Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 01 - Lickety-Split (8 page)

Nunzio rolled his eyes heavenward. A drop of olive oil glistened on his chin. “Where’s this guy with the thing?” he wanted to know.

Michael’s face reddened. “That’s what I need to tell you. There’s a slight hitch. The kid says he hasn’t got the thing.”

Nunzio shrugged. He sipped his red wine. “This kid with the thing. What is he stupid?”

“Nothing like that,” Michael said quickly. “I’ll be right back, all right? Ten minutes. Honest to God.”

Mel clutched the four quarters tightly in his right fist. People were pouring into the grandstand area now and he had to fight to keep moving in the right direction: an upstream salmon in a downstream-running river.

He was tall, though, and he stood straight and moved at a good clip. He could see over most of the crowd’s heads, and they could see him, a scarecrow-like figure in the ragged straw hat, the baggy gray cotton slacks, and the loose flapping sport coat he wore over a worn cotton flannel shirt. Pearl tried to get him to dress up, wear the things she’d bought for him, but he liked his old clothes. Familiar things kept the confusion at bay. He felt confused a lot lately.

He was looking for another hat, that silly rose-covered hat.

“Racetrack Rosie. You’ll smell like a Rose with Rosie’s picks.” He said it to himself and kept moving through the crowd, leading with his shoulders, not noticing the shouts when he stepped on a foot or bumped into someone in his way.

After what seemed like a long time he worked his way to one of the exit turnstiles. A uniformed security guard was just turning the corner and he looked at Mel in a funny way. “You going out, sir?” he asked politely. “Feeling sick or something?”

“No,” Mel said, annoyed. “I’m fine. I’m just looking for somebody. Rosie—the young lady who sells the tip sheets?”

The guard thought about it. He was good-looking, maybe thirty, with sleek brown hair that brushed his shirt collar. Muscles bulged from his short-sleeved white uniform shirt. His badge said Roberts.

“You mean Rosie Figueroa?”

“That’s the girl. Have you seen her tonight?”

“I seen her when I got here an hour ago,” the guard said. “You might look for her by the grandstand betting windows, back the way you came.”

Mel turned then and tried to go back. He could hear the band playing, something with a livelier tempo now. Was it “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”?

“Five minutes to post time,” the announcer called. “Five minutes to place your wager.”

The runways were crowded. So many people. And now he needed a bathroom.

He turned down a runway that should take him toward the elevators to the clubhouse level. There would be bathrooms there. But the lights in the hallway were dim. He was alone now. There was a doorway on the right side. He tugged on it. Locked. He could barely hear the crowd now. The hall was deserted and dark as a tomb.

Wait. Up ahead, light was coming from somewhere. And he saw something. A hat. A red-rose-covered hat.

“Hey, Rosie,” he called out. He broke into a near trot. The bathroom was forgotten for the moment. Less than five minutes to post-time. He needed that tip sheet.

The tunnel lead back outside. Mel stood and looked around, trying to get his bearings. He could see those tall streetlights in the parking lots, and the cars parked a little way away from a tall chain-link fence that surrounded this place. Some kind of service area, maybe. Pickup trucks were parked here, and there were dogs in cages, greyhounds, yipping and pacing with excitement.

He couldn’t see Rosie now. Didn’t know where she was. The dogs kept barking and hurling themselves against those metal mesh cages.

What was he doing here? Where was Pearl? Was it time to go to work already? Who had put all these dogs in cages in his driveway?

He walked around a black truck and stumbled over something. He looked down to see what he’d tripped over.

It was a woman. A woman wearing a red-flowered hat. Pearl had a hat like that one Easter. And a blue sailor suit. Cute as the dickens. He squatted down to speak to Pearl, but she was holding her head funny, asleep maybe, but with her eyes wide open.

“Pearl?” He reached out and touched her shoulder. His hand touched something warm and sticky. He wiped his hands on his slacks. Pearl had a bunch of papers in her lap, they were being blown about by the breeze, white pieces of paper scattered all over. He sat down beside her. “Pearl,” he said, shaking her gently. He had something all over his hand now. She didn’t say anything. Mad at him. Giving him the silent treatment because he’d been late getting home, stopping for a beer with the boys. He reached in his pocket for his handkerchief, needing to clean his hands, but he didn’t find one. Pearl always carried a hankie. She had a funny kind of pocketbook, a bright blue plastic pouch, strapped to her waist. Mel unzipped it, found a hankie, wiped his hands on it, then stuffed it back in his own pocket.

“Pearl?” He couldn’t stand it when she gave him the silent treatment like this. It could go on for hours, days even.

“I’m sorry,” he said loudly. “Real sorry. I didn’t mean it, honey.”

“Hey, man.”

Mel heard footsteps and a voice. He looked up. A teenager dressed in gray work clothes came through a gate from the parking lot. He was dark-skinned, wearing a baseball cap. He walked quickly over to Mel. “You can’t be back here, mister. This is a restricted area.”

Then he was standing in front of Mel, looking down at him, the kid’s eyes wide with terror. He was looking at Pearl.

“Holy shit,” the kid said.

This old guy looked like a crazy person, all raggedy, with blood streaks on his pants and shirt, blood on his hands too. Holding some papers and shaking the woman, telling her he was sorry.

He wanted to run, but he made himself bend down, to get a better look, see how bad the lady was hurt.

“Oh man,” he said softly. “Oh man. Why you wanna kill Rosie for?”

“We’re comin’ through,” Jackleen bellowed, trying to edge through the crowds. People were standing around, looking up at the closed circuit television monitors. She stopped, looking around helplessly. Truman was directly behind her.

“Working press,” he bellowed. “Out of the way. Coming through.”

The crowd parted, people giving them dirty looks as they went steaming by. But there was no sign of Mel.

“Maybe he wandered outside,” Truman said, gesturing toward an exit sign.

The going was easier here, people moving briskly in both directions, probably because there were no television monitors. The hallway came to a T. Truman looked right and left. No sign of Mel. “Let’s try down there,” Truman said, pointing to the left. It was darker here, almost like a tunnel.

Up ahead, Truman saw a doorway, and through the doorway, what looked like the parking lot. He started walking faster and then they both heard it: sirens. Close by. He thought about the last sirens he’d heard this close, when Nellie had her stroke.

The sirens were coming closer. Truman could see the area was enclosed by chain-link fencing. He heard the frenzied barking of dogs. Two police cars with flashing blue lights pulled up outside the fenced-in area and cops seemed to pour out of them.

“Mel!” Truman called. His friend was slumped against the fence, over to the right, his face buried in his hands. Mel was crying. “Don’t be mad at me, Pearlie. Please don’t be mad.”

That’s when Truman saw Rosie. She was leaning to one side, a flowery straw hat on her head, her eyes open but unseeing, and a gaping red wound across her neck.

“Sweet Jesus,” Jackleen whispered behind him.

“Move away from the body, please.”

Truman looked up. It was a cop, a St. Petersburg police officer, dressed in a white shirt and green uniform pants. “This is a crime scene, folks. You’ll have to step away.”

Mel was still crying. He didn’t seem to have recognized Truman or Jackleen.

The kid was agitated. “I found this old dude here,” he was telling the cop. “He was sitting down here beside the lady, talking to her, but she was dead. He kept saying he was sorry, you know? Callin’ her Pearl.”

One of the track security guards walked briskly up to the cop. He was muscular, with sleek brown hair and even white teeth. “What have you got here?”

“Looks like a homicide,” the cop said. He looked at the guard’s badge. “Do I know you?”

“Bobby Roberts,” the guard said, nodding. “Yeah. I work a beat out of the downtown traffic precinct. You mighta seen me in traffic court. This is my off-duty job. You want me to secure the area or something?”

“That’d be good,” the cop said. “We got detectives on the way.”

Now the kid was pointing to Mel. “That old dude had a knife in his hand. I couldn’t get him to put it down. Crazy old dude.”

Roberts walked over to the body, crouched down, and looked. When he stood up, he was ashen-faced. “Anybody given you an ID of the body yet? ‘Cause I know her. Name’s Rosie Figueroa. She’s a tout. Hangs around the track all the time.”

The cop wrote it down in his notebook. “Spell that for me?”

“It’s Cuban,” Roberts said. “You got me how to spell it. And the old guy. He was looking for her. Comes up to me ten minutes ago, asks me have I seen her.”

The cop wrote that down too. He looked up at Truman and Jackleen. “What about you two? Were you here when the body was found?”

“We just this minute walked up,” Truman said. “My friend here has Alzheimer’s. But he didn’t do this. He must have found the body. He was lost.”

The other police officer was kneeling down beside Rosie. He donned a pair of disposable rubber gloves and put his fingers on her wrist, trying for a pulse, then shook his head, snapped the gloves off, and threw them aside. “She’s dead,” he said, standing up now. “I’m gonna radio for homicide.”

They used Jackleen’s betting money to take a cab back to the hotel.

“Mel couldn’t kill anybody,” Truman said. He’d been saying that over and over.

“He had blood on his hands,” Jackleen pointed out. “And he kept saying he was sorry. Only he was calling her Pearl.”

“Poor Rosie,” Truman said. “She seemed like a good kid. Always smiling. Couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-one. Same age as my Cheryl when she got married.”

When they got to the Fountain of Youth he went over to the lobby phone booth and dug a quarter out of his pocket.

The desk sergeant wouldn’t tell him much, just that Mr. Wisnewski was being questioned by a Detective Rivers.

“You people have got the wrong guy,” Truman said. He slammed the phone down.

Pearl’s eyes got big and frightened when she saw who was knocking at Dottie Milas’s door. “Truman?” She got up from the card table, knocking her chair over, she was in such a hurry. “What’s wrong? Where’s Mel? Is he okay?”

The plan was to tell her once they got back to the Wisnewskis’ room on the fourth floor, but Pearl started crying, and Truman couldn’t handle that. So he told her what little he knew. Then he called Howard Seabold’s kid, the lawyer, Howie Jr., and set it up so Howie would meet them at the police department.

“He never even got a parking ticket,” Pearl said when she could speak again. They were in Mel’s car, the Chrysler. Truman drove, and Jackleen sat in the backseat, handing Kleenex to Pearl.

“I know,” Truman said. His eyes were on the road, he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss the turn into the police station. They’d built a new one in the years since he’d covered the cop shop for the wire service. Big and fancy. Justice Administration Building, it was called now. They could call it that. It was still the cop shop.

He wanted to ask Pearl about the knife they’d found on Mel, about that black eye she said she got from bumping into something, but every time he cleared his throat, he heard himself saying softly, “It’ll be all right. It’ll be okay.”

The desk sergeant had a secretary take Pearl and Truman back to the homicide office, but he gave Jackleen the kind of look she was used to getting. A black girl, only nineteen, and St. Pete was still the South, no matter how many Yankees moved down. So she sat in the lobby, read a Rotary Club magazine, and fumed.

The detective was waiting for them outside the door to the homicide office. He was white, in his mid-thirties, wearing a white and red-striped shirt with his tie undone. His face was smooth and round, a baby-face, Truman thought, surprised. In his days cops were grizzled veterans of the field, chain-smokers and hard drinkers.

“Mrs. Wisnewski?” the detective said, putting his hand on Pearl’s shoulder and giving Truman a quizzical look. “I’m Virlyn Rivers. Your husband is inside the office, talking to one of the other detectives. Has anybody told you what happened?”

“We know your people have the wrong man,” Truman said, stepping forward.

“Sir?” the detective said.

“Truman Kicklighter,” he said briskly, businesslike. “AP. Tampa. Assistant bureau chief. I was with Mr. Wisnewski at the track tonight. We’re old friends. He was only gone a couple of minutes. The next thing we know, you people have hauled him down here like a criminal.”

“You don’t think he killed that woman?” Pearl said, her voice quavering, threatening to start crying again.