middle of my class. He went on to get an MBA from Wharton. I went on to arrest druggies on South Street, catch homicide investigations as a young detective and catch hell from supervisors for not playing the game the way it was set up. Because of an unlikely and clandestine relationship between our mothers, we finally met, as men, in South Florida and now I work as Billy’s private investigator.
I walked up through the soft sand carrying my chair, my small cooler clinking with empty green bottles, and climbed the bulkhead stairs. The beach crowd had long abandoned the place after sunset. I set my things down and stood under the stairway-side shower and rinsed off the sand and salt and left wet footprints on the slate walkway to the bungalow where I was staying. It was a small, one- bedroom efficiency and a concession to Billy that had actually grown on me. I considered my home in South Florida to be the stilted research shack on a pristine river that ran along the edge of the Everglades. It was there that I’d first isolated myself after taking a disability buyout from my job as a cop up north. It had been, and still was, the perfect place to keep my head together. But as I began to do more and more investigative work for Billy and his clients, he made a convincing argument that the two-plus hours it took me to canoe off the wilderness river and drive to his office in West Palm Beach was often illogical. I agreed, even though I also knew my friend was worried that the shack had also become a hideout for me. It was time I came back into the world, even a small step back. I didn’t fight it.
The Royal Flamingo Villas was yet another of Billy’s finds. It was an anomaly in South Florida. For more than one hundred years the property close to the sand with a view of the ocean drew people and money. In the 1920s and ’30s there were small bungalows, pink stucco Spanish-looking estates of the rich, and the low-slung motels for driving tourists. Then came the four-story hotels, the quaint pine Kester Cottages for early residents and the modern concrete mansions of the ’50s and ’60s.
But by the 1980s you couldn’t buy a private home with an ocean view unless you were a millionaire, and even those were being squeezed by twenty-story condos set cornerstone to parking lot and blocking any glimpse of the water for anyone living even a street away from the beach. Highway A1A had become a concrete corridor for a new century, broken only by a fortuitous state park or a city beach where planners had been smart enough not to kill their future tourist business by banning development on the sand and keeping a modicum of open beach to lure more sun money.
But the owners of the Royal Flamingo Villas had been even more forward-thinking. The Flamingo had remained a group of small stucco cottages that flanked A1A in the city of Hillsboro Beach. Each place stood unconnected but for the stone footpaths that led through the property. Though they were bunched together like some close-knit village hunkered down for protection, the grounds were filled with banana leaf palms and sea grape and crepe myrtle trees that shrouded the place in green privacy. Most of the cottages were individually owned by investors who made up a small, collaborative association. It was brilliant. The only way a hotel chain or high-rise condo group could buy their oceanfront land was to convince the entire group to agree, first on selling, then on price. Billy was one of those owners. He had accepted the title to one of the cottages from a client for whom he had negotiated a deal with the feds to keep the sixty-year-old securities broker out of lockup. When it came time for Billy’s fee, he took the investment of land on the beach. There were only five cottages with unobstructed views of the ocean. One was Billy’s.
I propped the beach chair against the patio wall and draped my towel over the still unused gas grill and went inside. The floors were old-style polished terrazzo. The walls were painted some pale shade of foam green. A counter separated the kitchen from the living area. The furniture was wicker, and the cushions, drapes and the framed print on one wall were all done in some tropical-flower motif. The