“How many slices you want?” Louis asked.
“Not hungry,” Mel said.
Louis started to ask where he’d eaten but paused when he saw a plate sitting on the nightstand between the beds. He picked up the linen napkin that lay on top. The food was a partially eaten bacon cheeseburger. The plate had the Ta-boo logo on the edge.
“You’re getting takeout from Ta-boo?” Louis asked.
“Sure, why not?”
Louis threw the napkin down. “A little pricy, isn’t it?”
Mel shrugged and started to put his headphones back on. Louis reached down to stop him.
“What’s your problem?” Mel asked.
“Have you gotten any money from Kent?”
“He says he’ll have some in a few weeks.”
“How much?” Louis asked.
“He didn’t say.”
Louis went back to the pizza box. “I don’t know how you expect us to get by here,” he said. “Eighty-five a night for the room, a couple hundred for tuxedo rentals, and now you’re laying around here eating takeout from the most expensive place in town.”
“It’s not the most expensive place,” Mel said.
“That’s not the point,” Louis said. “We haven’t even decided if we’re going to take this case yet, and we’re already five hundred bucks in the hole.”
Mel swung his feet to the floor. “You going to bail on me here?”
Louis had a slice of pizza to his mouth, but he stopped and lowered it. Despite his increasing blindness, Mel was the most independent and get-out-of-my-face guy Louis knew. But his voice now had an edge of panic, a don’t-quit-on-me kind of panic.
“I’m not walking away,” Louis said, “but I’d like to know if it’s going to be worth our while. This isn’t going to be an easy investigation.”
“There are no easy investigations, you know that,” Mel said. “It’s just a lot of begging and digging, and if you’re lucky, you sniff out a lead that cracks things open.”
Louis sat down on the edge of his bed and bit into the pizza. Mel started to pick at the cold French fries on the plate. For a couple of minutes, there was nothing but the soft crunch of their chewing.
“So, what did you find out today?” Mel finally asked. “Does this Emilio fellow exist?”
Louis nodded. “Yeah. His last name is Labastide. He’s a Mexican illegal who worked for the lawn company in 1984.”
“You found him?”
Louis rose, grabbed Rosa’s photo off the dresser, and tossed it to Mel. Mel turned on the lamp and held the picture under the bright light.
“I found his sister, Rosa,” Louis said. “She hasn’t seen him since October of eighty-four. Says one night he just didn’t come home.”
“Does she think he went back to Mexico?”
Louis was chewing, and he shook his head as he mumbled an answer. “No. They came to this country together, when she was sixteen. She says no way would he desert her.”
Mel was quiet, and Louis let him think about things while he finished a second slice of pizza and pulled two beers from the cooler. He set one on the nightstand for Mel.
“Do you think there is a connection between Labastide and Durand?” Mel asked.
“I don’t know,” Louis said. “Five years between murders is a long time in the killing business.”
“Then let’s lay it out,” Mel said. “Grab that pad of paper over there, and start writing.”
Louis pushed the remaining pizza crust into his mouth and picked up the legal pad. Mel started reciting the commonalities between Labastide and Durand, something any detective did when looking at the possibility of a single killer for multiple victims.
Both were young, dark-haired, and handsome.
Both had little money.
Both were looking to improve their financial situations.
Both had personal contact with rich married women.
“We’re missing what could be the biggest link,” Mel said. “Did you ask Rosa if her brother was gay?”
“No,” Louis said. “It seemed like a lousy thing to throw at her, so I danced around it and asked about a girlfriend. She said she was sure he had no girlfriend, so I asked about a buddy. She said his best pal had gone back to Mexico.”
“So, we don’t know which way he swung,” Mel said.
Louis rose again to get another beer. “First time in my life I ever needed to know something like that about someone.”
“We need to know, Louis,” Mel said. “If Labastide was gay, that will indicate a very likely hate-crime connection.”
“Hate crimes are spontaneous and not usually planned. Hard to consider someone killing like that five years apart.”
“Maybe it wasn’t five years apart,” Mel said. “There was a case up in Virginia a few years ago where a married man who hated gays was picking up young guys in bars and taking them home and killing them. He got away with it for eight years, because the bodies in between didn’t turn up.”
Louis took a drink of his beer. Mel’s hate-crime theory was not one he was comfortable with. It felt far-fetched, almost as improbable as believing that Emilio had become some kind of boy toy who spent his afternoons lying on Egyptian sheets and sipping mimosas.
And there was still the fact that as far as they knew, Durand swung both ways. Was it possible that Labastide did, too? And if so, who was more likely to kill him? A jealous male lover or a jealous husband?
“We need to find out what happened to Labastide,” Louis said. “If he’s dead and it was a homicide, then we’ll know where to go.”
“We could call Barberry and ask him to research his database of John Does.”
Louis shook his head. “I don’t want to let that asshole know what direction we’re looking. I’ll call Dr. Steffel and see what she can dig up. If Labastide was murdered, it’s likely he was dumped in Palm Beach County.”
“If that doesn’t work,” Mel said, “we may have to resort to begging favors from Lance Mobley.”
Louis sighed. Mobley was the Lee County sheriff on the western side of the state, their home territory. Sometimes friend, sometimes adversary, but always a man looking for a microphone and a camera. Also one who did not know the meaning of the word discretion.
But if they had to play nice with Mobley, then so be it. There was no way to make a connection to Durand or Palm Beach until they knew what happened to Labastide.
Even if the cases turned out not to be related and Labastide had met some other kind of tragic end, Louis had still made a promise to Rosa Díaz. He said he would come back. And he didn’t intend to do that until he had something to tell her.
O’Sullivan’s was a cop bar. Conveniently located within walking distance of the Fort Myers police station, it had become, over the years, much like a married guy’s cherished den. Stale, smoky air, cigarette burns on the tabletops, shelves of softball and bowling trophies, a floor of crushed peanut shells, and a big-screen TV permanently turned to ESPN.
And like all primitive habitats, it had a pecking order.
City detectives had staked claim to the back end of the bar; county detectives, out of legendary necessity, owned the three tables near the men’s-room door. The slew of small round tables arranged down the center of the bar belonged to the rank-and-file officers, usually two kinds: those who dropped in only long enough to feed their egos by telling embellished stories of near-death experiences and those who had nothing else to go home to but dried-up cartons of Chinese takeout and an empty bed.
Lance Mobley, Lee County sheriff, sat in the back booth on his throne of tattered green vinyl, a vision of leonine golden hair, golfer’s tan, and an oppressively starched white uniform shirt. With one arm across the back of the seat and a booted ankle on his knee, he looked like a sultan surveying his realm.
As Louis and Mel had feared, Dr. Steffel had not turned up any medical examiner’s records for an Emilio Labastide, nor could she find any John Does matching the physical description. Late yesterday afternoon, Louis had resorted to calling Mobley. Louis gave him Labastide’s general information and, to reel him in, added something to whet the sheriff’s investigative appetite: “See if you have any decapitated corpses.”