The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 4

I was on the interstate, back in the fumes, back in the dull bake of the sun on concrete, back in the aggressive hurry up, back in the world.
I’d spent the morning staring out at the wet forest, watching the sun leak through the canopy and spackle the ferns and pond apple leaves and haircap moss below. I hadn’t given nature much thought before coming here. I only studied the nature of humans on the Philadelphia streets, and it wasn’t anything out of the sociology department at the University of Pennsylvania. People did things for pretty basic reasons and it has been that way for a lot longer than most of us will admit. We haven’t changed much since we first gathered as tribes. Just the stuff around us changed. Hunger and fear, love and jealousy, greed and hate still rule us. You could put that down in the middle of the swamp or at the corner of Broad and Passyunk and it was still going to be the same.
I’d made a pot of black coffee on the wood stove in my shack and then sat at my empty table, sipping. Then I packed up a gym bag with clothes and a shaving kit and paddled back down to the ranger station where I used the phone to call my lawyer. Cleve was nowhere in sight.
“Gone up to headquarters,” said his assistant, a young crew-cut kid who always seemed to have a crease in his uniform and a chip on his shoulder. The only time he seemed civil was when he was asking me if he could borrow the pickup truck I left parked in the visitor’s lot for days at a time. “Didn’t say when he’d be back,” the kid said, obviously miffed at being called in to cover. “What the hell happened this morning?”
I looked at him like an adult offended by his demanding tone and his use of profanity, and answered with the same flat voice I always used with him. “I have no idea.”
I went to the campsite restrooms where I showered and shaved, and then tossed my bag into my truck and headed south for the Palm Beach County Courthouse. And now I was bunched in with traffic, fighting with the other daily warriors for a moving spot on the highway.
After an hour of working along the middle lanes of I-95 at something approaching the speed limit, I slid onto the Clematis Street exit and crawled through traffic until I found the parking lot I always used when I came to the city. The old guy who worked the lot always recognized my midnight blue F-150 even if it had been two months since I’d been back. He always had a spot for me. I always had a twenty-dollar bill for him.
The temperature here felt ten degrees hotter than the river. As I walked the four blocks to the courthouse I could feel the beads of sweat sliding down the middle of my back. I was dressed in my civilized clothes: khaki trousers, a short-sleeved and unironed white cotton shirt and a pair of beaten Docksides. It was a look I adopted from the boat captains I’d seen in the few restaurants I’d visited, or in some hall of bureaucracy where they gathered for permits or licensing. It might seem shabby by northern standards, but was acceptable almost anywhere in South Florida. It was also the polar opposite of the look on Billy Manchester.
As I crossed the street onto the block that held the new county courthouse, I could see Billy waiting for me in the shade of a newly transplanted, half-matured Washington palm.
Standing with one hand in his pocket and the other cradling a manila envelope, he was looking off in the opposite direction and was, as usual, impeccable. He was dressed in an off-white linen suit that must have been a thousand-dollar Ferragamo and seemed brilliant next to his dark skin. His silk tie was pulled up tight to his freshly shaved throat, and his hair was closely cropped to the shape of his skull. He had one of those sharp-angled, perfect profiles you rarely see outside of the made-up world of television or movies, and at five foot eleven and a trim 160, that’s probably where you’d think you’d seen him before.
As I approached I saw two young women in summery suits pass purposely through Billy’s line of sight and flash two equally purposeful smiles. He grinned and tipped his head and just as they began to change course toward him, he gracefully turned to me, extended his hand and deflected the ladies without a trace of discourtesy. As the women floated off I wondered how he did it, but not why.
“M-M-Max,” he said in greeting. “Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy. L-Let’s eat.”

Billy Manchester is the most intelligent person I have ever met. And when I first talked to him on the phone I had an immediate intuition that he would not screw me.
After feeling him out a bit and after I explained the Philadelphia street shooting, we talked several times long distance about cop procedures, civil court possibilities, investment and tax laws. I never felt he was pumping me. In fact, it was more like him spilling valuable information to me. Still, I checked him out. Law degree from Temple University. Business degree from Wharton. Published dozens of times in professional law journals. No record of a lecture series.
He had all the credentials for academia, but was never a teacher. He had all the paper for a brilliant trial lawyer, but never tried a case I could find.
I had a friend at the Philadelphia Daily News run a clip search for me and found little. As a young man Billy had gained some attention as a kid from the inner city with a bright academic future. There was a piece about him and a prominent North Philadelphia public school chess club winning some prestigious tournament. A clip on his graduation at the top of his class from Temple’s law school. No mention of his parents.
How our mothers, a black woman from North Philadelphia and the white South Philly wife of a career cop, came to be friends, neither of us knew. We’d been raised in widely different ethnic neighborhoods. But we seemed to share a similar theory on the disparities in skin color and customs we grew up with: We knew it was there. You dealt with it when you had to. But most of the time, it only got in the way of things that mattered.
After more than a dozen phone conversations, Billy persuaded me to come to Florida.
When he met me at the airport the first time, his GQ appearance made me hesitate. Way too slick for the voice, I thought. Then he looked unblinking into my face with his steady brown eyes and issued what I would learn was his standard greeting: “M-Max. Y-You are 1-1-looking healthy.”
After I got over the disbelief and the quick feeling that I’d somehow been conned, Billy haltingly explained that he was a tension stutterer. Over the phone or even from the other side of a wall, his speech was as straight and flawless as the head of a debate team. But face-to-face conversation was a constant struggle. His stuttering was so profound even the most basic words jammed up behind his tongue. But he was as serious and sincere as I had first judged him to be and he put me up in his beachfront tower apartment for weeks until he found the research shack for me. We made an odd pair: a successful black attorney transplanted to the south and a white Philadelphia cop trying to escape the city. But I learned to depend on his judgment and knowledge, and I figured it was going to serve me now.
As we walked east through the heat rising up from the sun- bright sidewalks down Clematis Street, I explained again to him about the events of the night before. He’d said little when I’d called him earlier. But I knew from the envelope under his arm that he’d been busy. When we reached the corner of Flagler Avenue, Billy steered me to a shaded outdoor table on the patio of La Nuestra Café. I saw a hurried movement from the waiter who had one of those “No, no, no that’s reserved” looks on his face until he recognized Billy and then became effusive in his service.
Billy waited until he had a tall iced tea sitting before him and I had a sweating bottle of Rolling Rock in my hand. Then he put the envelope on the table between us.
In his phone conversations Billy was clear and logical and brilliantly straightforward. Face to face the stutter only made him more so.
“M-Max,” he said, his eyes narrowing and going the color of black-brushed steel. “You are in s-s-some shit.”

In the envelope was a stack of printouts dated weeks ago that Billy had copied off the computer Web sites of the three largest daily newspapers in South Florida. They lacked the typical, shouting headlines that the actual papers would have displayed, but the simple text was hammer enough.
     The body of Melissa Marks, the South Florida kindergartener reported missing last week, was found Monday in a remote area of Broward County’s western Everglades.
     Investigators said the cause of the six-year-old’s death was not yet known, but they believe the girl is the third victim in this summer’s string of bizarre abductions and murders of children that have terrified South Florida communities over the past three months.
     “We think the same person or persons are responsible for this and the previous atrocities,” said spokesman Jim Hardcastle of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has been coordinating a multi-agency task force that includes three county sheriff’s offices and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     “We are continuing a massive investigation into these homicides and are committed to finding those responsible.”
     Hardcastle declined to give any details of how police were able to locate Marks’ body and would only say that it was found in a remote area about thirteen miles west of U.S. 27, which is the unofficial border of the still-wild Everglades and the suburban communities of Broward County.
     Marks had been missing from her home in the new development of Sunset Place since last Sunday, when her parents reported to police that the girl had disappeared from their home in the middle of the night. The child had been asleep in her bedroom and was discovered missing by her mother who had awakened to give her daughter medicine for a recent illness.
     Despite an almost immediate and widespread search by neighbors and police with helicopters and dogs, no trace of the child was found until Monday’s discovery.
     The disappearance and death is eerily similar to the two earlier cases in which a seven-year-old boy from the western community of Palmetto Isles and a five-year-old girl from Palm Ridge were abducted in June and July. Their bodies were also found in remote wilderness areas.
     Investigators refused to comment on the causes of death and also declined to give details on how they were able to locate those bodies within days after the children were taken.

I shuffled through the printouts, all dating back to the first child abduction. The follow-up stories documented the FBI’s involvement, the futile searches for clues, the shattered parents, speculations, and not surprising, fear.
My throat had gone dry and the printout paper felt dusty between my fingers. Billy had purposely left out any reproduction of photographs that I knew would have been published: The smiling elementary school snapshots, the pictures of parents standing bleary-eyed and dazed at funerals, the flower collections and rain-soaked cards and farewells at some public spot.
As I read, the sun crept onto our table and Billy, sitting silent with his legs crossed, waved away the waiter twice. I finally looked up and he met my gaze and without a hint of humor said: “You don’t g-get out m-much. Do you?”
The uproar that the killings created hadn’t gotten onto my river or through my self-imposed wall against the world. As I stared out at the asphalt street, Billy filled me in on his inside information on the cases that had buzzed through the courthouse and law offices for weeks.
The investigators were keeping the details, especially the cause of death, as close as they could. They also had not revealed how they knew where to look for the bodies they had found. But somehow they’d gotten onto my river and were probably less than a couple of hours from finding the child I’d discovered. Now they had me attached to that killing. It was only good police work to consider me a suspect.
I was staring out across the street again, my fingers lightly touching the scar on my neck. I hated circumstances. A logical world can’t stand them, and an overcrowded world can’t avoid them.
Had the body floated down into the spot where I found it from some point upriver? The source of the tributary was a broad shallow slough that drained into the cypress swamp and was also fed by a canal opening that helped drain the Glades. Had the body been wedged at that particular spot on purpose? Did someone know about my nightly forays? Did someone know I’d find it?
Over the tops of the buildings a thick stack of thunderheads was creeping out of the western sky, roiling up as they sucked moisture out of the Glades and pushed toward the coast. But the ocean breezes held them back. Here the sun still glinted hot and bright off the chrome on a line of cars that filled the street and then flushed away each time the stoplight changed.
“If you’re th-thinking of t-talking to them, don’t,” Billy said.
I just shook my head. He knew I was thinking like a cop. He knew I would be thinking about Hammonds’ team and their struggle with a high-profile case.
He finally waved the waiter over and while it was my turn to hold a response, he ordered a cold penne pasta salad and, looking at me with a slightly raised eyebrow, took my silence as license to double the order for two. Billy knew I was existing on canned meat and fruit and the occasional skillet-fried tarpon from the river. He automatically tried to influence my diet when he had the chance.
His advice not to talk to Hammonds and his team meant he was asking me to hold on to my right to remain silent. It was something I hated when I was a cop, and because of that experience I knew how valuable it was from the other side of the fence.
“They’ve got to be pulling in every favor and chit they can to get this one off the board,” I said. “How the hell do you keep four dead kids off the front page and the brass off your ass?”
I knew the pressure to solve a case like this would be tremendous. They would already have looked hard at family members with the first abduction. That’s standard homicide procedure, especially when kids are involved. But according to the newspaper clips Billy pulled, none of the first three families had any connection with each other except that they all lived in new neighborhoods close to the edge of the Glades. Whether there was some hidden link between them that was being held back from the press was a guess. If it was not true, that left only the outsider theories. In between bites we talked about the possibilities.
Billy had been mildly intrigued by the case since the second child was found. Television news was all over it. The press conferences with broken, tearful parents pleading for the return of their children. The reward offers. The inevitable squeeze on the child-molesting suspects. And in this case, the tangible fear among the public. It was just the kind of thing I wanted to know nothing about. But even if I followed Billy’s advice and kept my silence, we both knew I was in it now. I was the first person outside the families with a connection, no matter how tenuous. The cops were going to jump on that. The only question was how hard.
After Billy paid and tipped the waiter enough to make his whole lunch shift worthwhile, we walked back to the courthouse through a rising heat I could feel through the soles of my shoes. The asphalt and concrete were like stove burners. The storm curtain had been slowed by the breeze, but its graying face was massing up now as the heat of the city rose up its nose.
“You are p-probably going to g-get a visit soon,” Billy said as he reached into a pocket of his suit and slipped out a thin cell phone and extended it to me.
“It’s charged up. C-Call me,” he said, smiling and serious. “Not next m-month either.”
I shook his hand, thanked him, and watched him walk away.
Three blocks later, the sweat was soaking my waistband and my feet actually felt damp. I got to the parking lot and I could see from the way the attendant looked down at his own shoes that something was wrong. When he took my ticket he looked up with a shrug, but with eyes that I swear were beginning to tear.
“I don’t know how,” he started to say as we walked toward the corner of the lot where I could see my truck parked in a front row. “I didn’t see no kids or nothing. I didn’t hear nothing either.”
I let him lead me around to the driver’s side where he stepped back with his palms turned out and issued an audible sigh.
Starting just behind the cab was a deep gouge in the paint about pocket high that ran almost to the middle of the front fender. Someone had used a key or screwdriver. When I bent to touch it, there were still tiny curlicues of midnight-blue paint spiraling off the line. The attendant wouldn’t meet my eyes. He just stared at the scratch, trying to wish it away.
I was thinking about a time when I was doing a six-month shift with the metropolitan investigative unit in Philly. The squad of detectives was formed to watch organized crime figures. Once, after spending two days following Phil “The Lobster” Testoro between his South Philly rowhouse and his suite in an Atlantic City hotel, Kevin Morrison, the guy I was partnered up with, got out of our unmarked car and strolled through the parking garage we were in. Checking for witnesses first, he approached Testoro’s Lincoln Continental, pulled out his keys and ran a serious sine wave down the length of the Town Car and then coolly returned. I sat without comment for five full minutes before Morrison, without looking at me, said: “Let him know we’re watching.”
Now I touched the gouge on my truck and scanned the sidewalks and street corners, futilely I knew, for an unmarked car with a couple of bored men in the front seat. Then I shook my head, said “Not your fault” to the attendant and got in the truck, cranked up the air conditioning and headed back to my river.