Cast of Shadows - v4 (19 page)

As long as other people were unparanoid, Canella’s job was uncomplicated. He could tail them from a single car length, take their pictures without a telephoto lens, record conversations with conspicuous microphones, get spontaneous answers to pointed questions. On most days Canella could pick up the truth as easily as his childhood hero, Harold Baines, picked up the laces on a slow, hanging curveball.

At the Brixton Diner, Philly’s waitress still maintained the ghost of a pretty smile but her hair and hips and the years since high school had beaten away the beautiful bitch she once was. “Ricky Weiss?” the waitress scoffed. “What do you want with him?”

“What do you care?” Canella asked.

The waitress, whose name was Debbie, laughed. “Whatever.”

“So you know him?”

“I know Ricky,” she said. “It’s a small town. And as far as that jerk goes, I wish it was bigger.”

“No good, huh?”

The waitress shrugged. “He’s all right.” Philly could tell how it would be with this one — she would offer an honest clue and then retreat. Another clue, another retreat. But he had time and money for a nice tip, and the diner was mostly empty.

“Do you know where he lives?”

“In a
trailer,
” she scoffed. “Why do you want to know?”

“Maybe he’s won a prize.”

“A cash prize?” The waitress opened her eyes wide, scraping mascara against one lens of her glasses.

“Maybe.”

“How much?”

Philly threw up his hands. The waitress gave him directions.

When lunch arrived a few minutes later, Philly engaged her again. “The other day, was Ricky in here with a couple of strangers?”

“Yeah, he was, actually.” The waitress didn’t ask what this had to do with Ricky’s prize. “A man and a woman. The man was a judge.”

“A judge?”

“Yep. Ricky kept calling him ‘Judge’ something.”

“Do you have any idea what they talked about?”

“No, but they left fifteen dollars for three coffees.”

“Hmm.”

“And whatever they were talking about, it made Ricky real mad. He was yelling something about them not having some money for him that they were supposed to have. He yelled something about a rip-off or something like that.” The waitress looked down at Philly as if she’d suddenly figured something out. “Ohhhh, okay,” she said, and grinned.

Philly smiled and nodded, wondering what sense the waitress was making of it all in her head. Then he asked in a whisper, “Is this the best coffee in town?”

The waitress shook her head. “Mess-o Espresso,” she said in a loud voice.

An hour later, Canella sat on a short wall of cut shale that bordered some young trees and other flowering greens outside the elementary school. Alice Pantini, school receptionist, sat to Philly’s left, her red skirt stretched judiciously around her knees. Between them were two Mess-o Espresso coffees.

“Yeah, the Seavers or Deavers, something like that. They were both doctors. Said they were moving to town.” Alice took a sip from her cup, judged it too hot with a pucker, and set it back down. “I don’t know what they make these cups out of at Mess-o Espresso but it’ll keep your coffee hot all day.”

“They said they were doctors, is that right?”

“Yeah. But they aren’t, are they? They seemed nice at the time, but I knew something was fishy.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“The only doctors ever want to practice around here are the ones that grew up here. People are mostly trying to get out of Brixton, not into it.”

“Huh.”

“So if they’re not doctors, who were those two?”

“Actually, they really are doctors.”

“Oh.” Alice seemed disappointed.

“Any idea what business they’d have with a guy named Rick Weiss?”

“Ricky Weiss?” Alice tucked her lower lip under the upper and leaned away. “Could be just about anything with that one. He’s always got some sort of scheme going.”

“No kidding?”

“He never has any money, though, which is just as well, because if he did he’d just throw it away on some crazy thing or other.”

“Do you know what he’s been planning lately?”

The temperature of Alice’s coffee was finally to her liking. “I think I heard it was mulch.”

“Mulch?”

“Yeah. He knows a guy at the lumberyard. He knows another guy with a chipper. Ricky’s got an old truck. He’s going to be the mulch magnate of Brixton, I guess.” She laughed.

“He still works at the golf course, though, right?”

“Oh, yeah. And he does mulch on weekends. Any of that help you?”

“Maybe,” Philly said. “But you’re very kind. Thanks for having coffee with me.”

“Oh sure,” Alice said. She held up her cup and licked her lips. “Mess-o Espresso.”

Canella looked at his watch. He’d never make the last flight back to Chicago. “Is there anything to do around here?”

“We’re not known for much,” Alice said. “Nothing besides being the birthplace of Jimmy Spears.”

“Who’s that?”

“Jimmy Spears? The football player? You didn’t notice the big sign on the way into town?”

“No, didn’t see the sign. But I remember him. Played at Northwestern.” Canella remembered a game in which Spears threw for some ridiculous number of yards and knocked him out of a five-dollar gambling pool he’d entered with some friends. “Is he still in the NFL?”

Alice nodded. “Miami. We all wish he’d play more than he does. It makes the games on TV a whole lot more fun. Some people got satellite dishes just to watch him stand on the sidelines every week.”

“Were you working at the school when he went here?”

“Yes, I was.” Alice leaned forward again. Her smile was tobacco yellow and the joints where her teeth met were dark brown.

“Nice kid?”

“Very nice.” Alice said. “All the teachers liked him. All the girls liked him. All the boys liked him. By the time he graduated he was president of student council, captain of the Class A champion football team, won a bunch of ribbons showing cattle. Everyone’s still real proud of him. Of course, the good ones get up and leave town, to Omaha or Lincoln or wherever. The others, the losers like Ricky Weiss, they’re the ones that stick around, which is why this little village will never be more than it is. Jimmy and Ricky were in the same class, I think.”

“What about these kids?” Canella nodded at the bunches of children improvising their recess on a grass infield framed by a bus circle.

“These kids are still young,” she said. “It’s up at the high school they all become stinkers. All except Jimmy.”

Canella drove in rectangles around the local farms, which radiated from the town like bonus squares on a Scrabble board. When he became tired, he pulled over and called Big Rob.

“What are you working on out there?” Big Rob asked, after his friend had described the remoteness of his location. “The usual. Cheating husband,” he said. “Wife wants some more details, but I don’t know if they’re out here to be found. To tell you the truth, I dread this kind of shit.”

“Cheating spouses?” Big Rob said. “That’s our bread and butter, Philly.”

Canella said, “I’m telling you, Biggie. Get out of the city. Come up by me. The North Shore. Do you know what the fastest-growing part of my business is? I call it ‘babysitting.’ No shit. Eighth-graders. Ninth-graders. Sometimes even older kids. Sometimes even
younger
. Three to four grand a pop. You follow them after school: to parties, basketball games, on Saturday nights while they cruise Main Street. The parents wanna know if they’re tripping on X. Or diddling. Or hanging with the wrong crowd. They just want to be sure the kids are going where they say they’re going, and it’s
so
easy, Biggie. Christ. These boys and girls have no clue I’m following them, and the parents will pay more to have their kids chased than they will their spouses.”

“Because they aren’t trying to hide the withdrawals from one another,” Biggie said with an understanding lilt.

“Yeah, they’re both in on it. This predivorce legwork takes it out of me, though, I tell you.”

Around six, Philly trolled by Ricky Weiss’s trailer and saw a red pickup in the drive that hadn’t been there two hours before. He parked his rented Focus in the street and walked up to the aluminum door without any thought to what he expected to find inside. He wanted to see his face, hear his voice, and get a look around his home just so he could tell Jackie Moore he did it. Fatten her file. Maybe he could get him talking somehow. Find out something that might connect him to Davis Moore.

He had thought of a story to tell Rick Weiss, and it was a thin one as far as Canella was concerned. He was counting on Ricky being as dense as everyone said.

Philly knocked and a man appeared on the other side of the screen. He was short and thin, and his back and legs bent in strange places, like pipe cleanerers. On his head was a mesh baseball cap with the name of a manufacturing company Canella didn’t know. He wore a white V-neck undershirt with so many stains and handprints Philly guessed he rarely wore anything over it. Through its cheap synthetic weave he could see matted brown chest hair that spread like kudzu up to the shaving line just above the man’s collarbone. There was a tattered leather belt looped around the waist of his grass-streaked jeans. In front was a big buckle with a horse on it, which made Philly wonder when he last saw a real buckle worn unironically on a belt. The man didn’t open the door.

“Yeah?”

“Hi. Are you Ricky?”

“Rick,” he said.

“Rick. Right. Sorry. My name is Phil Canella and I’m a reporter for the
Miami Herald
. I’m doing a feature story about Jimmy Spears and I heard you knew him growing up.”

“Yeah.” Weiss put his nose against the screen and peered at him. “I know Jimmy. What do you want to know?” Philly thought he looked appropriately suspicious.

“Can I come in?”

Ricky pushed the door open and Canella stepped past him. A city boy, he had never been inside a trailer home before and this one was nicer than he expected, larger than he would have thought. The kitchen to their left had only a small number of tiny cabinets but the counters were clean and clutter-free. The living room was dusted and the end tables flanking the couch were bare except for a beer can centered on a wooden coaster. Through a cracked door Philly saw the made bed, and the decorative pillows lined up across the headboard. Ricky has a wife, he thought. Or a girlfriend.

“So what do you want to know?” Weiss said, looking him over slowly.

“Just a few quick questions,” Philly said, getting Weiss’s permission to take a chair at the kitchen table.

“Yeah.”

“What was he like in high school?”

“What was he like?”

Philly nodded and began writing in his black, pocket-sized, vinyl-covered notebook, which he had plucked from a leather over-the-shoulder briefcase. He wrote down the brand of beer Weiss was drinking and the size of his television and doodled the shape of the scar that intersected with his right eyebrow.

“He was all right. For a jock,” Weiss said. He retrieved his beer and took a chair on an adjacent side of the table. “He didn’t hold it over everybody like some of them.”

“How well did you know him?”

“What are you after?”

“Like I said: a story about Jimmy Spears.”

“There are a hundred people in this town who knew Jimmy better than I did. Why don’t you talk to them?”

Again, no good answer. “Maybe I already did.”

“If you had, then you wouldn’t need me, would you?”

Canella shut his notebook. “I’m sorry. Someone told me you knew him. I’ve made a mistake.” He was trying to act nonchalant, and in doing so, left the notebook unprotected on the table. As soon as Philly said the word “mistake” he understood that he really had made one.

Weiss reached over and snatched it, turning in his chair to protect it.

“Hey!” Philly stood up and tried to reach over Ricky’s shoulder, but the greenskeeper spun away. He tore quickly through the pages and Canella tried to imagine what sense he might make from his notes.

They faced each other, Philly in the kitchen and Ricky in the living room but hardly more than a body’s length apart, and Canella watched helplessly as Ricky squinted his way through scrawled transcriptions of conversations at the diner and the elementary school and notes from other cases that would make no sense at all to him. The one thing Philly knew he wouldn’t find was a single word about Jimmy Spears, NFL football, or the Miami Dolphins.

He stopped on one page and put his finger on the paper, either to mark his place or to make a point. “You’re with the judge, aren’t ya?”

Judge?
Philly thought. Maybe this wouldn’t be a waste of time after all. “Who’s that?” he said.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Ricky said in a growling drawl. Canella punctuated his conversation with that word all the time, but Weiss was able to startle him with it now.

“I’m not
fucking
with you,” Philly said. “Give me the notebook.”

Ricky held it behind his back. “I know what the judge is up to.” There was a nervous edge to his voice, but he was also laughing with the relief of an Italian grandmother leaving confession.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Canella said.

“
Now
you’re fucking with me.” Ricky Weiss glanced at the detective and then turned back to the notebook, which he held very close to his face. “You and Forak are in this together. What are you supposed to do? Take care of me? Blackmail me? Shut me up?”

“I don’t know anybody named Forak,” Philly said truthfully. “I don’t know any judge. But maybe we can help each other.”

“Bullshit.”

Canella was frustrated and embarrassed enough to think about leaving. He stood between Weiss and the door. Even at his age, it would be fairly easy to make a run for it. He hated to lose that notebook, though. “A man came to you a few days ago,” he said quickly. “A man and a woman. You met at the diner.”

Ricky smiled with half his face. “I thought you said you didn’t know the judge.”

“He’s not a judge,” Philly said. “He’s a doctor.”

“What’s going on?”

Canella, who was a professional liar, hesitated before telling the truth. “That’s what I came here to find out.”