Sideswipe (3 page)

"Hoke's only forty-three, Bill. That isn't middle-aged."

"It can happen at thirty-three, Ellita. You don't have to be middle-aged to go through a mid-life crisis. Instead of telling Brownley, it might be best if we keep this to ourselves. I'll fill in the papers, and we can put Hoke on a thirty-day leave without pay. I can forge his name easily enough. I did it plenty of times when we were partners. Then I'll call his father up in Riviera Beach and get him to take Hoke in for a few weeks. If Hoke's up there on Singer Island, instead of here with you, Brownley won't be able to come and check on him."

"I don't think Mr. Moseley'll like that, Bill. And I know his wife won't. I met her once, when the two of them were going on a cruise, and she's one of those society types. The sundress she had on when she came to the ship must've cost at least four hundred dollars."

"There's not even any back to a sundress."

"Make it three-fifty then. But she looked down her nose at me. She doesn't approve of lady cops, I think."

"Hoke's old man's got all of the money in the world. I'll talk to Mr. Moseley, and he can get his own doctor to look at Hoke. A visit to the department shrink is supposed to be confidential, but it always gets out sooner or later. This thing with Hoke'll blow over soon, I know it will, and if we can get him out of town for a few days no one'll ever know the fucking difference."

"What'll I tell the girls?"

"Tell them Hoke's gone on a vacation. I'll call Mr. Moseley on your phone after I finish eating--the soup's good with this stuff, by the way--and you can drive Hoke up there this afternoon. You can still drive, can't you?"

"Sure. I go to the store every day."

"Okay, then. Take Hoke's Pontiac. Your car's too small for him, and you can drive him up there right after I call and explain everything to Mr. Moseley. You'll still be back in plenty of time to fix dinner for the girls. If not, you can always send out for a pizza."

Ellita nibbled her lower lip. "You really think Hoke'll be all right?"

"He'll be fine." Bill looked at his wristwatch. "It's onefifteen. If anyone ever asks you, Hoke's been on an official thirty-day leave of absence since eight A.M. this morning."

Hoke hadn't planned it that way, but that's how he got back to Singer Island.

CHAPTER 2

Stanley and Maya Sinkiewicz lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, in a subdivision called Ocean Pines Terraces. The subdivision was six miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and the Lake Worth waterway. There were no pines; they had all been bulldozed away during construction. There were no terraces, either. Not only was the land flat, it was barely three feet above sea level, and flood insurance was mandatory on every mortgaged home. Sometimes, during the rainy season, the canals overflowed and the area was inundated for days at a time.

Stanley was seventy-one years old but looked older. Maya was sixty-six, and she looked even older than Stanley. He had retired from the Ford Motor Company six years earlier, after working most of his life as a striper on the assembly line. During his last three years before retiring, he had worked in the paint supply room. Because of his specialized work on the line for so many years, Stanley's right shoulder was three inches lower than his left (he was right-handed), and when he walked, his right step was about three inches longer than his left, which gave his walk a gliding effect. As a striper, Stanley had painted the single line, with a drooping striping brush, around the automobiles moving through the plant as they got to him. These encircling lines were painted by hand instead of by mechanical means because a ruled line is a "dead" line, and a perfect, ruled line lacked the insouciant raciness a handdrawn line gives to a finished automobile. Stanley's freehand lines were so straight they looked to the unpracticed eye as if they had been drawn with the help of a straightedge, but the difference was there. During Henry Ford's lifetime, of course, there were no stripes on the black finished Fords. No one remembered when the practice began, but Stanley got his job as a striper on his first day of work and had kept it until his final three years. He had been transferred to the paint shop when it was decided by someone that a tape could be put around the cars; then, when the tape was ripped off, there was the stripe, like magic. Of course, it was now a dead stripe, but it saved a few seconds on the line.

Stanley and Maya had lived in Hamtramck, and they had paid off their mortgage on a small two-bedroom house in this largely Polish community. On a Florida vacation once they had spent two weeks in a motel in Singer Island. During this time they had enjoyed the sun so much they had decided to retire to Riviera Beach when the time came. The Ocean Pines Terraces development had been in the planning stages, and because pre-phase construction prices were so low, Stanley had made a down payment on a twobedroom house and hadn't had to close on it for almost two more years. After Stanley retired, he and Maya trucked their old furniture from Hamtramck down to the new house and moved in. The house Stanley had closed on for fifty thousand dollars, six years earlier, was now worth eighty-three thousand. With his U. A. W. pension and Social Security, Stanley had an income of more than twelve thousand a year, plus three ten-thousand-dollar certificates of deposit in savings. Their son, Stanley, Jr., now lived with his wife and two teenage children in the old house in Hamtramck, and Junior paid his father two hundred a month in rent. Maya, who had worked part-time, off and on, at a dry-cleaning shop a block away from their house in Hamtramck, also drew Social Security each month, and both of them were on Medicare.

Despite their attainment of the American Dream, Maya was not happy in Florida. She missed her son, her grandchildren, and her neighbors back in Michigan. She even missed the cold and snow of the slushy Detroit winters. Maya didn't like having Stanley at home all of the time, either, and they had finally reached a compromise. He had to leave the house each morning by eight A.M., and he wasn't allowed to return home until at least noon. His absence gave Maya time to clean the house in the morning, do the laundry, watch TV by herself, or do whatever else she wanted to, while Stanley had the morning use of their Ford Escort.

After eating lunch at home, which Maya made for him, Stanley usually took a nap. Maya then drove the Escort to the International Shopping Mall on U.S. 1, or to the supermarket, or both, and didn't return home until after three. Sometimes, when there was a Disney film or a G-rated film at one of the six multitheaters in the International Mall, she took in the Early Bird matinee for a dollar-fifty and didn't come home until five P.M.

When they first moved to Florida, Maya had telephoned Junior two or three times a week, collect, to see how he and his wife and the grandchildren were getting along, but after a few weeks, when no one ever answered the phone, she had called only once a week, direct dial, on Sunday nights. She then discovered that Junior would be there to talk--for three minutes, or sometimes for five. Her daughter-in-law was never at home on Sunday nights, but sometimes Maya would be able to talk to her grandchildren, Geoffrey and Tern, a sixteen-year-old boy and a fourteenyear-old girl.

Stanley was a clean old man, and very neat in his appearance. He usually wore gray or khaki poplin trousers, gray suede Hush Puppies with white socks, and a white shortsleeved shirt with a black leather pre-tied necktie that had a white plastic hook to hold it in place behind the buttoned collar. The necktie, worn with the white shirt, made Stanley look like a retired foreman (not a striper) from the Ford Motor Company, and he always said that he was a retired foreman if someone asked him his occupation. He hadn't been able to make any new friends in Florida, although, at first, he had tried. For a few weeks, Stanley had been friendly with Mr. Agnew, his next-door neighbor, a butcher who worked for Publix, but when Mr. Agnew bought a Datsun, after Stanley had told him that the Escort was a much better car, and an American car to boot, he no longer spoke to Mr. Agnew, even if Maya was still friendly with Agnew's wife.

When Stanley left the house in the mornings, he wore a long-billed khaki fishing cap with a green visor. He always carried a cane, even though he didn't need one. He wore the cap because he was bald and didn't want to get the top of his head sunburned, but he carried the cane to fend off dogs. The gnarled wooden cane had a rubber tip and a brass dog's head handle. The handle could be unscrewed, and Stanley had a dozen cyanide tablets concealed in a glass tube inside the hollowed-out shaft of the wooden cane. Stanley had appropriated these cyanide tablets from the paint shop at Ford because he found them useful for poisoning vicious dogs in Hamtramck, and later in Florida. Stanley was afraid of dogs. As a boy, he had been badly mauled by a red Chow Chow in Detroit, and he didn't intend to be bitten again. During the last three years, he had used three pills to poison neighborhood dogs in Ocean Pines Terraces, and he was ready to poison another one when the opportunity arrived. Stanley had a foolproof method. He would make a hamburger ball approximately an inch and a half in diameter, with the cyanide pill in the center. Then he rolled the ball in salt and put the ball in a Baggie. When he took a walk and passed the house where the targeted dog lived, he would toss the ball underhand onto the lawn, or drop it beside a hedge or a tree as he continued down the sidewalk. When the dog was let loose in its yard, it would invariably find the hamburger by smell, lick the salt once or twice, and then gulp down the fatal meatball. Thanks to Stanley's skill, the neighborhood was shy one boxer, one Doberman, and one Pekinese.

Stanley's cane had also helped to make him a fringe member of the "Wise Old Men," a small group of retirees that congregated each weekday morning in Julia Tuttle Park. This small two-acre park had been constructed by the developer as a part of his deal to get the zoning variance that he needed for Ocean Pines Terraces. There was a thatched shed in the park, where a half-dozen retirees played pinochle in the mornings, and there was a group of rusting metal chairs under a shady strangler-fig tree, where another, smaller group of elderly men sat and talked. The group that met under the tree was called the "Wise Old Men" by the pinochle players, but they meant this sarcastically. The two groups didn't mingle, and if a man went to the park every day he would eventually have to decide which one to join. Stanley didn't play pinochle, and he didn't talk much either, having little to say and a limited education, but for the first few weeks, after silently watching the boring pinochle games, he had joined the group Under the tree, to listen to the philosophers. The dean of this group was a retired judge, who always wore a starched Seersucker suit with a bow tie. The other Wise Old Men wore wash pants and sport shirts, or sometimes T-shirts, and comfortable running shoes. Except for the judge, Stanley was the only one who wore a necktie. The group had changed personnel a few times since Stanley's retirement--some of the older men had died--but the judge was still there, looking about the same as he had in the beginning. Stanley, when he looked in the mirror to shave each morning, didn't think that he had changed much either. He realized deep down that he must have aged somewhat, because the others had, but he felt better in Florida than he had ever felt back in Michigan when he had had to go to work every day.

One morning the topic under discussion was the "dirtiest thing in the world." Theories and suggestions had been tendered, but they had all been shot down by the judge. Finally, toward noon, Stanley had looked at his cane, cleared his throat, and said: "The tip of a cane is the dirtiest thing in the world."

"That's it," the judge said, nodding sagely. "There's nothing dirtier than the tip of a cane. It taps the ground indiscriminately, touching spittle, dog droppings, any and everything in its blind groping. By the end of a short walk, the septic tip of a cane probably collects enough germs to destroy a small city. I believe you've hit upon it, Mr. Sinkiewicz, and we can safely say that this is now a closed topic."

The others nodded, and they all looked at Stanley's cane, marveling at the filthy things the rubber tip had touched as Stanley had carried it through the years. After that triumph, Stanley had contributed nothing more to the morning discussions, but he was definitely considered a fringe member and was greeted by name when he sat down to listen.

But Stanley didn't go to Julia Tuttle Park every single day like the others. He was too restless. He sometimes drove to Palm Beach instead, parked, and walked along Worth Avenue, window shopping, marveling at the high prices of things. Like Maya, he visited the International Mall on U.S. 1, or parked in the visitors' lot of the West Palm Beach Public Library. He would browse through the obituaries in the Detroit Free Press, looking for the names of old acquaintances. The fact was, Stanley didn't quite know what to do with his long free mornings, yet although he was frequently bored, searching for something to do to pass the morning hours, he was unaware of his boredom. He was retired, and he knew that a man who was retired didn't have to do anything. So this was what he did: Nothing much, except for wandering around.

Once a week he cut the lawn, whether it needed it or not. In the rainy season, lawns had to have a weekly cutting; in the winter, when the weather was dry, the lawn could have gone for three weeks or more. But by mowing one day every seven, on Tuesday afternoons, he broke up the week. Maya did all the shopping and paid all the monthly bills from their joint checking account. Stanley cashed a check for thirty-five dollars every Monday at the Riviera Beach bank, allowing himself five dollars a day for spending money, but almost always had something left over at the end of the week.