“Your idea,” he said, “would be that if we just gave up on justice, fewer people would get hurt? If we just let Sanabria run wild, without persecution or prosecution, the rest of us are fine? That’s a pretty selfish idea, Perry. He killed other people before your friend, and he’ll kill other people again.”
“How long have you been chasing him?”
He couldn’t hold my eyes. “A long time.”
“How many years?”
“Twenty. About twenty.”
“And you’ve done nothing but add to his body count.”
“I don’t have to listen to—”
“If you want him that bad, why didn’t you just kill the son of a bitch, Dunbar? You’d have had an easier time doing that and getting away with it than you would have getting anything useful with Bertoli and that half-assed sting attempt.”
He got to his feet slowly, his jaw tight. “That’s not how it’s done. I do it right.”
“You haven’t yet.”
“I will,” he snapped. “I will. I’m retired, Perry, and still I’m here, asking for your help. That doesn’t mean anything to you? Doesn’t tell you anything about me?”
“It means something to me,” I said, “but not what you want it to.”
He stood there for a moment and stared at me, and I saw contempt in his eyes.
“You could do something about this,” he said. “A real detective would.”
He left my apartment then. I thought about what he’d said, and thought that a year ago the words would have been coming out of my lips. A year ago, I wouldn’t be back in my apartment right now or for many hours yet to come, I’d be chasing every lead, believing that I could do something to set things right. Why didn’t I now?
It stacked up on you, after a while. The violence. If you kept your distance, maybe you could avoid that; if every corpse and every crime scene photograph you looked at represented somebody else’s friend, somebody’s else’s brother, somebody else’s daughter, maybe you could hold that distance. It wasn’t working that way for me anymore, though. I sat in my living room after Dunbar left and I began to see the ghosts, Ken Merriman and Ed Gradduk and Joe before the bullets found him that day by the bridge over Rocky River. There was Keith Appleton, a sweet kid who’d been one of the first members my gym had and was murdered before his high school graduation, and Alex Jefferson, my onetime nemesis, and Julie and Betsy Weston, mother and child, long gone from this city and still present in my mind every single day.
It stacked up on you.
That afternoon I got out the CD Ken had burned for me and played it for the first time:
I heard those lyrics, and I thought of Ken, chasing Alexandra twelve years after she’d left, and of Dunbar, pursuing Sanabria two decades after he’d missed a chance to stick him in prison, and I wondered why they no longer felt like colleagues to me, like comrades.
I wouldn’t keep searching through the gloom. Because you couldn’t catch them all. Look at Dunbar. A full career behind him, and years after retirement he was still consumed by Sanabria, still hungered for him every day —and if he got him, finally? It wouldn’t mean much. There’d be another to take his place. Every detective had his white whale. I wondered how many of them ever lifted their heads long enough to see that the seas were teeming with white whales.
I took the CD out and put it back in its case and put it away, and when Amy came by that night I asked her if she could take a few days off. I wanted to go to Florida, I said. I wanted to see Joe.
“What about the funeral?”
“I don’t know anybody he knew, Amy. It’ll be a roomful of strangers, maybe strangers who won’t want to see me there. He was working with me when he got killed.”
“Still, it’s a gesture.”
“One he’s gonna see?”
She didn’t answer that, and I said, “Amy, I need to talk things out with Joe. I need you with me.”
She nodded. “I’ll call my boss.”
I went to the Hideaway alone that night. I drank a beer and a bourbon and I toasted to a dead man. Scott Draper, used to dealing with the emotions of the drunk or the emotion-drunk, left me alone until I waved him over and launched into a debate about the prospects of the Cleveland Browns. He saw the forced nature of it, but he asked no questions, and I was glad. I had one last bourbon before calling it a night, muttered a toast to Sam Spade, and then spun the whiskey glass back across the bar. It was done for me now. It was absolutely done for me.
28
__________
We left two days later, took a direct flight from Cleveland to Tampa and then rented a car. Even in the airport parking garage, among the shadows of cold concrete, you could feel the intensity of the Florida summer heat, opening your pores and baking into your bones. I put our bags in the trunk of the convertible Amy had insisted we rent—
We took I-275 south out of Tampa and drove over the Howard Frankland bridge toward St. Petersburg. A few miles past the bridge, I pointed at a sign indicating “gulf beaches,” and Amy turned off the interstate. Joe was staying in a place called Indian Rocks, one of the hotel-and-condo communities that lined the beach from Clearwater to St. Pete. The last time I’d been on the gulf side of Florida, I was nineteen and on a spring break trip. We’d been much farther south then, too, so none of this was familiar to me. I could understand why Joe had enjoyed it during the winter, but now, with the unrelenting sun and humidity that you felt deep in your chest, enveloping your lungs, his motivation for staying seemed a little less clear. This Gena must be one hell of a woman.
We hit a stoplight just outside of Indian Rocks and watched an obese man with no shirt and blistered red skin walk in front of the car, shouting obscenities into a cell phone and carrying a bright blue drink in a plastic cup. Amy turned to me, her amusement clear despite the sunglasses that shielded her eyes, and said, “Think Joe’s turned into one of those?”
“I’m sure of it.”
Joe had told me to call when we got to the little town, so now I took out my cell phone and called, and he provided directions to the condo that had been his home for the past six months. We drove slowly, searching for the place, a different collection of oceanfront granite and glass everywhere you looked. When I finally saw the sign for Joe’s building, I laughed. Trust him to find this one.
Squatting beneath two of the more extravagant hotels on the beach was a two-story L-shaped building that looked as if it had been built in the late 1950s and tuned up maybe once since then—perhaps after a hurricane. The old-fashioned sign out front boasted of shuffleboard and a weekly potluck.
“Oh, no,” Amy said. “It’s worse than I thought.”
We pulled into the parking lot and got out and stretched, and then Joe appeared, walking toward us with an easier stride than I’d seen from him in a long time, some of his old athlete’s grace coming back.
“Trust LP to wait until it hits ninety-five before he brings you down,” he said, going first to Amy, who hugged him hard. He looked good. Some of his weight was back, and the pallor he’d had when he left Cleveland in December was gone, replaced by a tan that made his gray hair seem almost white. He stepped away from Amy and put out his hand, and I liked the strength I felt in his grip, the steady look in his eyes. It was a far cry from the way he’d looked when he left. These months had been good to him.
He let go of my hand but continued to search my eyes. We’d had a few talks since Ken had been killed, but nothing at length. I’m not a big fan of phone conversations.
“Please tell me you don’t play shuffleboard,” Amy said.
