Clearwater Journals

by Al Rennie

Once more, I was swimming laps alone in a beautiful Olympic size pool. This time, not only was Jaws closing in on me, he had brought some of his more hungry relatives. There were some sharp loud shots. Jaws is armed with a 30/30 Winchester? Can’t be!

  I sat up in bed and tried to remember where I was. I was helped in that endeavour by an impatient voice just outside my barred exterior door.

  “Holiday—Joe Holiday—I know you’re in there. Open up! Now—I mean it. I’ll break this door down if I have too.”

  I checked my watch—seven thirty. “Who are you and what do you want?” I replied as I slid over the edge of my bed looking for any kind of weapon. Smart, I thought to myself. I have a Sig Saur automatic handgun in perfectly good working order hidden in my toilet and some guy is yelling at me to open my door immediately. I quickly slid into the bathroom—then stopped.

  “My name is Jansen. I’m a police officer. Deputy Chief Kemp told me to come and pick you up. You are supposed to be meeting him in twenty minutes in his office down town.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said as I peeked through the gap in the heavy navy coloured curtains covering the one small window in my room. “I guess I forgot. I’ll just pull on some clothes and be right with you.”

  “Well Sir, you better get a move on. We’re gonna be late as it is,” Officer Jansen said impatiently as he turned and walked back towards his cruiser. I could just see the nose of a police car parked back from the garage.

  I pulled on a pair of clean, but badly faded, blue jeans and a fresh navy blue “I Love Clearwater Beach” T-shirt—another of the shirts from the clearance bin at the souvenir shop’s “going out of business” sale. I thought about putting on the New Balance trainers I’d worn the night before. “Screw him,” I thought, “maybe I can piss Kemp off a bit wearing my flip-flops to his meeting.”

  I went out to join the waiting police officer. Maybe top cop Kemp will have a buffet breakfast waiting for me when I get there. It doesn’t hurt to dream. I started to pull open the front passenger door, but Officer Jansen shook his head adamantly and pointed at the back door of his cruiser.

  “I won’t try to play with the siren if you let me ride in the front,” I said like a spoiled five year old.

  “Policy—and do up your seat belt. Nice outfit.” Jansen, the cop fashion critic, had just defined our relationship. We didn’t have one. He was a cop doing what he was told to do to make a living. I was cargo.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Jansen led me, with my official “Visitor” tag stuck to my T-shirt, to a closed door on the fourth floor of the police building on Madison. The cop shop was only a very long throw from the park where I’d had my chat with Billy Ray the night before. I guess Fred Cooper must have had some pull in the police department because his name was on the door of this cubbyhole. Jansen knocked on the door and opened it when he heard a reply.

  “Joe Holiday Sir,” the young officer said.

  “Thank you Jansen,” Kemp muttered with a quick nod of dismissal before he did a slow head to toe scan on me. “That will be all.”

  The room was Spartan. There was no window to jump from—just peeling green paint, dark green filing cabinets, a cheap metal-legged desk and three hardwood chairs. It was pretty depressing. Maybe Cooper didn’t have as much juice as I thought.

  “Thank you for coming in Joe,” Kemp said trying to keep it polite. “Detective Sergeant Cooper and I thought we should have a little discussion with you this morning given the events of the last few days. It’s a little more formal setting than a Clearwater restaurant.”

  Kemp looked bright and alert and as dapper as when I had seen him last. There was a light sheen of sweat on his tanned face. He must have recently completed his morning exercise program. Or, maybe that was the effect I had on him. He smiled as though he had just told a very funny joke. I smiled back. We were being friendly. Cooper just looked older and more tired than when I had seen him only a couple of nights earlier. He was wearing the same pale blue and white striped seersucker wash and wear suit that had been so popular in the eighties. His tie was decorated in recent soup stain and his shirt seemed to be two sizes too large for him. He didn’t smile.

  “I had a choice about coming in here?” I asked. “I thought this was sort of like one of those royal command performance jobs.”

  Both of them ignored my remark. Cooper started. “We thought you might like to know that Billy Ray won’t be bothering you or anyone else for a little while. He was released because of a clerical mistake. He had violated his probation order when he was picked up carry dope and hanging around with another criminal. That would be Sammy Tolla. There is also an additional charge pending against Mr. Boyle. Maybe you can help us out here?”

  “I’d really like too,” I said growing more than a little suspicious about where this conversation was heading. “How can I be of assistance?”

  “It seems that something or someone frightened or pissed Billy off badly enough that late last night, he went into a bar and tried to buy a handgun. As I said, he’s already on probation; he can’t have one. Unfortunately for him, the guy he tried to buy the weapon from was a Tampa undercover cop. Our guy sold him the gun and then had him picked up with it in his possession no more than ten minutes later. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the frightening or pissing off part would you?”

  “Not a thing,” I said with a weak smile. “But it sounds like maybe Billy Ray has had a really bummer time lately. I feel for the guy.”

  There had been no clerical error. Kemp was responsible for putting Billy Ray on the street and in my sights. It would definitely be his style.

  “We’ll let that pass for the time being,” Kemp said in a business like tone. This was top cop swinging into administrative action. “We’ve arranged for Eddie Ralston to be here this morning. He has to be in court later on to testify in another drug related matter, so we brought him here first. We explained what had happened to Mia Doulton and explained to him how he might be of assistance—and then, how that assistance might help him. He talked with his lawyer first, and then he agreed to talk to Fred here. Depending on the deal we offer, he has the right to have this session strictly off the record. Fred and Eddie have an old cop and snitch relationship. We thought you might like to sit in.”

  With cops, hardly anything is really off the record, and I had never heard of any police department extending to any civilian the kind of invitation I had just received. Our original intent had been for Mia to visit Eddie Ralston in jail and appeal to him for help in understanding what Vickie had been like in the weeks before she was murdered. Ralston didn’t have to worry about being charged with her murder. I had read in Langdon’s notes that Eddie Ralston had already started to serve time for a drug dealing offence the week before Vickie disappeared.

  “That would be nice,” I said. I was still suspicious and getting hungrier by the moment.

  “Just before we go to the interrogation area,” Kemp said, “are you ready to tell me what was in the package Paula Langdon gave you yesterday?” The guy was truly obsessive.

  I understood the deal that he had just put on the table—another tit for tat. If I told him, what was in the package, I got to watch Coop talk with Ralston. If I didn’t tell him, he probably would have me shot. Or at least, I certainly wouldn’t be talking with Ralston now or any time in the immediate future. Of course, he was ignoring the other option—my favourite. I could lie to him.

  I chuckled as if it was inconsequential. “Not much actually. There was a very touching note from Mrs. Langdon about how much her husband had enjoyed his brief time with us—how he’d been sober and directed from the very first meeting he had with us—felt his life had …”

  “I get the idea,” Kemp said cutting me off, once again revealing his short tolerance level. “What was in the package?”

  “Just some notes that he’d made about the Vickie Doulton case. He was going to give them to me when we met anyway. There were about fifty pages of single spaced computer gen
erated notes,” I lied. These were the same notes Langdon had given me at our last meeting. I was betting no one had told Kemp about them.

  “And you have them still?”

  “Oh yeah, not here right now, but in my backpack at home,” I said truthfully.

  “And there was nothing else?”

  “Don’t think so,” I said. Kemp fumed. Cooper smiled. He knew I was being a jerk to piss Kemp off.

  “Let’s go,” Cooper said. “We’ll get back to you Chance after we’ve met with this dickhead.” The “you” I knew was Kemp: the “dickhead” was Ralston. I think.

  I Meet Eddie