He heard the locks clicking and walked out to the front room to meet Julia, who let out a little yelp and dropped the shopping bags on the floor.
“How did you get in here?” she said.
He held up the picture of Jennifer and said, “How do you know this girl?”
“What are you doing here? You want your stuff? Take it. I’ve been saving it for you.”
“Answer my question,” Harry said. “How do you know her?”
“How dare you go through my things? I should have you arrested right now.”
She picked up the phone and started pushing buttons. Harry grabbed the receiver out of her hand and smashed it against an end table, a contained explosion that sounded like a shot.
“This girl,” he said, “was in Manfred Pfiser’s hotel room on the day he got shot. I made a delivery for him, and when I got back to his hotel, this girl was gone and Manfred was dead on the floor. Who is she and what did she have to do with it?”
Julia said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She got a cigarette situated between her lips, and sent out the search party for a match. But she didn’t have one. She never did.
“For an actress, you’re a terrible liar.” Harry got up close to her, and dug his fingers into the fleshy part of her arm.
“You’re hurting me.”
He squeezed, and it buckled her knees. “Julia, honey,” Harry said, without raising his voice, “I’m gonna do a lot more than that if you don’t start giving me some answers.” He applied more pressure, then let her go.
“I met her in Los Angeles on a job, and she was in Miami when we were there. Her name is Vicki. She’s an actress.”
The white marks from Harry’s fingers had turned to red.
“What do you know about a guy named Leo?”
“Leo Hannah? They’re friends. He and Vicki and Lawrence Lendesma. They’re Miami people.”
“So you were in on it, too.”
“In on what? Have you lost your mind?”
Harry took a step toward her and Julia put up her hands. “She called me in March. She wanted to know when you were getting out of jail.”
“And you fucking told her?”
The cigarette quivered in Julia’s mouth. She walked over to the stove, held back her brand-new Cleopatra hairdo, and hunched over a burner. Straightening up, she took a deep drag.
“She said Leo wanted to make contact with you, that you two met in jail, and he was looking forward to seeing you when you got out.”
“How did she find out about Leo and me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Julia—”
“I swear to God, Harry, I don’t know.”
Harry brushed past her. All the things he’d wanted to say to her, everything he’d wanted to get back, none of it meant a thing.
Downstairs, Felix was worrying a powder-fed facial tic, his upper lip pulling back to reveal new, managedcare teeth, his jaw pulsing to a beat only he could feel. He was holding the door for a toddling relic in mink.
A thick chill dampened the twilight, the top third of the Empire State Building glowing pale through the settling fog. People swarmed on the sidewalks, umbrellas up, but the mist in the air was hardly like rain.
Harry felt sick, and leaned against the wall of a building for support. What was going on? Leo and Julia... Vicki, who he’d only met once, and Jimmy De Steffano, who he’d known all his life... was there anyone who wasn’t going out of their way to make him suffer? His own father couldn’t get rid of him fast enough, for god’s sake.
An image came to him then, Aggie at the bus station, just before she slapped him, asking “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?” And then the answer he’d given her.
The tears were bitter. He let them go.
Chapter Fourteen
Nobody took the trouble to give the boy a name, just two initials that didn’t stand for anything. It wasn’t the first time Martinson encountered this phenomenon, or even the second, and it wasn’t all that much of a phenomenon around Campville, JP Beaumond’s birthplace, a roach turd on the map a short shot east of Gainesville.
Five feet, four inches, one-hundred and fifty-nine pounds, his mean, dull eyes struck a near-perfect match with his mouse-brown hair. These mugs were snapped before Beaumond went to jail the last time. His record indicated he had a tattoo of a rebel flag on his left shoulder, and a chunk of meat gouged out of his left thigh, most likely an old stab wound.
His first run-in with the law came at age nine, when for no reason that was mentioned, JP slit the throats of six of his neighbor’s chickens, and the neighbor pressed charges, along with the county chapter of the ASPCA. Beaumond’s family was ordered to make restitution for the birds.
A few years later, the underage JP snuck out of a package store with a pair of Colt 45s, the bottled variety, then broke one of them over the head of the clerk attempting to apprehend him. This led to a brief hospitalization for the clerk, and a juvie bid for the ambitious JP, now moving up in the world, at a detention home outside of Middleburg. He earned two county bounces for a B&E and an assault, respectively, and did his first state jolt at the not-so-tender age of eighteen, after the deceitful JP borrowed his brother-in-law’s car, then neglected to bring it back. Two years on the inside, six weeks out, the unlucky JP had a return engagement at the Big House for selling three-and-a-half grams of cocaine to an undercover policeman in St. Augustine.
Which brought them pretty much up to the present, although in JP Beaumond’s case, everything was past for him now, and there wasn’t going to be any future. Somebody made certain of that when they shot him twice with a .25 caliber pistol and rudely pitched his body into a canal in the Everglades.
Hardly a week went by that some law enforcement agency wasn’t pulling a stiff out of that grassy river, a body some tour guide or fisherman found floating. Arnie thought by now even the dimmest bulb realized this feed-the-guy-to-the-alligators crap never panned out. An alligator would not eat a man unless he was starving, and being absolute boss of his neighborhood food chain, the alligator was never starving. Lazy, yes. Cowardly, yes. Hungry, no. All the same, somebody out there must’ve been feeling a bit peckish: Beaumond had a big bite taken out of his side.
It was a thoroughly unprofessional dump job. The victim’s wallet was in the hip pocket of his pants, and it contained twenty-seven dollars cash, a suspended Florida driver’s license, and another one from Georgia, assigned to Clement Snipe. It had JP Beaumond’s picture on it. Also, Visa, Master, American Express, and Automobile Association of America cards, all in the name of Theodore Kistler.
It was too bad Beaumond was dead. Martinson wasn’t sorry the world was minus one Campville native of JP’s standing, but he would’ve liked to talk to him. He must have finally pissed off the wrong guy. Leo Hannah, for instance. Or this Alex character Victoria Leonard was covering up for. Plenty of other people, too. But Arnie Martinson was in no way obligated to investigate the murder of this piece of shit, a Dade County headache all the way down the line.
Lili was rarely in this part of town after dark, and she was getting a good dose of why. The sidewalks were clogged with noisy Italians, Germans with seven-figure Swiss bank accounts, and blonde bunnies who seemed like they’d been raised in Midwestern towns but were too frail to be farm girls. Hip-hugging corduroys showcased their narrow figures, exhibiting brown bellies and pierced navels. Every fifty feet or so, one would uncork a mind-bending whinny, and throw her arms around another girl who looked just like her and happened to be approaching from the opposite direction.