All Through the Night Page 8

  He stared at her. Eilene did not do sad and resigned. “What is going on here?”

  She did not look up. “The businessman she was talking about is a very good person. He helps a lot of people. Our church is built on land he donated. People hit on him constantly because they know he’ll help if he can. He deserves better than this.”

  “So you think it’s a scam.” When his sister did not respond, Wayne said, “What else could it be?”

  Eilene just stared at her hands.

  “You want me to take this on?”

  Eilene said to the hands gripping one another upon the table, “I don’t know what I want.”

  On the way back to the house, a very strange thing happened.

  One moment, he was just Wayne Grusza, walking alongside his sister the pastor. A woman with whom, truth be told, he had a relationship that could only have been described as rocky. Eilene said to him, “Julio won’t stop talking about you and the trip to the airport. The kid really connected with you.”

  Wayne was ready to give her back the sort of semi-argument that had made up about ninety percent of every conversation they had ever had. As in, was this still payback on a debt he didn’t owe her?

  When it happened.

  A pair of ladies he could not have picked out of a lineup were walking from the bungalows to the parking lot. They spotted Wayne and Eilene emerging from the trees’ shadows and veered off course, Wayne assumed to pass the time of day with Eilene.

  Instead, the one using a cane said, “We were just going to the store. Do you need anything?”

  Wayne did a double take at the realization they were talking to him. “I’m good, thanks.”

  “What’s your favorite dessert?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Eilene answered, “Wayne takes a universal approach to sweets, but he’s always been addicted to chocolate.”

  One woman said to the other, “Your chocolate mud pie recipe isn’t too bad.”

  “It’s better than yours, is what you mean.”

  “For chocolate mud pie,” Eilene said, “my brother would become your willing slave.”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary.” The ladies bestowed a twinned smile in Wayne’s direction and tottered away.

  It took him the rest of the way back to his home to identify the sensation. Until he spied Jerry and Foster seated on his front porch, talking softly to the mystery lady leaning against the side railing.

  After all, Wayne had put a lot of years and miles between himself and the last time he had ever felt like he belonged.

  Before Eilene started up the steps, Wayne halted her with a touch to the arm and asked, “About Julio. Tell me what you want.”

  She found it hard to plead. “School gets out tomorrow. By next week he’ll be hanging. You know what that means, right?”

  “I was Special Ops, remember? Most of my team were born to hang.” One way or the other.

  “Julio is ready game for the druggies cruising the streets. His brother and father are both made men. Julio’s a known quantity. The dealers will pressure him to hustle their wares to the other kids. He’s got nothing. How long is he going to say no?”

  “I’ll talk to him again if you want, Eilene.”

  Her silent thanks almost made him blush. As if he had finally managed to get the deal right in her eyes.

  As Wayne climbed his front stairs, the mystery woman gave him a beautiful version of the stink eye, clearly expecting him to decline her offer. Instead, he leaned against the wall next to Jerry’s chair and said, “I’ll need to talk with your guy directly.”

  She looked first at Eilene, then said, “I can make that happen.”

  “Not just once. I need regular access.”

  “I will tell him.”

  “And his books. Corporate and personal. And somebody who’ll walk me through the auditing process.”

  “He employs a battery of accountants.”

  “Just one. Somebody you trust. Better still, somebody who’ll answer only to you. Someone you are certain won’t blab to a soul about what we’re doing.”

  “What I meant was, people keep a very close eye on his finances.”

  “Yeah, but how many are looking for an in-house scam?”

  She nodded. “I will make this happen. Do you want to talk about your pay?”

  “You strike me as somebody who came with a number you were going to argue over until you got it.”

  She gave a very European gesture, a slight forward thrust to her chin, a minimalist shrug.

  “I’ll take it. There. I saved us both a lot of trouble.”

  Jerry said, “You forgot to ask her name.”

  Wayne kept his gaze locked on target. “I didn’t forget a thing.”

  “Tatyana,” she replied. “Tatyana Kuchik.”

  Eilene said, “Tatyana is an attorney. She has just one client.”

  But Wayne could see Tatyana drawing back now, uncertain whether to speak this semi-famous guy’s name in front of people she didn’t know. So he said, “Where do you want this meeting to take place?”

  “He lives near Vero Beach. First I’ll need to go back to our Orlando offices and report in.”

  The idea struck him then. One that might draw a bit of sanity from a day that otherwise was totally off the wall. “When you come back, would you mind giving a kid a ride?”

  THIRTEEN

  Jerry wore his stone cop expression the next morning. Wayne came back from his run to find Foster sitting on his wide porch with the newspaper and Jerry in his kitchen making coffee. Wayne watched through the open window as Jerry lined things up on Wayne’s new kitchen counter. The kitchen was to his right and the living room, with the door to the porch, was on his left. Wayne wiped his face with his T-shirt and then watched Jerry set the coffee utensils out, as neat as little soldiers. Wayne liked how the wood looked in the sunlight, liked the smell. He had found a pile of old boards behind the maintenance shed, probably roofing timbers and at least a half century old, thick as his calf. He had planed them and sawed them and laid out a new countertop to replace the peeling linoleum.

  Jerry said through the window, “The thing kept me awake all night.”

  Wayne didn’t need to ask what thing. He had not slept much either.

  “We’ve got a crook working inside the guy’s company.”

  Foster went through his folding routine with the paper, lining up the edges with a machinist’s precision, getting it down to magazine size. “If he worked inside the company, the boss would’ve known him.”

  Wayne said, “We’re not talking about the angel.”

  “Point one, it wasn’t no angel.”

  Foster snorted. “Oh, and you’re so well connected to the man upstairs you’d know one? I don’t think so.”

  “Hey. My mama didn’t raise no fool.”

  “And you think this guy got to be boss of some big company being a fool?”

  “That’s been bugging me too,” Wayne agreed.

  Jerry poured a mug, handed it through the window to Foster. “Let’s say there’s two of them for the moment. A crook in the company who wants to take charge. But he’s a known quantity. So he comes up with this scheme, hire himself an outsider who’s gonna play on the man’s core weakness.”

  “Hold this.” Foster handed Wayne his mug, set down his paper, and pushed himself erect. He took back his mug and said, “Who’re you to call a man’s religion a weakness?”

  “Since when did you get big on the faith thing?”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about a man who uses what he’s earned to do good. That’s got to count for something, even in this cockeyed old world.”

  Wayne accepted his own mug, hooked his T-shirt over the porch railing, and backed off a pace. Content to stand there on his partially redone porch, listening to two guys the world called losers argue over a man none of them had ever met.

  Wayne was flooded anew with the same strange sensation he had experienced the da
y before, walking back from the dovecote with his sister. An elderly trio walked past on the lane, hard-of-hearing Harry and his wife and another lady. Harry hefted his cane in greeting. Harry’s wife said something to Wayne about the weather. The other woman gave him a wave and kept going.

  Jerry said, “You’re taking this personal.”

  Foster said, “Doggone right. A man like this deserves better.”

  “You let your emotions cloud your judgment, you can’t work a case clean.”

  “Yeah, well, that might work okay for Mister Ace Detective, but me, I do my best work when I’m good and hot.”

  Jerry refilled his mug and walked out of the kitchen and through the living room and joined them on the porch. “Let’s get back to this scam.”

  Wayne said, “So we’re assuming this was not an angel.”

  Jerry didn’t even bother to respond to that one. “You notice any resemblance to what we just been through here?”

  “You mean the accountant?”

  “I’m not saying there’s a connection. But it just hits me as strange, how we got two scams so close together. Big ones. Operated by pros.” Jerry used his mug as a pointer. “Foster here is no dummy—he managed a whole string of dry cleaners.”

  “I did,” Foster corrected, “until my stinko of a nephew robbed me blind.”

  “And I worked crime for thirty years. That accountant took us both in. Now we got another guy with some serious experience running people and managing money, who’s been hit hard enough and low enough that he’s holed up in his own house and letting other people run his company.” Jerry tasted his mug. “Cops hate coincidences.”

  Wayne said, “We need to find out who leases the scam artist his Lantern Island house.”

  “Let me make a couple of calls,” Jerry said.

  A whining grew in the distance, the sound familiar enough now that they all turned as one. Foster said, “Here comes trouble.”

  The red Ferrari seemed impatient even when going slow. Particularly when the driver could not help but gun the motor once before cutting it off. The silence afterwards felt like a vacuum.

  The two doors opened. Tatyana wore a business suit with a skirt so short, getting out of the Ferrari became a dance of the pinstriped veils.

  Julio emerged from the car in a teenage daze. Big as he was, he scarcely seemed connected to the earth as he followed Tatyana over to the porch.

  Jerry said, “Trouble is right.”

  Tatyana said something to Julio in rapid-fire Spanish. The kid responded with a goofy grin, clearly so in love with the woman and her ride he forgot all about the need for the street.

  “Hope you made sure your radio is still where it belongs,” Jerry said.

  Tatyana spoke to Julio again in Spanish and his eyes congealed to black stone. The lady had obviously just revealed the black man’s former profession.

  “Nothing like a cop to kill a good high,” Julio said.

  “I’m retired, ese.”

  “You know what they say. You can take a pig out of the pen—”

  “Whoa. Enough.” Wayne walked down the stairs. “We’re all friends, okay?”

  Jerry demanded, “What’s Señor Drive-By doing here?”

  “I invited him.”

  Foster said, “This is the kid I told you about.”

  “You spent a morning with this guy? You check your wallet?”

  Tatyana found the exchange humorous. She asked Julio, “You’ll be okay here for a while?”

  The grin partly resurfaced. “If it means another ride with you, sure thing.”

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be.”

  “No problem.”

  Jerry said, “Guys that deal in stolen goods, they generally don’t live by the clock.”

  Wayne snapped, “I said enough.”

  Jerry started into the house, then turned back to say, “I got your number, ese.”

  Tatyana gave Wayne’s sweaty form a swift up and down. “I was hoping for something a little more formal.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  Jerry was still banging around the kitchen when Wayne finished showering and dressing. He walked outside to find Julio in full slouch mode, sullenly determined to ignore the glares Jerry was casting through the front window. Wayne said to Julio, “Let’s take a walk.”

  He was aimed at the maintenance shed, hoping the caretaker might be open to a bribe, when Victoria pushed through her screen door and demanded, “Who do we have here?”

  “This is Julio.”

  Victoria began pattering off in Spanish, even faster than Tatyana. The kid responded with a smile so huge his entire face was transformed. One minute a card-carrying member of the Crips, another and he was just a big-boned kid.

  Victoria sighed with genuine pleasure. “I can’t thank you enough, Wayne.”

  “Eilene asked if I could maybe …”

  But the old lady was already waving him away and Julio inside, all in one grand gesture. “I missed this young man before we even met.”

  Something about the way Tatyana handled the car left Wayne wondering if she was showing off for his benefit. Which was more than a tad odd, since she had given him nothing except ice. But the longer he sat in the passenger seat with his tail almost dragging on the asphalt, the more certain he became. Maybe it was a female thing, wanting to show the jock she had what it took to handle the machine. Whatever the reason, he enjoyed it. The car was so low it made their speed seem even faster than it really was, which was already enough to stutter his heart. At the light leading to the causeway she was first in line. A lowrider with a pair of gardener’s helpers drew up next to her and rattled the exhaust. A Hispanic teen leaned out his window and shouted something that was almost lost to the noise of two rumbling engines. Tatyana called back something that caused the other driver to rev his motor way past redline. Tatyana burned a quarter-moon of rubber onto the bridge and hit a hundred in second gear.

  They headed north on A1A, flying through the two-lane traffic like the lanes and the double-yellow lines were laid out for mortals. She handled the road and the machine with the tight economy of a woman born to speed. The coastal highway opened up beyond the Vero city limits, rimmed by walls of welltended green. Here and there Wayne spied fleeting images of seaside mansions and condos in wedding-cake pastels. Tatyana downshifted and took the turn to John’s Island in a controlled four-wheel spin. And kept slowing when the gate arm blocking the entrance did not rise.

  A grizzled veteran with worn tattoos and an expression to match Jerry’s came out of the central guard house.

  Wayne figured the beefy guard was going to give Tatyana as serious a warning as he could without drawing his gun. Instead, he leaned down, stripped off his aviator shades, and asked, “This the guy?”

  “Wayne Grusza. This is Officer Coltrane, chief of John’s Island security.”

  The cop was also seriously country. “He don’t look like no pencil neck to me.”

  “He is—” Tatyana turned and gave him one of her patented slit-eyed inspections. “An investigative accountant.”

  The guard chewed on that for a moment, his belt creaking as he shifted his weight. He said to Wayne, “Mr. Grey is a good man. Here on John’s Island, we take care of our own. You hear what I’m saying, Mister Accountant?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  He had watery blue eyes that floated in a web of red. “You tell Mr. Grey he needs anything, he’s got my number.”

  FOURTEEN

  As far as Wayne was concerned, John’s Island was seriously misnamed. The place should have been called Castle-by-the-Sea.

  Two lanes ran side by side, one for cars and the other for golf carts. Wayne spotted a couple in matching togs and tans seated inside an electric surrey, right down to the fringed top. They were followed by a metallic silver cart with a fake Rolls Royce hood. Palms marched down both sides of both lanes in well-behaved rows. The orderliness defied anyone to speak an improper word or break rules that ha
d no need of being posted. Even Tatyana lost her taste for speed.

  “I hate this place already,” Wayne declared.

  Tatyana was too busy being tense to respond. She turned into a drive of pearl-white paving stones and rumbled up to a palace only slightly smaller than Disney’s. Two peaked turrets sprouted from opposite ends, both sheathed in plates of polarized glass. The effect was like being inspected by a pair of frog eyes wearing Wayfarers.

  She cut the motor but made no move to open her door. “There’s one more thing I need to tell you.”

  “How did the cop know about the problem here?”

  “He doesn’t exactly …” She waved that aside. “I need to tell you something. I fear I may have misspoken. The angel did not say my associate must find a warrior.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in angels.”

  The hand waved a second time. “What he said was, my associate’s challenge was to find himself a hero.”

  “Mr. Grusza, did I say that right? Easton Grey.”

  The man had a gaze to match his name, clear as winter smoke, biting and deep. There was nothing easy about this man—no wasted motion, no spare flesh. He was not small so much as economical. Wayne decided he would hate to sit across the poker table from this guy.

  That is, if a guy who believed in angels played cards.

  Mr. Grey might have been dressed for at-home casual. He might offer Wayne a buddy handshake and lead them through the living room into a small parlor by the kitchen. He might even pour coffee for them himself. But there was no question in Wayne’s mind. Right from the get-go, he knew.

  This guy was the real deal.

  While on duty, he had met a couple of generals. Not on parade. In the field. Out where it counted. And both of those guys, they could take their medals off and pack away all the stars, and they would still be who they were. Leaders.

  Just like this guy.

  “How do you take your coffee, Mr. Grusza?”

  “Black is fine.”