One night I found myself in front of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, staring at a thimble-sized pockmark in the wall, trying to see my own spattered blood deep in the grimy brick.
The next day I honored my mother's memory and this time used my brain. I contacted a lawyer in West Palm Beach, Florida. His family name had been scratched into my mother's address book decades ago. She and the matriarch of his family had some kind of never-discussed relationship. The lawyer was the woman's son, and my own mother had often urged me to "just meet him. He's a bright boy you could learn from."
I can't remember how he managed to convince me to fly south to see him. Perhaps it was the confidence and pure, simple logic in his voice. It wasn't condescending. It wasn't presumptuous. It wasn't overtly high-minded. He was the one who set me up in the research shack when I told him I wanted someplace isolated and completely different from where I'd come from. He's the one who arranged to use my departmental payout to buy into the ground floor of a new South Florida Internet research site. For the first time in a long time, he became the one person I trusted, and it paid off.
Out on the river I heard the burble of Cleve's outboard, the noise growing louder as he ferried Hammonds and his team back to the boat ramp. They'd have the child's body with them now, still wrapped tight until they got it to some morgue and the forensics guys could go over it.
As they went by less than 150 feet away through the cypress, I heard Cleve slightly rev the engine, letting me know he'd kept my place a secret, for now. But I knew I'd be back in a squad room soon enough, answering more questions. And I also knew I needed to talk to my lawyer before I let that happen.
CHAPTER 4
I was on the interstate, back in the fumes, back in the dull bake of the sun on concrete, back in the aggressive hurry up, back in the world.
I'd spent the morning staring out at the wet forest, watching the sun leak through the canopy and spackle the ferns and pond apple leaves and haircap moss below. I hadn't given nature much thought before coming here. I only studied the nature of humans on the Philadelphia streets, and it wasn't anything out of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. People did things for pretty basic reasons and it has been that way for a lot longer than most of us will admit. We haven't changed much since we first gathered as tribes. Just the stuff around us changed. Hunger and fear, love and jealousy, greed and hate still rule us. You could put that down in the middle of the swamp or at the corner of Broad and Passyunk and it was still going to be the same.
I'd made a pot of black coffee on the wood stove in my shack and then sat at my empty table, sipping. Then I packed up a gym bag with clothes and a shaving kit and paddled back down to the ranger station where I used the phone to call my lawyer. Cleve was nowhere in sight.
"Gone up to headquarters," said his assistant, a young crew-cut kid who always seemed to have a crease in his uniform and a chip on his shoulder. The only time he seemed civil was when he was asking me if he could borrow the pickup truck I left parked in the visitor's lot for days at a time. "Didn't say when he'd be back," the kid said, obviously miffed at being called in to cover. "What the hell happened this morning?"
I looked at him like an adult offended by his demanding tone and his use of profanity, and answered with the same flat voice I always used with him. "I have no idea."
I went to the campsite restrooms where I showered and shaved, and then tossed my bag into my truck and headed south for the Palm Beach County Courthouse. And now I was bunched in with traffic, fighting with the other daily warriors for a moving spot on the highway.
After an hour of working along the middle lanes of I-95 at something approaching the speed limit, I slid onto the Clematis Street exit and crawled through traffic until I found the parking lot I always used when I came to the city. The old guy who worked the lot always recognized my midnight blue F-150 even if it had been two months since I'd been back. He always had a spot for me. I always had a twenty-dollar bill for him.
The temperature here felt ten degrees hotter than the river. As I walked the four blocks to the courthouse I could feel the beads of sweat sliding down the middle of my back. I was dressed in my civilized clothes: khaki trousers, a short-sleeved and unironed white cotton shirt and a pair of beaten Docksides. It was a look I adopted from the boat captains I'd seen in the few restaurants I'd visited, or in some hall of bureaucracy where they gathered for permits or licensing. It might seem shabby by northern standards, but was acceptable almost anywhere in South Florida. It was also the polar opposite of the look on Billy Manchester.
As I crossed the street onto the block that held the new county courthouse, I could see Billy waiting for me in the shade of a newly transplanted, half-matured Washington palm.
Standing with one hand in his pocket and the other cradling a manila envelope, he was looking off in the opposite direction and was, as usual, impeccable. He was dressed in an off-white linen suit that must have been a thousand-dollar Ferragamo and seemed brilliant next to his dark skin. His silk tie was pulled up tight to his freshly shaved throat, and his hair was closely cropped to the shape of his skull. He had one of those sharp-angled, perfect profiles you rarely see outside of the made-up world of television or movies, and at five foot eleven and a trim 160, that's probably where you'd think you'd seen him before.
As I approached I saw two young women in summery suits pass purposely through Billy's line of sight and flash two equally purposeful smiles. He grinned and tipped his head and just as they began to change course toward him, he gracefully turned to me, extended his hand and deflected the ladies without a trace of discourtesy. As the women floated off I wondered how he did it, but not why.
"M-M-Max," he said in greeting. "Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy. L-Let's eat."
Billy Manchester is the most intelligent person I have ever met. And when I first talked to him on the phone I had an immediate intuition that he would not screw me.
After feeling him out a bit and after I explained the Philadelphia street shooting, we talked several times long distance about cop procedures, civil court possibilities, investment and tax laws. I never felt he was pumping me. In fact, it was more like him spilling valuable information to me. Still, I checked him out. Law degree from Temple University. Business degree from Wharton. Published dozens of times in professional law journals. No record of a lecture series.
He had all the credentials for academia, but was never a teacher. He had all the paper for a brilliant trial lawyer, but never tried a case I could find.
I had a friend at the Philadelphia Daily News run a clip search for me and found little. As a young man Billy had gained some attention as a kid from the inner city with a bright academic future. There was a piece about him and a prominent North Philadelphia public school chess club winning some prestigious tournament. A clip on his graduation at the top of his class from Temple's law school. No mention of his parents.
How our mothers, a black woman from North Philadelphia and the white South Philly wife of a career cop, came to be friends, neither of us knew. We'd been raised in widely different ethnic neighborhoods. But we seemed to share a similar theory on the disparities in skin color and customs we grew up with: We knew it was there. You dealt with it when you had to. But most of the time, it only got in the way of things that mattered.