Now she would go someplace in silence, in her own thoughts, seeing images only she could watch in her head, to a place that I could only speculate about: Was it anger over the loss of her leg, or a loathing of her own body? Was it self-pity that someone of her character would naturally fight against? A submerged hatred of me, given what my decisions had brought upon her?
I took this new flicker of thought, this idea that she felt a responsibility to reach out to someone else, as a good thing.
While we took a long bend in the trail, I accepted her silence and focused instead on a dark blip in the saw grass ahead. As we got closer, I could make out the green-black body of an alligator halfway out of the lake, up on the shore with its snout up in the air as if it were smelling the breeze. Twenty yards closer, and I could see that it was huge, a fifteen-footer at least. And it had something in its jaws. Twenty more yards, and I could see that wedged in the gator’s mouth was a Florida soft-shell turtle, the size of one of those big picnic salad bowls.
“Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.
I stopped and watched. The gator paid me no mind and continued to work its jaws, applying pressure. I could hear the turtle’s shell crackling as the teeth split its plastron: It was still alive, kicking its feet, stretching out its neck in a futile attempt to escape.
– 3 -
Billy Manchester was outside-well, his version of outside. He was standing at the railing of the outdoor patio of his penthouse apartment overlooking the island of Palm Beach and the Atlantic beyond. It was the kind of South Florida morning that’s lured people to this part of the country for more than a hundred years: sky clear and azure blue, air that’s clean and crisp and unsullied by pollution, carrying with it a salt scent of ocean water. The sun warm on the skin, containing an intensity that makes every color pop with a brightness you just don’t find in northern climes.
Billy had a folded Wall Street Journal in his hand. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed white oxford shirt and tailored trousers despite his stated intention not to visit his law offices today. His nose was in the air, as if scanning the far horizon. And the profile of his coffee-colored skin outlined against the sky gave the impression of some Nubian prince, or at least some GQ cover boy.
“I am sometimes astounded by your nearly prescient ability to call on me, Max, just at the simultaneous moment that I am considering calling you,” Billy said. “What is it they say about such psychic phenomenon?”
I was still inside his apartment, rooting around in his huge stainless-steel refrigerator, searching for a bottle of Rolling Rock despite the hour and my own stated objective to get back to work. I was dressed in faded jeans and an off-white T-shirt, off-white because of age and a lack of a decent bleaching, not because the color was fashionable. I had on a pair of beat-up deck shoes and no socks. In fact, I had not worn socks since I moved to Florida from Philadelphia some seven years ago.
“Brothers from another mother?” I suggested in response to the question, then opened the beer and walked out to stand with him on the patio.
“That w-wasn’t the phrase I was thinking of, Max,” he said, his smiling dark eyes now holding mine.
Billy has a profound stutter when he talks with anyone face-to-face. Behind a wall, on a phone, or simply out of sight, his speech is smooth, erudite, and flawless. But put a face in front of him, and a switch turns somewhere in his brain. Notice I do not say he suffers from a stuttering problem, because no one who is familiar with Billy and his abilities and success would call him a sufferer or victim.
Billy and I are from the City of Brotherly Love, but the neighborhoods we grew up in were different worlds. I was a third-generation cop from South Philadelphia, a son who was spoon-fed on the ethnic soup of Italians and Poles and Greeks and any other white European immigrant society that could trace its American heritage back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, Independence Hall harbored the breakaway English in 1776, but South Philly was home to the stevedores, brick masons, butchers, carpenters, and backbreaking, hard-drinking workers who made the whole new national machine churn.
And yes, Billy’s family might well trace its roots back to the slave ships from Africa and the human marketplace where they were sold only a few blocks east and south of where the Liberty Bell once hung. But in our half of the twenty-first century, most blacks had migrated to the north and west sides of the city. And in Billy’s neighborhood near Twelfth and Indiana, all the scourges of poverty, drugs, unemployment, and crime were rampant in the 1970s and 1980s. Somehow our mothers met in a church, both of them fleeing religious tradition and abusive husbands. A friendship was born. Billy finally escaped by using his intelligence and drive to get a law degree at Temple University, and a business degree at Wharton. Then he pledged to never live out of the sunshine again.
I fled my own past after my mother found the courage to do away with her husband, my father-our mutual devil. It was Billy’s mother who had shown her the way, provided the arsenic, given her the courage. I’d followed the family tradition and become an officer by then. I already knew that my father’s abuse was no secret among the fraternity of South Philly cops. The rules of the brotherhood in blue were both a curse and a blessing. No one had intervened during the years of beatings even if they were called to the scene. Watch out for a brother. But once it was done, no one let loose the autopsy report that showed the level of poison in my dead father’s blood. Watch out for the family survivors.
My mother finally succumbed a few years later, comfortable with her oppressor in the grave, and my father’s pension-but eaten away by Catholic guilt. I remained a cop until I was shot in the neck during a robbery gone bad. When I took a disability buyout and was determined to leave my past behind, I recalled my mother’s urgings to leave the city and look up her North Philly friend’s son, the successful lawyer in South Florida. For once, I followed her advice.
Billy had become both my friend and partner. He is the intellectual lawyer with a million contacts, admirers, and grateful clients. I am the headstrong private investigator who despite years of grinding and isolation cannot get the streets, or the work of a beat cop, out of my head.
I tipped my morning beer at Billy and took a long swallow as the sun glinted off the green glass. And my stuttering partner looked out at the gleaming horizon.
“Does that mean you have something for me to do?” I said of his admission that he had been close to calling me before I called him.
“Indeed, M-Max,” he said. “There is s-something turned ugly that I b-believe we should p-pursue.”
“A whistle-blower?” I said, taking another hit of my beer.
“Yes, wh-whistle-blower.”
“So you’re doing this thing corporately?” I asked, again trying to get Billy to explain things to me in terms an old street cop could understand.
“Actually it is b-both corporate and governmental. The w-woman works for a private rehabilitation center, b-but wh-what she suspects is that fake orders for wheelchairs and prosthesis are b-being billed to M-Medicare.”
“So if it’s a government gig with the feds getting ripped off, why doesn’t she go to the state attorney’s office, or the GAO, or somebody who’s actually getting screwed here?” I said.
Billy looked at me. He had already folded the newspaper two more times in his hand. Then he sat down in the patio chair, crossed his legs at the knee, and took on that lawyerly look of his.
“You pay taxes, M-Max. I p-pay taxes. Medicare is funded by us and every other legitimate American,” Billy said. “The m-maid, the grocer, the sch-school teacher, the office manager-we are the ones getting ripped off. And if there isn’t anything left when we get old and need a wh-wheelchair, we’ll b-be the ones hurting.”