"So what you're saying is, you'll investigate on your own."
"Yeah, if waiting to see what happens next is investigating."
"Good. Then you've got two cases to work. You're pretty busy for a new businessman."
Several months ago, after sliding into two different sheriff's cases and pissing off the local law enforcement brass, I'd caved in to some not too subtle suggestions and applied for a Florida private investigator's license. My years on the Philadelphia force hadn't hurt, and even the street shooting didn't stop them from granting me a concealed weapons permit. Of course I was one of more than 300,000 such Florida residents so permitted, and how many lobotomies were included in that select group was anyone's guess. It also hadn't hurt to have a detective with the Broward Sheriff's Office vouch for me. She was, in fact, my next call as soon as I got off with Billy.
"So you're heading over to my place?" Billy asked.
"Not right now, but if that's an offer, I'd like to reserve it until the shack smoke clears, as they say."
"My place is your place, Max. Diane and I will be out at the Kravis Center for the philharmonic, but make yourself at home."
Diane McIntyre was another attorney, and one of the few women I'd met in South Florida who had enough class and moxie to keep up with Billy on several levels.
"By the way, I've set up another appointment with Mr. Mayes in my office on Thursday, and I'd like you to sit in."
"He's here?"
"He graduated from Emory and is considering an acceptance to the seminary at Luther Rice. I get the distinct feeling he's trying to clear this thing, Max, before he moves on."
"All right, Thursday. I'm heading out to southwest Dade now."
"Nate Brown?" Billy asked, guessing my moves, sometimes before I even made them. Nate Brown was an Everglades legend. He'd been born and raised in the swamp and if he was still alive, no one knew the stories or the topography of that vast place better than he. If men had died while the Tamiami Trail was being built, Brown would at least have heard the rumors and tales of their passing around the late-night campfires or early-morning fishing swaps.
"An excellent idea, tapping Brown if you can," Billy said. "I can't give the same approval to a trip to Loop Road, if that's where you're going. Should I have a cold compress and an auto-glass repairman standing by?"
My last trip to the sanctuary of the Everglades' denizens had not been altogether friendly.
"I'm going to be careful this time," I said. The other end of the connection stayed silent, but Billy's wry smile was in it.
"What?" I said. But the phone had softly clicked off.
Before I made the turn to the southbound ramp of I-95, I pulled over and made another call.
"You have reached the desk of Detective Sherry Richards of the Metropolitan Investigations Unit. I am either on the phone or…" I waited for the damned beep.
"Detective. I am presently on dry land and if at all possible would like to meet with you on that matter we discussed last Tuesday," I said. One never knew these days about who had access to office phone mail, especially at a cop shop.
"I am occupied on another case this afternoon, but could meet you at our usual drop off point at 1930 hours. Call my cell if this is acceptable. Aloha."
I punched off the cell and wrinkled my forehead. "Aloha"? Where the hell did I get that? I pulled out onto the interstate, and any thoughts of misplaced levity quickly disappeared. In the few years I'd lived in South Florida I had never experienced I-95 when part of it was not under construction. And despite the constant presence of orange cones, disappearing lanes, ramp signs with burlap slung over them and the inevitable group of yellow-vested construction workers, I also have never experienced traffic doing less than sixty-five in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone. I eased into a spot in the middle lane and tried simply to keep pace.
An hour or so later I was in Miami; got off on Eighth Street heading west. The Spanish signage for everything from food markets to computer stores, dry cleaners to haircutters, restaurants to movie theaters, had lost its novelty for me. Miami-Dade County is now 54 percent Hispanic. Those who have danced to the luscious and lively beat of Afro-Cuban music in the street concerts or tasted a homemade saltena outside the American Airlines Arena, have no argument with multiculturalism. To think that Cuban- or South American-influenced politics is any more corrupt or two-faced than many homegrown administrations is to forget the good old boy history of Miami. I grew up in the days of Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia. To borrow from the NRA slogan, the linguistics and the melanin content of the skin don't devalue people; people devalue people.
I kept driving west through the typical Florida one-story commercial district, through the miles of three- and four-story apartment complexes, and finally through the construction zone of yet another expanding development of "town homes for luxurious country living starting in the low $90s to $120s." Then, in the span of a quarter mile, the road narrowed to a two-way macadam, and I rolled over the first of several water-control dams, through which man now decided how much flow was let loose into the lower Glades and on to Florida Bay. Eighth Street had turned into the Tamiami Trail. The vegetation crawled onto the side of the road and I could see the canal water on the north side, the ditch that the Moneghan dredge had originally dug. Beyond the ditch were acres and acres of land, some open and filled only with low sedge grasses and the occasional outcrop of cabbage palms, some grown thick with strangler fig and pond apple trees. The sun was directly overhead, and even though the temperature had climbed into the eighties, I rolled down the window and stuck my elbow out. Out of the city the air again felt worthy of letting in. Another thirty miles and I began looking for the turn to Loop Road.
Back in the early 1900s, an optimistic developer had laid out Loop Road as a hub of the future that would equal Coral Gables to the east. When the Trail project faltered during WWI, the long loop into the deeper Glades fell to whomever might use it. For the next few decades it became a jump-off point for illegal whiskey runners, gator poachers, small-time criminals or just societal dropouts looking to hide. The city to the east was where governments and laws were made. Out here in the wide-open Glades, those conventions were ignored.
Partway down the loop, I turned into the white-shelled parking lot of the Frontier Hotel. There were two old, mud-spattered four- by-four trucks pulled up near the entrance and a sun-faded Toyota sedan off to the side. Business was slow and it made me optimistic. My last trip here had included an ugly encounter with some young locals. It wasn't, and had never been, a place for outsiders. I pulled up next to the other trucks, rolled up the window and locked the doors before heading in.
Inside the entryway I had to stop and let my eyes adjust to the sudden dimness. I remembered the cramped "lobby," which gave up registering guests many decades ago, and I followed one of those long, rolled-out, industrial-strength carpet runners into the adjacent barroom. It was even darker in here. There was not a single window to the outside, and the electric sidelights glowed a dull yellow. Somewhere in the back a window air conditioner rumbled. A handsome mahogany bar ran the length of one wall, and two elderly men sat on stools at one end studying a cribbage board. I sat at the middle and watched the woman bartender ignore me at first, then cut her eyes my way too many times, like she was trying to remember an old one-night stand. Finally she moved my way, shuffling a wet bar rag from hand to hand.
"Can I get cha?" she said. She may have been the same woman from my last visit, but her hair color had been changed to a hue of red not known to nature. She was wearing a tight cotton pullover that formfitted her breasts and didn't make it down to the waistband of her jeans. Her other nod to contemporary fashion was a silver belly button ring, through which was looped a matching chain that circled her waist. The rolled skin of her flabby stomach was too soft and too pale for the look.