"Great pecs," I agreed.
"He and Evan were best friends. They met at OCS. Served together in Vietnam. In all Nick's letters, Evan did this…Evan did that. Nick looked up to him."
"Evan?"
"Lieutenant Evan Ferguson."
"They still keep in touch?" I asked, knowing the answer.
A cloud crossed her face. "Evan never came back. He was killed in an ambush or something. They were trying to save a Vietnamese girl. Nick and Evan were leading their battalions-"
"Platoons."
"Whatever. A bunch of American boys with rifles playing soldier. Something happened. Evan got killed and Nick got a medal. He doesn't like to talk about the details."
There was no way to avoid wading right into it. "Would he have talked about it with Marsha?"
She looked at me with those nut-brown eyes and seemed to consider the question.
"Doubt it. Like most men, he doesn't say boo about himself. About what he's feeling, I mean. Marsha would ask me about the war, and what Nick was like when he came back. She and I got to be close. She'd come over, we'd drink white wine and have a little pajama party, gabbing all night."
"About Nick?"
"Yeah, and other things." She thought about it. "But about Nick, a lot, sure."
"What did he tell you about the war?"
She looked away, mulled something over, and didn't let me see it. "Not much. Oh, he'd talk about liberty in Japan. But what happened on patrol, the fighting, not much at all."
"Did Marsha ever tell you she was investigating Nick?"
That stopped her a moment. "Investigating? No. Why would she do that?"
"For television. Like Mike Wallace, put him under the lights and grill him."
"Just the opposite. She wanted to do a profile, a puff piece to make him look good."
"Nick didn't tell me."
"He didn't know. At least he wasn't supposed to. She asked to see his mementos. You know, uniforms, photos, that kind of thing. There isn't that much. But she was sort of mystical about it. She'd stare at a picture or just lay her hands on his moldy old duffel bag."
"Why? Did she tell you?"
"She wanted to surprise him. Nick would come on live for an interview about some boring case in the office, and Marsha would have a profile all prepared about his childhood, the war, the crime-fighter stuff, his political life…"
"This Is Your Life," I said.
Priscilla laughed. "That's what I told Marsha, but she didn't know the show. Too young."
As she talked she straightened up a bookshelf, then dusted the desk with the palm of her hand. Even the modern woman can't fight a millennium of tradition.
"Maybe you could show me Nick's war memorabilia."
She hesitated and looked at me sideways. "Not without asking him first."
"Don't bother. I'll mention it to him myself. By the way, he told me you introduced him to Marsha."
There was a touch of sadness in her smile. "I knew she would never get serious with him. She wanted to use Nick, meet all the judges and lawyers and cops you need to know in her business. She wanted to get out of the mold they created for her at the station. Get onto hard news, then move to a bigger television market, like L.A. or New York. To her Nick was just a power fuck. And to Nick, she was just…"
"A sport fuck."
"You got that right."
"So there was a better chance of Nick coming back than if he found some divorcee looking for commitment."
She seemed to sigh. Her look spoke of lonely nights, of the anguish Nick caused her, of the love she still had for him. The brave front was crumbling. "It was almost as if I still had him. I liked Marsha. She'd tell me what they did, what he said about me. Usually he complained. I was always pushing him, he'd say, which was right. I pushed him to go to law school, to run for office. I pushed him to become the man he is."
"And then he left."
She nodded and turned her head away.
"Life never goes the way you plan it," I said.
I got that right, too.
CHAPTER 12
I hit every red light for fifty blocks heading east toward Coconut Grove. They're timed that way by our traffic planners, who are either sadists or extortionists who get kickbacks from the oil and tire companies.
My little coral-rock house was dark, quiet, and hot. I turned on the lights, pulled the cord on every ceiling fan, and opened the windows. The soggy air inside was soon joined by soggy air outside. I turned on the eleven o'clock news just to have some background noise.
It had been a slow news day by local standards. No gangland executions, no cockfight raids, no riots in the streets. No DC-3s dropping bales of marijuana through the roofs of convents. Just the usual assortment of mondo bizarro Miami news.
Lead story, a woman nine months pregnant and just off the plane from Barranquilla, sitting in a wheelchair at the airport. She told the customs agent her stomach hurt. Any other city, they would have thought the woman was going into labor. Here, they asked what she had swallowed before leaving Colombia.
Condoms filled with cocaina, she reluctantly admitted.
How many, the agent asked.
Ciento diez, she said, beginning to cry.
The agent didn't believe her, but sure enough, after a handful of laxatives, agents recovered a hundred and ten condoms filled with nearly two pounds of cocaine. "The woman's a real swallower," the anchorman solemnly concluded.
Then there was the Green Thumb Gang, ripping up expensive plants from residential yards. Nick Fox's face appeared on the screen. "I'm declaring war on the black market for flowers and plants," he announced. "We'll have men working undercover at the flea markets, and we advise all citizens not to buy lilies or liriopes from anyone you do not know."
And rounding out the news, two highway attacks, only one a homicide. A woman tailgating in her Honda was shocked when the driver in front stopped his Nissan, walked back to her car, and wordlessly poured his coffee through the window and into her lap. Then a man in a Hyundai apparently turned left too slowly to suit the man in the Corvette behind him. After being hung up at a traffic light, the Corvette driver took chase and peppered the slowpoke with a burst of nine-millimeter shells from an Uzi.
"Stay cool on our hot highways," a police major was saying. "Don't blow your horn except for safety reasons. Never get out of your car unless absolutely necessary."
Welcome to Belfast. Or maybe Beirut.
I was glad there were no new stories about the Marsha Diamond case. Mary Rosedahl hadn't even made television and was awarded only four paragraphs in the Journal under the headline flight attendant slain. As long as we didn't release the Compu-Mate connection, the news media probably wouldn't link the two killings. Not that they weren't still pestering me. That very afternoon, a reporter, a photographer, and a grip from Channel 8 ambushed me outside the courthouse with camera rolling.
"Any new developments in the anchor-lady murder?" Rick Gomez yelled over the traffic.
I picked up my pace and cut toward the street, hoping to tangle Gomez's mike cord on a parking meter. "Your fly's open, Rick."
He looked down, cursed at his own gullibility, and tried again. "Is it fair to say the investigation is stalled?"
"We'll have an indictment about the time your paternity case comes to trial."
"C'mon, Jake! Gimme something I can use."
"Have you tried condoms?"
"Jake, please."
"See if they come in petite."
The grip was getting a charge out of this, even if Rick Gomez wasn't. If nothing else, they could show it on the blooper reel at the station's Christmas party.
I jaywalked across Miami Avenue, cut close to a city cop on horseback, using him as a pick like in a basketball game. Gomez, a veteran street reporter, stayed on my heels. "Critics have questioned your qualifications to head the investigation."