“Did any of these boys get angry when she rejected them?”
Joyce shook her head. Louis could tell she was miles-and decades-away from the dingy garage.
“Ray told me Kitty was saving herself for a rich guy,” Louis said. “So Kitty was. .” He wasn’t sure how to make this sound anything but judgmental.
Joyce looked up abruptly. “Kitty was smart, she could’ve gone to college if she had some money. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
“So she wanted someone to take care of her,” Louis said.
“Don’t we all,” Joyce said softly.
She noticed Louis writing in his notebook. “Look, Kitty wasn’t a gold digger. She just wanted nice things. She wanted to go live in England someday, meet a guy with manners, like James Bond or something.”
Louis remembered the poster of Goldfinger on Kitty’s bedroom wall.
“Tell me more about Ray,” he said.
Joyce let out a sigh. “Poor Ray. He had such a crush on Kitty. It was kind of pathetic. We were mean to him. We teased him behind his back.” She hesitated. “I remember one of the other girls told us he copped a feel behind the grill. She was afraid to tell his Dad because she thought she’d get fired.”
She looked up at Louis. “Why are you asking me all these questions about Ray?”
Louis debated how much to tell her. “You said Ray had a crush on her. It might be helpful to me to know about anyone like that.”
“But why now? What’s the point? Kitty’s dead. Why are you bothering with this now?”
She was looking at him strangely, like she suddenly could read his mind, or like he was some weird voyeur, like poor old Ray Faulk.
“It might have some bearing on Jack Cade’s present case,” he said.
She stiffened at the name and something flashed over her face, like she had remembered something she had tried very hard to forget.
“I saw him once,” she said softly.
“Cade?”
Joyce nodded. Her eyes went to the girl who was sitting under the dryer, absorbed in her Cosmopolitan.
“When I was walking to school,” she said. “I was walking past this house, one of those pretty places over near the park.” She stopped, her eyes downcast. She was playing with the brush, rubbing the bristles over the palm of her hand.
“Was Kitty with you?”
Joyce nodded. “His truck was at the curb, an old beat-up red Ford with that landscaping sign on the door. He was pushing a lawn mower and he saw us walk by on the sidewalk.”
She stopped again. The air conditioner droned on.
“I looked up,” she said, “and I saw him watching us.”
She was gripping the brush, pushing the bristles into her palm. “He looked at me and. . he touched himself.”
Louis looked up from his notebook. Her head was still down, the brush gripped in her hand. When she finally raised her head, her eyes were bright, her face red.
“Did Kitty see him, too?”
Joyce shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t say anything to her. It was too. .” She hesitated. “I thought about it later, after. .” Her voice trailed off again.
There had been no mention of this in Ahnert’s report of his interview with Joyce. “You didn’t tell the police,” Louis said.
She shook her head slowly. “A detective came and talked to me, but I didn’t think about it until later, when I saw Jack Cade on television after he had been arrested.”
Louis’s pen was poised over the notebook as he looked at her stricken face.
“I never told anyone. I guess I was embarrassed,” Joyce said. “I should have, but I never did.”
“Mrs. Novick?”
They both turned to look at the girl, who had ducked out from under the dryer. “I’m done, I think, Mrs. Novick.”
Joyce looked at Louis, then got up to rescue her young customer. When the girl was sitting back in the swivel chair, Joyce turned back to Louis.
“I’ve got to finish this,” she said. “I got another one coming in five minutes. Winter Fest dance tonight at the high school. Big event.” She looked wistfully at the girl in the mirror.
Louis rose, putting his notebook away. She followed him out and stood by the door.
“Thank you for your time,” Louis said.
“Are you talking to others?” she asked.
“Others?”
“From the school or the drive-in, I mean.”
“Should I?”
She was chewing on her bottom lip. “What you said about Ray, about him having a crush on Kitty. .”
“Go on.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “It made me remember Ronnie Cade.”
Louis felt something in his chest, like a sudden extra heartbeat.
“Ronnie used to come to the drive-in a lot in that old red truck,” Joyce said. “The guys laughed at him because the truck had that landscaping sign on it and dirt and bags of fertilizer and things in the back. Ronnie always smelled like that truck.”
“Did Kitty laugh at him?” Louis asked.
“No. But I remember he used to watch her and sometimes he used to stick around when we were closing and ask her to go for a ride.” Joyce’s eyes were steady on his. “Kitty turned him down.”
“Was he at the drive-in the night Kitty disappeared?”
“I don’t remember,” Joyce said. “It was awful busy that night.”
She was standing there, arms folded over her chest, staring at something off in the distance.
“Mrs. Novick!” The girl with the rollers in her hair was calling.
Joyce looked back at her. “They don’t know,” she said softly. “They don’t know how fast it all can change. One minute you’re singing along to the radio, then something happens and your whole life spins off in a different direction.”
Her eyes welled. “One minute you’re fifteen, the next minute your life is over. You know what I mean?”
But Louis didn’t hear her. His mind was racing, thinking about Ronnie Cade, Jack Cade and the broken connections between fathers and sons.
“I have to go,” he said quickly, starting away. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Novick.”
“It’s Joy,” she said.
But Louis was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
He drove like a madman, the Mustang racing as fast as his brain. He saw it now, saw it clearly. He saw the answer to the question that had gnawed at him from the first day he met Jack Cade.
Why did you take that plea bargain?
I figured it was the better deal. Blood is thicker than water, man.
The scrub land bordering the highway sped by in a blur. The drive from Immokalee back to Fort Myers would take about an hour. Too much time to think, too much time for his anger to boil.
God damn Ronnie Cade.
He had lied. Worse, he had run his own little con game. Conning him with that I lost my father for twenty years shit, conning him into believing his life was ruined because his father went to prison. His life had been saved, for chrissake.
Blood is thicker than water. Damn right it was, in ways that Ronnie Cade couldn’t begin to understand.
He cut across downtown and picked up 41 North. He was thinking about Joyce and Kitty swimming in the moonlight, thinking about how both their lives had ended twenty years ago, thinking about the man who in one instant, had changed everything for them.
It was near three by the time he made his way across the causeway to Sereno Key. He was trying to figure out how to approach this. He told himself to do it like a cop, put Ronnie on the defensive, confront him with evidence, play head games with him and get him to say something incriminating.
But he wasn’t a cop. And maybe for once that was good. He didn’t have to worry about privilege and Miranda. And the more he thought about Kitty and Ronnie, and the twisted branches of the Cade family tree, the more he was ready to throw procedure out the window and just beat the shit out of the pathetic asshole.