Down the Darkest Street (5 page)

For some reason, the words stung Pete.
Staying with you.

“It just seemed weird,” Pete said. “What do you know about this Alice?”

Emily drained her glass and put it in the sink. She turned to Pete.

“What does it matter?”

“Humor me.”

“She worked with Rick. She was young. Right out of college. She was basically the new girl in the office. He said they ‘connected,’ and things evolved from there.”

She stormed past him, grabbing her purse from off the dining room table. She opened the door in one swift move and gave him a quick look.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s his. But it still hurts and I still feel like a chump.”

She didn’t give Pete time to answer. The door slammed shut. Costello leapt onto the dining room table and ran off. Pete looked around the empty, quiet house. He didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day.

He checked the time on the gaudy gold-colored clock hanging on the wall across from the front door. Almost six. If he hurried, he might catch her.

“
I need a favor.”

Kathy Bentley took a big bite out of her bacon cheeseburger and looked at Pete from across the grimy booth at Kleinman’s, a dive sports bar a block away from
The Miami Times
offices, Pete’s former and Kathy’s current workplace. Pete wouldn’t stand a chance at getting hired there again. Kathy was already back. The bar was tucked into a half-abandoned condo building near the Venetian Causeway, a stretch of highway that connected Miami’s downtown to the beaches. Pete remembered many a night—and morning—spent here. The place smelled of fried fish and cheap beer.

Kathy chewed her food and wiped her mouth with a napkin before responding. “I hope it’s something exciting.”

“Don’t think so.”

Kathy shrugged and took a long sip of her gin and tonic. Pete looked at the glass. He shouldn’t be here, he thought. Hanging around in bars. Watching her drink. It triggered things that he needed to leave alone.

“Should I not be drinking in front of you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not drinking.”

“So?”

“So, I’ve never seen you not drink in a bar before.”

“I’m just taking it easy. I’m not drinking today.”

“Yeah? What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

She reached out and patted Pete’s arm with her hand. She gave him a half smile.

“I think it’s a great idea.”

Pete didn’t respond.

“If anyone knows the symptoms of someone trying to quit drinking, it’s me. My dad drank nonstop until he died. But it’s not like he didn’t try to stop, once or twice.”

Kathy’s dad, Chaz, had been a newspaper columnist for
The Miami Times
. About a year ago, he’d asked Pete to find Kathy, who had gone missing. What Pete didn’t know at the time was that Kathy had been kidnapped and that Chaz was just a small part of a bigger puzzle, one that had links to the Miami underworld and eventually led to the deaths of Chaz and Pete’s best friend. Still, he had found Kathy alive. Kathy wrote a best-selling book with Pete’s help. Because of that, he could afford to live off Kathy’s overly generous consulting fee and his pittance of a salary at the Book Bin while he figured out what to do next, if anything.

Pete nodded, waiting for the moment to pass. He’d told no one, aside from Emily, that he was going to meetings for his drinking. He liked Kathy. Even considered her a friend. But they weren’t there yet. He gave her a dry smile in response.

Kathy looked up at one of the many TVs set up above the bar at Kleinman’s, checking the time on the all-day CNN newscast. She turned to Pete.

“So, what’s the big favor you couldn’t ask me over the phone? I have to head back to the newsroom in a little bit. I owe them a column.”

“I need to find out some stuff about a person that works with Rick Blanco.”

“Emily’s Rick?”

“Yeah.”

Kathy finished the rest of her gin and tonic and slid the glass toward the opposite end of the table.

“Why, pray tell, do you want to investigate Emily’s husband? Is this some weird guy thing?”

“Guy thing?”

“Yeah, guy thing. Where you somehow delude yourself that you, through whatever weirdness you’ve concocted, can win Emily back.”

Pete took a deep breath. “It has nothing to do with that,” he said, sipping his Diet Coke. “I just had a weird run-in with him today, and he said something that I can’t get out of my head.”

“Did he say this while threatening to kick your ass for sleeping with his wife?”

“We’re not sleeping together.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Then why… Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Kathy let out a chuckle. “Just because you’re not sleeping with her doesn’t mean you don’t want to be, or that her husband—who, from what little I can tell, is a jealous dude—doesn’t think you are. But yeah, I know very well you’re not.”

“How do you know that?” Pete said.

“That’s not the point,” she said, playing with her fries. “So, OK. Rick shows up. Then what?”

Pete looked at his hands. What was he doing? He should be at a meeting. Or at work. Or trying to find better work. His savings were running out, and even though his father’s house was paid for, there were other bills to pay. Still, something gnawed at him about the encounter with Rick, so he did what he’d always done: he dug around until he found something. It was an instinct he’d honed as a reporter, before alcohol and the death of his father had sent him spiraling to what he now referred to as “the bottom.” It was the instinct that had helped him find Kathy the year before.

“Then what?” Kathy said, pulling Pete back to reality. “I have to get back to work.”

“Right,” Pete said. “Then he started asking about Emily.”

“OK, so far this sounds amazingly predictable, dear. What a shocker that Emily’s husband, with whom she is no longer sleeping or living with, came to you, her ex-fiancé, with whom she is now apparently living, to find out about his wife. When does your story—which, mind you, is far from worth this watered-down drink you bought me—get interesting?”

Kathy always got to the point, in every aspect of her life. Her father may have been a deadbeat dad and an alcoholic, but he was a hell of a reporter once, and it had stuck with his daughter. She knew how to sniff out a story, and when to realize there wasn’t one.

“Well, he just looked off,” Pete said. “I’ve known Rick for a bit, and he’s always been very, well, I dunno—clean-cut? Never a hair out of place. Always dressed to impress. This time he looked like he’d just come out of a bar. And he smelled like liquor.”

“That’s just your AA mind projecting.”

“I don’t think so,” Pete said, no longer trying to keep up the appearance that he wasn’t in recovery. “Trust me, he looked off. Dave had to pull a gun on him.”

“Ah. Dave. The paunchy weirdo,” Kathy said. “Anyway—you were saying? Rick was looking rough and asking about Emily? Like I said, not a shocker so far.”

“Then, after Dave forced him to back off hurting me, he told me to mention someone named Alice to Emily,” Pete said. “That she would know what he meant.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Mention this Alice person to Emily.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “Alice was the woman Rick cheated on her with. Rick said she was missing and might be dead.”

“Well, that last part is weird,” Kathy said. She checked the time on the CNN screen again. “Fuck. I’m late. What else can you tell me about Alice?”

“She worked with Rick; he does construction in Homestead. Blanco Properties—I think that was the name of his company. That’s a start.”

“Got it,” she said, making a mental note. “Why do you need me to do this?”

“You’ve got access to
The Times
. I don’t.”

“Right. You’re stuck with Google like everyone else these days.”

“I wouldn’t go back there if they paid me,” Pete said, nodding in the general direction of his former workplace.

“That’s the thing,” Kathy said. “They wouldn’t.”

She got up, but not before sliding the check over to Pete’s side of the booth.

“Thanks for dinner, darling,” she said, kissing him on the cheek before walking to the exit.

Pete watched her go. She was an attractive woman. Smart. In good shape. She kept Pete on his toes when they sparred. He replayed their conversation in his mind. His eyes wandered toward the bar. He reasoned with himself. He was only checking to see the bottles Kleinman’s had stocked. For old times’ sake.

He dropped two tens on the table and drained his Diet Coke. He nodded to the bartender as he walked out into the hot Miami evening.

***

The call came a few hours later. Pete was home, trying to read his book. He picked up his phone and checked the display. Kathy.

“Hey.”

“Hola,” she said. “So, it turns out your story is more interesting than you made it out to be.”

“How so?”

“Lady’s name is Alice Cline,” Kathy said. “Ring a bell?”

It did. Alice Cline had been one of Pete’s earliest clients in the aftermath of the last year’s chaos. Although not licensed or very experienced, Pete had muddled his way through a few small-stakes cases, even before he had decided to quit drinking. The cases consisted of Pete sitting in cars and following spouses around to see if they were being unfaithful.

Alice Cline’s case was a little different. Back then, she’d been engaged to Jose Martinez, the youngest son of a prominent Miami politician. When they’d broken things off, the younger Martinez couldn’t handle it. He showed up at Alice’s apartment, called her constantly, and started harassing her friends. It was a relatively easy case, as far as these things went. Pete met Martinez’s father—City Councilman Miguel Martinez—in the parking lot of Casa Pepe restaurant on Bird Road and handed him a manila envelope that included a mini-drive loaded with his son’s voice mails, a printout that included a list of local reporters Pete had in his Rolodex, and a few black-and-white photos of his son acting the fool. Jose didn’t bother Alice again. Last Pete heard, he’d moved to New York to join a prestigious law firm.

That Alice ended up being Rick Blanco’s mistress was a strange coincidence. He felt the pieces start to click into place—forming something that Pete could almost see. But was Pete starting to look into this—and enlisting Kathy’s help—because he was just that good a guy? Because he needed something meaningful to do? Or did the idea that maybe Emily’s picture-perfect husband was a bit tarnished hold some appeal? He tried to prevent his mind from wandering down that path.

“Yeah, actually,” Pete said. “I worked on something for her almost a year ago.”

“Yeah, according to what I could dig up, she was tight with Jose Martinez,” Kathy said. “And then, suddenly, she wasn’t. You have anything to do with that?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, looks like after all that went down, she needed some cash,” Kathy said. “So she took a secretarial—excuse me, executive assistant—job in Homestead, working for Rick.”

“Any idea how long she’s been missing?”

“Not sure. I made a few calls,” Kathy said. “She lives near Sunset Place, with a roommate. No family in Miami. They’re all in Philadelphia. No siblings, parents divorced. A few traffic infractions, but beyond that, her record’s squeaky clean.”

“That’s all you got?”

“You realize the Internet is not a magic genie bottle, right? There are limits to what I can dig up, even misusing my work database.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “You got a home address?”

“I do,” Kathy said. “But before I pass that along, can I ask what it is you’re doing here, Mr. I-don’t-do-PI-work?”

“I’m curious.”

“Is that a synonym for
stupid
these days?”

“Are you going to give me the address or not?”

“On one condition.”

Pete sighed. “What?”

“Let me help,” she said. “And if we find anything worthy of press, I call dibs.”

Pete thought about it for a second. “Sure, that’s fair. I don’t imagine we’ll stumble across Atlantis or anything remarkable by just talking to a missing girl’s roommate.”

“You never know,” Kathy said. “The cops have probably talked to her, though.”

“The cops are clueless,” Pete said. His track record with the police was spotty at best, despite his pedigree as the son of a lauded homicide detective. “And I have a condition of my own, if we’re going to do this.”

“Oh? What?”

“You don’t hold out on me,” Pete said.

“Excuse me?”

“Keep me in the loop,” Pete said. “You have sources. You know things. And I can tell you’re only giving me part of the story. What else did your calls dig up?”

Kathy was silent on the other end.

“Rick’s been asking around for her,” Kathy said. “Her roommate, her old job, her family.”