The Four Corners Of The Sky (29 page)

Back at the hotel, after further unsuccessful phone calls to the Miami Vice Sergeant Daniel Hart, who remained “away from his desk,” she kept herself busy on her laptop; she answered her emails, went over her divorce papers from the lawyer, paid her bills, prepared for her fall class at Annapolis, and edited a lecture she would deliver in November at the International Organization of Women Pilots. She ironed her dress uniform.

Finally she bought a bathing suit and took a swim in the hotel pool, where a peculiar sense of peace came suddenly over her, an acceptance that there was nothing more she could do until she could do something. It was a strange unsettling sensation.

After her swim, with Malpy on her lap, Annie fell asleep on a blue deck chair by the pool. At some point she was half-awakened by what indistinctly felt like a shadow moving across her cheek, leaning over her, shading a coppery sun. Then the shadow moved away. She sat up startled, looking around, but there was no one near the pool. It must have been a dream. She fell back asleep.

Her cell phone sang shrilly on the table.

The caller was Sergeant Hart, finally returning her messages. While he had the same pleasant baritone as in their previous talk days earlier, he had taken on a curiously inquisitorial tone. “This is Daniel Hart,
MPD
. Do you have Jack Peregrine with you here in Miami?”

Confused, Annie rubbed her face to awaken. No, she confessed, she hadn’t yet located her father; that’s why she’d kept calling Hart, hoping he could help her.

He replied brusquely, “Withhold his whereabouts again, I’ll bring you in as an accessory.”

Baffled, she sat up. “What?”

Hart sounded bizarrely annoyed. “You should have told me you were headed to St. Louis as soon as you heard from him. You flew there to help him avoid arrest. Aiding and abetting an escaped suspect is a felony.”

“Hey, just a minute here—”

“I’m on my way to the Dorado now. I’m sorry you picked it. My ex loves that bar so much it makes me sick even to set foot in it.”

Annie swung her legs over the chair side. “What the hell are you talking about? What’s that got to do with me?”

“Sit tight. Don’t make me arrest you.”

“Are you nuts?” Indignation lifted Annie to her feet and sent Malpy tumbling. The little dog trotted to the pool and lay down, staring at his reflection in the water.

Hart added, “And stay away from Rafael Rook.”

Annie paced along the pool edge. “How do you know Rafael Rook?”

“You always answer a question with a question, Annie?”

Once again she was taken aback by his use of her name. “What are you, spying on me? What’s it to you if I see Rafael Rook?”

Hart told her that her “Cuban muchacho” had “a rap sheet thick as the Miami Yellow Pages,” that Rook and her father were notorious in the city for all the cons they’d pulled off together in the last ten years. If she persisted in “hooking up with them”—

She exploded. “Goddamn it, I’m not committing crimes with Jack Peregrine. He’s my father—”

“Ma Barker had sons.”

“This is insane! He said he was dying of cancer. I’m just trying to find him before it happens!”

Hart turned abruptly affable. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He was not.

For another thirty minutes, Annie paced the Dorado lobby. After a while, she returned to the large tiled swimming pool and paced beside it. Daniel Hart never arrived. The cell phone number he’d given her still didn’t answer; his office at the Miami Police Department kept putting her on hold.

A tan waiter with bleached hair, who’d been staring at her legs as he hurried past, almost ran into her. She grabbed at his tray of martinis and stopped the blue glasses from tipping.

“Good reflexes,” he told her.

She asked him if he knew where she could go rollerblading.

He gestured up the boardwalk, adding in an expansive outburst, “You’re getting a burn. Sun’s a bitch.” He pointed at her legs.

On rented red rollerblades, gleaming with sunscreen, running shoes tied around her neck, Annie skimmed along the boardwalk of Ocean Drive, eating slices of an orange, dodging in and out of batches of beach-walkers. She felt her breathing slow as she sped along.

The therapist she’d seen only once had accused her of an addiction to exercise. Perhaps it had seemed that way to a man who could sit in a chair all day, ingesting chocolate-coated coffee beans. But Annie had been raised by a tennis player, her aunt Sam, and by—in his youth—a long-distance runner, her uncle Clark, and from the age of seven on, from sleepy dawns in lap pools to cold nights on track fields, her days had been busy with sports. In sports, as in the Navy, there were rules, and there were prizes; both the restrictions and rewards were ways of keeping life in order. She liked it that in a track event, there were no limits except those of her body’s willingness to refuse defeat. Although smaller than her teammates, Annie had graduated from Emerald High School with four varsity letters. “There’s nothing a woman can’t do,” her aunt had promised her, and Annie had believed it and had proved it on track fields and diving boards, in the muddy sleet at Annapolis, in the sky.

All right, she told herself as she skated along Miami streets, so what if the peculiar Rafael Rook hadn’t shown up and neither had this equally bizarre detective, Daniel Hart? So what if her father remained the receding mirage he had always been? So what if she had no name for her mother but the one on a birth certificate that was obviously a joke, since it was impossible that her mother was Claudette Colbert, who’d been in her seventies when Annie was born? Hadn’t Claudette Colbert done all right as a role model?

When a child, of course, Annie hadn’t recognized the famous name of the dead movie star and so had believed when she’d first seen her birth certificate that Claudette Colbert really was her mother’s name. Aunt Sam, the film lover, had tried to break the news to her gently and had eventually introduced her to the actress by playing her a tape of
It Happened One Night.

From the moment Annie watched Claudette Colbert dive off her father’s yacht[__] in the beginning of that film, then hop on a night bus in Miami and wisecrack her way north with Clark Gable—the man for whom Clark Goode had been named—she had liked the small unflappable woman with her chic French bangs, throaty voice, and civilized laughter, with her new moon of an eyebrow raised at the folly of men.

She had asked Aunt Sam for more Claudette Colbert movies and had watched them all, loving the way there were so many airplane pilots in the films; how nothing ever fazed the woman, not Mohawks, not Japanese prison camps, not Nero, not running an egg farm with Fred MacMurray or racing around Paris with Don Ameche in his taxi, not even a whole trainload of drunken quail hunters on their bacchanalian way to Palm Beach.

Annie had replayed Claudette Colbert’s movies until she’d memorized them, pausing the tapes to study the actress’s gestures. The star gave the child something with which to fill in the otherwise empty concept called “my mother.”

Not that she looked for someone to do the day-to-day job. Sam did fine. But she was naturally curious about the original and as there were no other candidates but the star’s name on the certificate, it was to the star that she turned. Jack had told her so many contradictory stories that it was clear he couldn’t remember what absurdity he’d previously made up about the woman who’d borne Annie. So why not take Claudette Colbert as a maternal ideal?

By her teen years, Annie’s enthusiasm for Claudette Colbert faded. The star became just a French joke she shared with Georgette. “
Comme ma mère, Claudette, toujours dit,”
she would say to her friend.[__] She hadn’t thought much about her “real mother” for years now. Oddly enough, it was her father’s out-of-the-blue demand for help that had brought that unknown woman back into view.

Weaving quickly through traffic, Annie urged herself to take a wry Claudette look at the last few days. So what if—as seemed quite possible—this lunatic misadventure did not provide her with her real mother’s real name? Be fair, what had been lost from her life that had been there yesterday morning? She’d missed a birthday party, that’s all, and she had never really liked her birthday parties anyhow, not after the one when her father had carried her around a roomful of adult strangers who had laughed too loudly too close to her face and had smelled of alcohol.

So what? Her family, her friends, would all still be there in Emerald when she returned from Miami. Meanwhile, wasn’t it a revelation that she could spend three whole hours with Brad Hopper, whom she was divorcing, without crying her eyes out or wanting to murder him? Wasn’t it in fact pleasant that here she was in Miami skating along beside the white beach and blue sea? As Clark joked when she fell off her bike once, “Try again. Life goes on. Don’t you believe in re-cycling?”

Maybe when this was over, she could just sit in Emerald for a while, visiting with Sam and Clark, with D. K., with Georgette and other friends she hadn’t seen for ages. She could take the time to let life go on.

Pulling down her Navy cap, Annie ducked her head and doubled her speed. As she skated into a neighborhood of shady streets, she found herself on a familiar block; pastel stucco houses with tall skinny palms and wide twisted banyans lined a curving flat avenue. When her cell phone sang at her, she sat on the curb to answer it. She heard a female voice she didn’t recognize.

“Is this Lt. Anne Goode?”

“This is Annie Goode, yes? Who is this please?”

The woman had a low smoky voice. “You’re Jack Peregrine’s daughter? In Emerald, North Carolina?”

Annie was so surprised she answered the question. “Yes, but I’m in Miami now. Who is this?”

“Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.” The call abruptly ended.

“What the hell?” Annie said aloud. On her cell phone the incoming call was listed as “Private.” Who had it been? Some enemy of her father’s, or some friend? Someone who wanted to steal the courier case, or to whom the case actually belonged? Was it the same person who had arranged to have Jack Peregrine beaten bloody in the Royal Coach Motel? If so, why warn Annie? She would ask Trevor if there were some way to discover the number for a “Private” incoming call.

Looking across the intersection, she recognized the low pink stucco building with its logo in frosted glass—a sun on a horizon line. She’d unknowingly made her way back to “Golden Days,” the extended care facility for “active living,” where earlier Miss Napp had called security on her.

Suddenly she heard a car braking and then the violent screech of skidding tires. She spun around in time to see a pedestrian walk right into the path of a slow-moving large white sedan. The car’s front fender hit the man and he rolled off the hood like a doll made of rags. His cloth knapsack flew into the air. He lay motionless in the gutter.

Out of the big car scooted a tan elderly woman, whose hair and slacks and sleeveless nylon sweater were as pink as her Oldsmobile was white. With a groan the woman bent down to her victim. Quickly, Annie skated across the street and knelt beside the prostrate man. “Don’t move him,” Annie said to the woman.

“I didn’t! Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so.” There was no blood on the man and Annie could feel him breathing. Then his eyelid fluttered and one large rather sweet black eye blinked at her.

The woman grabbed her arm. “He’s dead.”

Gently Annie lifted the victim’s eyelid with her fingers; a round black eye stared curiously back at her. She turned to the terrified driver. “He’s not dead.”

The prostrate victim was a slender disheveled Hispanic man, not much older than Annie herself, with long rich black hair, come loose from his ponytail, standing out from his head as if he’d suffered an electrical shock. He had an attractive face with beautiful large soft dark eyes and gently curved full lips. He wore dirty bright-colored clothes that neither matched nor fit—the chino pants were too tight and the short-sleeved rayon shirt (with three fuchsia flamingos across its front) was too big.

The old woman kept shaking Annie’s arm. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s fine,” Annie told her. “Are you all right?”

The woman gave her a look of scorn. “He doesn’t look ‘fine.’”

“Fine? Fine?” whispered the man, still not moving. “There is no conclusive evidence that I’m fine.” He added in his soft Hispanic accent. “Things are broken.”

“What things?” Annie asked. “Leg, arm?”

“I think both,” he replied.

“Can you move them?”

“Can? Should? Categorically different. Something’s indisputably broken. But do not,” he turned to the older woman, “let us have any acrimony.” He tried to move and moaned. “We could avoid the hospital, a pleasure for everyone.” Pain spasmed through him loosely. “Three hundred dollars? I am not a greedy man. A trip to a Rite-Aid, a few braces, something for the pain.”

“Aha!” The elderly driver gasped, reaching on the curb for a big blue-beaded pocketbook. “I’m calling the police!” She poured the contents to the pavement, found a large cell phone in the pile. “I know you! You pulled this same stunt on my friend Louise right here at Golden Days. Four hundred and fifty dollars, she paid you.” The woman punched in 911.

“Hang up,” the man said, groaning. He grabbed the phone. “We don’t need the police.” He began lifting one arm, then the other, one leg, then the other; his limbs seemed to move without his volition, like a puppet whose strings were tugged. “I’m feeling much better.”

The old woman looked earnestly at Annie. “I don’t use this phone when I drive. I watch the road. I’m Mrs. Joyce Weimar. I swear before God, he walked right in front of me like a sleepwalker. I was thinking, is he blind? But where’s his dog? Here’s my license, Mrs. Joyce Weimar, just renewed. He’s a crook.”

Annie nodded at Mrs. Weimar reassuringly. She told the victim, “She’s right, you walked right in front of her car.”

“I am wounded she impugns my integrity.”

There was something very familiar to Annie about this man’s soft husky voice and polysyllabic speech. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”