it meant a thing.
Downstairs, Felix was worrying a powder-fed facial tic, his upper lip pulling back to reveal new, managedcare teeth, his jaw pulsing to a beat only he could feel. He was holding the door for a toddling relic in mink.
A thick chill dampened the twilight, the top third of the Empire State Building glowing pale through the settling fog. People swarmed on the sidewalks, umbrellas up, but the mist in the air was hardly like rain.
Harry felt sick, and leaned against the wall of a building for support. What was going on? Leo and Julia... Vicki, who he’d only met once, and Jimmy De Steffano, who he’d known all his life... was there anyone who wasn’t going out of their way to make him suffer? His own father couldn’t get rid of him fast enough, for god’s sake.
An image came to him then, Aggie at the bus station, just before she slapped him, asking “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?” And then the answer he’d given her.
The tears were bitter. He let them go.
Nobody took the trouble to give the boy a name, just two initials that didn’t stand for anything. It wasn’t the first time Martinson encountered this phenomenon, or even the second, and it wasn’t all that much of a phenomenon around Campville, JP Beaumond’s birthplace, a roach turd on the map a short shot east of Gainesville.
Five feet, four inches, one-hundred and fifty-nine pounds, his mean, dull eyes struck a near-perfect match with his mouse-brown hair. These mugs were snapped before Beaumond went to jail the last time. His record indicated he had a tattoo of a rebel flag on his left shoulder, and a chunk of meat gouged out of his left thigh, most likely an old stab wound.
His first run-in with the law came at age nine, when for no reason that was mentioned, JP slit the throats of six of his neighbor’s chickens, and the neighbor pressed charges, along with the county chapter of the ASPCA. Beaumond’s family was ordered to make restitution for the birds.
A few years later, the underage JP snuck out of a package store with a pair of Colt 45s, the bottled variety, then broke one of them over the head of the clerk attempting to apprehend him. This led to a brief hospitalization for the clerk, and a juvie bid for the ambitious JP, now moving up in the world, at a detention home outside of Middleburg. He earned two county bounces for a B&E and an assault, respectively, and did his first state jolt at the not-so-tender age of eighteen, after the deceitful JP borrowed his brother-in-law’s car, then neglected to bring it back. Two years on the inside, six weeks out, the unlucky JP had a return engagement at the Big House for selling three-and-a-half grams of cocaine to an undercover policeman in St. Augustine.
Which brought them pretty much up to the present, although in JP Beaumond’s case, everything was past for him now, and there wasn’t going to be any future. Somebody made certain of that when they shot him twice with a .25 caliber pistol and rudely pitched his body into a canal in the Everglades.
Hardly a week went by that some law enforcement agency wasn’t pulling a stiff out of that grassy river, a body some tour guide or fisherman found floating. Arnie thought by now even the dimmest bulb realized this feed- the-guy-to-the-alligators crap never panned out. An alligator would not eat a man unless he was starving, and being absolute boss of his neighborhood food chain, the alligator was never starving. Lazy, yes. Cowardly, yes. Hungry, no. All the same, somebody out there must’ve been feeling a bit peckish: Beaumond had a big bite taken out of his side.
It was a thoroughly unprofessional dump job. The victim’s wallet was in the hip pocket of his pants, and it contained twenty-seven dollars cash, a suspended Florida driver’s license, and another one from Georgia, assigned to Clement Snipe. It had JP Beaumond’s picture on it. Also, Visa, Master, American Express, and Automobile Association of America cards, all in the name of Theodore Kistler.
It was too bad Beaumond was dead. Martinson wasn’t sorry the world was minus one Campville native of JP’s standing, but he would’ve liked to talk to him. He must have finally pissed off the wrong guy. Leo Hannah, for instance. Or this Alex character Victoria Leonard was covering up for. Plenty of other people, too. But Arnie Martinson was in no way obligated to investigate the murder of this piece of shit, a Dade County headache all the way down the line.
Lili was rarely in this part of town after dark, and she was getting a good dose of why. The sidewalks were clogged with noisy Italians, Germans with seven-figure Swiss bank accounts, and blonde bunnies who seemed like they’d been raised in Midwestern towns but were too frail to be farm girls. Hip-hugging corduroys showcased their narrow figures, exhibiting brown bellies and pierced navels. Every fifty feet or so, one would uncork a mind-bending whinny, and throw her arms around another girl who looked just like her and happened to be approaching from the opposite direction.
The sneakers that encased each and every one of their feet made Lili’s pumps feel like mukluks. She looked like somebody’s maiden aunt with her wavy hair, mannish and out of it in this blue blazer over the white button- down shirt. But she wasn’t competing with these girls, she was at least ten years older than most of them, and she wasn’t doing a night on the town, she was working.
Though it was before eleven, there was a line outside the Calabash. A velvet rope divided patrons from a doorman holding a clipboard. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a pair of black and white wingtips, a grey hat with a snap brim that dove down over his left eye. His hair needed to be cut. The gel that held it together was failing. He took shallow puffs from a gold-filtered cigarette, chatting with a grim, steroid-bloated bouncer. Lili felt the nervous energy radiating out of him like a stink.
She tugged the collar of her white, button-down shirt, then walked right up and badged him.
He said, “How you doing tonight?” His skin reflected the violet neon of the club’s sign.
“I’m looking for somebody named Alejandro or Alex. Tall, thin, mid-twenties. Probably Cuban.”
“I know two guys named Alex,” the doorman said. “One’s a French guy who owns a restaurant on Alton Road, and the other one is married to my sister. They have two kids and they live in Sarasota.”
He reached over and unclipped the rope to let four people pass, then re-attached it. When the bouncer pulled the door open, Lili looked in and saw the club was deserted. The line was getting longer. Why were they making these people wait?
“He hangs around with a guy named JP Beaumond,” Lili said, and saw the doorman’s eyes flash on the name. He took two quick steps toward the stanchion, where he raised the rope again, letting in six more bodies.
“Beaumond, huh? Don’t know him.” He walked to the curb, his heels clicking, and flicked his gold-tipped cigarette into the street. He patted his pockets for the pack. He was lying.
“I’m going to go in and see if any of the staff can help me.”
“No problem,” he said, glad to be rid of her. “Be my guest.”
He signaled the bouncer, who opened the door, and Lili stepped into a cloud of music and swirling, cobalt light. The name Calabash must’ve been picked from a hat. There was no discernable theme in here, and the overpowering air-conditioning, coupled with the absence of a single stick of furniture, made the club feel as cold as it looked.
It was an enormous square, like a low-ceilinged aircraft hangar. The few souls inside threaded the emptiness like they were waiting to meet a guide. If they were scouting out a place to blend in, there wasn’t one. And nobody to blend in with, except maybe the hardball security crew deployed in strategic spots around the floor.
The bar was built of concrete and corrugated steel, a forbidding hulk that hummed with an industrial wasteland vibe. Three bartenders stood behind it, doing nothing but folding their arms against the chill.
Lili keyed in on the balding one wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt that said Calabash, South Beach in tiny letters where a pocket would’ve gone. Six feet, one forty, light build. He ran his hand over his scalp, smoothing his wispy hair back-to-front.
“What can I get for you?” He rested his elbows on the bar. His skinny arms matched the rest of his body. Lili showed him her badge and asked about a tall, Cuban kid named Alex.
“Not by that name,” the bartender said. He leaned in, his head close to Lili’s, to holler over the blare. “I try not to bother too much with their names. It gets like that when you’ve been at this as long as I have.”
He straightened and blew out a sigh. Lili smelled vodka on his breath.
“What about a guy named JP Beaumond?” Lili showed the bartender his mug shots.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Him, I know. We threw him out not too long ago, caught him selling coke in the
