“You can probably look her up and—”
“Her eyes swam with hurt. Like everything was spilling out of her at once. She’s in trouble. I know it.”
“Legal problems?”
“No,” he punched out, exasperated with me. “Her heart, man. She’s in pain.”
Hadley III snuck in through the cat door. She paused, wisely decided we weren’t worth her attention, and slinked into the house.
“I’d like you to find her for me,” he said in a quiet voice, as if embarrassed by his outburst.
“She can’t be hard to locate.”
“My marriage is about to become a statistic. The last thing I need heading into a divorce is a hint of impropriety. A trail of premeditated disloyalty. Even a whiff of it could cost me millions.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’ve done nothing with my life. Not a damn thing. A lost love. No kids. A business with pencil-thin margins reliant on TV ads that no one watches anymore. I built my sandcastle in the sky. I die? I’m just a picture in the paper, not even on someone’s wall. Not even a name on a park bench. Hell, my wife will expense my obit out of my business account.”
“You’ve done—”
“Not even a damn park bench. We don’t own our lives. We just rent them, and mine fits me like a cheap suit.”
“You can change.”
“Just find her, man,” he begged. “I can’t have phone calls and text messages on my phone. I need a discreet go-between. I trust you.”
“What do you think she needs to tell you?”
“I can’t even imagine.”
“Yes, you can.”
He leveled his eyes at me. “I want to see her, Jake. I need to see her.”
“Sorry, Andrew.” I stood and my left knee cracked. “I’m not the guy to be a discreet facilitator, nor do I see the need for cloak-and-dagger. She can’t be hard to find. Tell her you’d like to buy her a drink. I can’t imagine a simple inquiry on your part interfering with a divorce proceeding.”
“I don’t expect you to work for free.” He remained seated, pointedly refusing to cede his cause.
“I wouldn’t accept money from you. It’s just not my type of case.” And then, because it had bothered me when he said it, and I felt guilty for not asking at the time, I added, “What did you mean when you said that you’ve come clean, set the record straight and unloaded the guilt?”
He gave me a look that shriveled me, as if I hadn’t measured up to his expectations. He stood. “Nothing. Just running my mouth. Some bullshit about my youth. Hey, I always could lay it on pretty thick, couldn’t I?”
He offered his hand and squeezed tight, as if to infect me with his haunting romanticism. I walked him through the house. At the front door, he turned to me.
“You know I’m originally from the north and moved back there after my discharge. But I had to get out.”
“The winters?”
“The autumns, man. They just destroyed me.”
He sulked into his black car. It crawled down the street and disappeared into the smooth curve in the road that reminded me of a woman’s hip when she lies on her side. His license plate read sofa. I went back inside my hollow house, poured the rest of the cheap wine down the drain, and wished I’d offered him something better to drink. I opened the refrigerator to get two fillets of grouper and stared into the cold, bright light.
Keller was in trouble. I tried to convince myself that wasn’t the case, but he had only flirted in the shadow of the truth. And I had done nothing. I was stuck in the rut of my self-interest and unable to adjust. History offers us only one course, so I’ll never know if a plea to stay for dinner or a probing and ardent inquiry, incalculable as those acts might have been, would have made a measurable difference. Alternative history runs rampant and unchecked in our minds. It left me with this: My unwillingness to engage Andrew Keller in his moment of need, my self-centered inability to connect with another human being, led to everything that followed. The consequences lie on me, and me alone.
I believe this.
2
Nothing good comes from a cowboy sitting at the end of your dock. Well, one little stinker did, but I’m light-years ahead of myself.
I eased Impulse onto the lift and hit the remote. The boat groaned and squealed up to his level. When Impulse was high enough that a surfer’s wake from a passing cruiser wouldn’t roil her hull, I climbed out.
We exchanged pleasantries and shook hands. I hadn’t seen John Wayne since the mess with the cardinal years ago. Wayne was a U.S. marshal out of the Jacksonville office, but his heart, and apparel, never left his home state of Wyoming. At the time our lives had intersected, he had originally suspected me of murder. It was assisted suicide, but he didn’t know that at the time. He’d gone on to save my life and Kathleen’s as well. Wayne charging the beach with his six-shooter firing is an image I’ll carry to my grave. I was indebted to the man.
“Catch anything?” he said.
“Couple of nice trout.”
“Need to get them out?”
“They’re on ice.”
He nodded. A hazy, low cloud that was red at the bottom and iron-furnace white on the top filtered the late April sun. Wayne took a sip from a cardboard cup of coffee. I sat next to him and took a gulp of Corona a.m. It’s not day drinking—it’s morning drinking. I’d forgotten what a blessing an early cold one was.
“You know a man named Andrew Keller?” he asked.
“Your presence indicates the answer.”
“He happen to drop by about a week ago?”
“I think you know that as well.”
“Not for certain.”
“He did.”
“What did you two talk about?”
“Slow down, slim,” I said. “Are we talking about the same Andrew Keller? My buddy’s a heartbroken furniture salesman pining for the woman who slipped away. A man I hadn’t seen or heard from in years who—”
“Suddenly knocks on the door of a friend who spent five years with the Rangers and has had a colorful employment record since then.”
He removed his hat, revealing a mane of hair he’d need a jet engine to dry. To behold the man was to challenge the eye, for his face was a weathered testament to life. His meticulously trimmed handlebar moustache rested under eyebrows of unplowed fields of golden wheat. Canyon lines, cut from years and the people who marred those years, creviced his papyrus face. Most of us lotion our lines, but Wayne viewed his yesterdays in the mirror and saw no reason to look away.
“Had you engaged in previous contact with him?” he asked.
“That was the first I’d seen him in over a decade. Close to two.”
“What was the purpose of his visit?” Wayne had the fiercest blue eyes I’d ever known. Tiny cubes of ice that sparkled under those fields of gold.
I pushed my beer away. I got the feeling I was on the clock—or perhaps I felt a tad guilty. “He wanted me to track down a woman he’d not seen in nearly twenty years. Said he ran into her in downtown Saint Pete.”
“Did he give you the woman’s name?”