A Killing Night mf-4

by Jonathon King

  Movement at the couches got my attention and I joined the others. Billy had put Rodrigo at ease and they were clasping hands, the lawyer saying something again in Tagalog and adding: "Please have Allie take down that phone number and Mr. Avino's contacts. Ako'y nagpapsalamat, Mr. Colon for your courage." When Rodrigo stepped out to Allie's desk Billy turned to me.

  "Thanks for b-bringing him in, M-Max. I think w-we can work this without too much t-trouble. That part about the lower rung of workers getting p-paid by the cabin boys to handle some of their w-work so they can impress their supervisors by increasing their own n-numbers. It's amazing. The hungry ones work twenty-hour days just to g-get ahead. It's like an entire s-social crab pot on each sh- ship with race and color and p-payoffs all tossed into the mix and all invisible to the American customers around them."

  "Nothing a good union couldn't fix," I said, only half joking.

  "There's a p-political land mine," Billy said. "How about if we just try to get some of these m-men compensated for having their faces b-burned off?"

  "Sounds fair to me. So how come the rest of them won't join up?"

  "They're scared, M-Max. He says the Filipino job brokers have long arms. They make money by providing cheap labor, not on workers who have to get paid for injuries. He says the p-pipeline from Manila to Miami is short enough to send an enforcer to shut down dissent. They're all looking over their shoulders."

  I told him I'd watch out. I'd already given Rodrigo my pager and cell number. We were already setting up prearranged sites off the street. But I didn't want to tell him that I couldn't afford to be the guy's twenty-four-hour bodyguard when we had other cases to work. My own acceptance of Richards's request had just put another pinch on time and I wasn't going to bring it up. I changed the subject.

  "Speaking of politics," I said, motioning toward his desk and the photos and layouts.

  Billy did not bother to look back.

  "She w-wants to be a judge. I t-told her I would help in any way I could."

  I stayed quiet. I knew Billy. His face said more was coming.

  "But it s-seems that the good ole boy p-political cabal th-thought, when they heard her fiance was a r-respected attorney, I'd be an asset."

  "Let me guess," I said. "They didn't know you were black?"

  "How w-would they? I'm never in the courtroom. N-not much for their f-fund-raisers or cocktail circuit."

  "Jesus, Billy," I said. "You think that's going to make a big difference?"

  He looked past me for a few moments. I could see something working behind his eyes, a twinge of pain he rarely ever showed. I wondered if he'd misconstrued my question, thought I'd pointed it at his and Diane's personal relationship.

  "In love and politics, M-Max, everything m-makes a difference," he said, manufacturing a wry grin. "When you mentioned the paparazzi the other night, you weren't far off. We've caught people taking photographs of us together before, on the street, coming out of the courthouse, leaving one another's apartments."

  "Campaign sludge?" I said. "I doubt an interracial marriage would cause a second look in South Florida."

  Billy was still watching out over the skyline.

  "State p-politics doesn't get run by the residents in South Florida, M-Max. The power is still in Tallahassee where the real South still runs d-deep."

  His knowledge of law and languages aside, Billy had not left his ghetto beginnings and real-life taste of racism behind. I did not want to get into a discussion of his paranoia, or my naivete, and left him at the window.

  I drove Rodrigo to the block where he took treatments at a small walk-in medical clinic. Once again, around the corner and out of sight, we had lunch at a whitewashed lunch counter that opened out onto the street, with a row of worn swivel stools that sat on the sidewalk concrete. The place bragged on its original Cuban sandwiches and Colombian arepas. After my first mouthful I decided they were justified. If you can back it up, brag on.

  While we ate, Rodrigo introduced me to three other cruise workers who had obviously come at his urging. One man wore a bandage from his wrist to his shoulder. Another covered his head with a large-brimmed hat, but I could make out the signs of singed hair and burn scars at the nape of his neck. I took down names and promised only to pass them along to Billy. I paid the bill and shook Rodrigo's hand and climbed back into my truck and headed south to the Flamingo where I might swim and sit in a sea breeze and forget about changing the world for a while. I did ten blocks in the ocean, swimming parallel with the beach and looking up every twenty strokes to catch a familiar condo face or clump of palms or open street-end to mark my progress. Five blocks of freestyle south, against the current, five slow ones back, even with the push. Then I sat in my sand chair and let the sun and breeze dry the salt into a fine film on my skin, which seemed to crackle and pulled at the creases when I finally stood and went inside.

  I tried to read, first the prerevolutionary Adams book and then the local newspaper: Palestinians and Israelis were killing each other. Madonna was, well, being a celebrity. Republicans were promising tax cuts. The front page could have been ten years old, or perhaps, sadly, ten years into the future. I thought of calling Richards to back out of my promise to meet with O'Shea, tell her I was too busy with work for Billy, tell her something important had come up. Instead I went out and sat on the porch until long after twilight when all the color had leaked out of the day.

  CHAPTER 7

  I got to Archie's Bar at nine and was instantly put off by the glass-fronted door that had never been changed from when the place was the coffee shop or H amp;R Block office or nail salon it had been in a previous life. Not exactly the Irish pub I was expecting. I'd found a parking spot around the corner on a side street that bordered the out-of-date shopping center. I plugged the meter with quarters and then walked all four sides of the square before going in. After leaving Billy's office I'd become paranoid myself about a tail. It wasn't anything specific, no matching headlamps or too familiar silhouette of a single driver. But it had been a feeling I'd learned over the years to pay attention to. My sidewalk sweep of the center and the parked cars hadn't pushed it away.

  The lights in Archie's were too bright for my liking and once through the entry I slid immediately to the left to a spot with a wall and a view. The bar itself was a shallow horseshoe. A row of small tables barely big enough for two ran down the wall in front of the bar. Three bigger tables filled the space at the rear of the room. OK, I thought, maybe it had been a deli.

  There were twelve seats at the bar, all of them taken. Two women in their fifties sat in front of me, drinking something dark in ice. A thick, cloying perfume made me step back and I watched the tip of one of the women's cigarettes dance with the movement of her lips as she spoke to her friend. Next to them were a couple of beer drinkers; polo shirts with printing over the left breast pockets, both of them wore mustaches that worked down into beards that just covered their chins, one red, the other dark. Their eyes kept flicking up to what had to be a television screen that must have been in the corner above me facing out. I skipped past the two younger girls, one who sat determinately with her back to the Fu Manchu brothers. Next to them was a gray-haired guy who appeared to be in his sixties who was bent into a video poker game bolted to the bar, his pale face changing color along with the glow of the screen.

  There was a couple talking animatedly next to him and then my only possibility at the opposite end, sitting alone next to the opening where the bartenders would have to enter and exit. His hair was dark and curly, trimmed above the ears, and the overhead light caught his prominent cheekbones, which from where I stood made his face appear gaunt. His shoulders were broad, but sitting down it was hard to guess his weight. The sleeves of his denim shirt were rolled to the elbows and his hands were folded in front of a beer bottle, knuckles up.

  I stayed against the wall. His eyes seemed to watch everything and nothing, moving from the TV to the tables just behind him, from the girl couple to the bartender
's ass when she turned away from him, never lingering long and never coming close to locking on mine. It had been ten, maybe fifteen years. If it was O'Shea, I couldn't tell from here. I pushed off the wall and began to work my way toward his side. The room was smoky and a stereo was playing some kind of techno-country thing that was too loud for the space. I shuffled between the tables and the people standing. The place was at capacity, over if the fire marshal decided to come by.

  The guy at the end never turned to watch a six-foot three-inch man move up next to him, but when I got to his elbow he turned before I could say a word.

  "Hey, Max," he said, offering a newly opened Rolling Rock that I had not seen him buy. "How 'bout those Phillies?" His eyes were clear and gray with only the creases at the corners to give away his age. The pull at one side of his mouth, the Irish grin, had not changed.

  "Colin O'Shea," I said, accepting the bottle. "Wasn't sure it was you."

  "Is that why you took fifteen minutes to get over here, Max? I thought maybe you were just casing the place for a quick robbery."

  "Didn't think you'd noticed."

  "I might be old and off the job, Max. But I haven't gone blind yet. I think I even saw you get a snootfull of Annette's perfume over there," he said without turning. "To be honest, it's why I sit way the hell over on this side."

  No, I thought. You've still got your cop instincts, O'Shea. You're over here because you always sit with your back to the wall and your eyes on the front door to see who walks into the place.

  "So, how the hell you been? It must be, what, a dozen years?"

  "Might have been that night they had us all on that fire at Methodist Hospital when they had us doin' the evacuation," he said.

  The memory was vague in my head, a winter night, people in wheelchairs, firemen with crusts of ice on their jackets.

  "I think I remember you hauling some old bird down the stairwell and he was already yakking in your ear about suing somebody."

  "Yeah, and you were probably escorting the nurses, O'Shea. Always the ladies' man."

  For the first time, he snapped his eyes on mine, just for an instant, trying to find something there.

  "So, you on vacation, or what?" I said, looking away.

  "Yeah, sure, Max. This is part of a special Disney package." He waved his bottle in a small circle.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Let him tell it.

  "Naw. I've been down here maybe three years now," he said. "Got sick of the cold. Needed something new."

  I nodded again.

  "I heard you were down here somewhere, though. Guys up in the district said you kinda wigged out after you took that.22 in the neck and dropped both of those skells in the Thirteenth Street robbery."

  My fingers started to go instinctively to the soft, dime-sized circle of scar tissue the bullet had left just below my ear, but I stopped myself. One of the suspects I'd killed that night was a thirteen-year- old who was unarmed.

  "Hey, that was a righteous shooting, man," he said, clicking the lip of his bottle against mine and raising his eyebrows in a conspiratorial expression. But he was stepping into a space where he had no right to enter and I felt a small sulfur flare of anger heat a spot between my shoulder blades.

  I let it sit and O'Shea drained his beer and wiggled it at the bartender. He watched her walk to the cooler. When she bent to dig out a cold bottle from deep in the ice her short top slid up, exposing a tattoo of some kind low on her back and blooming up out of the waistband of her jeans. O'Shea watched without blinking, but so did I, and so did the mustache boys. She returned and put the beer in front of him.

  "There you go, darlin'," she said and looked over at me with a question. I waved her off.

  "Friendly place," I said. "Your regular stop?"

  "Just one of many, Max. You know us Irish. But it is regular enough for me to know it's not one of your stops, old friend."

  The tone had suddenly changed.

  "Yeah, well, I was…"

  "Asked to stop and check me out?" he said, interrupting. "By a long-legged blonde detective who doesn't give an old alcoholic cop enough respect to know an undercover sting when he sees it?"

  I was surprised enough to stay quiet while considering an answer. O'Shea looked behind me and then signaled the bartender.

  "Tracy. We're gonna take a table," he called out to her. She waved and he said: "Come on, Max, let's sit a bit."

  He took the chair against the wall under the St. Paulie Girl poster, leaving me with my back to the crowd. The beer maven above him held six steins and a smile and he matched her grin.

  "Good-looking woman that Detective Richards," he started. "Maybe the legs threw me the first two shifts she did over at the Parrot, but not much more."

  "You knew why she was there?"

  "At first, no. I figured the local narc squad was trying to hook into the over-the-counter trade. I'd been told that back in the day every bartender in South Florida had a connection. But that shit's over. Law enforcement isn't interested in the nickel-and-dime stuff anymore. And the dealers are way too careful now."

  "She said you hit on her, Colin," I said, trying to catch something in his eyes.

  "Yeah? She like that?"

  I felt a warmth rise into my ears.

  "I was trying to figure her game," he said, then took a long drink of his beer. "She was a lousy bar girl. Worked hard, but didn't work the customers very well. Acted too friendly too soon. Asked too many questions. I watched her do some other locals before she tried me. Bartenders don't interrogate. They remember the drink you order, not your hair and eye color and any distinguishing scars."

  I could see Richards doing the rail of men at the bar like a lineup.

  "Well, Colin, you've got the eye of experience to know a good barkeep when you see one."

  "OK, I'll give you that one," he said without a hint of offense. "I've fucked up in the past. You probably already know about internal affairs in Philly, about my ex and the domestic violence charges. But I've never hit a woman in anger, even though I don't expect anyone to believe me."

  He looked away, maybe with embarrassment, but then turned back.

  "I was an ass and I'll admit it. But fucking disappearing women? Come on, Max."

  His eyes were looking into mine now, and I couldn't turn away. He knew how cops hate to be stared at by perps. He was trying to show me he wasn't one of them.

  "So you know what the detective's after. What's your assessment?" I said, appealing, maybe, to the cop still in him.

  "On what? A serial abductor of barmaids? Shit, Max. It's a target-rich environment down here, but you're talking about sick. That's not some sex crime of opportunity. Some sex assault wants that, cruise the beach late at night. Hell, go after the chicks at the dance clubs, drop some Rohypnol in their drinks and voila! Happens all the time."

  I took another drink. He was right. I let him go on.

  "Shit, these girls behind the bar are smart, Max. They got the assholes trying to play them every night and they can see 'em coming a mile away. I don't see them falling for some crazy fuck."

  "So why don't you tell that to Richards? Help her out. Get her off your ass?" I said.

  "No, no, no, Maxey boy. You must know that one. You wouldn't be here. What, you got a P.I. ticket and worked a case with her before? She pulled my Philly file and made a connection and sent you on a confidential informant mission?"

  I stayed silent.

  "No way," he said. "She's a man-eater. She wants somebody's balls on the wall and I'm not handing her mine."

  He sat back then against the wall. Shania Twain was singing high and hard. O'Shea raised his hand to signal someone, then held his thumb and forefinger two inches apart and tipped the small, imaginary glass twice. I wasn't sure whether to push him or leave him. If I was going to feel guilty afterward, so be it. He hadn't blinked yet.

  "Richards says you dated two women who are now missing, not a trace," I said. "What was the saying in the academy, Colin? Twice is a c
oincidence, three times is a felony?"

  The bartender left her busy station and came and set down two shot glasses of honey-colored liquor and fresh beers. It was the first table service I'd seen in the place. She put her fingertips on O'Shea's shoulder before walking away.

  "Look, Max. I date a lot of women. I go to a lot of bars. Hell, I dated Tracy a few times," he said, tipping his head to the bartender as she left. "And there she is, in the flesh."

  "Yeah, how about Amy Strausshiem?" I said and the name made him turn his face away. He sipped at one of the whiskeys.

  "So Amy's one that your new friend Richards is looking for. Who else?" he said.

  I didn't answer and just shook my head. Even if Richards had given me the other names, you don't give information to suspects. Besides, it wasn't my case, I kept telling myself. All I did was agree to talk with the guy. O'Shea seemed to accept the silence.

  "I heard Amy's mother was in town," he said and I almost believed the sound of sympathy in his voice. "I went out with her. Nice girl. Smart. But she was too much of a challenge for me if you know what I mean."

  "No," I said. "Tell me what you mean."

  "She liked excitement. Liked to get her adrenaline up, which is fine to a degree, but Amy was walking a wire. I don't need that challenge, Max," he said, finishing the shot and winking at me. "I don't date women for the challenge."

  O'Shea had a reputation as a ladies' man back in the day. The dark curly hair and the smooth talk. But I remembered a time at McLaughlin's, a cop bar in Philly, when three of us watched him try to work a woman at the jukebox. No one warned him it was another cop's girl and when the guy got back from the men's room an anticipated confrontation went flat in a hurry when O'Shea tucked tail and slunk away.