“Yes,” Christina said, “this story is serious trouble, Ray. I want to pack up and go home.”
“And give it to ABC? Are you nuts?” He opened the door a little more. “We’re getting so close.”
Christina tried to bait him. “How about we fly up to Spartanburg tomorrow? Do the biker segment, like we planned?”
Reynaldo loved to do motorcycle gangs, since they almost always attacked him while the tape was rolling. The Spartanburg story had a sex-slavery angle as well, but Flemm still didn’t bite.
“That’ll wait,” he said.
Christina checked both ways to make sure no one was coming down the hall. “You heard about Chloe Simpkins?”
Reynaldo Flemm shook his head. “I haven’t seen the news,” he admitted, “in a couple of days.”
“Well, she’s dead,” Christina said. “Murdered.”
“Oh, God.”
“Out by the stilt houses.”
“No shit? What an opener.”
“Forget it, Ray, it’s a mess.” She shouldered her way into his room. He sat down on the bed, his knees pressed together under the towel. A tape measure was coiled in his left hand. “What’s that for?” Christina asked, pointing.
“Nothing,” Flemm said. He wasn’t about to tell her that he had been measuring his nose in the mirror. In fact, he had been taking the precise dimensions of all his facial features, to compare proportions.
He said, “When is Chloe’s funeral? Let’s get Willie and shoot the stand-up there.”
“Forget it.” She explained how the cops would probably be looking for them anyway, to ask about the five hundred dollars. In its worst light, somebody might say that they contributed to Chloe’s death, put her up to something dangerous.
“But we didn’t,” Reynaldo Flemm whined. “All we got from her was Stranahan’s location, and barely that. A house in the bay, she said. A house with a windmill. Easiest five bills that woman ever made.”
Christina said, “Like I said, it’s a big mess. It’s time to pull out. Tell Maggie to go fly her kite for Hugh Downs.”
“Let’s wait a couple more days.” He couldn’t stand the idea of giving up; he hadn’t gotten beat up once on this whole assignment.
“Wait for what?” Christina said testily.
“So I can think. I can’t think when I’m sick.”
She resisted the temptation to state the obvious. “What exactly is the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing I care to talk about,” Flemm said.
“Ah, one of those male-type problems.”
“Fuck you.”
As she was leaving, Christina asked when he would be coming out of his hotel room to face the real world. “When I’m good and ready,” Flemm replied defensively.
“Take your time, Ray. Tomorrow’s interview is off.”
“You canceled it-why?”
“It canceled itself. The man died.”
Flemm gasped. “Another murder!”
“No Ray, it wasn’t murder.” Christina waved good-bye. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“That’s okay,” he said, sounding like a man on the mend, “we can always fudge it.”
12
AfterTimmy Gavigan’s funeral, Garcia offered Mick Stranahan a ride back to the marina.
“I noticed you came by cab,” the detective said.
“ Al, you got eyes like a hawk.”
“So where’s your car?”
Stranahan said, “I guess somebody stole it.”
It was a nice funeral, although Timmy Gavigan would have made fun of it. The chief stood up and said some things, and afterwards some cops young enough to be Timmy’s grandchildren shot off a twenty-one gun salute and accidently hit a power transformer, leaving half of Coconut Grove with no electricity. Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. It was the best outfit he owned; he’d thrown out all his neckties when he moved to the stilt house. Stranahan caught himself sniffling a little toward the end of the service. He made a mental note to clip the obit from the newspaper and glue it in Timmy Gavigan’s scrapbook, the way he promised. Then he would mail the scrapbook up to Boston, where Timmy’s daughters lived.
Driving back out the Rickenbacker Causeway, Garcia was saying, “Didn’t you have an old Chrysler? Funny thing, we got one of those shitheaps in a fire the other night. Somebody filed off the V.I.N. numbers, so we can’t trace the damn thing-maybe it’s yours, huh?”
“Maybe,” said Mick Stranahan, “but you keep it. The block was cracked. I was ready to junk it anyway.”
Garcia drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, which meant he was running out of patience. “Hey, Mick?”
“What?”
“Did you blow up that asshole’s Jag?” Stranahan stared out at the bay and said, “Who?”
“The doctor. The one who wants to kill you.”
“Oh.”
Something was not right with this guy, Garcia thought. Maybe the funeral had put him in a mood, maybe it was something else.
“We’re getting into an area,” the detective said, “that makes me very nervous. You listening, chico?”
Stranahan pretended to be watching some topless girl on a sailboard.
Garcia said, “You want to play Charlie Bronson, okay, but let me tell you how serious this is getting. Forget the doctor for a second.”
“Yeah, how? He’s trying to kill me.”
“Well, chill on that for a minute and think about this: Murdock and Salazar got assigned to Chloe’s murder. Do I have to spell it out, or you want me to stop the car so you can go ahead and puke?”
“Jesus,” said Mick Stranahan.
Detectives John Murdock and Joe Salazar had been tight with the late Judge Raleigh Goomer, the one Stranahan had shot. Murdock and Salazar had been in on the bond fixings, part of the A-team. They were not Mick Stranahan’s biggest fans. “How the hell did they get the case?”
“Luck of the draw,” Garcia said. “Nothing I could do without making it worse.”
Stranahan slammed a fist on the dashboard. He was damn tired of all this bad news.
Garcia said, “So they come out here to do a canvass, right? Talk to people at the boat ramp, the restaurant, anyone who might have seen your ex on the night she croaked. They come back with statements from two waitresses and a gas attendant, and guess who they say was with Chloe? You, Blue Eyes.”
“That’s a goddamn lie, Al.”
“You’re right. I know it’s a lie because I drive out here the next day on my lunch hour and talked to these same people myself. On my lunch hour! Show them two mugs, including yours, and strike out. Oh for ten. So Frick and Frack are lying. I don’t know what I can do about it yet-it’s a tricky situation, them sticking together on their story.” Garcia took a cigar from his breast pocket. Wrapper and all, he jammed it in the corner of his mouth. “I’m telling you this so you know how goddamn serious it’s getting, and maybe you’ll quit this crazy car-bombing shit and give me a chance to do my job. How about it?”
Absently, Stranahan said, “This is the worst year of my life, and it’s only the seventeenth of January.”
Garcia chewed the cellophane off the cigar. “I don’t know why I even bother to tell you anything,” he grumbled. “You’re acting like a damn zombie.”
The detective made the turn into the marina with a screech of the tires. Stranahan pointed toward the slip where his aluminum skiff was tied up, and Garcia parked right across from it. He kept the engine running. Stranahan tried to open the door, but Garcia had it locked with a button on the driver’s side.
The detective punched the lighter knob in the dashboard and said, “Don’t you have anything else you want to ask? Think real hard, Mick.”
Stranahan reached across and earnestly shook Garcia’s hand. “Thanks for everything, Al. I mean it.”
“Hey, are we having the same conversation? What the fuck is the matter with you?”
Stranahan said, “It’s been a depressing week.”
“Don’t you even want to know what the waitress and the pump jockey really said? About the guy with Chloe?”
“W hat guy?”
Garcia clapped his hands. “Good, I got your attention. Excellent!” He pulled the lighter from the dash and fired up the cigar.
“What guy?” Stranahan asked again.
Making the most of the moment, Garcia took his notebook from his jacket and read aloud: “White male, early thirties, approximately seven feet tall, two hundred fifty pounds, freckled, balding-”