Shoot the Moon

Chapter Thirty-One - Just A Love Nest

 Benning Dalton's "Beach House" had thirty rooms and a view of the Atlantic Ocean. There was only a skeleton staff in residence but we made do with only two servants. It was merely luxurious rather than embarrassing. We bought the BMW down on the train. 

Echo came along every day and read the maps and searched the guidebook for likely motels. At the end of the first week searching Fort Lauderdale, I was losing faith in my hunch. It was, after all, only a drunken comment made years ago. My faith rested on the hope that Mickey Dolan would migrate back to his memories. Fort Lauderdale, Mickey's retirement home of choice. People only have a few original ideas about life. Most of them, they think of as kids in school. Rather than get picked up at an airport trying to leave the country, he would go to ground and stay there. It was just the idiot-genius kind of thing he would do, like hiding in New York as a homeless person. That was the idea, at any rate. 

I was ready to give up when we found him. He was in a seedy motor court on the back way out of town. The Palm View Motel was fifth-rate Fifties Florida architecture bent around a small, over-chlorinated pool. The stagnant humid air was tangy with the smell of the chemical. Mickey was asleep in a broken down lawn chair at the edge of the pool, his rear end sagging through the torn plastic webbing.  

"Wait here," I said to Echo and before she could protest I convinced her to keep the car running for a quick getaway if needed. "I don't know what the situation is. I'll be right back." 

Mickey looked in bad shape, bloated and scabby, like a dead fish on the shore. He was shirtless and wore old khaki shorts, over the top of which his belly was poised to spill like a vanilla milk shake. Under a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses repaired with a flesh colored band-aid at one temple, his face was sunburned a radioactive pink. His hair looked even thinner, retreating even farther up the heights of his skull. He hadn't shaved in a week. His face was collapsed around the jawbone and I wondered if he had lost his dentures or just given up on solid food. His legs were spread out on either side of the chair and his bare feet were planted on the cracked concrete of the pool deck. There were two opened cans of beer near his dangling right hand. Mickey was drooling and the puddle of saliva on his rubbery white chest was growing. Not exactly the master criminal I would have liked to see at that moment.  

I stood between Mickey and the sun. He didn't move, so I jiggled the chair with my foot and he jerked and grabbed the air like a man dreaming of falling. His eyes opened one at a time. They seemed to work independently for a while, like red veined soft boiled eggs, each finding its own way to my face. Finally he was able to study me, the situation, the year, the planets, and the stars and he cracked a slow toothless grin. 

"Murphy. Glad to see you, doctor." He said the words slowly, building the sentence one block at a time. 

"Is that right, Mickey?" I said. 

"Yeah. I was gonna call you. No shit. You remembered when we came down here? I used to love Florida. They kinda overbuilt the place, I think. Doesn't have the same charm. Glad to see you, man. No shit." 

"Why's that?" 

He looked away and fumbled for something to do. He finally wiped the puddle of spit from his chest and grabbed at a beer can. He caught it on the second pass. It was empty and he tossed it into the pool. He was panting as if his heart were laboring. 

"What are you doing here, Mickey?" 

"Things just...I meant to leave the country, you know, but I got this far and I... just... Very stressful life I been leading, man. Rest up awhile. Get a grip. You know? Good times we had here, remember?" He picked up the other beer can, shook it and dropped it. 

"You left me holding a very dirty bag, Mickey. Cruz, the police. People are all over me," I said, holding up my broken fingers, "I need help." 

"Sure, man. Anything."