Under Cover of Daylight (11 page)

“It’s a plant then.”

“It could be that.” Sugar shook his head, went over to the couch facing the Atlantic.

“She had money,” Thorn said. “What would she be doing running dope?”

“She talk to you about her money situation ever?”

“No.”

“Well ...”

“She owned Vacation Island. That place is worth millions. She and Dr. Bill had investments all over. What kind of shit is this?”

“OK, OK,” Sugarman said. He shifted around on the couch, glanced back at the wall of photographs. “I’m going to have to talk to Sarah. You know how to reach her?”

“Yeah,” Thorn said. “I have a number for her.”

Sugarman said, “Look, I hate this. I hate the whole thing. If Kate was killed by somebody in the drug business down here, we’ll find out. If it was something else, we’re going to find out. But we
will
find out. And, Thorn, we got to go where it leads us. I can’t rule out something just because I don’t want to think about Kate running grass. Christ, man. Last month I had to bust the Baptist minister. Drying out a bale in his backyard. The sucker found it fishing, just brought it on home. I mean, it gets so nobody thinks of the stuff as illegal. It’s just this thing, like broccoli; only it’s worth a bunch of money.”

“I need a minute,” Thorn said. “Give me a minute, Sugar.” Feeling it coming now.

Thorn got up and walked down the main hall. His old bedroom. A view north into Hurricane Lagoon. He closed the door and lay on his old bed. He shut his eyes. Let it rise inside him, flood up into his throat. A kind of panic. Dry at first. Almost an experimental sob. Then it came. Like an old friend back from a voyage. He covered his face with the pillow and let it take him.

Outside, the usual summer afternoon buildup off the Everglades was darkening the sky above Miami. Blue-black clouds. In Hurricane Lagoon a barracuda was feeding on the glassy minnows, the calm water boiling in spots as though someone had thrown a handful of buckshot into it. Then it was quiet.

R
ICKI
T
RUMAN PROPPED HERSELF UP
with a pillow, watched Grayson. He was in the rattan chair, the throne kind, his eyes on the view out that third-story window. La Concha Hotel, treetops, the old Coca-Cola plant. When the wind was strong from the east, brushing back the trees, a slab of the Atlantic was there. Grayson watched the view, recovering from the view he’d just had.

She didn’t like this, letting him watch her with another girl, but it was rent. Or it had started as rent, a monthly thing. She’d tried to keep it to just once a month, but lately Grayson was around every weekend, fixing things, always seeing if he could catch another session. She didn’t like it, but she liked what it gave her, more than rent, a good tight clutch on Grayson’s short hairs.

Maybe, just possibly, this was the last time. Kate’s will should be settled soon. Grayson had said six to eight weeks was considered normal. Cases like this one, without any problems. Only when there was a large family, squabbling, dissension. That could last for years. Or like Howard Hughes, somebody so rich and known every hitchhiker thought he should be made a baron of some little corner of the kingdom. Kate never picked up hitchhikers. Unless you counted Thorn.

Ricki certainly didn’t count him. For one thing, he wasn’t blood family. And anyway, Christ, what would he want with money, land, any of it? He’d been wearing the same shorts, sandals, the same exact pair for fifteen years. No, Thorn was no problem.

Grayson brushed the pants of his banker suit. Only guy in Key West dressed like he was headed for Queen Elizabeth’s for supper. People considered him a local eccentric for that, one more quirk in quirkdom. He didn’t own a pair of shorts or a T-shirt, far as she knew. Tell the truth, Grayson was quirkier than anyone she knew. Sitting there watching her and a friend making out, never blinked, never played with himself. Ricki had never even seen a bulge.

But then, when they were finished, tired of faking it for this jerk, he’d just stay there, sitting, gazing out that window, moping his face with a red bandanna he brought along. Some fantasy working overtime. Not a word spoken, never came across the room from that rattan chair by the window. But instead going way back into some kid’s dream, or maybe some other lifetime, his eyes not looking sharp or crafty or quick anymore, but lazy, drifting. It was something to watch.

A couple of her girl friends actually requested return engagements. “That guy? The cute lawyer owns Sandpiper Bay Club? That Grayson? I heard about him, but I never knew what he looked like.”

“Yeah, but don’t let it get around. People might think I was some slut, doing it in front of a major loot and plunder developer.”

Ricki put on the green kimono. A present from one of her girl friends’ ex-husbands. When Ricki added it up, it was like half what she had came from her friends’ divorces. Weird.

Kate, rich as she was, let Ricki waitress in Key West, just get by. Depending on divorce charity. It made Ricki furious every time she let the thoughts come.

All that money Dr. Bill had put away, all that cash coming from Vacation Island, and Kate living like a derelict. And there was Ricki having to take omelet orders from ignorant Canadians, zonked on bloody marys at nine in the morning. For what? What the hell did Kate have in mind? Character building? Ricki figured it was just one more eccentric trip, one more quirk in a world of quirks. Probably had all the money stuffed into mattresses. But that was all done with now, thank whatever Lord there was.

“How much you think it’ll be?” Ricki sat on the edge of the water bed, sloshing it lightly with her hand. Grayson was back from heaven. Tie straight, pants smoothed.

Hammering from the house next door. Another bed-and-breakfast hotel was going in there, another Conch moving north with a suitcase full of cash. A bunch of gay carpenters, trim and sunburned, a few feet outside her upstairs window, were moving around like spiders all over that dilapidated house.

“You ever get tired of thinking about being rich?”

Ricki said, “I’m thinking about buying an island somewhere.”

He shook his head. “You live on an island already.”

“I mean an island island. Cut off, no phones, no tourists. No planes in. Nobody selling T-shirts with the name of the island on it or some dead writer’s picture.”

“No food,” said Grayson. “No batteries for vibrators.”

There it was. His cute shot. She let it go.

A power saw screamed. More hammering. Ricki waited till it had passed for a moment.

“OK, so what happens next?”

“This is a bedtime story for you, isn’t it? Got to hear it over and over. Recite it for me, Daddy.”

“Screw you,” Ricki said. “The first thing is, I’ll get a call from the lawyer for the estate. Probably one of your buddies.”

“I doubt that. My buddies don’t practice south of Philadelphia.”

Grayson stood, checked his fly, brushed some lint from a shoulder. “And anyway, I don’t do Florida inheritance work. Strictly real estate.”

“And you don’t give a shit, anyway, at this point, huh? Even to help me know where I stand.”

He was at the window, looking down on the work next door, at the scaffold, the young men changing the Conch house from bright white to muted salmon. Restoring something that had never been there.

“Ricki, we’ve been over this and over it again. I don’t know what anyone’s bank account is. I have no idea what anyone has put into their will.”

“I need three thousand bucks.”

“What?” He turned from the window.

“I need three thousand right away, to pay for it.”

“Hey, look,” Grayson said.

“I’m serious. Those guys. You know who I mean.”

“I don’t want to talk about this. Any of it. It’s your business. If you’ve got some business with two guys who you owe three thousand, then I suggest you pay them the three.”

“My money won’t be here till after probate or whatever. These guys don’t wait six to eight weeks. I paid two up front, all I had in the bank. I had to borrow half of that. I thought they’d wait for the rest of it.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“I need three thousand.”

“This is your action. If you made a contract with two guys to render services and that service was rendered, then you have to pay them. The law is damn simple on that. If you stated in that contract that payment was contingent on future funds being released to you, six to eight weeks, then they should honor that understanding.”

“I assumed they could wait. We never said anything about it.”

“That’s different.”

“I need the money, Gray. This is Tuesday, the what?”

“Eighth, July.”

“They said by the twelfth. That’s Saturday, this Saturday.”

“Jesus, Ricki. You spring this on me. I can’t believe you.” He strayed across the room. Hammers picking up a beat, staying with it. It sounded to Ricki like a TV headache commercial.

“What’s three thousand to you?”

Grayson combed his hair in the rattan-framed mirror. All of it was his ex-furniture. Ricki always tried to rent from lawyers. You get the furnishings they bought on the way up. Their discards were better than anything Ricki could afford. But those days were almost done. Her ship was coming in now, almost in the harbor. Loaded to the gunwales.

“You going to just let these guys crawl over me?”

“Ricki, Ricki.”

“You know I can pay you back.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“What’s the fucking point then?” Ricki stood up, knotted the kimono tight.

“I can’t help you.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ricki said. “I get it. You put the idea in my head to make all this happen. Slip me a couple of, what did you call them, possibly useful phone numbers? Get me all involved, do all the work. Put me out front with my hands very dirty, and now, soon as this little chunk of land falls into your lap, you leave me standing out here, fucked. Two guys wanting to collect their pay. Two guys, it makes me wonder how you have their phone number.”

“Now, Ricki, let’s get this real clear what happened. You wanted something to happen in your life, so everything would be easier for you.” He put his comb in his vest pocket. Checked himself out one more time before turning to give her his full frontal. The pompous-lawyer voice starting to rise in him. “All I hear from the minute I meet you is how you can’t afford the rent, you can’t afford this and that. You shouldn’t have to live like this, a girl with a mother owns what yours does. You badgered me with this tearjerker for the last two years.”

Ricki straightened the sheets on the bed. A reminder to him, make it very plain, help him remember what he’d just been staring at, where that fantasy of his caught flame.

“I need that three thou.”

“This song. Same song, I heard it a thousand times. You were wishing your mother was dead long before you moved in here. It was a matter of time with you. You told me five minutes after I met you how you had this mother you wished you didn’t have. Sitting in here dreaming all day with the blinds down, you and your rubber penises and your dykey friends.

“Listen to me on this, Ricki. Brush off the cobwebs and get this very straight. Your mother was killed in a sour drug deal.”

“No one’s going to buy that. I cannot believe those guys. Professionals. Shit. I’m going to lay out five thousand dollars for something like that, nobody’ll ever believe a second? And so when they see through that, what’s the motive?”

“Political recalcitrance is always a possibility.”

“English,” Ricki said.

“She was a wood rat lover. She kept grocery stores from being built. Kmarts and condos and high rises from going in.”

“That’s the Everglades coalition; that’s not her.”

“Tell the fucking carpenters, electricians, plumbers, all those guys going to the land use meetings, the zoning hearings. Who do they hear all the time shooting down the building? She had a few people didn’t like her. Believe it.”

Ricki shook her head, not good enough. She was still right out there. Practically number one suspect.

“You owe me that three thousand. I did you a favor. The dirty work on this.”

“You did yourself a favor.”

“And this.” She patted the water bed. “You think this doesn’t count?”

Grayson sat down in the chrome sling chair, her television chair. He’d gone cold quiet. Sat there for two minutes, running his eyes over her, over the room, back to her, sizing her up and down, his lips just short of a snarl. The Conch Train clattered and rang its bell from Elizabeth Street, two over. Ricki worked on a mouth manicure, a dry cuticle. The thing kept snagging on the kimono, earlier in Lillian’s hair.

Grayson sighed, shook his head. “You’re living up here, what, with three lesbians? Largest collection of rubber products north of the Amazon. Playing games, this and that, things somewhere between outrageous and illegal. All this, you might call it, your collateral, like what you have to show when you put your word up against mine.

“See, I think your understanding is a little murky here. You think ’cause I’m a rich lawyer, I’m vulnerable, could get my reputation smirched and hurt business. Let me tell you something about rich lawyers, Ricki. First thing is, nobody gives a shit about what we do out of the courthouse. Long as we convince His Honor. Smirch away, if you think you can.

“And second thing is, rich lawyers get rich, generally, from making their version of the truth the one that people believe. You know, planting a whisper in the right ear and then standing back as the squad cars get rolling.

“So, what I’m saying is that if someone had it in mind to create some gossip, let some juicy things slip here and there, that same someone might be surprised at what sudden interest the law enforcement authorities might show in someone’s recent grievous loss of a parent,
OLD LADY KNOCKED OFF SO DAUGHTER CAN PURCHASE PLATINUM DILDO
.”

Grayson giving her a seventy-five-dollar-an-hour glare. The look must’ve won him a few cases. Ricki wasn’t scared of him, but still, she had trouble making eye contact when he had the volume turned up like this.

“You try that, Ricki. Just follow your line of reasoning, patting the bed, all that coy shit. You try to use that, if even a squeak comes out of you sounds like blackmail, or I hear something on Duval Street about how some lawyer may be a weekend voyeur, hey, Ricki, your little world is poof, gone. Poof.”