Fred said, "Biked down pretty fast. Thought I'd better talk to you."
Aaron exhaled, dropped the shovel, muttered, "Jesus Christ."
Suki rolled off her knees, sat down on the ground. "What is it, Fred?"
"That cop guy, Stubbs," Fred wheezed, "he came up to the hot dog. Looking for you. I didn't know if I should tell him where you were. Told him I could get a message to you."
"So what's the message?" she asked.
Fred gestured for time-out. He patted his damp pockets, looking for a cigarette. Still trying to catch his breath, he lit up, filtered vapor through his nicotine-colored moustache. "Said a woman got murdered. Seems to be a Russian. And the Frigate office got all busted up. Whoever did it took papers from your desk. He thinks they're looking for you. He thinks you oughta talk to him."
Suki bit her lip, the upper one. "Now he thinks that."
Fred blew smoke out of his nose. "Said he's sorry. He believes you now. Unofficially, he said."
Suki shook her head, looked along the ground at the line of shrubs they'd just put in, the churned and reworked earth. Life was supposed to be much simpler than it was turning out to be. Plant shrubs, cook meals. Sip wine and watch the sun go down. She said, "I just don't know anymore what I should do."
Aaron started getting to his feet. He stood up too fast and blood drained from his skull. His vision went blank silver at the edges and the solid earth felt like batter underneath him. He said, "You know, it's very strange. I'm a law-abiding person, I believed what I was taught in civics class. But my gut is saying that before we talk to the police, we really ought to talk with Bert the Shirt."
On Key Haven, in a study with narrow windows and snug- fitting blinds, Ivan Cherkassky and Tarzan Abramowitz were trying to make sense of Suki's pilfered papers.
"A mess," Cherkassky said disgustedly. "Here she puts a circle, there she puts an arrow. Over here she draws a line goes right off the page. Where it goes, this line? Is disorganized. I see nothing here."
Tarzan Abramowitz, leaning on a thick bare arm, was looking over his boss's shoulder. "A doodler," he said.
"Doodler?" said Cherkassky. "What is doodler?" He didn't like the nearness of the other man, the dampness of his armpit near his face. He tried to shrink down lower in his chair.
"Doodler. Squiggles she makes. Airplanes. Little men."
"Disorganized," Cherkassky said again, and elbowed the most recent batch of papers to the edge of his desk blotter, where they shuffled in with many others. Unpaid invoices that were three months old. Mechanicals from ads for sunglass shops, porno stores. A Rolodex written in the various hands of half a dozen people who'd come to understand that they couldn't make a living selling space for Island Frigate. Nothing so far about the sentenced woman's private life, who she saw, where she went, nothing that might give a hint as to her hiding place.
Cherkassky reached into the leather satchel for another handful of papers. The two men, mystified, pored through them. Wands of light squeezed through the small gaps at the edges of the blinds; motes of golden dust floated in the air.
At length Abramowitz, his massive jaw almost nuzzling his boss's ear, pointed at a paper not unlike the hundred others that had gone before, and said, "Aha!"
"Aha?" Cherkassky said.
Tarzan pointed with a thick and hairy finger. "Look! A small thing only, but perhaps ... This paper is, how you call, paste-down for an ad."
"Paste-down," Cherkassky echoed. "Yes."
"Copy of what goes to printer," Tarzan said.
"I understand."
"But look the date," said Abramowitz. "Day before she goes with Lazslo."
"Ah," Cherkassky said. "Only one day. Good."
"Now here," said the assassin. "You see here she doodles the circles, arrows, little fish? Here she writes 'Lucia's 8."'
Cherkassky bit his knuckles. "We know who this Lucia is?"
"Is restaurant," said Abramowitz. "Nice restaurant. Perhaps she is going there for dinner."
"But by dinner time she is—"
"She does not arrive. No dinner, very sad ... But perhaps there is someone waits for her. Friend. Boyfriend. Someone she tells things to."
Cherkassky swiveled in his seat. "We have busboy at Lucia's?"
"Of course," said Tarzan Abramowitz.
Cherkassky sighed. "Is how you say long chance."
"Long shot," said Abramowitz. "But okay, is a start."
Chapter 33
"Cops ain't subtle is the problem," Bert the Shirt was saying.
Aaron had fetched him from poolside at the Paradiso, and now he was sitting poolside at the Mangrove Arms. Life in Florida—largely a matter of moving from pool to pool, staying within the radius of the waft of chlorine. He was wearing an ice-blue guayabera and stroking the hard and bound-up belly of his comatose chihuahua.