the coffee and left, pulling Billy’s apartment door closed and checking the automatic locking mechanism before taking the elevator down. Outside in the front lot I instinctively scanned the cars, looking for one backed into a spot with signs of a cameraman. Now I wished I had confronted the guy the first time.

  I took A1A south and traffic was light. It wasn’t a beach day and the tourists and regulars would stay inside or inland somewhere out of the wet wind. The grayness gave the dunes and seaside mansions a look like old antique oil paintings, the colors dimmed and the landscape lonely. I was pulling into the Flamingo Villas when my cell phone rang.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Sherry, Max.”

  “Hey. You got my message?”

  “No. I haven’t been into the office yet. What did you need?”

  If she was calling me unsolicited, I immediately wondered why. To offer me something? To ask for help? If I let her go first, it would put me in a better position to state my own case. I hesitated, then realized I was playing the info-for-info game and shook my head like I could just toss off a million years of human social behavior like a bead of sweat.

  “I uh, wanted to get with you and tell you about a conversation I had with the bartender,” I said. “Marci, at Kim’s. The younger one who is fairly new.”

  “OK. Has this got anything to do with patrolman Morrison?” she said.

  “Yeah, it does. How’d you know?”

  “Well,” she said, and now it was her turn to hesitate, and maybe for the same reason I had.

  “I understand that you two had a bit of a face-to-face yesterday,” she said. “I know that’s your method of operation, Max. And I’m interested in what that finely tuned perceptive gut of yours told you when you looked him in the eye. But wasn’t that a little outside the envelope, trying to tail a cop while he’s in his squad car?”

  There was a bit of a lilt in her voice, like she was smiling when she said it, and not a smile that held a comeuppance.

  “Yeah, I suppose it was. But how did this information come to your attention?”

  “O’Shea called me,” she said, flat and matter-of-fact.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, spinning the conversation I’d just had with O’Shea.

  “He was concerned about you. He thought you were working something that was going to get you into trouble on his account and he said he didn’t want to be responsible. He said he figured that I should know the truth before the facts got twisted around to suit the uniforms.”

  “The truth?” I said.

  “Meet me over in the covered parking lot at the Galleria at two, under the west side,” she said. “It’s raining like hell down here.”

  I told her I would be there by two, as soon as I checked on another client.

  It was still only gray here. The clouds were heavy and had not yet opened up but I could hear the surf beginning to slash at the beach as the wind increased. The fronds of the rubber plants and white birds of paradise that sheltered each bungalow were clacking and the smell of salt and flotsam was thick in my nose when I came around the corner and stopped.

  The door to Billy’s hideaway was standing open. There was a light glowing somewhere behind the front window. Probably the one over the sink in the kitchen, I thought, putting the layout together in my head while I squinted and tried to pick up any movement inside. I stepped closer to the sea grape tree next to me and knelt with one knee in the sand. The wind swung the door a foot more and I could now see a bar stool on the floor and the small dining area light was missing from its spot suspended above the table, only a bare cord left hanging in the air. I was unarmed. My 9mm was back at the shack, wrapped in its oilskin cloth where I had retired it.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, I told myself, and then got up and took a couple of steps closer, listening through the rumble of the ocean and wind. There was still no movement from inside. I looked around for neighbors but the weather had sent most people indoors.

  On the flat concrete stones that started a path in front of the patio I picked up on a trail of dark droplets and one didn’t have to be a CSI to recognize blood, and that’s when I moved faster. At the door I peered around the corner. The front room had been tossed and glass and half a bulb from the hanging light lay shattered in one corner. The blood trail led to the couch and joined a stain there that formed the shape of Italy in the fabric. I was about to step all the way in when the panicked voices of women came from behind me in the wind.

  “Help! Somebody help him!”

  I turned and jogged toward the beach and saw three women, one with children huddled into her skirts, waving their arms and pointing out to sea.

  I had my shirt off by the time I hit the railing of the bulkhead and then used the top rung to swing over and down. I kicked my Docksides off after landing in the sand and I was honing in on a splotch of yellow that was bobbing fifty yards out. The shape expanded at the top of a crest to something human and then disappeared on the backside of the wave and a prayer seemed to bring it back to the surface again.

  I hurdled the first three waves and then launched myself like a spear down into the next one, grabbed a handhold of the bottom sand, pulled myself into a crouch and used my legs to launch again. Each time I dolphined I tried to catch a breath and a glimpse of the yellow shirt. Sometimes I got one, sometimes the other.

  When it got too deep I started to freestyle, looking forward each time a wave picked me up to the top of a crest. It didn’t take long to close in on the shirt. When I got to within ten yards I could see it was Rodrigo, one side of his face a pale white, the scarred half an angry red. But his eyes were still wide and he was flapping with one arm, trying to stay on top in the oxygen while the white water tried to drown him. I went to a breast stroke and got into the same swell with him and yelled his name. There was no recognition in his face but he saw hope and grabbed for it.

  I’d learned enough about water rescues to keep a struggling swimmer off your body. If you let them get a choke hold, you were both going down. I grabbed his wrist when he reached for me and held him at arm’s length.

  “OK Rodrigo!” I yelled. “You’re OK, you’re OK!”

  I was looking to find his other arm when a wave broke over both our heads. While we were under I reached for his other arm and held it. When we both cleared the white water Rodrigo was screaming in pain like he’d been hooked with a sharp barb and I realized the arm I’d grabbed was hanging limp.

  “Broke, Mr. Max! Broke, broke,” he spit out, his face twisted in agony and I let go of the arm.

&n
bsp; “OK, OK. Let me pull you, Rodrigo. Let me pull!”

  He may have understood me or maybe he went into shock but I was able to hook him under the pit of his good arm and turn his back so it was on my hip and I began sidestroking for shore. The waves had no rhythm and in the white water it felt like all I was doing was pulling at air bubbles and getting nowhere. I was breathing heavily and trying to scissor kick each time a wave pushed us, and then I’d rest when it left us bogged down in the swell. It seemed like thirty minutes and I started counting strokes to give myself a goal.

  In the middle of my second count to fifty I felt my right foot touch the ocean floor and the next wave pushed both of us onto solid sand. I struggled with Rodrigo’s sudden weight and then heard yelling, “We got you, man! We got you!” and we were suddenly surrounded by hands and arms and other bodies in the water around us.

  “Watch his arm, watch his arm, it’s broke,” I said as two men took Rodrigo from me and I felt another strong arm around my own waist.

  “Oh, shit, man and his leg, too, watch his leg, man!” another voice said.

  On the beach there was a red-and-white rescue truck with a red gumball light spinning on its roof and the lifeguards lay Rodrigo down in the lee side out of the wind and had me sit beside him. The little Filipino had an unnatural lump in the side of his arm where his bicep should have been and from the thigh of his left leg a stark white splinter of bone was protruding, blood trickling from the gash and mixing with the water and running a spiderweb of red down through the hair on his leg. One of the guards wrapped a blanket around the leg and someone draped one over my shoulders.

  While my heartbeat tripped down I heard the sound of a siren growing and two of the guards brought out a backboard, strapped Rodrigo onto it, and then carried him to the street end, where an ambulance was backing up to the bulkhead. After they took him away a guard crouched down next to me. It was Amsler, the guard whose chinning bar I used.

  “You want a ride to the E.R., Mr. Freeman? Let them check you out?”