“I don’t believe you. And I wonder if you know that aiding and abetting a fugitive is a felony you could be prosecuted for?” Put some heat under her ass.
“And I’d like to meet the prosecutor who’d try me on those charges. You’re not scaring me, detective.”
“I’m going to find your boyfriend, Ms. St. Denis, and I’m going to bring him back here to stand trial for this crime, with or without your help.”
“We hung out for like a month. We ate some meals, we watched some movies, we worked together. But I want to separate you from the notion that I have some special knowledge pertaining to this case. I don’t. And I don’t have anything more to say to you.”
She walked to the door and held it open. She was lying about not knowing his whereabouts, but Healy did have her convinced he didn’t do it. When she said she didn’t know anything thing beyond Healy’s version, she had told the truth. About that, anyway. Which was more than he could say for himself, and that yarn about his grandfather, who had been dead for years before Martinson’s parents even met.
Chapter Nine
With a reminder beamed at him just about every time he turned on the TV, Leo was feeling guilty about Manfred’s murder. But then a rapist got loose in Gainesville, forcing these college chicks to do it at knifepoint, and after that, some Homestead trailer-court mom buried her twin daughters alive. She claimed she had visions the kids were agents of Satan, who was behind like every other shrub in rural Florida, and this was way bigger news than some drunk getting offed in his hotel room, fabulous South Beach or not. In about a week or so, the Pfiser story died down. Leo’s feelings about him died down along with it.
Though he felt zero remorse over smoking JP Beaumond, Beaumond did come to visit him in a nightmare. Beaumond showed up in his army fatigues, settling once and for all the question of whether you dreamed in color. Leo distinctly saw the brown and khaki, the olive drab that made up Beaumond’s foul camouflage pants. Shirtless into the next world, his pink potbelly hung over his belt. The scary thing was, he had a huge bite out of his chest, a big chunk shaped like an alligator jaw. It wasn’t bleeding. Just a hunk of flesh that wasn’t there. Leo could see light coming through the back of him.
“Yew sum bitch,” Beaumond said in the dream, “Ah’m gwan git yew fer this.” It came out slow, like Beaumond had to think about it.
“Hey,” Leo said, startled by the wound and the fact he could hear Beaumond’s drawl so clearly, “you’re dead. Fuck you.”
Beaumond looked disappointed with the news, but he didn’t bother Leo at all after that, and Leo didn’t devote him any waking thoughts.
Alex Fernandez called and said he was sorry about jumping out of the car that day, but he was really freaked and he hoped Leo would forget it. He told Leo he was thinking about going to Cuba until things cooled off, some story about a sick relative he was going to peddle to Immigration, if it wouldn’t fuck with his green card. Leo thought it was a good idea. He also thought it was a good idea if Alex didn’t call the house any more.
Before he hung up, he asked Fernandez if he’d seen Vicki.
“Vicki?” Fernandez said. “Not at all. Do me a favor, Leo. If you see her, don’t tell her where I am.”
Since Leo didn’t know where he was, and didn’t want to know, he didn’t think that was going to be a problem.
But now he had to worry about Vicki. Leo hated worrying. It got in the way of his fun.
He would’ve started worrying before, had he run into Vicki anywhere, but he hadn’t. Which was weird. South Beach was an incestuous scene that got smaller by half if you lived here year round. You saw the same faces, whether you wanted to or not. It was inevitable. But now that he was looking for Vicki, she seemed to have disappeared. She wasn’t wandering Washington Ave. in the afternoon, or haunting the clubs at night, the stuff she did every day when she was on bivouac at the house.
Leo made up his mind to find her. He was sitting on a café terrace overlooking Ocean Drive, hung over bad from chugging cheap champagne at an agency party. Drinking espresso and profiling with a Marlboro, he peeped the parade of Euros and crude modelitas from behind his Revo wraparounds. Not a hide or a hair of airhead Vicki, her Chihuahua either, whose snout would be poking out of a basket bag that matched the hat Vicki was sure to be sporting. He ordered another espresso to stay alert. If he did get Vicki in his crosshairs, he wanted to be sharp, in case he had to reach some kind of decision.
After two hours, he still hadn’t seen Vicki. But the time hadn’t been wasted, since this bouncing blonde bundle two tables over was staring right at him. Leo played it off with a dramatic drag on his Marlboro, pushing his hair off his forehead, and sipping from an empty espresso cup, as if he were deep in thought, which he was not. He snuck a peek back. No question. She had the Kid locked right in the old pin-spots.
She had a rocking tan under her white bikini and the white shirt she had tied around her neck. Leo scanned the table for signs of neurotica. There were dozens, if you knew how to read them, but on the positive side, every blonde signal was go. She was drinking a glass of wine. Excellent. Sometimes they didn’t drink because they were uptight about their weight, and that could mean they’d be in the bathroom after a pricey meal, barfing up their supper.
Another positive vibration: no miserable mutt anywhere near her. And if Leo was not mistaken, that binder sitting on the empty chair was a portfolio. The genius of it all. Now he could walk up and ask what agency she was with.
He got the waitress’s attention and told her he’d be drinking a Cuervo margarita, straight-up with salt, at that table where the blonde was sitting, and to bring the blonde another glass of whatever she was having.
He picked up his cigarettes, walked over, and introduced himself. Did she mind if he joined her? Of course she didn’t. Leo lifted her book off the chair and asked who represented her.
“I’m not with any agency right now,” she said, implying she’d been with some agency in the past, though Leo knew that was impossible, unless she worked when she was a kid.
Was that a nervous giggle he heard? He believed it was.
Her name was Whitney and she was nineteen, a real corn-fed, hand-spanked, all-American type with either blue eyes or green eyes, a tough call from behind the shades.
Pretty was not Whitney’s problem. Height was. She wasn’t tall enough to model any kind of clothes, and she had the wrong shape for it besides, her plump titties touching the tabletop. Leo imagined she was thick through the waist and the hips, too, stealing a glance downstairs without being too obvious. The girls who got work were all starvation skinny, five-nine at least (a sixfooter was not unusual), all legs and necks and big flat feet that held them up.
Leo took a look through her book. A natural disaster, it was, in a way, better than he could have hoped. The pictures were poorly lit and the styles were so whack the clothes must’ve come from her closet. A photo of Whitney wearing a floor-length gown chopped a muchneeded three inches off her height. Somebody sausaged her into a one-piece bathing suit with a horizontal pattern; she looked like a zebra-striped fire hydrant. There wasn’t a single tear-sheet, not one shot from a magazine or a catalogue or any actual job she had done.
But toward the back of the book things got interesting. Whitney had a banging body she wasn’t bashful about showing off, and there was no denying those boobies, flowering fully in one photo, no annoying bathing suit blocking his view. The last few shots — the whole cheesebucket, woolly little pubic patch and everything. If her sights were set on the pages of Ass N’ Bush, this was a fine example of her work, but she’d get laughed out of every office on the Beach.