The Shadow Man (27 page)

‘Revenge.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘In Cuban society, hell, for almost all Latins, a death like that is a debt. My father and mother, they were made old by his murder. It fell to me.’

‘But what could you do?’

‘Well, I couldn’t just take a gun and shoot someone. I had to find some other way to pay.’

‘The killer?’

‘Never caught. At least, not officially. A guy fitting his description got busted coming out of a Dairy Mart with the register contents up in Palm Beach County two weeks later, but my brother’s friends and the old woman couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. The M.O. was the same. Wore the same mask, shouted the same words. Laughed the same way. Fit the pattern. But they couldn’t prosecute him for my brother’s murder.’

‘What happened?’

‘He got fifteen then, but did five. He’s back in again. I keep tabs on him. I get the prison people to keep running informants through his cell, see if he’ll talk, maybe accidentally. Just maybe say what happened to that forty-four Magnum that disappeared. Maybe shoot his mouth off about getting away with murder. I keep my brother’s case file in a drawer in my desk. Keep it updated, you know. Addresses. Statements. Whatever it will take, so that if I can ever link him concretely, the case is ready to go.’

She took a deep breath.

‘No statute of limitations on first-degree murder. No statute of limitations on revenge.’

She looked at him.

‘Obsessive, I suppose. But it’s in the blood.’

Again she paused, and he tried to think of something to say. But as he stumbled over his own words, she continued:

‘So, I guess, he’s why I went to law school. Instead of my poor brother. And he’s why I became a prosecutor, so that one day I could get up in front of a jury and point at the bastard and say he’s the one that killed him. Killed the little old lady who owned the place too, in reality. She had a weak heart and six months later passed away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Robinson said. ‘I didn’t know’ He realized this was about the stupidest, most trite thing he could say, but couldn’t stop himself.

Espy Martinez touched her free hand to her forehead. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. So there you have it. I’m sorry. We were having fun and then I launched into all this and now you look like someone caught swearing in church.’

She reached out and took a long drink from her wineglass.

‘I’d like to make a joke and get us laughing again,’ she said.

Walter Robinson thought for a moment, wondered why he felt something was missing, and then realized what it was. Before he could stop himself, he asked the question. ‘The suspect in your brother’s shooting … he was black, right?’

Martinez didn’t answer right away. Then she nodded. Robinson sighed and started to lean back, thinking to himself: there it is; there it ends. He began to get angry, not with Espy Martinez, or with himself or with anything other than the entire world, when she shot her hand out and grabbed his again, holding him fiercely, like she would if she were dangling on some precipice.

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘He was him and you are you.’

He leaned back toward her, feeling a rush of excitement.

She smiled. ‘My name,’ she said. ‘Do you know what it

means?’

‘Espy?’

‘No, silly. Esperanza.’

He grinned. ‘It’s not like I don’t know any Spanish at all. It means hope.’

She was about to reply, when the waiter arrived with their dinners. He hovered by the table, balancing the plates of food, unable to set them down over their arms, stretched across the table. He coughed and said, ‘Excuse me,’ and both Espy Martinez and Walter Robinson looked up at him and then laughed.

They ate in a rush, skipped dessert, ignored the offer of coffee. It was as if the simple confessions that they had made to each other had released them from the usual posturing, circling, feints and fakes of connection. She was quiet as he drove her across the city, to her front door.

There, he stopped the car and turned off the engine. She remained in her seat, looking toward the side of the duplex occupied by her parents. She assumed they were watching.

Robinson started to say something, but she wasn’t listening.

Instead, she turned to him and whispered with an intensity that surprised herself: ‘Take me someplace else, Walter. Anyplace. Anyplace at all. Your place. A hotel. A park. The beach, I don’t care. Just someplace different.’

He paused, looking at her. And in that moment they thrust themselves together, embracing, lips meeting electrically, and she pulled him to her, thinking that she was yanking all the loneliness and troubles in her entire life off balance and askew, and hoping that somehow the weight of him pressed against her would stabilize the windstorm of emotions soaring within her.

He took her back to his own apartment. He closed the door behind them, and they grasped at each other on the floor of his living room with the slippery urgency of a pair of lawbreakers worried about discovery. They tugged at each other’s clothing with a frantic need that transformed itself into a quick coupling, almost as if they had no time to get to know each other’s body. Espy Martinez simply pulled Walter Robinson down on top of her, trying to envelop him; for his part, he felt like a balloon blown to within a micrometer of explosion. That her skin had a particular softness, the curve of her small breasts, the shape of her

sex, the taste of the sweat that gathered on her neck - all this was information and knowledge that he was only obliquely aware of as he pushed down toward her with

demands that seemed ancient and impossible and were welcomed by her with thrusts of her own.

When he finished, he rolled to the side, breathing hard. He lay back with his forearm across his eyes. After a second he heard her say: ‘So, Walter, do you have, like, a bedroom? A bathroom? Kitchen?’

He opened his eyes to see her beside him, lifted up on one elbow, leaning over him, grinning.

‘Well, actually, yes, Espy, I do. All the usual and expected conveniences of modern life. A refrigerator. Cable television. Air-conditioning. Wall-to-wall carpeting …’

‘Yes,’ she said, laughing, and letting her hair brush over his chest. ‘I found the wall-to-wall carpet. It was right beneath me.’

As she spoke, she lowered her lips to his chest, then lay her cheek on his breast, listening to the rapid-fire beats of his heart.

‘Enthusiasm,’ he said.

‘So, Walter,’ she said quietly. ‘Who are you?’ He did not answer this time. Instead, he gathered her face in his hands and kissed her slowly. Then he gently pulled her to her feet and then reached down and lifted her up in his arms.

‘Bedroom,’ he said.

‘Romantic,’ she replied, still laughing. ‘Just don’t bump my head.’

This second time, they paced themselves, letting fingers, lips explore each other. ‘There’s time,’ Walter Robinson said. ‘There’s all the time in the world.’

Afterward he slept. But Espy Martinez felt an odd restlessness. She was both exhausted and depleted, but at the same moment filled with the satisfaction of the smitten. For a short time she watched the detective sleep, studying the relaxed angles of his face, caught by a shaft of moonlight that slid through the window. She held her hand

up against his cheek, to see the way the wan light illuminated her pale skin and made his dark flesh glisten. She had the thought that she’d stepped past some sort of fence, then berated herself, thinking that she was allowing herself to muse in racial cliches, and that if she expected to have another night beside Walter Robinson, she should try to shed these thoughts as she had pulled off her clothing; rapidly.

She slid from the bed and quietly maneuvered into the living room. It was a small apartment, in an undistinguished condominium. There was a nice view, looking back toward the bay and the city. She found his desk in one corner, placed so that he could see through the windows toward Miami. There was a picture of an elderly black woman framed in one corner. On the wall were diplomas from the police academy and from Florida International University. There was another picture of a much younger Walter Robinson, dusty, a streak of blood on one cheek, dressed in a football uniform holding a ball aloft. She recognized the colors of Miami High. She turned and saw on his desk a casual mingling of law texts, research and police department reports. She saw his notes on Sophie Millstein’s killing.

She continued to move stealthily, naked, through the moonlight. She whispered again: ‘Who are you, Walter Robinson?’

As if she could find some paper, some document, that

might explain him to her. She went to the kitchen and

smiled when she inspected the bachelor’s array of cold

beers and cold cuts that occupied the shelves. She went

back into the living room and noticed for the first time a watercolor on one wall. She approached it and saw that the artist had drawn an expanse of ocean, lit by shafts of sunlight, but that in the distance dark thunderheads had

formed, giving the entire painting a sensation of threat. It was difficult in the semidarkness to make out the artist’s signature, and she leaned toward it, peering closely, until she saw that it was only two initials: W.R. They were stuck deep in a corner, hidden right at the point where the colors changed from light to dark.

She smiled and wondered where he kept his easel and paints.

Then she returned to the bedroom and slid beneath a sheet next to him. She breathed in deeply, inhaling all the smells of their lovemaking, and closed her eyes, hoping but not really believing that there would be other nights like the one dwindling into morning around her.

He hesitated before touching her, then took a single finger and brushed back the sweep of hair from her forehead. He gently pushed at her shoulder and said, ‘Espy, we’re gonna be late. It’s morning.’

She did not open her eyes, but replied: ‘How late?’

‘It’s eight-thirty already. Late.’

She kept her eyes closed. ‘Are you in a hurry, Walter?’

‘No,’ he said. He smiled. ‘Some mornings, you just got to take your time about things.’

She reached out with both arms, like a poor actress mimicking a blind person, feeling the air, until she found his arms and shoulders and she drew him down toward her.

‘Do we have time?’

‘Probably not,’ he said, tugging the sheet away from her, pushing himself toward her.

Afterward they showered and dressed rapidly. He made some coffee, which he handed to her. She took a single swallow and grimaced.

‘Jesus, Walter. That’s terrible! Is it instant?’

‘Uh, yeah. I’m not much of a cook.’

‘Well, we’ll have to stop and get some real cafe Cubano on the way to the Justice Building.’

‘Do you want me to take you home, get your car?’

‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘Just take me to the office.’

He hesitated, then gestured with his arm, sweeping it about the apartment. It was a lost motion, speaking more of words that were difficult to speak than of anything else. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But when can we, I mean, I want to…’ and then he stopped.

She laughed. ‘Get together again?’

‘Correct.’

‘I don’t know, Walter. Where are we going to go with this?’

‘I’d like to go further,’ he answered.

‘So would I.’

They smiled at each other, as if some sort of agreement had been struck.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said. ‘I have to work a late shift tonight.’

‘Okay,’ she replied.

They joked and laughed most of the way to her office. They stopped for coffee and a sweet roll, which seemed hilarious. A cormorant flew low across the bow of his car as they crossed the causeway, which seemed comical. The mid-morning traffic had a rollicking, amusing quality to it. When they pulled to the front of the Justice Building, they were both close to giggling.

She stepped from the car and leaned back. ‘Will you call?’ she asked.

‘Of course. This afternoon. Don’t want to forget about Mr Jefferson. Those other fingerprint examinations should be finished by now. I’ll call you with Harry Harrison’s report.’

‘Brought together by Leroy Jefferson. If he only knew.’

Walter Robinson laughed loudly. ‘I wonder what he’d say.’

For a moment they looked at each other, each feeling the same, that they were standing at the starting line to something. And it was into that silence that they heard her name being called.

‘Espy!’

She turned and Robinson craned across the seat to see who was shouting. High on the steps to the massive courthouse building they could both see the lanky form of Thomas Alter. He waved, and then bounded down the steps toward them.

‘Hey, Walt, lucky to catch you here too.’

‘Hello, Tommy. Get any killers off today?’

‘Glad to see you too. Not yet. But you never know. It’s still early.’

He smiled, with just a touch of Cheshire cat grin.

‘So, Espy? You guys got your case together? You gonna put the screws to Leroy Jefferson?’

‘Tommy, you know the office’s policy on discussions. They have to be formal, with a stenographer. But I can tell you off the record that selling any plea is going to be tough, especially to Lasser. He doesn’t like it when little old ladies get strangled. Ruins his whole day. So, I’d say no chance. No chance at all.’

‘Really? No chance?’

‘You heard me.’

He didn’t seem fazed by this news. ‘Well, I don’t suppose, then, you’d like to see this …’ Alter reached into a briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

‘What’s that?’ Robinson asked. He had stepped from the car and walked around to the sidewalk, standing next to Martinez.

‘Lie detector test,’ Alter said abruptly.

‘And?’

‘Well, guess what?’

‘Don’t give us that coy crap, Tommy. What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that on this particular test my client demonstrated no signs of deception. None whatsoever. And you know what question we asked him?’

‘What?’

‘The question was nice and simple: “Did you kill Sophie Millstein in her apartment?” And guess what? He said no, and the machine says he’s telling the truth.’

‘Bullshit!’ Robinson exploded. ‘People can con those…’