I told him I'd watch out. I'd already given Rodrigo my pager and cell number. We were already setting up prearranged sites off the street. But I didn't want to tell him that I couldn't afford to be the guy's twenty-four-hour bodyguard when we had other cases to work. My own acceptance of Richards's request had just put another pinch on time and I wasn't going to bring it up. I changed the subject.
"Speaking of politics," I said, motioning toward his desk and the photos and layouts.
Billy did not bother to look back.
"She w-wants to be a judge. I t-told her I would help in any way I could."
I stayed quiet. I knew Billy. His face said more was coming.
"But it s-seems that the good ole boy p-political cabal th-thought, when they heard her fiance was a r-respected attorney, I'd be an asset."
"Let me guess," I said. "They didn't know you were black?"
"How w-would they? I'm never in the courtroom. N-not much for their f-fund-raisers or cocktail circuit."
"Jesus, Billy," I said. "You think that's going to make a big difference?"
He looked past me for a few moments. I could see something working behind his eyes, a twinge of pain he rarely ever showed. I wondered if he'd misconstrued my question, thought I'd pointed it at his and Diane's personal relationship.
"In love and politics, M-Max, everything m-makes a difference," he said, manufacturing a wry grin. "When you mentioned the paparazzi the other night, you weren't far off. We've caught people taking photographs of us together before, on the street, coming out of the courthouse, leaving one another's apartments."
"Campaign sludge?" I said. "I doubt an interracial marriage would cause a second look in South Florida."
Billy was still watching out over the skyline.
"State p-politics doesn't get run by the residents in South Florida, M-Max. The power is still in Tallahassee where the real South still runs d-deep."
His knowledge of law and languages aside, Billy had not left his ghetto beginnings and real-life taste of racism behind. I did not want to get into a discussion of his paranoia, or my naivete, and left him at the window.
I drove Rodrigo to the block where he took treatments at a small walk-in medical clinic. Once again, around the corner and out of sight, we had lunch at a whitewashed lunch counter that opened out onto the street, with a row of worn swivel stools that sat on the sidewalk concrete. The place bragged on its original Cuban sandwiches and Colombian arepas. After my first mouthful I decided they were justified. If you can back it up, brag on.
While we ate, Rodrigo introduced me to three other cruise workers who had obviously come at his urging. One man wore a bandage from his wrist to his shoulder. Another covered his head with a large-brimmed hat, but I could make out the signs of singed hair and burn scars at the nape of his neck. I took down names and promised only to pass them along to Billy. I paid the bill and shook Rodrigo's hand and climbed back into my truck and headed south to the Flamingo where I might swim and sit in a sea breeze and forget about changing the world for a while. I did ten blocks in the ocean, swimming parallel with the beach and looking up every twenty strokes to catch a familiar condo face or clump of palms or open street-end to mark my progress. Five blocks of freestyle south, against the current, five slow ones back, even with the push. Then I sat in my sand chair and let the sun and breeze dry the salt into a fine film on my skin, which seemed to crackle and pulled at the creases when I finally stood and went inside.
I tried to read, first the prerevolutionary Adams book and then the local newspaper: Palestinians and Israelis were killing each other. Madonna was, well, being a celebrity. Republicans were promising tax cuts. The front page could have been ten years old, or perhaps, sadly, ten years into the future. I thought of calling Richards to back out of my promise to meet with O'Shea, tell her I was too busy with work for Billy, tell her something important had come up. Instead I went out and sat on the porch until long after twilight when all the color had leaked out of the day.
CHAPTER 7
I got to Archie's Bar at nine and was instantly put off by the glass-fronted door that had never been changed from when the place was the coffee shop or H amp;R Block office or nail salon it had been in a previous life. Not exactly the Irish pub I was expecting. I'd found a parking spot around the corner on a side street that bordered the out-of-date shopping center. I plugged the meter with quarters and then walked all four sides of the square before going in. After leaving Billy's office I'd become paranoid myself about a tail. It wasn't anything specific, no matching headlamps or too familiar silhouette of a single driver. But it had been a feeling I'd learned over the years to pay attention to. My sidewalk sweep of the center and the parked cars hadn't pushed it away.
The lights in Archie's were too bright for my liking and once through the entry I slid immediately to the left to a spot with a wall and a view. The bar itself was a shallow horseshoe. A row of small tables barely big enough for two ran down the wall in front of the bar. Three bigger tables filled the space at the rear of the room. OK, I thought, maybe it had been a deli.
There were twelve seats at the bar, all of them taken. Two women in their fifties sat in front of me, drinking something dark in ice. A thick, cloying perfume made me step back and I watched the tip of one of the women's cigarettes dance with the movement of her lips as she spoke to her friend. Next to them were a couple of beer drinkers; polo shirts with printing over the left breast pockets, both of them wore mustaches that worked down into beards that just covered their chins, one red, the other dark. Their eyes kept flicking up to what had to be a television screen that must have been in the corner above me facing out. I skipped past the two younger girls, one who sat determinately with her back to the Fu Manchu brothers. Next to them was a gray-haired guy who appeared to be in his sixties who was bent into a video poker game bolted to the bar, his pale face changing color along with the glow of the screen.
There was a couple talking animatedly next to him and then my only possibility at the opposite end, sitting alone next to the opening where the bartenders would have to enter and exit. His hair was dark and curly, trimmed above the ears, and the overhead light caught his prominent cheekbones, which from where I stood made his face appear gaunt. His shoulders were broad, but sitting down it was hard to guess his weight. The sleeves of his denim shirt were rolled to the elbows and his hands were folded in front of a beer bottle, knuckles up.
I stayed against the wall. His eyes seemed to watch everything and nothing, moving from the TV to the tables just behind him, from the girl couple to the bartender's ass when she turned away from him, never lingering long and never coming close to locking on mine. It had been ten, maybe fifteen years. If it was O'Shea, I couldn't tell from here. I pushed off the wall and began to work my way toward his side. The room was smoky and a stereo was playing some kind of techno-country thing that was too loud for the space. I shuffled between the tables and the people standing. The place was at capacity, over if the fire marshal decided to come by.
The guy at the end never turned to watch a six-foot three-inch man move up next to him, but when I got to his elbow he turned before I could say a word.
"Hey, Max," he said, offering a newly opened Rolling Rock that I had not seen him buy. "How 'bout those Phillies?" His eyes were clear and gray with only the creases at the corners to give away his age. The pull at one side of his mouth, the Irish grin, had not changed.
"Colin O'Shea," I said, accepting the bottle. "Wasn't sure it was you."