The Shadow Man (26 page)

Espy Martinez nodded, but changed her tone: ‘Alter

seemed confident. I noticed that.’

‘Same to me.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see a reason, except that he’s an arrogant sonofabitch who always acts confident as hell right up to the moment he realizes he’s got no defense. Then he’ll come whining and begging for a plea bargain. Should be in a couple of weeks. Give him his moment or two.’

‘No plea. That came down from the boss.’

‘Good. He’ll want it, you know. That’s what the defense strategy will be: find some little weakness that he can exploit into some worry, so that instead of taking a risk with a jury, we’ll settle for the mandatory twenty-five.’

‘I don’t think the State will agree to that.’

‘That’s what he’ll be shooting for. Anything that keeps Jefferson off Death Row will be a victory for him.’

‘I wish we had a confession.’

‘Yeah. Make things perfect, wouldn’t it? And I would have got one out of the bastard if Alter hadn’t shown up.’

‘Juries like a confession in a murder case. Makes them feel certain they’re doing the right thing. Especially when they have to vote on the death penalty.’

‘I know that. But we’ve got just about everything else.’

‘Can we go over it all one more time? Maybe we can see a problem ahead of time if we talk it out? I’d rather be laying in wait for Alter when he comes walking through the door, hat in hand. Makes it easier to say no.’

Robinson grabbed at this opportunity. ‘Why don’t we make it dinner, or something? I’ll bring the case file, we can eat something, go over it slowly…’

Espy Martinez hesitated. Her skin flushed red and she felt hot. ‘Walter, I don’t know about mixing work and…’

She didn’t finish, but he jumped into the silence.

‘Hey. Don’t worry about it. A real date would be going to a movie or a play or a concert or a game or something. You know, where I show up at your place wearing a tie and carrying flowers and a box of candy and I open the car door for you. A real date requires nervousness and polite small talk and manners. This is something different. I kinda feel I owe you something for the other night. I mean, you weren’t supposed to end up shooting someone. I feel downright guilty about that.’

Martinez smiled, then replied: ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Well, it sure didn’t happen the way I had it all worked out in my head.’

‘Hey,’ she joked, ‘do you think I mind if all of a sudden everyone around here thinks I’m dangerous?’

‘Dangerous and notorious?’

‘That’s right. Two-fisted and pistol-packing. A woman to be reckoned with.’

The two of them laughed.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow night.’

‘I’ll pick you up at your office?’

‘No, at my house; You remember how to get there?’

He did.

They did not, of course, end up talking about the case, except in a perfunctory fashion at the start of the evening, almost as if it was something necessary that they had to get out of the way. He took her to an open-air restaurant that overlooked Biscayne Bay, the sort of place where the waiter behaves pretentiously and then serves mediocre food that is obscured by heavy sauces and a spectacular view. As they sat, he could see the blues of the water deepen, traveling from far out in the ocean toward the shore, first a pale, sky color, to a more solid azure, and then

finally into the deep navy, almost indistinguishable from black, that heralded the summertime night. City lights blinked on and seemed to score the water surface, as if painted on the rippling waves by an impressionist.

She sat across from him and knew it had all the easy romance of the tropics. She could feel a light breeze blowing through the folds of the loose-fitting dress she wore, touching her skin in hidden places with the familiarity of an old lover. She leaned her head back, then ran a hand through the sweep of her hair. She looked over at Walter Robinson, thought him terrifically handsome, and thought too that were her parents to see her sitting across from him, they would not speak to her for days, unless they were persuaded this meeting was all business. So, in deference to this image and to at least create the illusion of work, she asked:

‘Jefferson?’

Robinson smiled. ‘Right. A working dinner. I would say things are looking dark for Leroy Jefferson, which might be a pun, but we’ll leave race out of this.’

She nodded. ‘How so?’

‘Well, just before I left the office tonight, I got a call from Harry Harrison - I mean, how does someone get a name like that, anyway? - over in the fingerprints section. Guess whose prints showed up on Sophie Millstein’s bureau drawer?’

‘Our man Jefferson?’

‘None other.’

‘Well, that’s that, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Pretty much so. Harry said he still has to check the prints on the jewelry box, the sliding glass door, and the body print they took from Sophie’s throat, but thought we’d like to know what he’d come up with so far.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Jefferson.’

‘And Kadosh gave us a pretty good identification from the photo lineup.’

‘What’s pretty good?’

‘He picked out Jefferson’s mug shot and said he couldn’t be certain unless he saw the man in person, but he was pretty sure he was the man. The key thing with the old guy is keeping him away from his wife. He’s sort of used to having her tell him everything he thinks, and she has an opinion on everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Trust me. Everything.’

‘So?’

‘So, I can’t see the problem. If there is one.’

‘Where does that leave us?’

Walter Robinson grinned. ‘Actually, right here. Glass of wine?’

Espy Martinez nodded. She watched him pour her glass, then she slowly drank some, letting the cool, fruity taste descend through her. She looked out over the bay and thought for an instant that what she was thinking was like plunging into the waves after sunset.

‘Tell me, Walter. Who are you?’

He smiled. ‘Who am I? I’m a police detective that’s almost got his law degree and—’

She held up her hand. ‘No. Not what are you. Who are you?’

Robinson thought he heard an earnestness in her voice, and abruptly realized that she was asking more of him than he’d expected. He felt a momentary reluctance, but then, before he had a chance to check himself, started to speak slowly, quietly, almost as if part of a conspiracy.

‘I swim,’ he said, lifting a hand toward the bay. ‘I swim alone, when no one is watching, far from shore. In deep water. One mile, at least. Two, sometimes.’

He stopped there. He did not describe what he liked to do, which was to drive out to the tip of Key Biscayne to the state park at Cape Florida late in the afternoon, when all the beet-red tourists and the beered-up teenagers had already packed their picnic lunches and were trying to beat the shadows home. He would slide into the water and, taking powerful overhand strokes, push himself against the waves out past the red and white marker buoys, past any boundaries, to where he could feel the conflicting tug of tidal currents pulling at his arms and legs. There he would turn, treading water, and stare back at the key, down toward the rows-of condos, or off past the ancient abandoned brick lighthouse, where the ocean joins the bay. He would let the waters rock him, as if they were trying to insist they were safe, when he knew they were not. After a few moments he would take a deep breath and once again battle the rips and flows, dodging the occasional man-o’-war with its lethal sting, ignoring all thoughts of sharks, teasing exhaustion and the inevitable death it would bring, until he was able to touch sand beneath his toes, and he would drag himself back onto the beach, safe again, breathing harshly.

‘Why do you swim?’ she asked quietly.

‘Because when I was growing up in the Grove, none of the black kids ever learned how to swim. There were no pools and the beach was three bus transfers away. We lived in the most watery county in the entire nation - did you know that? - but we never learned how to swim. I remember, every year or so, there was always a story in the paper about some black kid drowning in a canal, where he was fishing or gigging frogs or just playing around. Slipped and fell into four feet of water and panicked and struggled and cried out, but no one was ever there and so they drowned. The white kids never drowned. You see, they

had pools behind their homes and were taught. Breast-stroke. Australian crawl. Sidestroke and butterfly. All that happened to them was they got wet and maybe they got yelled at when they got home and tracked water into the house.’

He put his glass of wine down. ‘I sound angry. I don’t want to sound angry’ She shook her head. She realized she had been told something important, almost like a clue hidden on a page of a mystery novel and that later she would see why it was important.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It makes it easier for me.’ ‘Easier for what?’

She didn’t reply. What she thought was: understanding what’s going to happen.

‘So, Espy, now I have a question for you,’ Robinson said after a moment’s quiet.

‘Go ahead. Shoot.’ She laughed slightly. ‘Maybe that’s a bad choice of words for me.’ ‘Tell me why you’re alone.’ ‘What do you mean?’

He made a small gesture with his hand, as if to say: you’re young, you’re beautiful, educated, and intelligent -and should be surrounded with suitors. Which she took as a compliment of sorts.

‘Because I’ve never found anyone who—’ She stopped, uncertain how to proceed. For a second she hoped Walter Robinson would step into the silence with some other question, then realized he wouldn’t, and so she continued, a small hesitation in her voice. ‘I suppose because of my brother.’ She took a deep breath. ‘My poor dead brother. My poor dead dumb brother.’ ‘I didn’t know, I’m sorry,’ he started. ‘No. It’s okay. It’s been almost twelve years. Labor Day

weekend. He was to start law school the next week…’

‘Car accident?’

‘No. Nothing that innocent. He was coming back from a snorkeling trip in the Keys with a couple of college friends. It was getting late, and they stopped at a convenience store to get something to eat. You know, stupid stuff: chips and beers and Ring-Dings and Slim Jims and all that crap that twenty-two-year-old males consume with such passion. Anyway, there they are, it’s a little half bodega, half 7-Eleven, just off South Dixie Highway, way down below Kendall, and they’ve got all this junk and my brother is teasing the little old Cuban lady who’s running the store. You know, asking her if she’s got a daughter, and if not, is she single, good-natured stuff, and they’re both laughing and speaking in Spanish, and he’s kidding his friends, because they’re Anglos and can’t understand what he and the little old lady are talking about, when a guy comes in through the front door wearing a stocking mask and waving a forty-four-caliber Magnum. He screams at everyone to grab the floor and somebody open the register. And everybody just freezes, then they do what he says, but he’s impatient, you know, because he’s wired on PCP, I guess, or maybe he’s just mean, or maybe he doesn’t like Latinos, I don’t know, but when the old woman hesitates, he just reaches out and pistol-whips her, right across the face. One minute she is joking and flirting with my brother, my poor dumb brother, and the next she is bleeding, her nose busted, her jaw broken. And my brother gets up, just to his knees, and shouts at the guy to stop it, leave her alone, and the guy takes one little look at my brother and laughs just once like he’s not sure who’s crazier, my brother or himself, and then shoots him, right in the chest. One shot. Boom! The old woman screams and starts praying, and my brother’s friends are hugging

the floor, figuring they’re next. And they would have been, because the bad guy turns to them and points the Magnum and pulls the trigger. Once. Twice. Then he spins and points it at the old woman, and pulls the trigger a third time. Nothing. Click. Click. Click. They’re too shocked and scared to realize the bastard only had one bullet in the gun. The bad guy laughs and then he heads out the door with the cash from the register and a bag of Doritos….’

She took another deep breath. ‘One bullet and a bag of Doritos.’

‘I’m sorry—’ Robinson started, but she held up her hand.

‘My poor dumb brother who should have kept his mouth shut but that wasn’t the kind of guy he was, doesn’t even make it to South Miami Hospital.’

‘It’s okay,’ Robinson started, unsure whether he wanted her to continue.

‘No,’ Martinez said quietly. ‘I should get all this out. I was fifteen, home in bed, asleep. I heard my parents crying, and then they went to the hospital. They left me behind. Alone. I sat up all night in the dark waiting for them to come back. I never did see my brother again, except at the funeral, and then he didn’t really look like himself, you know. I mean, he wasn’t grinning and teasing me like he always did. It was three days before I was to celebrate my quince. Do you know what that is?’

‘Well, sort of. It’s a party Latin girls get when they turn fifteen.’

‘Well, yeah, it’s a party. But it’s more than that. I don’t suppose it’s quite as big a deal as a bar mitzvah for a Jewish kid, because that’s all religion, but it comes close. It’s this celebration that announces that now you are a woman. There’s tradition and the sense that now you belong to something. It’s filled with fancy, frilly dresses and giggling

and slow music and chaperones, you know, parents watching all these children behaving like adults. In the Cuban community, it is an important event. You plan it for months. At fifteen, it’s the only thing you think about for days and days. But mine turned into my brother’s funeral.’

‘It must have been difficult,’ Robinson said, then thought that sounded stupid because it was so obvious. So instead, he reached across the table and touched Espy Martinez’s hand. She immediately grabbed his and held it tightly.

‘In my house, you see, my dead brother dominated everything. He was supposed to become a lawyer. Take over my father’s business. Become important. Influential. Raise a family and become something. And they never said it, but when he died, that all fell to me. But something else did too.’

‘What’s that?’