Rough Draft (12 page)

“I think it's pretty obvious. Somebody wants to turn Fielding in.”

Gisela snorted and brought her hands together in a T.

“Whoa there, girl. Time out, slow down.” Gisela had a quick sip of her drink and set the glass on the table. “Turn Fielding in? How the hell you figure that?”

Hannah listened for a moment to the Buffett song, its bouncy beat, its studied gaiety.

“If there's another explanation I'd like to hear it.”

Gisela was tapping her foot on the rooftop to the beat of the island music.

Randall had his arm around the piling and was gazing out at the western horizon where a small thunderstorm was hiding within a band of purple light, pulsing and sending flecks of red and gold into the stringy clouds above.

Hannah picked up her margarita glass and took the final swallow. She stood up and moved to the rail.

“Okay, so who is it? Who's sending you this secret note?”

“Either J. J. Fielding himself or somebody who knows where he is. Maybe one of his accomplices is feeling guilty and wants to see Fielding go to jail. Maybe Fielding screwed him out of his share of the money and he wants some kind of revenge. Who knows?”

“Hannah, Hannah. Any number of wackos could've read all that stuff about your parents' murder in the newspaper, then put it into that kindergarten code. Found out you go to see Janet English every Monday afternoon, snuck in there, and left it on the table for you to find.”

“A lot of this stuff wasn't in the newspaper.”

“Sure it was.”

“Nothing about house painters. Nothing about the shooter being tall. Blue sailboats on my father's tie, no one knew that except the ME and a couple of homicide guys with Miami PD, but no one in the public. Even the thing about J. J. Fielding's news photo, that was never released to the press.”

Gisela stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the page.

“Okay, what about this other thing? ‘Your name is the next key.' What the hell's that about?”

“Part of the riddle, I suppose.”

Hannah shook her head, staring up at the silhouette of a distant frigate bird hovering in the twilight sky like the blade of a black scimitar.

“In my limited experience,” Gisela said, “somebody wants to give himself up, or turn somebody else in, he calls the police. He doesn't scribble in a book and leave it on some shrink's coffee table.”

Hannah watched Randall lean against the piling. A laughing gull was strutting down the dock behind him.

“What you should do,” Gisela said, “you should take this book down to the department, show it to one of the homicide guys, Dan Romano or somebody. Get some reality therapy. Dan would be like, ‘Oh, you got a long column of numbers in a book you found in a doctor's waiting room, and now you're convinced that your parents' killer wants to talk to you.' Yeah, Dan would love to get his hands on this. He'd stand up on his desk, make an announcement to the whole squad room. Get everybody going.”

“Yeah, he would.”

“Damn right. And he'd get a hell of a laugh too. See what I'm saying, Hannah? This is just some kind of joke. A very bad practical joke. It's too screwy.”

Gisela rose and walked over to the little table where she'd set the blender. Hannah leaned back against the chrome rail.

“So is that what you'd do, Gisela? Toss the book in the waste can, walk away, not even try to get to the bottom of it?”

Down below Jimmy Buffett was crooning a song about a girl he'd met in a bar, a sexy lady from Caroline Street.

Gisela shook her head in sad disbelief and poured herself more margarita.

Randall let go of the piling and sat down at the end of the dock. He hung his feet over the side and bent forward to stare down into the water.

Gisela said, “So tell me, girl, let's say for some totally freaking off-the-wall reason J. J. Fielding or one of his accomplices wants you to come looking for him. Then why the
hell go to all that trouble, marking up your book, take it to a doctor's office on the off chance you might pick it up, and decode his little message? Why doesn't he just pick up a phone and give you a call, or send you a telegram?”

Hannah leaned against the rail and watched the purple bruise in the western sky grow darker by the second. A squadron of gulls drifted overhead with barely a movement of wing.

“Maybe he likes games.”

Gisela looked over at her for a long moment before she spoke.

“Maybe what you need to do, you need to talk to somebody.”

Hannah brought her eyes back from the sunset.

“I
am
talking to somebody.”

“You know, like Janet English, somebody like that.”

Hannah drew a long breath, held it for a second, then let it go in a rush.

Gisela wouldn't meet her eyes.

“All I'm saying is, maybe you should talk to a professional before you go launching off on something like this.”

“What? To get the shrink's approval? Are you kidding? I'm not some fragile ego that needs protection.”

“No,” Gisela said. “But he is.”

She lifted her chin and motioned toward Randall.

Down the row of boats someone turned on a television, the evening news. The long list of the day's horrors rendered in the glib voices of the professional news readers. Randall was still bent forward, communing with the water. Plinking pebbles into the still harbor.

“Listen,” Hannah said, turning to her friend, and trying to calm the quiver in her throat. “I know this whole thing sounds nuts, but you have to understand, if there is even the slightest possibility this is for real, I'm going to have to follow it to the very end.”

“Remember last time when you were so sure it was Fielding that murdered your parents? You were running all over
town, looking here, looking there. In a real manic state. And remember what happened?”

“I stopped.”

“Yeah, and why did you stop?”

“Because Randall asked me to.”

“That's right You were scaring him. You were scaring everybody. You nearly lost it, Hannah, you were so worked up, in a major lather. But because he asked you to, you stopped. You put it away and you went back to writing your books and your life and Randall's life got a lot better. Turned out you didn't need to find the people who killed your parents to be happy. You could be happy doing the things you liked to do. It was simple. And it's still simple. So I don't see why you'd want to risk everything you've got by starting all this up again.”

Gisela looked at her for a moment, then her gaze wandered off to the fading sunset.

“All I'm saying is that you should consider Randall before you get in another uproar like last time.”

“I am considering him. He's still afraid. He doesn't sleep. You know him, Gisela, the boy is in pain. He's never going to be a hundred percent secure until the killer is caught and put away.”

“A hundred percent secure? Tell me, who do you know that's a hundred percent secure?”

“I've got to do this, Gisela. I have no choice.”

“Okay,” she said. “But don't kid yourself. You're not doing this for Randall. You're doing it for yourself. Because it's a bone stuck in your throat.”

Hannah gazed into the half-light. A breeze tickled across her sweaty back. Out across the bay the twilight was losing its hold, darkness advancing quickly across the water, closing in like a dense fog.

The concentric rings Randall had made were widening out across the marina. Beautiful ripples spreading, one after the other, moving out toward the open water.

* * *

Hal was wearing a white Panama hat. He was wearing a yellow shirt with speedboats on it and a light windbreaker over that. Green-and-red plaid Bermudas that came to his knees and sandals. Clothes he'd bought at the airport when he landed. Everything still stiff, just a few hours off the rack. He had a camera and he was snapping pictures of the sunset. He was standing on the seawall looking out at the bay and taking photographs he would never develop.

The woman had a boy. She had a son and she took him with her when she went places. They were on the docks now. Hannah Keller was on the roof of a houseboat, big and square and painted bright colors. She was talking to another woman, dark hair and pudgy. The boy was standing on the dock, looking back toward the shore where Hal was standing. Hal took the boy's picture, then he turned and took a picture of a seagull.

Hal was not a dork. He was only dressed like one. A tourist dork. A pale Yankee sightseer down in Miami for a few days to get a tan and take lots of snapshots. That was the story his clothes were telling to anybody who looked his way.

The Keller boy was tossing pebbles into the water. Hal watched the rocks ruffle the smooth surface of the marina. Little waves from the rocks were headed right for Hal. He took a snapshot of one of them. The tiny wave ran into the rocks that were piled up next to the seawall, then it disappeared. There one minute, gone the next Just like Randy Gianetti. Just like Hal. Now you see him, now you don't.

Hal took another picture of the sunset. It was purple and green and red and there were colored bands running high up into the sky like the streaks of fat that spread through meat. Hal had seen postcards with pictures of sunsets. People thought sunsets were pretty. They stood around and watched them. They sent people postcards with sunsets on them. Hal wasn't stupid. This was how you knew what the pretty things were. The things they put on postcards, the things that people stood and watched while they said nothing. It was possible to figure these things out, to learn from watching
people. To understand all the difficult things by being observant and putting two and two together. This was what Hal did in his free time. He observed people. He watched and learned what it was like to be human.

“Pretty, isn't it?” a woman said.

She had come up beside him while Hal was busy with the camera. She had white curly hair and was slumped over with a hump in her back. Bones gone soft. A lonely old woman who wanted to talk.

“Pretty, isn't it?” Hal said back to her.

The woman took a look at him.

Hal raised the camera and snapped another picture of the sky. It was starting to lose its colors. The dark leaking back around the edges.

“The sunset is over,” Hal said.

“Oh, it's only pretty for a second or two,” the old woman said. “I suppose that's why we like it so much. The ephemerality, the briefness.”

Hal watched as Hannah Keller walked down the dock with her boy.

“Yes,” Hal said. “That's probably why we like it so much. The briefness.”

The old woman peered at Hal Bonner as he turned and ambled across the parking lot toward his red dirt bike. He could feel the touch of her eyes on the back of his pale blue windbreaker.

Across the parking lot Hannah was backing out of her space. A white Ford started its engine nearby and Hal saw a brown UPS truck parked by the office of the marina. Hal watched to see if anybody followed Hannah out of the lot and onto the street. He straddled the seat of the motorcycle and watched as the white Ford pulled out of its space a few rows over, then rolled slowly across the parking lot and out to the edge of the main street. The Ford waited for a break in the traffic, then turned in the opposite direction Hannah had taken. The UPS truck was heading to the street too.

Hal sat still on his motorcycle, his eyes roaming the parking lot.

Something wasn't right. He'd not seen anyone else following Hannah Keller, but still, there was a twitch in his chest, the needle on his Geiger counter quivering uneasily. There was danger nearby. He wasn't sure where it was or what it was, but it was there. The twitch in his chest had never failed him.

He back-walked the bike out of the parking space, started it, and puttered slowly toward the exit. The big palm trees were turning black. The streetlights had come on. At the edge of the street, he leaned forward and looked east and he could just barely make out her small red car as it disappeared around a curve in the road. The thing in his chest was twitching faster. But Hal followed anyway. Staying well back. Cautious, alert, ready to pounce, ready to flee.

Frank Sheffield's porch at the Silver Sands Motel faced east toward the Atlantic. Tonight the dark water was restless, lots of noise down there, forty yards away through a stand of sea oats and coconut palms. More erosion shifting sand up or down the beach, never where they wanted it.

“So you bring your little girls here, Sheffield? This your love nest, is it?”

“I live here, Helen. This is my home. So, yeah, when I get lucky enough to have a girl, this is where I bring her.”

“Jesus, I thought you were kidding. A dump like this. Does the Bureau know?”

“Hey, I got the surf pounding outside my back door. I got the breezes. I got stars. What the hell difference is it to the FBI where I live anyway?”

On the floor above them, there was a party in 206. There was always a party in 206. And they always played the same Moody Blues album, smoked the same cigars to cover up the odor of their potent dope. His tie-dyed neighbors.

Sheffield and Helen Shane sat side by side in the canvas directors' chairs which Frank left out in the elements on his small cement porch. The chairs had started out maroon, but in the ten years he'd had them, they'd weathered to a pale pink, always with a fine coating of sand on the seats. Usually he sat in one, used the other to prop his feet while he had his two evening rum and Cokes. Never more, never less. After the second Cuba libre he liked to lean back against the loose canvas and imagine himself as a movie director. Making a low-budget film about the people coming and going at a broken-down
motel surrounded by monster condos. Two shots of rum, and Sheffield became Cecil B. DeMille, all the gardeners doing his bidding, the maids smiling on his cue, the endless stream of pleasure-seeking tourists happily playing their parts. Everybody with a secret, a story bubbling inside.