Flamingo Lane, page 13
Her first summers in Bloomington had been fine. She had her new garden to tend, volunteer work delivering hot lunches for Meals on Wheels, Hunter to entertain with games of Yahtzee or Risk. She attended a weekly yoga class, swam laps at the community pool, ate Indiana tomatoes right off the dewy vine. Like Jen she developed an easy, natural rapport with Dieter’s father, skipping over to his house on Sunday evening with a slice of pecan pie. But when she came home, Dieter’s relentless work habits left her stranded, isolated, alone. Even when he wasn’t writing, he was writing, mentally constructing the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word.
Thrown off balance by Maggie’s severe mood swings, he promised to commit at least one day a week to trips around the state, just the three of them cruising down the scenic back roadways. On consecutive weekends they visited the limestone caves at Spring Mill, canoed the shallow waters of Sugar Creek, drove up to Parke County to tour the covered bridges. Hunter kept a journal, including photos he showed to Timmy Whitaker’s parents when they invited him over for one of their belly-groaning dinners, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, something called succotash, a bowl of black-eyed peas. When she asks after Maggie, Hunter tells Mrs. Whitaker that his mother’s fine even though he doesn’t really believe it. Because Mom has gone quiet again, distant. Hunter pictures her standing on a dock watching a ship she wishes she had boarded sail away.
Kershaw unties the bowlines, turns over the engine, and steers the pontoon boat into the familiar channel. The wind is slight today, barely ruffling the water, the sun a torch. He hands Faye a bottle of sunscreen and returns to the wheel as she rubs the lotion on her arms, her shoulders, her legs.
Nearing the far side of the lake, he throttles back, allowing the boat to drift south. Then he props open one of the wells and retrieves a dripping shrimp bucket filled with shiners. He offers to bait Faye’s hook but she smiles and says no, I’m good, I know how to do this. With a steady hand she spears the hook through the silver flesh below the dorsal fin, casts the shiner out toward the grass mats twenty feet away, and yanks the line at the last moment so it doesn’t snag in the green tendrils. Time and again she casts the shiner along the perimeter of the mats the way her father taught her to fish in the shallows alongside the sunken logs in the strip pits south of Terre Haute or the deep green inlets of Paint Mill Lake.
On the fifth or sixth cast, she feels the first strike, a sudden thump that immediately tightens the line and drags the shiner under the mats. Instinctively she jerks the rod backward, securing the hook, the tension in her arms and wrists tightening the muscles and making them ache as Kershaw wheels the boat a few degrees west, helping her urge the fish back out into open water. From the arc of the rod he knows that whatever she’s hooked is substantial, a striped bass or a channel catfish. Grinning his lopsided grin, he asks her if she’s okay and she nods, gritting her teeth. Steady on, he says, I’m right here with you, I’ll work the boat with you, and she hears a kind of reverence in his voice for the art of angling in grassy shallows and perhaps for her too, for her skill and patience, for her ability to land a large fish on her own.
Facing the meadow, Dieter taps the typewriter keys, falling under the spell of writing once again about Quintana Roo, fiction and memory joined, welded, forged. A bonfire on the beach, a gibbous moon rising over dark water. He types, remembers, relives it. The lisp of surf on quiet mornings when he went for a walk out to the lagoon before returning to core peppers or slice plantains in the restaurant of the hotel where divers from Madrid or Miami came for the reef, for the weed, for the hippie strays they seduced with romantic descriptions of shipwrecks off the coast of Spain. Parrish at sunrise sitting cross-legged in the sand watching the whitecaps roll in. Jen grilling pompano over fagots of native wood.
Coffee to sweat out last night’s whiskey. A piece of dry toast to settle his indigestion. A page he will later, in a fit of pique, tear into shreds . . .
Afterwards she remembers how the wine Kershaw served with dinner loosened her tongue and how she began to talk about Mexico, about the village on the sea and the bonfires on the beach and the day Pablo Mestival showed up, tacking his sailboat into the lagoon. Afterwards, in wonder, even awe, she remembers how for the first time since the rescue she was able to describe to a stranger, as she hadn’t been able to describe to her therapist or her parents or even her sister, Hannah, what really happened in Quintana Roo.
They ate on a screened lanai overlooking the dusk-shadowed lake. On the table, Kershaw placed two kerosene lamps alongside the brats he had just grilled and the potato salad he had made that morning. Famished, Faye forked a brat into one of the heated buns then sampled the potato salad, surprised by the unexpected sting of heat.
Tabasco?
No, chipotle, an old family recipe. Is it okay?
It’s great, I like the heat. He showed her the chilled bottle of chardonnay, which turned out to be a lucky choice. Of course, she smiled, accepting a glass.
After a second helping of potato salad and a second glass of wine, she dropped her napkin on her empty plate. Then she looked him in the eye.
Dieter told you about me, right? What happened to me?
Yes.
She nodded, staring off through the black screen at the lake, the sky, the curved blade of a sickle moon slicing through the belly of a cloud. I don’t mind you know.
No?
No. I mean you’re a cop. You must hear, see, terrible things.
All the time. Comes with the job.
She nodded again, still staring through the screen.
Does it ever get to you, she asked in a small voice. The stuff you see?
Yes, it gets to me.
Do you dream about it?
I dream about it.
I see ghosts, she said. I see these ghosts.
He watched her carefully, trying to imagine how hard this must be for her to tell him these things. And how desperately she needed to.
Afterwards he held the half-empty bottle of chardonnay up to the kerosene light but Faye shook her head. Then how about coffee, he suggested.
Yes, let’s have coffee. I need to sober up before I drive back.
Kershaw hesitated. He didn’t want to sound too aggressive and scare her away, but if he didn’t ask, he would always wonder what her answer might have been.
You could stay here, you know.
She lowered her eyes, staring down at the table, and Kershaw realized that he had made a mistake, a terrible miscalculation. After what she just told me, he chided himself, I suggest sex?
What I mean, he blurted out, is I have a spare bedroom. You could sleep there tonight and drive back in the morning.
Thanks, but I better get back.
Of course.
He walked her out to the car and opened the door. You sure you’re all right to drive?
I’m fine.
Okay then. He offered his hand, casually, as he had when she first entered the house. But this time she held on to it with both of hers. Thank you, she whispered.
For what?
For taking me fishing. And for letting me get all that off my chest. All that baggage. All that . . . drama. Abruptly she let go of his hand and shook her head, looking off at the dark spaces between the trees. I just hope it wasn’t too awful. I mean I hope you don’t think . . .
What I think is you’re a survivor, okay? What I think is you beat the odds down there by refusing to give up. What I think . . .(and here he hesitated, unsure how to go on, unsure how to say what he felt such a desperate urge to say) . . . Look, I’m just glad you didn’t give up. ’Cause if you gave up you wouldn’t be here tonight. With me.
He watched her bite her lower lip and he was afraid she was going to cry, something she hadn’t done, not once, during her long and painful recital. Then he felt her hand cup the back of his neck and her lips press against his and when she finally pulled away, her grin was lopsided too. I’ve been wanting to do that, she murmured, all day.
While he caught his breath, she slid into the driver’s seat and looked up at him. Will you call me tomorrow?
In lieu of a reply, he leaned down and kissed her through the open window, a gentle peck this time. Are you kidding? Of course I’ll call you tomorrow. Whadya think this is, a one-time deal?
Chance
On Sunday morning Chance followed Highway 98 north past the turnoff to St. George Island onto the bay bridge to Apalachicola, where traffic slowed for a tangle of cars arriving for services at the Episcopal Church. As he waited for the congestion to clear, he watched a procession of boats—shrimp trawlers, runabouts, oyster boats heading for the cuts beneath the bridge—troll out past the channel markers to the mouth of the river where the freshwater merged with the salt. Then the road opened up and he continued west across the peninsula, racing past long strands of sand until the traffic slowed again as he approached the paper mill at Port St. Joes.
A few miles east of Panama City he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store to check the directions he scribbled down in his notebook the night before following his phone conversation with Señor. It had been a tough call to make, but who else could he turn to for help? That cop—at least he assumed he was a cop—sniffing around the Monte Carlo had thrown him for a loop. Pacing the floor of his room at the Gibson, he kept glancing out the window, wondering if Kershaw would return. With backup.
A dozen questions swirled through his mind. How did they make him? And why? He hadn’t done anything since he arrived in Crooked River but walk around in a melancholy daze and hole up in his room. Why would anyone be suspicious? When his depression finally lifted, he had driven out to Christopher Key for a swim in the Gulf then treated himself to a couple beers and a plate of shrimp scampi at one of the dockside taverns. But he didn’t talk to anyone at the tavern except his waiter. In fact, the only person he had spoken to at any length since he arrived in town was Mr. Gold.
Wait. Was it possible that Mr. Gold was the one who alerted the authorities? The nosy old manager seemed harmless enough, but his persistent questions, no matter how casually framed, might not have been as innocent as I assumed. And foolishly, I didn’t shy away when he asked them. Why did I rattle on like that, talking about surveillance, my memoir, Dieter? The number one rule when you were on assignment was to play it close to the vest and keep your trap shut. And I didn’t do that, I failed to do that.
Dismayed by his lapse in judgment, he had walked over to the Delta Café and ordered a burger and fries to go. Then hurried back to his room where he ate the burger, tossed away the greasy fries, and poured three fingers of Jim Beam into the single smudged glass the housekeeper had left on the bathroom counter. Sipping the whiskey, he looked out the window at the darkening plaza, two hippies chatting in front of Nirvana, a biker wearing his colors reeling out the door of the Blue Moon. He scanned the sports page of the local paper, searched in vain for something of interest on TV, and finally, for good measure, popped a Xanax before lying down.
Then at sunrise he woke with a blinding headache and a pervasive sense of dread. The cop would run the plates and find out that the name on the registration of the Monte Carlo didn’t match up with the name of the guest at the hotel or the charge card he had used to secure his room. In other words, he was under suspicion. And nearly broke. Out of options, he had picked up the phone and dialed Mexico.
Unsurprisingly, Señor didn’t sound pleased to hear from him. He listened without comment to Chance’s report then advised him to sit tight, don’t go anywhere, I’ll call you right back. And three hours later, three impatient, antsy, nervous hours later, he finally did.
The Pelican Club, an elegant Spanish two-story perched on the crest of a sloped lawn above the grassy banks of St. Andrew’s Bay, exuded privilege and wealth, with yachts of every size and stripe moored in the private marina and young black men with rakes and clippers tending the elaborate grounds, including the circular drive that swept past a row of cabbage palms to the club’s imposing entrance, a pair of tall, intimidating mahogany doors. In front of the doors, a valet was waiting to park Chance’s car.
On a side deck overlooking the tranquil waters of the bay, Harvey Bellum forked a mussel out of its shell and dipped it in a glass ramekin of melted butter. Catching sight of the maître d’ escorting Chance to his table, he abruptly stood up. He was wearing an elaborate fishing vest with a maze of hidden pockets. Khaki slacks. Two-hundred-dollar sunglasses dangling by a cord.
Mr. Chance. He wiped his right hand on a napkin before offering it to his guest. Harvey Bellum. Please, have a seat. Something to eat? The food’s excellent here.
Thanks but no, I’m good.
As Bellum withdrew his hand, Chance noted the gold Rolex, the same watch Pablo Mestival wore. Well how about something to drink then. Coffee? A cocktail?
A beer. A beer sounds fine.
Beer it is. Before sitting back down, Bellum lifted a finger in the direction of the bar and a minute later a waiter appeared.
Swallowing the top inch of foam in his glass, Chance studied Harvey Bellum. Mid-forties, fit as a fiddle, with a wave of salt and pepper hair falling, rakishly, an inch below his collar. Handsome. Well-tended. Unafraid. Chance guessed lawyer, one of many Mestival must keep on retainer for situations like this. Florida, he once heard, was a major player in the drug lord’s ever expanding empire.
With an apologetic shrug Bellum held up his small fork. I hope you don’t mind if I go ahead?
Of course not. Have at it.
Every year, Bellum said, chewing one mussel while stabbing another, I get a call from the chef here. The mussels are in, he tells me, the black mussels. It’s all very . . . clandestine. No one seems to know where the mussels come from, or why they only appear once a year. A genuine mystery. He splashed the mollusk in the ramekin. Sort of like you, Mr. Chance.
Chance sipped his beer, projecting composure, professional calm. They didn’t like it when you were in too big a hurry. Patience, a Shaolin virtue, was one of the rules of behavior you were expected to obey. Etiquette. Protocol. It was the emptiest kind of posturing, of course, but Chance didn’t mind playing the game. Like James Bond, he was easily amused by the idiosyncrasies of his handlers.
With a contented sigh Bellum put down his fork, the dozen shells on his plate empty now. Took a sip of iced tea, carefully placed the glass on a coaster, and trained his gaze on his guest.
So I understand there have been . . . complications?
Yes.
Miss Lindstrom. She threw a wrench into the gears as it were, yes? By leaving Terre Haute?
Exactly. I wasn’t expecting that.
Bellum wiped his lips on a napkin. Well I’m just glad, he proclaimed, we’re all just glad that you were able to track her down to Crooked River.
Chance nodded, biding his time, waiting to see where this would go.
Unfortunately, Bellum added, I also understand that someone who may or may not be in law enforcement was seen taking photos of your car. Is that correct?
That’s correct.
Do you have any idea why?
Not a clue.
Bellum smiled. Faintly. Enigmatically. Yes well, again, we’re all pleased that you’ve handled this so professionally. It was wise of you to contact us before proceeding.
Bellum looked out at the bay where half a dozen small sailboats, Sunfish, skimmed the modest waves. In formation. A club of enthusiasts out on the water on a windy afternoon. So I suppose the only question at this point, he resumed, still watching the boats, is whether to go on.
May I speak frankly, sir?
Bellum swung his attention, his enigmatic smile, back to his guest. Why, of course you may. Please.
Chance glanced around the deck to make sure that no one was eavesdropping.
Look, if the guy’s a cop, and I don’t know that for sure, okay? But if he is a cop and he runs the plates on the Monte Carlo, it’ll still be clean, right? Even if my name isn’t the one on the registration?
Right.
Then I think we should proceed.
Bellum leaned back in his chair, a man at ease, in his element, on a Sunday afternoon.
Do you?
Yes I do. My record’s spotless, Mr. Bellum, as I’m sure you know. They have nothing on me.
As far as you know.
As far as I know.
Out on the water the sailboats, in tandem, leaned away from the wind, like a nautical ballet, or a painting by Dupuy. Bellum drummed a finger on the table.
So what you’re saying—and please correct me if I’m wrong—is that you still believe you can bring this, um, issue to a conclusion. A successful conclusion.
I do.
How long?
How long?
Do you expect it to take?
A few days, Chance answered.
On the outside?
A week.
Bellum paused to gaze out at the water again as one of the sailboats—a rogue—split away from the others, veering in a different direction. Then he shrugged, turning his palms up.
Would you excuse me, please? I have to make a call. Rising, he nodded at the empty mussel shells. You sure you don’t want a plate of these? No? All right then, I’ll be right back.
As Bellum crossed the dining room, Chance tracked him. At the bar, two middle-aged couples were sipping martinis. One of the women tossed her head back, laughing at something her companion had just said. Then her roving eye caught Chance’s and she didn’t turn away. They always look so cool, he thought, so pampered; and yet behind that beautiful façade they’re just as lost, he supposed, as everyone else. Alcoholic. Sexually frustrated. Bored to tears.
Okay then! Bellum was back, flashing his moneyed smile. Looks like a go, he announced. Full speed ahead.
