Cry Uncle (9 page)

“
You and I both know I
didn’t beat the rap,” he reminded Tony. “I’m still under
indictment. They tossed out the verdict on a
technicality.”

“
Yeah, right. One of the
jurors went to nursery school with the widow of the guy that got
murdered. And that never came out until after the verdict was
handed down.”

“
Don’t blame me,” Mick said,
all innocence. “The D.A. didn’t do a good job of screening the
jurors.”

“
You’d think that juror
would have disqualified himself.”

“
Maybe he figured it wasn’t
worth mentioning until it was too late. Not that I’m saying I had
anything to do with anything, even though the whole thing bought me
a new trial. That’s the American system of justice,
Tony.”“

“
You’re clever, Mick. Very
clever.”

Enough chit-chat. “Listen, Tony, I’ve got a
problem. They’re planning to retry me, you know that. You also know
the district attorney hasn’t got much against me, other than the
word of that woman.”

“
Pamela Hayes.”

“
She’s left town,
Tony.”

“
How do you know
that?”

“
I know it,” Mick said
tersely. He wasn’t about to tell the cop who was supposed to be
keeping an eye on him all the things he’d been up to while the cop
wasn’t keeping an eye on him. “She’s disappeared. And you know
damned well she’s going to reappear the minute they put together a
new trial for me. The bitch is going to show up in time to testify
against me again. You see what I’m saying, Tony?”

“
I know, but—”

“
She’s their whole case.
Nobody else happened to see the hit go down. No evidence was found
at the scene, other than a bullet slug in the guy’s body. The Hayes
lady swears it was me she saw doing the job.”

“
And she’s taken a
powder?”

“
Vanished into thin
air.”

“
I know her name is Pamela
Hayes. What else have you got on her?”

Mick pulled out his notes. His lawyer had
done a lot of research before the first trial—a lot of frustrating
research. Pamela Hayes had proven to be what in legal circles was
referred to as an unimpeachable witness. “She’s thirty years old.
The only child of Ronald and Margaret Hayes of Kirkland. Never been
married.”

“
You wouldn’t by any chance
have her driver’s license number, would you?”

Mick snorted. Tony was the cop here; he was
the one who had access to all the data. “No, Tony. But I do know
she worked for Murtaugh Associates as an architect. Did her
undergraduate work at Stanford, graduate studies at U.W. She’s
skinny and blond—or at least she was during my first trial. She
could be a brunette now, for all I know. When people disappear,
sometimes they get carried away.”

“
Speaking of getting carried
away... Has she run into foul play that you might know
about?”

“
You accusing me of
something?” Mick asked, forcing a laugh he didn’t feel. “I visited
her old address and they told me she was out of town. If the lady
had gotten shot during a robbery attempt or something equally
tragic, me and my lawyer would know about it.”

“
Here I am, supposed to be
tracking you, and now you want me to track her.”

“
Carefully, Tony. Not so
anyone would find out.”

“
I’ll see what I can do,”
Tony promised. “God gave us computers for a reason, didn’t
He?”

Sure
, Mick thought.
And God gave us
crooked cops like Tony for a reason
—
to make life a little easier for guys
like Mick
. “Whatever you can find will be
greatly appreciated.”

“
Meaning, we’ll be
celebrating Christmas the usual way?”

Mick pulled a face. “Of course, Tony,” he
said, laboring hard to filter his irritation out of his voice. Mick
always honored the holiday by donating a huge sum of money to
Tony’s favorite charity: the Tony Fund. These days it wasn’t easy
to own one’s very own personal police officer. Too many honest cops
screwed up Mick’s way of doing business.

But Tony had his price. And especially now,
when a second murder trial loomed ominously on the horizon, Mick
considered the guy worth every penny.

***

“
I DON’T KNOW,” Mary
said.

She was seated next to Joe at the table on
the screened porch. Through the screen they could observe Lizard
and Pamela in the back yard doing what Joe hoped was some extremely
quick bonding. Pamela, as usual, was dressed too formally, in a
crisp shirt and pleated slacks and those gold-button earrings that
seemed like the sort of jewelry best suited for a funeral. Lizard,
as usual, was dressed like a savage, in a pair of bib overalls with
the legs cut off and multicolored ink scribblings all over them,
and under the overalls the top half of her Bart Simpson pajamas.
She scampered barefoot through the herb garden, identifying various
plants to Pamela, who seemed alternately interested and
dismayed.

Sighing, Joe turned to glance at Mary
DiNardi. It occurred to him that Pamela looked more like a lawyer
than his own lawyer did. Mary had shown up at his house an hour
ago, dressed in a Hawaiian-print shirt and khaki shorts and
carrying a canvas tote with several folders of documents in it. He
happened to know Mary owned a couple of suits—he’d seen her in one,
once—and a leather briefcase that she saved for court appearances.
But any lawyer who made house calls certainly couldn’t be expected
to resemble a Wall Street wheeler-dealer, or even an architect from
Seattle.

Mary, not Pamela, was the expert when it came
to child custody hearings—and she was the one who’d told him he had
to clean up his act and present himself as a proper family man
before his in-laws attempted to spirit Lizard away.

“
What don’t you know?” he
asked.

“
Whether you and Ms. Hayes
can make this marriage work.”

Joe turned back to watch his niece and his
bride-to-be. It wasn’t dismay he read in Pamela’s face, he decided:
it was disgust. Evidently she had an aversion to little girls with
mud caulking the cracks between their toes, graffiti on their
butts, and the ability to lecture their elders on the difference
between fennel and anise.

So what if Pamela didn’t like Lizard? Joe had
never intended the marriage to work, except as a charade. When it
was time for him to get married for real, it would be to a woman
who was loose and sultry and buxom, who thought muddy feet were
just fine.

“
It was your idea,” he
reminded Mary. “You told me I had to settle down if I wanted to
convince the courts to let me keep Liz. You know as well as I do
that most of the single women on the island aren’t settling-down
material. Or else they’re into multiple settlings, like
Kitty.”

“
In other words,” Mary said
skeptically, “there’s not a single local woman you could make a
marriage with.”

“
I would have picked you,”
Joe said with an ingratiating smile, “but Frank got to you
first.”

Mary grinned. “Even if he hadn’t, I would
have turned you down. The last thing I want is children, whether my
own or someone else’s. And if you ask me—” she directed her gaze
through the screen and watched as Pamela picked a gingerly path
through the rows of sprouts, her arms akimbo and her nose twitching
in distaste “—your fiancee doesn’t seem too enamored of children,
either.”

“
She said she was willing to
give it her best shot. That’s the most anyone entering a marriage
can do,” Joe said, as if he were some sort of expert on the
subject. “All of which is academic, anyway. I don’t have time to
waste. I’ve got to get this marriage up and running before the
Prescotts make the scene.”

“
Which should be sometime in
early August,” Mary reported, riffling through the folder of papers
she’d pulled from her tote. “Your in-laws want to move Liz to
California so she can get settled in by the end of the summer. They
want her to be fully at home in their house before she starts
kindergarten.”

Joe grimaced.

“
I’ve written to their
attorney that you aren’t going to relinquish custody,” Mary said,
separating a paper from the stack. “This communication from their
attorney arrived yesterday.”

Joe took the letter. Beneath an intimidating
letterhead appeared several paragraphs of neat type, most of which
he was able to translate from jargon into English. The gist of it
was, the Prescotts intended to fight him for custody. They
considered him unfit as a parent, and they had money to burn, and
they would do whatever was necessary to remove the Liz Kid from the
pernicious influence of the Brenner half of her family.

The letter only confirmed what he’d already
known, but it ticked him off anyway. “What a crock,” he grumbled,
tossing the sheet onto the table. “They’re so damned eager to take
Lizard, but they couldn’t spare a thought for her well-being while
they were raking in the profits in Singapore.”

“
Their position is that,
although they wanted Lizard right from the start, they felt it was
in her best interest to remain in the United States.”

“
Her best interest.” He
snorted. “It was in her best interest to stay with someone who was
willing to turn his life inside out for her. They weren’t willing
to do that. I was.”

Mary patted his shoulder. “I’ll make sure
that argument gets entered into the record.”

But Joe was on a roll, and he wasn’t going to
let Mary’s assurances silence him. “They were traipsing around the
Far East, making a bundle on their development deals while I was
rocking Lizard back to sleep when she woke up in the middle of the
night screaming for her mother. They were attending formal dinners
at the American Embassy while I was teaching Liz how to pee in the
potty and chew with her mouth closed. Don’t tell me they’re better
parents than I am.”

“
Relax, Joe. I’m not telling
you that.”

“
Of course I’m the better
parent. But it’s not enough, is it. I’ve got to have a wife by my
side. We both know that if I appear before the court as a bachelor
I haven’t got a prayer.”

“
I’ll try not to take that
as a commentary on your faith in my abilities,” Mary muttered.
“There’s no question about it, Joe—you do need to present yourself
as square as a chess board. And I’ll admit, Ms. Hayes looks like
just the kind of woman who could model for a chess
board.”

Especially her figure, Joe thought
churlishly. “Okay. So if she’s so perfectly square, how come you
think my marrying her won’t work?”

Mary waved her hand toward the back yard,
where Pamela stood rigidly, her expression one of vague horror,
while Lizard scampered in circles around her, yammering about sage
as it pertained to assorted voodoo rituals. “Perhaps the expression
‘fish out of water’ means something to you.”

“
She’ll learn to
swim.”

“
Look at her. She’s dressed
like a northerner.”

“
She
is
a northerner.”

“
She’s got a
manicure.”

“
Your nails could use a
little TLC, too,” Joe snapped. Mary had the hands of a
forty-year-old—which made sense, since she was forty—but the
fingernails of an eight-year-old. She’d bitten them down to
nothing, a bad habit having returned from the dead after she’d quit
smoking a year ago.

“
Get real, Joe. What do you
think people around here are going to say when you suddenly show up
with a woman like Pamela Hayes on your arm? They’re going to know
it’s a sham.”

He clasped his hand over his heart and gave
Mary his most sincere smile. “They’re going to think I’ve turned
over a new leaf.” Leaning back in his chair, he extended his legs,
too restless to sit still but unwilling to let Mary see how close
to the bull’s-eye her darts were hitting. “As wives go,” he said,
“Pamela’s not bad. What makes you think a woman like her would
never be my type?”

Mary’s scowl spoke volumes.

He shrugged. “Before Lizard fell into my lap,
the very concept of a wife was beyond my comprehension. But I’ve
changed. Surely you can see that.”

Mary leaned forward and glowered at him. “It
doesn’t matter what I can or can’t see. All that matters is what a
judge is going to see, and the court-appointed advocate for Lizard.
What they’re going to see, Joe, is a Key West low-life bar
owner—”

“
A small business
entrepreneur,” he corrected her.

“
With a woman who’s much too
classy for him.”

“
Maybe she finds low-life
bar owners irresistible.”

“
As the saying goes, ‘Tell
it to the judge.’”

“
And anyway, I’m not a
low-life,” Joe argued. “I haven’t partied hearty in three years. I
work my tail off and pay my bills. I’ve got a car. I’ve got a Visa
card. I’ve got a mortgage.”

“
Have you got a
necktie?”

“
I’ll buy one,” he
promised.

“
You’ll need one.” Mary slid
her folder back into her tote. “If you want to marry that woman, I
wish you the best of luck.”

“
Gee, thanks, Mary,” Joe
grumbled. “If that’s going to be your attitude, I may not invite
you to the wedding.”

“
If you want a wedding
present from me,” Mary warned, rising to her feet, “you’d better
invite me.”