Paint It Black (2 page)

The jet dipped its left wing and the window filled up with turquoise.

Louis Kincaid pressed his face against the window and stared down at the water just two thousand feet below. He could see a speckling of sailboats, a race in progress maybe. They looked like white birds drifting against a cloudless blue sky, and it gave him a momentary rush of vertigo, as if he were upside down. He shook his head, a soft laugh bubbling out of him. The old woman in the seat next to him looked over, frowning slightly.

“The Gulf of Mexico,” he said, pointing. “Man, that's pretty, don't you think?”

She nodded briskly and buried her face back in her Barbara Cartland paperback. Louis looked back to the window. A sweep of beach came into view and then a block of custard-colored buildings along the shoreline.

A soft voice came over the intercom, announcing they would be landing in Fort Myers in ten minutes. Louis felt a quiver in his stomach. It wasn't nerves over his first trip in a plane so much as anticipation of what lay ahead.

He leaned back in the seat, his gaze drifting back to the window, the same question in his head that had been bouncing around there for days now. What in the hell was he doing here anyway?

Dodie . . . it was all his fault. If Dodie hadn't called, gotten him out of bed. Or if it hadn't been so damn cold that morning. Or if his damn car battery hadn't been dead again. If any of that hadn't happened, he might not have accepted Dodie's offer, might not be on this plane now, going to a place he didn't know, a job he didn't really want.

Hell, not just a job. A hundred bucks a day, with a minimum of fifteen hundred, just to do some digging around and find out who killed some woman's husband. Dodie had told him his friend, the wife's lawyer, needed someone special for the job.

“I'm a cop, not a private dick,” Louis had told Dodie.

“For a hundred bucks a day, you can be any kind of dick you want,” Dodie said. “You want the job or not?”

He didn't want it. But there was nothing else on the horizon. He was finished as a cop in Michigan, if not technically, then practically. There was nothing to do but start over again. He shook his head slowly. Twenty-six and starting over again. And not even with a real badge. He didn't even have a gun anymore.

He looked back out the window, at the checkerboard of white tile roofs and green palm trees.

“Shit,” he muttered. “At least it'll be warm.”

 

 

Southwest Florida International Airport was small, modern, aggressively upbeat, and air-conditioned to arctic levels. Louis slipped on his University of Michigan varsity jacket and waited for his bag, searching the crowd for Dodie. It struck him that the people had a different look here, lighter somehow, than they had seemed back in the cold of Michigan. Men in bermudas and baseball caps, women in sundresses and sandals. He focused on one woman standing impatiently at the Avis counter. She was thin and dry as a twig, eyes hidden behind big Jackie O shades, wearing a white pantsuit and heavy gold jewelry, with one of those yappy little cockroach dogs tucked under her arm.

“Kincaid!”

Louis spun at the sound of the familiar baritone. He was looking for a pale pitted face under a red ball cap and at first he missed him. But then, there was Sam Dodie, tan and smiling. Dodie thrust out a hand and Louis grasped it, surprised by the surge of feeling in his chest at the sight of his ex-boss.

For a second, they just looked at each other; then Dodie cleared his throat awkwardly and took a step back.

“Well, you made it. How was the flight?” Dodie said.

“Good. Long layover in Atlanta. Sat in the bar and watched the Hawks-Knicks for two hours.”

“Didn't know you were a basketball fan.”

“I'm not. Football.” Louis smiled. “It's good to see you, Sam. You look . . . good, really good. Retirement agrees with you.”

Dodie patted his belly. “Margaret's taking cooking classes, French shit.”

Louis found himself staring at Dodie's outfit, a pale yellow, boxy short-sleeved shirt worn loose over his shorts. The shirt's fabric was so sheer he could see Dodie's undershirt beneath.

“Interesting shirt,” Louis said.

Dodie ran his hands down his chest. “You don't like it? It's called a guayabera. It's Cuban. Lots of guys down here wear 'em. They don't pit out.”

Louis laughed. “Just never saw you in anything but flannel before.”

“Well, things is different here, Louis. I'm different here.” He picked up Louis's bag. “Well, let's get going or we'll get caught in rush hour. Margaret's waiting supper on us.”

“Hold on.” Louis disappeared into the crowd. He returned, lugging an animal carrier.

“What the hell's that?” Dodie asked, staring at the black cat inside.

“A cat. Its name is Isolde.”

“What?”

“Issy . . . it's called Issy.”

“Shit. Where'd you get it?”

“It's a long story,” Louis said with a sigh. “Come on, let's go.”

They headed west, out of the airport, in Dodie's Chevy, through a scrubland dotted with scrawny cows and billboards. The pastures soon gave way to a scorched-earth suburban sprawl of Arbys, Home Depots, and tract subdivisions with names like Cape Verde Isles and Paradise Palms. As they neared downtown Fort Myers, the numbing newness fell away, replaced by a pleasing funk of mom-and-pop motels, small businesses, and palm-shaded streets.

“It's not what I expected,” Louis said, eyeing a roadside stand whose sign promised
JUMBO SHRIMPS AND ORANGES SHIPPED
.

“What isn't?” Dodie asked.

“Florida.”

“Everybody says that. What'd you expect?”

“I don't know. Coconuts. Water.”

“This is the mainland. Plenty of water where we're heading.”

As they approached a high-arching bridge, Louis caught sight of a gray-blue river. The Caloosahatchee, Dodie told him. They went through a pretty neighborhood, the boulevard lined with towering royal palms standing guard like a precision drill team lining a parade route. Dodie flipped down his visor and steered the car due west into the sun.

They started across a two-lane causeway. The sign said
WELCOME TO SERENO KEY. HOME OF THE WORLD'S BEST FISHING
.

“This is it,” Dodie said proudly. “My little piece of paradise. All the water a man could want.”

They were crossing a large open bay, and the confluence of water and sky was sudden and startling, like being injected into a sparkling, bright blue ball. The bay extended in all directions as far as Louis could see, broken by green islands and the razor-wakes of darting Jet-Skis.

The causeway rose over a low-slung bridge and Louis watched a pelican ride the current, keeping pace with the car. Then, suddenly, it curved out to the water and rode inches above until it suddenly nose-dived in, like a paper glider crashing into the grass. The pelican surfaced with a fish in its bill. Louis laughed.

“What's so funny?” Dodie asked.

“Nothing, nothing,” Louis said softly, settling back in the seat.

Sereno Key wasn't a very big place, Dodie told him, as they touched back onto land. Only a couple thousand folks, some trailer parks, motels, landscaping nurseries, marinas, boatyards, and a small shopping area everyone called “the town center.” Sereno was a dog-bone-shaped island sandwiched between the Fort Myers mainland to the east, Pine Island to the north, and the gulf barrier islands of Sanibel-Captiva to the west. The mainland, Dodie informed him, was where “regular folk” lived, and Sanibel-Captiva was where all the tourists and “money folk” lived.

“We're kinda in between here,” Dodie said, slowing the Chevy to accommodate the key's two-lane main road. “Lots of retirees and folks who just want to be left alone.”

Sam and Margaret Dodie's home was on the north end of the key on Tortuga Way, in a modest neighborhood cut with canals and lined with palms. It was a tidy, two-bedroom bungalow rendered charming by small touches: yellow paint with turquoise trim, a picket fence, shutters, and a porch decorated with wood cutouts of dolphins.

“Made them myself with the jigsaw,” Dodie said. He brushed his hand through a windchime as he opened the screen. “Margaret! He's here!”

Louis had never met Margaret Dodie before, had never been invited to the Dodie home in the months he had lived in Mississippi. Sam Dodie had been the sheriff, his boss, and it had been a prickly relationship, growing from distrust to respect. But it had been strictly professional right to the end. Part of it, he knew, had been the place. Born and raised in Black Pool, Margaret Dodie probably had never had a black man sit at her dinner table. And her husband had probably never thought of inviting one, even Louis.

But if Margaret Dodie now felt the slightest bit uncomfortable, she didn't show it. She greeted Louis cheerfully, like she'd known him for decades. She was a plump woman, bright blue eyes sunk in a pink pincushion face, framed by a helmet of silver-blond hair. She fussed over him, showing him to her guest room, setting up a litter tray for the cat, and finally ushering him and Dodie out onto the patio with a small cooler of beer.

The Dodies' house looked out over a canal that led out through the twisting mangrove-lined waterway to Matlacha Pass. The patio was just a concrete slab but it was furnished with comfortable lawn chairs and festooned with Japanese lanterns and orchids, another of Margaret's new obsessions, Dodie explained. Dodie's own diversion, a new Sundance Skiff, sat at a small wood dock.

“You fish?” Dodie asked.

“Nope,” Louis said, smiling.

“You will, you stay here long enough.” Dodie took a swig of beer.

Louis settled back into a lounge chair. He could feel his muscles unclenching, his mind slowing. Maybe it was just the combination of the breeze, the pleasant brackish smells, or just the beer. Maybe it was Dodie's cheerful yakking. Whatever it was, he found himself thinking about childhood again, his “other-child childhood,” as he had only recently come to think of it. This time Higgins Lake in Michigan. A sunset over gray-blue water. The smell of marshmallows on a fire. The feel of cold sand between his toes. The first summer his foster parents had taken him up North.

A sound drew his eyes to the canal. A couple of kids were paddling out toward the open water in a canoe. Out toward the pass, Louis could see other small islands dotting the water like squat green pond turtles. It looked almost oriental somehow, like pictures he had seen of Japan.

“Another?” Dodie asked, reaching into the cooler.

“Why not?”

Dodie handed him a fresh Heineken. “I remembered.”

“I see.” Louis nodded to the Heineken that Dodie had just uncapped for himself. “When you start drinking this foreign shit?” he asked, smiling.

“Can't get no Jax here.”

“You told me once you'd never leave Mississippi.”

“Well, I thought about trying to stick around, you know, afterward.” Dodie shrugged. “But Margaret, well, she always wanted to see Florida, so we came down here on that vacation I'd been promising her. After Busch Gardens, we came over to Sereno Key here and decided we kinda liked it.”

“Nice place,” Louis said.

“I guess I should thank you for it,” Dodie said. “What you did up in Mississippi got me a nice big retirement settlement.”

They fell silent, Louis lost in his memories of Black Pool.

“So you don't miss Mississippi?” Louis asked.

“ 'Bout as much as a hemorrhoid,” Dodie said.

Dodie let out a satisfied belch. Louis looked out at the water. A large white wading bird had appeared on the dock, its slender neck bent in a graceful S, its long legs picking carefully along. Suddenly, it took flight over the water, its huge white wings stark against the deepening sky.

“Okay, so why me for this job?” Louis asked.

“Well, I heard you were out of work,” Dodie said.

“You hear why?”

“Yeah . . . yeah, I did.”

“You hear all of it?” Louis asked without looking at him. “You heard what I did?”

Dodie nodded slowly. Margaret came out to announce that dinner was in ten minutes. Dodie waited until she left.

“You don't owe me no explanation, Louis,” he said. “But I'll listen if you wanna talk about it.”

Louis's hands encircled the cold bottle. “Maybe later,” he said. “So what exactly am I supposed to be investigating here?”

“A man named Walter Tatum was found murdered, and his wife, Roberta, is the prime suspect,” Dodie said. “Her lawyer is the one who's hiring you. He wants you to find other suspects, or at least something so's a jury would find reasonable doubt.”

“When do I meet this lawyer?” Louis asked.

Margaret came out onto the porch. “Sam, Mr. Bledsoe's here.”

Dodie rose, looking at Louis. “How 'bout right now?”

Scott Bledsoe was a bland-looking man of about forty, tall and pale with thinning blond hair wisping over the sunburned spot on his scalp. His outfit of polo shirt, khakis, and sockless loafers spoke of family money somewhere, or at least an Ivy League diploma hanging on the wall. He moved with an odd, liquid grace that made Louis think of the white bird on the dock.

In deference to Margaret, dinner conversation was kept to small talk and compliments to Margaret on her yellowtail snapper in mango-tequila sauce. Louis learned that Bledsoe had lived in Fort Myers all his life and had never been farther north than Tallahassee, where he waited tables to put himself through law school. He and Sam Dodie had become friends after meeting at the marina; they both loved to fish.

“So, why me, Mr. Bledsoe?” Louis asked, as Margaret brought out plates of key lime pie.

“Sam said you were good,” Bledsoe said.

Louis took a bite of the tart pie. “There have to be plenty of private investigators here you could have used,” he said. “Why pay to bring me all the way down here?”