Cold Florida Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Phillip DePoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: Fry’s Bay, Florida, 1974

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Two: Seminole Swamp

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Three: Fry’s Bay

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  A Selection of Titles by Phillip DePoy

  The Fever Devilin Series

  THE DEVIL’S HEARTH

  THE WITCH’S GRAVE

  A MINISTER’S GHOST

  A WIDOW’S CURSE

  THE DRIFTER’S WHEEL

  A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE

  DECEMBER’S THORN

  The Foggy Moskowitz Series

  COLD FLORIDA *

  * available from Severn House

  COLD FLORIDA

  A Foggy Moskowitz Mystery

  Phillip DePoy

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Phillip DePoy.

  The right of Phillip DePoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  DePoy, Phillip author.

  Cold Florida. – (A Foggy Moskowitz mystery)

  1. Missing children–Florida–Fiction. 2. Seminole

  Indians–Florida–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery

  stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8575-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-683-1 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-739-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  PART ONE

  Fry’s Bay, Florida, 1974

  ONE

  It was two in the morning, the middle of February. I was signing my time card, but I could barely read the handwriting I was so tired. Then the phone rang. I said something rude to it, but it rang again anyway. I looked at the door to my crummy office. It seemed very unsympathetic to my situation. It stayed closed. The phone rang a third time, and I picked it up.

  ‘He’s not in,’ I said.

  ‘Nice try, Foggy,’ Sharon said. ‘But this is important.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them again. I imagined how nice it might be to lie down on the top of my desk. I would only have to move a couple of folders in the right direction to make a nice pillow. The light in the room was hurting my eyes. The hum from that fluorescent tube was stopping up my ears.

  ‘Still there?’ Sharon said impatiently.

  ‘Define there.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘you have to go to the hospital.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I told her. ‘I’m very run down lately.’

  ‘Hasn’t hindered your sense of humor,’ she said, without the slightest hint of levity. ‘Somebody stole a baby. From the neo-natal care whatever-you-call-it.’

  ‘Stole a baby?’ I rejoined. ‘At two in the morning? This close to Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she mumbled and I heard her rustling something on her desk. ‘I guess it is almost Valentine’s Day at that.’

  ‘Isn’t this more of a police type of a situation?’ I asked her.

  ‘The baby’s mother is missing too,’ Sharon said right back. ‘She’s a junkie, and the baby’s addicted too because the mother shot up while she was pregnant. Shot up, apparently, all the time. So now she’s gone, and the baby’s gone, and the police are called thence, but they also want someone from our little branch of crime-fighters on the scene, because they’re defining it as “an endangered child” case. So, tag. You’re the only one on duty at the moment.’

  ‘Technically speaking,’ I began, hoisting my time card up to the phone as if she could see it, ‘I already signed out.’

  ‘Technically speaking, I’m five-foot-eleven, but does anyone call me willowy? No. I get scarecrow a lot.’

  ‘I always think of you as willowy.’

  ‘Not the point.’

  ‘It’s not?’ I asked, somewhat disingenuously.

  ‘The point is,’ she sighed, ‘that just because you think it, that doesn’t make it so. You think you’re off. But you’re not.’

  ‘Nietzsche or Kant or one of those German types,’ I said, very reasonably, ‘and I, would disagree with you. They always like to tell you that the only thing that makes it so is that you think it’s so.’

  ‘Have them call me tomorrow,’ she snapped, ‘and we’ll discuss it, but at the moment?’

  ‘I’m going to the hospital.’

  ‘I told them already that you’re on your way. So hurry. Don’t stop for coffee.’

  I hung up without saying anything further about German philosophers.

  I looked around my office and took a second, a brief second, to reflect on my lot in life. How, I asked myself, did I end up here? My office was the size of an elevator car, no window. My desk was made of plywood. The walls were painted some color that wasn’t even bright in 1947 when it was applied. The floor was a blond carpet that had so many stains everybody thought it was an imitation Pollock – a bad imitation. There was nothing on any wall, unless you’d counted the smudges. And the guy who’d worked in the office before me was a two-pack-a-day smoker who’d died of lung cancer, so the place smelled like an ashtray in a bus station.

  The entire building was just as bad: a squat, concrete two-story, painted pink. It was a box with windows and a flat roof that leaked. And I was on the second floor. The sign out front said Child Protective
Services because Congress passed Public Law 93-247, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The act came with a little bit of federal funding. The only job I’d had in Florida before that was as a sort of private investigator. But the romance of that job had worn thin after a while – nearly as thin as my bank account – so a nice government paycheck seemed just the ticket. Also, for reasons too nefarious to disclose, it was the perfect job for me. It helped me to atone for past transgressions.

  Previously, I had been happy-go-lucky in Brooklyn: the halcyon days, before 1971 – a long three years earlier. Sometimes this happy-go-lucky me, my former self, would emerge from the place in my brain where I’d buried him. When that happened, the little man who used to be me, he taunted me.

  ‘You used to be the best four-wheel booster in Borough Park,’ he would say. ‘Free as a bird. What happened to you?’

  The beauty of stealing a car in a mostly Hasidic neighborhood, of course, was that the cops didn’t give it as much attention as they would have in, say, Brooklyn Heights.

  ‘You were only caught twice,’ he said, the guy in my head, ‘and one of those times all you had to do was apologize to a guy named Schlomo, and Bob was your uncle. He let you cop a walk.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I explained, also in my head, ‘but the second time I got caught, I was on my way to the slam. I was only able to avoid it by slipping out of the cop car under very dire circumstances and hiding out all the way to Florida. Florida is where you made me come to! And now, somehow, it got to be 1974!’

  That would usually shut him up, the little guy in my head. For a while.

  As I was leaving, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the dirty glass part of the door. I needed a shave, and a haircut, and a new suit, and, to be honest, a fair amount of plastic surgery. But was that going to happen? The beard grew fast. The hair looked better longer. The suit, well, it used to be Brooks Brothers, but at this point it looked like the brothers had fought over the thing before going their separate ways. And that face: seriously, I used to catch clocks trying to avoid eye contact. Still, it was the face I was given, and it certainly belonged to a guy who would call himself Foggy. So there I was.

  I decided to walk to the hospital. It was only five blocks, and I thought the air and the exercise would wake me up. The wee hours of the night were always quiet in our little berg. This particular night the streets were slick because of the rain and shiny because of the moon, which was full like a big white snowball. Which, by the way, they never saw around those parts: snow. Still, it was plenty cold, and I got the shivers, which made me walk faster. Because I was from parts north, I always underestimated the ability of a cold night in Florida to ice me up. I never wore an overcoat. I always thought to myself, You’re from Brooklyn! What do you need with an overcoat in Fry’s Bay?

  These were the thoughts I was having as I walked along the chilly, wet streets toward the hospital. There was no other idiot out of doors. Everyone else had sense enough to come in out of the rain. Still, it was my job, and I tried not to complain.

  I rounded the corner of Broad Street and saw the Emergency sign for the hospital a block away. It was all red and misty, hanging in the air above an empty parking space where ambulances might hang out. I had to prepare myself to talk to night nurses about a stolen baby and a junkie mother. I was not an overly sensitive guy but, still, a conversation like that took a moment of steeling up beforehand.

  I was wet, so I shook off a little before I sauntered in through the emergency door. I was greatly relieved to see Maggie Redhawk at the nurses’ station. I knew her, she knew me. That was going to make things a little nicer.

  Maggie Redhawk was a fifty-year-old woman of what she said was mixed ethnicity, which meant she couldn’t decide if she wanted to write African-American or Native American on her census form. She and I had bonded because of my somewhat unusual looks. She thought I looked more like a Seminole than she did. Now, in fact, I was actually almost entirely a Russian Jew in the heritage arena. But, to Maggie, I looked a little like a Seminole, and we had several discussions about the lost tribes of Israel. We mostly talked about other things such as the weather and, on this particular night, a missing baby.

  She saw me walk in. She was dressed in her usual hospital uniform, so large on her that she looked like a big white pillow with a black wig on.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘You’re wet.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes. And I am also cold.’

  ‘You’re here about the missing baby.’

  No small talk. That was interesting to me because Maggie was a big one for the small talk.

  ‘I am,’ I told her. ‘And the missing mother that goes with her.’

  ‘The baby’s the problem,’ she allowed, ‘because, if it doesn’t get its medication in just about three hours, it’s dead.’

  ‘That is a problem.’

  ‘We ain’t really got time to kid around, Foggy,’ she told me, more serious than I had ever seen her.

  ‘So tell me about the mother,’ I said, sidling up to the nurses’ station.

  The emergency waiting room was about as per usual for that time of night. It was not much bigger than a living room. Four or five guys were bleeding in chairs under very harsh fluorescent lighting. The place smelled like rubbing alcohol and vomit. The floor was smeared with the black traces of gurneys and wheelchairs and heel marks. And Maggie smelled like powder, a nice white scent.

  ‘The mother’s a junkie, like I said,’ Maggie told me matter-of-factly. ‘Had the kid in her apartment. A neighbor reported it. They both would have died otherwise.’

  ‘She came here when?’ I asked.

  ‘Last Thursday, not quite a week ago.’

  ‘So, this baby,’ I concluded, ‘it’s really in bad shape.’

  She nodded.

  ‘All right.’ I rapped my knuckles on the countertop between us and made as to leave.

  I was halfway to the door before she objected.

  ‘Wait. Where are you going?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘I am going to the apartment of the mother with all due haste,’ I told Maggie, without turning around. ‘It seems like a good place to start.’

  ‘Her apartment?’ she queried. ‘And where do you think that is?’

  ‘I’m guessing,’ I told her, my hand on the door, ‘that it’s the address listed beside her name on that paperwork in front of you. Right where it says “patient’s residence”.’

  ‘How the hell—’ she began to ask me.

  I didn’t hear the rest of her question, because I was already outside and on my way to the address of one Lynette Baker, an apartment on Pine.

  Another nurse passed me as I stepped on to the sidewalk. ‘Tell Maggie that I can read upside down. Tell her I’m not as stupid as I look.’

  The nurse looked up, caught my face, recognized me, and smiled. ‘Yeah, I’ll tell her. But I think she probably already knows the second part. I mean, it would just be cruel if you actually were as stupid as you look.’

  ‘Comedy after two in the morning,’ I rejoined.

  ‘You have to do something to keep from crying,’ she said, shoving on the door to go into the hospital, ‘don’t you?’

  I nodded, even though she didn’t see me, because I figured she had a point.

  TWO

  Shortly after, my fist was saying blam on somebody’s door. It took a while, but somebody answered.

  ‘What?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘You’re the concierge of this establishment?’ I held up a badge.

  Now, if she looked at it too good, I’d maybe have to wade through half an hour’s worth of explaining what a task force was and sometimes even what a battered child was, though I always found that the phrase was fairly self-explanatory. If she was sleepy, she might mistake my badge for a cop badge, and everything would be Jake.

  She squinted past the door chain. ‘Oh. You’re here about the junkie.’

  ‘After a fashion,’ I confessed.

  She unbolte
d her door. She was dressed in a fright wig and chenille bathrobe. Her feet were adorned with the dirtiest slippers I’d ever seen. She reached up to a nail by the door for a ring of keys.

  ‘Come on.’ She muscled past me, down the hall, and up a flight of splintery stairs.

  Even though it was pressing three o’clock in the morning, there was a stereo on somewhere, playing Los Tigres Del Norte very softly. My Spanish was rusty, but the song was about a woman who shot a drug smuggler and stole his money. Somewhere else gave off the smell of cooking onions, and it made my stomach growl. A woman was crying in D-7 as we passed her door. The shower was running in D-9. The super stopped at D-11 and shoved the key in the door without knocking.

  ‘This is her place,’ she said loudly. ‘But she ain’t in, I can tell you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because she’s in the hospital.’

  She flung the door open. Immediately a stench assaulted my considerable nostrils that made me think maybe I was in a slaughterhouse.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ I asked haltingly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That smell?’

  ‘What smell?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying to ignore it.

  ‘After you,’ she said.

  I took a tentative step into the lair, and was presented with something worse than the smell: the scene that was causing the smell. The dump was a one-room affair; sometimes they call it a studio. There was a sofa, a side table, a lamp, a large photograph of a penguin hanging on the wall, and seventeen years’ worth of accumulated garbage. In addition to the empty pizza boxes and moldy cottage cheese containers, there was a significant amount of blood and guts on the sofa. My guess was that our girl had her baby right there.