“Onion bagels are her favorite. She wouldn’t have done it for honey wheat. I tried that first.”
“Ah, so, do you always bribe women to get what you want?”
He grinned. “I usually don’t need to.”
I was attempting to execute the rather complicated maneuver required to climb off a kayak alongside a dock, and I nearly went into the river at this comment. The tide was high, so very little of the ladder was left above water, and I made an extremely ungraceful landing by sliding onto the dock on my belly. After tying off the kayak’s bowline, I dusted off my hands on my shorts and stood up. Joe’s mountain bike was propped against the trunk of an old oak tree, and he was again dressed in Lycra bike shorts, this time with a baby-blue tank top. He handed me a cardboard coffee cup.
“Thanks.” I inclined my head in the direction of the wood picnic table closer to the Larsens’ house. “Let’s get a ways back from the river. I’ve inhaled enough exhaust this morning.”
“So how’re things?”
I didn’t say anything, just looked into the bag he’d brought, pulled out a cinnamon raisin bagel, and spread the cream cheese on with a plastic knife. I knew what he was doing. Joe was trying to get back on my good side by bribing me with bagels. I’d take the bribe, but as for forgiveness, he was going to have to work for it.
I bit off a big piece and chewed slowly. “Hmmm. These are really good. The coffee, too. Thanks.”
“So, how’s that kid?”
“Fine.”
“Have you been to see her?”
“Yup.”
He tried to wait me out, make me need to fill in the silence. Not this morning. Not after what he’d said yesterday.
“Seychelle, look, I want to help you. I like you. I’m a retired cop and I’m bored, so I’d like to help out any way I can. You’re not experienced. You should use me. Use me and abuse me.”
“It’s nice of you to offer, Joe, but...”
“You’re still pissed off at me, aren’t you. First my daughter, now you. I seem to piss off all the women I try to help. This is about yesterday, isn’t it. About what I said about your old man.”
“Don’t call him my ‘old man.’ ”
“Okay, this is about Red, then. Hmm. I thought you were better than that, Sullivan.”
I glanced quickly at him, frowned, and turned away. The bagel tasted lousy all of a sudden.
“You said you were going to find that kid’s father,” he said, “and you sounded like you meant it. I believed you.” He balled up his napkin and crushed his empty coffee cup. “But now you’re so hung up on some old news about what did or didn’t happen more than twenty years ago, you’re gonna turn down a chance to use thirty years of investigative experience because you’re pouting over your daddy.” He stood and collected the bag with the remaining bagels.
I sighed. “Sit down.”
He stood there, waiting.
“Would you sit already?” I said.
“Why?”
“You’re gonna make me say it, aren’t you. Okay. Maybe I could use a little help. There. See, I kinda screwed up last night. Somebody followed me, and it nearly got ugly. I thought I’d made sure I didn’t have a tail, but I guess I’m not a very good Nancy Drew after all. I don’t want to make that mistake again. So, yeah. I’ll take you up on your offer.”
He sat down on the wood bench. “Okay, so you need to find this kid’s father.”
“Yeah. She says her father is an American, and she thinks she was being brought to America to join him. I figured the place to start, then, was the boat that brought her to America. I’ve set up a meeting today with someone who knows something about the Miss Agnes."
“Would you mind if I tag along? I could watch your back.”
I looked at his bike shorts and clean blue tank top. “I don’t know that you’ll still want to when you hear where we’re going.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Swap Shop.”
What we now know as the Swap Shop started life back in the sixties as the Thunderbird Drive-in Movie Theater. When the owner began running a flea market on the blacktop expanse on weekends, the concept grew and grew, eventually becoming an indoor/outdoor collection of permanent booths with a food court and full-time entertainment including a circus, complete with elephants, rides, and an outdoor carnival. The place still showed movies at night, but the main business now took place during the day when the Swap Shop resembled the outdoor markets of third-world countries more than an American shopping mall.
We got lucky and found a minivan pulling out of a parking space. I whipped Lightnin’ into the spot before a hooked-up Honda Civic with booming bass could beat me to it.
“You like to live dangerously, I see,” Joe said.
Although most of the sky was blue, a small dark cloud just overhead began to spit raindrops on us as we walked across the parking lot. We picked up the pace and ducked under the tent that covered the long rows of outdoor stalls.
“You ever been here before?” I asked Joe.
“No, can’t say that this is my sort of spot.” He seemed to draw into himself, as if he were afraid he might catch something.
I like grit. Always have. And the Swap Shop was one of the grittiest places you could find in South Florida. And that was saying something.
Within a few minutes, the rain had stopped, and the fierce sun was out again, pushing the humidity into the nineties. The odors from fried foods, sweet cotton candy, and sweat mingled with the steam that was rising off the asphalt, making it difficult to breathe. I half expected Joe to pass out.
Hispanic families and East Indian men manned most of the stalls. They called out to us as we passed, offering us their assorted car parts or their knife and sword collections or their T-shirts with off-color slogans. The blacktop beneath our feet was throbbing with the bass from the reggae music as we passed a huge array of subwoofers. I didn’t see many Haitians among the stall owners, though folks in the crowd of patrons seemed to speak more Creole than anything else. I figured that most of the Caribbean islanders probably sold fruits and veggies over in the food market. Joe and I asked an elderly security guard for directions and discovered that Paris Kids was a children’s wear store inside the main building.
“What’s the plan?” Joe asked as we headed toward the double glass doors.
“I don’t have one,” I told him. “I’m supposed to talk to a girl who works in this booth. She supposedly knows something about the Miss Agnes, maybe came over on board herself. I’d like you to just keep back, see if anybody shows an interest in us. The Capitaine guy is a dark-skinned man, well over six feet tall, with a goatee and a mustache. If you see anybody around fitting that description, let me know.”
“Sounds like a plan to me. Consider me invisible.”
From inside the building, we could hear an announcer’s voice booming over a PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . .” and it was clear that we had arrived in time for the circus performance. The crowd was so thick that we had to turn sideways to fit through the doors and fight our way into the building. An old mirrored ball flung dancing spots of light around the crowd, and neon signs advertising gyros and pizza and Tic Tac Dough lottery cards provided the only other light. I saw the sign for Paris Kids on the far side of the food court and squeezed my way through the crowd in that direction. I’d already lost track of Joe.
When I made it to the shop’s door, I felt like I had just paddled my kayak into a side eddy of the river. I paused to catch my breath, and before I became aware of anything else in the shop, a woman was at my side.
“Can I help you?” She was a matronly Haitian woman in her mid-forties.
“No, thanks. I just want to look around.”
“Do you have something special in mind?” Her fingernails were long and painted with some kind of intricate designs. Little jewels glued to the nails glinted in the fluorescent lights.