CHAPTER
NINE
Alicia Snow watched through the front window as Lucas and Bob rolled out of the parking lot in the Pathfinder. They’d frightened her. They seemed smart and mean, a bad combination. She mentioned Patty Pittman’s disappearance because Pittman’s disappearance had nothing to do with the boating party, and if the marshals started investigating Pittman, they wouldn’t be pushing on her.
She walked back to the office and got on her phone. A man answered after five rings and she said, “This is Al. Where are you?”
“At my place.” His voice down low; she could hear a television in the background. “What’d I tell you about calling? My wife is out in the living room, if she . . .”
“Listen to me! Two U.S. Marshals were here, questioning me,” Snow said, the fear leaking into her voice. “They asked about the party on the boat. About who could pick you guys out, if they saw pictures. They know about all the girls.”
“Shit! I heard about those guys. They’re going around hitting on people. How’d they get to you?”
“I don’t know, they didn’t say. When I told you about Patty Pittman disappearing, you said it didn’t have anything to do with you guys, so I told the marshals about her. I figured that if they’re investigating Patty, they won’t be questioning me. They really scared me; these marshals are mean. What are we going to do?”
After a silence, Jack Cattaneo said, “We’re going to take it easy—or you are. Nobody will know about you, about the two of us. I mean, if my wife heard about us, I’d wake up with a knife in my chest. So: you take it easy, play it cool, relax. They . . . didn’t try to pressure you? They didn’t know anything?”
“No, nothing like that. They were polite, they were going around trying to find people who’d seen your faces. And the girls did. I told them I remembered some guys on the boat coming up while we were getting hamburgers, but I didn’t talk to you. I told them I really couldn’t pick anyone out from a picture.”
“But they got a list of the girls.”
“I guess.”
“All right. I’ll talk to some guys. You stay cool. Here comes Belinda.”
He clicked off.
* * *
Belinda wasn’t actually coming. Cattaneo’s wife was rattling around the family room with her acrylic paints and an oversized canvas she was calling Moonrise, Big Cypress. Satisfied that she hadn’t overheard the phone call, he put the phone in his pocket, sat on a kitchen chair, and closed his eyes.
He had, indeed, told Snow that nobody on the boat had anything to do with Patty Pittman’s disappearance, but he’d been lying. In fact, the men on the boat had everything to do with Patty Pittman, and now, if Snow had put the feds on the Pittman case, it could be coming back to bite them on the ass, not that they’d had any choice with Pittman.
He chewed on a thumbnail for a moment, sighed, and wandered back to the family room and asked, “Belinda: late lunch?”
“Can’t right now, honey. I’m right in the middle of a passage and these paints dry so fast . . .” She was a thin woman with tight black hair and a silver ring on one side of her nose; she was wrapped in a canvas apron.
She freaked her friends out—other housewives bought paint sets and canvases and made bad pictures of their cats and pots of geraniums that wound up in boxes somewhere. Belinda painted Florida and South Jersey landscapes that sold for thirty to fifty thousand dollars each, out of galleries in Miami and Manhattan. They couldn’t get enough of them.
“Okay. Well, I’m gonna go walk around,” Cattaneo said.
“Why don’t you go over to the deli and get a salad?” she asked. “Don’t eat any of those fishy things, they make you burp.”
She meant fart, but he left it at that. “I’ll see you in an hour,” he said. “Why don’t you call the McKinleys and see if they want to go out to the Cat’s Cradle for dinner. I’ll buy.”
“If you’re buying, they’ll go,” she said.
* * *
Cattaneo went back to the bedroom for his sunglasses, straw hat, and burner phone. He took the elevator down and walked out of the condo onto Collins Avenue, found a piece of shade next to a parked U-Haul truck, and poked in a number.
The phone was picked up on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“This is me. I need to talk to the guy.”
“Hang on.”
There was a moment of silence, then “Hey.”
“Hey. You know those two guys we were talking about? They got in touch with my barber and they were asking about the rest of the girls.”
“Goddamnit! Where’d you hear this?”
“Barber called,” Cattaneo said.
“They’re bringing pressure. They’ve been all over town, the way we hear it,” the guy said.
“They’re something new, and they’re asking about Patty Pittman,” Cattaneo said.
Down the sidewalk, a disheveled street woman had been pushing a shopping cart along, and now she stepped next to a hedge, pulled down her pants, and took a dump. A half block from his condo, for Christ’s sakes. Neighborhood was going to shit, literally; maybe they should sell the place.
“That’s . . . not good, but I don’t think we have any exposure there, not after this long. I’ll figure something out,” said the guy on the phone. “Have a nice day.”
Cattaneo clicked off, put his cell phone in his pocket, walked down the street to the woman, who’d finished and pulled up her pants. He could smell what she’d left behind, and he said to her, “You ever do that again, I’ll break your fuckin’ arm.”
“Kiss my ass, shitbag,” she said. She was radically thin, her face seemed to be mostly nose and cheekbones, and gray with dirt.
Cattaneo grabbed her by the arm with one hand—she seemed no heavier than a bird—and with the other, balled into a fist, hit her hard under the armpit and felt the ribs crack. The woman gasped and whimpered and he pushed her behind the hedge where she fell on her back, crying, and he walked away.
Fuckin’ trash, he thought. Where were the cops when you needed one?
* * *
Cattaneo continued on to the deli, where he had a corned beef sandwich with a ton of mustard and red onions, and a small salad, so that he would, he hoped, smell like a fuckin’ lettuce leaf when he got back home. He was licking his fingers when the burner rang and the guy asked, “You at home?”