All Through the Night (20 page)
T
he homicide detective from the Naples Police, Mehan, met them where the entrance to Lantern Island joined the main five-lane drag. He didn’t like doing it, but he showed up. “Explain to me why we’re standing out here in hundred and ten degree heat, hundred and ten percent humidity, when we got a nice cool interview room—crank the AC up high, even buy you a Coke, you ever think of that?”
Jerry just gave him stone. “We have something we think you ought to see. And we can’t leave this spot.”
Mehan glanced over to where Julio sat slightly hunched over inside Wayne’s truck. Julio might have started communicating with God, but it didn’t make him pals with strange cops. “You’re gonna tell me the reason, I hope.”
Jerry nodded to Wayne. Tell the man.
Wayne set it up. Showed him the pages from those Tatyana had printed out. Explained the connection between Triton and Cloister. “There’s no reason why they would enter into a partnership with themselves unless they were hiding something. As in, sweeping profits under the carpet.”
“We’re back to this scam thing of yours, am I right?”
Jerry said, “Let him finish.”
Mehan sighed heavily. He used two fingers to pluck the shirt off his chest.
Wayne described their meeting with Neally. Then he showed Mehan the strip of newspaper.
Mehan tried hard to hold onto his skepticism. “He gave you this how?”
“When he shook my hand.”
“After he told you he couldn’t help you.”
Jerry said, “Now tell him the good part.”
“There’s more? You got to be kidding me. What, he gave you a map with a skull and crossbones?”
Tatyana said, “This is serious, Detective. We have an elderly gentleman who’s been abducted and the possibility of a serious statewide scam.”
“I am still waiting for the first bit of evidence on that scam deal.” But Mehan was no longer sneering.
Wayne described what had happened at Easton Grey’s on Saturday. The false gardeners, the surveillance amp, the cameras. And Foster being kidnapped the next morning.
Mehan looked from one to the other. “You got somebody official who’ll back you on all this?”
Jerry opened Tatyana’s phone, keyed in a number, said, “Jerry Barnes for Officer Coltrane. Yeah, I’ll wait.”
Mehan accepted the phone. “Officer Coltrane? Detective Mehan, Naples Homicide. We spoke yesterday.”
Jerry waited until the detective stepped away to say, “I believe we finally got the man’s attention.”
A Lexus SUV turned off the highway and pulled past them. Wayne glimpsed an all-too-familiar face wearing a startled flash of recognition. The car continued another hundred feet or so before the brake lights came on.
The young woman emerged stiffly from the car. It was Patricia, but different. Four years older. Slightly fuller around the middle. Far better dressed. Her hair was cut stylishly short and the ends frosted. Perfect makeup.
But her rigid anger was exactly the same as he had seen, and caused, all too often.
“Wayne?”
“Hello, Patricia.”
“What are you
doing
here?”
Wayne was still sorting through various responses when he felt another person step up beside him and declare, “He is with me.”
“And you are?”
“Tatyana Kuchik.” She offered a business card. “Counsel to the Grey Corporation.”
The restyled Patricia took her time over the card, using it as a focal point while she reknit her day. “You’re a lawyer.”
“That is correct.”
Memories flooded back at the sight of her face pinching up tight, compressing her lips and her eyes. Wayne ached with the ability to name the reason for every line that extended almost to her hairline.
Patricia asked Tatyana, “What’s he done now?”
“Wayne is aiding us in an important investigation.”
Patricia took in the unmarked cop car with the flasher on the dash. Mehan stood two steps away from Jerry, listening to the phone and watching the drama with a faint smirk.
Patricia said, “I’m a little out of practice. Is that cop talk for he’s not been arrested yet?”
“Wayne is not in trouble, ma’am. He’s a consultant—”
“Whatever. I do
not
want to hear.”
She stomped back to her car, then turned back for a parting shot. The line might have been different, but the song was one he recalled all too clearly. “You stay
away
from my family!”
Mehan slapped the phone shut and walked back over. “Charming lady. She’s got to meet my ex. They can have coffee, trade arsenic recipes.” He handed Jerry back the phone. “Okay. Coltrane confirms what you’ve told me. Everything except the abduction, which they still have on the books as a missing person.”
Wayne stared at the space where Patricia’s car had been. The air still shivered from the heat.
Jerry said, “Foster Oates was abducted.”
“No note, no ransom, no call. Guy’s got no assets to speak of.” Mehan raised his hand to stifle Jerry’s protest. “I hear what you’re telling me, and it don’t matter. Where I’m standing, there’s nothing to substantiate your claims. And nothing to tie what we got here into this surveillance deal clear on the other side of the state.”
Tatyana’s ire raised the day’s temperature another notch. “You’re dismissing everything we have just shown you?”
“Absolutely. This has waste of time written all over it.”
Jerry stabbed at the strip of newspaper dangling from Mehan’s hand. “What about that?”
“Come on, man. You’re a cop. You know chain-of-evidence rules same as me.”
“My friend’s been abducted and this is the first clear indication—”
“Correction. Your friend is
missing.
And for all I know you got that homeboy hiding in your truck to write this up.”
“Julio is clean.”
“Sure he is. That’s why he’s plastered to the floorboards.” Mehan handed Tatyana the strip of newspaper. “Soon as you got some
real
evidence, you be sure and give us a call.”
A
fter the detective left, Jerry explained he and Julio were going to try and find an ally within the local force, then swing by some of the churches with big Hispanic populations. Wayne had no intention of leaving the terrain unguarded. It both surprised and warmed him, though, how Tatyana insisted on staying with him.
He couldn’t tell her how often he’d been there on his own before. “It’s fine,” he told her.
Tatyana saw Jerry’s smirk and asked, “You think I am funny?”
Jerry said, “No, sister. Wayne is one lucky dude, is what I’m thinking.”
“This is a serious issue,” Tatyana said. “This is a safety issue.”
“You’ve been calling the man a warrior, right? I’m guessing our hero will be just fine on his own.”
Tatyana made him wait at the entrance while she walked across the street and bought them sandwiches from a deli-grocery. When she returned, she drove them back to the north point and parked just past the Neally entrance. A pair of giant live oaks formed a living canopy over the road. The street was completely empty.
They unwrapped the sandwiches, pastrami for him and tuna for her. There was a tension in the silent car. A pressure Wayne found he did not mind in the least.
She waited until they had both finished their meal to ask, “What do you hope will happen?”
Wayne glanced at the clock set in the dash. It had taken her forty-three minutes to ask the question. He liked that about her. This sort of patience was not normal in Americans. He had seen it overseas, where television and film and games and life’s rush meant nothing. He liked it a lot.
Wayne replied, “We won’t know until we see it.”
She nodded. Accepting both his answer and his lack of certainty. She gave the silence another fifteen minutes. Then she asked what he had been waiting for.
She said, “Do you want to tell me about her?”
A simple no would shut that door. Wayne knew she would never ask him again. And he was tempted. He had, after all, been storing away his secrets for years. This was not something the military had taught him. He had been working on that trait a long, long time.
Even so, he replied, “My whole life feels like one giant mistake just rolling into the next one.”
He expected her to deflect. That had been his experience with women. Tell them the raw truth, even when they’d asked for it, and they’d change the subject.
Instead, Tatyana turned in the passenger seat so she was half facing him, and said, “Tell me the worst.”
“There are a lot of those too.”
“Pick one.”
That was the trouble with memories. Lift the lid looking for one, and all sorts of beasties started crawling out of the pot. “When I was fourteen I got arrested for the second time. Maybe the third. A buddy lifted a car and I went along for the ride. When my dad came down to get me, we had to sit with a police counselor while they decided whether to book me or not. The counselor asked my father if this was typical behavior for me or if this was something new. Pop told the lady, ‘The boy’s been looking for trouble since the day he discovered long pants.’ They booked me as a juvenile accessory and gave me ninety days, suspended.”
“So you never had anybody stand up for you.”
“Eilene did.”
“She is what, three years older than you?”
“Two.”
“She was a child then too. I meant someone who mattered when you were young and most vulnerable. Someone who could shield you from harm and offer you a way out.” She started to reach for him, but stopped herself. “We have more in common than you realize.”
“I bet you didn’t make a profession of learning all the wrong moves.”
Her gaze was not so much open as bruised. He glanced over and found himself unable to look away.
She did not demand so much as softly remind. “We were talking about you.”
A pair of white egrets stalked insects by the side of the road. Their impossibly slender legs took ballet steps through the trimmed grass. “Patricia and I were just kids when we got married. She was eighteen and I was a year older. By then I’d aced my basic training, advanced infantry, long range surveillance, whatever they threw at me. For the first time in my life I’d found something I was good at.”
“What about accounting?”
“That came next.” The army’s logic defied explanation. How they managed to tie him into the office corps was anyone’s guess. But they did. Him with the two stripes and a whole truckload of gung ho, getting strapped to a desk. The lieutenant in charge knew there had been a mistake the instant Wayne opened his jacket. He promised to do what he could, if Wayne would give him his best until things got sorted out. What neither of them had expected was how much Wayne enjoyed the work. Wayne told Tatyana about the class work, the simple pleasure he found in making numbers talk. “The instructor and the lieutenant said I was one in a million. Words I’d never heard before. I was almost sorry when they pulled me into Ops.”
But not for long. The training and the high-wire tension molded the recruits into the first real family he’d ever known. Which was true for a lot of the grunts. Misfits with a lot of reasons to rage, learning how to turn their fury into the edge to stay alive.
He realized he’d gone quiet. “Sorry.”
She gave him that smile that remained buried down so deep he wondered if he was the first who had ever seen it. “For what?”
What she said next caught him totally off guard. “I used to think getting the worst over early had its advantages. After that, life would just get better. That kept the pressure on me. Made me work harder for what I wanted to achieve. There must be worse things in the world. I know that now. But back then, I only knew my life. Being beautiful, becoming a woman, and locked up in a Siberian orphanage. That is what I have tried to run away from. And failed.”
The bruises in her gaze had grown deeper still. Wayne stared at her face and wondered if, in fact, the conversation had ever really been about him at all. “I’m so sorry, Tatyana.”
“I was married to Eric six months before I ever mentioned this. When I did, he acted like I had something wrong in me, not being able to walk away from my memories. I used to think that was why he cheated on me with those women. I learned later that there had been many of them. I thought maybe he did it because I couldn’t let the past go.”
“Listen to me. I don’t know him and I don’t know what happened. But I know this. He never deserved your trust.”
Then the car appeared.
Tatyana said, “It’s the maid.”
Wayne opened his door and slid out. He leaned back in and spoke hurriedly. “When she stops, try to see if she’ll tell you anything more. I’ll be around. You won’t see me but it doesn’t matter. Call me when you can.”
She started the car. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
He did not shut the door. “Promise me we’ll finish this talk later, okay?”
She looked at him but did not speak. She did not need to.
J
erry answered the phone with, “Yo.”
“Where’s Julio?”
“Working the crowd outside this church, place used to be a warehouse. You oughtta see him. Got the ladies all cackling, crowding around like he’s giving away candy. What’s up with you?”
“I’m sitting in a tree watching the Neally house. Tatyana just left, following the maid. She took off in a brand-new canary-yellow Escalade.”
“Must be the wife’s car.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. I’m hoping she’ll stop at the market or someplace and let Tatyana in on what’s happening.”
“I don’t like you sitting surveillance with no backup. You keep your phone on. We’ll get back over to you soon as we can.”
Wayne cut the connection, then checked to ensure the cell phone’s ringer was set on silent buzz. He slapped the lid shut, stowed it in his pocket, and lifted his head just in time to watch a limo pull into the Neally drive.
The stretch Lincoln had all its windows down. There was just the driver and one man in back. Wayne knew it was a man because of the jacket sleeve and the edge of starched white French cuffs and flash of gold cuff links. The man was hidden behind a newspaper. Another day, another deal. Wayne’s perch was a live oak whose branches grew out and over and dug back into the earth again, following the wall that fronted the Neally estate. Unless someone looked straight up, Wayne was invisible.
Wayne waited until the limo purred up the long drive and disappeared around the side of the house. He waited until the silence took charge once more. The street was empty save for the wavy heat rising off the asphalt and the golden rivulets of afternoon sunlight lancing through the higher limbs.
Wayne rose from his crouch and climbed up one level. A bough thicker than his waist extended a full thirty feet into the Neally front yard. Wayne scampered out to where the limb began rocking under his weight. He crouched and readied himself to drop to the ground. The house was just visible through the foliage, about seventy yards to his left.
He stopped.
The sprinkler system for the house next door switched on. Wayne listened to the metallic rush and smelled the wet. He swiveled slightly and studied the Neally house. The yard and the home looked utterly empty. A squirrel leapt from the ground onto the tree about fifteen feet from where he crouched. Wayne listened to the squirrel’s claws scramble across the bark and felt a rising sense of dread.
He crawled back along the tree limb to his lair. Far more than the surrounding leaves blocked his vision. Wayne pulled out his phone. He stopped in the process of opening it. He did not bow his head so much as curl his entire body around the apparatus. What was it Victoria had said he needed? His chest quivered with a laugh that was far more irony than humor. If gut-level truth counted for anything, he had prayed more in the past twenty-four hours than in the past two dozen years.
When he dialed, Jerry answered with, “You missing me?”
“Where are you now?”
“Ten minutes out. Less. Why?”
“Something’s happened. A limo just pulled in the drive.”
“Who was it?”
“Couldn’t tell you.” Wayne realized then what had been bothering him. “What kind of guy rides in the back of a smoked glass limo with all the windows down?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“Think about it.”
“So the dude’s a fresh air freak.” But more serious now.
“The driver too?” Wayne said. “Both of them in suits? On a day this hot and muggy? The newspaper he’s holding rattling in the wet wind?”
Jerry took his time, came back with what was already rocking Wayne’s brain. “They wanted you to see inside.”
Wayne nodded enough to make the limb creak. “One man and his driver.”
“Which means they got a welcome committee waiting for us.” Jerry was talking to himself as much as to Wayne. “How’d they do that? The place is one way in, one …”
Wayne supplied what Jerry had already realized. “They came by boat.”
“Worked for us.”
Wayne was very pleased he had a sudden reason to grin. “I’ve got an idea.”
Jerry stayed trapped inside his thoughts as they drove toward Lantern Island. He had to hand it to the kid. While Jerry had remained in the truck, the kid had glad-handed his way through three churches, trading jokes with the ladies, coming out with everything he could possibly hope for. Call it fifteen minutes for each, start to finish. The kid would make a good undercover cop. Which was not why Jerry was glum. He felt let down by his own side, Mehan giving him “chain of evidence.” Jerry knew exactly what had been going down and he didn’t like it. Mehan was resisting a handover to the Naples white-collar crime unit. Maybe he was worried the white-collar crew would ridicule his lack of solid evidence. But Jerry had started case files with less to go on. He was thinking either Mehan feared losing control of the case or he was just plain lazy. And neither of these was a good response to a request from another cop.
But that wasn’t the real reason Jerry burned inside his own skin.
As they approached the final stoplight before the turn to Lantern Island, Julio shifted in his seat and said, “What about you, bro?”
“Don’t call me bro.”
“You been around Miss Victoria for years, right? How come you’re not saved?”
Jerry stopped at the light and looked over. It was the exact sort of conversation he’d be having with a long-time partner. The two of them easy in silence until one gave voice to a thought, usually starting midway through the concept. Like they were so in tune with one another they could assume the other would understand everything that went before.
Only this was with a barrio kid, him of the low-rider pants and the juvie sheet sixteen pages long.
Even so, Jerry hated how Mehan had treated Julio. The sneer, the suspicion, his ready attitude to slap on the cuffs first and search out the reason after.
Which was exactly how Jerry had acted.
That was what burned his craw.
Jerry said, “Who says I’m not saved?”
The kid shrugged. “The smell of this pizza is killing me. Okay if I have some?”
“Wait till we’re through the gate. The guard sees you chomping down and smeared with tomato sauce, he’s gonna know something ain’t kosher.”
“What, you think I can’t eat and stay clean?”
“Just hang on a sec, we’re almost there.”
“I know how to eat, man. I ain’t no animal.” Julio turned glum. “I know some, though. Animals.”
“So how come you’re not a banger? Last I checked, the Churos still had your area locked up tight.”
“Them and the Black Hands, yeah.”
“So you never joined?”
“They started on me. I talked to Eilene.”
“And?”
“She never said. But I think she phoned my old man.”
It made sense. “That was smart.”
“Or my brother. One or the other. I think. They never said. All I know is, one day they were on my case, the next and I had this bubble around me—they see me coming, they cross the street.”
Jerry made the turn. He glanced over, saw how the kid had gone morose on him. Amazing how the simplest question could rake across old wounds. “I asked for a miracle once. God said no. I got mad. End of story.”
“You don’t believe in miracles?”
“I didn’t say that.” He slowed for the guard station. The guard checked their day pass and opened the gate. Jerry waved his thanks and said, “But no. Matter of fact. I don’t.”
Julio grinned. “We’re sitting here, talking like two normal people. That’s a miracle in my book, man.”
Jerry rolled his window back up. “You got me there.”
The first thing Jerry said when Wayne opened the truck door was, “How’d you do that?”
“Move over.” When Julio shifted Wayne climbed in. “Did the guard call through?”
“Checked our day pass and license number is all. Now answer the question. I was watching all the angles, I glide the street, I park a block away, then poof, up you come.”
Julio said, “Man don’t need no cape to be super bad. But if you got one of them Bat-cars, I’m claiming shotgun.”
“Dude don’t need a black car with fire out the back end. Man’s already got hisself a Ferrari. That ride and that lady, I’d say the combo’s good for a shiver.”
Wayne took note of the change in the truck’s atmosphere, the easy grin the two men shared, but decided there was nothing to be gained by asking about it. “Where’s the pizza? I can smell it but I don’t see it.”
“What Julio didn’t scarf is behind the seat.”
“Right. Like you didn’t hose down five slices.”
“Two. I ate two.”
“Whatever. Man looks at me holding the box—don’t touch that, don’t touch, then whoosh. The box is empty.”
Wayne asked, “You ate all the pizza?”
“We got two more, don’t worry.”
“And a Coke, you get thirsty eating yours.” Julio twisted around, came up with a pungent box and a can. “The driver there, he can talk your head off, going on ’bout how hungry you get on stakeouts. Like sitting in a hot car watching an empty street is something I need to know about.”
Wayne ate a slice, drank, asked Julio, “Tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Man, there you go with the rocket science again. Jerry already melted my brain with all his orders. You want a blue-print, call NASA.”
“Got to admit, the kid has a point,” Jerry said. “Julio carries the pizza boxes to the door and rings the bell. How hard is that?”
Wayne selected another slice. “You’re taking his side now?”
“Whatever gets this show on the road.”
“You’ve got your gun, right?”
Jerry lifted his shirt. A snub-nosed revolver was attached to his belt. “Haven’t taken it off since they nabbed Foster.” He watched Wayne eat, and asked, “You phone the lady and tell her what you’ve cooked up?”
Wayne took another bite, shook his head.
“No, best not. She’d probably go all lawyerly on you, want you to sign some release or something.”
Wayne finished his slice and the Coke, then slid from the truck. He stood holding the door and said to Julio, “Just don’t go scouting the terrain looking for me or Jerry.”
Jerry opened his door. “And don’t go inside the house, whatever they tell you.”
Julio looked from one to the other. “I been thinking. Miss Victoria, I know she’d like it if we prayed first.”
Jerry’s eye found Wayne’s across the truck. His eyebrows were high enough to dig furrows across his forehead. “That a fact.”
Julio nodded, said to the former cop, “You want, you can say the words.”
“I told you already. God don’t pay any attention to me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Kid.” But the heat wasn’t there. “You started this motor. You drive the car.”
The men got back in the truck. When Julio was done praying, Jerry gave Wayne another look, as in, You believing this? He climbed out, watched Julio slide behind the wheel, and said, “Tell me you’ve driven a truck before.”
“Man, who you talking to?” Julio fired the engine. “I been boosting cars for years.”
“Of course. Silly me.” When the kid drove off, Jerry said, “Having a barrio kid talk to God on a cop’s behalf, this day is already beyond strange.”