Cry Uncle (19 page)

“
Don’t yank my chain, Tony.
If I’ve got to travel all the way to Florida, I need to know where
to go. Miami, Tampa, Orlando... You’ve got to get me her
address.”

“
You aren’t allowed to leave
the state while you’re out on bail, Mick.”

“
That’s not your problem.
Your problem is, I need to know if this Pamela Brenner is the same
broad as my good friend Miss Hayes. And I need to know where she
lives. And frankly, her plate numbers would be more useful to me
than her driver’s license, which she no doubt will be carrying in
her wallet where I can’t see it. Like, I’m supposed to pick the
pocket of every skinny blond bitch in Florida to see if she’s got
the right license? Get me tags, pal. Get me an address. Florida’s a
big state.”

“
I’ll do what I can,” Tony
promised.

“
Just get me what I need,
and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“
Yeah,” Tony promised again.
“That sounds about right to me.” He hung up without saying
good-bye.

Mick lowered the receiver and grinned. He
might have been heavy-handed with Tony, but the guy was a wimp, and
he responded well to being scolded. Mick didn’t even have to spell
out a threat. He just had to give a little nudge, and Tony would go
back to risking his neck to get Mick what he was after.

Florida. Pamela
Brenner,
nee
Hayes,
lived in Florida. Once again Mick could taste success.

Still smiling, he lifted the remote control
and turned the sound back on. The lady on the screen was lying
dead, the man looming above her, looking mighty satisfied with what
he’d accomplished.

Jury selection for Mick’s new trial wasn’t
supposed to begin for months. If necessary, his lawyer could drag
things out even longer. But it probably wouldn’t be necessary. Mick
would soon be feeling the same smug satisfaction as the guy on the
TV show, taking pride in a job well done—and walking free when the
state’s star witness was unable to testify against him.

Oh, yes, he thought, gazing at the female
corpse on the screen. Things were definitely looking up.

***

IF ANYONE HAD TOLD Pamela she was destined to
be married to a man she never saw, she wouldn’t have believed it.
Then again, if anyone had told her she was going to observe the
slaying of a professional colleague, put herself in jeopardy by
testifying against the murderer in court, and flee to a steamy,
sticky island off the southern tip of Florida, where she would take
an utter stranger as her husband and accept his wild little niece
as part of the package, she wouldn’t have believed that,
either.

None of this had been a part of her life
plan.

She wanted to see her husband. She wanted to
talk to Jonas, tell him how her day had gone, boast about how she’d
persuaded Lizard to behave with the assistance of a dish of
peppermint-stick ice-cream and a pad of graph paper that had so
pleased the little girl she’d forgotten all about her demands to be
taken to the beach. Pamela had purchased pencils, a ruler, a
protractor and the graph paper so she could begin jotting ideas for
the overhaul of Birdie’s house. Lizard had insisted that she knew
Birdie’s house—and Birdie—better than Pamela did, and therefore she
should have some graph paper to jot ideas on, too.

If peace could be bought for the cost of a
pad, Pamela wasn’t above spending the money. More than peace,
Pamela had bought victory over the Liz-Monster. It would have been
cheap at twice the price.

Pamela wanted to tell Joe. She wanted to brag
that, for a single, professional woman who’d never had any dealings
with five-year-old brats, she had acquitted herself with Lizard
rather nicely. Joe had told her not to wait up for him, but she’d
wanted to see him, so she’d pulled a paperback novel from the shelf
in the den and settled on the porch to read until he got home from
the Shipwreck.

And then, apparently, she’d fallen
asleep.

She hadn’t seen Joe, but he’d seen her. When
she woke up the next morning, she found herself in her own bed. Who
but Joe could have carried her up the stairs?

She knew he was strong enough. She knew how
easily his powerful arms could lift her and cradle her against his
chest. He’d carried her across the threshold, hadn’t he? And
embraced her, and kissed her...

She supposed she should be grateful that he’d
left her fully clothed when he’d brought her to her room last
night. It would have been simple enough for him to undress her when
she was too soundly asleep to protest. For that matter, it would
have been simple enough for him to kiss her awake like a scruffy
Prince-Charming arousing Sleeping Beauty from her century-long
slumber. Pamela wasn’t sure she would have stopped him.

But obviously he hadn’t wanted to kiss her,
or undress her, or join her in bed. Now that the enchantment of
their wedding had worn off, he had come to his senses and decided
to keep his hands, and his lips, to himself.

Pulling herself out of bed, she removed her
wrinkled clothing, tossed it into her laundry hamper, and donned
her bathrobe. She passed the bathroom to peek at his bedroom door,
which was firmly shut. No doubt he was still sleeping.

Feeling out of sorts, she showered, returned
to her bedroom and dressed in the Key West uniform: fresh shorts
and a T-shirt. Then she went downstairs.

Lizard was seated cross-legged on the floor
of the den, no more than a couple of inches from the television, an
open box of sugar-laden cereal in her lap. She wore a tank shirt
and sweat pants cut off at the knees, with a feather tied into the
drawstring at the waist. Her attention glued to the cartoon on the
TV, she didn’t acknowledge Pamela’s quiet “Good morning.”

Pamela could have urged Lizard to put a few
more feet between herself and the screen, or to turn it off
altogether. But Lizard wasn’t her child, and training her not to
pig out on junky cereal while watching junky cartoons wasn’t
Pamela’s job. At the moment, she wasn’t really in the mood to be
sociable, either.

Abandoning the den, she went outside to get
the newspaper. A light drizzle was soaking the earth, and the
newspaper was soggy despite its plastic wrapper. Her spirit felt
soggy, too.

Really, she assured herself as she returned
to the kitchen and spread the sections of the paper out to dry, she
didn’t care about seeing Joe. He was just her husband, and Lizard
was just her niece by marriage. Nothing important. Hardly a family.
Pamela would fix herself a pot of coffee and read the waterlogged
paper, and she wouldn’t mind a bit if she was all alone.

***

AS IT TURNED OUT, she didn’t see Joe once
during the entire day. After breakfast, she and Lizard went across
the street to Birdie’s house to measure the rooms and diagram the
building’s foundation on their graph-paper pads. When they went
back home for lunch, Joe was gone. In the afternoon Pamela traipsed
through the mud of Lizard’s garden, listening to Lizard pontificate
on the balance of nature and the fact that Birdie knew how to make
dandelion wine, which proved that dandelions were just as valuable
as grapes, and that if weeds weren’t good God wouldn’t have made
them. Pamela refrained from pointing out that God had also made
thugs like Mick Morrow, so maybe not all His creations were good.
Lizard was too young to become a cynic.

For dinner Pamela served salmon. Lizard
argued that it was in fact orange and not pink, but Pamela held
firm and the kid ate it. Afterward, Lizard endured two baths—she
flunked Pamela’s inspection after the first bath—and Pamela read
her a chapter from a book chronicling great battles in world
history. “I like the parts about weapons,” Lizard told her. “Read
about the catapults, okay? They’re neat. I wanna build one.”

Pamela read the chapter on catapults, then
tucked Lizard in. “I’ll tell Uncle Joe you said good-night,” she
said, although heaven only knew when she would have the
opportunity. Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe today had been
an anomaly, but Pamela couldn’t shake the suspicion that Joe didn’t
want to talk to her, didn’t even want to be in the same room with
her.

“
Give him a kiss from me,”
Lizard requested.

Pamela gritted her teeth. “Okay.”

“
And tell him I don’t really
think you’re ugly. Just kinda skinny, is all.”

“
I’ll tell him.”

“
And you should grow your
hair longer, so you can make it in braids, like mine.”

“
Okay. Bedtime, now,
Lizard.”

“
And tell Uncle Joe we’re
gonna borrow his tools to build Birdie’s house.”

“
I’ll tell him.”
If I happen to bump into him anytime in the near
future,
Pamela grumbled under her breath.
“Have you ever gone a whole day without seeing him,
Lizard?”

Lizard peered up from her pillow. Her small
round face was surrounded by a mass of hair, and then by a
menagerie of stuffed creatures that included an alligator, a
possum, and what appeared to be a rat. “No, but that’s on account
of, we didn’t have you. Sometimes he’d bring me to the Shipwreck
with him. But now you’re here, and I bet he never brings me there
again.” This prospect clearly did not sit well with her. She
scrunched her face into a scowl. “He keeps telling me a bar is no
place for a kid. I like it there, but he doesn’t like me hanging
out there. He says now that I’m older I gotta clean up my act. If
you ask me, two baths is clean enough.”

“
Well, I’m glad you’re not
going to the bar. I agree with him—that’s not an appropriate place
for a child to be.”

“
But I like it there. And
Kitty’s teaching me how to mix drinks, and she always makes me pink
stuff. Strawberry daiquiris or pink ladies, only she leaves the
booze out.”

“
Thank heavens for that,”
Pamela muttered. “You’re better off drinking milk.”

“
Milk is yucky. I like
daiquiris better.”

“
You definitely need to
clean up your act, young lady.” Pamela ruffled her hands through
Lizard’s hair, then smiled and turned off the light.

“
Don’t forget to kiss Uncle
Joe for me!” Lizard called after her.

She closed Lizard’s bedroom door and
descended the stairs. The house was unnervingly quiet, as still and
silent as her condominium back home when she wasn’t listening to
Mozart. It didn’t seem right that she should have changed her
residence, her name, her marital status, her entire existence—and
still feel so alone.

She wandered into the den, perused the
television listings in the newspaper, and decided there was nothing
she felt like watching. Joe had a modest stereo system, and she
studied his collection of CD’s. Not a single classical recording
among them. Mostly rock—oldies as well as an assortment of more
recent grunge bands.

She wondered if he owned a
copy of
Stand By Me
.

The closest he would get to standing by her
would be a song on a disc, she thought grimly. Joe was doing
exactly what she’d once hoped he would do. He had married her and
now was giving her as much independence as she’d had as a single
woman.

She didn’t want a relationship with him, she
reminded herself. She didn’t want to become overly involved in his
family. All she wanted was a disguise, protection from Mick Morrow.
Not a lover, just an adult to talk to at the end of the day.
Someone to confide in, to boast to, to describe Lizard’s zany
concepts for Birdie’s house: “I think we should build a tree house
in the living room, with a rope ladder. And then if the company got
boring you could hide up there and shoot arrows down at them. And
you know what? We should put a chimbley in the middle of the
kitchen, just in case Birdie’s food catches on fire.”

Perhaps, given her voodoo activities,
Birdie’s food did spontaneously combust. Perhaps, given the woman’s
apparent obsession with all things avian, she could use a tree
house.

If only Joe were home.

Sighing, Pamela picked up the book that had
put her to sleep last night. She was about to stretch out on the
sofa when the telephone rang.

The shrill sound was so unexpected she
flinched. Her heart thumped wildly; her breath caught in her
throat. It took her a full minute to remember that no one in any
position to do her harm knew where she was. The call would be for
Joe, not for her.

Either that, or the caller was Joe himself.
Calling to say hello, maybe. Calling to say he would try to get
home earlier tonight, or wake up earlier tomorrow, so they could
exchange a few words like a married couple.

Refusing to give in to pleasure at the
thought of getting a phone call from her absentee husband, she
hurried into the kitchen and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“
Mary DiNardi here,” said
Joe’s attorney. “Is this Pam?”

Pamela tried to stifle her disappointment.
“Yes,” she said, recalling Joe’s brisk dark-haired lawyer, whom
Pamela had met a few days before the wedding. She had gotten the
impression that Mary didn’t like her much—or at least didn’t like
the notion of her marrying Joe. Mary had treated her with a cool
formality totally at odds with her easy humor and congeniality with
Joe.

Well, Mary didn’t have to like Pamela, and
Pamela didn’t have to like Mary. They were united in keeping Joe
and Lizard together; they could tolerate each other.

“
Hello, Mary. Joe isn’t in
right now. He’s—”

“
At the bar. I know. I
figured if I called him there, he might get the message garbled or
whatever. Anyway, since you’re the lady of the house...” She
cleared her throat, as if speaking those words strained her voice.
“I’ve received a correspondence from the Prescotts’ lawyer saying
they’ve filed custody papers with the court. The court has
appointed a guardian for Liz.”