“Miami Jones,” Kelty said, pointing at me, “this is Detective Remington. Rem, Jones is married to one of our former deputies, Danielle Castle.”

  “Former?” asked Remington.

  “She’s with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement now.”

  Remington raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure if she considered this a positive or otherwise.

  “Who’s the vic?” I asked.

  Kelty shrugged. “Local ne’er-do-well. Minor dealer.”

  I let out a sigh. “Suspicious?”

  “We’re here aren’t we?” said Remington.

  “You got someone in mind?”

  “More than that,” said Kelty. “We made an arrest.”

  “What’s your interest in this club?” asked Remington.

  “Like I said, my client is a member.”

  “What’s your angle?”

  “My angle?”

  “What are you doing for this client?”

  “He’s due some money from an injury fund that covers boxers, and they’re saying he doesn’t fit the criteria.”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “I got a brain surgeon at the university says they’re wrong.”

  “So what’s that got to do with this club?”

  “I was talking to other former boxers, looking for a pattern of denials.”

  “Did you find one?”

  “I did.”

  “So all the members of this club are boxers?” asked Kelty.

  “It’s called the Pugilists’ Club.”

  “And my gym is called Orange Theory,” said Remington.

  “Fair enough. I don’t think it’s exclusive, some members are just fans of boxing, but yeah, a lot of them are current and former boxers.”

  Kelty glanced at the darkened club upstairs and then at me. “You know the owner?”

  “Maxine Mitchell.”

  “A woman?” said Remington.

  “Yeah. They can do anything these days.”

  “Smart guy.”

  “Not according to my wife.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Any link to Stone Mitchell?” asked Kelty.

  “His wife. You knew Stone?”

  “In passing. A few colleagues trained at his gym. You know the new guy?”

  “Samson? Yeah, I met him.”

  “Thoughts?”

  “Seems okay. Maxine said she’d known him all his life—he used to be a boxer too—and when Stone passed she sold the gym to him.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “What’s he got to do with all this?”

  “Nothing,” said Kelty. “In your travels, you hear of a guy called Johnny Cabrini?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kelty scraped one shoe across the asphalt. “What’d you hear?”

  “I’m gonna stop talking now.”

  Kelty frowned. “He’s your client.”

  “Yep.”

  “Damn.”

  “Why?”

  “We just arrested him for murder,” said Remington.

  I looked at all the cars and cops and crime scene techs, and the people watching and the news crews and the yellow-and-black tape reining it all in.

  “You think Johnny killed your drug dealer?” I asked.

  “We do,” said Kelty.

  “So who’s this dealer?”

  “We can’t tell you that,” said Remington.

  “Okay. I’ll see you guys around.”

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “To talk to the media,” I said. “Get ahead of this thing. You know how it works.”

  “You’re not on his defense team,” said Kelty. “You said it was an insurance thing.”

  “That’s right, Detective, I’m not.”

  “All right,” he said. “You keep your mouth shut with the media and we’ll share a little.”

  “That’s all I want. I’m going to have to go and see his wife and explain what’s going on.”

  Kelty jinked his head and led me closer to the alcove. I couldn’t see much. The alcove was in shadow most of the day, but I did see a cloth over a body-shaped lump and a forensic investigator I knew.

  “The ID on the vic says his name is Richard Whitecross,” said Kelty.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Our database says he’s a low-level dealer, mostly steroids and prescription meds, opioids, that sort of thing. A little fentanyl and meth maybe. Hangs around this area by all reports. Surprised you haven’t seen him.”

  “I don’t know what the victim looks like.”

  Kelty tapped on his phone and tilted it toward me: a photo of Richard Whitecross’s driver’s license. “Word is he goes by the name—”

  “Ricky the Fudge,” I said.

  Kelty put the phone back in his pocket, and I could almost feel Detective Remington pulsing beside me.

  “So you do know him.”

  “No. But you’re right, I have seen him around. Here and outside Stone’s—Samson’s—gym. A trainer there told me he hangs around, and I saw him try to peddle his wares in the club the other night.”

  “That so?” said Kelty.

  “She might be in on it, this club owner,” said Remington.

  “She’s not in on it,” I said. “Soon as she clapped eyes on him, she booted him out.”

  “So he’s not popular at the club?” she said.

  “How many dealers are popular in your neighborhood?”

  She didn’t reply.

  I directed Kelty’s attention to the alcove. “So you found Johnny here?”

  “No. We arrested him at home. In his garage, to be exact. Make of that what you will.”

  I pictured the garage with its cot and rancid stench. “How did you place him here?”

  “The cleaner discovered the body early this morning and called 911. We were here when the guy next door turned up for work.” He jinked his head toward the payday lender on the right side of the alcove. “See the security camera?”

  I hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a camera mounted above the door to the store. It was targeted at the payday lender’s vicinity but might have caught the area outside the alcove in its periphery.

  “He showed us the video from last night,” said Kelty. “The victim arrives and then your client. There’s a fight and only your guy walks away.”

  “How did you know who he was?”

  “Registration on his truck.”

  “So you went to his house.”

  “That’s right. Got no one home, but the side door to the garage was open. We found him asleep in there. Can you imagine? Killing a guy and then going home for a nap.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much, not yet. The tox screen will tell us what he’d been into, but the garage stank like a distillery. Is he a user?”

  “Drugs? Not that I know of.”

  “But you can’t say for sure.”

  I shook my head.

  “And you were worried about him harming himself,” said Remington.

  I wished I hadn’t mentioned that now, so I said nothing more.

  “He went off the deep end,” said Remington. “Drunk and drugged up. Then he had an argument with his dealer and took him out.”

  I couldn’t argue, so I didn’t.

  “You say you know the wife?” asked Kelty.

  “Yeah.”

  “She wasn’t home last night.”

  I didn’t want to say she was staying at her daughter’s because Johnny had gotten violent, so again I said nothing. It was becoming a thing.

  “You’ll tell her?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll tell her.”

  “All right. Let her know we’ll be in touch.”

  “Sure.”

  Kelty and Remington moved away. I was about to leave when I noticed the forensic investigator near the ME’s van. I wandered over.

  “Lorraine Catchitt,” I said. “Like with a baseball, not what’s in a litter box.”

  The investigator spun around. She was wearing a full-body disposable coverall. The hood was pinched tight around her face, so she was nothing more than eyes, nose, and mouth. She smiled. “Jones, you remembered.”

  “It’s hard to forget.”

  “What brings you out on such a fine morning?”

  “Turns out the guy they arrested was a client.”

  “Nice.”

  “Not really. Kelty wants me to inform his wife.”

  “Classy.”

  “Can you tell me anything? I’d rather not go in blind.”

  “Looks like a fight. I’d say your man punched the victim’s lights out and killed him.”

  “His punch or the fall?”

  The plastic suit barely moved when she shrugged. “The autopsy will tell us more, but honestly, Jones, you punch someone in the head and they fall down and crack their skull, that’s not really mitigating.”

  “But we’re talking accident?”

  “From what Kelty’s saying, the guy might have been a user in a fight with his dealer, so maybe he didn’t mean to do it. But maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t like the guy and came to off him. That’s not for me to decide.”

  “Me either. Thanks, Lorraine.”

  She smiled again, and I got the sense that few people in her line of work used her first name.

  “Anytime, Jones.”

  I left her to her business, stepped under the crime scene tape, and walked back to my car. I was going to have to talk to Tina Cabrini, but first I was going to have to talk to Mick. I didn’t relish either conversation.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mick took the news stoically. I wasn’t sure why I expected anything else, but I thought this might be the sort of thing to bring whatever played out as rage in Mick’s head. Maybe rage was just a different kind of silence from happiness for him, and all the important stuff was going on behind the mask, hidden from view. I hoped not; no one could manage that kind of emotional range on the inside while showing nothing on the outside, at least not without doing some serious damage.

  After a brief conversation that sounded a lot like two bulls grunting in a field, I asked Mick if he could help me find Tina.

  “Yep.”

  I let him know what the sheriff’s detectives had told me, that Tina was not at the house when they arrested Johnny, and I asked if he knew where her daughter lived. He hung up and texted me an address in Palm Beach Gardens. That could be thirty minutes in traffic from the club. I had no idea about Mick, as it suddenly occurred that I didn’t know where he lived. This shouldn’t have been a shock—he was the guy who owned my favorite watering hole, not my best man—but over the years we’d seen so much through the lens of Longboard Kelly’s, he felt closer than that. Perhaps same coin, different sides.

  I took off immediately. I wanted to be there before Mick. Not that he didn’t care, but I wasn’t sure how he would articulate the message. The traffic had cleared some, so it was only twenty minutes before I reached the interchange at PGA Boulevard.

  Palm Beach Gardens might have been the mall capital of the world, there were so many of them; half the suburb was parking lots. I paid them no mind and followed my phone’s dulcet tones to an apartment complex north of the Gardens Mall.

  The place was called Gardens something or other, but I didn’t get the reference—if you walked there, you wouldn’t pass through a garden—but the development was nice enough: clean streets, tidy shrubs, and views of faux lakes.

  The gatehouse attendant gave me some guff about not being on the list, so I told him some baloney about being welcome to pass on the details of her father being killed as an innocent bystander in a drive-by shooting. He likely decided it was better coming from me, because he lifted the boom without further debate. I parked on the street, which was often some kind of mortal sin in these gated communities, and waited for Mick. I passed the time picturing the gatehouse guy telling him he couldn’t come in. Mick’s response was sure to be less eloquent than mine.

  Mick pulled up a few minutes later. He parked the Eldorado behind my Jeep, and I met him between the two vehicles.

  “All right?” I asked.

  “Nup.”

  We walked up the stairs to the second floor. Mick rang the bell. A man answered the door in a white T-shirt and camo pants. He looked a little like Desi Arnez Jr. with a crew cut. He didn’t appear to recognize Mick.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  Mick looked at him like he was assessing the guy’s weaknesses, but he said nothing. In a bar that was one thing, but in general society, that kind of staring was a touch creepy. I mentally patted myself on the back for not letting Mick do this alone.

  “Is Tina here?” I asked.

  “You are?”

  “I’m Miami Jones. This is Mick. We’re doing some work for her.”

  “Work? Like gardening or something?”

  I had been called many things in my life, but this was a first.

  “No. It’s about Johnny.”

  The man nodded like he knew no good was coming of our visit, then he shut the door in our faces. I looked at Mick, who kept looking at the door. It opened again. This time it was Tina.

  “Mick? Miami? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Mothers and wives had an intuition about these things. Either that or they always assumed the worst.

  “Are the girls home?” I asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “You want to step outside for a sec?”

  She did just that and closed the door behind her. “It’s Johnny? What’s happened?”

  “Tina, he’s been arrested.”

  She put her hands to her mouth to stifle something, and for a long moment she said nothing, just looked off into middle distance.

  “We don’t know everything yet, but the detectives are saying he was involved in a fight with another man late last night at the Pugilists’ Club. The other man died.”

  “Oh no. It’s my fault.”

  “No, Tina. It’s not your fault. Johnny isn’t well. You know this.”

  “But . . .”

  “Do you want to go inside?” I asked. “I can help you tell the girls.”

  “Huh? No, no. I can do that. I just . . .” She moved to Mick and hugged him. It wasn’t a lunge like she needed to be held more than anything on earth, more like she was thankful he had come.

  “Mick,” she whispered.

  “Teens,” said Mick.

  Tina pulled away and wiped her face, but there were no tears. Johnny had been getting worse for decades. I figured she knew a conversation like this would come sooner or later.

  “He was arrested in your garage,” I said. “Were you home at all last night?”

  “Yes, I collected some things for the girls, and some food and toiletries and stuff.”

  “But you didn’t see him?”

  “He wasn’t there, no.”

  “Did you stay the night?”

  “No, I went there after my shift, about nine thirty. I left close to eleven.”

  “And the side door to the garage was closed.”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Just trying to get a timeline of things. So you don’t know where Johnny was last night.”

  “No,” she said, also shaking her head. “What happens now?”

  “He’ll appear before the court in the next couple days, and then we’ll find out.”

  “We don’t have money for bail.”

  “The court will get into that. As and when, we can talk to a bail bondsman.”

  “But I can’t even pay the rent, Miami.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask my office manager to look into what services are available. But don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? Johnny isn’t well. What bail bondsman is going to give him a bond when he can’t guarantee he’ll show up in court?”

  “Sorry. I mean, we’ll all do what we can. We just need to let this process work its way through.”

  “I don’t mean to sound heartless, but what does this do to the fund money? They offered five hundred. I need that.”

  “I know it’s hard, but don’t take it. We can do better than that.”

  “But my rent.”

  “My office manager will look into what legal roadblocks we can throw up, see if we can slow that process down a bit.”

  “I need to get home.”

  “You might be better here with family.”

  “If I’m inside the house, it’s harder for the landlord to change the locks.”

  “And the girls?”

  “They can stay here for a few more days. It’s better. I need to clean up the house, the garage. I don’t want them reminded of their father’s bad days. It’s too hard on them already.”

  I nodded. Mick didn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Will you be okay over there by yourself?” I asked.

  “You mean will I hurt myself because my mentally ill husband is in jail?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Miami, I have held myself together for years now, all for my girls, and for Johnny too. I can hold on a little longer.”

  We agreed to keep in touch. She patted Mick on the shoulder like she was looking after him as well. As she made to open the door, I remembered I had one last question.

  “Tina, was Johnny doing any drugs that you knew of?”

  She frowned. “Dr. Abe gave him antidepressants. He took Advil a lot and sometimes OxyContin, I think.”

  “Where did he get the OxyContin?”

  “I don’t know. Dr. Abe, I guess?”

  “He didn’t take anything harder?”

  “Just whiskey.”

  “Okay, sorry to ask. I’ll be in touch.”

  She turned and pushed her way inside. I glanced at Mick. He looked the same. He might have been having a heart attack, or his team might have just scored the winning touchdown; it was impossible to tell.

  We walked back out, but Mick didn’t get into his car, so I stepped over.

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll pay you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Get Tina her money.”