The Four Corners Of The Sky (41 page)

Not until they were on their way back to the Dorado, and caught in a morning traffic jam caused by a fender bender at a big intersection, did Annie announce her intention of driving right now to the Miami police department headquarters on Second Avenue to find Sergeant Hart. She explained her conviction that the best way to keep both Raffy and her father out of jail was for her to make a deal with the police as quickly as possible. Tell Hart everything. So that’s what they were going to do. Right now.

The closeness they’d established at the track vanished. Raffy refused to let her take him to the “son-of-a-bitch cops.” Asked to listen to reason, he declined, lapsing into indignant Spanish that she couldn’t follow although she was able to interpret the gist from his tone. Finally she blurted out that she’d already left a message with Hart, saying that Raffy and she had found the gold statue called the Queen of the Sea and that they wished to turn it over to the police. If indeed the relic was a relic, it belonged to Cuba.

The slender musician stared at her in horror then abruptly threw open the car door and tumbled out of it into the street. “
Gracias!”
he shouted over his shoulder.

“Raffy! Come back here!”

But he ran across the divider into the rush-hour traffic on Ocean Drive.

“Raffy!”

Dodging honking cars, threading his way to the beach side of the busy four-lane, he soon disappeared into the crowd.

Annie shook her head, watching him go. The car behind her beeped. She leaned over, closed the door. Traffic moved and she moved with it. Oddly enough, she had no doubt she would see him again.

The desk officer at the Vice Unit of the central Miami Police Department was evasive when Annie persisted in her demands to speak with Sgt. Daniel Hart, whose home number and address were unlisted in the phone directory. Finally he snarled at her, “Try La Loca. It’s a bar in Coconut Grove. Dan’s there every night.”

Night? It was only nine-thirty in the morning. She needed to see Hart sooner than that. The desk officer was sorry, but could do nothing about it.

He connected her with another Vice detective to whom she gave the basic facts about the fraud case that Hart was pursuing, although she did not give him the details of her father’s whereabouts or the whereabouts of the statue of the Queen. This detective didn’t appear to be much interested but he agreed to pass along her information to Hart. Clearly the capture of Jack Peregrine was not an urgent priority here at
MPD
, nor was the current location of Sgt. Daniel Hart.

She headed back onto the expressway, making slow progress through the morning’s rush-hour traffic. As she drove, she called Golden Days. They had no Dr. Parker on their staff, or at least wouldn’t admit to it. When she asked to speak to Coach Ronny Buchstabe, they tried to put her through to their administrator, Ms. Skippings. Annie hung up. She didn’t want her dad arrested until she could set up an amnesty arrangement with Hart. Better just to leave him resting at Golden Days. She called Sam in Emerald to fill her in on her latest encounters with her father, including a report of Jack’s weak condition in the hospital. She also described the discovery of the gold statue in the courier case and Rook’s endless tales of Jack’s criminal past. But it was Jack’s current health that Sam most wanted information on.

Hearing that he might really be dying of cancer, Sam made a sudden sobbing noise but stopped herself quickly with a sharp laugh.

“I don’t know what to think,” Annie told her. “Is it true? Is it a con? What do you think?”

The truth was that Sam thought her brother had terminal cancer, but she quickly reassured her niece that “Jack’s pulling our leg. But it’s a very, very bad joke.”

Annie agreed that it wasn’t funny. Meanwhile it seemed likely that, even if terminal, Jack’s condition wasn’t immediately critical; when she’d seen him yesterday he wasn’t even in intensive care. But she would definitely speak with a doctor at Golden Days as soon as possible and would insist that they move her father to a better hospital, even if it meant returning him to prison. As soon as she found the elusive Daniel Hart, she would sort it all out.

“Poor Jack,” sighed Sam. “He got mixed up with a bad crowd.”

“Right. Poor dad. This Feliz Diaz must have corrupted him.”

Sam said, “Listen, if I’ve heard of Feliz Diaz, he’s a kingpin, because you know I never watch that junk TV news and I don’t read the right-wing rags.”

“Sam, you think
Newsweek
and the
New York Times
are right-wing rags.”

“Bought and sold, baby
.
” Sam urged Annie to collect Jack and fly him home on one of Brad’s Hopper Jets so that Clark could get him admitted to the hospital in Emerald where Sam could watch over him.

“I can’t keep borrowing Brad’s jets. I’m divorcing him.”

“Are you sure? I just want you to be happy.”

“Come on, Sam. Were you happy? Like Clark says, who’s happy?”

Sam claimed that she was much happier than she’d used to be. The older she got, the less she cared about crap that made you unhappy, like what anybody else thought of her, and how much money she had, and what she might have, could have, should have done better in the past. Like that double-fault serve in the ’83 national first round that had haunted her for ten years. She just wished she could help Annie not waste these years of her youth that Sam herself had wasted.

Annie said, “Sam, don’t get philosophical on me. I’ve heard enough of that from Raffy Rook today.”

“Raffy?”

“Rafael Rook. By the way, he told me Dad said my mother’s name was Kay Denham. Think that’s possible?”

There was a long pause. Then Sam said, “Sweetie, Kay Denham is the name of the character Claudette Colbert played in
I Met Him in Paris.
”

“Goddamn him!” Annie made her exit turn so fast her tires squealed. “Why would he even tell Raffy that?”

“Leave well enough alone,” suggested Sam.

Annie said that she
had
left well enough alone for decades. It was Jack Peregrine who had hauled her back into his life. “So too bad. No way I’m dropping this, Sam. Bye.”

Annie followed the exit back to South Beach and the Hotel Dorado where she answered all her Annapolis emails and sent her uniform in a rush order to be dry-cleaned. Okay, if she had to wait till tomorrow morning, she’d wait. Maybe that was her challenge; she hated waiting and so she was forced to do it. She hated not working and never took vacations. She had so much unused leave that the Navy had told her to use it or lose it. How long had it been since she’d answered to no schedule? Not since she’d started elementary school. All right, today she’d win the war of waiting. Maybe she’d even go shopping. Maybe she’d go to a bookstore and buy a book and sit by the Dorado pool and read it. She could do anything she wanted. That would be the hard part.

Late that afternoon, Annie was swimming laps at the hotel pool. As she swam, methodical, classic form, she determined that if she had a mother out there anywhere alive, she would somehow get that woman’s real name out of her father and would track her down and…why…?

What would she even want from the woman at this point, besides asking her why she had ever left her baby behind with a man like Jack Peregrine? Maybe it was only that. She would ask her that one question.

Annie thought about how her first Navy flight instructor had yelled at her in the cockpit as they’d sat in the jet on the rainy deck of the
USS
Enterprise
. “You gotta
go
, Goode! You women wanna join the Navy, you gotta fly a Tomcat not a pussycat.
Commit to go, damn it!
” And she had forced herself to set aside both his remark and her fear. She had taken a long breath and then shot her jet forward off the deck of that rolling ship in what the instructor had admitted after they’d landed was a goddamn 90 percent perfect takeoff. Afterwards, he’d made her repeat the takeoff to get the other 10 percent right. And Annie had done it again. And again.

If she were asked to claim a single virtue in herself, it would be that she didn’t quit. She had never failed to cross a high school track meet finish line, however much it hurt. She had never failed to crawl over the last wall of the Annapolis obstacle course, however bigger, stronger male midshipmen mocked her. And in a month she would break a record testing a new jet. Or if she failed, she would try again. She wouldn’t quit.

Swimming faster, Annie’s hand touched the pool’s end; she neatly flipped herself and headed back in the other direction in her smooth steady crawl. Lap forty-eight.

Forty-nine.

Fifty.

As she climbed out of the pool, reaching for her towel, her glance caught sight of a woman at the other end of the large long rectangular pool, standing near the diving board. To look at the woman, Annie had to face into the blinding dazzle of the sunset, so all she really could see was a flame of dark-gold hair and the glint from oversized sunglasses and flare from a gold bracelet. Annie toweled water from her face. When she looked again, the woman was gone. The woman she’d seen at Golden Days.

Annie hurried around the pool edge to the diving board. There was a cigarette crushed in the hotel’s black ashtray on a table. It was a Chesterfield, a small lipstick smear on the end of the paper. It was warm. Who would smoke unfiltered cigarettes anymore? Except her father and this sun-shadowed woman in his life.

At the same time, back in Emerald, Sam was instructing the high-school movie fan who worked for her at Now Voyager to “woman the store.” Sam retired to the editing room where she was supposed to be transferring old Super-8 films to
DVD
for a client. But what she actually did was to sit there in the dark, watching a film called “Annie.”

Over the years she’d been adding material to this loop, reorganizing its sequence of clips a dozen times. The movie now began with some poorly lit footage that Jack had shot decades ago on that surprise month-long visit to Pilgrim’s Rest with his one-year-old daughter. Anne Samantha Peregrine.

The first clip showed Sam running after the baby Annie who crawled at an amazingly fast pace over to the screen door, which she tried to push open with her head. Sam, laughing, opened the door and let her pull herself out onto the porch. In the next, Annie was careening along the hallway in a bright yellow plastic learning walker that Sam had bought her. It had a steering wheel, horn, radio buttons, a headlight, and turn signals. Annie was laughing in delight.

The next clip, shot at the end of the month’s visit, showed Sam on her knees in the morning room. She held her arms out to Annie a few feet away, standing unsteadily in little red overalls. Spike-haired, round-faced, irresistibly smiling, she held her arms tight around a table’s leg—the table on which, years later, the puzzle of the blue sky would sit. In the silent film, Sam kept calling to Annie to come on, come on, walk to her.

Suddenly letting go of the table, laughing, tipping, staggering in a joyful unbalance, Annie ran fast across that vast space between risk and safety and fell into her aunt’s outreached arms.

Alone in the editing room, Sam clicked the “Annie”
DVD
forward to later footage, shot with a camcorder sixteen years after those first steps of Annie’s. This footage had sound. It opened with a long shot of the Emerald High stadium as the school’s marching band came onto the field, playing “Johnny B. Goode.” Annie had just won the National Youth Speed Race, urging the
King of the Sky
to a speed of which D. K. Destin had not thought it capable. On the football field the band formed the shape of an airplane, while the bandleader stood on a platform beside cheerleaders who sang into a mike:

Her mama told her someday, though you are a girl,

You will be the fastest in the big old world.

Saying Annie P. Goode tonight.

Go Go

Go Annie Go

The camera then zoomed to a closeup shot of Clark, seated right beside Sam. Clowning, he pulled his bright green Emerald High tasseled ski cap down over his head. Then the camera zoomed back to Annie as she walked out onto the field, waving and smiling. She held up the trophy, and shook it at the sky.

In the edit room, Sam paused the film on the teenaged Annie’s face. She looked very much like the young woman who had so long ago broken Jack’s heart. Or so at least he’d claimed to his sister.

Sam studied the shot of Annie’s face until it went off “pause” and the screen turned as blank blue as the puzzle of the sky.

T
hat evening, taking the
MPD
desk officer’s advice, Annie drove to the bar named La Loca to look for Daniel Hart. A bartender there told her that Hart was indeed a daily, usually showing up around sunset. She promised to point him out when he arrived.

Half an hour passed. Young people arrived by twos, threes, dozens. Their voices grew quickly louder at the crowded bar. None of them was the Miami detective.

Annie moved to a booth where she ordered a salad and a bottle of flat water. The waiter looked disappointed by her Spartan choices. Above her head hung blue fish netting in which large neon blue plastic martini glasses tangled with starfish. Barbie dolls in bathing suits lay in the net against G.I. Joes and model cars.

She phoned Trevor in Maryland, describing her visit to her father at Golden Days, the strange call from the woman telling her to stay away, her surprise when Rafael Rook and she opened the case in which they’d found something that resembled the gold Queen of the Sea (which was now locked in her hotel room). She gave Trevor Sergeant Hart’s phone number and the license plate number of the black Mercedes she’d seen outside Golden Days: Was it in fact the racketeer Feliz Diaz’s car? Could Trevor also find out anything about Diaz’s girlfriend, Helen Clark?

Trevor grouchily told Annie that he didn’t work for her, he worked for the U.S. government.