circumstantial.”
She went silent for several beats and again was looking beyond me.
“He’s got this way about him,” she said, shifting back to my eyes. “It’s this quiet confidence. He’s not one of those ‘Hey, baby. Let’s party’ kind of guys. He’s good-looking, smart and knows just the right things to say to these kinds of women to lure them, get them to let their guard down.”
The quizzical thought running through my head must have been on my face because she answered before I could ask how she’d managed to get all her detailed observations.
“He tried to pick me up,” she said and then seemed to wait for my reaction.
“In a bar?”
“Yeah. While I was working on the case.”
“You went undercover?”
“Yes,” she said.
“As a bartender to try and get someone to abduct you?”
“That’s a blunt way to put it, but yes, basically to get a feel for what these girls were seeing and maybe get lucky enough to pull a suspect list together.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “O’Shea made you?”
“Yeah. Probably before he actually asked me out,” she said. “Picked me up after work on our first date and when I got into his car he asked if we needed to stop at the P.D. so I could punch out my time card.”
She was shaking her head at the memory.
“Hey, hard to pull that on a good cop. And the guy was a good cop when I knew him,” I said.
She seemed to gather herself.
“But not when you didn’t know him, Max. His department file showed three reprimands for undue use of force during arrests. He lost time while he was in an employee health services program, which probably meant he was drying out someplace even before the Faith Hamlin case.”
The waitress came by. I nodded my head to another refill and took a long sip. I’d hate to see what my own department file would show. It had already made me a suspect once in South Florida.
I looked up at her and maybe she could see the doubt in my face, or maybe she thought she needed to put an exclamation on her motivation.
“His wife filed a domestic abuse charge against him, Max,” she said, and her mouth went tight into a line. “He’s not without some bit of a warm-up.”
I let the words sit. I knew where her head was at, and there wasn’t anything to say.
“You want me to talk to him,” I said, more statement than question.
“Look, Max. God knows you don’t owe me anything. But you’ve got a past with this guy. And you’re good at reading people. Anything you could get might help.”
I leaned forward.
“You got an address and number for my old comrade in blue?”
She pulled a business card and pen from her purse and wrote on the back. “He’s been showing up at Archie’s on Oakland Park on Thursday nights,” she said.
I pinched the card between my fingers. She reached over and touched my hand with her fingertips as she slid out of the seat and then put two one-dollar bills on the table.
“It was great seeing you, Max. Thanks.”
I sat and watched her walk away. This was a woman I’d swum naked with in the turquoise water of her backyard pool, who I’d made love to, with difficulty, in a rope hammock until dawn. Now I had no idea where we stood. No, I thought, maybe I’m not so good at reading people.
I was back at the Flamingo, tying on my running shoes. I was grinding at a case that wasn’t mine, wasn’t Billy’s and that I wasn’t sure I needed to be sticking my fingers in to begin with. My former fellow cop’s face was becoming clearer to me every minute that I worried at the rough-edged stone of memory rolling around in my head. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know his secrets.
I pulled on an old gray T-shirt and walked out to the beach to stretch out on the bulkhead. It was past noon, an insane time to run in the heat of an early September. The summertime highs of the low nineties wouldn’t break for at least another few weeks. The sun was high and white and the only savior was the ocean breeze that had come up in the night and stayed, blowing the smell of salt and sargasso grass in from the southeast. I breathed deep while propping my heel up on the handrail to the wooden stairs. When my hamstrings stopped stinging, I walked the