Terrific, I thought, wiping my mouth with a napkin.
Way to hit the ground running.
Chapter 72
HAVING SPLASHED SOME WATER on my face, I felt slightly better as I came down the rolling stairs of the tiny jet onto the airport tarmac. The small Key West airport looked the same as it always had: namely, as laid-back and weathered as its baggage handlers. You could actually see the crystal blue water sparkling beyond the runway’s chain-link fence, lulling and beautiful and beckoning.
I tore my eyes off it as I followed the line of smiling, ready-to-party young businesspeople. This wasn’t a vacation for me. It was more like a suicide mission. Get in and get the heck out, I told myself.
“Miss?” said an NBA-sized black guy in aviator shades and a green tennis visor, tapping me on the elbow on the airport’s sidewalk.
Christ, did he recognize me? I thought. “What?” I snapped at him.
“Do you need a taxi to your hotel?” he said warily as he pointed at the car behind him.
We stopped at the Hyatt five minutes later. After I paid and tipped the driver, I hurried into the lobby as if the parking lot were a sniper zone.
The large black female concierge gave me an easy smile when I came in. “Nina Bloom?” she said when I showed her my credit card. “Oh, yes. I just got off the phone with someone about you.”
What?!
“Your firm just upgraded your room,” she said. “They must like you. You’ve been transferred to one of our penthouse suites.”
The first time I felt that I’d breathed all day was after I’d tipped the bellboy and had the door securely locked behind me. It really was a beautiful suite. South Beach chic. White leather furniture, black quartz countertops, neon bright modern art. Outside the sliding glass doors, a queen-sized white chaise with my name on it lay on a private, Mexican-tiled roof deck.
There was also a huge gift basket on the countertop. Tropical flowers, Godiva boxes. Even an orange and green magnum of Veuve Clicquot champagne.
“Thanks for doing the right thing, kid. Go get ’em!” my boss had written in the message.
Well, at least I was making someone happy.
I read in one of the hotel magazines about the upcoming Conch Republic (as Key West jokingly called itself) Independence Celebration. There was a bed race down Duval Street and, of course, lots of drinking. Maybe that was a good thing. Hopefully, the whole police department, including Peter, would be more than busy with the greater influx of tourists than normal.
I plopped down on a low, white leather couch and called Emma.
“I made it,” I said. “I’m so tired.”
“Sure you are, Mom,” Emma said. “I feel for you. Enjoy your business trip to Key West. Try not to throw your back out limbo-ing the night away.”
I shook my head. She didn’t understand. She had no idea how much I wanted out of this place, how much I wanted to go straight to the airport and head home.
“You better not do any partying with that Gabby, either, Miss Wiseacre. I love you, Wilson. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After I hung up, I put in a call to Harris’s attorney, Charles Baylor, whose office I would be visiting tomorrow. No answer. What else was new? I was going to take a shower, but then I saw the sky. The sun was going down, and the sky was turning a ridiculously intense electric blue.
I shook my head again as I remembered partying in Mallory Square that last sunset on spring break. Dancing and singing to Bob Marley, I’d actually thought I could be happy and carefree forever.
I’d thought wrong.
Despite the memory, and my usual policy of not mixing business with pleasure, I decided to bring the bubbly bottle out onto the roof deck with a water glass. Because if anyone on earth needed a drink at that moment, it was me.
On second thought, I left the water glass inside and headed for the white chaise, the champagne bottle’s foil trailing behind me.
Chapter 73
CHARLES BAYLOR’S OFFICE was on Terry Lane, a block south of Hemingway’s house in Old Town. Nine a.m. sharp on Friday morning, holding a box of Dunkin’ Donuts in one hand and a box of coffee in the other, I rang his bell with my elbow.
As I waited, I heard a screaming saw at the rear of the house. On the porch, a rusty bicycle sat next to some beat-up diving tanks. What the hell kind of law office was this? When the saw stopped, I put down the coffee and whammed on the door with my fist.
A bleary-eyed, tan, shirtless guy wearing a green bandanna, goggles, and an air mask opened the door a minute later. He wiped his hands on his sole visible item of clothing, his cutoff jeans.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I’m looking for Charles Baylor. The attorney?” I said.
“He’s not here at the moment,” the guy said, grinning like an idiot as he pulled down the mask. “I’m Charlie Baylor, the carpenter. Maybe I can help you out?”
I restrained myself from rolling my eyes. Nice to meet you, too, wiseass, I thought. “I’m Nina Bloom from Scott, Maxwell and Bond. They put me on to assist in the Justin Harris case. I left you about a dozen messages.”
“Well, bless my banjo,” Baylor said in an exaggerated hick accent. “You must be Miss New York City here to learn the hillbilly beach bum some lawrin’. I got every one of yours and the righteous Mission Exonerate’s calls, all right. You didn’t get my e-mail? ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ My client is in competent hands. You should check your BlackBerry. My message heading, I believe, was ‘Go Find a Tree to Hug.’ Guess you’ll have to drink all that coffee yourself. Shame. See you around.”
Could this guy be a bigger prick? I thought, as he started to close the door in my face. I drop-kicked the doughnut box into the gap to stop it.
I’d come down here for a lot of reasons. Messing around wasn’t one of them.
“ ‘Competent hands,’ huh?” I yelled as he looked down at the crushed doughnuts in pained shock. “What are you building back there, Mr. Baylor? Harris’s coffin?”
He pulled off his bandanna and ran a hand through his sandy hair. He looked to be in his early forties, but his lean, brown, weather-beaten face was still boyish somehow. He looked more like a landscaper than a lawyer. One with eyes the color of the sky I’d seen from my balcony last night, but that was beside the point.
“Harris’s coffin?” he said with a grin. “That’s cold, woman. Damned if I’m not starting to like you. Please call me Charlie. When are they changing your firm’s name to Scott, Maxwell and Soulless Bitch?”
I held eye contact with him, then smiled for the first time myself. “Invite me in, and we can go over it, Charlie.”
Chapter 74
HALF OF THE LAWYER’S HOUSE was beautifuclass="underline" golden, varnished Dade pine floors; a completely refurbished curving banister and stairway; a white-on-white marble cook’s kitchen out of Architectural Digest. The other, gutted half, with its shattered plaster walls and garbage-brimming joint compound buckets, had a striking resemblance to a crack house.
Luckily, I was quickly escorted through the construction site into an artfully finished oak-paneled office behind the kitchen.
Charlie dropped the salvaged doughnut box onto his immaculate desk and took a Heineken keg can from a minifridge.
“Out of orange juice?” I said, making a show of checking my watch.
“In Key West, this is orange juice,” Charlie said, popping the beer can’s top and taking a slug.
I almost passed out when I noticed the framed Harvard Law diploma on the wall, a little magna cum laude banner bridged across its lower right-hand corner.