Shimmer (18 page)

They had never met, but the older woman had seemed to know her immediately.

And her eyes had filled with dislike.

Jerome's mother for sure.

‘I'm Claudia.' She'd steeled herself, suppressed her impulse to turn tail, had put out her hand instead.

‘Yes,' Roxanne Lucca had said.

She had declined the handshake, but taken a step back into her house.

‘You better come in.'

But Claudia was done with cowardice.

So she had stepped inside the house.

57

There had been no answer, Sam told Grace, when the Cook County patrol cops had called at the Lucca house in Melrose Park.

‘No 911 call, and no external signs of trouble,' he said.

Nowhere near enough to go on, in other words, for them to break in.

‘The next flight out of MIA's at one thirty,' Grace told Sam. ‘We can be in Chicago by four, local time.'

‘Not “we”.' Sam was still adamant. ‘Like I told you.'

‘We could drop Joshua at your dad's.'

‘We could, but we won't.' Sam was halfway up the staircase, unfastening his holster as he went, since much as he might have liked to be armed, there was no way he was going to play those kinds of games at MIA or anyplace out of jurisdiction and end up in a world of new trouble.

‘That makes no sense.' Grace followed him into the bedroom, agitatedly watched him lock away the Glock. ‘Claudia's depending on me.'

‘She's depending on
us
,' Sam reminded her. ‘So you can get this straight, Gracie. Whatever's happening inside your father's house, whether it's Frank or his wife or Cooper behind it –' he checked his wallet, credit cards, ID – ‘there's no way on this earth you're going in there.'

‘Then let me at least be there. I can wait outside.'

‘And what if Claudia calls back and there's no one here?' He paused on his way back to the door, took her face in both his hands and kissed her mouth. ‘I know it's hard as hell to be the one doing the waiting, sweetheart, but I'm going to be on that flight alone.'

Not many nightclubs did open off-season in South Beach on Tuesday nights, so it hadn't taken Martinez and Riley long to pinpoint just two in the immediate area, Hot-Hot-Hot and Menagerie, their plan to take the cropped head shots of the new victim to both places later.

After they'd shown them to Mildred.

The photographs were still pretty grisly for all Miami-Dade's efforts, but the best they could manage.

Except that there was no sign of Mildred in Lummus Park or on the beach, neither near her bench nor anyplace around.

‘Maybe she's lying low because she's scared,' Riley said.

‘More likely because we're not Sam,' Martinez said.

They hung around Ocean Drive for a while, and while Riley checked out the nearby restroom, Martinez tried sending her a text, and then they waited another five minutes.

No show.

Sam called Grace just before boarding.

‘Any more from Claudia?'

‘Not a thing,' Grace told him. ‘Her phone's still switched off and no answer at the house.'

‘How're you and Joshua holding up?'

‘Don't worry about us, we're fine.'

‘I've been wondering,' Sam said, ‘if you oughtn't to be telling Daniel.'

‘Me too,' Grace said. ‘But there's nothing he could do except go crazy.'

‘If it were me,' Sam said, ‘I'd want to be told.'

‘Told what? That Claudia let us think she was going home to him, but went to Chicago instead? How could we do that without raising the other issues?'

‘Not our place,' Sam agreed. ‘Let's wait.'

‘At least till you find out what's going on,' Grace said. ‘Or she calls me again.'

Mildred could not easily have explained why she hadn't wanted to speak to those two cops. Neither of them were strangers to her, after all, but then she'd always – even while Donny had still been alive – been picky about who she chose to spend time with.

Time being the only commodity she had to barter these days.

Samuel Becket was different. Before him, there'd been that pleasant young Officer Valdez, and she'd had no objection to passing the time of day with him on occasion, but her relationship with Detective Becket was something else altogether.

‘That's it, precisely,' she said to her dead fiancé. ‘We do
relate
to each other.'

Not that Detective Martinez had ever disrespected her, or that nice enough red-headed young woman who had been with him this afternoon.

But Samuel Becket had given her a telephone.

Samuel Becket had wanted her to go to a
hotel
, had wanted to pay for that out of his own hard-earned money so that she could be safe. And not just – she was sure about that – because he thought she might be some kind of eye-witness.

No one since Donny had truly given a damn about Mildred Bleeker.

‘Not that I've allowed them to,' she told him now. ‘To be fair.'

A boy aged about fourteen, in foolish-looking baggy pants and a baseball cap, passed by the trees where she was still hiding in case the detectives came back, saw her talking to herself and rolled his eyes.

‘Weirdo,' Mildred heard him say.

And then she realized, suddenly, the real reason behind her reluctance to talk to Becket's colleagues. It was because she was afraid of exactly why Samuel had not been out there, as usual, with his partner.

She was scared that something bad might have happened to him.

‘Neurosis,' she told herself, because he might just have influenza, or be working on some other case, or even simply be taking a day off.

But Samuel Becket had asked her, just this morning, if she'd be around later.

And then he had kissed her on the cheek.

So neurotic or not, Mildred was anxious that there might be some bad reason for his not having been here with Detective Martinez this same afternoon.

And the truth was she didn't want to know what that reason might be.

Not until she had to.

58

‘
I'm at O'Hare,' Sam told Grace at 4.05 p.m., moving fast through the arrivals concourse towards the exit.

‘Thank God,' she said. ‘No news here.'

‘I'm almost at the cab line,' he said. ‘Be there soon as.'

‘Have you called the Sheriff's office yet?'

‘Jury's still out on exactly when I tell them I'm here.'

Outside it was grey and windy, a heck of a lot cooler than Miami, but still pretty humid. The line was shorter than it might have been, and Sam positioned himself behind a group of four businessmen discussing their dinner plans for the evening ahead.

‘Are you sure that's such a good idea?' Grace said.

‘I'm not forgetting my history,' Sam assured her. ‘But if no one opens the door to me at your dad's house, I want the option of finding my own way in. Get in and get Claudia safely out – then call for back-up if necessary.'

‘I love you,' Grace said, trusting his instincts and too damned grateful for his motives to risk any argument. ‘So much.'

The line was moving swiftly, plenty of cabs flowing in and out, and the talk ahead of Sam was still of slabs of baby-back ribs, though nothing, he knew, was likely to spark any appetite in him until he had good news for his wife.

‘You try and stay calm,' he told her. ‘Kiss the baby for me.'

‘You just stay safe,' she told him back.

South of Franklin Park, a couple of miles from his destination, Sam's cell phone rang, startling him out of the kind of blank zone that the drab semi-suburban cab ride had seemed to damp over his brain.

‘Do me a favour, man,' Martinez said. ‘No craziness this time, OK?'

‘None planned,' Sam told him. ‘Any ID from Miami-Dade on the new victim?'

‘Nothing yet,' said Martinez. ‘And nothing from Mildred yet either. Riley and I went to find her, but if she was around, she wasn't coming out to play.'

The cab pulled up at a red light intersection.

‘Do me a favour,' Sam said, ‘and try again later.'

‘Goes without saying,' Martinez said. ‘You told the Sheriff you're there?'

‘Not yet,' Sam said. ‘I'm on leave, remember.'

‘Yeah,' Martinez said. ‘Day off with the family.'

The lights turned to green, and they were moving again.

‘Do you know,' Sam said, ‘that I never even met my father-in-law before?'

‘Sure I know,' Martinez said. ‘And from the sounds of him, you didn't miss much, though it's always beaten the hell out of me how a man like that could get himself a daughter like Grace.'

‘Tell me about it,' said Sam.

David and Saul had just arrived at the house on Bay Harbor Island.

‘Sam didn't need to tell you,' Grace said. ‘How much do you know?'

‘Enough,' David said, ‘about your so-called stepbrother.'

‘Still,' Grace said, ‘this really wasn't necessary, I'm perfectly fine.'

‘You won't be perfectly fine,' David said, ‘till you know Claudia's OK.'

‘And Sam's home again,' Saul added.

She hugged them one at a time.

‘Glad to have you,' she said. ‘As always.'

Sam had his cab driver drop him off at the end of the street.

It looked nicer than he'd anticipated – though he'd had no good reason to expect drabness, since the misery of the young life that had coloured Grace's personal descriptions of Melrose Park had happened, for the most part, in another house on another street.

Here, the sidewalks were well-maintained, and the houses too, with cared-for front yards, plentiful trees and flowers.

Sam paid off the driver, pulled out his phone, waited till the car had moved away and then called Grace again.

‘Almost there,' he said.

‘Your dad and Saul are here. You didn't need to tell them.'

‘I didn't want you being alone.' Sam started strolling. ‘Don't worry if you don't hear from me for a while.'

‘Even a sniff of trouble,' Grace said, ‘swear you'll call for help.'

‘No heroics, sweetheart, I swear.'

He ended the call, went on up the road.

‘How long should we wait, do you think,' Grace asked David, ‘before we call the Sheriff's office?'

Saul was on the floor in the den, playing with Joshua.

Plenty of laughter happening.

‘He hasn't even gone inside yet,' David said. ‘Let's not look for trouble.'

‘Jerome Cooper is trouble,' Grace said. ‘I was wrong not to let Sam arrest him here.'

‘We don't even know if the guy's there,' Saul pointed out. ‘He'd have had to have been following Claudia nonstop, which is a stretch, surely?'

‘Maybe she knew he'd already gone back,' Grace said. ‘Maybe that's why she went there to confront him.' She dropped down on to her knees, and her son gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Anyway, our father might have been a bastard, but he's sixty-five years old now, and I can't picture him or his wife as enough of a threat to have had Claudia sounding so scared.'

‘Probably this Jerome character then,' David said.

‘Who you said is just a creep,' Saul said. ‘Which means Sam can probably handle him with one hand tied behind his back.'

‘Probably,' Grace said, miserably.

‘I say we need to give Sam an hour,' David said.

‘I don't think I can possibly wait that long,' Grace said.

‘Grab a cuddle with this little guy,' Saul said, and tickled his nephew's belly.

Grace glanced at her father-in-law, noticed for the first time how tired and pale he looked. ‘Are you feeling all right?'

‘I got a little head cold starting, nothing much.'

‘Can I get you something for it?'

‘I took already,' David said.

‘You should go home,' Grace said. ‘Both of you.'

‘You should know by now,' David said, ‘we're not that easy to get rid of.'

The house was the plainest in the street.

A squat, two-storey structure with a pitched roof, its walls clad in dull brown and grey timber. The kind of house whose frontage resembled a face and abruptly put Sam in mind of the spooky house in the old Amityville Horror movie poster.

He shut the thought right off, threw a glance up at the iron-grey clouds while considering, one more time, the wisdom of calling the cops now, then decided yet again that it would be premature, time-wasting and, more than likely, pointless.

He raised his right hand, rapped twice on the green door.

Got no reply.

He took a few steps back and checked out the path that led around to the rear of the house – saw nothing but a low fence and some shrubs to keep him out – and then he moved back to the door and rapped one more time.

The door opened.

59

Cal was writing in the Epistle.

Cal the Hater. Never more so.

He remembered hoping, when he first bought
Baby
, that his very own boat would sail him into a better future, out of pain and bitterness and hate, of others and of himself.

He'd learned differently.

He was calmer now than he had been earlier, though his back and shoulders and the wounds on his chest still hurt like hell, and he wished he had more gin, but somehow, seeing the cop and the old woman together, the kiss and all, had sent him hurrying back to his dump without even thinking of buying another bottle.