Chapter FORTY-TWO
We drove to Clewiston following Highway 80. Smoke from the stacks at the sugar refinery billowed into the sky like a beacon, drawing us forward. We stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee and then followed Bubba’s directions south. We made a couple of turns off county roads and found ourselves on a track that ran straight as an arrow through miles of sugarcane fields. We passed two settlements that housed the workers who cut the cane, many of them Jamaican immigrants. We pulled off the road into the yard of a single house that sat about fifty feet from the berm. It was a small, clapboard building with a tin roof showing large patches of rust. An hour had passed since we had left Bubba sitting chained to the chair in the interview room.
We parked and went to the house. I knocked on the screen door and in a few minutes it was answered by a pretty young woman wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs. She was in her late teens or early twenties. She had long blonde hair, reaching to her shoulders. It looked as if she didn’t own a brush or comb. She was barefoot, her toenails covered with chipped black polish, her feet dirty.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Are you Jenny Talbot?”
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Matt Royal. This is Logan Hamilton. I’m a lawyer up in Longboat Key, and I need to speak with Ms. Talbot.”
“That’s me,” she said. “Come on in.”
We walked into a small room that held a threadbare sofa and two straight chairs. A small TV sat on a table across the room from the sofa, a morning show of some kind playing soundlessly.
“Have a seat,” she said, pointing to the sofa. “I know who you are. Bubba called me from the jail.”
I was surprised. “He did?”
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“Did he tell you about Pete Qualman?”
“Yeah. That’s why he called. Said Pete’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t make no never mind to me,” she said.
“I thought you were his girlfriend.”
“Nah. We’re like those people on the TV, I guess, friends with benefits.”
“How so?”
“He’d come around when he got horny. Usually brought me a little gift or something. I’d haul his ashes and he’d leave. Came about twice a week.”
I was surprised. “Are you a prostitute?” I asked.
I saw anger flare in her face, a tightening of the jaw, redness creeping up from her neck, a grimace. “F*ck you,” she said. “I ain’t no whore. I liked it when Pete come around.”
I was losing her fast. “I’m sorry, Ms. Talbot. I didn’t mean to offend you. Can we start over?”
She relaxed a bit, sat back in her straight chair. “Okay. What do you want?”
“I want to know about Pete,” I said. “Who his friends were, why he was going to Sarasota, what kind of job he had up there, that sort of thing.”
“He didn’t have no friends to amount to anything. He lived down in the next settlement in a bunkhouse with some of the crew Bubba ran.”
“Did he ever mention any of the crew as a friend?”
“No. I don’t think he had much to do with them.”
“What about the guy in Sarasota?”
“What about him?”
“Did Pete ever tell you that he was a friend, where they met, what the job was in Sarasota?”
“I know it was some guy he’d been in the lockup with over near Belle Glade.”
“Glades Correctional?”
“I guess.”
“Do you know the friend’s name?”
“Jeff, I think.”
“Last name?”
“I never heard it.”
“How did Pete get here? Did somebody bring him?”
She smiled, the first sign of life I’d seen in her face other than the anger when I’d accused her of being a whore. “No. He had a sweet ride. Took me for a drive. Real leather seats and a sound system that’d knock your shoes off if you cranked it up enough.”
“What kind of car?”
“I don’t know. He said it was German.”
“BMW?”
“Could be. I don’t know nothing about cars.”
“Was he planning to come back to see you?”
“I suppose. Next time he got horny.”
“Did he say where he got the car?”
“Said he borrowed it.”
“From whom?”
“Didn’t say. I figured it was his boss’s car.”
“Jeff?”
“I guess.”
“Do you work?” I asked.
“Sometimes I get a job waitressing. Not lately, though. Times are tough.”
“Where do you get the money to live on?”
“I got a couple of kids and the state sends me a check every month.”
“Where are the kids?”
“They’re with my daddy. Over to Clewiston, shopping.”
“Does your father live here?”
“Yeah. This is his house. Well, it belongs to the sugar company, but he works for them, so he gets the house.”
“Does your mother live here, too?” I asked.
She laughed, a short, bitter-sounding bark. “She run off when I was a baby. It’s just Daddy and me. Always been that way.”
I paused for a moment, thinking about this young woman. I wondered what she might have become had she been born into different circumstances. She was pretty and perhaps a different upbringing would have rubbed off the rough edges. She could have been a coed up at Gainesville or Tallahassee instead of rotting in this hidden part of Florida.
We were in the middle of the state, about sixty miles either way to Ft. Myers on the west coast or Palm Beach on the east. In some reality, we were thousands of miles or years removed from the golden people that lived and played and laughed on the gilded coasts. There was surely nothing to laugh about in this blighted place.
“Do you know anybody that might help us find this Jeff?”
“Nope. Can’t help you there.”
I thought for a moment and looked at Logan. He caught my eye and shook his head once, quickly. I got to my feet. “Thank you, Ms. Talbot,” I said. “We’ll be on our way.”
She stood, a flash of anger turning her face into a rictus of outrage. “You bastard,” she shouted. “You think I don’t know who the f*ck you are? You think I’m some backwoods whore who don’t know nothing? I saw it on the news. You’re the bastard what killed Pete.”
I didn’t think now was the time to explain what happened, not that she’d believe me anyway. Logan was getting out of his seat. “Let’s go, Matt,” he said.
I think if I’d known what was waiting in Jenny’s front yard, I would have just stayed inside. Barricaded and calling 911 for help.