Tropical Freeze (22 page)

“I’m trying,” he said. “But it’s a lot of damn guessing, so circumstantial.”

“Judge Thorn,” she said. “He’s got to have proof.”

He drove down U.S. 1, towing that Porsche past the new K Mart, the old shopping center, a couple of miles south of that, and turned into the Bomb Bay Trailer Park.

She said in a quiet voice, “How’d he look, Thorn?”

He shook his head, looking straight ahead.

“Never mind,” she said. “Never mind.”

She showed him which house was Ozzie’s. Thorn parked in Ozzie’s backyard, got out, unhooked the Porsche. Darcy stayed in the cab of the truck. When he’d run the towline back onto the spool, he walked over to the Porsche.

The water had all run out now. Strands of algae hung from the chrome strips around the window. Gaeton was in the passenger seat. His face was puffy, and his flesh was gleaming rubber. His hair had been sliced back from the water. A dark ragged cavity in his forehead.

Thorn looked across at the tow truck, at the back of her head. Darcy waited, looking ahead out the windshield at an empty lot across from the water. She didn’t need to come back there to look. She had him in her head, in that vision inside her, which seemed more accurate and reliable, maybe even more vivid than what Thorn could see, standing there before the fact itself.

Thorn spit. He sent it across the gravel lot. He hardly ever spit. He couldn’t remember the last time. And now he felt like kicking something. He hadn’t felt that in a long while either.

He rolled the Porsche backwards into a ramshackle garage, and found a white painting tarp in there, and tossed it over the car, then came back around to the passenger door. The neighborhood was still, a northerly breeze flickering through the coconut palms. It sounded like a smoldering fire in the dry underbrush. It must have been near two, three in the morning.

Thorn opened the door and stuck his head in the car and slid his arms around Gaeton’s body, hauled him out. He was stiff but soggy. Thorn carried him like a bride across the threshold over to Ozzie’s ice cream truck. He didn’t look at his face again.

He opened the double rear doors and hefted Gaeton up onto the steel floor of the truck. A long yellow extension cord ran from the compressor on the side of the truck to the side of Ozzie’s house. As Thorn was climbing into the truck, the generator switched on.

Inside one of the bins was the ice cream. In the smaller cooler on the left side there were plastic Baggies full of joints and uncleaned marijuana. He closed the double doors behind him and stood there panting, eyes burning. He blinked them clear.

The aluminum doors to the bin hinged in the middle. Thorn lifted the door out. The cooler was two, two and a half feet across. He had to do some rearranging, moving the Eskimo Pies, the ice cream sandwiches, the Popsicles to one side of the freezer case.

When he’d cleared the space, he lifted Gaeton up onto his shoulder. A cup of cold canal water gushed down Thorn’s back, and something tinkled onto the metal floor behind him.

Thorn settled the body as gently as he could manage into the case. Gaeton’s back rested against the icy bottom of the cooler, still in a sitting position.

With his fingernail, he scratched the layer of frost off the temperature gauge inside the cooler. Thirty-four degrees.

He had to rock Gaeton’s body upright. Then, one hand on his knees, one on his chest, pushing hard, trying to flatten the body a couple of degrees so he could fit the doors back in place. It took five minutes, all the strength he had. But he got him in there, burying him under Popsicles, fruit bars, Fudgsicles.

Thorn turned and squatted, began to pat the floor to find the object. He took it outside the truck into the light from the streetlamps. Though by then he already knew what it was, rolling it around in his fingers.

It glittered in the streetlamp. A gold queen conch earring.

He took it over to the tow truck, got back inside. Darcy turned to him, and he held the earring out to her in his open palm.

“What is it?” she said, taking it from his hand.

He waited till she looked up.

“Proof,” he said.

Sugarman came to his front door with a huge mug of coffee. He wore a red striped cotton robe and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

Thorn said, “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

“Since Christmas,” he said. He sipped the coffee. “You want to come in, or that all you wanted to know?”

Thorn asked him if he still had that sixty-second Polaroid camera. Sugar said, yeah, he did. Thorn asked if he could borrow it for a couple of days.

“Sure you can,” Sugarman said. “Even though I know you’re not going to tell me what you want it for.”

“It’s spooky how well you know me,” Thorn said.

Florida Secure Systems was in the Banco Nacional Complex on Biscayne Boulevard. The building was one of those postmodern things, brightly colored loops and spirals of concrete frosting the plain white granite walls. Tack some last-minute whimsy on the dead serious. The entranceway was the stark marble of a government building, but just inside the revolving door were murals of bright pouty lips, painted fingernails, red high-heel shoes. There was a whole wall of Marilyn Monroe touching her chin to her naked shoulder.

Thorn rode the elevator, listening to the soft jazz Muzak, watching a Cuban woman in a tight green dress touching up her mascara. He had on a white button-down shirt, gray poplin pants, and his best deck shoes. Fifty miles south, in the Keys, he might be dressed for a wedding. Here he looked like a ragman.

He carried the small leather pouch where he stored his fly-tying tools. The pliers, clippers, scissors of his trade. They rattled, and the Cuban woman turned to look at him. Thorn smiled, but she wasn’t having any of it. She’d met smilers before.

The elevator was glass, running up the inside of the building, giving them a tour of the plumbing and electrical circuitry. Thorn had a pang, thinking of his house, of the stacks of timber lying out in the yard. That skeleton of wood, half done, much of it already graying in the winter sun.

The woman got off on twelve, and Thorn rode up one more floor. The doors opened into the Florida Secure Systems suite. A chrome and Plexiglas desk blocked his way. Behind it was a wall of glass that showed a sweep of Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach beyond.

Roger was sitting at the desk. He’d been working on his tan. He was wearing an aqua polo shirt with a bright blue marlin jumping over his pecs. He looked up from a copy of
Vanity Fair
.

Thorn nodded hello.

“Well, well, Mr. Thorn.” Roger folded over the page of his magazine and leaned back in the receptionist chair. “I got a bone to pick with you.”

“What, did he cut off your rations?” Thorn said. “Just because I dumped him in that hot tub?”

“Mister, you made the man’s major shit list.”

“Yours, too?”

“Fortunately, I’m not a grudge holder. But if you’re here to toss the man out the window or anything, I’m going to have to be more vigilant.”

“I just want to see him, say hi. I drove all this way.”

“Yeah, but the problem is, the man doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Roger said.

“Well,” Thorn said, “then he should see a psychiatrist.”

Roger smiled, said, “You’re the one should do that, showing your ass around here. I mean, either you’re crazy or your goddamn androgen’s pumping overtime.”

“Both,” Thorn said. He sat on the edge of the desk. “You want to buzz him or should I?”

Benny, in a charcoal suit, French blue shirt, red Oxford tie, was wearing a small dot of a bandage on his right earlobe. When Thorn came into the office, he’d seen it and taken a deep swallow of air.

Benny was saying, “Yeah, yeah, right, Thorn, I’ll give you a job. Soon as the next ice age comes, when the woolly mastodons are running down Biscayne Boulevard. When you can ice-skate to Bimini. Yeah, then come see me, we’ll find you a slot.”

“But Gaeton said the coast was clear. You’d forgiven me.”

“Gaeton Richards?” Benny said, lowering his eyes to the papers on his desk for a fraction of a second, bringing them back up. “Where is that asshole anyway? He hasn’t been around since last week.” Benny took a quick look at Thorn’s leather pouch.

Thorn said, “You didn’t know about the accident? I saw him just yesterday, brought him home from the hospital.”

Very slowly Benny brought his eyes to Thorn’s. Gave him a thorough exam. Thorn suffered through it for a moment or two, then turned away, continued his prowl of Benny’s office.

The wall across from his desk was covered with photos. Benny and J. Edgar Hoover. Benny and a crowd of men in tuxedoes, one of them Richard Nixon. Benny with a head of hair and Kissinger. And standing next to the Russian writer with the funny beard. Benny and some Arab sheikh. Thorn was looking at that one, standing with his back to Benny now, examining this black-and-white photo of Benny on a yacht, up in the pilothouse with an Arab in a white headdress. Benny yakked at the side of the sheikh’s face while the Arab concentrated on the direction they were headed.

“Hey, hot rod, you turn around, look at me,” Benny said, “tell me what accident that would be.”

Benny and a Miami TV star. Benny with a pencil-thin mustache, shaking hands with a former Florida senator. Thorn turned around.

“You ask me that, and it surprises me,” Thorn said. “Because Gaeton told me you knew all about it.”

Benny said it wasn’t Thorn’s goddamn business what Benny knew or didn’t know about. His eyes were charged now. He drew himself up out of his chair, put his hands flat on the desk, and leaned forward. A lot of amperage in his eyes.

Thorn said, “He spent a few days at Mariner’s Hospital before I even knew about it. You know him, how secretive he is about everything. He called me yesterday, I went down there. Jesus, I thought he was in a head-on, all the bandages, bruises. His face, shoulder. It looked bad, but he was up, moving around OK. Creaky, and his speech was slurred a little, but moving around.”

Benny said, “And he told you to come here, speak to me? Is that what you’re saying? Gaeton Richards did that?”

“Yeah, he did.” He kept his voice easy while his heart had hiccups. Thorn sat down in the bucket seat next to the desk. It looked like an ejection seat. Go ahead, he was thinking, let it rip.

Benny said, “And so what you’re saying to me is, you came up to Miami, see if I still desired your services? That’s the bullshit you’re spouting here?”

Thorn made an affirmative hum.

“You know what, Thorn?” Benny sat back down. “The business I’m in, I’ve met flakes and scutwads like you wouldn’t believe. But this is a goddamn first. A guy, one day he tries to drown me in my own hot tub. A week later he’s in my office talking bullshit to me like we were kissing cousins.” Benny turned halfway around, gazed out at the sleek skyline of Miami. “I’m a believer in hiring the handicapped. I got all kinds of half-wits and dimwits working for me. Making a decent wage, too, by God. But let me tell you something, I wouldn’t pay you a nickel to pick fleas off my ass.”

He had his white phone up then. Punched three numbers.

He said, “Key Largo. The number for Mariner’s Hospital.”

Then he punched that, watching Thorn intently with a lift of an eyebrow.

Benny asked for Gaeton Richards’s room. He waited, squinting at Thorn. Benny kept the phone at his ear, curled his hand underneath his desk. The office door lock clicked.

Benny’s eyes shifted down to his desktop, and he said, “When was that? Yesterday?”

As he listened, Benny rose, came around the desk, stretching the phone cord behind him, moving closer to Thorn. His gray suit was tailored to take twenty pounds off him. Halfway working.

“And he was in for how long? Yeah, OK. His doctor’s name was what? Oh, you can’t? Tell me, why is that?” Benny edged up closer to Thorn and let him see the look in Benny’s eyes, a cold light. He ran those eyes over Thorn’s face as he listened to the voice on the phone.

Benny said, “Well, then never mind, honey, I’ll find out myself. And hey, tell me one more thing, sweetheart, you having some serious blood flow problems between your legs, or what?” Benny listened to her answer, smiling. Thorn could hear her squawk. He’d have to apologize to Cynthia Sanderson. Doing Thorn a favor and having to take Benny’s abuse.

When he’d hung up, Benny brought his eyes slowly to Thorn’s and said, “You got my attention, hot rod. If that’s what you wanted, you got it.”

“I could put you into some good fish,” Thorn said. “I know where they are. I know a hole, I’ve taken snook, jewfish out of it. Next day another one swims in and takes its place.”

Benny shook his head, walked back to his desk, and clicked the door lock again.

“I already settled your fate, Thorn, or you might be ticking me off right now. My friendly advice to you, son, is to start lining yourself up some reliable pallbearers.” Not angry. Not anything. He sat down, leaned back in his chair and went off somewhere, thinking, or whatever he did in there.

Thorn said, “I’ll tell Gaeton you asked about him.”

“Yeah,” Benny said, his eyes drifting back to earth. “Do that. You do that.”

Thorn got off the elevator at the twelfth floor. A lawyer’s office. The receptionist was the Cuban woman in the green dress he’d ridden up with. She cupped her hand over the receiver and said, yes?

“I’m here to service your copier,” he said, jingling his pouch at her.

She scowled at him and told the person on the phone she’d call right back. She led Thorn down a hallway with a plush purple carpet to a stark room with five copiers. She waved her hand at the silent machines and said something in Spanish about the tainted ancestry of all copy machines.

“Do any of them work?” he said.

“Just the one,” she said. She patted it cautiously. “We call and call. It is a week now.”

Thorn said, “Well, you should’ve bought the XR four hundred series. You bought the bottom of the line. Pieces of shit like this are always broke.”

She said something else in Spanish. An anatomical absurdity.

When she left him, he flipped open the lid of the working machine and laid the snapshot he’d taken on the glass plate. It took him a minute of fiddling, but he got it spitting out copies in a while. He made fifty before the machine broke down.