The Shimmer

by Carsten Stroud

  “Couldn’t they trace that?”

  “They’re trying. It’s bouncing around between a bunch of European banks and a couple of them are run by some United Emirates consortium that is pretty hard to pressure from here. It’s gonna take a while, if it can be done at all.”

  “Are they looking for Coleman?”

  “Sort of. We figure he went into the lagoon. We’ll find him. Or what’s left of him. But at least we know she’s been flushed out. We’d be out looking for her right now if it weren’t for this damn storm. So fill him in, okay? What’s Jack doing? I take it he’s not there, in the room?”

  “Not yet. He’s back in the storeroom, banging around.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m gonna go batten down some hatches. You two stay there, okay? This thing will blow over in a few hours. I’ll list you as ten-seven, but if I need you I’m gonna call.”

  “Look, while I have you, can you run a plate for me? May be nothing, but I’d like to know.”

  “Sure. Give it to me.”

  “Late-model white Benz SUV, Florida plates, nine three nine x-ray x-ray zebra.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Just outside here, Crescent Beach, about an hour ago. Two people inside. Maybe more. Windows were tinted. It felt like they were watching this house, waiting for us.”

  “Just because you’re a paranoid wacko doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to kill you.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve got my tinfoil hat on. But you’ll run it anyway?”

  Mace said he would, and then came another loaded silence. “So you’ll be staying there?”

  “Yeah. We’ll be here.”

  “Yeah, well...well...”

  “Relax, Mace. We’ll behave.”

  “None of my business.”

  “Truer words have never been spoken.”

  “I just don’t want either of you to...”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  He was gone and she set the phone down just as Jack came back up the hall, lugging a large clear plastic storage box.

  “Sorry. This was way in the back.”

  He set it down on the coffee table.

  “What is it?”

  “Box of my grandfather’s stuff. Collected it off the Siren, and some of it was in the pool shed out back. Mostly scrapbooks and stuff from when he was in the Marines, stuff from Korea. Some of his homicide files. But there’s also this.”

  He rooted around in the collection—medals, some small photo albums, a couple of stacks of police notebooks held together with elastic bands, Zippo lighters—it all smelled of smoke and mold and salt water. He came up with a small black leather bag, held shut with a faded scarlet ribbon.

  He opened it, tipped what was in it out onto the tabletop. Pandora felt her belly tighten. It was an old, engraved gold locket with small dents.

  They both spent some time staring at it, which under the circumstances seemed like the only sensible thing to do. The wind off the ocean was building into a steady howl and columns of wild rain were lashing against the windows. The room grew dark as the cell wall came down on them like a coffin lid. Jack reached over and flicked on the table lamp beside the couch.

  “Okay,” said Pandora. “This I do not get. This is just nuts. This can’t be the same locket that Walker was talking about.”

  Jack picked it up, put it into her open palm.

  “What’d he say? ‘To Bea from Will Xmas 1909’? And these little dents? They sure look like teeth marks. If this isn’t the same damn locket, I mean, what are the odds?”

  “Is there anything inside it?”

  “I haven’t been able to open it. It is hinged though, and you can see the edges. But the only way to get it open seems to be to break it, and I just...can’t do that.”

  She held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed to pulse against her skin, but she knew it was just her own blood coursing. She shook her head.

  “Neither can I.”

  Pandora set the locket down on the table, carefully, as if it were explosive.

  “So. When Walker was talking about it...”

  “Yes. I recognized it. I remember seeing it when Barbara and I moved in. Clete’s stuff was all in boxes. We went through everything.”

  “And this was...where?”

  “In a large storage box with all of his case files and notebooks from when he was with Jacksonville Homicide.”

  “Was there anything in them that explained this locket?”

  “Maybe. I’ve never really looked. I thought the locket was just a thing he’d picked up along the way. It was in a shoebox along with one of his old casebooks. I’ve got it here.”

  Jack went back to the storage box, started rooting around in it again, came up with a Florsheim shoebox, and inside it was a worn-out leather notebook, bound with an elastic cord. The leather was cracked and seamed and may once have been a rich maroon but now it was the color of dried blood.

  He laid the book down on the table, slipped the elastic off and gently opened it. Lying on the first page was a very old brown envelope, marked with a Kodak logo, held closed with a circular tab and a piece of red cord.

  “Only thing that connects with the locket is that it was in this shoebox along with the casebook.”

  “So open it.”

  Jack unwound the cord and tipped the contents out onto the table beside the locket. They were faded color shots, the old-fashioned kind with the rippled white borders. They were taken from what looked like the inside of a car, through the driver’s-side window. Judging from the cars on the street it would have been sometime in the 1950s.

  There were fifteen shots in all, and in each one was a black-haired and very pretty woman in a flowered sundress walking arm in arm with a big-shouldered, black-haired man wearing a light-colored double-breasted suit.

  The shots tracked them along a broad street with a row of palm trees next to what looked like the bayside section of St. Augustine and ended when they got to a red-and-white motel called the Monterey Court.

  The final shot showed them pausing to kiss outside the doors of the motel, the woman facing directly into the camera, smiling, saying something to the man embracing her. It was a good close-up shot, taken with an excellent camera, and the image of the woman was clear and sharp, the afternoon sunlight full on her face. Jack went right on gundog point, and so did Pandora.

  They knew that woman.

  “Have you still got that enhanced shot of Bowman, the one taken at the Carousel Bar in New Orleans?”

  Pandora opened her iPhone, found the shot, held it up so Jack could see it.

  “It’s her,” he said. “It’s the same woman.”

  Pandora picked the shot up, looked from one to the other and again. She sighed.

  “I’ll admit there’s a...resemblance—”

  “Pandora. Come on. They’re identical.”

  “So...her mother? A relative?”

  Jack was shaking his head, as unwilling as Pandora to accept what he was seeing.

  “Yeah. Yes. Has to be. Can’t be the same woman.”

  There was a postcard clipped to the stack, on the front, a photo of a motel from the 1950s.

  Jack flipped the postcard over.

  Monterey Court

  16 Bay Street, St. Augustine, Florida

  Phone JA9-8854

  Facing beautiful Matanzas Bay, in the heart of historical St. Augustine. Located one block from Fort San Marcos. 33 Units. Air-conditioned, hot water, heat, free television, ample parking, Beautyrest and Englander mattresses, tile baths, tub and shower combinations. Outstanding restaurant adjacent.

  Mr. and Mrs. W. H. McLain, Proprietors

  Written in pencil on the blank side of the postcard were two names and a time and date.

  Tessio Vizzini

  Aurelia DiSantis (???)
<
br />   Saturday, August 24, 1957, 1430 hours

  Pandora was quiet for a while.

  Then she said, “You know it always kills me when they say things like ‘facing beautiful Matanzas Bay’ because matanzas is a Spanish word for a massacre.”

  “Yeah, I know. Two hundred years ago, they killed a bunch of French sailors down on the beach.”

  “One hundred and eleven men. Because they wouldn’t switch religions. And now it’s a tourist attraction.”

  “Jeez, honey. You carry a grudge for a long time. You’re not even French.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m a Viking. We specialize in grudges. We’re like that.”

  A silence, while Jack thought about how much he had loved her. Before Barbara. And still loved her.

  After Barbara.

  Then a sigh.

  “Okay. Let’s review here. Whoever took these shots—let’s assume it was your grandfather—he’s obviously doing some surveillance work.”

  “Yeah. Question is, for whom?”

  “I’d assume for the Jacksonville PD. I mean, that guy in the suit is Tessio Vizzini, the head of the same Vizzini family your grandfather took down? Right?”

  “Yeah. Tessio was the capo di tutti capi.”

  “And when did Clete Redding go after the Vizzini family? I mean, that night he went in after them all? When was that?”

  “End of August 1957. The thirty-first, I think. It was a Saturday night.”

  “So about one week after these pictures were taken?”

  “Yeah. Looks like it.”

  “And a couple of nights after your grandmother was killed, if I remember that right?”

  “Yes. She was killed on the thirtieth of August.”

  “Her name was Mary Alice, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack’s answers were getting short. He did that when she was getting close to the bone.

  “And where was she killed, Jack?”

  He shook his head.

  “That was just...one of God’s little mind fucks. He likes doing sadistic shit. It keeps the light-years flying by. You get bored when you’re eternal. Good to have an ant farm to fuck around with during those long cosmic nights.”

  She sat back and stared at him.

  “Well, poetry. I would never have expected it.”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re not saying. Mary Alice died in a single-car crash on the Matanzas Inlet Bridge, in almost the exact same spot where Barbara and Katy died last Christmas Eve.”

  “Yeah. A coincidence.”

  “Like the locket? Like the woman in the surveillance shots looking exactly like Diana Bowman?”

  “What the hell else could it be?”

  “I guess that’s what we’re trying to figure out here. So, the shoot-out at the Vizzini compound, the day after your grandmother—Clete’s wife—dies in a mysterious car crash. And you don’t think there’s a connection?”

  “He denied it. I put it to him straight a couple of times, but he’d always shut down, tell me it was nothing I needed to know about.”

  “But you’ve thought about it. I know you have. I know how your mind works. You ever figure out what made him do that? That night? Was it a suicide mission? Or revenge for the death of his wife?”

  “I asked him about it. He said he was just trying to get some information and the button guys got ugly and...things got out of hand.”

  “Please. Jack. You really buy that?”

  “Hey. He went in alone. Against policy. Would he do that if he was about to start a war?” said Jack.

  “Yes of course he would. If he didn’t want any witnesses. Or something else happened, something we don’t know about, something that triggered him. Do you know what that could have been?” said Pandora.

  “No. He was a wall of rock when I pushed it. And about the crash, the Highway Patrol guys were all over it. Looks like she just lost control—maybe fainted—and went through the guardrail...just like...”

  She put her hand on Jack’s arm, held it there.

  “Jack, I’m sorry to push, but something is going on here. You know what the commission said during the hearings in 1963?”

  “Yeah. They said he went in to wipe out everybody who knew he’d been taking money from the Vizzini syndicate for a couple of years. That they’d fed him high-profile busts, made his career, and that one night he just decided to go in and take them all down.”

  “He denied it.”

  “Oh yeah. A lot of good it did him.”

  She paused, stopping at the edge of the obvious question, not wanting to speak it.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Did I believe him?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “I think he was...walking a thin line. Those were different days. People played both sides. Cops took tribute, never saw it as a bribe. Politicians, city councilors, zoning bylaw guys—they all took money. It was the way things were done.”

  “Still is.”

  “Yeah. And even we do that sometimes, don’t we? We take a gang guy down, stick him in solitary to sweat awhile, then offer him a deal if he’ll give us somebody deeper inside. We work the street, we run informants we know are in the life, dealing, stealing...and we let them operate, if they give us what we need.”

  “We don’t take money to do it, do we?”

  “No. No we don’t. But we do take the promotions, the credit, the pay raises. But for Clete, I think it started out that way—he figured he was working them. For information. For busts. And then one day, it all changed, and he had been compromised, or it could be read that way, and he was in too deep to get out. Maybe Tessio had something on him, a tape or some photos he could take to J. Edgar, or to the Kefauver people. So Clete was trapped, and he did what he had to do to survive. It was a corrupt world, Old Florida...”

  “Still is. Honey, so’s the whole damn country.”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  And then Pandora’s phone buzzed at them. She picked it up, sighing—Dixon.

  “Mace?”

  “Yeah how’s it going?”

  “Jack and I are looking at family photographs,” she said, giving Jack a sideways look.

  Jack shook his head. Don’t say anything to Mace yet, okay?

  “Okay, look, I ran that plate, from the Benz?”

  “Yeah? And anything?”

  “Well, yes, actually. It’s registered to a car dealership in Jacksonville, Nino Ferrucci’s Ferraris and Other Fine Cars. Thing is Nino Ferrucci doesn’t own the shop. He’s just the front. The real owner is a numbered corporation, Florida level, just a bunch of numbers, but the numbers brought up a hit from the FBI office. I called Deke over there and he says that this numbered corporation is linked to the Vizzini family.”

  Pandora looked at Jack, held up a finger.

  Interesting hit. Wait one.

  “They’re not active these days,” Pandora said.

  “No. Supposed to be totally legitimate. Cars. Real estate. Shopping malls. As if. But I thought you should know. Probably nothing to it. But...well...now you know. Okay?”

  “Yes. I do. Thanks, Mace.”

  “Well, button down, Pandora. This storm is settling in for the night.”

  “We are totally buttoned.”

  “Yeah? Glad to hear that.”

  She clicked off, filled Jack in on the return on that white Benz.

  They kicked it around for a while, decided it was something they should follow up on. If only for the Vizzini Family connection. Which seemed to be pushing the “mere coincidence” boundary more than a little. They were looking at a picture of Tessio Vizzini taken sixty-one years ago, and today there’s a Vizzini-connected Benz parked up the block.

  They were quiet for a while, thinking about the Benz. And t
he Vizzinis. It stuck in their heads, setting off a major cop alarm.

  More as a reflex than a conscious thought, Jack reached over and picked up his weapon, handed Pandora her gun belt too, put them both down a little closer.

  “Okay, this other stuff—the Benz—isn’t getting us anywhere with the Bowman woman. Let’s set that aside for now. Nothing’s going to happen in a storm like this. And the place is a bunker.”

  “Yes,” she said, but she moved her piece a little closer.

  “So, back to it, and just for the sake of argument, what was Karen Walker saying about the Bowman woman knowing a lot about St. Augustine in the fifties? Like she had actually lived through that period?”

  “She said that Bowman knew places like the Alcazar Hotel, the Reef Bar... She knew all about places that had been torn down or shut up years ago. That would probably include the Monterey Motel we’re looking at right here. And there she is. Right there in the picture. Which is utterly nuts, right?”

  “Yes,” said Pandora, with an edge. “It is.”

  “So what the hell have we got here?”

  Pandora went quiet for a time.

  Jack saw her do it.

  “Okay. You’ve got something on your mind.”

  She turned her wineglass in her hands. Outside the storm was rising to a freight-train roar and the whole house was vibrating like a bass drum. The rain was slicing in sideways and lashing the screening over the window so hard it was rattling. The sky was rumbling like a kettledrum and the underbelly of the storm was full of flashing white fire. The street was invisible, hidden by curtains of rain and the gathering darkness. And the room lights were flickering. Pandora was ignoring all of it, which took some concentration.

  “When Karen was dying...you remember?” she said.

  “No. Totally slipped my mind. Karen who?”

  “Okay. Sarcasm. Got it. You know there was a camera running?”

  Jack was tuned in to this woman pretty well. He got it in three.

  “You pulled the video. Looking for the Shimmer,” he said.

  She smiled at him.

  “Thanks for not calling the Rubber Room guys,” she said.