Dead Last (11 page)

“What’re you talking about?”

“It’s there on your wife’s obituary. Turn it over.”

Thorn sighed and did as instructed.

On the flip side of the obituary was a portion of the society page. In the margin beside the pictures of men and women in tuxedos, pearls, stiff poses, and manufactured smiles, his name was printed in all caps.
THORN.

In bold black ink, someone had traced and retraced the letters four or five times—the way a kid with a crush will spell out the name of his true love, bearing down again and again in the same grooves.

“I don’t get it.”

“Looks to me like somebody’s got the hots for you.”

“You did this,” Thorn said.

“No, sir. I promise you I did not.”

“Then Mickey did it. She knew about me through Rusty.”

“That was my first thought. But we can rule that out.”

“Why?”

“I know this is weird, but Mickey had a thing about the color purple. Don’t know why. I questioned her about it several times, but she never said. Started in her childhood, is all I know. She had pens galore. Fountain pens, razor points, felt-tips, ballpoints. Always jotting down notes, marking up the margins of her books. All her pens had purple ink. Every single pen in her house. Not a red or a blue or a black to be found. And believe me, I looked. Searched top to bottom. Purple ink, every single one.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Believe it, Thorn. It was on her bedside table, just like that. Mickey lying there dead, and your name on the back of your wife’s obituary. The way it’s printed, going over and over the same lines, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out whoever the killer is, he’s got a powerful interest in you.”

ACT TWO

PURPLE BASEBALL BAT

EIGHT

OUT IN THE GRASSY CENTER
of the Floridian courtyard Gus Dollimore and the director of photography were staring up at the clouds. Not long ago April Moss wouldn’t have known why. But she did now.

For the last week she’d been getting an education in the finer points of TV production while several scenes from
Miami Ops
were being shot at the nursing home where her mother was rehabbing from knee surgery. Gus and the cameramen were looking up at the sky because they were waiting for the sun to move past a sucker hole in the clouds and give them a few minutes of precious sunlight, enough to go ahead and shoot their next scene. Natural light, as Gus liked to say, was a fickle bitch.

Set back twenty yards from where the scene would take place, and a few feet behind the canvas directors chairs and the cameras and the lights, were about twenty of the elderly residents of the Floridian nursing home, most of them in wheelchairs. For them this was the day’s recreation. Instead of falling asleep in front of their favorite game shows, they could drift off watching a real TV show being made.

As April crossed the yard, she spotted her mother sitting stiffly in her wheelchair parked in the back row of the audience. She picked her way through the crowd, settled into a folding chair beside her mom, and said hello, but Garvey Moss was in a sour mood and didn’t reply.

Since coming to the Floridian after a double knee replacement, Garvey had been in a major funk. Not doing her leg lifts, or riding the stationary bike. Refusing to walk. The pain was intolerable and the pain pills made her stupid. The stubborn woman wouldn’t budge from her wheelchair.

A full minute ticked away before she acknowledged April.

“TV people stand around more than road crews,” Garvey said. “Twenty idiots watching one guy shovel dirt. No wonder everything’s falling apart. All those people getting paid, nobody working. Just twiddling their peckers.”

Garvey Moss. Seventy-five years old, but with the zest and looks of a woman twenty years younger. Her black hair hung long and straight halfway down her back—not a trace of gray. The same genetic good fortune kept her skin clear and unwrinkled and her brown eyes laser guided. April could only hope Garvey had passed on a coil or two of that DNA. The next few years would tell.

“If I had a say,” Garvey said, “my grandbabies wouldn’t be mixed up in such a silly business. Those boys would have real jobs where they got dirt under their fingernails and grease on their faces. End of the day, they’d have something to show for what they did. Something solid.”

“The boys are happy with their work, so you should be happy, Mom.”

April looked around at the rest of the audience. Most were a decade older than Garvey. Well into their dotage, parked at the nursing home for the duration. To her left a woman in a green bathrobe was clutching a stuffed dog to her chest and whispering in its tattered ear. Two chairs down a gentleman was hunched over, playing with the zipper of his tartan plaid pants.

Most seemed to be lost to one degree or another in the same demolished confusion, as if they’d been dropped into their chairs from some bewildering height. All the glowing particulars of their life histories had turned to smoke within them. In the last few days, April had met two or three who were capable of bright gurgles of memory, a smile, a coherent sentence. But most had moved into a postverbal state and seemed to be waiting patiently in this strange outpost for some major organ to fail.

It had been Garvey’s choice to rehab at the Floridian. The complex was near the home they shared along the Miami River, but more important, that venerable institution had occupied the same thick-walled stucco building for over eighty years. Garvey Moss had a deep affection for all things connected to Old Miami, and she’d made it one of her crusades to support any enterprise in the city that had lasted half a century.

To April, the Floridian resembled one of those tacky mom-and-pop roadside motels her parents frequented when she was a kid. The place hadn’t been updated since cars had fins. Ancient air conditioners chugged in the windows, dripping rusty water steadily onto the terrazzo floors while overhead squeaking ceiling fans idled. On the grounds were a couple of coral fountains full of green slime and a broad lawn, and in a wing at the back was a gym with some unused weights and treadmills, as if the room existed only to pass some state regs. All in all, the Floridian was more funky than charming, with gummy stains on the carpets and ammonia wafting from the shadows.

Even after a scouting visit had turned up the sad state of the place, Garvey was adamant. If she had to suffer through weeks of physio, then by god, the least she could do was support that rare occurrence in Miami, historic preservation.

“Have you been walking today, Mother?”

“I walked ten miles, then ten more. I ran two marathons after that.”

“What’d you have for lunch?”

“Cream of vomit soup,” she said.

“Oh, come on. I’ve tasted the food. It’s not that bad.”

“Everything’s from a can. You like it so much, you stay, roll around in this chair. We’ll pull a switcheroo.”

“Just a few days more. Suck it up, Mom.”

“Food’s so salty, I’m puffed up like a water buffalo in rainy season.”

She thumped a finger on April’s wrist and pointed at a man leaning against a column in the breezeway across the courtyard.

“Now there’s my type. Gary Cooper meets Rambo. I’ve been winking at him, but he’s a little shy, pretending not to notice.”

April glanced at the blond man, then did a double take. A face immediately familiar. There was a sudden hitch in her pulse, dampness on her palms. Sawyer walked past the blond man, coming out of the main complex, script in hand, chatting with one of his assistants, looked over, saw April, and waved. April waved back.

“This place is a geriatric tar pit,” Garvey said. “I must have been out of my mind. I should’ve left my knees alone. Just hobbled off into the sunset like every other gimpy dowager. Why’d you let me do this to myself?”

“You couldn’t make it up the stairs to your room, Mother.”

“I should’ve installed an elevator. Or moved to the maid’s room on the first floor. Slept on that old purple couch. It’s perfectly comfortable.”

“It’s done now. You’ll just have to deal with it.”

“I’m going home. I’m sick of this place.”

“You need therapy, Mother. Your muscles are going to atrophy.”

“You can’t hold me prisoner. I’ll call a cab, come home on my own.”

“Tell the truth. Are you really that unhappy?”

“Unhappy? I hate this place. Look around, it’s full of dead people.”

Garvey was silent for a minute, rubbing at the ache in her thighs. April watched a young woman in jeans kneel down beside an elderly lady in a nearby wheelchair. Both with the same distinctive jawline—another mother/daughter team. The girl spoke into her mother’s ear, but the ancient lady stared helplessly ahead at the buildings across the street.

That scene was April’s future, Garvey’s future, everyone’s damn future.

“His name is Thorn. He’s available. His wife just died.”

April’s pulse threw an extra beat, then another.

Inside her purse her phone vibrated, but April ignored it.

She snuck a look at the man still lounging in the breezeway. Apparently he hadn’t spotted her. He was speaking to a person standing beside him. Male or female, hard to tell. Short and blocky, loose-fitting clothes. Bad haircut and a dirty face. Relax, she told herself. Take a breath, no reason to freak.

Thorn was watching the TV crew block the next scene, Dee Dee Dollimore and a male actor standing in the shade while their personal assistants directed handheld fans at their faces and dabbed white washcloths at the sweat sheening their skin. Out in the sun, two stand-ins were holding the actors’ positions, giving the cameramen and light guys a chance to adjust their settings.

Thorn.

April was the reason he was here. The obituary she’d written about Rusty Stabler had lured him back into her orbit. He’d come to thank her, reconnect, ask her out, or something else.

This was entirely April’s fault. Of all the people who’d died last week, she’d chosen to fill her limited space with Thorn’s wife. Not that Rusty hadn’t deserved coverage. She was a notable woman. From humble roots she’d ended up wielding major political and economic power. Outsider becomes insider. Disenfranchised daughter of single mom turns into a major benefactor for the very school that almost ground her to dust.

But April easily could have skipped her. She called the shots on what went in. Naturally Thorn was in her mind when she wrote the piece. On some level she must have been trying to draw him back into her life. God, how absolutely crazy. Look what she’d done. She’d thought about it often, Thorn showing up again, but now that it was happening, she was totally unprepared.

She considered bolting. Race home, lock herself in, take no calls. Forget her mother and go into hiding. But no, of course she couldn’t do that. She was an adult. There was some way to manage this. There had to be.

“And how do you know the man’s name, Garvey?”

“He’s from Key Largo. A girl who used to live down there is a nurse in this shit hole. She told us about Thorn when he walked in the rec room after lunch. He’s famous in the Keys. Everybody knows him. He’s a roughneck and a lady killer. I said he sounded like just your type.”

“You said that in public?”

“I say everything in public.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Wants to talk to you. Called your office at the paper, they couldn’t locate you, someone suggested you might be here, visiting your poor suffering mother. He’s here to interrogate you, dear. It’s all very mysterious. There’s a woman with him with tattoos all over her face. She’s a cop. They’re investigating something you did a long time ago in your checkered past.”

“Stop it, Mother.”

April’s phone vibrated again. She pulled it from her purse, checked the ID. Isaac, her assignment editor.

“Don’t answer it.”

“It’s work.”

“And I’m your mother. What’s more important?”

April slid the phone back into her purse.

“Somebody famous must have died.”

“They don’t have to be famous, Mother. You know that.”

“Have you started writing mine? Before you do, I need to fill you in on the early years. A lot of raunchy stuff happened before you barged onto the scene. I was a party girl, you know. I could shake that thing.”

Garvey deemed April’s job at
The Miami Herald
shamefully beneath her abilities. April had an undergrad degree from Duke in American lit, did two years at Columbia’s School of Journalism, followed by a decade with the
Herald
exposing the frauds and bamboozlers who gorged at the public trough. No journalistic challenge there. In Miami, muckraking was fish-in-the-barrel stuff. The town had been so saturated in corruption for so many years, you couldn’t take a step without the mire oozing between your toes.

After a decade and dozens of scandals, April came to the uneasy conclusion that she’d been writing the same story over and over, only changing the names and making adjustments in the cash amounts. When the obit job opened, she nabbed it. She wanted off the street, out of the courtroom, away from the primping TV gaggle.

It didn’t take long to realize she’d stumbled into writers’ heaven. Obits were gold. A major challenge to her writing skills—trying to capture the human dignity of common people in a few hundred words, the long arc of hard work, family trials, and the triumphs along the way. Short prose poems of lives well spent and those tragically frittered away. The writing was elliptical, like Japanese painting, just the essential bones to suggest the full-bodied existence of a complex person.

“You don’t think he’s handsome? Now, that’s exactly the reason you’re still single. Those snooty standards. I don’t know where you got that bad trait. Certainly not from me. When it came to men, I could lower my standards at the drop of a pair of trousers.”

“Look, I have to go. I’ll be back after dinner, Mom. Do your exercises, okay? Stop giving the therapists a hard time.”