“That was Detective Mark Jacobs, Miami-Dade Homicide. He’ll be here in five minutes.” Stanton set the phone down and came around his desk.
“It’s after midnight,” Lola said. “It’s too late for police grilling. Call him back; tell him we’ll do it in the morning.”
“I held him off all evening,” Stanton said. “He’s coming.”
“I’m not talking to any cops.” Snake rose and headed for the door.
Lola said, “No, stay. The three of us need to talk.”
He minded his mother and went back to the love seat. He’d always minded her. Not that he feared or loved her. He obeyed out of instinct. Duty to the female race. Some vestige of his loyalty to Carmen.
They were in the study where LBJ had shaken Snake’s hand. Two leather wingback chairs for Lola and Stanton, the white brocaded love seat for Snake.
Lola wore a simple navy dress. Her bright red hair was pinned up, a single coil broken loose and hanging down her right cheek like a strand of yarn. She’d been upstairs in her bedroom when the news came. Her adopted son dead, the victim of a savage beating.
Snake could see Lola’s eyes were swimming. Her face hot and dizzy.
Through the evening helicopters hovered over the estate. News crews were camped at the front gates with satellite trucks and klieg lights, cameras trained on the front of the house, waiting for action.
Stanton made calls, managed to banish all but one of the choppers. A helicopter from the single local station where he had no pull was still hovering. Every minute or two its spotlight raked the grounds, and the beam passed across the velvet curtains and sent a slash of light into the study where they sat. Lit up the swirls of dust.
“That sweet boy,” Lola said. “That innocent, damaged child. And look at you, Stanton, sitting there so detached, like it didn’t happen. Like Carlos wasn’t clubbed to death. Like it’s all just some technical problem to be solved.”
“He was an adult,” Snake said. “Not a child.”
Stanton sighed. He rose from his chair, went over to Lola, touched a hand to her shoulder, but she cringed, and Stanton removed his hand and returned to his chair and looked at Snake and shook his head.
Snake shifted his weight on the bench, and a quiet groan escaped him.
“Are you hurt?” Lola bent forward.
“The guy threw a bat at me. Same one he used on Carlos. It clipped me in the back. But I’m okay, I’m fine.”
Lola closed her eyes and sank back into the chair, looking for a moment as if she were going to start weeping again. But she drew a fortifying breath and shook her head in a way that mingled sadness and disgust.
Stanton said, “Snake, this man. Describe him again. Anything you may have left out.”
“His name is Thorn.”
“First name or last?”
“He doesn’t know,” said Lola. “You’ve asked him that over and over like some stupid cop. Leave him alone.”
“Guy looks like a boat bum,” Snake said. “Dark tan. Works outside.”
“About six feet tall?”
“That’s right.”
“One seventy-five, one-eighty?”
“Yeah, late forties, blondish hair. Some kind of blue-collar hero. A roofer maybe, but something tells me that’s not his line of work. The boat shoes. I don’t know, he just has the feel of a dock rat.”
Stanton gave him a curious look, as if he’d detected the fury in Snake’s voice. Snake was trying to hide it. Act the way he had for those long months after his family was slaughtered. Dead and cold and focused. He’d deal with Stanton King when all the pieces were in place. Hack off his head if he had to. But for now he was staying cool.
“Carlos had such potential,” Lola said. “But he needed direction. He was lost. So lost.” She shifted her eyes to the grand piano wedged into a corner of the room. An instrument that Snake had never seen opened.
“We did everything we could for both boys,” Stanton said.
“Money,” Lola said. “That’s what you did. Your great solution to everything. Pour money on it.”
True enough, by Snake’s reckoning.
When he and Carlos each turned eighteen, Stanton presented them with a bank account, replenished it when it was empty. Using Stanton’s political contacts and a chunk of cash, Snake had secured a taxi license and bought his own cab. A few years later Carlos acquired an interest in the porn business. Not the professions Stanton or Lola had in mind.
Snake had spent the decades roaming the city in his taxi just as he’d done as a boy on his Schwinn, mindless motion. Searching for something, he didn’t know what. Some insight, some human revelation. In the meantime, distracting himself with empty movement, the clamor of the city. Surviving as Cassius did. Falling back, dancing, pushing the big ugly bear out of range.
In forty years he’d barely lived. He’d had only one lover. Back when Snake was twenty-five. The woman was ten years older, a dentist he’d picked up at the airport. Cindy Marcus. They struck up a conversation, and by the time they reached her South Beach condo, Cindy invited Snake inside. It lasted five years. Two nights a week. Snake in her bed, Snake taking her to dinner and clubs and the beach. Snake going through the motions. Cindy was short and blond and an atheist. Carmen’s opposite. She said she loved him, and kept waiting for him to say the same. Five years. Snake couldn’t bring the words to his lips. Couldn’t lie. He drove his cab, picked up fares, went back to Stanton King’s house each night. When she ended it, Cindy wept and beat her fists against his chest as if trying to bring his heart to life. It didn’t work. Nothing worked.
Carlos indulged in flesh. Stuck in the soft mud of early adolescence. Fascinated by sex. Spending his nights with strippers and whores. Visiting swing clubs every chance he got, long nights of anonymous sex. Behind his locked bedroom door dirty movies played constantly, the fake grunts and moans of fake ecstasy. Nothing Lola or Stanton could do to pry him loose from his obsession. Carlos was Carlos. Bruised fruit. A boy whose bedroom wall had once exploded. Never the same.
Stanton tried money, Lola lavished them with affection. Coming into their life a few months after they were adopted by Stanton, she assumed a smothering familiarity with the boys. Tried to befriend them, coax their love. Carlos played along, milked what he could. Cash, toys, later a car, a speed-boat, and clemency for his many transgressions. Snake gave Lola what politeness he could muster and was never openly hostile. But he could never answer her warmth with warmth of his own. That part of him was scooped out, buried in the casket with Carmen’s body.
Lola’s attempts at maternal passion struck Snake as desperate and foolish, as though she was driven by some emotion more complicated than motherly love. Nor had Snake ever grasped why a woman of such beauty and class would enter such a businesslike marriage with a man she showed no fondness for. What words she exchanged with Stanton were no more intimate than the chitchat of strangers on a bus. Once or twice he’d heard hints of her shady past. Lola the party girl. But he never saw a trace of that woman.
Across the room Stanton rose and poured himself an inch of scotch and leaned against the mahogany bar.
“Only got a few minutes, Snake. We need to get your story straight.”
“I’m not wasting time with cops.”
“Well, you might have to. If you do, then this Thorn fellow, leave him out. And no mention of the photo. We’re going to call this a robbery attempt. I’ve spoken with the clerk at the store. She’s cooperating.”
Lola leaned forward to catch their words.
“The photograph?” Lola stood up. “Where is it? Who has it?”
“I’m working on that, darling. Be patient.”
“You and I need to talk, Stanton. Alone.”
“We will. I promise. But there are things I must handle now.”
After a moment or two, Lola saw she would get nothing more from Stanton and sat back down with a helpless glower.
The spotlight blasted against the bayside window. It searched out the slit between the curtains, illuminated the frayed patches where the ancient fibers had worn to velvet cobweb. Then moved on.
A single lamp on a side table lit the high-ceilinged study. Snake glanced around at the furniture. Same pieces from the night with LBJ. Forty years and nothing had changed. Air the same, same dust circling in the slants of light. Aroma of leather and stale fabric and pipe smoke from Stanton King’s father and grandfather. Same Oriental carpets, heavy mahogany furniture, pool table, deep-set casement windows. Stained glass, crystal chandeliers. Same port and brandy bottles positioned on the shelves of the study exactly as they always had been. Shadowy portraits of Kings going back five generations. The imperial style of a British outpost in the jungles of Malaysia.
Stanton finished his drink and set the glass aside as the single whoop of a siren sounded outside. Spinning blue lights brushing the heavy curtains.
“Before we let them in, I want a word with Snake. In private.”
“Stanton, I have to know what you’ve done. What you intend to do.”
“Of course. Soon, I promise, we’ll have a long talk. Now please greet our guests and delay them a minute or two.” His tone, coolly dismissive.
Lola lifted her gaze, staring into the shadows that hovered at the edge of the ceiling. Listening to the racing heartbeat of the chopper overhead.
She brought her eyes down from the gloom, showed them to the men. As bright and dangerous as shards of shattered glass.
She stared at Stanton with black hatred until he could weather it no more and turned away.
“Everything is going to be fine, Lola. Snake and I will put it right.”
“You’ve never put anything right in your life, Stanton King. Everything you ever touched, you destroyed. Everything.”
Stanton wouldn’t look her way until she’d given up and marched from the room. With a shaking hand, he reached for the decanter, poured another glass, swigged it and refilled.
Snake waited for him to swallow the next slug, then said, “Who’s the man with the diamond ring?”
“What?” Stanton bumped the glass and spilled liquor on his hand.
“The man sitting next to you at the fight. I recognized that ring, the clothes, the physique. It’s the man whose fingers I chopped off. He was sitting beside you earlier that evening. What’s his name?”
“You’re insane, Snake. You’ve lost your mind.”
“I always wondered if you were involved. Now I know you were. I just don’t know how. Not yet.”
“This conversation is finished. You’ve crossed the line.”
“It had something to do with LBJ. The way you brought me in here that night and put me on display. You were trying to win the president’s approval, weren’t you? Because something went wrong. But LBJ didn’t buy it. You fucked up, and that was the end of everything. No more politics. Career over.”
In the hallway Snake heard the approach of subdued voices—men showing respect for Lola’s loss.
But Snake wasn’t running yet.
“You were planning to take it all to the grave, but this picture cropped up, brought it back.”
“All this time, Snake, you lived under my roof, ate my food, wore the clothes I provided, and you harbored this hatred, these wild fantasies?”
“I don’t hear you denying it.”
“It’s absurd. I won’t even discuss such a thing with you.”
“You saved me and Carlos, brought us into this house. I used to think it was just a political trick, taking in these two destitute boys, just a way to get reelected. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? A lot more. You killed my parents and my sister, then you took me and Carlos in. Why? Was it just guilt? Your pitiful attempt at making amends?”
“You believed this, Snake, but did nothing, said nothing?”
“There was a woman that night at my house. I heard her voice. She was in charge. Running the show. That’s her, isn’t it? The one in the photograph. The blonde sitting next to you. What’s her name?”
“Enough,” Stanton said.
“Does Lola know what you did?”
Stanton bowed his head and refused to speak.
“I promised myself,” Snake said, “that I would find out why Carmen died. And I’m going to do it. I’m finding out what this was about.”
“Not that you deserve a response to these charges, but I had nothing to do with your sister’s death. I had nothing to do with any of it.”
“Who was the man with the diamond ring? Who was the blonde? Tell me or don’t tell me, it doesn’t matter. I’ll find out, then I’ll be back.”
He heard the men speaking with Lola only a few feet from the door. Snake crossed the room, parted the heavy curtains, dragged open the window.
Outside, the helicopter’s beam raked the grounds, probing the branches of the oak trees, lighting up the swimming pool and cabana.
The police were at the door, knocking softly.
“That lady cop that Carlos shot. She knows about the photograph. She’s Thorn’s lover. She’s going to be a problem for you.”
“Don’t worry about the lady cop. She’ll be dead within the hour.”