Thicker Than Water Read online

  Louis didn’t reply. Mobley picked up his beer off the top of the jukebox and started back to his table, nodding at Louis to follow. The table in the back was cluttered with empty beer bottles, crumpled napkins and ashtrays brimming with butts. The two cops sitting there looked up at Louis, then their eyes slid to Mobley.

  “Since when did this table go civilian, Sheriff?” one asked.

  “Since I said so. Take a piss break, guys.”

  The men ambled off toward the pool table. Mobley motioned for Louis to sit down.

  “What do you drink?” Mobley asked.

  “Heineken.”

  Mobley went to the bar and returned with two beers. He slid in the booth across from Louis and finished off his first beer in one long drink then reached for the fresh one.

  “What’s this about, Sheriff?” Louis asked. “You going to bust my chops just because I saw Cade?”

  “There’s a lot of interest in this case, from Tallahassee on down. Sandusky wants to know who the players are, that’s all.” Mobley eyed him over the lip of the bottle. “Are you a player?”

  Louis hesitated. He didn’t like Lance Mobley. Worse, he didn’t respect him. The guy was a political animal who ran his department like a personal fiefdom. Louis was tempted to use this Cade thing just to piss him off.

  “It sounds like you’re circling the wagons, Sheriff.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know if you’re working for Cade?”

  Louis took a drink of beer.

  Mobley sat back, laying his arm across the back of the booth. “Have you done any homework on this yet, Kincaid?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, let me give you a quick history lesson then,” Mobley said. “Jack Cade raped and murdered a girl named Kitty Jagger back in 1966. They had him dead to rights. His slimeball lawyer, the late Spencer Duvall, managed to finagle a plea bargain for him for manslaughter.”

  Louis remained silent.

  Mobley shook his head. “The asshole should’ve fried to a crisp for what he did to that girl. Instead, he gets a lousy twenty years. A fucking gift. Then what does he do? Gets out and one week later shoots the goddamn lawyer who saved his ass in the first place.”

  “He says he didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, he said that twenty years ago, too, but he took the plea quick enough.”

  “What do you have on him?”

  “His lawyer has all that. Talk to her,” Mobley said.

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  A slow grin came over Mobley’s face. “So you’ve met Susan Outlaw.”

  “Yeah, this afternoon.”

  “We don’t like her much around here, you know.”

  “She’s just doing her job,” Louis said.

  Mobley’s smile faded. “Yeah, I suppose. But no one’s going to plead Cade down this time. Not even by a day. He’s going to fry this time.”

  Louis leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “What do you have?”

  “Why should I give you anything?”

  “Professional courtesy?”

  “You’re not a professional. You don’t have a badge. You don’t even have that PI license yet.”

  “Look, I know you don’t like me—”

  “Most the guys in here don’t like you.”

  “That shouldn’t change how you do your job, Sheriff,” Louis said.

  Mobley leaned back in the booth again, considering him carefully. Louis took advantage of the pause.

  “All right, just tell me what I’m up against,” he said.

  Mobley glanced around the bar, then he let out a long, beer-scented sigh. “We got witnesses who heard him threaten Duvall the morning of the murder. We got a witness who says he saw Cade that night hanging around the building. We got his prints on Duvall’s desk.”

  “He doesn’t deny being in the office. He had an appointment.”

  “We also found his prints on the credenza behind Duvall’s desk.”

  “What about other prints?”

  “Hundreds. Other lawyers, the secretary and the partner, the wife. But no one suspicious.”

  Louis picked up his beer.

  “Plus,” Mobley added, “we got one of his Raiford buddies telling us Cade bragged about how he was going to get back at Duvall when he got out.”

  “Did Cade offer an alibi?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah, a real dandy. He and his kid were home watching TV.”

  Louis took a drink, averting his eyes.

  Mobley leaned forward. “You know what you’re really up against, Kincaid? The dirtbag factor. Jack Cade was, is, and always will be a dirtbag. He killed once and he did it again. People can’t get beyond that. And our esteemed prosecutor, Vern Sandusky, knows it. He’s on his white horse, making up for the shitty system that let Cade off so light twenty years ago.”

  Louis picked up the napkin and wiped the condensation off the side of the Heineken bottle. “Sounds like a slam-dunk.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  Louis stood up slowly. “Thanks for the info.”

  “Don’t get yourself dirty with this, Kincaid.”

  Louis paused, looking down at Mobley. He could see the Busch logo in his pupils.

  “You looking for more clippings for your scrapbook, Kincaid, is that it?” Mobley said. “Well, you might get some more headlines working this case, but you’re not going to win any popularity contests defending that asshole.”

  “I’m not out to win anything, Sheriff.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, picking up his beer.

  Louis started away.

  “Get your fucking PI license, Kincaid,” Mobley called out, loud enough for the whole bar to hear.

  The rain was moving in. Louis could see it, advancing across the gulf like a pale gray scrim falling across a stage. When it reached shore, it brought a cool breeze that wafted through the screens and set the auger shell wind chimes clicking like old bones.

  Louis had been watching a small brown lizard do pushups on the screen, and as the rain hit, it sent the lizard scurrying for cover. Issy launched herself at the screen after it.

  “Hey, knock it off,” Louis yelled at the cat. But both creatures had disappeared.

  Louis stared dismally at the sagging screen. It had torn free of the wood frame in the corner. He debated whether to go in and get a knife and try to poke it back in, but he knew Issy would just tear it up again.

  Damn Pierre. The little weasel landlord expected him to act as a security guard for a break in the rent, but the damn cottage was falling apart and he wouldn’t repair a friggin’ thing.

  The rain was picking up force, pounding on the roof now. Louis’s eyes drifted upward. If this kept up, he would have to move the bed again.

  With a sigh, he put on his glasses and turned his attention back to the newspaper clippings he had just started reading.

  After leaving Mobley, he had gone to the public library and pulled copies of everything to do with the Duvall murder case. It wasn’t much, but he needed to get the basic facts and there was no way he was going to get his hands on any police files. Neither Mobley or Susan Outlaw were going to help that account.

  He turned his attention back to the News-Press articles. Spencer Duvall’s body had been found by his secretary, Eleanor Silvestri, when she came to work at eight A.M. the next morning. According to the medical examiner, Duvall had been shot once in the head, the time of death estimated around nine-thirty P.M. Duvall and his secretary had been alone in the office, working late, but she left at about nine. Jack Cade had visited Duvall’s office earlier in the day and been overheard making threats to the attorney.

  Louis moved on to the most recent article about Cade’s arraignment. He paused, seeing Susan Outlaw’s name. She said she would not seek a change of venue, even given Cade’s history. “What happened twenty years ago has no bearing whatsoever on my client’
s current legal situation,” she was quoted as saying.

  Man, was this woman naive or just plain dumb?

  There were other older articles about Spencer Duvall, including a feature that detailed his rise to one of the state’s highest-profile criminal lawyers, with an estimated net worth of 5.3 million. His professional style had earned him the nickname The Tortoise. He was plodding and thorough—and he never lost.

  Finally, there was an old copy of Gulfshore Life. It was a heavy glossy that advertised itself as “The Magazine of Southwest Florida” but was more a bible of the good life, stuffed with ads for art galleries, plastic surgeons and financial advisers.

  The magazine had an article about a renovation at the Thomas Edison House, led by the historical society. The Duvalls were mentioned as the project’s leading contributor, coughing up a cool quarter mil.

  The librarian had also marked another page in the back. It was a society column called The Circuit, and it took Louis a minute to find the Duvalls in one of the color group photographs. It was one of those typical society snaps, a line-em-up-shoot-em-down, with the subjects posed, champagne glasses in hand, faces frozen in smiles.

  It was a Christmas party of some kind, and there were eight people in the photograph, all in gowns and tuxes. He picked out Candace Duvall in the front—small, tanned and attractive with blond hair sleekly upswept, a big toothy smile, dressed in strapless red with diamonds at her neck and ears. Spencer Duvall towered at her side, a good-looking man of about forty-five, with thinning sandy hair over a wide forehead and intelligent dark eyes behind stylish wire-rimmed glasses. In contrast to his wife, he was somber, unsmiling. He looked more like a befuddled physics professor than a dogged defense attorney.

  Louis set the articles aside and looked out to the gulf. The rain was letting up, the afternoon sun slanting low through a slit in the gray clouds. The odor of low tide hung in the air, that familiar brew of kelp, brine and rotting things.

  Why was he doing this? He didn’t want this case. Why was he even reading these damn articles?

  He felt something touch his bare ankles and looked down to see Issy staring up at him.

  “What?” he said.

  The cat didn’t move.

  “Food? Is that it?” He pushed himself out of the chair and the cat followed him into the kitchen. He shook some Tender Vittles into a bowl on the floor. He leaned against the sink, thinking of Ronnie Cade, about what he had said about losing his father for twenty years.

  Shit, at least Jack Cade was still alive.

  The dampness was creeping through the cabin. Louis rubbed his hands over the thin cotton of his T-shirt. He went into the bedroom to get a sweatshirt.

  At the dresser, he rummaged through the drawers until he found an old University of Michigan sweatshirt. He pulled it on. He was about to close the drawer when he paused.

  The manila envelope was tucked under some old shirts. He had forgotten that he had put it there.

  He pulled it out and undid the clasp. He upended the contents onto the top of the dresser. There were only a handful of photographs, a couple from college, a few of Phillip and Frances Lawrence, one of Bessie, the old woman who had rented him a room in Black Pool, Mississippi. A faded portrait of his mother when she was eighteen, a snapshot of his sister, Yolanda, and another of his brother, Robert.

  Then, he found it. A small square in black and white, its edges pinked in the old style of the fifties. A white man, standing on a porch, wearing overalls and a straw hat that shielded his face. The image was blurred slightly, like the man had been moving just as the picture was snapped.

  He hadn’t looked at the photograph in a long time, so long in fact that he half-expected the man in the picture to age. But he never did. He was always exactly the same.

  Louis stared at his father, his thumb rubbing the slick surface.

  Then he gathered up the photos and put them away. Going back to the kitchen, he scanned the counter and spotted the business card laying next to the phone.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Ronnie Cade’s number.

  Chapter Six

  The sky was still bruised with clouds by the time Louis made his way across the causeway to Sereno Key. The Dodies lived on the key, so he knew his way around, and he headed the Mustang quickly through the small town center and up to the north end, looking for Mantanzas Trail. Sereno Key was a small island, comprised of trailer parks, marinas and neat little canal-laced retiree neighborhoods like where the Dodies lived. The key also was the home to half a dozen wholesale nurseries that grew native palms for the landscapers replanting the scorched-earth tract-home developments springing up around Fort Myers. There was a building boom going on in Southwest Florida, and money was being made digging up century-old oak trees and replacing them with scraggly palms.

  But prosperity had apparently bypassed J.C. Landscape. The sign that greeted Louis outside the chain-link gate said WE MEET ALL YOUR LANDSCAPING NEEDS, but what he saw suggested Ronnie Cade’s business could barely meet its own.

  The grounds, puddled from the rain, were dotted with scrubby palm trees and plats of plants struggling to stay upright. A five-foot pile of black plastic pots was heaped against a shed next to pallets of mulch rotting in their faded bags. A small tan and black dog was laying near the door, chained to the shed, and it raised its snout to sniff the air as Louis got out of the Mustang, then went back to sleep. The smell of gasoline and manure hung in the air.

  Ronnie Cade had heard the Mustang’s door and came out of the shed, wiping his hands on a dirty rag.

  “You found the place,” Ronnie said.

  “It wasn’t hard.” Louis looked around. There was a double-wide trailer parked behind the shed. It was fronted by a small concrete patio that held a barbecue grill and some plastic chairs clustered around an old wooden electrical spool. Huge purple thunderheads were piling up again in the west.

  “You have a lot of land here,” Louis said.

  Ronnie squinted out over the grounds. “Yeah, ten acres,” he said flatly. “Come on inside. We can talk while I finish up.”

  Louis followed, stepping over the comatose dog. Inside, it was cool and smelled of cut grass. The shed was filled with bags of fertilizer, compost, power mowers, edgers and other gardening tools. Ronnie went to a workbench, where the guts of a gas-powered leaf blower lay exposed under the glare of a florescent light.

  “I was surprised when you called,” Ronnie said, picking up a screwdriver. “I thought when I didn’t hear from you, you decided to blow me off.”

  “I went and saw your father,” Louis said.

  Ronnie turned to look at him, but then went back to poking the screwdriver in the blower. “So?”

  “He didn’t give me any compelling reason to take your case.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Maybe you can.”

  “Can what?”

  “Give me a reason.”

  “I already did. I told you, my father is innocent.”

  “What about twenty years ago?” Louis said.

  Ronnie turned and stared at him. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Well, I need—”

  Ronnie pointed the screwdriver at Louis. “Look, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Louis heard a motor outside and the sound of air brakes releasing. He looked out the door and saw a yellow school bus pulling away down Mantanzas Trail.

  A moment later, a boy came to the door, stopping in the threshold when he saw Louis. He was about thirteen, gangly, with unruly dark hair and sunburned arms exposed in his Van Halen T-shirt.

  “Hey, Dad, what are you doing home? I thought you were cutting Bay Beach today?” he asked, eyeing Louis.

  “Got rained out. What about you?”

  “Teacher work day. Half day.” The dog had come in, and the boy dropped his backpack to scratch its ears.

  “Go get changed,” Ronnie said. “I need some help loading that sod before it
starts raining again.”

  “Oh, man . . .”

  “No lip, you hear?”

  He heaved a sigh. “I’m hungry.”

  Ronnie wiped a hand over his brow. “Okay, there’s some of those pizza things left. Then get back out here, okay?”

  “Do I nuke ’em on high?”

  “No. Half-power or they splatter up the inside.”

  With a lingering look at Louis, the boy left, the dog trailing after.

  “Your son?” Louis asked.

  Ronnie nodded, concentrating again on the leaf blower.

  Louis was thinking how much the boy looked like Jack Cade. He remembered that Ronnie had said he lived with his son and wondered if the boy’s mother was in the picture. He had the feeling she wasn’t; there was something about this place that had the forlorn aura of men living alone.

  “He helps you around here, I take it?” he asked.

  “Eric? Yeah. He’s a good kid. Not like me when I was his age. I gave my dad a lot of shit. He even had to bail me out of jail once when I did something stupid. But he kept me straight after that. Maybe that’s why I feel I owe him this now.”

  Ronnie glanced at him. “You got any kids?”

  Louis shook his head quickly.

  “I raised Eric by myself,” Ronnie said, his fingers deep in the blower’s greasy bowels. “His mother split when he was seven. Hand me those pliers, will you?”

  Louis scanned the bench and held out the pliers. Ronnie’s face was screwed in concentration as he took another stab at the wounded motor. Finally, he threw the pliers down.

  “Fuck! The fucking thing is stripped. Shit!”

  He ran a hand over his brow and took a step back, staring at the mess of metal on the bench. He looked at Louis and gestured to the bench. “The fucker’s shot!”

  Ronnie spun and kicked at a metal stool, sending it crashing against the wall. He stood there for a moment, hands on his hips, head bowed. Then he turned to Louis.

  “I can’t pay you,” he said, his voice strained.

  Louis held out his hand. “Look, Cade—”

  “No, you’re not hearing me. That five hundred I said I’d pay you?” Ronnie was shaking his head. “I haven’t got it, man! I have two-hundred and thirty-three dollars in my checking account and if I don’t use it to buy a fucking new blower, I can’t go to work tomorrow!”