Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [43]
Beeker sighed.
“Bring some ice for the wine, and I’ll tell you,” he surrendered.
Later that morning, with Beeker asleep, Bobby Freed walked alone to Singleton Docks to watch the shrimp boats come in. His mind was in turmoil, sickened. He would have to control his fury before the council meeting that night. Beeker had told him a story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Julie Clayton; it was the kind of thing you read about in the tabloids. But it had happened in Key West. And no one knew. Let me find some proof of what I have heard, Freed prayed silently. And the whole world will know.
Julie Clayton lay in Room 177 of Duval Hospital. She had been there for weeks, with a snake’s nest of tubes to feed her and drain her, and machines to preserve the pretense that she was still alive. Julie Clayton was a vegetable.
Once, the way Beeker told it, she had been a student at Key West High, a fun-loving girl who took her kicks wherever she could find them.
She had found one too many, and his name was Drake Boone.
She must have been a cinch, huh, counselor? What a change from slap-and-tickle with panting adolescents in seedy drive-ins: a blow-dried, big-shot lawyer with three-piece suits, a fancy car, and an office with its very own private entrance. What a wonderful secret for a fifteen-year-old girl, right, Drake? No band practice for Julie. No empty afternoons before soap operas in dingy trailers. For Julie, rather, after-school excitement, adventure, sex, perhaps even the illusion of love. Did you pretend it was love, Drake? Did you lovingly roll her joints? Was it you who introduced her to the wonderful high that comes from a couple of tiny pills? Was she wild, Drake, at those wonderful impromptu office parties? How many more like her were there? And where were you, Drake, you hideous bastard, the afternoon that Julie Clayton popped so many pills that they shut down her nervous system and left her a cabbage? Were you there, Drake, or could any fifteen-year-old wander in and help herself to joy juice at the private entrance of Drake Boone, Jr., attorney-at-law?
Neal Beeker had told the story in the strained tones of a sinner at confession. His hospital room had been across the hall from where Julie Clayton lay. And late one night, restless and unable to sleep, he had padded to a first-floor lounge for a cigarette and there encountered the girl’s mother: a haggard, work-worn woman, Key West blue collar.
“I think she must have had a few drinks, Bobby, because she was real uptight at first, but then she opened up. She must have talked for half an hour, a monologue, almost like she was in a trance, talking to herself. Then suddenly she looks up and sees me and goes all white. That was the worst of all, Bobby, what she said then.”
“What did she say, Neal?”
“She said, ‘Mister, please forget what I told you. Mr. Boone, he made me promise not to tell anybody. He says he’ll pay the hospital bills as long as I keep my mouth shut. But if anybody finds out what Julie done, Mr. Boone says he’ll have them turn off the machines, and my baby will die.”
IN THE SUMMER, Manolo always rose with the dawn. The skylight in his studio had an eastern exposure, and in the mornings the light was perfect. He would paint in total absorption for several hours, until it became too hot. Manolo disliked the heat, and to have air-conditioned a studio with a high vaulted ceiling would have been wasteful. Besides, even air conditioning could not have helped with the glare. And to have fought the glare would have meant sacrificing the light. It was a closed circle: Manolo only painted by morning. It was his conceit that he could have made it as an artist if he had not become a doper, although he knew his subtle abstracts with occasional flashes of a dark vision were not truly of international standard. Still, he sold one every now and then, and he even had a show once, in Miami. For Manolo, art was at once a smuggler’s cover and a private passion.
While he painted, Manolo tolerated no interruptions. At first, he had had the