The Blue Edge of Midnight (3 page)

As I paddled, the knots in my shoulders from the hours of sitting and answering questions started to work themselves out. It was still a good hour from sunrise. The river was now unnaturally quiet. I could pick up the low undulations of Cleve’s outboard even though they had to be a mile ahead. But the motorboat’s passing at this hour had effectively turned off the millions of live sounds along the banks and in the thick mangrove islands. The frogs and insects had shut up, wary of the man- made noise and movement, and fallen into the survival cover of silence. I’d interrupted their natural rhythm with my nightly paddling. But as I’d learned to smooth my passage, and perhaps as the river world got accustomed to my months of slapping through the night, it had simply adapted. Even the lower species do that.

I got back into my own rhythm: a reach, a pull through, finish with a light kick. A soft slurring of black water. I was grinding again. The dead child’s face was in my head, mixing with the kid on a Philadelphia sidewalk. The FDLE team would have to spend some time up at the scene. But what were their options other than recovery? You couldn’t cordon off a river. And despite the overblown tales of forensics, you weren’t going to lift prints from the trees.

But I knew they’d pass right by the old stilted research shack I was living in, and while the weathered, hundred-year- old Florida pine construction caused the place to nearly disappear into the cypress forest, I wondered if they would squeeze the location out of Cleve. Would he swing them up through the overgrown channel to my porch? Would they rummage through the place without a warrant like I had done myself not so many years ago as a cop? It was illegal, but when we knew we had a chance to find evidence on some mope and wanted either to find something to convince us or find something to clear him and get him off the list, we did it. It was called efficiency in the face of urgency. Sometimes people, even the innocent, get used.

If they found something that took me off their list it would be a relief, but the idea of Hammonds sorting through my cabin caused me to pick up the tempo and I started driving the canoe hard.

By the time I reached the entrance to the forested section of the river, the first hint of dawn was peeling back the darkness in the eastern sky. But only a dozen or so strokes into the cypress canopy the air went wet and thick and too dark for the uninitiated. The FDLE crew must have started questioning their decision not to wait for daylight the minute they motored up into this blackness. A man can adjust, but can never be natural in such a place. He has genetically bypassed it, developed different sight, hearing and scent. But like someone only partially blind, I could make it back through my neighborhood by reading the unseen landmarks, feeling the current, the swirl of eddies, the familiar pools.

A half mile in I slowed at the pond apple outcrop, felt for the slight shift in water drifting west, and let it lead me. Two column-like cypress trees marked my entryway. A shallow- water entrance took me back fifty yards off the main river to a small dock platform. From there, steps climbed up to my back door. There was no one in sight. Not an unnatural sound save my own.

I looped a line from the dock around the bow seat and climbed out onto the landing. Then I bent to the first step of the staircase and under the glint of dawn looked carefully for a pattern in the moisture. No careless feet. The surface was undisturbed. Shortly after I’d moved in here, a friend suggested I hook up some kind of alarm system. He was convinced I’d be the target for uninvited explorers and bone-headed adventurers who might think that any cabin this remote belonged to anyone who could find it. I thought about it, but after several months of being here, I dismissed the idea. By listening and absorbing every sound, I reasoned, I would hear anyone sloshing and grunting and disturbing the flow of the place.

If I wasn’t here, an alarm system wasn’t going to stop anyone with an intent to break in anyway. It wasn’t your typical neighborhood. Who was going to come running if an alarm went off? And even if someone broke in, there was little inside of value to take.

The cabin had been built at the turn of the century by a rich Palm Beach industrialist who used it as a vacation hunting lodge. It was abandoned in the 1950s and then rediscovered by scientists, who, bent on mapping the patterns of moving water in the Everglades, used it as a research station. When their grants dried up it was abandoned again. When the stock market and the economy tumbled in the oil crisis of the 1970s, the family that held deed to it put it on the market. The friend who set me up in it didn’t go into its ownership. He simply arranged to collect $1,000 a month from my investment portfolio, and paid the bill.

I didn’t argue the price. In the odd way of the world, the shooting in Philadelphia had left me with both damage and opportunity.

For ten days after my shooting on Chestnut Street I’d been silent, unable to get words through my swollen throat. Then I faked my inability to speak for another week.

The media stir that buzzed with the deaths of two boys quickly moved on to the next video disaster they could spin up onto the six o’clock news. Officers I worked with or had been friendly with called me to see how I was and to say that the shooting was clean. Once the crime scene and shoot team guys had documented that the first kid’s gun had been fired, and Casamir’s recollection of the events didn’t waver, they quickly closed the investigation.

I still had to sit through the playing of the inside surveillance tape and watch as the second kid leaped out of the store and disappeared from the camera frame. Only I had seen him catch my bullet. Everyone else only looked at the aftermath and called it a justified use of force, a clean shooting. But it was my shooting.

After seeing the obligatory shrinks and counselors and department managers, the most valuable appointment I had was with the human resources wonk who recited my options, which included a large lump sum disability payment if I should decide to quit.

My uncle Keith, a cop along with my father for more than twenty-five years, blew a slow whistling breath through his teeth at the number of zeros in the payout.

I took the check and tried to wash out the memory. In the mornings I ran for hours along the uneven concrete of Front Street in the river breeze off the Delaware. In the afternoons I shot baskets alone at Jefferson Square playground or hung at Frankie O’Hara’s gym and took my turns getting pummeled by local fighters. At night I walked, streetlight to streetlight, sometimes looking up to find I’d gone miles without realizing it, having to concentrate on a corner street sign for several seconds to determine where I’d wandered to.

One night I found myself in front of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, staring at a thimble-sized pockmark in the wall, trying to see my own spattered blood deep in the grimy brick.

The next day I honored my mother’s memory and this time used my brain. I contacted a lawyer in West Palm Beach, Florida. His family name had been scratched into my mother’s address book decades ago. She and the matriarch of his family had some kind of never-discussed relationship. The lawyer was the woman’s son, and my own mother had often urged me to “just meet him. He’s a bright boy you could learn from.”

I can’t remember how he managed to convince me to fly south to see him. Perhaps it was the confidence and pure, simple logic in his voice. It wasn’t condescending. It wasn’t presumptuous. It wasn’t overtly high-minded. He was the one who set me up in the research shack when I told him I wanted someplace isolated and completely different from where I’d come from. He’s the one who arranged to use my departmental payout to buy into the ground floor of a new South Florida Internet research site. For the first time in a long time, he became the one person I trusted, and it paid off.

Out on the river I heard the burble of Cleve’s outboard, the noise growing louder as he ferried Hammonds and his team back to the boat ramp. They’d have the child’s body with them now, still wrapped tight until they got it to some morgue and the forensics guys could go over it.

As they went by less than 150 feet away through the cypress, I heard Cleve slightly rev the engine, letting me know he’d kept my place a secret, for now. But I knew I’d be back in a squad room soon enough, answering more questions. And I also knew I needed to talk to my lawyer before I let that happen.

CHAPTER 4

I
was on the interstate, back in the fumes, back in the dull bake of the sun on concrete, back in the aggressive hurry up, back in the world.

I’d spent the morning staring out at the wet forest, watching the sun leak through the canopy and spackle the ferns and pond apple leaves and haircap moss below. I hadn’t given nature much thought before coming here. I only studied the nature of humans on the Philadelphia streets, and it wasn’t anything out of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. People did things for pretty basic reasons and it has been that way for a lot longer than most of us will admit. We haven’t changed much since we first gathered as tribes. Just the stuff around us changed. Hunger and fear, love and jealousy, greed and hate still rule us. You could put that down in the middle of the swamp or at the corner of Broad and Passyunk and it was still going to be the same.

I’d made a pot of black coffee on the wood stove in my shack and then sat at my empty table, sipping. Then I packed up a gym bag with clothes and a shaving kit and paddled back down to the ranger station where I used the phone to call my lawyer. Cleve was nowhere in sight.

“Gone up to headquarters,” said his assistant, a young crew-cut kid who always seemed to have a crease in his uniform and a chip on his shoulder. The only time he seemed civil was when he was asking me if he could borrow the pickup truck I left parked in the visitor’s lot for days at a time. “Didn’t say when he’d be back,” the kid said, obviously miffed at being called in to cover. “What the hell happened this morning?”

I looked at him like an adult offended by his demanding tone and his use of profanity, and answered with the same flat voice I always used with him. “I have no idea.”

I went to the campsite restrooms where I showered and shaved, and then tossed my bag into my truck and headed south for the Palm Beach County Courthouse. And now I was bunched in with traffic, fighting with the other daily warriors for a moving spot on the highway.

After an hour of working along the middle lanes of I-95 at something approaching the speed limit, I slid onto the Clematis Street exit and crawled through traffic until I found the parking lot I always used when I came to the city. The old guy who worked the lot always recognized my midnight blue F-150 even if it had been two months since I’d been back. He always had a spot for me. I always had a twenty-dollar bill for him.

The temperature here felt ten degrees hotter than the river. As I walked the four blocks to the courthouse I could feel the beads of sweat sliding down the middle of my back. I was dressed in my civilized clothes: khaki trousers, a short-sleeved and unironed white cotton shirt and a pair of beaten Docksides. It was a look I adopted from the boat captains I’d seen in the few restaurants I’d visited, or in some hall of bureaucracy where they gathered for permits or licensing. It might seem shabby by northern standards, but was acceptable almost anywhere in South Florida. It was also the polar opposite of the look on Billy Manchester.

As I crossed the street onto the block that held the new county courthouse, I could see Billy waiting for me in the shade of a newly transplanted, half-matured Washington palm.

Standing with one hand in his pocket and the other cradling a manila envelope, he was looking off in the opposite direction and was, as usual, impeccable. He was dressed in an off-white linen suit that must have been a thousand-dollar Ferragamo and seemed brilliant next to his dark skin. His silk tie was pulled up tight to his freshly shaved throat, and his hair was closely cropped to the shape of his skull. He had one of those sharp-angled, perfect profiles you rarely see outside of the made-up world of television or movies, and at five foot eleven and a trim 160, that’s probably where you’d think you’d seen him before.

As I approached I saw two young women in summery suits pass purposely through Billy’s line of sight and flash two equally purposeful smiles. He grinned and tipped his head and just as they began to change course toward him, he gracefully turned to me, extended his hand and deflected the ladies without a trace of discourtesy. As the women floated off I wondered how he did it, but not why.

“M-M-Max,” he said in greeting. “Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy. L-Let’s eat.”

Billy Manchester is the most intelligent person I have ever met. And when I first talked to him on the phone I had an immediate intuition that he would not screw me.

After feeling him out a bit and after I explained the Philadelphia street shooting, we talked several times long distance about cop procedures, civil court possibilities, investment and tax laws. I never felt he was pumping me. In fact, it was more like him spilling valuable information to me. Still, I checked him out. Law degree from Temple University. Business degree from Wharton. Published dozens of times in professional law journals. No record of a lecture series.

He had all the credentials for academia, but was never a teacher. He had all the paper for a brilliant trial lawyer, but never tried a case I could find.

I had a friend at the
Philadelphia Daily News
run a clip search for me and found little. As a young man Billy had gained some attention as a kid from the inner city with a bright academic future. There was a piece about him and a prominent North Philadelphia public school chess club winning some prestigious tournament. A clip on his graduation at the top of his class from Temple’s law school. No mention of his parents.

How our mothers, a black woman from North Philadelphia and the white South Philly wife of a career cop, came to be friends, neither of us knew. We’d been raised in widely different ethnic neighborhoods. But we seemed to share a similar theory on the disparities in skin color and customs we grew up with: We knew it was there. You dealt with it when you had to. But most of the time, it only got in the way of things that mattered.