Lemon Reef (23 page)

“You said Del met someone,” I said. “Did you ever meet him, or do you have any idea where we might find him?”

“Shit no!” Sid dropped his head back and closed his eyes. “I wish I did, because whoever he is, he knows the whole story, and maybe he could help me out now that Del's dead. Talon did this to her. I know it, and he's gonna get away with it the way he gets away with everything.” In order to run his right hand over his brow he had to lower his left hand to the waist chain. “I should have known better. Del begged me to take the plea for her sake and for Khila's. If I refused, then I think in the end, she would have said what was true. But she was so desperate, and I knew what else he did to her, I knew she was right to be scared. She said she needed time to work this out. She swore she would find a way to get me out.” Staring at me, he said, “Now what am I gonna do?”

Sid impatiently waved his head at the guard, signaling he was ready to go. The guard approached. As Sid stood up, I looked at him, aware I might never see him again. I wanted to say something encouraging, but what?

Over his shoulder he said to Nicole, “Tell Mom I said hi.”

*

As we left the prison grounds, Nicole said, “So what now, Sherlock? We break into asshole's house to get that box, get caught, he goes to butt-fuck Texas, and we live next door to Sid. Isn't that what you legal people call poetic justice, or some shit like that?”

I laughed a little. “No.” I tried to roll down my window, eager to let the air wash the stale prison scent off me, only to be reminded the window was stuck and the handle broken.

Nicole put a cigarette in her mouth and hit the lighter. “You're a judge, goddamn it. Can't you just tell the police this was a murder? Can't you just tell them to go get the box from Talon's house?” It took her several tries to line the lighter up to the tip of the cigarette. “Or what about my brother, don't you know anyone who could help him, you know, get out of prison?”

I tried to respond to her questions, but all I could think about was the nausea I felt and trying to keep from vomiting. Nicole was swerving in and out of the lane on the road, the car was filled with cigarette smoke, my window was broken, and when I shut my eyes I saw roach traps and writhing puppies. My phone rang, and had it not been Jake Mansfield, I would never have risked answering in that state.

“I'm not finished yet, but I thought I'd let you know she's a half mile away from the range of endpoints that are possible, given the place she reportedly started from.”

I undid my seat belt, climbed over the front seat into the back, and cranked down the first window I could reach. The air rushed in, dense and humid, and I felt the nausea subside by degree. Now sober, I asked, “What are you saying?” We were driving on Route 41, banked on one side by slash pines and on the other by snarls of prickly leaf vegetation.

“I ran the numerical, controlled for shallow water, surface drift, and gravitational force, and even with allowing for a significant margin of error, she ended up in the
opposite
direction. To end up where she was, from where he says she started out, she would have had to drift
against
the current. Either she swam there or she was put there, but she did not drift to that spot from the reef coordinates you gave me.”

Heat seeped out in waves from the blacktop, warping the air. Other cars were way ahead or way behind. I grabbed my pad and pen from the front seat and wrote everything he said down. Then I got off the phone and told Nicole to pull over. When she did, I jumped out of the car and stood still for a moment, trying to get my bearings.

With the nausea subsided and the smoke cleared, I saw the terrain of the Everglades surrounding us and realized I must have slept through this stretch on the way there. I walked down the road in the stifling heat. Without asking why I was walking or where I was going, Nicole just followed me slowly in the car. Florida as I knew it: miles of flat, dusty, brown ground and tall, mostly leafless sticks for trees. And then, with no prior warning, no gentle transformation of terrain, one arrives at the edge of a slow-moving river or a bed of tall grass, teeming with plant life and animal flurry. It's not that these shockingly beautiful places are hiding so much as just peacefully, quietly coexisting with the banal and the hideously ugly. We were upon one of the many Everglades sloughs known best and most illustratively as liquid ground. This particular river, which I thought might be the Shark River Slough, connected the fresh water of Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and the Keys. It was all continuous and interdependent—and delicate. If one stood in this spot long enough, one could sense the earth breathing.

The sunlight bent through cypress trees and cast white light over the water and saw-grass surface. The current moved at a snail's pace, up to and around an isolated mahogany “island.” The islands are mounds in the slough created centuries ago by coral cliffs abandoned by receding seawater, now calcified into limestone beds that provide havens for mighty oaks and majestic mahoganies. Many of the trees, like the one before us, were young, the more mature ones having been logged a long time ago for furniture. The contradictions—at once hard and soft, wet and dry, salt and fresh, still and moving—were overwhelming.

Nicole and I found a dry spot under a tree by the water, where a slight breeze swept over the grass. Nicole was worried about alligators and couldn't relax. I, on the other hand, was having more trouble with the mosquitoes, which—I have always been convinced—prefer Jewish blood. A blue heron posed serenely in the distance.

“Talon is lying, Nicole. What my friend just explained to me is that there is no way Del's body drifted from Lemon Reef to where she was found.”

“How? How does he know that?” Nicole crossed her arms defiantly. She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, then reversed the process. She flicked her finger as if she were holding a cigarette. I noticed her facial tic, and the jerky hand and leg movements she worked hard to conceal by staying in perpetual motion.

“This guy that I asked to help me is an expert in that exact question. He has this method for studying bodies floating in currents.”

“How come the police don't know what he knows?” She was listening to me and watching at the same time for alligators. She shook her head and said to herself, “They're fucking fast, those suckers.”

“I think because the science is so new. It's still experimental.” I swatted my neck, which made Nicole eye the car longingly.

“So she didn't drift to where they found her. I doubt she swam there. He wouldn't drag her there all the way from the reef, would he?”

Then it occurred to me. “She was already at the spot where they found her. That's where she died.”

Nicole looked a little uneasy, her eyes shifting back and forth, grappling, always grappling with some invisible constraint or intrusion. “So what you're thinking,” she said, “is that Tal killed her, and then he swam to the reef and made the trade?”

Nicole hit my arm to get my attention. I looked up and she gestured behind me with a lift of her chin. Standing off in the knee-high brush, the color of wheat, was a smooth-coated panther with liquid brown eyes and ready, sprung ears. She matched her background almost perfectly, making it hard to find her twice.

“Something like that. It seems risky, killing her and then doing the trade. He didn't want her floating out there with other divers around.”

“Well, that's why he hooked her to that chain.”

“Maybe.” I brought my knees to my chest and hugged them. “I think he made the trade and then went back and killed her. My only problem is timing. We know he made the trade at ten fifteen. Assuming it took fifteen minutes to swim from the reef back to the boat, he was back around ten thirty, which is when he said Del went into the water. He called the police from a landline at eleven oh five. That means he only had thirty-five minutes to kill Del, move the boat to Lemon Reef, swim to shore, and then get to the phone.” I was thinking out loud. “So the death had to be quick. She had no marks, and there were no drugs. There was no sign of a struggle. She wasn't hit or strangled or even held underwater, that we can tell. She was alive when she went into the water and dead from a heart attack, with Talon having moved the boat and gotten himself to a shoreline phone, thirty-five minutes later. How
is
that possible?” Thinking further, I said, “We don't have the full toxicology, so maybe it was a drug they haven't detected yet.”

“How long was Del underwater?”

“No way to know exactly. They estimate between six and seven hours.”

Nicole raised her chin and grimaced slightly. Then she lit a cigarette, a ritual I now recognized as part of the perpetual-motion phenomenon. “Well, isn't it over anyway, on the fact that she didn't die where Talon said she did? Can't we just tell the police Talon is lying, now that we can prove it?”

I watched the smoke from the cigarette rise, felt it trying to write something on the air. “It's more than we had before,” I said gently. “But we don't know if Jake's findings will be admissible here, and I want to figure out how Talon killed her before I leave it to the state of Florida to make a case against him.” I looked for the panther, the heron, one of Nicole's alligators, and found none of them. “Get me back to town,” I said. “I promised my mother I'd come over for dinner.”

Thursday

I woke up thinking about the box Del had described in the letter she sent to Sid and wondered what was in it. The thought was residue from a dream about Del, but I couldn't remember now what the dream had been about. I rose slowly. Dinner at my parents' had been uneventful, and I did feel better for having seen them. Norma showed me pictures from her last trip with Brian. Mel managed to look like he was participating in the conversation, his eyes on me while his ears labored in the direction of the television. He was a news junkie.

I was planning to go for a run with Katie, so I got dressed, then went to the closet and searched through my bag for my running sneakers. Then I tossed the bag back into the closet messily, on purpose, not closing the closet door. Gail's guest room had pale peach and aquamarine walls, and wall-to-wall cream-colored carpet. The furniture around me—slick, black-and-chrome, modern—was accented with pastel pillows, ceramic fixtures, and a large mirror in a gold frame. I sat down on the bed adorned with a cream-colored satin duvet and panicked momentarily as I felt its softness grab hold of me. The low ceiling pressed down on me, the shiny objects stood firm like miniature soldiers keeping guard, as the structure and decor of this square space conspired, I was suddenly convinced, to trap me in a
Golden Girls
rerun. I chafed at the aesthetic and fought an irrational wave of anger at Gail.

Then I talked myself down, reminded myself I should be happy for Gail. This condo was a triumph for her, the appliances and central air-conditioning and dedicated parking space and gardeners paid out of association dues, her daily proof she hadn't let life outwit or overlook her. She kept a guest room, and she was now proudly and generously letting me stay in it. I returned to the bag, shook it into place on the closet floor, and shut the door. Still, I did hate the Georgia O'Keeffes; I wished there were just one Stevie Nicks poster here, not framed, but taped to the wall.

*

As I waited for Katie to arrive, I allowed myself to remember the October '83 Stevie Nicks concert. We had seats on the lawn in the periphery of the stadium. Katie, Gail, Edie, and Susan passed a soccer ball around in one direction and a joint in the other. I was on a secret date with Del for my fifteenth birthday. We sat next to each other on a blanket in the grass, our legs extended, outer thighs touching. We were watching Stevie Nicks dance, her black gauze wrappings a flowing silhouette against the backlit stage, like a crow, wide winged against a full moon, the stark image intermittently rendered opaque by a floor of dry ice melting upward.

It was the first and only time we made a public claim, high on pot and emboldened by the smoke and mirrors of a flamboyant stage queen and the music and lyrics of “Landslide.” Edie, Susan, Katie, and Gail knocked the soccer ball around on the lawn behind us, too stoned to notice us, or us too stoned to care. Jason Schwartz was with them, trying to keep Katie interested in him beyond her thirty-second limit. I was loving Del, loving the moment, and allowing sex to be the nearby and ever-more-poignant promise it always was for me when I was with her in public. The night heat was so intense it made the loose tank tops we wore feel thick. I watched a single bead of sweat form under Del's arm, then trail down and disappear into the indent at the edge of her rib cage where the upward slope of her breasts began. My eyes traced the lift of her shirt to the point—her nipple—peaked like a cliff at the edge of a steep incline.

It started when Del, not trusting I would let myself get high, took hits from the joint we were sharing, covered my mouth with hers, and injected me with smoke. We ended up kissing without fully intending to, and then caught ourselves. But the feeling of fooling around in front of other people had gotten us both pretty roused. Now, eyes fixed on Stevie, Del tossed her hair so it fell loosely and evenly around her face and said, “Which panties are you wearing?” It was more a demand than a question, as if she had a right to know.

I whispered in her ear, said each word slowly. “Blue. Silky.” A daring smile. “Bikini.” I'd worn her favorite pair for our date. Del breathed in through clamped teeth. I was surprised and thrilled when she casually placed her thigh over mine. I watched her maneuver her short skirt to do it. Staring at her upper thigh, I glanced around to see if anyone we knew was watching, then slid my hand up her skirt, worked my fingers under her panties, and touched her. She was swollen and soaked. My mouth near her ear, I more breathed than said, “Damn!” I thought we were just teasing each other. It was something we did more and more in public—cop feels, steal glances, pass love notes in class to see who could make the other blush first and then most. I couldn't believe it that night when Del pushed my hand in farther and kissed me in the way I knew her to mean it.