Shimmer

‘Let’s hit the Strand first,’ Sam had said at the outset, since that particular boutique hotel faced the beach between 10th and 11th Streets, and was also one of the few buildings in that part of the Art Deco District with balconies – and a rooftop known as one of the best spots in South Beach for watching firework displays.

And maybe homicides, too.

Nothing there, nor at the Victor, no one discovered anyplace as yet with anything useful to talk to them about, though in the circumstances neither Sam nor Martinez had expected this to be easy.

‘Mildred wants to talk to you, Sam,’ Detective Beth Riley informed him at around eleven as she and Mary Cutter – a petite, attractive detective with whom Al Martinez had enjoyed a brief, but pleasurable relationship some years back – came into the large office shared by the Violent Crime detectives.

Sam’s antennae were up. ‘Where and when?’

‘Usual time and place, she said,’ Cutter answered.

Which meant around noon in Lummus Park, on a palm-shaded bench.

‘Think she has something?’ Martinez asked.

There was no acrimony between himself and Cutter, though fear of just that was what had driven them both to ending the relationship before they’d got in too deep. No special woman in Martinez’s life these days, though that was, he claimed, the way he liked it; no one to worry about night and day, he said, no one to fear for him.

‘She didn’t say,’ Cutter answered.

Homeless people were often high on the investigators’ agenda, seldom as suspects, more often just the most likely bystanders to have stumbled on potential evidence or useful information.

Mildred Bleeker was a bag lady of uncertain years who enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect with some of the cops and detectives in the Miami Beach Police Department. In return for their courtesy – and, now and again, a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape – Mildred had never shown any great qualms about assisting the police with occasional nuggets of information about crimes of violence, especially those related to drugs.

She did, however, have her preferences, and for a while her favourite had been a young patrolman named Pete Valdez, but he’d left the department a few months ago, and since then Mildred’s personal bias had leaned firmly towards Sam.

‘I heard about your troubles, Detective Becket,’ she’d told him one morning last March, encountering him on the corner of Lincoln and Washington and accepting his invitation to dip into the bag of Krispy Kremes he was bringing to a departmental meeting. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I ask you how your family are faring now?’

‘I don’t mind at all.’ Sam had been surprised but touched, had told her they were faring pretty well, and then he had shown her some photographs of Joshua, and in return Mildred had tugged out a gold locket from beneath layers of mostly black clothing – she always wore black with just a few splashes of colour – and had opened it to reveal a pair of tiny black-and-white photographs of a young man and woman.

‘My fiancé,’ she had said.

‘And you,’ Sam had said.

‘About a thousand years ago,’ she said.

‘I’d still know you anywhere,’ Sam told her. ‘Handsome couple.’

‘Donny was one of a kind,’ Mildred said. ‘They broke the mould, you know?’

‘Same with my wife,’ Sam said. ‘Grace.’

They’d left it there, respecting each other’s privacy, but there had been a fair number of exchanges since, and during one Mildred had confided that Donny had died as an innocent bystander in a drug-fuelled shooting. Sam had tried a few times to persuade her to come eat with him in a restaurant or coffee shop or even back at their house, which Grace had encouraged – anything that might take the lady’s fancy – but she had always thanked Sam and refused. So far as he could tell, Mildred Bleeker’s lifestyle was of her choosing, and the closest they’d ever come to lunching in comfort had been a couple of conch-filled tamales on her bench.

‘Could be anything,’ he said, as Cutter set down a coffee cup on her desk and Riley started checking her messages.

‘Mildred know about the rowboat?’ Martinez asked.

‘She didn’t say,’ Riley said, raking one hand through her short red hair, her mind already half on other things.

‘Guess she wouldn’t,’ Martinez said. ‘You not being Sam Becket.’

All Sam knew was that he’d give a whole lot more than a dozen tamales for so much as a clue as to where the slaying had taken place. With nothing new to go on, and with the likelihood that the brutality had gone down inside someplace – maybe in a motel or hotel room or a brothel or a garage or someone’s private apartment – the only way they were going to find out about that any time soon was if it was some place where, say, an employee had walked in this morning to find more than they’d bargained for.

No reports yet of bloodstains or chemical spillage or even struggle.

Sam was itching to see Mildred.