Crime (24 page)

— There, look! Tianna shouts, as the first city road signs appear before them:

Bologna 32

Punta Gorda 76

Lennox feels the kiss of solace. They’d done it, crossed the state: the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Florida always looks as if it’s about the same size as the UK on the maps, but it feels smaller. He starts to relax. Lets the exhaustion ease out of his shoulders. Driving in America’s a piece of piss, when you get used to it. The roads are bigger, better and, best of all, straight. He’ll check that this Chet guy is on the level. Then he’ll call Trudi, apologise for his behaviour and head right back.

The need to know what has happened to Robyn nags at him. But that’s Chet’s department; he’s more than fulfilled his obligation. Thanks to him, this wee Tianna was now safe from scum like Johnnie and that Lance character. And he’ll find a way to get at those bastards. There are international contacts in the law enforcement world and he’ll put the word out. There are always ways and means.

That song has come on again: Brad Paisley’s ‘Alcohol’. Now they’re crooning along to it together. He’s a little disturbed by that knowing way she chants the lyrics.
It isn’t right for a young
girl
. But she isnae a bad kid. She’s funny and clever and she’s got spirit and you can take to her. She deserves better
.

Tianna is fascinated with Trudi’s magazine. — Will you get married in a castle? How neat would that be!

— It’s awfay dear.

— It is
so
dear, she says, picking him up wrong. — Madonna, she got married in a castle in Skatlin.

— Aye. Somewhere in the Highlands, Lennox confirms. It was to an English guy who made crime films. Lennox had gone to see one. He’d liked it. It was nonsense of course, like most crime in fiction and on television, but it kept the action moving along. It entertained.

Is crime essential, he ponders, in order to provide such diverting extravaganza? Where would we be without human frailties? Hollywood would be fucked. Perhaps we owe the gangster and the criminal a lot. By supplying the crime they created demand. For security guards, cops, screws, lawyers, builders, administrators, technicians, politicians, writers, actors, directors. Where would we be without them?

He can’t think of the castle’s name though. — It’s a big castle. Up by Perth or somewhere. They have loads of dos there.

— Is it near where you live?

He wonders about that. A three-hour drive? Yes and no. Is Muirhouse near Barnton? Yes and no. — Kind of.

Now Tianna is explaining baseball to him. Takes a notebook from her bag and draws the diamond, elucidating it all with care and patience. Innings: the top and bottom of. Pitchers, hitters and fielders. Four balls. Three strikes. Loading the bases. Home runs. The bullpen. She likes the Braves from Atlanta, Georgia, because they are the nearest Major League team to Alabama.

She shows him the cards. Lennox sees that they are not valuable, all modern reissues with their 1992 Kitemark. Scots Bobby. Mickey Mantle. Joe DiMaggio. Babe Ruth. Reggie Jackson. Willie Mays. Most of them probably dead before she was even thought of. But the names mean little to Lennox outside of the movies. He seems to remember that Marilyn Monroe fucked one of them. DiMaggio.
That’s it, the Simon and Garfunkel song. She also shagged
the
likes of JFK and Arthur Miller. Was she a gold-digger, attracted to powerful men, or a trophy shag for rich sleazebags? Or was it, as the feature writers might gush, the devastating mutual attraction of the charismatic, which both parties were powerless to resist?

— Yeah, I reckon you oughta get married in a castle, Tianna is persisting. — That would be awesome.

Lennox plays with the thought: him in full Highland dress, Trudi in what else but bridal white. Brides all seem the same to him though, especially when they have their hair scraped back; that stern, graven-imaged look. He doesn’t want Trudi like that. She could say something with her hair pinned back that would cut him ten times more deeply than the exact same words would with it down and flowing. He’d read an article in
Perfect Bride
stating that the average British bride weighs nine pounds
above
her normal weight at the wedding. The conventional wisdom of the boozer; they starve themselves to look great in the wedding pictures, then pig out on the honeymoon and engage in a lifelong battle against obesity. Not so, apparently. Pre-wedding nerves encourage overeating so they go into the ring overweight. This sounds true: it explains the number of bloaters in the
Evening News
pictures. — I dunno. It’s a funny thing, Lennox considers, pursing his lips, — Trudi, my girlfriend … my fiancée, he corrects himself, — she wants a big wedding. I’d rather spend the money on a good holiday, you know, a honeymoon.

— Will you try and make a baby on your honeymoon? Tianna’s searching knowingness stings then nauseates him.
She’s just a wee lassie, teasing you
. Skin tingling, he looks back to the road. A silver car overtakes them, slows down. It was the second or third time. — That’s the sort of thing that the two people involved talk about. It’s not for public discussion. His tone is haughty and he can hear his sister in it.

Tianna is puzzled by his response. — But people do talk about it. Brad Pitt told everybody that Angelina Jolie is having their baby.

— That’s Hollywood stars, but. They want to tell everybody everything because the publicity is like a drug … like candy to
them
. They need it. A lot of people are into it now, but then they find that it’s too much like candy: it makes them sick afterwards, he reflects, looking at the silver car ahead.
Fucking prick. Where was the cunt going?

Tianna turns away and runs a brush through her mane. Scraping it back she secures it with an elasticated band. It feels soft in her fingers, so different from Clemson’s; that hair that grew like spines on his moist skin. Her flesh crawls in recollection of the touch of his putrid lips. Then trembling up in the roof space, ladder pulled to her, and him shouting:
Where the fuck you gone, you lil’ whore
, her momma asleep downstairs, with the sedatives he’d given her. Thinking that it was better to go down and get it over with than live with that fear.

12

Bologna

TRUDI SIPS AT
her bitter coffee as she watches a grinning couple on the television, in workout gear, slowly cat-flexing with two large docile domestic felines. The idea is that this practice gives busy professionals the chance to combine fitness maintenance with quality pet time. The woman has the ginger cat’s chest supported on one outstretched palm, her other hand under its belly. She raises the animal in slow, rhythmic, repetitive motions. — Twenty on this side, twenty on the other, she says.

— Great, Melanie, the man grins, and Phoebe seems to be enjoying it too, as we cut to a close-up of the sleepy cat’s face. As we switch back to the man, he sits down on a bed and lifts the big tabby on to his shins. — This is a tricky one, but remember, if your cat gets uncomfortable and leaves, you’re going too fast, and he slowly raises the animal with a leg extension. — Slooowww … that’s the way, almost imperceptible. Luckily, Heidegger’s a little tired right now. One … two … three … I can’t emphasise enough the importance of keeping it slow and controlled … Melanie?

Trudi Lowe packs her gym gear into a small bag and heads round to the Crunch fitness studio on Washington Avenue. She has remembered Aaron Resinger saying, — I use Crunch. It’s functional and friendly. All shapes, all sizes, but everybody seriously working out. I don’t like gyms where people just go to pose.

The effeminate young man on the desk has attempted lofty indifference, but in response to what he clearly perceives as the exoticism of her tones, decides that gushing theatrics now suit his mood better. — My God, I love that accent, where are you from?

Trudi dutifully explains as she procures the day pass for twenty-four dollars. A self-respecting daughter of Caledonia, she switches back to sterling to assess relative value. Thinks of possible sweet add-ons, but it’s unlikely that Aaron will be around. He’ll be at work, selling high-end real estate. Surely.
Fancy meeting you here. Sorry I had to leave without saying goodbye. Forgive me? Coffee? Great
.

She has to think of him because when Trudi thinks of her fiancé all she experiences are waves of rage, frustration and despair. He had the nerve –
the fucking gall
– to ask her about the men she’d seen during their relationship hiatus, which
his
cheating had precipitated. Now Ray is taking a strange child –
a young girl
– from here to God knows where.

As she climbs the narrow stair from the reception area to the gym, a cold chill creeps up on her. She recalls Ray sitting on the ground, head in hands, moaning disturbing stuff about young girls in Thailand. The emotion twangs into a reverberating thought, igniting in a dark section of her brain, only gaining potency when she grasps that her fear isn’t for him.

Highway 41 slashes across the Everglades to Bologna, where it becomes a coastal road all the way up to Tampa. Despite the air conditioning in the car, Lennox’s hand greases the wheel’s leather covering. Trudi is getting further away and the kid next to him has fallen mute again, studying her cards. It seems a pattern: she cautiously raises her head above the parapet, then something in the present recalls the spoiled fruit of her own past, and the retreat into herself is unequivocal. No matter: he can play the long-ball game.

The Tamiami Trail, in its south-west Florida section, is a blemished conduit of shopping malls, fast-food outlets and used-car dealerships that alloy into the city of Bologna. Some rudimentary guide notes on the Florida atlas explain that while it was named after one Italian city it was modelled on another: the miracle that was Venice. The similarity was to the degree that both relied on an extensive canal system for transit. This carriage, though, is pretty much of the leisure variety in Bologna,
FLA
. Retirees and second-home recreational sailors enjoy the watery network, which surges out from back gardens with docked boats into the ten thousand islands and beyond to the Gulf of Mexico.

Lennox contemplates the well-marked roads that lead to planned communities with their guarded security gates, Bermuda-grass vistas and dredged lakes. The advertising agencies have invented pastoral and tropical names like Spring Meadow, Ocean Falls and Coral Reef, unconnected to any geographical reality. But to the retirees of the northern states with their unforgiving winters, the notion of a sanctuary in the sun would have Arcadian appeal on the glossy brochures and websites. So the developers razed bare the lush terrain and threw up their prefabricated house frames, attached the panels and the cinder block, the PVC and plasterboard. Then they wrapped the residences in high boundary walls, despite selling them on the promise that crime in the region was negligible. They’d invariably finish the job by sticking an Old Glory up a flagpole, to flutter in lax entitlement.

Lennox and Tianna drive towards the hub of the community, which is more established than most that have sprung up in south-west Florida. The houses vary in scale of wealth and grandeur, many surrounded by mature palm trees, mangroves and less tropical vegetation. The small downtown area has superior retail outlets clustered under wrought-iron balconies in two-storey buildings, modelled on older Southern towns like Savannah, Charleston and New Orleans. Further down towards the marina it again grows blander; armies of condominiums line the coarse grass verges and lawns. Lennox rolls down the window as they cruise the narrow streets in the sun, the green Volkswagen miscast among the big 4×4s and the swank convertibles that proliferate. The glitzy wealth on parade should preclude crime. Everyone seems to have money here, but people with money often want other things. The most seductive of all being the illusion that it isn’t just their money that sets them apart from the rest of humanity.

The road ends at a wall, with a gated entrance and sign above it: GROVE BEACH CLUB AND PRIVATE MARINA.

— This is it, Tianna says excitedly.

Lennox pulls into the parking lot outside a row of offices and shops. The marina is busy; most of the moored boats are gargantuan, with several pristine ones in adjacent broker’s yards. Tall new constructions of condo blocks tower over the harbour. One is a work-in-progress, scaffolded, with Hispanic workers in hard hats bouncing along the gangways.

The lot is busy. Just as they’ve secured a parking space and left the car, a black Porsche, driven by a red-shirted white man with blond hair and shades, attempts to pull out and instead reverses into a stationary pickup truck. His convertible suffers minor damage at the rear. Furious at his own carelessness, he gets out the car and starts shouting at the man in the truck. — You goddamn idiot! What in hell’s name … my car!

The reluctant recipient of his attentions is a small, stocky Latino man in a hard hat and construction-worker clothes, who makes a flabbergasted appeal. — But … but … you backed right into me!

— I did not – don’t you – what the hell – where do you work? That site over there? The thyroid cartilage in the white man’s larynx bubbles as he points across the inlet to the development under construction.

The builder looks to the rising apartment block and falls silent.

The white man casts his glance towards Lennox and Tianna, who have been watching the exchange. Lennox turns away. — Did you see that? Excuse me, sir? The man’s insistence grates and Lennox stops and faces him. — Did you witness that? His mouth open: a snide air of belligerence invoking someone else.

— I did. Lennox slowly scans the complainant, then glances at the construction worker. He removes his shades and hooks them into the neck of the Ramones shirt and stares harshly at the white guy. — And I’d strongly advise that you apologise to this gentleman. He nods towards the Hispanic builder.

The authority in Lennox’s voice takes the man aback. The dark patches in the armpits of his shirt ebb a millimetre outwards. The skin on his face, around his sunglasses, flushes a deeper shade of red. — But I –