Still, there was that sarcasm.
"Hey, I'm on dry land. How about lunch?"
"Today? I don't know, Max. Wind's a little stiff. Might be too busy for you."
I was left again without response. Seriously pissed? Or joking? Three, maybe four weeks ago we'd been out on Billy's thirty-four- foot sloop, sailing to nowhere with Billy and his girlfriend, another lawyer who had an office in his building.
I had met Richards several months ago. She'd been on a special task force investigating a string of child abductions and killings. One of the dead kids had ended up on my river. Despite myself, I got pulled into the investigation. She'd kept a professional and wary distance until the case had broken. Then she'd found too many reasons for coming to the hospital to check on me while I convalesced from a gunshot wound.
I tried to see her whenever I came in off the river. Drinks at a beachside tiki bar. Dinner at Joe's Seafood Grill on the Intracoastal. I couldn't keep my eyes off her legs during a Saturday afternoon on the beach. She'd noticed. She was after all, a trained cop.
On the sailing trip she'd surprised me with her dexterity and seamanship. She'd been showing me up from the time we'd pushed off from the dock, but it had only registered a small manly tick with me and probably hadn't even crossed her mind. You don't do much sail trimming on the streets of Philly. Then Billy had decided to unfurl his spinnaker in a downwind run and I'd jumped to show I wasn't useless. The damn sail was huge and far too unwieldy and strange in my hands. When I'd tangled the lines and tripped on a stanchion, the women had smartly taken control. Richards had whipped the lines out of my hands before I went overboard. Then she and Billy's friend expertly set the whisker poles and stood framed in the billowing color and smiled and hooted at the boat's speed. Billy winked at me as I settled back in the cockpit and watched with a tainted respect.
I'd been through a short marriage with a cop in Philadelphia. She, like Richards, had been strong and tough-minded, smart and intuitive. Those were things I liked, things I understood. But both were also emotional, able to absorb a victims pain, to show an instant empathy. The dual abilities were unsettling.
My ex-wife had also lived on an adrenaline push, one I didn't want to compete for. I still didn't think I knew Richards well enough to know if that was another shared quality. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
"Oh come on, Max. Don't tell me you got intimidated by two women who could handle a spinnaker in an eight-knot breeze better that you two boys?" she said, breaking my too-long silence.
"Can't intimidate a man who knows his limitations," I said. "And I'm sorry I haven't been in sooner. So introduce me to a new recipe for mangrove snapper."
My apology must have been accepted.
"How about Banyans at two?" she finally said. "Bring your cash, Freeman, it's on you."
I started back south on A1A, rolled down the windows along a stretch of beachfront where oceanside condos had somehow been banned. From the road the view of the surf and the watery horizon were unobstructed. On the sidewalk I watched a young woman in a bikini walking south, her hips switching like a metronome. Two buzzcut boys walking a pit bull said something to her and she nonchalantly flipped them the finger. I slowed for a middle-aged man crossing from the hotel side, sliding on roller blades, shirtless and tanned with a multicolored parrot perched on one shoulder. I passed a throbbing, low-ride Honda Accord that broadsided me with a bass line from a backseat full of speakers. Eight hours ago I was watching a wild bird hunting gar fish on a thousand-year-old river. Welcome to Florida.
I got off the ocean drive and went back west half a mile, over the Intracoastal bridge, and found a parking spot across the street from Banyan's. Inside the restaurant was an open courtyard dominated by the huge trunk of a live banyan tree that measured some eight feet across and spread its monstrous canopy up and over the surrounding roofs. Its leaves were so dense that even at midday it left a cool and dusky patio below.
When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw Richards sitting at a table near one corner, a cop's territory where you could catalog everybody who walked in. She was dressed in a cream-colored suit, white silk blouse underneath. She sat at an angle to the table so she could cross her legs. Even sitting you could see her height in the long bones from knee to ankle and elbow to wrist. Her blonde hair was pulled back. Her eyes, I already knew, would look green today. I am not a smiling man, but approaching the table I could feel it coming into my face.
"Hi. Nice table."
"The advantage of two o'clock lunches," she said without missing a beat. I took her hand and bent to kiss her lightly in greeting and stole a deep draught of her perfume.
"Freeman, you are god-awful thin," she said when I stepped back.
"Thank you," I said, pulling out a chair to the side of hers so I too might have a view.
"What, the fish on the river haven't been cooperative?"
"You mean they don't like to be caught and eaten? Or I'm a piss- poor fisherman?"
"Exactly," she said. "But you're in luck. The special is red snapper, and it's very good here."
I opened a menu as if to make a decision on my own. Took a breath, looked up into her face.
"You're looking fit, detective. Climbing the gears right off that Stair Master?"
One of our connections was a passion for exercise, a shared habit of sweating through a pain we both understood.
Her husband had been a street cop who had died in the line of duty. He had confronted a kid in a holdup and never expected a thirteen-year-old to aim a gun in his face. According to his partner, that night he'd just stared at the barrel and seemed to tilt his head in confusion when the kid pulled the trigger. It was still not long enough in the past.
"No more Stair Master," she answered. "Got a new thing. Aerobics boxing. Great stuff."
"Figures," I said.
She raised an eyebrow, then let the comment slide.
"So, what's up on the river, Freeman? Anything we should know about?"
Her question reminded me how hard it was for her not to always be a cop. There had been some loose ends in the abduction case. A witness, an eighty-year-old legend of the deep Glades, had disappeared and was never found for questioning. The detectives knew he had picked me out as a conduit for special information and wondered if I would ever put them in touch "just for conversation to fill in some holes," they said. What they didn't know was that the old man had saved my life. My repayment was his anonymity.
"Everything is quiet on the river," I said. "But we've got to get you out there again, work on that paddle technique."
"Yeah, sure," she said, but there was a grin on her face.
"No," I said. "This time it's your side of the woods where I think I need some help."
The waiter came and took orders, and as we sipped iced tea, I told Richards about Billy's theory about the insurance scam and murder. I gave her what sketchy information I could about the women's locations and similarities, and about the insurance investigator who, for lack of a better word, was working with me.
She listened, nodding and only interjecting with the proper street names and neighborhood tides. When the fish came, sizzling off the grill and surrounded by dirty rice, we both went quiet.
She finally broke the silence. "Even that many naturals, in that section of the city, wouldn't necessarily raise any flags. And even if Billy alerted us to it, I doubt it would push anyone off the dime to take a closer look."
I looked up from my plate.
"It's a high crime zone, Freeman. You know the drill. Keep the lid on. Try to make insider friends, keep the politics in check and don't sweat the small stuff. They've got bigger problems over there."
It was my turn to raise eyebrows, first at the small stuff comment and then as an unspoken question about the bigger problems. She took a few forkfuls of rice, pulled a loose strand of hair back behind her ears and began again.