Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  “So you killed him, too,” I said.

  Heffernan’s expression darkened. “You going to be an asshole? I’ve already been worked over pretty good, Tanzi. You’re not here to grill me.”

  “I’m just wondering why you’re telling me this.”

  His grey eyes narrowed, and he looked like he would either take a swing at me or start crying. “Bobby told me what happened to your wife,” he said. “Your first wife, I mean, and then I remembered reading about it in the paper. Her name was Glory, right? She cheated on you, and she got killed? And he also told me what happened last night with your second wife. I just thought that you might understand if I told you something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that I love Chloe. I’ve always loved her, even though she pushed me away almost from the beginning, because she was in love with her boss. And I fucking lived with that for nine years. It destroyed me. There’s no way that they won’t put me away me for all three hits, I know that, I’m not stupid. So I’m going to cop a plea, and maybe I’ll be out in twenty years. But I just wanted to tell one guy who might understand that I have always loved my wife, and I still do.”

  “Chloe thought that you were going to kill her,” I said.

  Heffernan looked at me like I had just slapped him in the face. He didn’t have an answer.

  When I was a deputy I used to sit in this very same room, and I would hear people say some amazing things. Excuses, bullshit, pleas for forgiveness, tears of rage—you could witness the entire spectrum of human emotions in one night, and sometimes from the same person.

  Talbot Heffernan had called me in to bear witness to the only thing that he still cared about, which was his love for Chloe Heffernan despite her nine years of infidelity. She was no innocent, and neither was he, and he would be an old man when he got out of jail, if he ever did. I almost felt sorry for him.

  But I didn’t.

  “So you love your wife, and you killed three people.”

  “They were scumbags,” Heffernan said. “Florida was a nice place before those people arrived.”

  By those people, I assumed that he was referring to the Cubans.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “That’s what the Seminoles said, five hundred years ago.”

  SUNDAY

  Roberto Arguelles pulled into my driveway in his mother’s beat-up old Toyota and got out. The car was falling apart, and the silver paint had gone nearly transparent from too much sun and salt spray, but to my now-sixteen-year-old friend it was a freedom machine, and none of us had seen much of him since he had passed his driver’s test a few weeks before.

  “You going to Royal’s party?” he said, as I let him in. “My mom wanted me to remind you.” He crossed through the kitchen to the refrigerator and got himself his customary Coke.

  “Not sure yet,” I said. Barbara and I had gone to three different counselors in the months since we’d separated, and none of them had been worth a damn. My wife had continued to stay in touch with Megan Rumsford, and I could deal with the fact that Barbara had fallen in love with someone else, and that it was a woman, but I just couldn’t get my head around how she could maintain a relationship of any kind with the person who had stolen our baby. I felt uneasy every time we were in the same room. Counseling seemed pointless, and I figured that I would have been better off spending the money on oysters.

  Barbara was fine about sharing time with Royal, and we were on a schedule where I picked him up every day at eleven, fed him lunch, put him down for his nap, and then when he woke up, he and I would play. Barbara used the free hours to run errands or whatever else she had to do, and when she started school again in September I was hopeful that my time with Royal would expand. I was supporting all of us on my pension and the money was getting tight, but I had picked up a few P.I. jobs—the usual runaways, cheaters, deadbeats, and so on—and the income had helped pay the bills for our two households. It felt good to be back to work, and I had stopped worrying about putting Royal in danger because of my job. If anything, I felt more secure and more able to protect him from threats that could potentially come from anywhere—like from an obsessed, troubled woman who I had thought was my healer and my friend.

  “Did you read about my Aunt Maria?” Roberto said. “It’s in the paper today.”

  “I haven’t seen the paper.”

  “She stepped down. They said it was for health reasons. Shortest term ever for a Cuban vice president.”

  “I wonder if they took her money.”

  “Nah, it’s still there,” Roberto said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can still get on her computer,” he said. “I check in now and then to make sure she’s not going to do anything bad to us.”

  Roberto and his family had been lying low ever since Lilian’s abduction, and it was a subject that we hardly ever brought up. It would be a long time until Lilian didn’t think about her captivity every day, or Gustavo forgot about his vicious beating at the hands of the Iturbe brothers, who were behind bars again after a shootout with a brave mall cop in June. Meanwhile, the Arguelles household was spotless, and Lilian had started her job again at the hospital. They were on the mend, but those things took a while.

  “So are you going?” Roberto said. “Get dressed and I’ll drive you.”

  I was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a day-old T-shirt, and I hadn’t shaved. Living by myself was comfortable, and I liked it, but there was crap strewn around everywhere and the place wasn’t about to be featured on the cover of Good Housekeeping anytime soon.

  “I don’t have a present,” I said.

  “All you have to do is show up,” Roberto said, and I suddenly realized that he was way more on top of this than I was. The child is father to the man.

  Half an hour later we were in Barbara’s tiny backyard out behind her rental house. Royal was seated in a chair that was clamped to the side of a picnic table, and he was happily smearing gobs of dark chocolate cake all over himself and anyone who dared go near him. Roberto gave him a stuffed bear that he had picked out, and Barbara opened a stack of other gifts from the mommies of the small cluster of one-year-olds who were also in attendance. Sonny had dropped off Susanna Pimentel, who had remained friends with Barbara, although Sonny still kept his distance from my wife. I mostly stood around while everyone took endless pictures with their phones and posted them to Facebook. I had to admit that Royal looked cuter than hell, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and Barbara noticed my discomfort. She walked across her carefully tended lawn to where I stood. “Thank you for coming, Vince,” she said.

  “It’s his birthday,” I said. “I didn’t get him anything. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you want to take him back with you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Are you teaching tonight?”

  “Actually—I was thinking of going to visit Megan,” Barbara said. “Chattahoochee is five hours from here, so I thought I’d spend the night, and then come back and pick him up tomorrow afternoon.”

  Chattahoochee was the state mental hospital where Megan had been sent for an evaluation. “How is she?”

  “Better,” Barbara said. “It was pretty rough at first.”

  “Are you and her still—”

  “I don’t know what we are, Vince. I’m sorry. I know it makes you squirm every time it comes up.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “Of course it is,” she said. “We’re still married.”

  “I think I’ll roll, if this is winding down. I’ll go tell Roberto.”

  “I’ll get Royal’s things,” Barbara said.

  Fifteen minutes later Roberto and I had packed my baby son’s travel equipment into the tiny rear end of Lilian’s hatchback, with just enough room to spare for the three of us. The side window was open, and Barbara kept trying to stuff more things into it, until I warned her that if she crammed in one more diaper, the car would collapse under the weight. We said our goodbyes and drov
e back to my place, where we unpacked all the gear and scattered it around my house with everything else.

  There was a message from Rose DiNapoli on my machine, and I pushed the button while Roberto was outside with Royal.

  Hey Tanzi, remember me? You were going to take me out for red snapper, like, a couple months ago? Hey, no rush, right? Listen, I have to drive up to Melbourne on Tuesday, and I thought I’d see if you wanted to get lunch. Unless you’re too big a deal now, because you solved three murders. Call me back, OK?

  The sound of her voice put a smile on my face. It would be nice to see her. I would definitely call her back.

  “I have to go home,” Roberto said, as he entered the kitchen with the baby in his arms.

  “I’ll take him,” I said. “Thanks for the ride, dude.”

  “Not a problem, dude.”

  Royal was too restless for his nap, and I wasn’t even going to bother putting him in the crib. It must be all the sugar, I decided. I felt restless also. The house was suddenly far too empty. The late August sun had nudged the temperature into the mid-nineties, which is when nobody in their right mind would go to the beach, but I packed up our suits, a few towels, a backpack carrier, and my beach chair, and we drove across the bridge to the barrier island with the top down and the wind blowing through Royal’s dark, feathery hair. I turned north to Tracking Station Park, an old NASA installation with a nice stretch of beach that would be deserted. Barbara and I used to go there when we had first known each other. That seemed like a long time ago.

  I laid out our towels and the beach chair, and then decided to put him in the carrier and walk down to a concrete pier that jutted into the ocean, about half a mile away. I’d been walking the beach every morning; it had taken the place of my physical therapy and was paying off. My limp had improved, I’d dropped a few pounds, and even though my marriage was falling apart in slow motion, I was getting my confidence back. Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to be married. I’d tried twice now, and that was probably enough.

  Tanzi’s Tip #12: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Except for the married ones. Then it’s loud desperation.

  The only people on the beach were a bored-looking lifeguard and a group of high school kids playing with a football. I headed south toward the pier with Royal in the backpack. He liked to pull at my hair, and now and then he’d utter a single word and would repeat it endlessly. At the moment it was bear, and I realized that he had dropped the stuffed toy that he’d been carrying—his birthday gift from Roberto—and I turned around to go back and look for it. I scanned the edge of the water, hoping that the toy hadn’t gone in and been washed away.

  Royal saw it first. “Bear!” he yelled, into my ear. I saw a dark object at the water’s edge and jogged, with him in the backpack, until we could retrieve it from the sea. I wrung it out and passed it back to him, and he held it to his mouth, tasting the now salty, wet fabric and cooing.

  I turned around and started south, and again he called out the name of his toy. He had dropped it again, and I knew that I was being subtly drawn into his little game.

  We spent the better part of an hour playing Royal’s version of fetch, in which I was the willing retriever. Somewhere along the way my worries and regrets wandered off to another place, and I was simply here in the milky, white-hot sunshine with my baby boy. After a while we sat down, and I released him from the backpack and watched him crawl around in the sand, talking and laughing and having a good time. The backpack was stocked with an extra diaper, and I changed him on the beach, surprising myself at how automatic the motions had become. I may not be much of a husband, but I was a pretty good dad.

  I packed him into the carrier, and we started our way back toward the tracking station. All of the running around and the heat would wear him out, and I would try to get him down for his nap when we got home.

  A dark object washed across my feet in the foam, and for a moment I thought that Royal had dropped his bear again. I bent over to pick it up.

  It wasn’t the bear, or a shell. It was a sea bean. Not as rare as the deer cowrie that we’d found back in May, but it was something that you didn’t see that often. Sea beans were drift seeds, and they could originate from anywhere in the tropics. The ocean currents would carry them for hundreds of miles and then deposit them along the beaches up and down the Florida coast. This one was heart-shaped, about three inches across, and it fit neatly into the palm of my hand. If I oiled it, the dark, mahogany-colored surface would polish to the luster of a piece of fine furniture. I passed it back to Royal, who put a corner of it into his mouth.

  “Bean,” I said.

  “Bean,” he repeated.

  Maybe this was another gift from Glory. It was hard to believe that she had been gone for almost three years now, and I wondered what she would have made of all this. I doubted that she would have cared much for Barbara. But I knew that she would have loved my little boy.

  I gathered up the rest of our gear, and we crossed the hot sand toward the parking lot. Royal was clutching his wet bear in one hand and the sea bean in the other.

  “Happy birthday, son,” I said, as I strapped him into his car seat.

  He looked up at me with his big, liquid eyes.

  “Bean,” he said.

  # # #

  About The Author

  C.I. Dennis is the author of Tanzi’s Heat and Tanzi’s Ice. He lives in Vermont and New Hampshire with his family and a whole lot of dogs.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my early readers and editors Joni Cole, Deb Heimann, Chelsea Lindman, Isabel Dennis, Sara Dennis, Will Siebert, Bob and Heidi Recupero, Roy Cutler, Betsy Jaffe, Gordon Henriksen, and especially to Roberto Veguez for his invaluable help on things Cuban.

  Special thanks also to Alexander Dennis: cover artist, musician, son, and father.