“Matrimonial surveillance. Man wants to know if his wife’s playing around.”
“How come you’re not handling it yourself?”
“I got made,” Warren said.
“Oh my.”
“Yeah.”
“Shame on you,” she said. “Who’s the client?”
“Man named Frank Summerville. Partner in a law firm I do work for.”
“And the lady?”
“Leona Summerville.”
“When do I start?”
“Do you have a car?”
“A very good car.”
“What kind?”
“The nondescript kind.”
“Best kind there is.”
“Otto used to drive a faded blue Buick Century.”
“I drive a faded gray Ford.”
“Mine’s a faded green Chevy,” Toots said.
Warren took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He put it on the table, tapped it with his hand, and said, “The lady’s address and phone number. Case you need to use it for whatever nefarious purpose.”
Toots smiled as if she already had in mind a possible use for Leona Summerville’s phone number.
“Five pictures of her,” Warren said, “one in color, the rest black-and-white. A phone number where you can reach me, and a drop box you can use, all right here in the envelope.”
“The drop box is in the envelope?” Toots asked, deadpan.
“No, wise guy, the drop box is at Mail Boxes, Etc., on Lucy’s Circle. The key’s in the envelope. Aren’t you going to ask how much the job pays?”
“I’m assuming I’ll get what Otto paid me.”
“And what’s that?”
“Fifty an hour.”
“Nice try.”
“It’s what Otto paid me,” Toots said, and shrugged innocently.
“Bullshit,” Warren said.
Toots shrugged again.
“So how much are you paying?” she asked.
“One-sixty for an eight-hour day.”
“Nice try.”
“Hey, come on, that’s twenty dollars an hour.”
“I know how to divide, thanks. Thanks for the coffee, too,” Toots said, and stood up. “It was nice meeting you.”
“Sit down,” Warren said.
“Why? So you can buy a reformed user for coolie wages? No way, Mr. Chambers.”
“We’re back to Mr. Chambers, huh?”
“Only because you’re fucking me around.”
“Sit down, okay?”
She sat.
“How does twenty-five an hour sound?” he said.
“Forty sounds better,” she said.
“Toots,” he said, “we both know the going rate.”
“I guess we do.”
“The going rate is thirty-five an hour.”
“That’s right. So why’d you offer me twenty?”
“Because if you’re still doing coke, you’d have grabbed it.”
“Which means you didn’t believe me, right?”
“Not when you asked for fifty. Fifty sounded like somebody figuring how much dope that kind of money would buy.”
“No, fifty was to show you I wasn’t desperate for the job.”
“Are you desperate?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her.
“I am,” she said.
He kept looking at her.
“I need the job,” she said. “You want to give me twenty, that’s fine, I’ll take it. But that doesn’t mean I’m doing dope.”
“I’ll give you thirty-five,” he said. “Plus expenses. The going rate.”
“Thank you,” she said, and nodded.
“You want some more coffee?” he asked.
“No. I want to get to work,” she said, and picked up the envelope.
The security guard at the gate weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He was wearing a brown uniform, and there was a very large pistol in a holster at his waist.
“Yes?” he said to Matthew.
The unadorned word bordered on rudeness.
The man had jug ears, a little black mustache, black hair trimmed close to his head, and brown eyes spaced too closely together. Except for his size, he bore an unfortunate resemblance to Adolf Hitler. The few words he’d spoken had been delivered without a trace of a redneck accent. Matthew figured him for imported talent.
“I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Mrs. Brechtmann,” he said.
“Your name?”
“Matthew Hope.”
The guard pressed a button on the intercom.
“Mrs. Brechtmann?”
“Yes, Karl?”
“Man named Matthew Hope to see you. Says he has an eleven o’clock appointment.”
Says he has an appointment.
“Show him in.”
“Yes, m’am.”
He hit another button. The gate began sliding open.
“Follow the road straight back,” he said. “Park on the right.”
Morrie Bloom had once told Matthew that a cop was trained to think of all lawbreakers as bad guys. The good guys versus the bad guys. Ask any cop. The trouble with this sort of thinking, however, was that it left no room for differentiating between a man who’d illegally parked his car and a man committing a murder. This was what caused too many cops to behave like storm troopers when they approached a man who had exceeded the speed limit by two miles an hour. The man had broken the law. Hence the man was a bad guy. Hence he could expect the same treatment afforded a rapist. Argue with the cop, try to tell him he didn’t have to behave this way with an honest citizen, and he’d slap you in handcuffs for resisting arrest, and then toss you into the backseat of his car like a plastic bag of garbage.
It took one highway patrolman thirty seconds to destroy the television, motion picture, and book image of the law enforcer as a sympathetic hero.
Thirty seconds.
Morrie said cops should think about that every now and then.
It had taken Karl Hitler here thirty seconds to raise the hackles on Matthew’s neck, and he was only a security guard.
Matthew nodded icily, put the Ghia in gear, and drove through the open gate and up the road. In the rearview mirror, he could see Karl standing in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, staring at the car as it moved away from the gate.
The level road wound leisurely through stands of pine and palm.
Sunshine glanced off the polished tan hood of the car.
There was the sound of muffled waves nudging an unseen shore, and then the unmistakable aroma of salt and sea wafted through the open windows.
Florida.
Matthew smiled.
And eased the car around another bend in the road.
The Brechtmann house came suddenly into view.
It sat in majestic splendor some fifty feet back from a magnificent vista of the Gulf, the waters on this clear sunny day shading from an emerald green in the shallows to a cobalt blue in the deep beyond. Most of the sand on the southern end of Fatback Key had been washed away in last September’s hurricane, but the Brechtmann beach had been spared, seeming proof that the rich only got richer. According to Warren’s report, the Spanish-style mansion had been standing on this very spot since sometime around the turn of the century, when Jacob Brechtmann — then twenty-eight years old — carried his seventeen-year-old bride, Charlotte, to Calusa, where he gifted her with the house and erected a new brewery somewhat smaller than the one he already owned in Brooklyn.
The house had withstood at least five hundred hurricanes since it had been built, and it was still here, a seemingly permanent monument to Jacob Brechtmann’s moneymaking prowess and his expansionist bent.
Matthew parked the Ghia, got out of the car. and walked to the front door.
Leona supposed she still loved that about him. his dedication to the law. Tell Frank he could no longer practice law, and he would cease to exist. The law was his life. In his study here at home, bookshelves lined three of the walls. They contained rows and rows of books concerning the law. There were windows set above the topmost shelves, creating a clerestory effect. Sunlight slanted through the windows. Dust motes from a Charles Dickens novel lazily floated on the air. Leona could imagine a bewigged British barrister sitting behind Frank’s massive desk, pondering a brief, Big Ben tolling a quarter past the hour. Eleven-fifteen. Tooled black leather set into the desk’s richly burnished mahogany top. A brass lamp with a green glass shade. A lawyer’s room. Her husband’s room at home. She felt like an intruder.