Jonathon King - A Killing Night

Billy was on the other side of the huge single room, behind the kitchen counter, working some new magic at the stove.

"M-Max," he said, over his shoulder and then broke away from the steaming pot. "Y-You are l-looking healthy."

We shook hands and then he pulled me to him in an uncharacteristic embrace. "G-Good to see you."

While he got me a beer I sat on one of the stools at the counter and surveyed. I was familiar with Billy's penthouse, had lived here my first few weeks in Florida before getting settled into the river shack. I'd come and gone often as Billy slowly pulled me into his cases as his investigator. The big, fan-shaped living area was plush with thick carpeting and wide leather sofas. Billy's eclectic art collection adorned the textured walls and topped the blond wood tables. But I picked up some new, more colorful additions; a delicate ballerina sculpture, a large painting of a field of flowers. A woman's touch, I thought, as Diane pulled out the stool next to me, sat and took a sip of wine.

"So Max, let me tell you about our trip to Venice," she said, smiling and anxious like a little kid who can't hold an exciting tale any longer. I could see Billy grin and then while he cooked an incredible pan-seared snapper, we both listened, Billy only interrupting when he felt it was safe.

She was halfway through a description of a stroll through the Piazza San Marco when Billy said: "I w-was trying to f-find the similarities with Fort Lauderdale, the Venice of America, b-but just the water in the canals d-didn't do it."

Diane gave him a "get real" expression while he winked at me.

Billy is a supremely confident man. He is GQ handsome, athletically built, although I have never seen him do anything physically strenuous short of captaining his forty-two-foot sailboat. He is a brilliant attorney and had proven to me personally that he could manhandle the markets by investing my police disability buyout and making me comfortable if not rich. His only flaw is the stutter that embedded itself during childhood and has remained. On the phone or even from the other room his speech is flawless. But face-to-face he cannot control the staccato that jams his tongue. The stigma kept him out of the courtroom as a trial attorney, but sharpened his abilities to research and absorb through every other method of communication. And it hadn't seemed to slow him down when it came to beautiful women.

What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn't knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.

Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I'd been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I'd ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman's daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state's own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they'd broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: "Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?"

She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn't just because she was gorgeous.

Diane took us all the way through dinner and coffee with descriptions of the Basilica of Saint Mark and the Correr Museum and 2:00 A.M. wine tasting at L'Incontro. When the dishes were cleared, I thought she might continue but she gracefully excused herself with: "I'll leave you both to business while I go make some phone calls." Billy and I exchanged looks and took our coffee to the patio.

The dominating feature of Billy's apartment were the floor-to- ceiling glass doors that made up the entire eastern wall and opened onto the ocean. I stood at the railing and looked to the horizon where there was still a hint of blue.

"Anything n-new on Harris?"

"I've been watching him, but the press coverage must have pushed him under his rock for a while," I said.

Harris was a physician who'd been writing tons of prescriptions for pain pills to Medicare patients in return for kickbacks. Billy had been working the guy for a class action suit by a group of cancer victims. I was logging his movements and interviewing poor patients who had been or still were seeing him. We were doing well until a high-profile conservative radio talk-show personality got busted for feeding his pain pill addiction with illegal prescriptions. In the media frenzy Harris had significantly cut back his operation. But Billy had done his work and we probably had the guy nailed already. One of the radio host's lawyers had called Billy through the attorney grapevine, but Billy had refused to share any information.

"I'm more worried about the cruise ship guys," I said. "Rodrigo has been real twitchy the last couple of times I went up to talk with him. He's worried about his job and I think the others in his crew are telling him to back off getting any kind of legal representation because they'll all get blackballed from working."

Billy had me working a line on a dozen cruise ship workers who had been injured in a boiler explosion as their ship was coming in to the port of Palm Beach. The cruise ship business was huge in South Florida with tens of thousands of tourists packing the floating cities for luxury trips to the Caribbean. But the unknown population was the thousands of workers, almost every one a foreigner, who cleaned and catered and served and smiled for those vacationers for wages that those same Americans wouldn't let their teenagers work for. But the explosion had cast a light on their world belowdecks and Billy had been contacted to represent men who had been mangled and bloodied and burned during the accident. Rodrigo Colon was one of the burn victims willing to talk.

The cruise ship company had paid for their initial medical treatment and was putting them up at a second-rate hotel, but the workers all knew that once they left the U.S., any claims to treat their injuries or compensate them for their ruined bodies would be lost. Their contracts would be ripped up and they would lose all future opportunity to work in the industry. Billy knew he couldn't change the economics of the world, but he did think he could push the rich American cruise industry to do the right thing for those who had been disfigured and disabled in the explosion.

"It's w-worth it to k-keep trying, Max."

"Yeah, I'm bringing Rodrigo in to see you," I said. "Maybe you can convince him to recruit the others."

I was watching the blackening ocean. An uneven cloud cover blocked any early stars. Billy was waiting me out.

"Anything else g-going on out there?" he finally said.

I took a long sip of coffee and blew the heat out of my mouth into the sea air and told him about Richards's call and her request of me to interrogate an old Philly cop I'd worked with.

"That's w-what she said? Interrogate?"

"Maybe not that specific," I said. "She asked me to talk to him. Gave me the option. Didn't want me to think I owed her."

I was thinking of the dream, of O'Shea digging the gun out of Hector the Collector's hand. Did I owe him, too? Billy let the silence hang between us. It was not uncomfortable, but I could feel his eyes on the side of my face.

"I thought you t-two were through."

"Yeah," I answered. "I thought she was through with me."