She shook her head. “He has brothers, a mother, people up in Bradenton. They can do it.”
Ah, problems with the in-laws. Alfie nodded, got those names, and told her he’d get back to her later.
The sneeze came on the way to the car. It was a big one and somehow brought on a whole bunch of new questions about the sister. Men kill their girlfriends, but they don’t often kill sisters they hang out with. Something about a sister – no matter how much you hate her, you don’t shoot her in the heart the way you want to. Alfie’s throat itched too. That itch reminded him that things aren’t always the way they seem. Jumping to conclusions was the one thing you should never do in police work.
It started with the sister and went to the gun. Julie said her husband didn’t keep a handgun, but there was a rifle in his truck. There was no rifle in the truck parked by the boat ramp. And no boat either. Where was the boat? Alfie drove to High and Dry, the marine storage where Julie said Lustfield kept his boat.
Pete Mulvey, an old geezer from another era, wearing a wife-beater and cutoffs, told him, “Yeah, Reed come by this mornin’ and took out the boat.”
“You saw him go out?”
“Oh, yeah. He was going south down to Naples to look at some property from the water.”
“Anybody with him?” Alfie asked.
“Some dude. I didn’t get a real good look at him. Seemed like a city feller.”
Alfie snorted. “City feller” had another meaning down here. He went back to the parking lot and slapped his forehead when he easily located a second Blackwolf truck. He called the chief.
“It’s Rose.”
“What you got?” Hogle said.
“Looks like Reed Lustfield’s on a fishing trip down to Naples today.”
“No shit.” Hogle grunted.
Got him. “The company has more than one truck.”
Silence on the other end.
If they had a few more people on the job, they could have figured that out a whole lot sooner. ’Course, they were working three towns out of their jurisdiction. “Lydia Dale is his sister,” Alfie added.
“Any way you can reach Lustfield?”
“He left his cell phone and wallet home, but I’ll see what I can do.”
Alfie called some of the numbers Julie had given him. Second call, he got a name for the Blackwolf foreman who usually drove the second Ford truck, the one with the license plate of the death truck in Paradise. Name Everett, another high school contact. Just before sunset, the coast guard located Lustfield’s Grady-White just down the coast at a marina in Punta Gorda, where Lustfield had stopped for gas and a grouper sandwich.
It had been a long day, but Alfie wanted to make things right with Julie before he headed north to Paradise, where it now looked like an old story dating from high school had played out in one final rejection. Lydia had said no to a deadly suitor for the very last time. This kind of thing should never have happened in Paradise, but a lot of things should never happen.
Alfie turned into the subdivision where Julie lived. He’d been too busy to call during the investigation. But now he wanted to apologize for what Pride had done – getting the shooter/suicide wrong and devastating her needlessly. For all he knew Lustfield wasn’t having an affair at all. All these things were in Alfie’s head. He wanted to be a good cop and erase that look of horror Julie Lustfield had when she found her husband’s wallet and cell phone – the suicide message that wasn’t.
And then, as he cruised closer to the house, he saw the lights on and heard the stereo blasting an eighties house-party song: “Dance to the Music.” Inside, Julie’s friends were doing just that. Alfie got out of the car, puzzled by the party scene clearly visible through the living room picture window. He started up the front walk, saw the chips and dip on the coffee table and the drinks flowing, and slowly realized that Julie had done what he’d told her to do. She’d called her friends to be with her in her time of mourning. It’s him, she’d said, but he’d read her wrong. She’d spoken with relief, not sorrow. He shook his head. Maybe in all these hours, no one had called to tell her different.
Alfie turned around and got back in his car, where he sat in the dark, drumming his fingers to the beat. Funny how the two men both left their wallets home on the same day. What was the meaning in that? When the song finally changed, he picked up his cell and placed the call. The phone inside the Lustfield house rang and rang. None of the revelers stopped to pick up. When voice mail finally beeped, Alfie left a message for Julie: Lustfield had been located alive on his Grady-White down by Punta Gorda and was on his way home. At least he could tell himself he warned her.
Such a Lucky, Pretty Girl by Persia Walker
I was fifteen when my stepfather died. I don’t remember much about it. The doctors said I didn’t want to. “Selective amnesia,” they called it. Whatever it was, I thanked God for it. For years, I managed to put that time out of my mind. For years, everything was fine.
Until the Snow case.
They still talk about Chrissie Snow on West 86th Street. They still whisper about how she looked coming down, like a doll, with her T-shirt billowing out and her hair trailing behind her. She didn’t claw at the air or put out her hands in any desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.
She simply came down. Fast.
It was three o’clock on an icy Saturday afternoon in mid-January. My partner and I caught the call. Chrissie was still warm when we got there.
Even sprawled on a sidewalk, in a pool of blood, she was lovely, with a mass of soft bronze hair and ebony eyelashes that beat any they sell over the counter. She couldn’t have been much more than sixteen – seventeen, at most. She wore a pastel-pink T-shirt with strawberry-colored bows dotting the collar, light-blue jeans, and pale-blue socks. She was on her stomach, her hair fanned out, blood trickling from her ears, her right leg bent at an impossible angle. Stab wounds punctured her chest. Her right hand gripped a panel of curtain. The left side of her face was crushed, but her right eye was good, and it was open. She moved her lips, struggling to speak or breathe, but nothing came out – nothing but a bubble of blood.
Seconds later, her struggle was over.
Such a pretty girl, said an inner voice. The words chilled my soul.
We were standing before an old tenement from the early 1900s. Six floors up, I could see an open window, and a curtain flapping in the breeze.
The emergency medical team declared the girl dead at the scene. The uniforms held back rubberneckers and questioned those on the street. Ellis Bates of the Crime Scene Unit photographed and measured the scene and the body. My partner and I checked her for ID.
Lee went through her pockets. “Found something,” he said, and pulled a note from her back pocket. “It’s got the name of a hotel. Very expensive, very first-class. You’ll recognize it.”
When I saw it, I did.
The place was swanky, all right. Nothing you’d think a kid could’ve afforded on her own.
Lee and I joined Bates in going into the building. The lock on the front door was broken, and so was the one on the inner door. Stylish, it wasn’t, but the place was a rare haven in Manhattan for low-income, rent-stabilized tenants. A narrow, creaking elevator took us up in a jerky ride. We got off on the sixth floor and walked down a narrow, funky hallway, counting doors till we came to the one that seemed right.
It was unlocked.
We entered the apartment to a gust of frigid air. It was a two-bedroom that looked as though it had been cut off of a neighboring unit. The kitchen wasn’t much more than a sliver. The place was austere, devoid of knickknacks. It was immaculate, with the precise cleanliness of an institution.
The apartment ran along the front of the building. I went from room to room, checking the windows. Those in the kitchen, living room, and bathroom were fine; the one in the bedroom was not. There were the gaping window and the flapping curtain I’d seen from the street. Dark-red dots spattered the wall next to the window and the hardwood floor.