With a little bad luck, and who didn’t have that, life could come to this. Three quarters of a century of loneliness and struggle, and here you were in a hospital, stranded between living and dying. It was scary. The chances were pretty good Martinson could wind up the same way, after a heart attack or a stroke or a bout with cancer. Retired and out of the loop, a couple people who remembered him from his cop days, Lili and Robotaille, say, would visit him and bring him flowers he couldn’t see, until he became a nuisance people would rather forget about, wondering why he didn’t just hurry up and die. Life was seldom fair. Martinson had gotten his mind around this a long time ago, but the cruel tricks it managed to come up with sometimes knocked the breath right out of him.
The water in the vase he filled last week had evaporated to an inch from the bottom, murky with dust and shriveled petals. He threw the old flowers in the garbage, rinsed the vase in the bathroom sink, and filled it about halfway. He put the fresh flowers inside. The scent of honeysuckle filled the room and chased away the modern, antiseptic smell.
Martinson chattered, arranging the flowers on a night-stand. “Here’s a card,” he said, spotting a religious greeting from an order of nuns. “It’s signed by a Sister Bridget in Des Moines. A picture of some saint.” The icon had its arms spread, palms out and ready to embrace. “It says they’re praying for you to get well.”
The doctor told Martinson his visits might not be helping, but they couldn’t possibly be doing any harm. He encouraged him to keep it up. This was an honest doctor, a short guy with tight curls, who gave Arnie the truth early on when Arnie was wondering who else came to see her. And when he asked about her condition, whether it was like being asleep or being knocked out or what, the doctor admitted coma was something they didn’t know that much about. The young doctor hadn’t honed his bluffing instinct. He was the first doctor Martinson heard say, I don’t know.
Arnie took the chair at Josephine’s bedside and let three meaty fingers rest in her palm. Josephine wrapped her hand around them, the way she always did. The first time, he jumped up to find that honest doctor and tell him what happened, thinking he’d been present for some major breakthrough. The man informed him it happened all the time. A reflex. Again, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t necessarily mean all that much either.
But it convinced him Josephine Simmons was in there somewhere. Shallow chest moving up and down, eyes shut, bony fingers squeezing with a surprising strength, the way a baby could startle you with how much power they had in their tiny fists. Under the wires and tubes and plastic attachments, a human being whose life had basic fundamental value was fighting to get out.
He said, “You rest up and try to get better, Josephine. I gotta get back to work, but I’ll be by to see you next week. The flowers are beautiful. Yellow tulips. And you can’t miss that honeysuckle, right?”
Martinson made a move to get out of the chair, and as he stood, he thought he felt Josephine’s fingers tighten their grip, but it was possible he only imagined it.
The prevailing sentiment around the job was that John Kramer’s ascension to lieutenant had as much to do with his skill at navigating Department politics as it did with any leadership qualities he may have possessed. Kramer was in place before Acevedo got here, but Robotaille and other veterans related the disappointment they felt when Arnie Martinson didn’t get the promotion.
Arnie would’ve claimed he wasn’t interested in the job. He would have said Kramer made a fine lieutenant, and he would’ve denied there was any rivalry between them, but they often disagreed on policy. Like whether or not to make the composite of their suspect in the Pfiser murder public. Kramer was for, Martinson dead set against.
The following events proved the Martinson instincts sharp:
1) Patrolman Kenneth Simms, recovering from a gunshot wound and probably considering another line of work, dropped by the station to visit his buddies. Taking note of the composite on a bulletin board, he said it bore a glancing resemblance to a guy who broke his jaw at Lefty’s, a bar on Washington that was now a coffee shop. The guy’s name, Simms recalled, sounded Irish and started with an H. He asked somebody to look it up. Harold James Healy.
2) Later that day, a Fort Lauderdale sergeant called Beach detectives and told them they might want to take a look at a bouncer in a joint called Sailor Randy’s.
And 3): Yesterday, an FBI fingerprint search spit out a match for a partial that had been lifted from the stereo in Manfred Pfiser’s room. It was identified as belonging to one Harold James Healy, last known address, New York City. With no help from the general populace, Harold James Healy was glowing super-nova hot.
Score one for Martinson.
The one thing they gained by releasing the composite was the likelihood of alerting the suspect to his status. And they created a task that would tie up Ron Robotaille for days. He was watching a tips hotline right now, unwrapping a piece of candy and sticking it into his mouth.
The FBI faxed a nice, neat package. Healy was born on 12/16/61 in Manhattan, and took his first fall on 5/23/78, for being a passenger in a stolen car. He earned an Adjournment Contemplating Dismissal.
On 11/12/90, he was arrested for possession of a controlled substance, codeine, and issued a summons. The judge slapped his wrist and Healy managed to outmaneuver the law until 8/15/94, when he was charged with assault in New York. His attorney plea-bargained it down to being a patron of a disorderly premises.
He did his very first bit a year later right here in the Dade County Jail. Tumbling on a slew of charges, including assaulting an officer, he got off easy. Nine months inside. Acevedo studied the mugs from Healy’s most recent bust. The French chick had a point. He did kind of look like Robotaille. It was a stretch, but Lili could see it.
She slanted her eyes at Robotaille, who was wearing a bored expression, taking an obligatory note from somebody on the phone. She looked from the mug shot to the composite to Robotaille. Healy wasn’t what you’d think of as ugly, but he was no Ron Robotaille.
Ron was great looking, and he was a nice guy, too, but he was so dull he made you want to scream. It took Lili two dates to figure it out. They had a decent, unexciting time at a restaurant in Aventura, and another night they went to see a boring movie, Robotaille’s choice, then for drinks in the Grove. Somehow or other, they wound up in Lili’s apartment.
Wait a minute. This was dishonest thinking. They wound up in Lili’s apartment because she was entertaining the idea of having sex with him, but when they got there, he wouldn’t shut up about his soon-to-be-ex-wife, which turned off Lili like a light switch. Robotaille managed to put two and two together. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew he’d blown it, and he didn’t ask Lili out again. Only now, even their most mundane exchanges were strained with a clumsiness that wouldn’t have been there if not for those two dates. Lili was sorry she’d bothered. If he wasn’t so handsome, and Lili hadn’t been so flattered, she wouldn’t have.
Robotaille looked over, and Lili quickly averted her glance to Healy’s mug shot. The look in Healey’s eyes was one of half-drunk exasperation, not that dead-lensed, clench-toothed, tough-guy stare that jumped out of so many of these pictures. Healy was trying out the you’ve-got-the-wrong-man stare. You saw a lot of those, too. Annick Mersault, that syrupy little pain in the ass, hadn’t done much with the shape of Healy’s face, or his nose, or his chin. But the eyes, she had gotten the eyes exactly right.
Wispy clouds splashed white like brushstrokes against the sky. It was a bright afternoon, a day for the Department of Tourism. Martinson was driving with the windows down. It was hot enough for the AC, but Arnie held out for the muggiest weather to run it, afraid that the shock of the cold air blowing on him could trigger a migraine.