“No. The place is better than it looks, really.”
“What’s the median age of the occupants?”
“There are some kids. One guy just retired from Visa, can’t be more than sixty.”
He led us out of the parking lot and around the building, past a sparkling pool with nobody in the water and up the steps to a corner room with a view of the ocean. Now that we were out of the car, the heat was staggering. Even down here on the water the humidity settled on you like lead. There were maybe fifteen steps going up to the second floor, and I felt each one of them the way I’d feel an entire flight of stairs back home. I’ve never been so happy to hear the grinding of an air conditioner as I was when Joe unlocked the door and let us in.
His room was larger than I would’ve expected, and bright, with all that sun bouncing in off the water, palm trees rustling just outside. Not a bad place to spend a winter. Also, tucked inside here next to the AC unit, probably not a terrible place to spend the summer. Just don’t open that door.
We spent the afternoon in or around his hotel, talking and laughing and generally doing a fine job of pretending this visit was a carefree vacation. He wasn’t fooled, though, but he waited, and so did I. We’d get our chance to talk soon enough, but we needed to be alone for it.
In midafternoon I left them in the room and wandered outside and down to the beach and the blistering heat and called the office to check my messages. Nothing new from Graham or Harrison or anyone else. I had an old saved message, though. I couldn’t stop myself from playing it again.
I played it three times, as if listening to it over and over would reveal something I had missed.
I’d gotten us nowhere. In the entire course of our investigation, we had interviewed a grand total of three people beyond Harrison: John Dunbar, Mark Ruzity, Mike London. What had he seen? What could he possibly have seen?
It didn’t matter. I told myself that with a silent vigor—it did
29
__________
That night we got to meet the much-heralded Gena. Of course, she hadn’t been heralded at all—that wasn’t Joe’s style—which had only made the anticipation greater. If I’d expected someone like Ruth, I was surprised. Gena was about a foot taller, for starters, brunette when Ruth had been blond, blue eyes instead of green, from Idaho instead of Cleveland. She was younger than Joe, too, probably by ten years, and Ruth had been significantly older than him. She was, in almost all ways, the polar opposite of his longtime wife, but that didn’t make her any less likable. She was attractive and witty and intelligent, and Joe’s eyes lingered on her in a way that made me continuously want to hide a smile.
We left the beach and drove all the way into St. Pete to go to a restaurant Joe liked called Pacific Wave. The food was outstanding, and Amy and Gena ran away with the conversation. Joe hadn’t found himself a journalist, but something close. She was an attorney who’d become an advocate for public records and government access, and with those credentials it didn’t take long for her to endear herself to Amy. I also began to understand why Joe was still here in the summer but hadn’t made any remarks about a permanent relocation. Gena was in Florida only temporarily, as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a renowned journalism center in St. Petersburg. She’d come down on a grant, and that grant would be up in September.
“Then it’s back to Idaho?” Amy asked.
She nodded, and I saw Joe take his eyes off her for the first time while she was speaking.
“How’d you meet, anyhow?” Amy asked. It was a classic female question, I thought, and one that guys never seemed to ask. They’d met, that was all. Wasn’t that enough knowledge? It’s no surprise that some of the best detectives I know are women.
“One of my colleagues at Poynter has a time-share up here,” Gena said. “I came to a party there, got bored, and went for a walk. Joe was sitting on the beach in his lawn chair. Not so noteworthy, you might think, but this was at ten o’clock at night. It stood out.”
Amy looked at Joe, and he shrugged. “There were always a bunch of people out during the day. They got annoying.”
“We got to talking a little, and he was explaining why palm trees are so resistant to wind, even in hurricanes,” Gena continued, and now it was my turn to look at Joe.
“You learn a lot about palm trees growing up in Cleveland?”
“I did some reading.”
“Evidently.”
Gena smiled. “After a while I realized I’d been gone too long, and I had to get back, but I also wanted to see him again. He didn’t seem to be picking up on that—”
“You can imagine what a great detective he is,” I said.
“Well, that’s what I finally had to use. By then I knew what he’d done, and he knew why I was here, so I told him I needed to have someone with police experience come speak at one of my seminars. Talk about public access and the back-and-forth with the media, things like that. It ended up being a fine idea, but I’ll confess it hadn’t been part of the original plan.”
“You spoke to students?” I said to Joe. “To
He nodded.
“Tell them about the good old days, when there were no recorders in interrogation rooms and every cop’s favorite tools were the rubber hose and the prewritten confession?”
“I might have held a few things back.”
After dinner, we drove back to Joe’s building. He mixed drinks for the three of us and grabbed a bottle of water for himself, and we went out to the patio as the heat faded to tolerable levels and the moon rose over the gulf. It was quiet here, and I thought of Gena’s story, of Joe on his lawn chair alone on the dark beach, and I realized that it had probably been a hell of a good choice for him to come here, to be away from the things that he knew and the people that knew him, for at least a little while. We all burn out, time to time. Some people never find that dark beach and that solitary lawn chair, though. I was glad that he had.
At one point, as the conversation between Amy and Gena became more animated and I thought my absence would be less noticed, I got up and walked down to the water and finished my drink standing in the sand. After a while a light, sprinkling rain began, and I realized the voices from the patio had faded. When I went back up, Amy and Gena were gone. Joe was sitting alone, watching me.
“They go inside?” I asked.
He nodded. I took the chair next to him again. It wasn’t really raining yet, just putting forth a few suggestions.
“Amy was telling us about your friend,” Joe said. “Ken.”
“Friend? I’d known him about a week, Joseph.”
“That make it easier, telling yourself that?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” he said. “Right now, I mean. Something like that happens . . . the guy working with you gets killed, I just assumed you’d dig in.”
“When your partner gets killed, you’re supposed to do something about it, that what you mean? The classic PI line? Well, I don’t have it in me anymore. So try not to get killed.”
“Understandable. Sometimes it’s good to take a few days—”
“No, Joe.” I shook my head. “I don’t need a few days, and when I say I don’t have it in me anymore, I don’t
