Dead Last (36 page)

“And the punch line is?”

“Lydia’s ninety percent certain the person on the street in Atlanta was a woman. A woman holding a paper sack that more than likely contained a butcher knife she was about to use in a violent manner on a male nurse who lived two blocks from where this incident took place.”

“The ischium told her that?”

“Ischium is all I remember. There was more. But, shit, I’m losing my short-term memory. Five years ago, I could’ve repeated everything she said, word for word, now all that fancy jargon just drifted back into the general sludge.” Frank tapped a finger to his skull.

“I know the feeling.”

“So it was Dee Dee Dollimore on the street in Atlanta.”

“I don’t think so, Frank.”

“Still stuck on the baseball bat, the knuckles lining up?”

“Why’s this lady only ninety percent certain? What’s the ten percent?”

“I don’t know. Something about how the perp lifted her hand to cover her eyes, it had a masculine look to it. She had all the lingo. The science of it. But nine out of ten, it’s Dee Dee.”

“I should’ve gone inside with you.”

“We can go back, Lydia wants to meet you.”

“No, thanks.”

As Sheffield pulled onto Old Cutler, heading north toward the Grove, his phone jingled.

It was Rivlin calling back.

“Let me guess,” Frank said. “No Vibram FiveFingers on the inventory.”

He listened to her answer, then said, “I’m getting another call, I got to drop you, Rivlin.”

Frank shook his head, saying to Thorn, “No Vibram at the condo.”

Thorn watched Frank read the caller ID, then press the button on his phone, his face hardening.

“Go ahead,” he said.

He listened to the voice for the next mile, then another mile, saying nothing. They cruised through the Cocoplum Circle, headed up Ingram Highway into Coconut Grove, Frank still listening, his face growing harder.

As they entered the business district of the Grove, Frank said, “Yeah, I got it. I got it, okay.” Then he paused and said, “Right now, Sunday afternoon? Can’t wait till the morning?”

Sheffield listened a little longer, then clicked off and swerved into a parking space across from Commodore Plaza.

“We’re done,” he said. “You’re on your own.”

“Mankowski?”

“Sorry, Thorn. It’s been a blast.”

“You’re walking away? Like that?”

“Like I said, I’m sorry. Rivlin blew the whistle. Called the boss, told her I was letting you ride shotgun. Mankowski’s pissed. Well, more than pissed.”

“And what about April and the next obituary? The trap?”

Frank sighed.

“I’ll bring Mankowski up to speed, she can decide. But I doubt she’ll want to ride that horse. Meanwhile, she’s set up some kind of pissant teleconference with an assistant AG in Washington, so I can answer some questions, go on record, help them decide if they’re going to cut off my head or just my nuts.”

“When it happens, it happens quick.”

“Not usually this quick,” Frank said. “Don’t worry about me. Can you get back to the Moss house okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Sorry, Thorn. Really. This isn’t how I wanted it to end. You tell Sugarman hello for me, okay?”

Thorn climbed out of the car and watched Sheffield drive off.

He dug out his phone to try April one more time, and saw the battery icon blinking red.

TWENTY-NINE

THORN HIKED FROM THE GROVE
to Spring Garden in a little under three hours, getting lost a couple of times, and taking a detour to charge his phone battery in a Little Havana RadioShack, a service he bargained down to five dollars, which left him with a single buck for emergencies.

If he was going to make peace with Miami, it wasn’t going to start today. It wasn’t a city hospitable for walkers. He stopped counting the near misses, the sideswipes, the horns razzing him, the pedestrian traffic signals that lured him into the middle of an eight-lane thoroughfare, then left him sprinting for his life.

It was just before six when he entered April Moss’s pedestrian gate. Wagging his stump, Boxley cantered over and plowed his snout into Thorn’s crotch for the latest update. April’s Mini Cooper was still gone.

Thorn stood in the driveway and drew the phone out and called again. This time she picked up her cell on the first ring.

“Everything okay? Where are you?”

“Turn around,” she said.

The gate slid open behind him and April pulled into a space near the front veranda. Garvey threw open the passenger door and ordered someone to assist her immediately. Thorn hauled Garvey out of the passenger door and settled her into her arm crutches.

“Oh, the places we’ve gone and the places we’ve seen. Some of them so boring I’m about to turn green.”

“You look beat, Thorn.” April gave him a tired smile and patted his arm.

“I was starting to get anxious.”

“Oh, he was getting anxious,” Garvey said. “Call the wedding planner.”

“I went to my office at the
Herald,
” she said. “Turned off my cell. I needed some downtime to get the obit done.”

“Oh, yes, it was downtime. I can’t remember the last time I was this far down.”

“Garvey spent the afternoon at the Floridian doing some long-overdue rehab on her knees.”

“She dumped me off like a kid at daycare. That’s a glimpse at the horrors ahead: First it’s the nursing home, then they pick you up and deliver you to the front door of the mortuary and push you out. See you later, masturbator.”

Garvey hobbled up the front steps, sloughing off April’s helping hand.

“What am I going to do with you, Garvey?”

“Call me a male escort. Or maybe if Rambo isn’t busy, he can massage some of my aching parts.”

Thorn followed them inside, and Garvey tottered off to her encampment in the maid’s room.

April headed silently to the kitchen.

She browsed the refrigerator shelves for a moment while Thorn took a seat at the kitchen table.

“I’ve got turkey and cheddar. I can make sandwiches.”

Thorn said that would be fine. She offered him beer, wine, or water and Thorn took the Heineken. She poured herself a Chardonnay and set his open beer in front of him, then put together the sandwiches and took her seat across from him.

“You turned your obit in?”

“I did.”

“Without talking to Frank?”

“I did it my way.”

Thorn ate some of his sandwich, tried not to guzzle the beer.

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t have a copy. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

“Why’d you do that, April?”

“You don’t understand, do you, Thorn? You’re smart in so many ways. Like I said before, you’re sensitive for a man. But you’ve got these blind spots.”

“I’m not arguing that.”

“Somebody has taken my writing, the one thing in my world, beside the boys and Mother, that gives me sustenance. And they’ve tainted it. They’ve turned my words into some perverse, violent poetry they use for their poisonous end. I feel like I’ve been robbed of one of my most precious possessions. The thing that gave me my identity, my purpose.”

Thorn waited, watching her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked down at her untouched sandwich, shaking her head.

“So you went to work to reclaim some of that.”

“Yes.”

“And the idea I proposed, using this as a trap, you wanted no part of that.”

April lifted her eyes and gave him a weary smile.

“You do try,” she said. “I’ll have to say that. You may not get it exactly right, but you try to understand.”

Thorn got up and poured himself a glass of water, drank it down, and returned to the table. April reached out and took his right hand in hers and laced her fingers around his, squeezing hard. Then she drew her hand away and hid it in her lap. She lifted the hair from her neck and let it drop.

“I never really knew who you were. We had those few hours together, and then I was pregnant, and the boys came. And I never knew the person who fathered them. I knew your name, where you lived, a glimpse of your world, but I didn’t know you. So there was something missing all these years, a sense of what our family was about.”

“What did you tell the boys?”

“The truth. A one-night stand. A handsome stranger swept me off my feet. That’s what we called you, ‘the handsome stranger.’ We’d tell stories about you, concoct wild tales of what you were doing, what dragons you were slaying, all the exotic places you’d seen. You were a game we played, an invention that kept us entertained. Long, elaborate stories. Garvey’s role was to put you in mortal danger, some terrible monster coming for you, suspending you on a fraying rope over a burning pit, and the boys always found a solution, a magical power you had that allowed you to escape. It was fun. It was our private family game.”

“So the other men, the suitors in the photos with the boys, they must have had a hard time competing with the handsome stranger.”

She smiled.

“It was hopeless. No one could live up to the stories we invented. I didn’t realize the consequences of it while it was happening. I just thought we were having fun and being creative, and I was giving the boys an emotional foundation, a father substitute. But what we were doing was making you into an impossible ideal. Nobody could compare to the handsome stranger. The others would stay around for a while, then every one of them figured it out sooner or later, that they were in competition with some supernatural rival they could never beat.”

“You could have driven down to Key Largo and told me.”

“You could have driven up to Miami and looked me up.”

“Did you think I was going to do that? Did you expect that?”

She took a bite of her sandwich, looked off toward the window onto the back porch where the bird feeder hung.

“Sometimes, when the boys and I were making up stories about the handsome stranger, I’d feel a sense of longing. I’d feel hurt and abandoned and even angry sometimes that you never reappeared. It wouldn’t have been hard to find me. My byline was always in the paper. But finally I gave up on that fantasy, or that illusion, or whatever it was. It seemed juvenile and self-destructive. It kept me stuck in that same emotional place, a high school kid mooning over some brief encounter.

“I don’t know how old they were, the boys, maybe ten or eleven, but one day at breakfast, we were sitting right here where we’re sitting now, and when Flynn started in with a handsome stranger story, I told him to stop. I’d never done that before. I’d always played along, been amused, enjoyed it in a silly way. But I told him to stop. And he must have heard something in my voice. Both of them must have heard it because we never did that again. Never after that day. Flynn just stopped the story and got back to his food and we never spoke of it again.

“I don’t know if that was right or wrong. It probably hurt them. They probably felt a sense of loss about no longer having the handsome stranger to fantasize about. I don’t know. But that’s the last we spoke of you.

“Garvey came up with another idea. She started making up stories about the Marvelous Trio.”

“Trio.”

“She left herself out. Trying to keep the spotlight on us, mother and sons. The Marvelous Trio had magical powers too and Garvey put us in all kinds of awful situations, and the boys would play along, but it was never the same as the handsome stranger. Gradually, as the boys got older, the Marvelous Trio stories stopped and that whole storytelling thing drifted away.”

Thorn picked up the sandwich and put it down again. He looked around the kitchen, imagining the family gathered here, the young boys telling tall tales about him, making him into a hero, building some extraordinary version of a man that no one could ever match. He put himself in that long-ago kitchen, filling the role that had been left open for him. A role so far away from the one he’d carved out for himself.

“You never let me know about the boys,” Thorn said, “because you were angry and hurt. Was that some kind of revenge?”

She gave it a minute of thought, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe a little. But mainly once the boys and Garvey and I had built our family, our habits, our traditions, I didn’t want to risk all that by inviting somebody to the party who had so much power to disrupt it.”

“But I showed up anyway. You summoned me. Maybe it wasn’t conscious, but you wrote my name on that obituary.”

“I had no way of knowing what would happen. I didn’t summon you. I was thinking about you, yes. But I never imagined, or even hoped this would happen. You and me around the breakfast table.”

They finished their meal in silence, worked side by side at the sink to clean up. When the dishes were put away and the dish towel folded, she turned to him, close enough to touch, but not so close she was offering herself.

“Anything else?” she said.

Thorn stepped closer and opened his arms and April hesitated only a second, then stepped into his embrace, turning her head and resting her cheek against his shoulder. The smell of her hair, the fit of her flesh against his was both familiar and completely new. He heard something like a high wind coursing around them. As though the entire structure were being buffeted by a gale, testing its strength, making every plank, every wall shiver against its force.

She drew away and moved back to the table, touching her cheek with the fingertips of her right hand as if testing the solidness of her own tissues.

“Who did these things, Thorn? Who is it?”

“Sheffield thinks it was Dee Dee. And when the horror of what she was doing overcame her, she killed herself.”

“Is that what you think?”

“No. The person in the motel room with the baseball bat wasn’t Dee Dee.”

“She didn’t do it,” April said. “It definitely wasn’t Dee Dee.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m a hundred percent certain, yes.”

“And how do you know?”

April heard Garvey coming down the hallway, the rubber tips of her crutches squeaking against the wood.

“You’ll see. Tomorrow you’ll see.”

THE MIAMI HERALD