Dead Last Read online

  It had been Garvey’s choice to rehab at the Floridian. The complex was near the home they shared along the Miami River, but more important, that venerable institution had occupied the same thick-walled stucco building for over eighty years. Garvey Moss had a deep affection for all things connected to Old Miami, and she’d made it one of her crusades to support any enterprise in the city that had lasted half a century.

  To April, the Floridian resembled one of those tacky mom-and-pop roadside motels her parents frequented when she was a kid. The place hadn’t been updated since cars had fins. Ancient air conditioners chugged in the windows, dripping rusty water steadily onto the terrazzo floors while overhead squeaking ceiling fans idled. On the grounds were a couple of coral fountains full of green slime and a broad lawn, and in a wing at the back was a gym with some unused weights and treadmills, as if the room existed only to pass some state regs. All in all, the Floridian was more funky than charming, with gummy stains on the carpets and ammonia wafting from the shadows.

  Even after a scouting visit had turned up the sad state of the place, Garvey was adamant. If she had to suffer through weeks of physio, then by god, the least she could do was support that rare occurrence in Miami, historic preservation.

  “Have you been walking today, Mother?”

  “I walked ten miles, then ten more. I ran two marathons after that.”

  “What’d you have for lunch?”

  “Cream of vomit soup,” she said.

  “Oh, come on. I’ve tasted the food. It’s not that bad.”

  “Everything’s from a can. You like it so much, you stay, roll around in this chair. We’ll pull a switcheroo.”

  “Just a few days more. Suck it up, Mom.”

  “Food’s so salty, I’m puffed up like a water buffalo in rainy season.”

  She thumped a finger on April’s wrist and pointed at a man leaning against a column in the breezeway across the courtyard.

  “Now there’s my type. Gary Cooper meets Rambo. I’ve been winking at him, but he’s a little shy, pretending not to notice.”

  April glanced at the blond man, then did a double take. A face immediately familiar. There was a sudden hitch in her pulse, dampness on her palms. Sawyer walked past the blond man, coming out of the main complex, script in hand, chatting with one of his assistants, looked over, saw April, and waved. April waved back.

  “This place is a geriatric tar pit,” Garvey said. “I must have been out of my mind. I should’ve left my knees alone. Just hobbled off into the sunset like every other gimpy dowager. Why’d you let me do this to myself?”

  “You couldn’t make it up the stairs to your room, Mother.”

  “I should’ve installed an elevator. Or moved to the maid’s room on the first floor. Slept on that old purple couch. It’s perfectly comfortable.”

  “It’s done now. You’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “I’m going home. I’m sick of this place.”

  “You need therapy, Mother. Your muscles are going to atrophy.”

  “You can’t hold me prisoner. I’ll call a cab, come home on my own.”

  “Tell the truth. Are you really that unhappy?”

  “Unhappy? I hate this place. Look around, it’s full of dead people.”

  Garvey was silent for a minute, rubbing at the ache in her thighs. April watched a young woman in jeans kneel down beside an elderly lady in a nearby wheelchair. Both with the same distinctive jawline—another mother/daughter team. The girl spoke into her mother’s ear, but the ancient lady stared helplessly ahead at the buildings across the street.

  That scene was April’s future, Garvey’s future, everyone’s damn future.

  “His name is Thorn. He’s available. His wife just died.”

  April’s pulse threw an extra beat, then another.

  Inside her purse her phone vibrated, but April ignored it.

  She snuck a look at the man still lounging in the breezeway. Apparently he hadn’t spotted her. He was speaking to a person standing beside him. Male or female, hard to tell. Short and blocky, loose-fitting clothes. Bad haircut and a dirty face. Relax, she told herself. Take a breath, no reason to freak.

  Thorn was watching the TV crew block the next scene, Dee Dee Dollimore and a male actor standing in the shade while their personal assistants directed handheld fans at their faces and dabbed white washcloths at the sweat sheening their skin. Out in the sun, two stand-ins were holding the actors’ positions, giving the cameramen and light guys a chance to adjust their settings.

  Thorn.

  April was the reason he was here. The obituary she’d written about Rusty Stabler had lured him back into her orbit. He’d come to thank her, reconnect, ask her out, or something else.

  This was entirely April’s fault. Of all the people who’d died last week, she’d chosen to fill her limited space with Thorn’s wife. Not that Rusty hadn’t deserved coverage. She was a notable woman. From humble roots she’d ended up wielding major political and economic power. Outsider becomes insider. Disenfranchised daughter of single mom turns into a major benefactor for the very school that almost ground her to dust.

  But April easily could have skipped her. She called the shots on what went in. Naturally Thorn was in her mind when she wrote the piece. On some level she must have been trying to draw him back into her life. God, how absolutely crazy. Look what she’d done. She’d thought about it often, Thorn showing up again, but now that it was happening, she was totally unprepared.

  She considered bolting. Race home, lock herself in, take no calls. Forget her mother and go into hiding. But no, of course she couldn’t do that. She was an adult. There was some way to manage this. There had to be.

  “And how do you know the man’s name, Garvey?”

  “He’s from Key Largo. A girl who used to live down there is a nurse in this shit hole. She told us about Thorn when he walked in the rec room after lunch. He’s famous in the Keys. Everybody knows him. He’s a roughneck and a lady killer. I said he sounded like just your type.”

  “You said that in public?”

  “I say everything in public.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Wants to talk to you. Called your office at the paper, they couldn’t locate you, someone suggested you might be here, visiting your poor suffering mother. He’s here to interrogate you, dear. It’s all very mysterious. There’s a woman with him with tattoos all over her face. She’s a cop. They’re investigating something you did a long time ago in your checkered past.”

  “Stop it, Mother.”

  April’s phone vibrated again. She pulled it from her purse, checked the ID. Isaac, her assignment editor.

  “Don’t answer it.”

  “It’s work.”

  “And I’m your mother. What’s more important?”

  April slid the phone back into her purse.

  “Somebody famous must have died.”

  “They don’t have to be famous, Mother. You know that.”

  “Have you started writing mine? Before you do, I need to fill you in on the early years. A lot of raunchy stuff happened before you barged onto the scene. I was a party girl, you know. I could shake that thing.”

  Garvey deemed April’s job at The Miami Herald shamefully beneath her abilities. April had an undergrad degree from Duke in American lit, did two years at Columbia’s School of Journalism, followed by a decade with the Herald exposing the frauds and bamboozlers who gorged at the public trough. No journalistic challenge there. In Miami, muckraking was fish-in-the-barrel stuff. The town had been so saturated in corruption for so many years, you couldn’t take a step without the mire oozing between your toes.

  After a decade and dozens of scandals, April came to the uneasy conclusion that she’d been writing the same story over and over, only changing the names and making adjustments in the cash amounts. When the obit job opened, she nabbed it. She wanted off the street, out of the courtroom, away from the primping TV gaggle.

  It d
idn’t take long to realize she’d stumbled into writers’ heaven. Obits were gold. A major challenge to her writing skills—trying to capture the human dignity of common people in a few hundred words, the long arc of hard work, family trials, and the triumphs along the way. Short prose poems of lives well spent and those tragically frittered away. The writing was elliptical, like Japanese painting, just the essential bones to suggest the full-bodied existence of a complex person.

  “You don’t think he’s handsome? Now, that’s exactly the reason you’re still single. Those snooty standards. I don’t know where you got that bad trait. Certainly not from me. When it came to men, I could lower my standards at the drop of a pair of trousers.”

  “Look, I have to go. I’ll be back after dinner, Mom. Do your exercises, okay? Stop giving the therapists a hard time.”

  “Well, if you’re not interested in the bad boy,” Garvey said, “then I’m staking claim.”

  As she lifted her purse and started to rise, April saw him coming. The man from Key Largo named Thorn.

  She settled back into her chair. This was manageable. It had to be.

  He was taller than she remembered, blonder and more wide shouldered. While he was on his way through the maze of wheelchairs, the white-haired gentleman in plaid pants reached up to pluck Thorn’s sleeve. Thorn stopped and the two shared a quick conversation that ended in a mutual laugh, then he came on, his eyes on April, a guileless look of familiarity as though the two of them had a long and chummy history.

  When he was standing before the Moss women, he looked at Garvey.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m sorry if I’ve misread anything, but were you winking at me?”

  “Oh, goody,” Garvey said. “Stand back, April, I saw him first.”

  “So you were winking?”

  “Is that a problem?” April’s tone surprised her, sounding more hostile than she intended.

  Thorn shifted his gaze to her.

  “No problem at all.” His voice was neutral but his eyes were not.

  “My daughter is a newspaper reporter,” Garvey said. “It’s her job to be a hardass. Me, I’m used to it by now, but it puts normal people off.”

  Thorn smiled at Garvey, then his eyes drifted back to April. Very blue, and in that dazzle of sunlight, turning even bluer.

  Thorn turned to the odd-looking woman beside him and was about to introduce her when Gus Dollimore’s assistant, the first AD, clapped his hands and made a piercing two-finger whistle.

  “Thank you, everyone. We need quiet please. Picture up. Get to your places. Very quiet on the set, please.”

  The director of photography bent forward, slipped his head under a dark cloak shrouding the monitor’s screen from the sunlight.

  “This time stay wide,” the DP called to the cameraman. “Open up a half stop. Okay, now open up another crack. And would you please get that young lady out of Billy’s sight line.”

  The DP waved at one of the Floridian nurses who had positioned herself in the line of vision of an actor in the upcoming scene. A potential distraction once the scene got started, her eyes attracting his.

  Dollimore called out, “Okay, we’re rolling. Let’s get this on the first try, what do you say? Very quiet please. Let’s hear a pin drop. Thank you, people. Cell phones off, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerries, Cranberries, and switch off those vibrators, boys and girls. Whatever you got, turn it off.”

  * * *

  The scene required eight takes. By then Thorn had memorized the lines of both actors. The gentleman who was playing the manager of the old-age home rendered his part flawlessly. But the young slender woman with short black hair managed to mangle her brief speech or botch the pronunciation of a word seven times in a row.

  She was decked out in a painfully tight sleeveless dress that showed off her ballet dancer’s legs and a pair of biceps that she hadn’t gotten from lifting china teacups to her lips.

  During one break, Buddha leaned close and whispered, “Dee Dee Dollimore, the airhead I mentioned.”

  Finally, when the actress managed to speak her three lines without a hitch, something was wrong with the light. A cloud passed across the sun in the middle of the scene and the whole thing had to be reshot.

  Thorn and Buddha stood together a couple of yards behind April and her mother. Twice April glanced back at him, and she kept shifting in her seat, as if she was considering a dash for the exit.

  The director was a lean man in his fifties, with dark hair cut short. Between takes the guy bounced up from his chair, totally wired, talking nonstop to the actors, the cameramen, the guys holding the lights, the sound technicians, anybody and everybody, until the cameras were rolling again.

  In the chair beside the director was a sandy-haired kid who sat placidly through all the screwups, rarely looking up from a script that lay open in his lap.

  During one of the breaks, Buddha nodded at the relaxed young man and whispered in Thorn’s ear, “One of April’s twins. Sawyer.”

  She’d brought along her electronic tablet and she tipped it so Thorn could view the screen. It showed a webpage for the TV show, Miami Ops, publicity shots of the cast and the director, whose name was Gus. She slid her finger along the screen and advanced the pages until she came to Sawyer, the show’s head writer. A handsome kid with stylishly scruffy hair, dark blue eyes, strong jaw, and a twinkle of mirth on his lips. Looked like a young Viking who hadn’t experienced battle yet.

  “And his brother,” Buddha said. “Flynn. One of the leads.”

  Again she slid her finger across the screen until another face appeared.

  Clearly Sawyer’s twin. Almost perfectly identical. His hair was trimmed precisely and was a shade blonder than Sawyer’s. His face fuller by a fraction, but the real divergence was in the eyes. Flynn could pass for a fair-haired Viking too, but this kid was clearly a veteran of some battlefield or another. Whatever nasty shit he’d witnessed was lingering in the stern set of his brow, and in his jaw, which was clamped like a man bracing for some jolt he saw coming from a long way off.

  When the shooting was finally done, the Floridian’s pink-coated staff emerged from the shadows of the building and began to wheel the old folks back inside. The film crew started buzzing around, breaking down the set.

  Off to Thorn’s right, the old gentleman in plaid pants who had tugged on Thorn’s sleeve to mumble something about how damn hot it was rose up from his wheelchair, hopped forward, tilted his face to the sky, and began to howl like a deranged wolf.

  The action in the courtyard ceased.

  The old guy stumbled into the open grassy area and raised his palms to the sky as if to address the Almighty.

  “All right, horndogs, turn your vibrators back on,” the old man called out in a croaky voice. “Whatever you got, turn it on, baby. Turn it on.”

  He basked in the stunned silence for a moment, then he brought his hands to his face and began to peel away a rubbery film—the mask of wrinkles he’d been wearing.

  Most of the crew laughed as Flynn Moss revealed his youthful face and swiveled around for the entire assembly to admire his prank.

  Some of the Floridian staff applauded enthusiastically—oh those Hollywood cutups. Thorn watched as Sawyer shook his head at his brother’s stunt with a smile of grudging admiration, as though the young man had spent a lifetime being upstaged by his crowd-pleasing twin.

  April was in a hurry to leave. She kissed her mother and came over to Thorn. Before she could say a word, Buddha stepped between them, taking charge.

  “I need to speak to you, Ms. Moss, on an urgent police matter.”

  April was almost Thorn’s height, with fair skin and thick chestnut hair. She wore a light blue sleeveless dress with faint yellow striping, a simple silver bracelet, and a necklace made of polished stones the size and color of olives. Her mind seemed to wander for a moment as her dark brown eyes remained fixed on her two boys, who were sharing a laugh out in the courtyard.

  “You know Poblanos?” she
said, sliding her gaze to Thorn.

  “What is it?”

  “Bar downtown. I can be there at five.”

  “We’ll find it,” Thorn said.

  April took a quick look at Buddha, gave her a sisterly smile, then left.

  NINE

  THORN DROVE BUDDHA’S RENTAL, A flame-red Ford, east through Little Havana. The car’s dashboard clock said 3:20. An hour and a half to kill before Poblanos.

  Buddha took out her electronic tablet and busied herself with it while Thorn struggled with the steering wheel. His right hand was so swollen and sore he had to use his left to steer.

  “Where we going?” she said, without looking up.

  “Key Biscayne.”

  “Why?”

  More finger tapping on the glass screen.

  “Guy I know used to live out there. Want to see if he’s still around.”

  “A social call?”

  “He might be of help with our project.”

  “Okay.”

  “Last I knew he was the agent in charge of the Miami FBI field office.”

  Buddha looked up and stared at him for a moment.

  “Is there something going on between you and April Moss?”

  Thorn hesitated a moment.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Yeah, I thought there was.”

  “What’d you see?”

  “Something going on,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘going on.’ A long time ago we met briefly. Nothing serious. I don’t know if she even remembers.”

  “She remembers,” Buddha said. “Oh, yes.”

  “You’re one of those sharp-eyed cops.”

  “I’m a woman.”

  Thorn was silent.

  “And you remembered her all right.”

  “It’s a curse,” he said. “I remember all of them.”

  “You keep a little black book?”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “Well, now,” Buddha said. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  “I’m sure there’s plenty.”