Double Whammy (6 page)

“So the state attorney's office dropped the burglary charge on Mr. Football Hero, and nailed me for agg assault. He gets a scholarship to USC, I get felony arts-and-crafts. That's the whole yarn.”

Pickney sighed. “And you lost your job.”

“The newspaper had no choice, Ott.” Not with the boy's father raising so much hell. The boy's father was Levon Bennett, big wheel on the Orange Bowl Committee, board chairman of about a hundred banks. Decker had always thought the newspaper might have rehired him after Apalachee if only Levon Bennett wasn't in the same Sunday golf foursome as the executive publisher.

“You always had a terrible temper.”

“Luck, too. Of all the thieves worth stomping in Miami, I've got to pick a future Heisman Trophy winner.” Decker laughed sourly.

“So now you're a ...”

“Private investigator,” Decker said. Obviously Ott was having a little trouble getting to the point.

The point being what in the hell Decker was doing as a P.I. “I burned out on newspapers,” he said to Ott.

“With your portfolio you could have done anything, R.J. Magazines, free-lance, the New York agencies. You could write your own ticket.”

“Not with a rap sheet,” Decker said.

It was a comfortable lie. A lawyer friend had arranged for Decker's criminal record to be legally expunged, wiped off the computer, so the rap sheet wasn't really the problem.

The truth was, Decker had to get away from the news business. He needed a divorce from photography because he had started to see life and death as a sequence of frames; Decker's mind had started to work like his goddamn cameras, and it scared him. The night he made up his mind was the night the city desk had sent him out on what everybody figured was a routine drug homicide. Something stinky dripping from the trunk of a new Seville parked on the sky level of the Number Five Garage at Miami International. Decker got there just as the cops were drilling the locks. Checked the motor drive on the Leica. Got down on one knee. Felt the cold dampness seep through his trousers.
Raining like a bitch
. Trunk pops open.
A young woman, used to be, anyway.
Heels, nylons, pretty silk dress, except for the brown stains.
Stench bad enough to choke
a
maggot.
He'd been expecting the usual Juan Doe—Latin male, mid-twenties, dripping gold, no ID, multiple gunshot wounds.
Not a girl with a coat hanger wrapped around her neck.
Not Leslie. Decker refocused.
Leslie.
Jesus Christ, he knew this girl, worked with her at the paper. Decker fed the Leica more film. She was a fashion writer—who the fuck'd want to murder a fashion writer?
Her husband, said a homicide guy
. Decker bracketed the shots, changed angles to get some of the hair, but no face. Paper won't print faces of the dead, that's policy. He fired away, thinking: I know this girl, so why can't I stop?
Leica whispering in the rain, click-click-click.
Oh God, she's a friend of mind so why the fuck can't I stop.
Husband told her they were flying to Disney World, big romantic weekend, said the homicide man
Decker reloaded, couldn't help himself.
Strangled her right here, stuffed her in the trunk, grabbed his suitcase, and hopped a plane for Key West with a barmaid from North Miami Beach.
She'd only been married what, three months?
Four, said the homicide guy
,
welcome to the Magic Kingdom. Haven't you got enough pictures for Chrissakes?
Sure, Decker said, but he couldn't look at Leslie's body unless it was through the lens, so he ran back to his car and threw up his guts in a puddle.

Three days later, Levon Bennett's son tried to steal R. J. Decker's cameras outside the stadium, and Decker chased him down and beat him unconscious. Those are my eyes, he'd said as he slugged the punk. Without them I'm fucking blind, don't you understand?

At Apalachee he'd met a very nice doctor doing four years for Medicare fraud, who gave him the name of an insurance company that needed an investigator. Sometimes the investigator had to take his own pictures—“sometimes” was about all Decker figured he could handle. Besides, he was broke and never wanted to see the inside of a newsroom again. So he tried one free-lance job for the insurance company—took a picture of a forty-two-foot Bertram that was supposed to be sunk off Cat Island but wasn't—and got paid two thousand dollars. Decker found the task to be totally painless and profitable. Once his rap sheet was purged, he applied for his P.I. license and purchased two cameras, a Nikon and a Canon, both used. The work was small potatoes, no Pulitzers but no pain. Most important, he had discovered with more and more cases that he still loved the cameras but could see just fine without them—no blood and gore in the darkroom, just mug shots and auto tags and grainy telescopic stills of married guys sneaking out of motels.

None of this he told Ott Pickney. Being a private detective isn't so bad, is what he said, and the pay's good. “It's just temporary,” Decker lied, “until I figure out what I want to do.”

Ott managed a sympathetic smile. He was trying to be a pal. “You were a fine photographer, R.J.”

“Still am,” Decker said with a wink. “I waltzed out of that newspaper with a trunkload of free Ektachrome.”

 

The funeral was like nothing R. J. Decker had ever seen, and he'd been to some beauties. Jonestown. Beirut. Benghazi.

But this was one for the books. The L. L. Bean catalog, to be exact.

They were burying Bobby Clinch in his bass boat.

Actually, part of the boat. The blue metal-flake hull had been sawed up and hewn into a coffin. It wasn't a bad job, either, especially on short notice.

Clarisse Clinch thought it a ghastly idea until the Harney County Bass Blasters Club had offered to pay the bill. The funeral director was a dedicated fisherman, which made it easier to overlook certain state burial regulations concerning casket material.

R. J. Decker resisted the urge to grab an F-1 and shoot some pictures. The last thing he needed in the viewfinder was a shrieking widow.

The thirty-acre cemetery was known locally as Our Lady of Tropicana, since it had been carved out of a moribund citrus grove. The mourners stood in the sunshine on a gentle green slope. The preacher had finished the prayer and was preparing to lay Bobby Clinch's soul to rest.

“I know some of you were out on Lake Jesup this morning and missed the church service,” the preacher said. “Clarisse has been kind enough to let us open the casket one more time so you boys—Bobby's fishing buddies—can pay your eternal respects.”

Decker leaned over to Ott Pickney. “Which one is Lockhart?”

“Don't see him,” Ott said.

A line of men, many dressed in khaki jumpsuits or bright flotation vests, a few still sloshing in their waders, filed by the sparkly blue casket. The undertaker had done a miraculous job, all things considered. The bloatedness of the body's features had been minimized by heavy pink makeup and artful eye shadows. Although the man in the casket did not much resemble the Bobby Clinch that his pals had known, it could easily have been an older and chubbier brother. While some of the fishermen reached in and tugged affectionately at the bill of Bobby's cap (which concealed what the ducks had done to his hair), others placed sentimental tokens in the coffin with their dead companion; fishing lures, mostly: Rapalas, Bombers, Jitterbugs, Snagless Sallies, Gollywompers, Hula Poppers, River Runts. Some of the lures were cracked or faded, the hooks bent and rusted, but each represented a special memory of a day on the water with Bobby Clinch. Clarisse made an effort to appear moved by this fraternal ceremony, but her thoughts were drifting. She already had a line on a buyer for her husband's Blazer.

Ott Pickney and R. J. Decker were among the last to walk by the casket. By now the inside looked like a display rack at a tackle shop. A fishing rod lay like a sword at the dead man's side.

Ott remarked, “Pearl Brothers did a fantastic job, don't you think?”

Decker made a face.

“Well, you didn't know him when he was alive.

“Nobody looks good dead,” Decker said. Especially a floater.

Finally the lid was closed. The bier was cleared of flowers, including the impressive spray sent by the Lake Jesup Bass Captains Union—a leaping lunker, done all in petunias. With the ceremony concluded, the mourners broke into small groups and began to trudge back to their trucks.

“I gotta get some quotes from the missus,” Ott whispered to Decker.

“Sure. I'm in no particular hurry.”

Ott walked over and tentatively sat down on a folding chair next to Clarisse Clinch. When he took out his notebook, the widow recoiled as if it were a tarantula. R. J. Decker chuckled.

“So you like funerals?”

It was a woman's voice. Decker turned around.

“I heard you laugh,” she said.

“We all deal with grief in our own way.” Decker kept a straight face when he said it.

“You're full of shit.” The woman's tone stopped just short of friendly.

Mid-thirties, dark blue eyes, light brown hair curly to the shoulders. Decker was sure he had seen her somewhere before. She had an expensive tan, fresh from Curaçao or maybe the Caymans. She wore a black dress cut much too low for your standard funeral. This dress was a night at the symphony.

“My name is Decker.”

“Mine's Lanie.”

“Elaine?”

“Once upon a time. Now it's Lanie.” She shot a look toward Ott Pickney. Or was it Clarisse? “You didn't know Bobby, did you?” she said.

“Nope.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I'm a friend of Ott's.”

“You sure don't look like a friend of Ott's. And I wish you'd please quit staring at my tits.”

Decker reddened. Nothing clever came to mind so he kept quiet and stared at the tops of his shoes.

Lanie said, “So what did you think of the sendoff?”

“Impressive.”

“ ‘Sick' is the word for it,” she said.

An ear-splitting noise came from the gravesite. Bobby Clinch's customized bass-boat casket had slipped off the belts and torn free of the winch as it was being lowered into the ground. Now it stood on end, perpendicular in the hole; it looked like a giant grape Popside.

“Oh Jesus,” Lanie said, turning away.

Cemetery workers in overalls scrambled to restore decorum. Decker saw Clarisse Clinch shaking her head in disgust. Ott was busy scribbling, his neck bent like a heron's.

“How well did you know him?” Decker asked.

“Better than anybody,” Lanie said. She pointed back toward the driveway, where the mourners' cars were parked. “See that tangerine Corvette? That was a present from Bobby, right after he finished second in Atlanta. I've only given two blowjobs in my entire life, Mr. Decker, and that Corvette is one of them.”

Decker resisted asking about the other. He tried to remember the polite thing to say when a beautiful stranger struck up a conversation about oral sex. None of the obvious replies seemed appropriate for a funeral.

The woman named Lanie said, “Did you get a look inside the coffin?”

“Yeah, amazing,” Decker said.

“That fishing rod was Bobby's favorite. A Bantam Maglite baitcaster on a five-foot Fenwick graphite.”

Decker thought: Oh no, not her too.

“I gave him that outfit for Christmas,” Lanie said, adding quickly: “It wasn't my idea to bury him with it.”

“I wouldn't have thought so,” Decker said.

They watched the cemetery workers tip Bobby Clinch's coffin back into the grave, where it landed with an embarrassing thud. Hastily the diggers picked up their shovels and went to work. Lanie slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses and smoothed her hair. Her motions were elegant, well-practiced in the kind of mirrors you'd never find in Harney. The lady was definitely out-of-town.

“It wasn't what you think. Bobby and me, I mean.”

“I don't think anything,” Decker said. Why did they always have this compulsion to confess? Did he look like Pat O'Brien? Did he look like he cared?

“He really loved me,” Lanie volunteered.

“Of course he did,” Decker said. The Corvette was proof. A greater love hath no man than an orange sports car with a T-top and mag wheels.

“I hope you find out what really happened,” she said. “That's why you're here, isn't it? Well, you're going to earn your fee on this one.”

Then she walked away. R. J. Decker found himself concentrating on the way she moved. It was a dazzlingly lascivious walk, with a sway of the hips that suggested maybe a little booze for breakfast. Decker had done worse things than admire a woman's legs at a funeral, but he knew he should have been thinking about something else. Why, for example, the grieving mistress knew more about him than he knew about her. He got up and strolled after her. When he called her name, Lanie turned, smiled, didn't stop walking. By the time Decker caught up she was already in the Corvette, door locked. She waved once through the tinted windows, then sped off, nearly peeling rubber over his feet.

When Decker got back to the grave, Ott Pickney was finishing his interview.

He nodded good-bye to Clarisse. “A cold woman,” he said to Decker. “Something tells me Bobby spent too much time on the lake.”

As they walked to the truck, Decker asked about the fishing rod in the coffin.

“Looked like a beauty,” Ott agreed.

“Yes, but I was wondering,” Decker said. “Guy goes fishing early one morning, flips his boat, falls in the lake . . .”

“Yeah?”