I had a pretty good idea that the money being moved around the perimeter of Cricket O'Connor's life was being cleaned by someone, somewhere. First rule of dealing with assholes: Follow the money.
'When I was robbing banks for the IRA, it wasn't so difficult to move money,' Fiona said. I'd gone to her condo in the marina after meeting with Cricket, and Sam went off to do a little snooping. I filled Fiona in on the details, plus some of my suspicions, and then sat at her kitchen table and thumbed through a stack of society magazines that Cricket O'Connor had given me earlier in the day, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man she called Dixon Woods in the background of someone else's photo spread, since she told me the two of them had 'made the scene' whenever he was in town. The 'scene' looked to be something like the senior prom, but with elaborate ice sculptures instead of balloon art and no one under fifty-five to be found, but in pretty much the same gaudy outfits.
While Fiona cooked a Persian dish that had a lot of onions, peppers and lamb in it, and that smelled vaguely like the month I spent living above a cafe in Iran a few years back, I also tried to figure out how to approach the whole Natalya issue. I hadn't told Fiona about Natalya yet, knowing that it would be the sort of thing that would probably cause her to purchase guns for her own personal use, and I wanted to control that situation for as long as I could.
'You walked in,' Fiona continued, her voice downright wistful, 'shot a few people in the knees, locked a few others in the vault and then took what you needed. You drove down the street, ran up the stairs of the flat, dumped the money out on the bed, rolled around a bit and then went out for a pint.'
'A simpler time,' I said. The magazine I was reading-and by reading, I mean flipping through with a growing unease-was something called Palm Life, a magazine dedicated to, according to the slug line on its masthead, 'the good life and golden years beneath the palms.' There weren't any actual stories in the magazine, just elaborate photo spreads with a descriptive paragraph about who was in the picture and why those people were, I guess, living the good life beneath the palms. 'Tell me something, Fi. What is the allure of being seventy and wearing a tiger-print miniskirt?'
'Being trashy isn't just for young women anymore, Michael,' she said. Fiona set a plate of sizzling vegetables and meat in front of me and took the magazine from my hands. 'You could do quite well in this world. Find yourself a refurbished wife and just stand by her side while she gets her picture taken. You'd need a better tan, though. And a pair of yellow pants wouldn't hurt, apparently.'
'If that's the good life, I'll stick with whatever this is.'
'It's funny how none of these women have any wrinkles,' she said, flipping the pages.
'None that you can see.' I ate a few bites of the dish. It was surprisingly tasty. 'When did you become such a good cook?'
'Your mother and I are taking an online cooking class together,' she said. She'd stopped on a double-page spread of a pool party at some mansion. There were men in Speedos who would have been better off in girdles.
'When I was a kid,' I said, 'if it wasn't made from a box of macaroni and cheese or wasn't served in a tin foil dish courtesy of Swanson's, it wasn't homemade.'
'You're a little old to be blaming your bad childhood for anything,' she said. 'At least not anything you've done since you met me.'
Fiona was probably right. But I'd learned plenty about being a spy by being a kid. First improvised-explosive device I ever made was in the backyard of a neighbor's house after Nate and I were kicked out one evening for complaining about the culinary options. You want to blow something up but are afraid you just don't have the skill set? Go into your garage, grab some disinfectant. Better: If you live in a place like Miami, you probably have a high-grade pool cleaner, but even if you don't, your local home-improvement store does. Buy a gallon. Grab some liquid soap.
Mix them together.
Stand back.
You're done.
Potassium permanganate and glycerin: best friends for young arsonists and prospective spies alike. You have children and want to get their attention away from their iPods, video games and the Internet? Teach them to blow things up.
We saw our dad create that particular explosive concoction in the garage one afternoon by accident. It's one of my few good memories of him. Anyway, it taught me how to make things go bang during a bad situation.
Which got me thinking about Dixon Woods again. I had to figure out a way to draw him out, get close enough to him to figure out where the money was, or where it had gone, and why he needed it in the first place. I figured if he just wanted a quick score, he could have had one. Coming back for more, getting married, all that-it screamed of intricacy. Greed was one thing. But this kind of personal involvement was something different.
'You say you're doing something online with my mother?' I said.
'Online. Offline. We are getting very close.' Fiona was already working through another issue of Palm Life, this one with a picture of Priscilla Presley gracing the cover. She sat on the hood of a Bentley beneath a headline trumpeting a charity called 'Hound Dogs for Humanity.' Fiona flipped a page and I saw her eyebrows rise in actual surprise, rare coming from Fiona. She slid the magazine over to me. 'How do you dance when you're hooked to an oxygen tank?'
'Slowly,' I said. In the foreground of the photo, a man in pink gabardine slacks and matching liver spots was doing a kind of palsied shimmy alongside his tank and a girl-she wasn't a woman, at least not in the conventional sense, particularly since her most prominent parts didn't look much older than toddler age-in a tight black dress and about a quarter million dollars in diamonds.
But that wasn't what Fi was surprised by. In the background of the picture was a woman who looked a lot like Cricket O'Connor doing a shimmy of her own, but the man she was dancing with was blurred by movement. The paragraph beneath the photo indicated that it was taken during a fund-raiser for literacy… held at a nightclub called Love/Blue. Not a lot of things that happen in Miami make sense when you look at them directly. A benefit for literacy at a nightclub didn't even register on my egre-giousness barometer. But the picture was a nice reminder: Scan the background, dig a little, you'll find the dirt you expected.
In this case, there were likely hundreds of shots taken at this event-probably two dozen of this one moment alone, particularly if the photographer had a sense of humor-and that meant there was a strong likelihood a photo of Dixon Woods, whoever he really was, would be in one of them and we'd be able to start making good on one of my core beliefs: that people frequently do illegal things out of desperation and stupidity. It was clear Dixon was desperate for money-and that whoever he'd screwed was desperate to get their money back, too-but it was also clear Dixon was stupid in a very basic way: He made poor, sloppy decisions, and that meant he was probably already juicing someone else like he had juiced Cricket, or was about to.
Figuring out what the hell he looked like would be a good start. Cricket's description of him-'tall wavy brown hair, brown eyes, a little thick in the middle, a very hairy chest and a body like Sam's'- boiled him down to about three billion men. Not a good statistical control.
Nevertheless, Sam was going to spend the afternoon checking a bit more deeply into Dixon, though we both knew that it was unlikely to lead us anywhere directly related to Cricket's problem. We also knew that to know Dixon Woods' name in the first place meant that whoever was pulling this grift knew more than he should.
It was a level of the game we didn't impart to Cricket. I figured it could wait. First, we had to figure out who we were dealing with. I told Fiona that I thought it would be nice if she used her online time-in between her Learning Annex classes with Mom-to create an enticing profile on one of the singles support groups Cricket had originally used, a plan she immediately embraced.
'Maybe I'll get a bit of an eyebrow lift, too,' she said.
We'd need to see about a photo, no matter what. The offices of Palm Life might turn up the evidence Cricket couldn't. Predictably, according to the masthead, the offices for Palm Life, which covered the good life of the golden years under the palms, were located in a fashionable neighborhood of Coral Gables, a good dozen miles from even a marginal life. I made a bet with Fiona that the offices would be surrounded by palm trees that not a single drunken couple had managed to desecrate and that they'd be happy palms, unlike the ones near my mother's house, which have that sad, dead look caused by too many fruit rats using them as their winter homes.
I checked my watch. It was just past noon. Plenty of time to play dress-up with the media folks.
'You feel like going on a field trip?' I asked.
