Cold Florida Read online

  I took one step farther in, and I could see the stove and fridge side-by-side to my left, and a bathroom without a door on it. The sink was filled with dishes and the tub had water in it.

  There was a window, but it had plastic over it, to keep out the cold I was guessing.

  ‘You hear the ruckus a few nights ago?’ I asked, trying not to look anyplace in particular. ‘The baby being born?’

  ‘Me? No. It was Gerard.’

  ‘I see. And where is Gerard?’

  ‘D-10,’ she told me. ‘Right across the hall. But he ain’t in either. He’s still working. He’s a stripper. A male stripper. You ever hear of such a thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now, about Lynette.’

  ‘She’s a junkie.’

  ‘You already told me that.’

  ‘She’s always late with the rent.’

  ‘And yet, you let her stay.’

  ‘It ain’t my place,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘I get to live here for free, and all I gots to do is take in the rent, notify people about this and that, and call the cops on a regular basis.’

  ‘You call the cops last Thursday night when Lynette …?’

  ‘Gerard came to me,’ she sighed. ‘I went to the cops, yeah. But I knew there was something more to it. You don’t bleed that much just from having a baby.’

  ‘You’ve had a baby?’

  ‘No,’ she said, adjusting her chenille robe, ‘but I seen it on the television.’

  ‘I’m going to look around in here now, for a minute,’ I said, swallowing.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she told me. ‘I’m going back downstairs to have a little nightcap.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  She left. I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about the scene in that room when the baby was born. I was just hoping to find something to tell me where the girl, the junkie, Lynette Baker might be hiding.

  I opened my eyes, and all of a sudden I could have kicked myself for not asking what the baby was named. It would be nice, I thought to myself, to be able to say the baby’s name to the junkie mother. Sometimes when you personalized things, a junkie would soften up. A little.

  I took a moment to stare at the picture of the penguin on the wall. It seemed hilariously out of place, though I did not, at that moment, feel much like laughing. I decided that it was the only thing out of place in the dump, so I should start by examining it more closely. Sometimes you got lucky.

  I took the few steps farther into the apartment that were necessary for me to grab the picture frame. I lifted the picture off the wall. There was a nail and a sizeable hole in the wall around the nail, like somebody had hit the nail so hard that the nail went all the way in and the hammer left an indentation, a little crater. Otherwise, there was nothing hidden on the wall.

  I looked at the back of the picture. There was a very old slab of corrugated cardboard that was held in place by four finishing nails, one in each corner. I bent two of the nails a bit and slid the cardboard out of the way. A postage-stamp-sized baggie dropped to the floor. It was sealed with scotch tape and almost completely flat, but it had a nice white powdery substance in it. I scooped it up and pocketed it. Then I saw that, written in very light pencil in the corner of the backside of the cardboard, it said Jody and gave a telephone number.

  Like I said, sometimes you got lucky.

  I looked around, found the phone, and dialed the number. Just like that.

  It rang maybe fourteen times before a very disgruntled female voice said, ‘What?’ into my ear.

  ‘Lynette,’ I said calmly.

  There was a pause, after which the person said, ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’d like to speak with her.’

  ‘Me too,’ the voice said. ‘She owes me money.’

  ‘So, you have to be Jody,’ I said politely.

  ‘I don’t have to be,’ she insisted.

  ‘OK,’ I allowed, ‘maybe you want to be Jody, because I hear that I might purchase some interesting memorabilia from you.’

  ‘What?’

  I got the impression that Jody was just about to hang up.

  ‘I call it memorabilia,’ I hastened to say. ‘I know some people just call it trash – in fact, that’s just how Lynette described it to me. “It’s all junk,” she said to me. But never the less, I am interested. And I am a somewhat significant collector.’

  I could hear her smile. ‘I get it. That’s good. But, OK, look: I don’t sell to dealers. I’m strictly a neighborhood operation, you understand.’

  ‘I hoped I might have a look-see, like, now.’

  ‘I’m sleeping. It’s three in the morning.’

  ‘If I like what you have,’ I told her softly, ‘I could buy out your entire inventory. But I’ll be gone by dawn, back to … back out of town, you understand.’

  ‘Christ,’ she mumbled, mostly to herself.

  I heard her light a cigarette.

  ‘I would like to come over right now,’ I pressed.

  ‘Yeah.’ She coughed. ‘OK. But I’ll have to ask you for a minimum purchase no matter what. You know, for the inconvenience.’

  ‘For the inconvenience,’ I agreed.

  THREE

  On my way to Jody’s address – a number she would only whisper, as if someone might overhear – I stopped by the all-night donut shop to pick up something sweet for Jody. Junkies liked the sweets. The place was called Donuts, so that you would know exactly what they sold without any guesswork.

  I walked into the place and was not surprised to see seven or eight other people there, eating donuts and drinking coffee and generally minding their own business. This was a popular place with the late-night set: kids out after curfew, drunks trying to sober up before going home to somebody, even the occasional police person endorsing a time-honored cliché.

  The shop always smelled nice, like fresh donuts, even when there were none. And the lighting was not too harsh, which I liked. Also, whoever owned the joint had installed a jukebox that contained only jazz from the cool school. This frustrated some of the younger customers, who complained that there was no music they liked. Generally, everyone else told them to beat it if they didn’t like it, and generally they did. This left the place in a sort of pristine time capsule. As I sidled up to the counter by the cash register, the tune So What was playing. This was not only a fine Miles Davis tune but also a relatively correct philosophical attitude, in my opinion.

  ‘Foggy,’ the woman at the cash register mumbled, after the briefest possible glance.

  She was, perhaps, sixty years old, five-foot-nothing, red of eye and rouge of cheek. Once, maybe, her hair had been red, but now it took something called henna rinse to make it stay that way. I knew about that because she complained, almost every night, about how it made her hair wiry. Her face was a road map and filled with details about what she had done in her past. The donut shop, she said, was only a rest stop for her. Just a place marker in the progress of her journey. But she’d worked there since 1952. Her name was Cass.

  ‘Yes, Cass,’ I admitted, ‘it’s me.’

  She didn’t look back up from her newspaper. ‘You’re off work late.’

  ‘I’m not off at all,’ I said to her, ‘in that I’m still on.’

  ‘You’re still on?’ Still, she did not look up. She was dressed in the same shabby pink waitress uniform that she had worn since 1952, when she got here looking for a job and a place to hide.

  ‘I’m still on,’ I repeated, ‘and I would like half a dozen.’

  ‘What are you working on so late?’ She was irritated with the whole idea.

  ‘Tell you later.’ I tossed down a buck, which was nearly twice as much as six plain sugar donuts cost.

  She didn’t touch the bill. In fact, she didn’t even seem to look at it. She hauled herself off her chair, and I could actually hear her bones creak. The ashes dripped from her cigarette down on to the floor, and when she turned away from me I could see that her hairnet had a very large hole in it.r />
  ‘They ain’t fresh,’ Cass said over her shoulder. ‘Lou’s drunk again.’

  ‘When were they made?’

  ‘Midnight.’ She said it like it was the Middle Ages. ‘Lou left right after that. He was out in the alley and then he didn’t come back.’

  ‘Still,’ I told her, ‘a couple of donuts can be good at this time of night.’

  She resumed her tortoise-like forward motion. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Two, please.’ I tossed down another buck. I knew it was way too much, but Cass could use the moolah, and the state paid me double for overtime. I didn’t mind sharing.

  Cass was back with a white paper bag and two cardboard cups in relatively short order. I made as to leave and she coughed.

  ‘Your change,’ she growled.

  ‘What change?’ I asked her, pushing through the door and back out on to the street.

  The rain had stopped completely. I was still wet, but the hot coffee cups were keeping my hands warm, so the shivers were more or less gone.

  Inside of five minutes, I was gently kicking at the bottom of the door in an apartment building only very slightly nicer than the one where Lynette most recently had her baby.

  I saw the peephole darken. ‘Get lost!’ said a very male voice.

  ‘OK, I can try,’ I answered reasonably, ‘but it won’t be that easy, because this is a small town and I’ve lived here already three years. I know the place pretty well.’

  ‘You the guy?’ the voice was asking me – obviously Jody making her voice very deep.

  ‘I am the guy. It’s Foggy Moscowitz. I got coffee and donuts.’ I held up the same so that she could see the truth of what I was saying.

  There was a slight pause in the conversation, and then I heard a chain on the inside of the door start to move. As this happened, I heard her saying, in her normal voice, ‘I could go for donuts. I could go for donuts real good.’

  The donuts had changed her attitude, which had been my plan. The door edged open. Jody looked me up and down, then she peeped out into the hall. Two seconds more went by, and she stepped aside to let me pass. She was wearing a giant gray sweatshirt and nothing else that I could see. It came halfway down her thighs, but it seemed pretty short to me. Her wiry blond hair was pulled into two ponytails, one on either side of her head so that she looked like a demented Kewpie Doll.

  I handed over the bag of donuts. She shoved her hand down in it, fished one out, and crammed the whole thing into her mouth.

  I held up the coffee. She nodded, picking out her second donut.

  ‘Save a couple for me,’ I told her.

  She turned away, and I thought she was pretending not to hear me because she was already grabbing a third.

  Jody’s place was just as depressing as Lynette’s, but at least there was no blood on the sofa, as far as I could tell. Still, I preferred to stand. There were scattered newspapers and magazines everywhere. A cruddy yellow sofa was backed up to the window, which looked out on to an alley. There was only one other chair. There were bookshelves, but they had as many candles and whatnots on them as they did books. I thought there might be a kitchenette off to the left, but it smelled like very old cabbage. And what do you know: there was a picture of a penguin on the wall over one of the bookshelves. It was the exact same picture that was hanging in Lynette’s apartment.

  Jody collapsed on to the sofa, seriously tearing into a fourth donut. I still preferred to stand, but I set both coffees down on the table in front of her. This was generally called a coffee table, so I inferred that it would be appropriate. However, on this particular table there was a scale, a measuring spoon, and other items that a police officer might refer to as paraphernalia.

  ‘Is that a photo or a drawing, that penguin?’ I asked, pointing to the picture.

  ‘It’s a photo,’ she said, around a mouthful of donut. ‘I took it. It’s my photo. I made copies. I used to sell my photos at that gallery on Biscayne, but they closed.’

  ‘Where did you take that photo?’ I asked, suspiciously. ‘There are very few penguins in this part of Florida.’

  ‘It was at the Lowry Park Zoo over there in Tampa. They got this place called Fairyland with all these concrete statues of nursery rhymes and a big maze that you can only get to if you go over a giant rainbow bridge.’

  As luck would have it, I knew the place. The way she described it, it sounded like a junkie vision, but in fact there really was a great big rainbow bridge and a bunch of concrete fairytales. Still, it dated from 1957 and was currently a bit on the seedy side.

  ‘Lynette has a picture just like this,’ I said casually.

  ‘She likes penguins.’ Jody gave me the kind of shrug that told me something. It told me that a shrug was central to her philosophy of life. ‘I gave her a copy.’

  ‘I have to find her.’ No point beating around the bush. ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Damn it,’ she whined, shifting around on the cruddy yellow sofa. ‘You’re a cop?’

  ‘No,’ I told her in a voice that she had no choice but to believe.

  She sat up and looked at me for the first real time. ‘No. You’re not a cop. I see that. What then?’

  ‘Lynette had a baby a few nights ago.’

  Jody’s eyes got wide. ‘I thought she was pregnant!’

  ‘She and the baby are missing. If I don’t find them in a few hours, the baby will die, and I’ll have to fill out all kinds of paperwork. So please, tell me where she is.’

  ‘But you’re not a cop.’

  ‘I’m a concerned citizen.’ I squinted, trying to control my irritation. ‘Where is Lynette?’

  ‘Why are you looking for her?’ Jody complained. ‘You her dad?’

  ‘I look like her dad?’ I was offended. I was by no means a kid, but I did not have dad written anywhere on me.

  ‘You look a little like one of them Indians from over on the nation, but you got a better suit and a sharper edge. Plus, you ain’t from around here.’

  ‘Where am I from?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Yankee Land,’ she said, oozing disgust.

  ‘OK, but now you have to tell me where Lynette might hide out.’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’ she said in a voice that was twice too loud. ‘Do I keep up with Lynette?’

  ‘Well,’ I reasoned, ‘I know she was here earlier tonight.’

  It was a guess, but a good one. Where would a junkie go after a few days of deprivation, especially if she thought the cops might be watching her own place?

  ‘She wasn’t here,’ Jody told me, but she didn’t even bother to make it believable, or maybe she wasn’t capable of lying in a convincing manner.

  ‘She came here, you sold to her, and she split. But to where? Family? Girlfriend? Father of the baby?’

  Jody slumped down. Her sweatshirt rode up and I could, unfortunately, see that she was sporting no undergarments of any sort. A gentleman should always avert his eyes. I considered averting mine all the way to Pittsburgh.

  ‘Pete’s,’ she mumbled, after the merest of pauses. ‘She might be over there.’

  ‘The billiards parlor on third?’ I asked.

  ‘She ain’t got no family. And who the hell would be a father to her baby? I didn’t even know she was pregnant, for sure. But sometimes she goes over there after she shoots.’

  ‘Where else?’ I asked, looking into the kitchen.

  ‘She knew this guy who lived across the hall from her, Gerard,’ she sneered. Apparently she did not care for Gerard.

  ‘The male stripper?’

  She gave me the once-over. I could see it out of the corner of my eye. ‘You don’t look like a sissy. How would you know about Gerard?’

  ‘Anything else?’ I sighed.

  ‘That bastard Indian, Lou Yahola. He was friends with her.’

  ‘Lou at the donut shop?’

  ‘Damn, Jackson, you do get around. How you know Lou?’ Jody somehow managed to make these sentences sound like she was impressed, while she was actu
ally insulting me. Or maybe I was just forming a bad impression of the kid.

  ‘It’s a small town,’ I told her.

  ‘But you and me never met,’ she said.

  ‘We travel in different circles,’ I told her.

  ‘So you don’t want to buy none of my – what’s that you said? Memorabilia? I liked that. That was clever.’

  ‘I don’t care to make a purchase.’ I reached into my pocket and fetched the tiny baggie from Lynette’s apartment. ‘But, so it shouldn’t be a total loss for you, I am returning merchandize for which you have already been paid.’

  I tossed the baggie in her general direction, still trying hard not to look right at her.

  ‘So who do you work for, really?’ she asked me, ignoring the dope in her lap area.

  ‘I work for the county,’ I said quickly. ‘I look out for kids, little kids.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked, in the softest voice she had yet used.

  ‘Really,’ I confirmed, turning to head for the door.

  ‘They pay you for that?’ she wanted to know. ‘The county.’

  ‘Yes, but the money is not my primary motivation.’ I reached out for the door handle.

  I heard her stand up behind me. ‘What is, then? Why you do it?’

  ‘Yom Kippur,’ I mumbled.

  ‘The Hebe Holiday? That’s today?’

  ‘The actual day,’ I explained, as I opened her door, not looking back at her for fear of turning into a pillar of salt, ‘is the tenth day of Tishri. But I got a lot of atonement and repentance built up to do, so for me it’s every day – for a while.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ She started to say more.

  But I didn’t hear the rest because I closed the door behind me and headed down the hallway toward the street.

  FOUR

  I didn’t want to backtrack because I thought it would make me lose momentum. So I wasn’t returning to the donut shop or Lynette’s apartment right away. I figured Lou was drunk or sleeping one off, and Gerard wasn’t home yet. So I kept going forward; headed over to Pete’s Billiard Emporium.