I was the son of a son of a cop in South Philly, a neighborhood that was white and ethnic and Catholic and often blue-collar raw. Billy lived in the black ghettos of North Philadelphia. He broke all of his stereotypes and went to Temple University Law School, top of his class. I went to the police academy, middle of my class. He went on to get an MBA from Wharton. I went on to arrest druggies on South Street, catch homicide investigations as a young detective and catch hell from supervisors for not playing the game the way it was set up. Because of an unlikely and clandestine relationship between our mothers, we finally met, as men, in South Florida and now I work as Billy's private investigator.
I walked up through the soft sand carrying my chair, my small cooler clinking with empty green bottles, and climbed the bulkhead stairs. The beach crowd had long abandoned the place after sunset. I set my things down and stood under the stairway-side shower and rinsed off the sand and salt and left wet footprints on the slate walkway to the bungalow where I was staying. It was a small, one- bedroom efficiency and a concession to Billy that had actually grown on me. I considered my home in South Florida to be the stilted research shack on a pristine river that ran along the edge of the Everglades. It was there that I'd first isolated myself after taking a disability buyout from my job as a cop up north. It had been, and still was, the perfect place to keep my head together. But as I began to do more and more investigative work for Billy and his clients, he made a convincing argument that the two-plus hours it took me to canoe off the wilderness river and drive to his office in West Palm Beach was often illogical. I agreed, even though I also knew my friend was worried that the shack had also become a hideout for me. It was time I came back into the world, even a small step back. I didn't fight it.
The Royal Flamingo Villas was yet another of Billy's finds. It was an anomaly in South Florida. For more than one hundred years the property close to the sand with a view of the ocean drew people and money. In the 1920s and '30s there were small bungalows, pink stucco Spanish-looking estates of the rich, and the low-slung motels for driving tourists. Then came the four-story hotels, the quaint pine Kester Cottages for early residents and the modern concrete mansions of the '50s and '60s.
But by the 1980s you couldn't buy a private home with an ocean view unless you were a millionaire, and even those were being squeezed by twenty-story condos set cornerstone to parking lot and blocking any glimpse of the water for anyone living even a street away from the beach. Highway A1A had become a concrete corridor for a new century, broken only by a fortuitous state park or a city beach where planners had been smart enough not to kill their future tourist business by banning development on the sand and keeping a modicum of open beach to lure more sun money.
But the owners of the Royal Flamingo Villas had been even more forward-thinking. The Flamingo had remained a group of small stucco cottages that flanked A1A in the city of Hillsboro Beach. Each place stood unconnected but for the stone footpaths that led through the property. Though they were bunched together like some close-knit village hunkered down for protection, the grounds were filled with banana leaf palms and sea grape and crepe myrtle trees that shrouded the place in green privacy. Most of the cottages were individually owned by investors who made up a small, collaborative association. It was brilliant. The only way a hotel chain or high-rise condo group could buy their oceanfront land was to convince the entire group to agree, first on selling, then on price. Billy was one of those owners. He had accepted the title to one of the cottages from a client for whom he had negotiated a deal with the feds to keep the sixty-year-old securities broker out of lockup. When it came time for Billy's fee, he took the investment of land on the beach. There were only five cottages with unobstructed views of the ocean. One was Billy's.
I propped the beach chair against the patio wall and draped my towel over the still unused gas grill and went inside. The floors were old-style polished terrazzo. The walls were painted some pale shade of foam green. A counter separated the kitchen from the living area. The furniture was wicker, and the cushions, drapes and the framed print on one wall were all done in some tropical-flower motif. The only similarity with my shack on the river was the quiet. Ever since I'd left the constant background noise of the city I had developed a deep appreciation of quiet. I went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee in the drip coffeemaker-a blessed upgrade from my tin pot on the wood-burning stove on the river. Once it was started I sat on the wooden stool at the counter and finally dug the beeper out of my pocket to see which of Billy's numbers I needed to call. I stared at the digits for several seconds, not recognizing them at first, and then letting my memory work. It brought a scent of careful perfume, a flash of blond hair, eyes a shade of green, no, gray. I had not seen Detective Sherry Richards in several months. The number in front of me was to her cell phone. The last time we had spoken it had been on that phone and I distinctly remembered it had been late at night and it had been dark. "Yes. This is Max Freeman. Uh, returning Detective Richards's page. I will be available, uh, well, I'll be up most of the night if she needs me, uh, if this is an urgent matter."
Shit, I thought, and then left the number of the new cell phone Billy had given me on the answering machine.
Richards and I had a history. Hell, the woman had saved my life when she pulled the trigger on a calculating asshole who had me at the business end of a 9mm during a case Billy had put me into. The guy had miscalculated that time, believing that a woman cop wouldn't drop the hammer on him. Sherry Richards was not the kind of woman afraid to drop the hammer.
We'd had a relationship. But I had slept with her in a bed left empty by a punk kid who shot her cop husband while he was still shaking his head in disbelief at the child's age. My own short marriage to a Philadelphia officer had ended when she had, well, moved on to other challenges. Even though Richards and I had carefully eased into something good, I'd opened a bit of myself to her and was dumbfounded when her heart seemed to clack shut like a vault. She didn't like the endings either of us had witnessed. They scared her, so she left the show early. I had not seen her in several months.
Now it was past midnight and I was sitting out on my porch reading a new biography Billy had loaned me on John Adams. The old fart was fascinating, innovative, maybe damn brilliant, but he was also ambitious and I am not a fan of ambitious. I'd moved a free- standing lamp with an old yellowed shade outside and run the cord through one of the jalousie windows. In between pages I was staring out at the black ocean. A night breeze had come up and the brush of waves on the sand had turned to a harder, ripping sound, like fine cloth being torn. The sharp scent of decay that came with low tide was in each breath and it created an odd mixture with the aroma of my fourth cup of coffee. My eyes were closed when the chirp of my cell phone snapped them open. I punched it on with my thumb.
"Yeah."
"Yeah?" she said. "Well, your phone etiquette hasn't changed, Freeman."
"What can I say? Evolution is a creeping process."
"Let me guess. You're reading with your feet up on that old gouged-up table and you're still working on the last pot of coffee for the night."
"You're a psychic," I said.
"You're a dinosaur."
"Thank you."
Her voice was warm and light. I was relieved, but a little set back by her ability to call after months and be so damned giddy.
"Actually, I'm not out at the shack. I'm in town on the beach."
"Billy's?"
"Sort of. It's a little oceanfront place he keeps to hide clients when they're trying to avoid subpoenas and officers of the court."
"Sounds perfect for you, Max," she said, and we both let that sit for a quiet beat.
"So, you're close by. How busy are you?" she said, her voice shifting up into a tighter, business mode. OK, it was not a social call.
"Busier than I have a right to be, but just finishing up a job with Billy. What's up?"
"I've got a case I'm working on, Max," she started. "The disappearance of some women bartenders here in Broward."
"You're working missing persons?"
I hadn't meant the question to sound like she'd been demoted.
"Not just missing," she said. "Gone. Like off the face of the earth missing. Not runaways, or gone on a lark, or start over somewhere else missing."
"OK," I said. Her tone made me think she'd already heard one too many skeptics on this.
"Similar circumstances? Hours? Physical appearances?" I asked, turning my former cop process on, giving her the professional courtesy she deserved.
"Yes. Thank you," she said. "Enough of a pattern for somebody to take them seriously."
OK, I thought. There's enough sarcasm there to know she's been butting heads with command.
"So, how can I help, Sherry?"
"You know a guy named Colin O'Shea? Former Philadelphia cop. Might have worked patrol during your time?"
It didn't take long for me to come up with the face. Colin O'Shea. Kid from the neighborhood. St. Marie's High School. Touch of the Irish. Good-looking guy. I'd run into him on the corners and after some football games when we were coming up. I got to know him a little better when we both became cops. He was a third- generation cop, like me. After a few at McLaughlin's, when the others were half bagged and horseplaying, we'd talked. He gave off the hint that he wasn't convinced that the blue tradition was his true calling, either.
But he was also a manipulative son of a bitch. Angry. The two traits had come together one night in the streets and O'Shea had, in a way, saved my ass.
"Yeah," I said. "I knew him from back then. Haven't seen him for years. He helping you somehow on this?"
"Not exactly," she answered. "He's my suspect."