Blood of My Brother (16 page)

“You look like that rock guy,” Rhonda said to Jay once they were seated. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” said Jay, smiling despite himself.

“The one who’s buried in Paris.”

“Jim Morrison,” said Dunn.

“That’s it!” said Rhonda. “I just saw a TV show on him. Man, he was
cute
.”

“I can’t believe you know who Jim Morrison is,” Jay said to Dunn.

“Love Me Two Times,” said Dunn.

“You got that right,” said Rhonda.

Jay laughed out loud, as much at the exchange between Rhonda and Dunn as at the detective’s deadpan delivery, be-lied by the twinkle dancing for a split second in his pale blue, bloodshot eyes.

“I remember the guy,” said Rhonda, smiling her big smile at Jay and nodding. “What about him?”

“Was the FBI here as well?” Dunn asked.

“Yes, blue suit.”

“Anybody else?”

“No. Until now.”

“Did you see the body?” Dunn asked.

“No. Just Lourdes. No way I need to see a dead body.”

“Did Dan say anything when he checked in?” Jay asked.

“Is Dan the dead guy?”

“Yes.”

“No. He was quiet, serious, you know?”

“Nothing?”

“Just ‘Hello, I need a room. On the second floor. In the back.’ I put him in G208.”

“What do you think happened?” Dunn asked.

“
Shit
,” said Rhonda, “drugs, robbers, jealous husband . . .”

“Was there a woman?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did Dan look like anybody famous?” Jay asked.

Rhonda smiled again as she thought about this, then said, “No. Maybe a Latin lover type.”

“Can you describe him?” Jay asked.

“Tall, black hair, mustache, nice silk shirt.”

“Were you shown mug shots?”

“The FBI guy did.”

“Not the Miami detectives?”

“No.”

“Did you recognize anybody?”

“No, but they were bad pictures.”

“Bad pictures?”

“They were fuzzy.”

“You mean grainy?” Jay asked, breaking into Dunn’s staccato string of questions, “like with a telephoto lens?”

“That’s it,” said Rhonda, “like they were at an airport, or getting out of a car, you know? Not like mug shots like you see on TV.”

“Were you questioned at headquarters?” Dunn began again.

“They said they would bring me down, then they never came back.”

“Who, Miami?”

“Yes.”

“Does Lourdes still work here?”

“No, she went back to Guatemala around Thanksgiving. Good luck finding her.”

“What kind of car was the guy driving?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Did he put it down on the registration card?”

“No. He just scribbled his name.”

There was a pause, a short moment of introspection for all three.

“How long was Lourdes working here?” Jay asked.

“About six months.”

“What time did she come on duty?”

“Nine a.m.”

“Did the FBI guy leave his card?” Frank asked.

“No.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was a strict-looking guy, gray hair, around fifty.”

“Anything in particular you remember him saying, or asking?”

“No, the same as you guys. He showed me the pictures.”

“How many pictures?” Jay asked.

“Two.”

“What size?”

“Big. Eight-by-ten?”

“Were they of the same guy?”

“It was two guys, Spanish, maybe Mexican-looking. I thought one could be the guy, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to make a mistake.”

Another pause followed this exchange, in which Rhonda looked from Jay to Dunn and back to Jay, ready for the next question. Jay could tell from her face, composed but expectant, that this was more interesting to her by far than checking horny teenagers, budget-obsessed tourists, and tired salesmen into the South Miami Beach Motor Hotel. But the
interview had reached the top of its arc, and was over. When she realized this, she said to Jay, “I’m sorry I wasn’t any help.”

“No, you were helpful,” he said. “We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.”

“Was Dan your friend?” Rhonda asked.

Jay looked at Rhonda, finding himself hoping he would get one more of her face-changing smiles before he and Dunn left. He had made a mistake by referring to Dan as anything other than “the victim” or “the dead guy.” Or had he? There was a point in the conversation when Rhonda seemed more interested in helping. He shrugged inwardly. It didn’t matter.

“Yes,” he said. “He was a good friend.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “That’s tough.”

They were both, he knew, thinking of the way Danny had died.

“You know,” said Rhonda, “while you’re in town, you could call me. Maybe I can get that laugh out of you again. You
are
a handsome devil.”

“Thank you, Rhonda,” Jay replied, smiling, “maybe I will,” knowing he wouldn’t, unless it had something to do with Danny.

Jay and Dunn were staying at the Silver Sands Hotel in North Miami Beach—ten stories of white brick, with a pool in back, surrounded by imported palm trees and beds of brightly-colored flowers. From their fifth floor balconies they could see across A1A to the ocean, a dazzling, foamy green, quite different from the steely blue Atlantic along the Jersey coast. They had picked the place because it was close—but not too close—to where Danny was killed, in South Beach, with its all-night noise and its crowds of multicultural and multi-gendered partiers. After their talk with Rhonda, they returned to the Silver Sands, where Jay changed into a bathing suit, took one of the room towels, and walked across the street to the beach. He swam for a few minutes, and then lay on the towel on the warm sand as gulls circled and dove, feeding in the surf. He and Dunn had spent three days at an isolated fishing camp on Big Pine Key, where the wound on Jay’s arm, bloody but superficial, had healed, and where they were apprised, via calls to Linda Marshall, of the lay of the land in Jersey.

Jay had been at Ocean Beach in San Francisco the day his parents’ plane went down. They had gone first to Seattle to visit cousins who had moved away years before. His
mother, anxious to see her only child after a five month interval, wanting to surprise him, had talked his father into cutting their Seattle visit short by two days. Carmela, forty-nine, was completing her seventh year teaching senior English and Latin at a private high school in Montclair. That year her students had read
A Death in the Family
and
So Long, See You Tomorrow
, lessons, she told Jay, in the sadness that permeates and shapes all of our lives.

A.J., fifty-three, could hardly believe that he had put in nineteen years at the A&P, where he was now the head baker. Though he rarely showed it, the sadness that Carmela was referring to haunted his memories of Newark’s First Ward, where he had left behind the dignity of running his own business and his own life, losses as profound and life changing as those suffered by James Agee’s fictional family and William Maxwell’s heartbroken narrator.

Jay heard about the crash on his car radio as he drove home from the beach, thanking God it was not his parents’ plane that had gone down. In the chaos that followed over the next few days, Danny appeared. He helped Jay pack his things. He talked him into attending a memorial service on Mount Tam, where people said they saw the plane fall into the sea. He bought airline tickets and took Jay home. And now he was dead, too.

Jay had never fired a gun in his life, not even held one, but while on Big Pine Key, Frank Dunn took him to a god-forsaken mangrove swamp, where he fired Dunn’s police-issue .38 revolver many times. Lying on the beach, he recalled the rush of adrenaline before, and the euphoric calm after each shot he fired at the bottles and cans Dunn had patiently teed up on a decrepit tree trunk. Dunn, grim faced, showed him the proper stance and grip; told him to squeeze off the round rather than jerking the trigger, to absorb the kick with
his full body. Firing the gun had centered him, confirmed for him the necessity, the inevitability, of what he was doing.

When he returned to the hotel, he found Dunn sitting at one of the outdoor tables near the pool bar, drinking what looked like a gin and tonic. He was wearing the same drab suit and tie he had worn on the plane and for the interview with the hotel clerk, and would probably wear the entire time he was in Florida. His only concession to the tropical weather was an odd-looking woven hat that he wore to protect his balding head from the sun. Jay joined him and ordered a scotch to bring back to his room to drink while he was shaving and showering. They were meeting Angelo Perna at eight o’clock at El Pulpo.

“Nice swim?” Dunn asked.

“Yes. It was good.”

“Linda called.”

“Did you speak to her?”

“I did.”

“What’s up?”

“Your picture was in the
Times
and the
Daily News
this week. The FBI wants to talk to you about Bill Davis’s murder.”

“So there’s a manhunt on?”

“It’s not funny, Jay. There’s more.”

“What?”

“Cheryl called her. Markey’s people are all over her. They’ve threatened to arrest her as a material witness if she doesn’t tell them where you are.”

Jay shook his head. He had called Cheryl from Big Pine Key to tell her that he would be away indefinitely and to give all client matters to Don Jacobs, but he hadn’t told her where he was or what his plans were.

“Cheryl’s gotten a lawyer,” Dunn said, “and offered to take a lie detector test.”

“Unbelievable.”

“She’s a tough kid.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s a hearing scheduled for Monday on the subpoena for Linda’s notes. The paper’s lawyers say they’ve never seen the US Attorney’s Office so worked up over a case like this. There’s a good chance she’ll go to jail for contempt.”

Jay said nothing. He knew that Linda’s notes contained nothing more than what was revealed in her article, that it was Kate Powers’s letters that she was prepared to go to jail over. She was tough, but jail? With two young kids? Jay did not trust Chris Markey, and was not about to cooperate in his investigation, but he could get him off of Cheryl’s back, and maybe Linda’s. When he got back to his room, before getting in the shower, he called the FBI’s office in Newark and left a message for Agent Markey to call him at the Silver Sands Hotel in North Miami Beach.

El Pulpo was an unpretentious place, with a worn mahogany bar, comfortable leather banquettes in the front, and a dining room and kitchen in the back. It was located on 17th Avenue, at the western edge of Little Havana, in a residential neighborhood of tightly-packed bungalows, duplexes, and two-family houses with small patches of lawn or dirt yard in front. When Jay and Dunn arrived, there were four or five kids, boys and girls aged eight or nine, catching fireflies in the street and putting them in a glass jar. The
E
of the neon sign above the entrance consisted of three of the eight legs of a stylized octopus, which flashed red, while the remaining letters flashed yellow. White and silver Christmas wreaths hung on the fixed glass windows that flanked the front door.

Inside, they were greeted by Maria Perna. Petite, gracious, her long, black, gray-streaked hair pulled back and tied with a plum-colored ribbon to match her sleeveless silk blouse, Angelo’s Cuban-American wife was El Pulpo’s hostess. Her ankle length black skirt and high-heeled sandals made her seem taller than her actual height, which appeared to Jay to be just over five feet. She gripped both of Dunn’s hands in hers, and kissed him on the cheek. She did the same to Jay, and then brought them to Angelo’s office, a banquette
in a corner of the front room. She promised to return later, when they were done with their business. Dunn and Angelo shook hands, and Dunn introduced Jay. A waitress took their drink order.

“So, how are you?” Angelo said to Dunn.

“I’m good. You?”

“I’m good.”

“That’s a hell of a wife you have there.”

“Thanks,” Angelo replied. “I’m a lucky guy.”

“How’s Sam?” Dunn asked. “Is he here?”

“He’s good. He’s not working tonight.”

“How old is he now?”

“He’ll be sixty.”

“Your kid brother sixty? Unbelievable.”

Jay watched the two old friends smile at each other. He had heard Dunn’s stories of the days when they were rookie cops in New York. They were sixty-two now. A lifetime had passed. Angelo looked content, younger than his years. Dunn looked tired and older. He had ordered bourbon, and Jay wondered if Angelo knew his friend had been sober for many years, and that it was the torture and murder of Dan Del Colliano that had started him drinking again.

The waitress came with their drinks, and while she was setting them down, Angelo said to Jay, “So, you lost a good friend?”

Jay nodded.

“I was in the Army with a Del Colliano,” Angelo said. “In Nam.”

The waitress, to Jay’s right, seemed to stop in mid-motion as she was reaching with his drink, then it fell from her hand onto the table with a bang, ice and scotch making its way to the edge before she recovered and placed a napkin quickly down. Jay had seen this happen
peripherally, but he looked full at her as she cleaned the table, and saw that she was gaunt, but very beautiful, young, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, with short-cropped dark hair, full lips, and fine, deep blue eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping the last of the spilled ice onto her serving tray, “the glass was wet. I don’t think I got any on you. I’ll get you another drink.” She was embarrassed, but calm, and her accent was
what
? Jay could not place it.