Magic City (11 page)

“Here you go, Mr. King. Whole wheat bagel, cream cheese, café con leche.”

Sammi set his food before him, and Stanton King rewarded her with a smile. For the past two months she'd been his waitress. College girl, nineteen, with wide hips and an unflagging resolve to flash her bejeweled belly button. As was her habit, Sammi stole a glance at the port-wine stain that marked Stanton's right cheek, then blinked and looked away.

Vascular lesion.
Nevus flammeus
. The vessels and capillaries were enlarged and dilated. As the decades rolled by, the color had deepened, and nodular and papular hemangiomas developed, causing increased disfigurement and irregularity of the skin texture. Classic case.

To make matters worse, that patch of skin seemed directly wired to his emotional switching station. When he was calm, the stain merely tingled, but in times of stress it became a scalding sore, pulsing brightly as if to broadcast his agitated inner state.

Once a South Florida power broker, Stanton King was now reduced to a mere Coconut Grove eccentric who each day at this late-morning hour pedaled his bike from his estate on St. Gaudens Road up the bumpy bike path, along Main Highway, past Ransom Everglades School, into the shade of towering banyans that had been giants even when Stanton was a boy. To onlookers he no doubt seemed to be yet another ancient hippie cruising the streets in search of his stoned youth. Few locals knew his name, or the role he'd played in shaping the city's destiny, not to mention the influence he once wielded in matters more far-reaching.

His grandfather was a two-term governor of Florida and his father a congressman and golfing buddy of a Democratic president. Even as a child, Stanton had been groomed for higher office. Though certainly the position his ancestors had in mind was loftier than the only one he'd attained. Mayor Stanton King. One brief stint in the limelight of city politics. A boy wonder whose meteoric career fizzled just as suddenly from a single disastrous misjudgment.

Now his only striving was to disappear into the sameness of each day. At exactly eleven Stanton rode his Schwinn to Café Europa. Same tiny table, same teetering metal chair out on the sunny sidewalk. He had his café con leche, his bagel, his dollop of cream cheese, and watched the world pass. Each afternoon he whiled away the hours at the Japanese Gardens on MacArthur Causeway, an oasis of quiet.

As Sammi departed, Lola appeared and drew back a chair and planted herself across the table from him. Her jaw was locked as though she were clamping back a rush of hateful words.

Despite her fuming mood, and even in the harsh full sun, Lola was still beautiful. Finely boned with untamed hair, bright red that was lately streaked with lightning bolts of gray. She dressed with stylish casualness in the Hepburn manner. Tailored slacks and linen blouses in quiet tones. A Yankee princess whose dear departed father had been something of a religious fanatic. It was, in fact, his pious devotion and severity that sent Lola off into a lifetime of rebellion.

When Stanton first met her at a gala at the French consulate, she was only twenty-five but was already notorious in the Miami social scene. That first night she was making introductions between men in gold-trimmed robes to men in dark silk suits. Touching each with familiarity. Moving with the bright and fluent ease of a koi through those exotic waters. She had lovers. Lovers in the room that night, lovers in distant lands. Young lovers and old lovers, and Stanton had heard talk of princes and dictators.

That night he watched her from afar. She noticed him, made fleeting glances, even granted a private smile to the young mayor everyone was talking about. But she didn't cross the room to speak. Stanton took that as a demure invitation. At that moment he resolved to win the heart of this extraordinary woman at any cost. A price, it turned out, far exceeding anything he might have imagined.

Now decades removed from those heady days, late at night after a sip or two of sherry, if Stanton tried very hard, he could imagine he and he alone engaged Lola's heart. But the thrill of that fantasy never endured long. For the foul odor of his true circumstance always came sneaking back. Stanton might be the man Lola married, but he had certainly never been the man she loved.

“I thought you had a United Way luncheon.”

“Are you going to tell me what's going on, or sit there like a damned fool?”

“You mean the photograph.”

“Of course that's what I mean.”

“I sent Snake and Carlos to destroy it and all the copies. I don't think it turned out so well.”

“You sent our sons? You got them involved in this?”

“Yes. It was a stupid thing to do. An impulsive overreaction. It came at me so fast last night, it knocked me off balance. I wasn't thinking straight.”

Sammi came over to ask if Lola was having coffee, but Lola was looking off at the treetops across the street and did not reply. Stanton shook his head at the girl, and she let them be.

“It's just a photograph, dear. Two hundred people got a look at it last night at the gallery, and apparently no one registered a thing.”

“It's starting again,” she said. “I always knew it would. Something like that won't stay buried. It scratches its way out of the ground and there it is, the monster is staring you in the face again.”

“I called the Agency,” Stanton said. “A couple of hours ago.”

Lola brought her eyes back from the trees, but there was still a great distance in them, as if she were peering past the flimsy veneer of this moment.

“The Agency.”

“Yes, Langley.”

“Who did you speak with?”

“No one. I left a message for Pauline.”

“Oh, God. Not Pauline.”

“There's no one else to turn to, darling. If we're going to make this right, we have to involve Pauline.”

“They wouldn't take your call at Langley?”

“No, but it was early. I'm sure the message will work its way up. They can't ignore this.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Just the general outline. A photograph of Liston-Clay. The potential to implicate the Agency in matters it would rather not be made public.”

With the table knife, Stanton glazed his bagel with cream cheese.

Lola stared at him in disbelief. Eating at a time like this.

He'd just begun to chew the first morsel when he noticed the large man crossing Main Highway without concern for the traffic.

The man's grim and familiar gaze was fixed on Stanton.

So it was happening already. Two hours. Far quicker than he'd imagined.

Though he had to be nearing seventy, Edward Runyon had aged damned well. Head shaved and well tanned, mustache neatly clipped. Muscles plumped and firm, head held high. No wattles, no shadowy circles beneath his eyes. Garbed in a bright green Hawaiian shirt, baggy tan slacks, and clunky sandals, as though Runyon had just been delivered to Miami by cruise line.

Stanton searched for the telltale bulge of a handgun, but the shirt was too loose-fitting to be sure. There might be others nearby as well, of course, Runyon's confederates. They frequently worked in pairs, sometimes in larger groups to swarm their target. Though Stanton doubted a man of his age and fragility warranted anything so extreme.

“In fact, I believe my message was delivered,” Stanton said.

“What?”

“Must be off,” Stanton said to Lola. “Ta-ta.”

Ten yards away Runyon stepped onto the sidewalk.

Stanton palmed a piece of silverware, rose from his metal chair, dropped his napkin in his plate, and led the man away from his wife in what might very well have been a final act of chivalry.

She called out to him, but Stanton didn't reply. He kept an unhurried pace, drifting away from Main Highway, up Commodore Plaza toward Grand Avenue. At that weekday hour the sidewalks were nearly deserted.

Within half a block Runyon was beside him, step for step.

“Long time,” Runyon said.

“Not long enough.”

“You look like death, old man. Some reprobate on welfare.”

“And you have the appearance of a condo commando. What is it, Boca Raton, land of self-righteous privilege?”

“Bingo,” Runyon said. “Yanked from the sixth fairway to wipe the shit off your ass.”

“Why you?”

“Why not me? I got a stake in this, right? And I'm local. Makes sense.”

“Please tell me, old friend, this is not wet work?”

“Don't piss your shorts, King. If they wanted you dead, you'd already be on a slab.”

“They can't remove me. There'll be consequences.”

“Whatever you say, old man. Got a preference where we talk?”

“Suddenly I'm not in a garrulous mood,” Stanton said. “Maybe later after I've gathered my wits.”

Locking a grip onto the back of Stanton's neck, Runyon steered him into an alcove at the front of a kitchen shop. A
CLOSED
sign hung on the door. In the windows were shining copper pots and pans, the tools of a pampered chef.

Runyon shoved Stanton forward, crushing his face into the storefront.

“You called, we came,” Runyon said. “What'd you expect?”

Stanton couldn't speak, his teeth sliced into the back of his lips, the glass was cold and unyielding. Tasting blood now. A clump of his frizzy hair was caught in Runyon's clasp, and Stanton's scalp burned as roots tore loose.

Runyon relaxed his grip enough for Stanton to turn his head and speak.

“I tried to handle it myself. But it didn't work out.”

Runyon drew Stanton's face away from the glass and held him in place for a moment. His reflection came back to him as a ghostly echo. An ethereal Stanton King who stared at him with eyes so desolate, it was as if this other self were looking back from the land of the unliving.

Then Runyon slammed his face into the wall of glass. Across the black heavens of Stanton's mind, holiday sparklers spewed and flickered.

“That's for fucking up forty years ago,” Runyon said. “Putting a giant turd in my file. That cost me, old man. You waltz away from the stunt without a bruise, I get docked five pay grades.”

Stanton groaned but couldn't muster a coherent reply.

“And this is for fucking up today.”

He drew Stanton's head back for another jolt against the glass.

Before he could administer that act, Stanton jammed his hand backward and the table knife he'd pilfered entered Runyon's belly just above the belt line, sliding into the big man's spare tire with only slight resistance. What a pleasant surprise to find Runyon more blubbery than he first appeared.

Though it was an awkward strike, backhanded and coming at an oblique angle, it accomplished its goal. Runyon dropped his hold on Stanton's neck and stumbled back. An inch or two of the knife handle gleamed through his shirt, not a fatal blow by any means, but blood was already staining the crotch of his tan slacks.

“You fuck,” Runyon grunted. “You fucking fuck.”

“Brilliant, Edward. Such eloquence.”

Stanton reached out and tugged the knife from Runyon's love handle. The big man retched, staggered backward against the opposing window, and gripped his gut with both hands like a woman feeling the first jolt of labor.

Then Stanton eased forward into the brute's striking range and wiped the blade, one side, then the other, against the sleeve of Runyon's surfer shirt.

“Shall I finish you now? A swipe across the throat?”

Runyon growled, but the rage in his face had collapsed. He blinked erratically, as if only seconds from blacking out. Stanton fingered his nose. A stab of pain rang through his sinuses, but apparently the nose was not broken.

“I'll speak with Caufield,” Stanton said. “And no one else.”

With his back flat against the window, Runyon slid down until his butt thumped against the sidewalk.

“Pauline Caufield doesn't waste time with trash like you.”

“It's either talk to me or the whole bunch of you are going down.”

“Big talk.”

“Oh, this threat is well grounded, my friend.”

Runyon drew a precise breath.

“Listen to me, Edward. Listen well. Back in the old days when you and I were in our prime, I filed away certain paperwork that passed through my hands. That fiasco you mentioned. I still have every last document.”

Runyon closed his eyes against the pain and growled, “You don't blackmail these people.”

“Oh, it's not blackmail, Edward. It's life insurance. If I'm killed or disappear suspiciously, poof, our misspent youth is in the headlines. Splashed in bold print across the heavens. Names, dates, all of it. Just imagine the newspaper stories, the gleeful bloodletting. Oh my, think of the drama.”

“You're lying. Shit like that never trickled down to riffraff like you.”

“You forget, Runyon. Before my excommunication, I was their fair-haired boy. The next big thing. For that brief time it all flowed through me.”

Stanton King glanced back to see if his spectral other-half was still witnessing from the windowpane. But no, the phantom had vanished in the mid-morning glare. Retreated to his haven in the beyond.

“The files are put away in a safe location, Edward, so it will do no good for a pack of goons to tear apart my house. Pass that along, if you would.”

Runyon's tan was turning milky. He swallowed and swallowed again.

“But rest assured, old friend, I'm fully prepared to take everyone down with me. So tell Pauline, won't you? I want a sit-down. Just the two of us. Like old times, a couple of spooks chewing the fat.”

“You're fucked, Stanton. Royally fucked.”

“Yes, yes. But then, who among us isn't?”

In Alexandra's front yard a flock of white ibis probed the lawn for cutworms and grasshoppers. Foraging well inland from the mucky tidal flats and moist prairies that were their usual hunting grounds. Hunched backs, red faces, long curved bills, stalky crimson legs. Five white ones grouped together, and standing several feet away was a slightly smaller ibis tinted a dark brown with a white belly and a white rump. An immature bird, as gawky and uncertain as an outcast teen. Tagging along but keeping his distance, as if mortified by his uncool parents.

It cheered Thorn that even with the sprawl and gridlock, bits of wilderness still leaked in. Weeks ago on a morning walk, he and Alex came across a pair of manatees wallowing upstream through the Coral Gables canals, and Alex assured him that snook and tarpon still cruised those same waterways past the seawalls of the multimillion-dollar villas. Lately he'd heard the cry of ospreys and seen great blue herons soaring on the parking lot thermals. Foxes roamed the dense foliage of Coconut Grove, and giant iguanas and parrots and pileated woodpeckers roosted in the underbrush in almost every Miami neighborhood, snakes and possums and raccoons prowled even through the snipped shrubs and hedges of the newly minted condos. The more fragile species had departed long ago, but the tough ones managed to dig in and adjust to that overpeopled terrain. Apparently it was possible.

Thorn was well acquainted with the doomsayers who made careers out of lamenting the lost Florida. There was a lot to lament, of course. But like it or not, Darwin had a point. The bitter truth was that every species either adapted or disappeared. Nothing complicated about it. For Thorn, the creatures worth celebrating were those still hanging on, the tough birds, the resourceful reptiles, the sluggish manatees dodging propellers. Bully for them. Finding their way through the maze, outliving their delicate cousins. Burrowing into a niche and making do. If this land he loved was to survive, it would be because the native creatures hung on, won their daily skirmishes with bulldozers, managed to cope and multiply. Thorn was rooting them on.

The ibis turned to watch Thorn and Lawton climb from Alexandra's Toyota, then fluttered a few yards away and resettled in the tall grass next door, not far from where Thorn had pitched the revolver.

Across the street Alan Bingham's car was still parked in the drive. The street was quiet. No mowers, no cars passing by, no one walking a dog. A working-class area with the ghostly feel of a neighborhood recently evacuated for some dreadful cause that Thorn and Lawton were oblivious to.

Lawton halted on the sidewalk and stared off toward a swath of cobalt blue beyond the rooftops.

“They wouldn't let Cassius try on a shirt.”

“What?”

“A short-sleeve shirt lying on a sale table, two dollars, ninety-nine cents,” Lawton said. “It was in the newspapers. Happened at Burdines, the downtown store, sales clerk refused to let Cassius try it on. Company policy. Negroes couldn't try on clothes 'cause it would contaminate them and no white person would ever buy anything there again. Cassius didn't make a stink out of it, just left the store. Here's this kid, he's got an Olympic gold medal hanging around his neck, and they wouldn't let him try on a frigging shirt.”

“Things have changed in forty years,” Thorn said.

“Oh yeah?” Lawton headed down the front walk. “What planet you been living on?”

Thorn unlocked the door, stood aside for Lawton, and when he stepped inside himself, he found the foyer blocked by Alexandra's roll-on bag.

“It's about damn time she got back,” Lawton said. “Leaving her old man in the hands of an unreliable doofus, what kind of daughter would do that to her defenseless old dad?”

“Something's happened. She just left a few hours ago.”

“My ass. It's been weeks. Don't try to play with my head, boy.”

Thorn stepped past him, took a quick glance around the kitchen, and saw that the pistol was gone. He headed at a trot down the hall, calling out her name.

He pushed into her bedroom but found it empty. He called her name again, but all he heard was the raucous voice of the television that Lawton had switched on in the Florida room. Flicking through the channels in an endless search for some show he could never find.

Thorn walked across the hallway to Lawton's bedroom and opened the door, realizing as he did that he'd never seen it shut before.

When he stepped in, he was confronted by piles of Lawton's clothes scattered about the floor, drawers yanked out, contents tossed, the mattress flipped off the bed and gashed open in several places. Pillows disemboweled, paintings ripped from the walls, their backings torn off. The side table was on its face, chairs overturned, the tiny bathroom ransacked as well. Apparently by the time the looters reached the green-tiled lavatory, they'd lost patience and changed from searchers to destroyers. The mirror was shattered, toilet seat broken off, shower curtain dumped in the tub, tubes of toothpaste and shampoo and hemorrhoid cream had been squeezed flat, their contents smeared across the countertop and the windowpanes.

Thorn headed for the door and had one foot in the hallway when he caught movement to his right. He swung back and scanned the small room but saw nothing. He bent down, flipped aside the mattress, revealing only more of Lawton's garish collection of Bermuda shorts and peacock shirts.

He stood and listened. Then ticked his gaze from one side of the room to the other until he thought he saw a small shrug of the white comforter that was humped by the overturned dresser.

Next to the comforter a kitchen knife was stuck in the oak floor. It was cocked at a severe angle, its point buried half an inch into the wood.

Thorn grabbed the edge of the spread and yanked it aside, and Buck, the sweet, intelligent yellow Lab, wobbled to his feet and trudged toward Thorn. He made it about a yard before he groaned and settled back to the floor.

Thorn squatted beside him and explored his coat gingerly until he found the damp spot behind one ear. The dog yelped and drew back.

“What the hell're you doing!”

Lawton stepped into Thorn's field of vision. He was gripping an aluminum baseball bat in his right hand.

“Look at this place. You goddamn weasel. You attack my dog, you tear up my bedroom. That's the last straw. You're doing some hard time for this.”

Lawton pointed the baseball bat at him, but his words had no muscle. Going through the motions. Exhausted from his grueling day.

The bat was a memento from his police softball league in the final years of work. He'd batted lefty, averaging .340 against much younger men. A few weeks back Alex had told Thorn about his athletic feats, her smile full of a daughter's pride.

“Listen to me, Lawton. Those same guys were here again looking for the photo, and they ran into Alex and Buck.”

“Yeah? Who're you all of a sudden, Dick Tracy?”

Thorn squatted beside the dog and touched his ruff. The Lab looked up at Thorn, eyes still fogged. He fingered Buck's skull near the blood-matted patch and the dog winced and began licking his lips.

“Got to get him to a vet,” Lawton said.

“We will, but we need to find Alex first.”

“Alexandra,” Lawton said. “She went to Tampa. Her and Buck.”

Thorn went room by room through the rest of the house. It took five minutes, every closet, under every bed, behind every door. Nothing out of the ordinary, except Lawton's ransacked room, Alexandra's luggage at the front door, that carving knife, the missing pistol.

The only scenario he could assemble was that she'd arrived, heard the two shitbirds tossing Lawton's room. Maybe Buck beat Alex back there and the two men snared the dog and clubbed him. Alex heard the fuss, grabbed the knife from the kitchen, and confronted them. After that, it could go anywhere. She could've chased them off, or captured them, hauled them away to jail.

But he knew those story lines weren't likely. She'd never leave Buck in such condition. The only other choices were ones he wouldn't let take shape in his imagination. Alex hurt, Alex kidnapped, and goddamn it, Alex dead.

Back in Lawton's bedroom Thorn found Lawton slumped on the edge of his box spring. Buck stood over a water bowl, lapping.

Lawton raised the bat and took a loose-gripped, easy swing.

Buck finished with his water and went over to the comforter and lay down, watching Thorn with a bleary look. Head up, chin tipped down, the dog's ears drew back in a cringe of guilt. He'd failed to protect his master.

“That dog's not right. He needs medical attention.”

“He's tough, he'll be okay,” Thorn said. “We need to get started. You up to this, Lawton? Or should I take you back to Harbor House?”

“Up to what?”

“We have to find Alex.”

“Yeah, how you planning on doing that?”

“We've got an excellent search dog, and you're a first-class police detective,” he said. “That should be enough.”

Lawton found a lost smile, and his lips held it for several seconds.

“Ready, Buck?”

The dog lifted his head, thumped his tail. It was Alex's command, prepping the dog for work.

From the clothes hamper, Thorn retrieved the blouse Alexandra wore the day before, and in the foyer he squatted in front of Buck. He passed the material below the dog's nose and Buck stiffened to full alert. His eyes were sharp and questioning. Her? Not her?

Thorn got the dog's lead from the table by the front door and clipped it on, and the three of them walked outside into the grass where the flock of ibis had been dining on worms and beetles.

Lawton tagged along, running his palm up and down the smooth cylinder of his bat.

“Used to love them low and inside,” he said. “Crank those suckers a hundred yards. Never played high school ball. No time for that fiddle-faddle, but I could've made the team if I'd tried. Coach was after me all the time to come out, and I wanted to, but times were rough and I had a bakery job. Sweating my ass off with all those ovens. Man, that was work. That was the real McCoy, that job, sweat and more sweat. But those smells, oh man, I loved those cinnamon buns.”

Buck swung his nose back and forth a few inches above the ground and led Thorn to the end of Alexandra's sidewalk. Then turned left and followed the trail up the walkway toward the spot where Snake had parked earlier.

The dog kept tugging till he reached the shade of a gumbo limbo and pulled Thorn off the sidewalk, across the grassy swale to the curb.

Then halted. Trail's end.

Thorn looked up and down the empty street.

“They took her away in a car,” he said.

Lawton cocked his bat over his shoulder, took aim at the trunk of the gumbo limbo, and did a slo-mo swing that ended in a tap against the tree. Then he looked off at the distant sky as if following the ball's trajectory.

“Going, going, gone. Downtown, baby, downtown.”

Buck looked up at Thorn, awaiting further orders.

But Thorn had none. Standing on the curb, staring out at the deserted street, he was trying to remember what Alex said one afternoon about Buck's abilities in urban landscapes, all that asphalt and concrete where scent trails were continually contaminated by foot traffic and car tires, and even the very bacteria that scent was composed of was destroyed by so much carbon monoxide floating on the breeze. Alex had once mentioned cases of dogs tracking scent trails while hanging their heads from the windows of moving cars. Guiding their master through freeways and city streets. Improbable, perhaps, but at the moment it was all Thorn had.

“Let's get the car, Lawton, come on.”

As he bent forward to turn the ignition key, the cell phone in his pocket dug into his waistband. Thorn eased back and pried the phone from his pocket.

He didn't remember when or where he'd done it, but somehow he'd managed to switch off the phone.

He punched the
ON
button, waited till the gizmo tinkled and came fully alive, then pressed the speed-dial number for Alexandra and listened to it ring.

After six buzzes he was about to punch off when there was pickup.

He pressed it hard against his ear.

“Alex? You there? Alexandra?”

For a moment he heard only silence.

Then Snake Morales spoke in the languid cadence he'd used earlier.

“Would this be Mr. Thorn I'm speaking with?”

“Snake?”

There was a pause, then Alexandra's voice came on, strained but unhurried.

“I'm okay, Thorn. Bring them the photograph. Just keep it simple. No one has to get hurt.”