Twenty-Seven Bones

But that might change, too. Wasn’t the Caribbean where everybody went to find romance?

As Pender began rummaging through his closet looking for the Hawaiian shirts he’d also bought in Carmel, with Dorie, the phone rang. It was Julian Coffee, notifying him of a slight change of plans-a stopover in Miami.

“My criminalist, who also happens to be my eldest daughter Layla, lifted and restored prints from the left hand of the male vic,” said Julian. “She ran them through AFIS yesterday, spent all night winnowing down the possibles, and came up with a twelve-point match with one William Wanger, Miami, Florida. No criminal record, but his military prints were on file. I know how you feel about interviewing at the source, so we got the address for you-I thought you might want to drop by and have a word with Mrs. Wanger.”

“Does she know yet?” asked Pender, after jotting down the address and the new flight information.

“I can’t see how-she filed a Missing Persons with the Miami PD a couple weeks ago, but we haven’t notified them yet.”

“I have to tell you, Julian-I’m not exactly crazy about the idea of being the one who has to tell a woman that she’s now a widow.”

“You’re right, Edgar-I should probably find someone who’d really, really enjoy it.”

“I don’t mean-”

“See you late this afternoon, then. And don’t forget to bring plenty of sunblock-our nude beaches are world famous.”

“Nice change of subject there, Julian.”

“Thank you, Edgar-we do what we can.”

2

“How was that, Miss Brown? Are you feeling better?”

“Heavenly.” The toothless ancient glanced over her shoulder at Holly, who had just finished deep-massaging her withered glutes, and gave her a blue-black, gummy grin. “Gyirl, nobody ain’ touch me like dot in go’ on forty year, y’know?”

Holly’s Tuesday/Thursday morning gigs at the Governors Clifford B. Apgard Rest Home were simultaneously her most rewarding and her least remunerative. It would take her three hours of hard work to earn what she could make in a single hour elsewhere, but the head nurse had told Holly privately that the incidence of decubitus ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, had decreased 25 percent since Holly had begun working there.

Some of the improvement, of course, was the direct result of therapeutic massage bringing increased blood flow and muscle tone, but the most important benefits, Holly suspected, were indirect. When your body feels better, you move around more; when you move around more, you get fewer bedsores.

After the rest home, Holly drove by Busy Hands, located in a sprawling single-story cinder-block building situated directly across the Circle Road from the Sunset Bar, to pick up her messages and maybe a little work-after paying her rent, she’d be closer to broke than she had been all year.

The front room, which looked more like the waiting room of a seedy transmission repair shop, was empty. Mrs. Ishigawa was at her desk in the front office, behind the counter, cooking the books for lunch.

“I just dropped by to see if there are any extra shifts available this week.”

“Nope.” As always, Mrs. Ishigawa looked like the world’s oldest geisha, dressed in kimono, obi, split-toed ankle socks, and split-toed sandals, with a chopstick through her upswept, improbably black hair. As always, she was holding a lit cigarette between the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. “But you got two terephone corrs, one woman, one man,” added the old woman, in her mincing, West Indian-flavored Japanese accent. “Man was Apgard-I terr him, shoot, mon, you run terephone rine up to Core, you cheap bassard, you don’t gotta bodda me ev’y five second.”

“And the woman?”

“I don’ ’membah name. You check burretin board.” Mrs. Ishigawa waved her cigarette in the direction of the corkboard next to the pay phone on the cinder-block wall behind her.

The woman turned out to be Emily Epp, half of a nice couple who’d been among Holly’s earliest non-Busy Hands clientele. Holly called her back first, set up an appointment, then returned her landlord’s call.

“Apgard here.”

“Mr. Apgard, it’s Holly Gold.”

“Miss Holly! Good to hear from you, thanks for calling me back. I find myself in desperate need of your services. What’s your schedule like this afternoon?”

“Conveniently enough, I just made an appointment with your tenants at the overseer’s house. I should be done around two.”

“How about two-thirty at the Great House, then? We’ll set up your table by the pool. Be a lot more comfortable, and you can take a dip afterward.”

Holly thought about it for a moment. She’d never been out to the Great House before-she rarely paid home visits to single male “happy ending” clients like Apgard. But the Great House was supposed to be quite a place-not to mention she’d get to keep everything she made instead of turning half of it over to Mrs. Ishigawa. “Two o’clock it is.”

“I’ll be looking forward to seeing you,” said Apgard warmly.

There was something in his tone of voice that Holly found faintly disturbing-it set off what she thought of as her uh-oh alarm. She would have called him back to reschedule at the Busy Hands, house cut or no house cut, but she couldn’t think of an excuse. The man was her landlord: piss him off, and she and the kids might end up living under a green plastic roof in Sugar Town.

3

Some wit had once described Washington, DC, as a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, thought Pender, this was largely true of Miami as well.

The taxi dropped him off at a whitewashed bungalow in a neighborhood that looked as if it had seen better days. As have I, Pender mused as he shambled up the walkway in his garish Hawaiian shirt and gaudy white Panama-as have I.

The woman who answered the door looked to be in her mid-sixties, but lean and tan, dried as jerky. The vee of skin at her neck was creped, but her face was eerily unlined and immobile. Botox, thought Pender, and plenty of it.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Wanger?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Ed Pender, I’m with the FBI, I need to ask you a few questions about the missing persons report you filed recently with the Miami PD. May I come in?”

She looked up-and up; she was a tiny thing. “Do you have some identification?”

Pender still carried his old Department of Justice shield in his wallet, next to his driver’s license. Couldn’t hurt, he figured, and it might even save him a speeding ticket someday. He tinned her; she stepped aside and ushered him into a tiny, foyerless, and blessedly air-conditioned living room.

“Can I offer you something to drink?” she asked him. “How about a nice cold glass of lemonade?”

“Sounds great.”

Alone in the living room, Pender took the opportunity to look around. Spotless white carpet, two small sofas facing each other across a driftwood coffee table. The armchair at the head of the grouping almost certainly belonged to the master of the house, whose picture-broad-faced man in a white cowboy hat-was featured prominently on the mantel and the coffee table.

When Mrs. Wanger returned, Pender was still standing. “After you,” he said, as if he were the type of gentleman who could never sit in the presence of a standing lady. Not true-he just needed to see where she was