Hawk Channel Chase (2 page)

Some kind of gut reaction.

I carried his to the porch. He grasped the bottle as if its contents might save his life, but he didn’t tilt it back. He rested it on his knee and watched a damp ring form on the press line of his khakis. Then he shifted his gaze downward, used his free hand to rub his eyes and appeared to be organizing his thoughts, perhaps choosing his words. On closer look I decided that his shoes probably cost more than his haircut. I listened to a neighbor’s air conditioning compressor kick on. Music from fifteen yards away told me that a rude guest over at the Eden House had downloaded a chorus of “Kokomo” for a max-volume ringtone. Breaking rules of the hotel and mankind. Aruba, Jamaica, my ass. A perfect reason to proscribe the death penalty for selected misdemeanors.

Two minutes passed before Catherman lifted his head and tried to say something. A moment of silent eye contact ended with, “You’re a photographer.”

I was hoping for something more informative.

I couldn’t think of a response that wasn’t redundant. Respectful of the man’s distress, I waited him out.

He said, “You’ve built quite a reputation for yourself.”

Another one requiring no answer, though it could have been a negative shot rather than positive. To move things along I said, “How so?”

Catherman still hadn’t tilted back his beer. He leaned to one side and pulled from his trouser pocket a wrinkled bank envelope stuffed with currency. “I want you to take pictures of my daughter. She’s photogenic. You won’t have trouble making her look wonderful. This is a token retainer. You can bill me your regular day rate beyond this, and I’ll cover your expenses without question.”

Like the brush of a frond, a stroke of apprehension painted goose bumps on my arms. I assumed the bills were hundreds; his “token” retainer looked fat enough to be three or four grand. He wasn’t shopping for a photo shoot. I knew my answer ahead of time but I couldn’t ignore the man’s pain, the agony of a stranger.

Thankful that I had opened it, I took a slug from my bottle and said, “How long has she been missing?”

A minute of silence informed me that my guess was dead on.

“She’s only nineteen,” he said. “Her name is Sally.”

Keep it rolling, I thought. “Is she here in the Keys? Does she go to school?”

He nodded. “Full load at the community college. She works the checkout counter at Colding’s Grocery on Summerland, right where Monte’s Restaurant used to be. She’s been here since the start of summer. She lived all these years with my ex in Sarasota, but down here she’s started to bloom, to use her talent.
Solares Hill
just printed an article she wrote about snorkeling.”

“Could she have met someone who…”

“No way.” He looked away from me, stared beyond a column of ferns inside the porch to a place more distant than Dredgers Lane. “Every customer in the place, that grocery, every co-worker the past four months, has appreciated her smile, her openness. Even the idiot boss man treats her like a human while he bullies his other employees. But there’s no way, no chance in hell she would run off, even go out to dinner without calling me first. It’s not something I drilled into her mind or ordered her to do. It’s the way she is. God knows she didn’t get it from her asshole mother.”

The coffee maker quit gurgling and barking. A
 
Conch Train went south on Frances, its driver droning memorized patter about architecture.

“She didn’t come home from work yesterday?”

“Right. She made it to class, an eleven-o’clock that ended at ten after noon, but she never made it to work at two. She works two-to-eight or nine, depending on the day of the week. They said they called her cell a few times, then the home number. I found their message at home last night.”

“She have her own car?”

“The only orange Mazda Miata in the Keys. You can see it a mile away. But nobody’s seen it.”

“How does my being a photographer bring you to me?”

“That’s not the reputation I’m chasing.”

I stared at him for a moment then put the money envelope on the porch table and went to the kitchen. “You still up for a cup?”

“Black’s good,” he said. “Could I have another cold one to go with it?”

“All out. You can finish mine, if you want. One sip missing.”

He looked at the open bottle for a moment then extended his arm. I placed the beer in his grasp.

After another couple of minutes, a ceremony of alternating slugs of coffee and sips of beer, he got down to it. “I heard you helped find a nut case who was killing ex-Navy dudes. I also heard you helped bust a sheriff who snuffed his mistress. You’ve got a rep of knowing how things work in the Keys and how to make things happen.”

“Those last two things,” I said, “I’m no different than anyone else who’s been here a few years. I’ve adapted to my environment. You hear stuff, you see things happen, you understand more of it but never all of it. But law enforcement or private investigation are not my dream vocations. They’re down below my last choice. I got into a couple… umm…”

“Situations?”

“Right,” I said, “and the only safe exit was to pinpoint the guilty. I don’t have special skills to flash in the marketplace.”

“You think it was luck?”

“Mr. Catherman, I’ve run good luck past my lifetime allotment, if there is such a thing. What I’ve done, it’s no more than picking up a kid who’s fallen off his bike. Or helping someone in the library who’s dropped a stack of books. There’s been no plan of attack, ever. No expertise or bravado, no grace under fire.”

“You’re running yourself down.”

“What, you've got a dossier on me?”

“No, I was filling the air with words. But dealing with killers, you sure as hell were being more than charitable.”

“I was finding the shortest road to survival,” I said. “When those episodes were behind me, all I wanted was to go back to taking pictures.”

His expression went to a touch of anger then faded to mild disbelief. It was his turn to wait me out, so I took a break to gather the facts. For some reason I sensed that Catherman could drag me into a “situation” more complicated than he’d outlined. His cash wad was fatter than required for finding a runaway nineteen-year-old. His mercurial body language, from his aggressive salesman persona to his meek hurt daddy to the mixing of coffee and alcohol, threw me warning signals as well. I had to wonder how much drama or paranoia lay behind his obvious desperation and dread. Or how much peril.

Then he chugged the whole beer.

“Surely you’ve talked with the police, the deputies,” I said.

He nodded. “Last night twice and again this morning. They reacted like I’d dropped in to complain about a crack in the sidewalk, most notably Detective Lewis. She acted like it was her tenth missing person of the week and she was damn tired of people losing each other.”

I let that one ride without comment. I knew that most agencies didn’t consider a person “missing” until twenty-four hours had passed.

“This was the last cold one?” said Catherman.

I nodded.

“A first-class bitch,” he said. “She asked if I had questioned her friends about enemies and possible foul play. I told her I thought that was her job. She said her job was to talk to fathers just discovering that their daughters had hormones too.”

I offered a tempering, “Cops have their weird days.”

“Right,” he said. “I have mine. But this county’s like a lot of others. They’ve got weird cops who mostly have bad days. I carried a snapshot of Sally to give them and this Lewis didn’t even ask me for it.”

I stared at him and said nothing. I knew that Bobbi was capable of the hardness Catherman described, but always for a reason. Perhaps she had scoped his offbeat mannerisms, decided to keep his anxiety level in perspective.

“Right,” he said. “I need to concentrate on the real problem.”

“Can I ask a question without having you pissed off at me, too?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Go for it.”

“Does Sally have a girlfriend or two she might confide in?
 
Close friends who know things a parent might never know, no matter how perfect their child?”

His jaw clenched, his eyes went beady for an instant. Then he nodded. “She carpooled to school with a girl from Summerland Key until the girl dropped her morning class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her name’s Mikey Bokamp.”

“What’s her opinion on Sally’s disappearance?”

“I haven’t… Why don’t you ask her yourself? That can be your first step in putting together a portfolio. Here…” He tilted sideways, pulled out his wallet, extracted and handed me a small head-and-shoulders color photo.

He’d been right about photogenic. Shoulder-length pale brown hair with streaks of yellow. Skin the tone of clean white sand and blue, low-mileage eyes. Sally radiated innocence, wholesomeness. She looked like an optimist, a natural cheerleader, a walking-around good mood.

“With your expertise I guess you could shoot circles around that picture,” he said. “What are your specialties? Portraits or sunsets or what?”

He was trying to butter me up, so I didn’t respond. I thought of that sequence of letters on his business card, his professional designations, whatever they were. His line of work, if he really held a bona fide real estate license, practically demanded that he train in negotiation, psychological puppetry, whatever their sugarcoated term might be. They turn into manipulators with all that “win-win” hokum. I’ve often believed that “win-win” could best be defined as two smiles and one screw.

We listened to a neurotic woodpecker tap an aluminum rain gutter across the lane. A waft of kitchen-prep odors, what I would peg as capers, mushrooms and olive oil in a white wine reduction sauce, came through my screening. The restaurant down on Grinnell finally had opened for lunch, a promise of good eats. A reminder that I might need to buy a bathroom scale.

“You shoot for, like, national magazines, or what?” he said.

I placed the photograph on the table next to the money envelope. “I’ve done that, yes. Three or four advertising agencies outside the state.”

“So you don’t just work locally…”

“I was in the Bahamas this past week. I have Costa Rica scheduled for early November and four days in Sanibel right after that. How long have you been in real estate?”

“Not very damn long,” he said.

“How do you get all those letters after your name on the business card?”

“Cram courses in Miami and the Internet. For some you go to one or two seminars and some you sign up once a year. Why do you ask?”

Instead of saying “Just nosy,” I shrugged.

“I ran the press room for a commercial printer in Clearwater until three years ago. The sales people were always drunk so the business went south. They downsized and kicked me to the sidewalk. The shift work caused my divorce, but I was still trying to get back with my ex. Having no work at all flat did in my chance of that. So I came down here, and one thing led to another. Turned out to be best anyway.”

“Sometimes change is good,” I said. “Were you trying to buy every house in town?”

“Certain houses, certain sizes. My client wants privacy, places that are off the beaten track.”

“Even if it’s only seventy-five yards off the beaten track?”

“That’s a long way in a small town. Are you and I making progress here?”

It was my turn to think clear thoughts and select proper words. I juggled the missing young woman’s odds on the spectrum between voluntary departure and outright abduction. These were the Keys. Anything could happen and usually did. If she had vanished by her own decision, she probably was in fine shape. If someone had grabbed her, had she been targeted because of her fundamental innocence?
 
I dropped that line of thought. Who can define “target” in the mind of a sicko? Plus, that same sweetness could prevent her father or friends from imagining that she might, someday, engage in sex or make awful choices in her romantic pursuits.

I couldn’t muster a post-crime image of the young woman in the photo hurt or flung dead on the roadside or dumped in the ocean. I trusted, for the moment, that she was alive, having a better time than her father thought possible.

It made it easier for me to turn him down.

“Mr. Catherman, I’m not licensed to be an investigator and I can’t pretend to be a cop. In the eyes of the police, that makes me a pest. If they choose to see it another way, I would be a fraud and a felon. And right from scratch, looking for Sally, whom I’ve never met and I don’t know how she thinks or what she does with her days, how could I do any better than you?”

“How about experience and success?” he said. “How about guts and local knowledge?”

“My entire track record consists of getting out of jams. I don’t know the first damned thing about finding and working my way into, to borrow your term, situations. I never had to locate anything. It always found me.”

“You’re saying my money’s no good.”

“I’m saying…”

“Why have you been wasting my time?”

“Just to give you free beer and a hot drink. Your time, my porch. Ears and eyes better than walls. You were a wreck I wanted to salvage.”