"Give me a second to shower."
Decker hated funerals. Working for the newspaper, he'd had to cover too many grim graveside services, from a cop shot by some coked-up creep to a toddler raped and murdered by her babysitter. Child murders got plenty of play in the papers, and a shot of the grieving parents was guaranteed to run four columns, minimum. A funeral like that was the most dreaded assignment in journalism. Decker didn't know quite what to expect in Harney. For him it was strictly business, a casual surveillance. Maybe even Dickie Lockhart would show up, Decker thought as he toweled off. He was eager to get a glimpse of the town celebrity.
They rode to the graveyard in Ott Pickney's truck. Almost everyone else in Harney owned a Ford or a Chevy, but Ott drove a new Toyota flatbed. "Orchids," he explained, a bit defensively, "don't take up much space."
"It's a fine truck," Decker offered.
Ott lit a Camel so Decker rolled down the window. It was a breezy morning and the air was cold, blowing dead from the north.
"Can I ask something?" Ott said. "It's personal."
"Fire away."
"I heard you got divorced."
"Right," Decker said.
"That's a shame, RJ. She seemed like a terrific kid."
"The problem was money," Decker said. "He had some, I didn't." His wife had run off with a timeshare-salesman-turned-chiropractor. Life didn't get any meaner.
"Jesus, I'm sorry." The divorce wasn't really what Ott wanted to talk about. "I heard something else," he said.
"Probably true," Decker said. "I did ten months at Apalachee, if that's what you heard."
Pickney was sucking so hard on the cigarette that the ash was three inches long. Decker was afraid it would drop into Ott's lap and set his pants on fire, which is what had happened one day in the newsroom of the Miami Sun.None of the fire extinguishers had been working, so Ott had been forced to straddle a drinking fountain to douse the flames.
"Do you mind talking about it?" Ott said. "I understand if you'd rather not."
Decker said, "It was after one of the Dolphin games. I was parked about four blocks from the stadium. Coming back to the car, I spotted some jerkoff breaking into the trunk, trying to rip off the cameras. I told him to stop, he ran. He was carrying two Nikons and a brand-new Leka. No way was I going to let him get away."
"You caught up with him?"
"Yeah, he fell and I caught up to him. I guess I got carried away."
Pickney shook his head and spit the dead Camel butt out the window. "Ten months! I can't believe they'd give you that much time for slugging a burglar."
"Not just any burglara football star at Palmetto High," Decker said. "Three of his sisters testified that they'd witnessed the whole thing. Said Big Brother never stole the cameras. Said he was minding his own business, juking on the corner when I drove up and asked where I could score some weed. Said Big Brother told me to get lost, and I jumped out of my car and pounded him into dog meat. All of which was a goddamn lie."
"So then?"
"So the state attorney's office dropped the burglary charge on Mr. Football Hero, and nailed me for agg assault. He gets a scholarship to USC, I get felony arts-and-crafts. That's the whole yarn."
Pickney sighed. "And you lost your job."
"The newspaper had no choice, Ott." Not with the boy's father raising so much hell. The boy's father was Levon Bennett, big wheel on the Orange Bowl Committee, board chairman of about a hundred banks. Decker had always thought the newspaper might have rehired him after Apalachee if only Levon Bennett wasn't in the same Sunday golf foursome as the executive publisher.
"You always had a terrible temper."
"Luck, too. Of all the thieves worth stomping in Miami, I've got to pick a future Heisman Trophy winner." Decker laughed sourly.
"So now you're a ... "
"Private investigator," Decker said. Obviously Ott was having a little trouble getting to the point.
The point being what in the hell Decker was doing as a P.I. "I burned out on newspapers," he said to Ott.
"With your portfolio you could have done anything, R.J. Magazines, free-lance, the New York agencies. You could write your own ticket."
"Not with a rap sheet," Decker said.
It was a comfortable lie. A lawyer friend had arranged for Decker's criminal record to be legally expunged, wiped off the computer, so the rap sheet wasn't really the problem.
The truth was, Decker had to get away from the news business. He needed a divorce from photography because he had started to see life and death as a sequence of frames; Decker's mind had started to work like his goddamn cameras, and it scared him. The night he made up his mind was the night the city desk had sent him out on what everybody figured was a routine drug homicide. Something stinky dripping from the trunk of a new Seville parked on the sky level of the Number Five Garage at Miami International. Decker got there just as the cops were drilling the locks. Checked the motor drive on the Leica. Got down on one knee. Felt the cold dampness seep through his trousers. Raining like a bitch.Trunk pops open. A young woman, used to be, anyway.Heels, nylons, pretty silk dress, except for the brown stains. Stench bad enough to choke a maggot.He'd been expecting the usual Juan DoeLatin male, mid-twenties, dripping gold, no ID, multiple gunshot wounds. Not a girl with a coat hanger wrapped around her neck.Not Leslie. Decker refocused. Leslie.Jesus Christ, he knew this girl, worked with her at the paper. Decker fed the Leica more film. She was a fashion writerwho the fuck'd want to murder a fashion writer? Her husband, said a homicide guy.Decker bracketed the shots, changed angles to get some of the hair, but no face. Paper won't print faces of the dead, that's policy. He fired away, thinking: I know this girl, so why can't I stop? Leica whispering in the rain, click-click-click.Oh God, she's a friend of mind so why the fuck can't I stop. Husband told her they were flying to Disney World, big romantic weekend, said the homicide man.Decker reloaded, couldn't help himself. Strangled her right here, stuffed her in the trunk, grabbed his suitcase, and hopped a plane for Key West with a barmaid from North Miami Beach.She'd only been married what, three months? Four, said the homicide guy, welcome to the Magic Kingdom. Haven't you got enough pictures for Chrissakes?Sure, Decker said, but he couldn't look at Leslie's body unless it was through the lens, so he ran back to his car and threw up his guts in a puddle.
Three days later, Levon Bennett's son tried to steal R. J. Decker's cameras outside the stadium, and Decker chased him down and beat him unconscious. Those are my eyes, he'd said as he slugged the punk. Without them I'm fucking blind, don't you understand?
At Apalachee he'd met a very nice doctor doing four years for Medicare fraud, who gave him the name of an insurance company that needed an investigator. Sometimes the investigator had to take his own pictures"sometimes" was about all Decker figured he could handle. Besides, he was broke and never wanted to see the inside of a newsroom again. So he tried one free-lance job for the insurance companytook a picture of a forty-two-foot Bertram that was supposed to be sunk off Cat Island but wasn'tand got paid two thousand dollars. Decker found the task to be totally painless and profitable. Once his rap sheet was purged, he applied for his P.I. license and purchased two cameras, a Nikon and a Canon, both used. The work was small potatoes, no Pulitzers but no pain. Most important, he had discovered with more and more cases that he still loved the cameras but could see just fine without themno blood and gore in the darkroom, just mug shots and auto tags and grainy telescopic stills of married guys sneaking out of motels.
None of this he told Ott Pickney. Being a private detective isn't so bad, is what he said, and the pay's good. "It's just temporary," Decker lied, "until I figure out what I want to do."