“… all the available men in Calusa are either married or gay.”
“Not me,” Warren said.
Fiona arched an eyebrow.
“Good-looking fella like you must be involved, though,” she said, and decided to lay her cards on the table. “With a woman more your own age.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Fiona,” he said, using her given name for the first time. “I find most women my age a bit adolescent.”
“You do, huh?”
Eyes meeting.
“I prefer more mature women,” he said.
“Indeed,” she said.
“Indeed,” he said.
Both of them nodding. Slow nods in the afternoon stillness. Somewhere in the dim recesses of the room, a typewriter began clacking. And then fell abruptly silent again. Warren was wondering whether he’d get shot down if he asked her out to dinner. She was wondering whether she should suggest discussing his age preferences over a drink later this afternoon. Neither said a word. The opportunity hung there expectantly, hovering on the air like a Spielberg spaceship, all shining with promise. And then, unassailed, it drifted off into a galaxy of glittering dust motes, and the distant typewriter began clacking again, shattering the stillness, destroying the moment. It was Fiona who, embarrassed, broke eye contact.
“So what kind of license plate has your boss come up with?” she said.
Warren dug into his pocket and fished out his notebook. He leafed through it until he came to the page upon which he’d scribbled the number Matthew had given him on the phone.
“Here you go,” he said, and handed it across the counter to her. Fiona looked at it.
“No such animal,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t have plates beginning with a number. Not here in Florida.”
“This is what the man saw,” Warren said.
“Then the man saw wrong. Here in Florida, we use three letters, two numbers, and then a single letter. The computer chooses the letters and numbers at random, automatically eliminating any already designated sequence. You can have, oh, CDB 34L, or DGP 47N, or AFR 68M, or whatever. But what you can’t have is the sequence here on this paper.”
“You’re sure about that, huh?” Warren said.
“Am I sure that my unlisted phone number is 381-3645?” she asked, and arched her eyebrow again.
7
The police gym was the size of a good college gym, well equipped, air conditioned, and relatively empty at five o’clock that Tuesday afternoon. Save for Matthew and Bloom, there were only two other people in the vast, echoing room: a runner tirelessly circling the overhead track and a bare-chested man in blue trunks, pumping iron. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed through the long, high windows. It had not yet rained today. It had not rained at all yesterday. Everybody in Calusa was saying that the Russians were monkeying with the weather. This in spite of glasnost. Some ideas were slow to take hold in the state of Florida.
Bloom was wearing grey sweatpants and sweatshirt, the Calusa P.D. seal in blue on the front of it. Matthew was wearing black warmup pants and a white T-shirt. Both men were wearing sneakers. Bloom had an inch or so on Matthew, in height and in reach, and some forty pounds in weight. But he was here to teach him tricks that automatically rendered physical superiority meaningless.
“You put on some weight,” he said.
“Ten pounds,” Matthew said.
“That’s a lot. You got a little paunch, Matthew.”
“I know.”
“You ought to come here every afternoon, run the track.”
“I should.”
“Those two cowboys catch you with a paunch, they’ll roll you down 41 all the way to Fort Meyers.”
He was referring to Matthew’s private spectres, two Ananburg cowboys who’d once made chopped liver of him in a Calusa bar, and whom he’d later caught up with and all but crippled. His nightmare was that they would find him again one day and next time he wouldn’t be quite so lucky. Bloom kept telling him it wasn’t a matter of luck, it was skill. Knowing how to break the other guy’s head before he broke yours. Bloom said that learning to maim somebody was merely a matter of how much fear you had inside you. If you didn’t care whether two cowboys beat the shit out of you and maybe buggered you, then forget learning how to fight dirty. For Matthew, the personification of fear was Two Cowboys. This was fear incarnate. Beat the Two Cowboys, and you vanquished fear. But to beat them, you had to know how to gouge out an eye or crack a man’s spine.
“You want to dance around a little before we start?” Bloom asked.
The men moved onto the mat. Bloom was very fast for a man his size. Matthew, with his paunch — well, it wasn’t quite a paunch — was slower, and therefore more susceptible to the open-handed slaps Bloom kept landing. Puffing, out of breath, he danced around Bloom, caught him with a good left-handed slap to the jaw—
“Good,” Bloom said.
— and then followed up with a right-handed slap to Bloom’s biceps, which, had it been a punch, would have hurt him badly.
“So we’re on opposite sides again, huh?” Bloom said, moving away, feinting, and then slapping a fast one-two to Matthew’s face. The slaps stung. Matthew backed off, circling, circling.
“You took the Leeds case, huh?”
“I took it.”
“You’re getting a reputation,” Bloom said.
“For what?”
“Defending sure things.”
Bloom was smiling. This was a joke. The last three had been anything but sure things.
“We make these wonderful arrests we think’ll stick,” Bloom said, “and then you come along and knock us on our asses. Tell me, Matthew, why don’t you make my life simple?”
“How?”
“Run for State Attorney. Then we can work these cases together.”
“Oh?” Matthew said. “Is Skye quitting?”
Across the gym, the weight lifter had begun working out on the punching bag. A steady rhythmic background patter now accompanied their dance over the mat, both men moving around each other, constantly jabbing, slapping, moving in again, backing away, circling, great blots of sweat staining their shirts, rivulets of sweat running down their faces.
“Skye’s looking northward to Tallahassee,” Bloom said.
“What’s this big one he’s sitting on, Morrie?”
“What big one?” Bloom asked innocently.
“I hear something’s in the wind.”
“Who told you that?”
“A little yellow bird.”
“Me, I’m deaf, dumb, and blind,” Bloom said.
“Supposed to break in the paper. I’m still waiting.”
“Maybe we’re still waiting, too.”
“For what?”
“Ask your little yellow bird. You had enough of this?”
“Sure,” Matthew said.
They walked over to where they’d put their bags against the wall, took out towels, wiped their faces and necks. Both men were breathing hard.
“Can I ask you some questions?” Matthew said.
“Not about that.”
“No, about the Leeds arrest.”
“Sure.”
“Tell me what happened that morning.”
“Nothing. We went there with a wallet we found at the scene. Unmistakably Leeds’s. He was in his pajamas when we talked to him. He identified the wallet as belonging to him, and we asked him to come along. Interviewed him in the captain’s office, pulled Skye in when we figured we had real meat.”
“When was that?”
“You mean when we knew we had him?”
“Yes.”
“When we got the call from Tran Sum Linh.”
“Saying?”
“Saying he’d seen the man who’d murdered his friends.”
“And?”
“We ran a lineup for him. He identified Leeds as the man he saw going into the house that night.”