Pulse (14 page)

“Papa?” Frank’s knees buckled as the years fell away. He was eleven again. His briefcase dropped to the floor. “Papa?” Tears blinded him, but he had to see. He inched toward the body as he had done once before, the smell of blood making him tremble. He crouched to lift a corner of the small rug, twisting his head, straining to see the swollen features, the bulging eyes.

They were not his father’s. He fell into a sitting position, head between his knees. He had to think, take control. He felt nauseous. He struggled to his feet and managed to make it to the door before he threw up on the wooden floor outside the office. Still gagging, his handkerchief over his mouth, he turned to stare back into the room. He should have come sooner, now it was too late.

He gasped, needed fresh air. Needed to call somebody. He lurched through the darkened restaurant and tried to wrench open the locked door. Hands shaking, he twisted the bolt and swung it open. A bright light from the alley blinded him for a moment. Someone stood there. A tall man, pointing a gun at his chest.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“S
top right there, hands out to the side, and chill for a minute ‘til I sort this out.”

“He’s dead,” Frank gasped.

“Dead? Who’s dead?” The young cop’s voice changed. “What are you talking about?”

“Inside. The man’s dead.”

“Okay, put your hands flat against the wall.” When he obeyed, the officer holstered the gun and frisked him. “Got any knives or needles on you? Anything I can stick myself on?”

Frank shook his head. The cop had jammed his foot against the inside of his instep, keeping him slightly off balance.

His heart pounded, his mind reeling between images of what he had just seen and discovering his father the same way, thirty-three years earlier. Then, he had run blindly into the street trying to stop passing cars for help. Brakes had screeched, people had shouted. A policeman had come. But this cop was handcuffing him, speaking rapidly into a little microphone on his lapel, requesting backup “on the double.”

A patrol car screeched up to the mouth of the alley moments later, then another. Two cops sprinting toward them amid a jangle of metal and keys. One wore a yellow rain slicker.

“I’m checking for a possible break and this guy comes charging out, ranting about a body in there.” He turned to Frank. “Show me.” Wasn’t that what the cop said outside his father’s shop? he thought.

One went around to check the front. Frank led the other two back through the shadowy kitchen, toward the office. His head swam and his legs were numb. What if they found nothing? he wondered. No blood. No body. Like the storm-tossed boat, the stranger lurking in his bedroom, in his driveway. Was Kathleen right? Was he crazy? They had all been just as real. Six feet from the door that stood half open, he stopped and shook his head.

“I can’t.” His voice broke. The police must have thought him squeamish, but he was apprehensive about what might not be there.

“Stay right there,” the first cop said. He stepped sideways and peered cautiously into the office without touching the door. “Oh, Christ. He’s right,” he said to the other one. He stepped into the room for a moment, then emerged. “The guy’s definitely dead.” He turned to Frank. “Anybody else in the building?”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The cops drew their guns and flashlights.

The first talked into his lapel again, asking for more backup, homicide, ID and a supervisor.

A homicide detective responded on another frequency. “We’ve got a forty-five, an apparent thirty-one at the Tree Tavern on Coral Way,” the young cop told him. “Homeless guy flags me down, says he thinks there’s a ? and E in progress. I stop a guy flying out the alley door. Says somebody’s dead inside. Victim appears to have multiple gunshot wounds to the head. Four or five casings. Looks like evidence all over the place.” He paused to listen on the tiny earpiece.

“No, it looks more like a twenty-nine than a thirty-two, but I haven’t notified robbery yet.”

He glanced at Frank. “Yeah, he’s not going anywhere.”

“Who’s the dead man?” a black detective asked him. Her inquisitive eyes roved over Frank’s clothes, his expensive watch, his silk tie. The alley was roped off now. Bright camera lights and people were gathered on the far side of the yellow tape.

“I said, who’s the dead man?”

Frank was startled into attention. “I don’t know. Probably Ron Harrington.”

“What do you mean, probably?”

“I never met the man.”

“Kelly here says you appeared to be extremely upset. You were that worked up about it when you didn’t even know the man?”

“My father. You see, my father …” After all these years, tears stung his eyes. “My father was murdered.”

“Here in the city?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Whose case is it?”

He paused, remembering. “A Detective Carpenter.” He could see the man again, in his mind’s eye, burly and balding.

“Carpenter?” She looked disgusted, voice accusing. “We have no Detective Carpenter.” She turned impatiently to a patrolman. “Give this guy a seat in your car for safekeeping. We need to talk to him at the station.”

“It was thirty-three years ago,” Frank explained.

“Hey,” said a graying detective, “I knew a Carpenter in homicide, retired ‘bout twenty years ago when I was a rookie.” He looked curious.

“You own a gun?” the woman asked. Her name was Constance Jewell, she said. Tall and broad-shouldered, she wore blue eye shadow and carefully applied tangerine lipstick. His driver’s license was in her hand. The dispatcher had just informed her that Franklin D. Douglas had no outstanding warrants, no history, no record, not even traffic.

“Yes, I do, it’s, it’s in my car.”

“Fired it recently?”

“This week, at the range.”

“Lemme ask you a question.” She gazed up at him with a heavy-lidded speculative look, as though about to proposition him. “Are you involved in this? Maybe you had a reason. Did you shoot that fellow in there?”

“Hell, no.”

“Okay then. What do you think about this? I know it’s inconvenient, but how about cooperating with us? We have a test that will pick up nitrates, traces of gunpowder, on your skin, see if you fired a weapon today.”

He agreed to submit to a gunshot-residue test and to allow them to examine his gun, and they removed his handcuffs. He signed a waiver. A lawyer would advise against it, he knew, but he had nothing to hide. A technician swabbed his fingers and palms, one by one, then sealed the swabs invials. They seemed disappointed that his gun was a .38-caliber revolver and not an automatic.

“Call Detective DeVito or Jarrett from Miami Beach P.D. They know me,” Frank offered.

“Call over there,” Jewell instructed another officer, never taking her eyes off Frank. “See if they’re working today and if they’re on the air.”

Two cameramen were filming as he and a patrolman walked down the alley and he climbed into the backseat of a squad car. The homeless man stared from the crowd.

“Am I under arrest?” Frank asked numbly.

“They just want to talk to you,” the officer said reassuringly. He closed the door as a Channel Seven cameraman pressed his lens up to the window.

“So we meet again.” DeVito pulled up a chair in a small informal interview room in the fifth-floor homicide office. The door stood open, with Detective Jewell in and out of the room as they talked.

“I’ve met people who were witnesses in more than one homicide in a week, but they’re usually part of our crack-head population or some six-year-old kid who lives in Germ City, at ground zero in a war zone. You don’t fit in, Frank. What’s the story here? What’s goin’ on?”

He explained. He was helping Rory, a widow, to straighten out her husband’s estate, and made a business appointment with Harrington. He gave them Rory’s number to confirm his story. They called it several times, they said, but no one answered.

“Her husband was Harrington’s partner.”

“And what happened to him?” Jewell asked.

“He committed suicide, shot himself last summer.”

The detectives exchanged glances. “So let me get thisstraight,” DeVito said. “The partner of your second murder this week committed suicide? Lemme ask you, Frank, you got some kinda nickname, like the Angel of Death?”

“You’re forgetting his father.” Detective Jewell leaned against the doorframe listening.

“Maybe I oughta get my lotto numbers from you,” DeVito said.

“Shit happens, huh?” Jewell said.

They sent his gun off to the lab. The dead man, according to the wallet found in his back pocket with fourteen hundred dollars in cash, appeared to be Harrington, pending formal identification by the medical examiner.

Frank’s name and the time of their appointment were noted on the dead man’s desk calendar. His story checked out, clearly disappointing the cops who had hoped for a quick arrest. Based on Harrington’s turned-out side pockets, the rifled drawers and the empty safe, they had called in a robbery detective and were discussing possibilities, known holdup men with violent tendencies.

If they are known robbers, Frank thought, why are they on the street? The helplessness and hopelessness of the entire system seemed overwhelming.

“We need to take your statement,” Jewell told him.

“Can I do it tomorrow?” He was worried about Rory. Where was she?

Jewell shook her head. “We’ve got a dead body, we don’t know what’s going on. We need everything down on paper tonight.”

He made the statement, took his medication, returned by the first cop who had frisked him, and promised to be available should they need to talk to him again. When they took him back to his car outside the restaurant, the reporters were gone and the crowd, aside from a few stragglers, had dis-persed. Only the crime-scene technicians remained. Frank watched two emerge from the building. There was something troubling about them that he could not quite recall. He started across the street toward their van, but turned back to his car. He had to find out about Rory.

He arrived at Twin Palms in less than twenty minutes. The rain had stopped and the temperature had dropped. Stars shone, cold and hard in a gunmetal sky.

The station wagon stood in the driveway, lights on in the house.

He wondered how long she had been home and kept his finger on the bell.

“Who is it?” She sounded frightened, but threw open the door at once when she saw who it was.

She was still dressed, in blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt over a Marlins T-shirt, her hair loose.

“You’ve been with Ron all this time?” she said brightly.

“Sort of.” He rubbed his left wrist where the handcuff had bit into the flesh. “Where were you?”

She looked at him oddly. “Worked all afternoon at the Seabird Station, then picked up Billy from Jill’s house. We went out for pizza, came home, and I had a nasty little encounter with something dead.” She shuddered.

“What a coincidence.” He followed her into the living room. “So did I.”

“What?”

“You first.”

“Well …” She switched off the TV and motioned for him to sit. “I was groping for the front door key in the dark and, wouldn’t you know, dropped the mail on the stoop. A buncha magazines and those slick catalogs all scattered. When I slid my hand underneath to pick ‘em up, I felt somethingslimy and dead on the doormat.” She grimaced in mock horror. “Poor Billy musta thought I had a heart attack.”

“What was it?”

“A great big ol’ dead lizard. Tail half chewed off. I’m sure Hootie, the cat, killed it.”

“Mine was messier.”

Daniel Alexander watched from the mantel as he told her. In the dim light, Frank thought his smile looked malevolent.

“My God.” Her hands flew to her throat. “Ron? You’re sure?”

“The police seem certain it was him. At first they thought I killed him.”

“Good God, no! What did tryin’ to help me git you into? I’m so sorry, Frank.”

“Now they suspect robbery.” He wondered how much to tell her. Where had she really been?

“You think it was the insurance money?”

“He wouldn’t keep that kind of cash around, would he?”

“He might have. Showing off. That was Ron. He liked to flash money, to impress people, especially women.”

When he asked to see a picture of Ron Harrington, she brought out a scrapbook and turned to a photo of the partners in front of their first Tree Tavern Restaurant. Harrington appeared to be the man he had found. In the photo he and Daniel looked proud and happy. Who could have foreseen that within a few short years both would be dead?

“I’m not sure where to go from here,” Frank told her. Harrington was long divorced, according to Rory, and had no widow he could talk to. “Maybe we can contact his lawyer and see if there is anything among his papers that might give us a lead.”

It was late; he knew he should leave but needed to talk. He hated mistrusting her. She had seemed genuinely shockedby the murder. His heart went out to this widow, alone, with a young son. Why did he doubt her? He felt like two people with warring emotions. He had to talk to someone.

“Rory,” he began, his voice uncertain. “Since the surgery, I feel like I’m never alone. I’ve had dreams, think I see things, sometimes hear a voice … not,” he added quickly, “the sort of voices heard by paranoid schizos. But I’ve thought … maybe it was Daniel.”

Her expression did not change.

“I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“Shoot no,” she said calmly. “Daniel and I talk all the time.”

“Well, Christ, Rory. Ask him what he did with the money.”

“Well, it’s not like precise Q and A, but when I need him most,” she said softly, “he’s always there. I kin hear him telling me not to worry, that everythin’ will be all right, that I kin raise Billy by myself. That I’m strong enough to do what has to be done. He helps keep me going.”

She took his hand. “Some a this,” she conceded, “could be survivor’s guilt. My aftercare counselor says it’s only natural. We both feel it because we’re alive and he isn’t.”

He shook his head. “But now,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, “I’m sensing something else. Rory, I keep having the strong feeling that Daniel is alive.”

“Of course he is.” She touched his chest gently. “He’s alive in you.”

He sighed. No one would understand, or believe him.

“I went to a meeting,” he said, leaning back, the intensity drained from his voice, “an organ-recipient support group, with Kathleen. It was a disaster.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the right kind of a meetin', not the kind of support that you need.” She paused. “There are alterna-tives. You know I’ve tried different groups myself, trying to get a handle on things, looking for answers, solace or somethin'.” She shrugged. “I’ve found one that might make more sense to you right now.”

He sighed, wondering why women always believe that talking, even to total strangers, will solve everything.

“They’re into other planes of existence, the struggles of restless spirits in transition.” She looked at him expectantly. “Why don’t you try one of their lectures?”

He declined. This was no time to become involved with charlatans hawking some out-of-this-world mystical hocus-pocus. Kathleen would be certain he’d gone bonkers.