“Four bucks,” Jackie said when she got back, out of breath but holding the coffeepot. “They eat like truck drivers for four bucks, and they want to skip out on their checks?”

  “Larceny in the soul,” Truman observed.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Jackie said. “Bondurant says I have to keep paying on the Corvette, even though he stole it. I’ve got to have $77 by Friday. This Friday and every Friday for the next two years. You’ve seen what my tips are like, TK. How am I gonna save up for another car when I’m paying off that bloodsucker for the car he stole?”

  “We?” Truman asked.

  “I thought maybe you’d help,” Jackie said. “Like you did when Mr. Wisnewski was in trouble. You said before that you’d make some phone calls, talk to a friend in the state attorney’s office.”

  “That was when it was just a nasty little scam,” Truman said. “Now you’re talking about murder.”

  “You said you’d help,” she said plaintively.

  “Bondurant Motors.” The voice was a man’s, high-pitched, with a pronounced Southern drawl.

  “Hello,” Truman said brightly. “Jeff Cantrell, please.”

  Long pause. “He don’t work here no more.”

  “He’s no longer with you?”

  “Who is this?” Wormy Weems demanded.

  “This is Mr. Jackson at MCI,” Truman said. “I’m calling about Mr. Cantrell’s long distance service. Frankly, I’m distressed to hear he’s changed employment. He doesn’t answer at home, and on his credit application he gave this number as his place of employment. Do you have a more current number?”

  “No.”

  Dial tone.

  Truman hadn’t expected much from Bondurant Motors, but it was on his checklist of calls to make, and he was nothing if not methodical. Forty years with the AP would do that for you.

  His Nellie had hundreds and hundreds of friends. She’d been dead over a year now, and they still sent Christmas cards and called. Nellie’s friend, Nancy Ann, had a daughter, Louise, who worked at the state patrol driver’s license office. He hadn’t expected Louise to remember him.

  “Mr. Kicklighter?” she said. “Of course. Mama misses your Nellie awful bad, you know. We all do. And I saw that big story in the St. Pete Times last year. That was really something.”

  Louise had inherited her mother’s tendency to prattle. Truman decided to get right to the point. He did have other calls to make.

  “I’m working on another big story now,” he confided. “Major stuff. Extremely confidential. Possible organized crime connection.”

  He’d found over the years that the mere mention of organized crime tended to terrify and motivate.

  “How can I help?” Louise said, lowering her voice. “Is it mob?”

  “Possibly.”

  He told her what he needed, an address and a driver’s license number for a Jeffrey Cantrell.

  “With a ‘G’ or a ‘J’?” Louise asked. He could hear her clacking away on her computer keyboard.

  “J—I think,” Truman said.

  She clacked merrily away. “The mob,” she said worriedly. “Right here in Pinellas County?”

  “Afraid so,” Truman said.

  “Here it is,” she said.

  The address was actually not far from the Fountain of Youth. Allamanda Road, 316-B. Before she’d let him hang up, he had to promise to come to Louise’s to dinner, too—any Sunday he liked.

  Allamanda Road was a narrow street of close-set wooden houses tucked in back of Sunken Gardens, one of St. Pete’s oldest tourist attractions. When Cheryl was little, they’d taken her there on Sundays, let her pose for pictures with a parrot on her head. The gardens were still full of tropical birds—parrots, cockatiels, macaws. There was a flock of wild peacocks, too, whose desperate shrieks still brought calls into police headquarters that somebody was killing a baby somewhere.

  Number 316 Allamanda was painted a dull white. Cracked concrete pillars held up a sagging roof, and the grime-encrusted jalousie windows were cranked open. At the end of an abbreviated sand driveway, Truman could see that the tiny, wood-frame garage had been converted to an apartment. The mailbox by the front door had 316-B painted on it. He went to the apartment door and knocked. He was trying the handle when he heard a door open behind him.

  The lady of the house was at home. He whirled around to say howdy-do.

  “Hey, you.”

  She stood on the back stoop, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was only a little taller than Ollie, not quite five feet. Her hair was short and curly and lavender, her eyes large and suspicious behind sparkly cat-lady eyeglasses. She could have been forty or sixty.

  “Hello, there,” Truman said. “I’m looking for Jeff.”

  “Gone,” the landlady said, flicking some ash into a straggly hibiscus bush by the back door. “You interested in a nice apartment? One-bedroom efficiency. I can let you have it for two hundred dollars a month till the season starts.”

  “Can I see the inside?” Truman asked.

  She took a drag off the cigarette and considered.

  “Nope,” she said finally. “Hasn’t been cleaned. Come back next week, you can have a look.”

  Truman nodded. “What happened to Jeff? I thought he was pretty well set here.”

  “He left,” the landlady said. “I found an envelope on my front porch with next month’s rent, in cash. Note said he had a new job on the East Coast.”

  “Cash, huh?” Truman asked.

  “That’s right. Cash spends real good.”

  The landlady turned to go back inside.

  “Wait,” Truman said. “Jeff and I had a business deal going. He forgot to tell me he was leaving. I was wondering, uh, you ever see any of his other friends come around?”

  She shut the back door and padded over to him. Her feet were bare, the nails painted a metallic purple two shades darker than her hair.

  “What’s all this to you?” she demanded. “Who the hell are you, knocking on my door asking a lot of nosy questions?”

  “He owed me some money,” Truman said. “Lousy punk. I’m surprised he paid you off.”

  “Me, too,” she admitted. “Usually, I couldn’t run him down for the rent until the middle of the month. Cute kid, but he lied like a dog.”

  “That was Jeff,” Truman said. “Anybody else beside me come around looking for him? Maybe one of his buddies would know where he went.”

  She took a long, last drag on the cigarette and tossed it on the ground. Truman had to take a quick sidestep to avoid having it land on his shoe. The sand driveway was littered with dozens of other spent filter tips.

  “No buddies,” she said. “Just the skinny Jap girl with the big boobs. If those things are real, mister, I’m Mother Teresa.”

  “She have a name?”

  The landlady was patting the pockets of her cotton housedress, looking for more cigarettes.

  “None of my business,” she said. “Come back next week if you want to see the apartment. I got other people interested.”

  He had to bang on the back door repeatedly to get her to come back. And then she wouldn’t open up. Just talked through the open jalousie window.

  “What kind of car was Jeff driving?”

  “Which time? He was in the car business. Drove a different one all the time.”

  “What was he driving the last time you saw him?”

  “Saturday night? Some fancy red sports car. Made a big racket.”

  Red.

  “A Corvette?” Truman asked.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  The security guard at the St. Petersburg Times wanted to give him a hard time. The guy was pushing seventy, had a self-important navy-blue blazer and a walkie-talkie strapped to his hip. Retired beat cop, probably.

  He tossed Truman’s AP press card back across the desk. “This thing expired nearly two years ago.”

  “They only issue them every few years,” Truman lied. “They’re making new ones right now.”

  “Get one then,” the guard said. “Can’t let you in without an ID.” He went back to reading the TV listings.

  There was a phone sitting on the security desk. Truman picked it up and dialed the city desk.

  Gary DiLisi, the editor he’d been doing some freelancing for, came on the line.

  “Gary? Truman Kicklighter. I’m down here in the lobby. This rent-a-cop won’t let me up to use the library. Can you come down and sign me in?”

  Truman hung up. The guard acted like he hadn’t been listening to any of it.

  Gary DiLisi looked like he was barely old enough to operate the elevator by himself, he certainly didn’t look old enough to be assistant city editor on a paper the size of the St. Pete Times. He wore blue jeans, sneakers, and a blue work shirt with a red Mickey Mouse tie knotted around his neck. No socks. He was a baby, but as babies went, he was okay.

  “Truman,” Gary said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You giving Stanley here grief? He’s pretty tough, you know.”

  Gary laughed. Stanley didn’t. Gary signed Truman in on the log book.

  “What’s the guy gonna do?” Truman asked. “Beat me up with his walkie-talkie?”

  In the elevator, Truman told Gary what little he knew about the alleged murder of Jeff Cantrell.

  “I’ve seen that car lot, Bondurant Motors,” Gary said. “I always wondered how they got that old Cadillac up there on the roof like that. But if Cantrell was working for this guy, Bondurant, why would he kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” Truman said.

  “The used-car scam is kind of interesting,” Gary said thoughtfully. “If you go anywhere with that, I might buy a story. Especially if it’s got a consumer angle. Christ, everything’s gotta be ‘News You Can Use’ these days.”

  Most of the time, Truman hated what technology had done to newspapers. But in the paper’s morgue, technology was a blessing. No more dusty envelopes full of yellowing clips, no more envelopes missing because some reporter had lost it or spilled coffee all over it.

  The St. Pete Times’s back files were mostly on computer.

  After the librarian signed him onto the system, Truman typed in Bondurant. And Ronnie.

  There were forty hits. Most of the references were items about special sales promotions, or golf tournaments Bondurant had played in. Bondurant Motors gave away roses to moms on Mother’s Day and pony rides to kids on the Fourth of July. Ronnie was a real citizen.

  But two of the items made him seem less so. In 1983 and again, in 1985, Ronnie Bondurant had been arrested along with six or seven other men in what the newspaper described as bar brawls, both times at The Candy Store, a strip joint on U.S. 19. One of the men arrested with Bondurant had a name Truman recognized: Bradley “Junior” Stegall.

  Stegall had been a defense witness at a drug trial Truman had covered in the 1980s. He was a very small-time doper who always seemed to wriggle off the hook. Junior Stegall had turned an otherwise boring trial into a lowlife situation comedy with his South Georgia twang and his protestation that the defendant could not have been off-loading a sixty-five-foot shrimp boat full of Colombian gold as the state charged because he was with him, Junior Stegall, at a whorehouse down in Bradenton at the time the incident allegedly took place.

  Truman had halfway mourned the news when he heard years later that Stegall had been found knifed to death in a cow pasture in Arcadia. So few small-time hoods were memorable these days.

  Truman had logged off the computer and was ready to leave when he spotted the sign by the door saying that the computer files only went back as far as 1980.

  He wandered down the aisles of clip envelopes, his nose twitching from the smell of dust and old newsprint. He found Bondurant, Ronnie, wedged between a long row of thick envelopes for Bond, Julian.

  Bondurant, Ronnie, had three crumbling clips in his file. In 1973, Bondurant had been picked up in a drug bust at a motorcycle repair shop where he worked as the manager. Two other employees, William D. Weems and a Keith Peters, had been charged with single counts of possession of marijuana. But they’d found a set of scales and a ten-pound block of marijuana in the trunk of Bondurant’s car. He was charged with possession with intent to distribute.

  There had been a hue and cry back then, because the cycle shop was across the street from a high school, and parents complained that Bondurant was corrupting young minds.

  The two subsequent clips detailed Bondurant’s plea bargain. He pleaded guilty, closed the shop, and was sentenced to eight months at the county work farm.

  Truman photocopied the clips, thanked the librarian, and left.

  He waved to Stanley on his way out of the lobby. “See you later, old-timer.”

  Chapter TWELVE

  As usual, he felt a sharp pang of long leaving the newspaper building. Separation anxiety, Nellie called it. He missed being a part of daily journalism, the busyness of it all, the smug look on the faces of reporters and editors who knew today about the inner workings of tomorrow’s news. No matter how much freelancing he did, he was now an outsider, a dabbler. His press credentials were outdated and so were most of his contacts.

  He started to walk back to the Fountain of Youth. The relentless blue of the sky overhead had a gray tinge to it. Were they in for an early morning storm? Fine. Anything to break up the sameness of August.

  Boredom was not an emotion he had ever been acquainted with until Nellie died. When she was alive, his life seemed to buzz with activity. His Nellie was a planner, a schemer, a doer. And he’d been a willing accomplice through the years. Now she was gone. The house was sold, and time seemed to be the one commodity he had to spare.

  When he got to the hotel, he kept going. He had no particular destination in mind, he just needed to think.

  As he walked he thought about Ronnie Bondurant and his unimpressive criminal career. Murder was a big step up from bar brawls and nickel-and-dime drug dealing. And how did car theft fit into the picture? He needed to know more about Bondurant than the St. Pete Times’s old clippings. He needed a police source.

  But who? His most recent dealings with local cops hadn’t been pleasant, especially last year, after he’d revealed the involvement of a St. Pete uniformed officer in a murder scheme.

  Clyde Guthrie came to mind. He was retired from the FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Truman hadn’t known him well, because Guthrie had been based out of the FDLE’s Orlando office, but Guthrie came into the El Cap now and again, and they’d swapped war stories.

  Chet’s Newsstand was only a block away. There was a slight breeze now, and the clouds were black-tinged and bulging.

  “Hi, partner,” Ollie said. He was lifting stacks of magazines off a pallet, counting and sorting them. “You on the case?”

  “Sort of,” Truman said. “Okay if I use your phone?”

  “Any time,” Ollie said magnanimously. “As long as it’s not long distance. You know how management is.”

  He called Frankie at the El Cap. Frankie knew everything about everybody.

  “Guthrie?” Frankie said. “Yeah. I know the guy. He lives on a boat. Tied up at a slip over on Coffeepot Bayou. Let me think. He told me the name of that boat one time. Kind of a cop joke, I think.”

  Frankie chuckled. “Now I remember. Saturday Night Special. Good one, huh?”

  “I get off at three today,” Ollie said, eavesdropping on Truman’s conversation with Frankie. “This guy’s former FDLE, huh? You think he can help us get the goods on this Bondurant?”

  “He might know something,” Truman said, not wanting to make a big deal out of it. “I’ll let you know.”

  Coffeepot Bayou was too far to walk in this heat. He went back to the hotel and got the Nova. It was still parked where he’d left it. He patted its fender affectionately.

  As he pulled up to the dock, he felt a drop of water on the arm he rested on the open window. He glanced upward. Black-tinged thunderheads had rolled in front of the sun. The breeze off the bay ruffled the hair on his arms.

  It was early for rain yet. These hot August days when it was ninety-eight degrees by noon, they got rain most days, around six o’clock. But it was just noon now.

  He pulled the station wagon into the crushed-shell parking lot. The little municipal dock was a far cry from the marina downtown, at the St. Pete Yacht Club, where rich people parked their water toys. This one consisted of just one long dock sticking out into the bay, with four rows of slips radiating out from it. There was a small dockmaster’s shack housing gas pumps, bathrooms, and an office. Maybe two dozen boats were tied up, none of them bigger than thirty feet. One of them should be the Saturday Night Special.

  The rain started coming down hard, and thunder rumbled overhead. The wind blew the rain sideways, and it streamed in through the open car windows.

  Truman rolled the windows up, leaving an inch at the top for ventilation, then he settled back in his seat to wait. The storm would blow through in fifteen or twenty minutes. It always did.

  But the air in the Nova was hot and sticky. A mosquito lit on his arm and Truman swatted at it, leaving a red-and-black smear on his forearm.

  There was a shelter at the end of the main dock. Nothing more than a couple of benches with a table and a spigot where you could clean fish. Still, it had a roof and it was better than sitting in the car suffocating.

  He made a run for it, carrying his shoes in his hands, dashing barefoot through the clamshell parking lot toward the end of the dock.

  By the time he made it to the shelter, his clothes were soaked and his wet hair was plastered to his head. He sank gratefully down onto one of the benches, breathing hard from the sudden burst of exercise.

  This was good, he realized suddenly. He was outside, on the water, soaked to the skin. Not shut up inside his tiny, sweltering hotel room, idly reading the newspaper, glancing at his watch to see if it was time to eat a meal or wash his clothes or take a walk.

  The rain made steady plinking sounds on the surface of the bay. A pelican came flapping up to rest on a half-submerged piling beside the boathouse. Truman wriggled his toes on the warm wooden planks of the dock and resolved to go barefoot more often.

 

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