Winter 2007 (16 page)

Once they’ve completed
their transaction, he says, “I didn’t mean to go all business on you. It was…”

“It’s no thing. I do a lot
of business with older guys this time of day. It beats night work. They’re
usually not freaks, so it’s easy money.”

“I know, but you were being
friendly and I….”

“Oh, was I?” The blond
shoulders her purse and smiles frostily. “You must have me confused for
somebody else. I was working the room, Clifford.”

“Cliff,” he says in reflex.

“Okay. Cliff. I’m going to
move to another stool so I can make eye contact with your buddy. But I’m down
here most every morning, so if you need me for anything else, you just sing
out.”

Cliff doesn’t know why he
does this type of thing, plays pranks for no reason and without any point. He
wonders if had it mind to compromise Ashford, to get something on him; but he
doesn’t believe it’s about manipulating people. He figures it’s like with the
sea turtle—he’s showing off, only for himself alone, his audience reduced
to one. Another instance, he thinks, of his nonchalance.

Ashford returns and tells
Kerman to bring him a glass of water. He swallows some pills, wipes his mouth,
and says, “They should blow up that john. It’s a fucking disaster area.”

“I can help you with that.”

“Huh?”

“I was in a demolition unit
during Vietnam.”

Ashford’s eye snags on
something— Mary Beth is sitting across from him, eating her French fries,
giving each one a blowjob, licking off the salt and sucking them in. He tears
himself away from this vision and says to Cliff, “We haven’t been able to
locate Miz Gerone, so officially you’re a person of interest. If that blood on
your house matches DNA the lab extracted from her hair brush, I’m going to have
to bring you in.”

Cliff offers emphatic
denials of any involvement with her disappearance. “We fucked occasionally,” he
says, “but that was it. We didn’t have much of an emotional connection.”

“I know this is a frame.
But the way you’ve handled everything, telling that story, lying about your
girlfriend, it…”

“That wasn’t a lie. I
couldn’t get back into my house because you were processing it. So I went over
to Marley’s after you released me, and things got deep. I swear to God that’s
the truth.”

“Doesn’t matter. It looks
bad. You want to know something else that looks bad? I got a copy of one of
your movies in the mail the other day. Jurassic Pork. Came in an envelope with
no return address.”

“Aw, Christ. I did that
picture for the hell of it. I was curious to see what it was like.”

“Somebody’s trying to
besmirch your character.” Ashford chuckles. “They’re doing a hell of a job,
too, because you were definitely the shortest man in the movie.”

“Yeah, yeah!”

“Prosecutors love to drop
that sort of detail into a trial. Juries down here tend to think poorly of
pornography. But the frame is so goddamn crude. The person doing the framing
must have no comprehension of evidentiary procedure.”

“So you believe me?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,
but I believe something’s going on at the Celeste.” Ashford has a sip of water,
sneaks a peek at Mary Beth, who returns a wave, which he brusquely
acknowledges. “You know of any way a used car can be given a new car smell?”

“Polyvinyl chloride,” Cliff
says. “The stuff they make dashboards out of. It comes in a liquid form, too.
The manufacturers use it as a sealant. When a dealer has to take a car back on
warranty, some have been known to slap on a coat of PVC and resell the car as
new.”

Ashford takes out his
notebook. “What was that? The sealant?”

Cliff repeats the name.
“The stuff’s poison. Every time America has a whiff of a new car interior, they’re
catching a lungful of carcinogens.”

Apparently unconcerned by
this threat to the nation’s health, Ashford says, “I might have found that Ford
Escape. About five years ago, we were investigating a stolen car ring and we
thought Muntz could be involved. We put a man into his service center in South
Daytona. Nothing came of it, but I still had my suspicions. I went up there
Tuesday and there was a red Ford Escape sitting out back under a tarp. I had
one of our people take a look at it. It had that new car smell, but the engine
number had been taken off with acid and the paint job wasn’t the original. The
car was originally gray, like the one you saw.”

“If Jerry was chopping
cars, they would have cut it up within an hour or two of bringing it into the
shop,” Cliff says. “It’s been a month.”

“He might have a special
order for an Escape. It might be a present for one of Muntz’s bimbos. Maybe he
had a buyer and the guy has a cash flow problem. Who knows? Maybe it slipped
his mind. Muntz is no Einstein.” Ashford’s cough is plainly an attempt to
disguise the fact that he’s taking yet another look at Mary Beth. “He’s got
papers, but the name on them doesn’t check out. He claims the guy came in off
the street and said he won the car on a quiz show. I haven’t got enough to
charge him, but my gut tells me that was your Escape.”

“So what’s next?”

“I might check in to the
Celeste tonight and see what’s what. Vice has some expensive cars they use for
undercover work. I can finagle one for the night, tell the guy on-duty at the
yard I need it to impress some woman. That should get me into Room Eleven.”

“You think that’s a good
idea?”

“I can’t see what else to
do. I don’t have much time. If Gerone’s DNA comes back a match to the blood on
your house, you’re going to become the sole target of the investigation.”

“I thought you said you
believed me!”

“I may buy your story. Some
of it, anyway. But no one else does. The only reason you haven’t been arrested
is there’s no evidence, no body. I’m on my own. The captain…” Ashford grimaces.
“He’s a results kind of guy. He’d love to make this case. It would look good on
his resume. You’re about as close to a Hollywood celebrity as we got around
here, and a trial would get him exposure. It’d be huge on Court TV. He won’t
authorize me to do diddley until after the DNA comes back. If it’s a match,
you’re in the shit.”

“When’s it due back?”

“Depends how far behind the
lab’s running. Maybe two-three days. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”

“Fuck!” Cliff tries to
concentrate on the problem, but he’s too agitated—he flashes on scenes
from prison movies, the wavy smear of blood on his porch, the face of the
witch. “You shouldn’t do this alone.”

Amused, Ashford says,
“Yeah, it’s going to be rough, what with demons and all.”

“You don’t know what
happened to all those people.”

“First of all, we don’t
know it’s ‘all those people.’ We don’t even know for sure about Gerone.
Second…” He pushes back his coat to reveal his holstered weapon. “I’m armed,
and I have thirty years on the job. I appreciate your motherly concern, but
nothing’s going to happen that I don’t want to happen.”

“Have you asked yourself
why they only disappear people who rent Number Eleven?”

“Well,” says Ashford after
pretending to contemplate the question. “I guess because it has a magic stone
buried underneath it.”

“You don’t have an answer,
huh?”

“Maybe there’s a hidden
entrance,” says Ashford, registering annoyance. “Or you just didn’t see the
people leave. Maybe they take them out in little pieces. I got way too many
answers. I got them coming out of my ass. That’s why I’m going up there, man.
That’s how you work a case.”

Unhappy with this attitude,
knowing he can’t influence Ashford, Cliff says, “I don’t understand why you’re
doing this for me.”

“Jesus!” Ashford gives a
derisive laugh. “You think I’m doing this for you? I don’t give a flying fuck
about you. I’m doing this because I enjoy it. I dig being a cop. I hate to see
bad guys get away. And that’s what’s going to happen if you become the focus of
the investigation. We might get Muntz and the What’s-the-fuck’s-their-names for
auto theft, but if they’re guilty of murder, I want to make sure they don’t
slide.”

Cliff has new picture of
Ashford as a rebel, a loner in the department who never advanced beyond the
rank of sergeant because of his penchant for disobeying his superiors. He
realizes this picture is no more complete than his original image of the man,
but he thinks now that they’re both part of Ashford’s make-up. He wonders what
pieces he’s missing.

“Go on, get out of here,”
Ashford says, still irritated. “We’re done. Go play your free games.”

Cliff hesitates. “Give me
your cell number.”

“What the hell for?”

“If you’re in there more
than two hours, I’ll call you.”

Ashford glares at him, then
extracts a card case from his jacket and flips a card onto the counter.

“Call me before you check
in,” says Cliff. “Right before. So I’ll know when the two hours are up.”

“Fine.” Ashford signals
Kerman, holds up his cup, and grins at Mary Beth. “See you later.”

Chapter Ten

As often happens when Cliff
is under duress, he’s inclined to put off thinking about crucial issues. He
returns to Jungle Queen and finds that his place has been taken by a bald,
sunburned, hairy-chested man in a bathing suit, a towel draped around his neck,
who has frittered away all but two of his free games. Cliff watches for a bit,
drawing a perturbed glance from the man, as if Cliff is the reason for his
ineptitude.

He spends the rest of the
morning pacing, puttering around the apartment, his mind crowded with thoughts
about Stacey. They didn’t care for each other that much, really. The
relationship was based on physical attraction and sort of a mutual
condescension—they both viewed the other as being frivolous and shallow.
Nevertheless, the idea that she’s been murdered makes him sick to his stomach.
He switches on the TV, channel-surfs, and switches it off; he vacuums, washes
dishes, and finally, at a quarter past one, needing to talk it out with
someone, he calls Marley.

“I’m in the middle of
something,” she says. “I’ll call you
tomorrow.
“

From her emphasis on the
word, he understands that she probably won’t be home tonight, that she’s
trapped by her mother’s impending breakdown.

He drives to the Regal
Cineplex in Ormond Beach, where a movie’s playing that he wants to see, but
after half-an-hour he regrets his decision. It’s not that the movie is
bad—he can’t tell one way or another—but sitting in the
almost-empty theater forces him to recognize his own emptiness. It’s still
there; it hasn’t gone away. He’s reminded of the first month after he returned
to Daytona, when he attended matinee after matinee. He missed being part of the
industry, and watching movies had initially been a form of self-punishment, a
means of humiliating himself for his failure now that the work wasn’t coming
anymore; but before long those hours in the dark, staring at yet not really
seeing those bright, flickering celluloid lives, brought home the fact that he
was missing some essential sliver of soul. He hadn’t always missed it—he
was certain that prior to Hollywood he’d been whole. Yet somehow, somewhere
along the line, show biz had extracted that sliver and left him distant from
people, an affable sociopath with no particular ax to grind and insufficient
energy to grind it, even if he had one. He hoped Marley could bring him back to
life, and he still hopes for that, but hope is becoming difficult to maintain.

He walks out into the empty
lobby and stands at the center of movie displays and posters. Pitt and Clooney,
Will Smith and Matthew McConaughey, posed heroically, absurdly noble and grim.
He buys a bag of popcorn at the concession stand from a pretty blond teenager
who, after he moves away, leans on the counter, gazing mournfully at the beach
weather beyond the glass. Thinking that it was the violence of the film that
started him bumming, he tries a domestic melodrama, then a bedroom farce, but
they all switch on the Vacancy sign in his head. He drives back to Marley’s
apartment in the accumulating twilight, a stiff off-shore wind beginning to
bend the palms, and waits for Ashford to call.

By the time the call comes
at ten past nine, Cliff’s a paranoid, over-caffeinated mess, but Ashford sounds
uncustomarily ebullient.

“Black Dog, Black Dog! This
is Dirty Harry Omega. We’re going in! Pray for us!”

Cliff hears high-pitched
laughter in the background. “Is someone with you? I thought you didn’t have any
back-up.”

“I brought along the hoo…”
He breaks off and asks his companion is it okay he refers to her as a hooker.
Cliff can’t make out the response, and then Ashford says, “I brought along the
beautiful,
sexy
hooker you set me up with.”

More laughter.

“Are you crazy?” Cliff
squeezes the phone in frustration. “You can’t…”

“He wants to know if I’m
crazy,” says Ashford.

An instant later, a woman’s
voice says, “Ash is
extremely
crazy. I can vouch for that.”