Billy passed me the folder and I scanned the booking photos that he had downloaded off the Department of Corrections Web site.
“Did you show these to Rodrigo yet?”
“I’ve called him twice. B-Both times he’s been short, almost whispering and asked for you. He says he’s all right, but I could hear the fear in his voice,” Billy said. “Hard to see how a Filipino middleman gets these two as leg breakers.”
“It’s a global village, Billy. We learned the hard way that the criminals have cell phones and Internet sites, too. If their job recruiter in Manila gets squeezed because his people are making noise about legal representation on work problems, he makes a call to a fellow shit-heel in Miami, who farms it out,” I said. “I’ll talk to Rodrigo. Can I take these mug shots?”
Billy flipped the backs of his fingers and stood up.
“While I w-was asking around, I also t-talked with a prosecutor friend in Broward about your Mr. O’Shea.”
He walked over to the wall of windows and looked out toward the ocean. Though we were twelve stories up, he never looked down over the edge and into the streets. Billy never looked down.
“He tells me he’s had to t-turn Sherry down on filing a probable cause on O’Shea t-twice. He t-told her all she has is circumstantial evidence, even with the Philadelphia incident. No b-body. No forensics. Just a couple of witnesses willing to say they saw him with two women who m-may be missing.”
“As far as I know, he’s right,” I said.
“She’s also all alone on th-this according to him. Her p-pursuit of these cases in general and O’Shea in p-particular is causing hard feelings with her b-bosses and at the state attorney’s office.”
“Your friend say what they’re going to do?”
“G-give her some slack for now b-because of her past record. Nobody’s telling her she’s wrong. They all know the kind of investigator she is. B-But she needs some substance.”
“I wish I could help her.”
“Nothing fr-from Philadelphia?”
“Nothing of substance,” I said, thinking of the portrait of Faith Hamlin on the wall of the store, of tears in O’Shea’s ex-wife’s eyes, the smell of whiskey and the guffaw of old cops and their younger, too confident brethren. “I doubt you’d like the changes, or the lack of them.”
“I have n-no intention of ever experiencing them, my friend.”
Billy looked at his watch.
“I need to m-meet Diane.”
“Good luck with the Romans,” I said.
“Et tu, b-brother,” Billy said. “Et tu.”
I spent most of the next day on the beach, letting the sun seep into my bones where the twenty-three-degree Philadelphia gray had chilled the marrow. Your blood does get thinner down here. It has to be a proven, scientific fact. Somewhere there’s a university study working on a government grant to tell us all a fact that we all know.
I ate breakfast in the bungalow and then called Richards. When I got her answering machine I hung up before the beep. I spent an hour out on the sand and then stretched out and took an easy two- mile run. The sun was hard and white in a blue sky. The salt cream of big breakers caught my shoes. The wind was still blowing out of the east and the tallest palms along the shore leaned into it, their fronds blown back like the long hair of women with their faces into the breeze.
Back at my chair, with my heart still thrumming, I pulled off my running shoes and shirt and hurdled into the waves. When I was thigh deep I dove into and under an oncoming crest, dug my fingers into the ocean floor and then pulled while bringing my feet up under me, and then drove forward and up. With my arms spread in a butterfly stroke I burst to the surface, grabbed a lungful of air and immediately dove forward and down to the bottom to repeat the motion. It was a technique I’d learned from the summer lifeguards in Ocean City, New Jersey, where we escaped as teenagers from the hot asphalt streets of South Philly. It was called dolphining and it was exhausting but twice as fast as swimming to get through the shallow surf. Once out past the breakers I turned inland and bodysurfed a wave to the beach, and then dolphined back out. After five trips I was done, arms heavy and lungs aching from gulping and holding air. I sat heavily down into my beach chair. When my breathing returned to