“I’m thinking when Reggie first arrived, he saw something right away that made him go charging up the stairs.” The cop reached into the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a crumpled roll of paper. “Something that made him forget about shutting the front door, something that made him race upstairs, to check under that floorboard.”
“But you said nothing looked like a robbery,” Jerzy said. He relaxed his forehead. He was doing fine.
“NOT A REGULAR kind of robbery.” Detective Edrow Fluett tapped the crumpled roll of paper against Jerzy’s chest. “This was in Reggie’s hand. He must have ripped it off the window when he ran in.” He slipped off the rubber band and unrolled the first few inches for Jerzy to see.
“I make banners for the window,” the kid-man said.
“Like this one yesterday? Huge red letters saying fifty bucks back for each pair of returned boots?”
“Reggie didn’t know those boots were junk until he sold most of them. He said we would give fifty bucks back to anyone returning a pair. He said they’d buy from us forever if we did that.”
“That cheap bastard said fifty dollars back on an eight-dollar purchase?”
The kid-man nodded.
“So, all those smelly boots piled on the tables by the front window where someone coming in would see them first thing . . . ?”
“Yesterday I took back just about every pair Reggie sold. Even yours.”
Edrow glanced down at his new fifty-dollar boots. “Fifty bucks back. I couldn’t believe it,” he said, looking up.
“Reggie said it would make you want to shop us again and again and again.”
“Reggie was a real son of a bitch,” Edrow said.
Jerzy shrugged.
Detective Edrow Fluett turned toward the door, but then he stopped.
THE COP HAD a slight smile on his face, and Jerzy was sure he was seeing into the center of his brain, where Jerzy kept the truth.
But the cop just smiled wider. “What about all those signs on the wall: ‘All Sales Final’?”
Jerzy felt he could afford a little smile of his own.
“Reggie had a change in his heart.”
The Herald
By Leslie Glass
The two deaths occurred sometime in the early morning, in the parking lot of the public boat ramp off Fruitville and Route 41, also known as the North Trail. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man who’d spent the night at the Goodwill facility on 10th Street a few blocks from the bay and who was prowling the waterfront in search of some peace and quiet. He saw blood on the driver’s-side window of a Ford truck and wandered over to investigate. He viewed the bodies from both sides of the vehicle and checked the doors before threading back through the traffic on the North Trail to the Chevron station on the other side, where he told the attendant to call the police. Then he took off.
ON WEDNESDAY, THE hump day of the week, Paradise Major Case detective Alfie Rose had not been expecting any excitement beyond his juvie mission, which got him up before he liked seeing the light of day. He’d gotten an early call from Roy Sultan, an officer responding to an attempted break-in who knew Rose was familiar with the would-be perpetrator involved. Bleary-eyed, Alfie hurried out to confront Jeff Burt, a tattooed kid he wanted to save from the system. That’s how he happened to be on Bee Ridge in the parking lot of Persnickety Cat, talking alternatives with a boy who could go either way. Drink and dope his way into a flying leap off the Skyway Bridge, or face up to the human fucking condition and get his ass back in school. It was seven a.m., and there was still time. Sometimes, Alfie saw himself through a camera’s eye and thought, This is my life. Unmarried cop, in a car with a kid who looked like something out of an eighties punk band, hoping to do a tiny bit of good for someone who needed a little extra help.
Alfie pulled into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and bought two glazed donuts and some coffee while Jeff remained silent. Then he set out the alternatives for Jeff in a matter-of-fact voice that was far calmer than he felt. No kid in free-fall really thinks he’s going to end up in a body bag, and Alfie wanted to get that across in a measured sort of way while eating something he knew might clog up his arteries and kill him down the road. He’d sung the same old tune to Jeff before to no good effect, so he felt a powerful sneeze of rage coming on at the early hour and at his inability to be truly useful. Just like his dog, Alfie registered his negative feelings through his nose. But it wasn’t just the kid and the morning that were bothering his sinuses.
It was spring in Paradise, and the air was filled with all kinds of shit. There weren’t supposed to be seasons in Florida, but seasonal changes occurred there nonetheless, Alfie had learned in his first year. Before the hurricane phase officially began, a mammoth rebirth of plants big and small started in March and dragged on right through June. Sometimes in the morning Alfie’s car, parked in a carport, would be green or yellow or red with pollen that had blown in during the night and covered everything like sandstorms in the desert. The stuff coming out of the trees could choke a horse.
Come on, speak to me. Alfie started drumming his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had to say something. That was the rule. He wouldn’t let the kid’s silent, guilty, hangdog, shoot-me-in-the-head expression end the discussion. Silence only signaled a postponement of the inevitable — another incident to follow. Shit, Alfie didn’t have all day. He resisted the urge to glance at his watch.
Never mind what Jeff had been planning for his morning, or how the fifteen-year-old had talked himself into the rightness of what he’d been doing — Alfie didn’t want him back in an orange suit, in front of a judge who wouldn’t be as understanding the third time in two months. It was hardly a major case, but he was taking the time. Also Alfie liked the boy’s clueless mom, Sharon.
Alfred Rose had been in the cops up north, then in the military. He’d seen war, and after he came home, he drifted to Florida for the weather and joined the Paradise PD, where until recently he’d been a detective in Vehicular Homicide. Six months ago, he’d pulled Jeff out of the car wreck that killed his dad. The two had been on their way to a father/son golf tournament out at Foxfire Country Club near I-75 when they’d been broadsided by a pool-cleaning truck driven by an illegal alien without a license.
The fatal car wreck was the kind of case Alfie had worked for the last three years, every single one a catastrophe. In the Burt family tragedy, the driver of the truck had been drunk at the time of the accident. Despite evidence to the contrary, the owner of the vehicle claimed it was stolen and he’d never seen the guy before. As for Jeff and his dad, the father/son golfing team had been a good one, and they’d been hoping to win that day. It was a real nasty case, and neither Jeff nor Sharon was doing well.
Still, if Alfie hadn’t had a promotion, his connection to the family would have ended there. A few months later, however, Alfie was promoted to the Major Case Squad, and Jeff started crossing his path as a juvie, breaking into shops, looking for cash to buy dope. He sported Goth tattoos and dyed black hair, and didn’t look as if he had enough to eat. Alcohol and dope were one thing, but Goth didn’t go down well in Paradise. The grieving Sharon didn’t get the role of parenting a kid on a suicide ride, and Alfie knew he was going to have to talk to her about wising up and getting some help. Court-ordered rehab was what he had in mind.
When Jeff refused to say much more than the fact that he was sorry, Alfie broke down again, gave the boy his strongest “Come to Jesus” talk, then drove him to Riverview High School and watched him melt — as much as a Goth at Riverview could melt — into a crowd of pretty preppy-looking kids. Jeff entered what Alfie thought was the right building and didn’t look back, so Alfie hoped he might stay. It didn’t change his mind about the six-month program, though. His box squawked, and he answered.
“What you got, Matilda?” he said.
She told him, and he turned north on Tuttle. All the Major Case detectives in the department, including his partner, a tough female former New York cop na
med Betty Mudd, happened to be at a law-enforcement conference in Vegas. So he caught the call. His expression tightened as he considered the complications that were sure to come with this one. Murder was not exactly a welcome tourist in Paradise.
At 7:38, after season, it was only a six-minute drive up the Trail to the public boat ramp. By the time Alfie got there, three units had already secured the area and a coast guard chopper circled above, as if someone might be making an escape by sea. No civilian cars were sitting in the parking lot, but Patrick Pride of the Herald Tribune was parked as close as he could get. As soon as Alfie got out of his car, Pat rushed over to block his progress.
“Alfie, old buddy, what’s the story?” If he got one step closer, he’d be treading on the detective’s snakeskin cowboy boots.
All the annoyance that had been building up since before dawn finally exploded out of Alfie. He sneezed loudly. Patrick Pride wasn’t his buddy, and nobody else in the department was Pride’s buddy either. The young man was in his first newspaper job — maybe first job ever, and he was a real dickhead when it came to getting his stories straight. This guy wasn’t about the facts, and the pisser was that nobody at the paper cared about his tactics. The crime beat at the Herald was the lowest rung of the ladder, from which the most inexperienced newcomers started the climb. Alfie only just refrained from elbowing the youngster in the chest. “You’re the reporter, you tell me,” he said as he pushed past him.
“Looks like a murder-suicide.” Undaunted by the reception, Pat trotted along beside him.
“Don’t make it up as you go along like last time, buddy,” Alfie warned him, trying to make an impression. “It matters.”
“He did her and then himself. You want to tell me who they are?” Patrick Pride wasn’t a good match for his name. He was short and soft in the belly, didn’t look as if he had to shave more than once a week. His shirt hung out, and he wasn’t wearing socks. He didn’t smell as if he’d bathed too recently either. He was twenty-one, maybe, just old enough to buy a drink.
“Come on,” he wheedled, a wart that wouldn’t go away. His notebook was out, and already a page was full of scribbles.
Alfie glanced at it, then over at the officers guarding the scene. He could see blood on the truck window but not the mess that was inside. Crime Scene hadn’t arrived yet, and it looked as if no one had disturbed the bodies by searching for IDs. “Beat it,” he said, “and don’t speculate.”
“Come on,” Pat protested.
“I mean it. Don’t make any more trouble with your fictions,” Alfie said.
“I don’t write fiction.” He spit the word out with contempt. “Just do my job, same as you.”
“Yeah.” Alfie sneezed again. “Someday I’ll show you how,” he said, and left him there, writing something. Later, Alfie thought he should have grabbed that notebook and given Pat a real verbal kick in the ass. But it seemed he wasn’t that good at lecturing on Wednesdays. In any case, his eyes had already focused on that bloody window, and he wasn’t thinking about anything else.
The bodies were in the cab of a Ford truck, with the logo BLACKWOLF CONSTRUCTION on the doors. A man and a woman. Young, not more than thirty or so. A few years younger than Alfie. To the left of the parking lot was a boccie court, where Italians in white shorts and shirts played on Sunday. Straight on was the bay, where the sailboats from City Island held their races on Friday afternoons. People used the boat ramp for the sleek go-fast boats and for fishing runabouts. Except for the bloody truck and the police cars, it was deserted now. Nothing to the right except swamp and then low buildings and businesses, and then the wall of condos marching north up the Trail toward the airport. It was not brightly lit at night. He was thinking witnesses. Who might have seen something?
The officers stepped back as Alfie took his look. First thing he noticed was the pistol in the hand of the male deceased. What up north they called a “Saturday night special.” Nothing fancy, just something to get the job done. The bullet had not entered his head cleanly and had made a mess of his face, which had probably been good-looking enough in life. Alfie speculated that he might have been a novice shooter and hadn’t held the gun steady when it went off. He might have aimed at his heart, his neck, or the side of his head, and missed them all. Or else he’d tried to shoot in the air and missed that too. A saliva test would show if he’d ever put the barrel in his mouth. The doors were locked, and he’d been knocked back against his window, but maybe, somehow, he hadn’t done himself. Those were Alfie’s first thoughts.
In another life, up north, Alfie had seen an autopsy of an apparent suicide. Everyone thought the man had jumped off the terrace of his apartment until the ME found a bullet in his brain. The entry wound had been in his mouth, and he couldn’t have jumped after he was already dead, now could he? Alfie had learned back then never to assume. In any case, the bullet in this DOA’s face went where not even a suicidal person would want a bullet to go, and the man might even have lived a little while in agony, with the car doors locked and a dead girl no help beside him. There was plenty of blood to support that conjecture.
The dead woman, by contrast, was leaning against the passenger door with a clean hit from the driver’s side — bullet in the heart, probably. She seemed to have been taken by surprise. Her mouth gaped, as if she hadn’t expected the evening to end this way. Or the morning to begin this way, either one. She was a pretty blonde; what else could she be in Paradise? Alfie had to admit that it looked like a boyfriend/girlfriend thing after all. Homicide-suicide, just like Pat Pride had said. Open-and-shut case. All it needed was a few weeks of paperwork to clear the case. He tapped his boot tip to get on with it.
CSI came eventually, the chopper dipped away, and deconstruction of the scene began. It looked like what it looked like, and the girl’s name was Lydia Florence Dale. Lydia Dale’s driver’s license and twelve credit cards were in her purse by her feet. She was thirty-two. The male DOA had no ID on him, but they guessed he was the owner of the truck. Alfie wondered where the guy’s wallet was. Lost it? Left it on a motel bedside table? Someone lifted it at a bar? He ran a check of the license plate and came up with a name.
REED LUSTFIELD LIKED to leave home early, sometimes as early as five o’clock. His wife, Julie, wasn’t always out of bed when he left. What was the point? He was a good-looking guy, and she’d been proud of him when they married a decade ago. He’d built her this house, down in North Port, a tidy three/four bedroom because they’d expected to have a bunch of kids right away. But it didn’t happen. Turned out, she was okay in the reproduction department, but Reed had a problem. Handsome hulk as he was — as healthy as he looked — his sperm turned out to be sparse and lazy. It came as a shock. With the knowledge, he lost his sex drive. Ten years into the marriage, the two of them were still trying to figure out what to do with the devastating information. Julie knew that Reed would have been able to deal with a flaw in her much better than one in himself. He’d shut down. Now she was thirty-three and didn’t jump out of bed to fill his lunch bucket so often anymore.
Reed was busy building two mansions up in Panther Ridge, where the lots were three acres or more, and it took forty-five minutes to get there. He didn’t build houses like theirs anymore, homes where people could live comfortably. Now his houses were so large that it was a major commitment just to go down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Half-mile walk through a maze of rooms and down a couple of flights of stairs. Each house was filled with brass hardware and marble bathrooms and granite kitchens and acres of travertine floors. They took forever to get done, and each project was a protracted migraine headache for Reed. Suffice it to say, he was gone a lot, managing an army of subs who couldn’t speak English.
Julie suspected he was avoiding her for another reason too. He didn’t like the negativity of their situation. And sometimes she just thought his absence was due to Lydia, his so-called bookkeeper, more like soul mate. Julie had been feeling sick about her life for a couple of years and hadn’
t decided yet what to do about it. Except for the “having her man in jail” part, she thought of herself as a country song. She was alone a lot while he was drinking beer and hanging out somewhere else. She guessed the rest of it.
Today, for some reason, she was up in the dark, pulling on her jeans and following Reed into the garage, where he’d gone without stopping for coffee in the kitchen.
“Reed?” She didn’t even know what her question was. Do you love me? Do you hate me? Should we get a divorce? Hey, say something. But it was almost too late to start asking the deep questions. She could see it in his face . . . when she saw his face. These days, he wasn’t doing much looking at her.
“Hey, baby,” he said without turning around.
When she saw what he was doing, she stopped short. Reed was loading his fishing gear into his truck. Two rods, the nets, and the bait cooler. The tackle box. Life jackets, again two. It made her think of Brokeback Mountain, a movie she’d hated. The word “gay” popped into her head, and she almost choked on it.
“You going fishing?” She didn’t get the question out. She stopped because Reed would think it was a stupid question. He didn’t like her stating the obvious. Like, they couldn’t have children, so how about making another plan? He didn’t like that at all.
She could see he was going fishing. But why and with whom? Confused, she looked back into the kitchen, where the clock on the microwave said it was 5:45 a.m. Last she knew, it was Wednesday. Was he getting the boat down from the boat high-rise it lived on and going out fishing in the middle of the week when there were all those headaches at Panther Ridge to deal with? She just couldn’t speak up and make the query. Funny thing about men: they could make a girl feel like doggy doo just for asking a simple question. Reed hadn’t told her last night he was going fishing. He didn’t tell her now when she was standing there, watching him load up the truck. He was a Republican, real secretive, and just didn’t like to tell.