9


Tina woke up alone in bed. She wrapped herself in a sheet and padded groggily around the dark house, looking for Mick Stranahan. She found him outside, balanced on the deck rail with his hands on his hips. He was watching Old Man Chitworth’s stilt house light up the sky; a cracking orange torch, visible for miles. The house seemed to sway on its wooden legs, an illusion caused by blasts of raw heat above the water.

Tina thought it was the most breathtaking thing she had ever seen, even better than Old Faithful. In the glow from the blaze she looked up at Stranahan’s face and saw concern.

“Somebody living there?” she said.

“No.” Stranahan watched Old Man Chitworth’s windmill fall, the flaming blades spinning faster in descent. It hit the water with a sizzle and hiss.

“What started the fire?” Tina asked.

“Arson,” Stranahan said matter-of-factly, “I heard a boat.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” she suggested. “Maybe somebody tossed a cigarette.”

“Gasoline,” Stranahan said. “I smelled it.”

“Wow. Whoever owns that place has some serious enemies, I guess.”

“The man who owns that place just turned eighty-three,” Stranahan said. “He’s on tubes in a nursing home, all flaked out. Thinks he’s Eddie Rickenbacker.”

A gust of wind prompted Tina to rearrange her sheet. She got a shiver and edged closer to Mick. She said, “Some harmless old geezer. Then I don’t get it.”

Stranahan said, “Wrong house, that’s all.” He hopped off the rail.” Somebody fucked up.” So much for paradise, he thought; so much for peace and tranquility.

Across the bay, from Dinner Key, came the whine of toy-like sirens.

Stranahan didn’t need binoculars to see the flashing blue dots from the advancing police boats.

Tina clutched his hand. She couldn’t take hereyes off the fire. “Mick, have you got enemies like that?”

“Hell, I’ve gotfriends like that.”

By midmorning the Chitworth house had burned to the waterline, and the flames died. All that remained sticking out were charred tips of the wood pilings, some still smoldering.

Tina was reading on a deck chair and Stranahan was doing push-ups when the marine patrol boat drove up and stopped. It was Luis Cordova and another man whom Stranahan did not expect.

“Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Stranahan announced, plenty loud. “Two Cubans in a boat, and no beer.”

Luis Cordova grinned. The other man climbed noisily up on the dock and said, “And here’s something else you don’t see every day: An Irishman up before noon, and still sober.”

The man’s name was Al Garcia, a homicide detective for the Metro-Dade police. His J. C. Penney coat jacket was slung over one arm, and his shiny necktie was loosened halfway down his chest. Garcia was not wild about boat rides, so he was in a gruff and unsettled mood. Also, there was the matter of the dead body.

“What dead body?” Mick Stranahan said.

Badger-like, Garcia shuffled up the stairs to the house, with Stranahan and Luis Cordova following single file. Garcia gave the place the once-over and waved courteously to Tina on her lounge chair. The detective half-turned to Stranahan and in a low voice said, “What, you opened a halfway house for bimbos! Mick, you’re a freaking saint, I swear.”

They went inside the stilt house and closed the door. “Tell me about the dead body,” Stranahan said.

“Sit down. Hey, Luis, I could use some coffee.”

“A minute ago you were seasick,” Luis Cordova said.

“I’m feeling much better, okay?” Garcia scowled theatrically as the young marine patrol officer went to the kitchen. “Interdepartmental cooperation, that’s the buzzword these days. Coffee’s a damn good place to start.”

“Easy, man, Luis is a sharp kid.”

“He sure is. I wish he was ours.”

Stranahan said, “Now about the body… “ Garcia waved a meaty brown hand in the air, as if shooing an invisible horsefly, “Mick, what are you doing way the fuck out here? Somehow I don’t see you as Robinson Crusoe, sucking the milk out of raw coconuts.”

“It’s real quiet out here.”

Luis Cordova brought three cups of hot coffee. Al Garcia smacked his lips as he drank. “Quiet-is that what you said? Jeez, you got dead gangsters floating around, not to mention burning houses-”

“Is this about Tony the Eel?”

“No,” Luis said seriously.

Garcia put down his coffee cup and looked straight at Stranahan. “When’s the last time you saw Chloe?” Suddenly Mick Stranahan did not feel so well.

“A couple months back,” he said. “She was on a boat with some guy. I assumed it was her new husband. Why?”

“You mooned her.”

“Can you blame me?”

“We heard about it from the mister this morning.”

Stranahan braced to hear the whole story. Luis Cordova opened a spiral notebook but didn’t write much. Stranahan listened somberly and occasionally looked out the window toward the channel where Al Garcia said it had happened.

“A rusty anchor?” Stranahan said in disbelief.

“It got tangled in this silky thing she was wearing,” the detective explained. “She went down like a sack of cement.” Sensitivity was not Garcia’s strong suit.

“The rope is what gave it away,” added Luis Cordova. “One of the guys coming out to the fire saw the rope drifting up out of the current.”

“Hauled her right in,” Garcia said, “like a lobster pot.”

“Lord.”

Garcia said, “Fact is, we really shouldn’t be telling you all this.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re the prime suspect.”

“That’s very funny.” Stranahan looked at Luis Cordova. “Is he kidding?”

The young marine patrolman shook his head.

Garcia said, “Mick, your track record is not so hot. I mean, you already got a few notches on your belt.”

“Not murder.”

“ Chloe hated your guts,” Al Garcia said, in the tone of a reminder.

“That’s my motive? She hated my guts?”

“Then there’s the dough.”

“You think I’d kill her over a crummy one-hundred fifty dollars a month?”

“The principle,” Al Garcia said, unwrapping a cigar. “I think you just might do it over the principle of the thing.”

Stranahan leaned back with a tired sigh. He felt bad about Chloe’s death, but mostly he felt curious. What the hell was she doing out here at night?

“I always heard good things about you,” Al Garcia said, “mainly from Timmy Gavigan.”

“Yeah, he said the same for you.”

“And the way Eckert dumped you from the State Attorney’s, that was low.”

Stranahan shrugged. “They don’t forget it when you shoot a judge. It’s bound to make people nervous.”

Garcia made a great ceremony of lighting the cigar. Afterwards, he blew two rings of smoke and said, “For what it’s worth, Luis here doesn’t think you did it.”

“It’s the anchor business,” Luis Cordova explained, “very strange.” He was trying to sound all business, as if the friendship meant nothing.

Stranahan said, “The murder’s got to be connected to the fire.”

“The fire was an arson,” Luis said. “Boat gas and a match. These houses are nothing but tinder.” To make his point, he tapped the rubber heel of his shoe on the pine floor.

Stranahan said, “I think you both ought to know: Somebody wants to kill me.”

Garcia’s eyebrows shot up and he rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Who is it, chico? Please, make my job easier.”

“I think it’s a doctor. His name is Rudy Graveline. Write this down, Luis, please.”

“And why would this doctor want you dead?”

“I’m not sure, Al.”

“But you want me to roust him on a hunch.”

“No, I just want his name in a file somewhere. I want you to know who he is, just in case.”

Garcia turned to Luis Cordova. “Don’t you love the fucking sound of that? Just in case. Luis, I think this is where we’re supposed to give Mr. Stranahan a lecture about taking the law into his own hands.”

Luissaid, “Don’t takethelaw intoyourown hands, Mick.”

“Thank you, Luis.”

Al Garcia flicked a stubby thumb through his black mustache. “Just for the record, you didn’t invite the lovely Chloe Simpkins Stranahan out here for a romantic reconciliation over fresh fish and wine?”

“No,” Stranahan said. Fish and wine-that fucking Garcia must have scoped out the dirty dinner dishes.

“And the two of you didn’t go for a boat ride?”

“No, Al.”

“And you didn’t get in a sloppy drunken fight?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t hook her to the anchor and drop her overboard?”

“Nope.”

“Lu is, you get all that?”

Luis Cordova nodded as he jotted in the notebook. Shorthand, too; Stranahan was impressed.

Garcia got up and went knocking around the house, making Stranahan very nervous. When the detective finally stopped prowling, he stood directly under the stuffed blue marlin. “Mick, I don’t have to tell you there’s some guys in Homicide think you aced old Judge Goomer without provocation.”

“I know that, Al. There’s some guys in Homicide used to be in business with Judge Goomer.”

“And I know that. Point is, they’ll be looking at this Chloe thing real hard. Harder than normal.”

Stranahan said, “There’s no chance it was an accident?”

“No,” Luis Cordova interjected. “No chance.”

“So,” said Al Garcia, “you see the position I’m in. Until we get another suspect, you’re it. The good news is, we’ve got no physical evidence connecting you. The bad news is, we’ve got Chloe’s manicurist.”

Stranahan groaned. “Jesus, let’s hear it.”

Garcia ambled to a window, stuck his arm out and tapped cigar ash into the water.

“Chloe had her toenails done yesterday morning,” the detective said. “Told the girl she was coming out here to clean your clock.”

“Lovely,” said Mick Stranahan.

There was a small rap on the door and Tina came in, fiddling with the strap on the top piece of her swimsuit. Al Garcia beamed like he’d just won the lottery; a dreary day suddenly had been brightened.

Stranahan stood up. “Tina, I want you to meet Sergeant Garcia and Officer Cordova. They’re here on police business. Al, Luis, I’d like you to meet my alibi.”

“How do you do,” said Luis Cordova, shaking Tina’s hand in a commendably official way.

Garcia gave Stranahan another sideways look. “I love it,” said the detective. “I absolutely love this job.”

Christina Marks heard about the death of Chloe Simpkins Stranahan on the six o’clock news. The only thing she could think was that Mick had done it to pay Chloe back for siccing the TV crew on him. It was painful to believe, but the only other possibility was too far-fetched-that Chloe’s murder was a coincidence of timing and had nothing to do with Mick or Victoria Barletta. This Christina Marks could not accept; she had to plan for the worst.

If Mick was the killer, that would be a problem.

If Chloe had blabbed about getting five hundred in tipster money from the Reynaldo Flemm show, that would be a problem too. The police would want to know everything, then the papers would get hold of it and the Barletta story would blow up prematurely.

Then there was the substantial problem of Reynaldo himself; Christina cold just hear him hyping the hell out of Chloe’s murder in the intro: “The story you are about to see is so explosive that a confidential informant who provided us with key information was brutally murdered only days later… “ Brutally murdered was one of Reynaldo’s favorite on-camera redundancies. Once Christina had drolly asked Reynaldo if he’d ever heard of anyone being gently murdered, but he missed the point.

Sometimes, when he got particularly excited about a story, Reynaldo Flemm would actually try to write out the script himself, with comic results. The murder of Stranahan’s ex-wife was just the sort of bombshell to inspire Reynaldo’s muse, so Christina decided on a preemptive attack. She was reaching across the bed for the telephone when it rang.

It was Maggie Gonzalez, calling collect from somewhere in Manhattan.

“Miss Marks, I got a little problem.”

Christina said: “We’ve been looking all over for you. What happened to your trip to Miami?”

“I went, I came back,” Maggie said. “I told you, there’s a problem down there.”

“So what’ve you been doing the last few weeks,” Christina said, “besides spending our money?” Christina had just about had it with this ditz; she was beginning to think Mick was right, the girl was ripping them off.

Maggie said, “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was scared. Scared out of my mind.”

“We thought you might be dead.”

“No,” said Maggie, barely audible. A long pause suggested that she was fretting over the grim possibility.

“Don’t you even want to know how the story is going?” Christina asked warily.

“That’s the problem,” Maggie replied. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

Then, almost as an afterthought, Maggie asked, “Who’ve you interviewed so far?”

“Nobody,” Christina said. “We’ve got a lot of legwork to do first.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t interviewed anybody!”

Maggie was trolling for something, Christina could tell. “We’re taking it slow,” Christina said. “This is a sensitive piece.”

“No joke,” Maggie said. “Real sensitive.”

Christina held the phone in the crook of her shoulder and dug a legal pad and felt-tip pen from her shoulder bag on the bed table.

Maggie went on: “This whole thing could get me killed, and I think that’s worth more than five thousand dollars.”

“But that was our agreement,” Christina said, scribbling along with the conversation.

“That was before I started getting threatening calls on my machine,” said Maggie Gonzalez.

“From who?”

“I don’t know who,” Maggie lied. “It sounded like Dr. Graveline.”

“What kind of threats? What did they say?”

“Threat threats,” Maggie said impatiently. “Enough to scare me shitless, okay? You guys tricked me into believing this was safe.”

“We did nothing of the sort.”

“Yeah, well, five thousand dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. By the time this is finished, I’ll probably have to pack up and move out of Miami. You got any idea what that’ll cost?”

Christina Marks said, “What’s the bottom line here, Maggie?”

“The bottom line is, I talked to 20/20.”

Perfect, Christina thought. The perfect ending to a perfect day.

“I met with an executive producer,” Maggie said.

“Lucky you,” said Christina Marks. “How much did they offer?”

“Ten.”

“Ten thousand?”

“Right,” Maggie said. “Plus a month in Mexico after the program airs… you know, to let things cool off.”

“Y ou thought of this all by yourself, or did you get an agent?”

“A what?”

“An agent. Every eyewitness to a murder ought to have his own booking agent, don’t you think?”

Maggie sounded confused. “Ten seemed like a good number,” she said. “Could be better, of course.”

Christina Marks was dying to find out how much Maggie Gonzalez had told the producer at 20/20, but instead of asking she said: “Ten sounds like a winner, Maggie. Besides, I don’t think we’re interested in the story anymore.”

During the long silence that followed, Christina tried to imagine the look on Maggie’s face.

Finally: “What do you mean, ‘not interested’?”

“It’s just too old, too messy, too hard to prove,” Christina said. “The fact that you waited four years to speak up really kills us in the credibility department… “

“Hold on-”

“By the way, are they still polygraphing all their sources over at 20/20?”

But Maggie was too sharp. “Getting back to the money,” she said, “are you saying you won’t even consider a counteroffer?”

“Exactly.”

“Have you talked this over with Mr. Flemm?”

“Of course,” Christina Marks bluffed, forging blindly ahead.

“That’s very weird,” remarked Maggie Gonzalez, “because I just talked to Mr. Flemm myself about ten minutes ago.”

Christina sagged back on the bed and closed her eyes.

“And?”

“And he offered me fifteen grand, plus six weeks in Hawaii.”

“I see,” Christina said thinly.

“Anyway, he said I should call you right away and smooth outthe details.”

“Such as?”

“Reservations,” said Maggie Gonzalez. “Maui would be my first choice.”


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