“You missed your calling,” Angie said. “Shortstop for the Yankees.”
“I had a Yankee,” she said, as she looked down at the photo she’d caught. “Wasn’t worth shit in the sack, always talking about—”
“Go on, Rita,” I said. “Don’t be shy.”
“Hey,” she said, her eyes fixed on the photo. “Hey,” she said again.
“What?”
She handed me the folder and the photo and dashed off the dock inside.
I looked at the photo she’d caught.
“What was that all about?” Angie said.
I handed the photo to her.
Rita came running back onto the dock and handed me a newspaper.
It was a copy of the St. Petersburg Times, today’s edition, and she’d folded it back to page 7.
“Look,” she said, breathless. She pointed to an article midway down the page.
The headline read: MAN HELD IN BRADENTON SLAYING.
The man’s name was David Fischer and he was being held for questioning in the stabbing death of an unidentified man found in a motel room in Bradenton. Details in the article were sketchy, but that wasn’t the point. One look at a photo of David Fischer and I knew why Rita had handed it to me.
“Jesus,” Angie said, looking at the photo. “That’s Jay Becker.”
18
To get to Bradenton, we drove 275 south through St. Petersburg and then rode up onto a monstrous bridge called the Sunshine Skyway, which stretched over the Gulf of Mexico and connected the Tampa/St. Petersburg area with the Sarasota/Bradenton landmass.
The bridge had two spans, which seemed to be modeled after dorsal fins. From a distance, as the sun dipped toward the sea and the sky turned purple, the dorsal fins appeared to have been painted a smoky gold, but as we rode over the bridge itself, we saw that the fins were made up of several yellow beams that converged in ever-smaller triangles. At the base of the beams were lights that when turned on and combined with the setting sun, gave the fins a golden hue.
Christ, they loved their colors down in these parts.
“‘…the unidentified man,’” Angie read from the paper, “‘believed to be in his early thirties, was found facedown on the floor of his room at the Isle of Palms Motel with a fatal knife wound to his abdomen. The suspect, David Fischer, forty-one, was arrested in his room which adjoined the victim’s. Police refused to speculate on motive or comment on what led them to arrest Mr. Fischer.’”
Jay was being held in the Bradenton County Jail, according to the paper, pending a bond hearing, which would have been held sometime today.
“What the hell is going on?” Angie said as we drove off the bridge and the purple in the sky deepened.
“Let’s ask Jay,” I said.
He looked awful.
His dark brown hair was flecked with gray that had never been there before and the bags under his eyes were so puffy I’d have doubted anyone who told me he’d slept this week.
“Well, is that Patrick Kenzie sitting before me or is that Jimmy Buffett?” He gave me a weak smile as he came through the doorway into the visitation area and picked up the phone on the other side of the Plexiglas.
“Barely recognize me, eh.”
“You almost look tan. I didn’t know such a thing was possible for you pasty Celtic folk.”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s makeup.”
“Cash bail is a hundred grand,” he said and sat down in his cubicle across from mine, cradled the phone between chin and shoulder long enough to light a cigarette. “In lieu of a million-dollar bond. My bail bondsman’s a guy name of Sidney Merriam.”
“When’d you start smoking?”
“Recently.”
“Most people are quitting at your age, not starting.”
He winked. “I’m no slave to fashion.”
“A hundred grand,” I said.
He nodded and yawned. “Five-fifteen-seven.”
“What?” I said.
“Locker twelve.”
“Where?” I said.
“Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” he said.
“What?”
“Run the clue down, Patrick. You’ll find it.”
“Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” I said.
He looked over his shoulder at a slim, muscular guard with a diamondback’s eyes.
“Songs,” he said. “Not albums.”
“Got it,” I said, though I didn’t yet. But I trusted him.
“So they sent you,” he said with a rueful smile.
“Who else?” I said.
“Yeah. Makes sense.” He leaned back in his chair and the harsh fluorescents overhead only accentuated how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him two months ago. His face looked like a skull.
He leaned forward. “Get me out of here, buddy.”
“I will.”
“Tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the dog races.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I got fifty bucks on a gorgeous greyhound. You know?”
I’m sure I looked confused again, but I said, “Sure.”
He smiled, his lips cracked by the sun. “I’m counting on it. Those nice Matisse prints we saw in Washington that time? They’re not going to last forever.”
It took me thirty seconds of looking into his face before I understood.
“See you soon,” I said.
“Tonight, Patrick.”
Angie drove back over the bridge as I looked through a street map of St. Petersburg we’d bought at a gas station.
“So he doesn’t think his prints will hold up?” Angie said.
“No. He told me once that when he was with the FBI, he made himself up a false identity. I guess it was this David Fischer guy. He has a friend in Latent Prints at Quantico, so his fingerprints are actually on file twice.”
“Twice?”
“Yeah. It’s not a solution, it’s a Band-Aid. The local police send his prints to Quantico, this friend of his has the computer programmed to spit out the Fischer identity. But only for a couple of days. Then the friend, to save his job, will have to call back and say, ‘The computer’s coming up with something odd. These prints also match a Jay Becker, who used to work for us.’ See, Jay always knew if he got in some sort of jam, his only hope was to make bail and skip.”
“So we’re aiding and abetting bail-jumping.”
“Not so as they can prove it in court,” I said.
“Is he worth it?”