A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,5
lanes, cruising south at the acceptable ten miles an hour over the speed limit, and slipped off the packed interstate onto an equally busy avenue. In downtown West Palm Beach I maneuvered through the one-way streets to a commercial block of high-rises that carried the names of banks and financial institutions on the façades. The buildings were all done in the same sandstone texture with the same contemporary block design. It was like a cookie-cutter Levittown gone vertical.
When I got to Billy’s building I took the side entrance to the parking garage and stopped at the booth.
“Visitors spots right there to the left,” the attendant said after checking my name on a clipboard. He’d given me a pleasant enough smile in response when I’d given Billy’s name, but like a trained street cop he’d also let his eyes roam my face and I could almost feel him reciting hair color, eyes, collared shirt and no tie. In my rearview I saw him taking down my tag number. It was a careful building.
I locked the truck and walked through a tiled passageway to the main lobby. There I ignored the scrutiny of the desk clerks and crossed to the bank of elevators, stepped in, and pushed 15. The entrance to Billy’s suite was unmarked, just a double wood door of solid varnished oak. Inside the carpet was thick and simply patterned in a soft burgundy. There were several fine seventeenth- century English landscapes on the walls of the reception area that surrounded a large cherry wood desk. Behind a computer screen and a multi-button phone was Billy’s secretary.
“Good morning, Mr. Freeman,” she said, standing to reach over the desk to shake my hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”
“It is always my pleasure, Allie.”
“Thank you,” she replied without a flutter. When Billy had first introduced me and told her where I lived and that I would have no mailing address, she’d seemed mildly amused. She was a third- generation Floridian, was creative and cultured and had only a cursory knowledge of the Everglades. The idea that a newcomer would live at its rough edge seemed a curiosity to her. The idea that the most dominating physical feature of an entire state could be ignored seemed to me an equal curiosity.
“Go right in, Mr. Freeman. He’s waiting,” she said. “I’ll bring coffee.”
Billy came around from behind his desk when I entered and smiled broadly. He was dressed impeccably in a starched, hand- tailored white shirt buttoned at the throat. His vest was brocaded in a swarm of subtle color. His suit pants were lightweight and charcoal, the matching coat was on a hanger. His shirt cuffs were rolled, carefully, twice.
“M-Max. Y-You are 1-looking well,” he said in his standard greeting.
It had taken me some time to get used to Billy’s stutter, and only part of the effort had been because of the incongruity with his appearance and obvious success. But the constant reminder was the way his speech pattern turned on and off. His is a tension stutterer. On the phone, from the other side of a wall, even through a darkened doorway opening, his voice is clear, smooth and flawless. Face-to-face, his words clatter and fall from his mouth. The distinction seems a joke or a deception at first. But I learned early to listen to the words themselves, and judged him only by what he said, not how.
Billy was the one who’d convinced me to come to South Florida after bailing out of ten years and a family tradition with the Philadelphia Police Department. He was the one who invested my disability buyout into a profitable stock portfolio. He motioned to the leather sofa that faced the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city.
I considered it a humbling debt to help Billy Manchester in any way I could.
“I h-h-hope m-my recitation last n-night was n-not too confusing,” Billy said, bringing a stack of legal folders to the coffee table and sitting. “I have g-gathered as m-much information as there is, and it’s n-not m-much.”
He spread five folders out like a hand of cards. Fanning them with the tips of his fingers. I scanned through them. Each was labeled with a name. Some contained death certificates. Some included paramedics’ run sheets and police reports. The medical examiner’s reports were scant. The one similarity among them all was the cause of death: natural.
Allie came in with coffee and set the china service on the table and then smiled when she slipped the