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Cold Florida

A Foggy Moskowitz Mystery

Severn House Publishers Limited

It was two in the morning, the middle of February. I was signing my time card, but I could barely read the handwriting I was so tired. Then the phone rang. I said something rude to it, but it rang again anyway. I looked at the door to my crummy office. It seemed very unsympathetic to my situation. It stayed closed. The phone rang a third time, and I picked it up.

'He's not in,' I said.

'Nice try, Foggy,' Sharon said. 'But this is important.'

I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them again. I imagined how nice it might be to lie down on the top of my desk. I would only have to move a couple of folders in the right direction to make a nice pillow. The light in the room was hurting my eyes. The hum from that fluorescent tube was stopping up my ears.

'Still there?' Sharon said impatiently.

'Define there.'

'OK,' she said, 'you have to go to the hospital.'

'Good idea,' I told her. 'I'm very run down lately.'

'Hasn't hindered your sense of humor,' she said, without the slightest hint of levity. 'Somebody stole a baby. From the neo-natal care whatever-you-call-it.'

'Stole a baby?' I rejoined. 'At two in the morning? This close to Valentine's Day?'

'Hmm,' she mumbled and I heard her rustling something on her desk. 'I guess it is almost Valentine's Day at that.'

'Isn't this more of a police type of a situation?' I asked her.

'The baby's mother is missing too,' Sharon said right back. 'She's a junkie, and the baby's addicted too because the mother shot up while she was pregnant. Shot up, apparently, all the time. So now she's gone, and the baby's gone, and the police are called thence, but they also want someone from our little branch of crime-fighters on the scene, because they're defining it as "an endangered child" case. So, tag. You're the only one on duty at the moment.'

'Technically speaking,' I began, hoisting my time card up to the phone as if she could see it, 'I already signed out.'

'Technically speaking, I'm five-foot-eleven, but does anyone call me willowy? No. I get scarecrow a lot.'

'I always think of you as willowy.'

'Not the point.'

'It's not?' I asked, somewhat disingenuously.

'The point is,' she sighed, 'that just because you think it, that doesn't make it so. You think you're off. But you're not.'

'Nietzsche or Kant or one of those German types,' I said, very reasonably, 'and I, would disagree with you. They always like to tell you that the only thing that makes it so is that you think it's so.'

'Have them call me tomorrow,' she snapped, 'and we'll discuss it, but at the moment?'

'I'm going to the hospital.'

'I told them already that you're on your way. So hurry. Don't stop for coffee.'

I hung up without saying anything further about German philosophers.

I looked around my office and took a second, a brief second, to reflect on my lot in life. How, I asked myself, did I end up here? My office was the size of an elevator car, no window. My desk was made of plywood. The walls were painted some color that wasn't even bright in 1947 when it was applied. The floor was a blond carpet that had so many stains everybody thought it was an imitation Pollock – a bad imitation. There was nothing on any wall, unless you'd counted the smudges. And the guy who'd worked in the office before me was a two-pack-a-day smoker who'd died of lung cancer, so the place smelled like an ashtray in a bus station.

The entire building was just as bad: a squat, concrete two-story, painted pink. It was a box with windows and a flat roof that leaked. And I was on the second floor. The sign out front said Child Protective Services because Congress passed Public Law 93-247, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The act came with a little bit of federal funding. The only job I'd had in Florida before that was as a sort of private investigator. But the romance of that job had worn thin after a while – nearly as thin as my bank account – so a nice government paycheck seemed just the ticket. Also, for reasons too nefarious to disclose, it was the perfect job for me. It helped me to atone for past transgressions.

Previously, I had been happy-go-lucky in Brooklyn: the halcyon days, before 1971 – a long three years earlier. Sometimes this happy-go-lucky me, my former self, would emerge from the place in my brain where I'd buried him. When that happened, the little man who used to be me, he taunted me.

'You used to be the best four-wheel booster in Borough Park,' he would say. 'Free as a bird. What happened to you?'

The beauty of stealing a car in a mostly Hasidic neighborhood, of course, was that the cops didn't give it as much attention as they would have in, say, Brooklyn Heights.

'You were only caught twice,' he said, the guy in my head, 'and one of those times all you had to do was apologize to a guy named Schlomo, and Bob was your uncle. He let you cop a walk.'

'Yeah,' I explained, also in my head, 'but the second time I got caught, I was on my way to the slam. I was only able to avoid it by slipping out of the cop car under very dire circumstances and hiding out all the way to Florida. Florida is where you made me come to! And now, somehow, it got to be 1974!'

That would usually shut him up, the little guy in my head. For a while.

As I was leaving, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the dirty glass part of the door. I needed a shave, and a haircut, and a new suit, and, to be honest, a fair amount of plastic surgery. But was that going to happen? The beard grew fast. The hair looked better longer. The suit, well, it used to be Brooks Brothers, but at this point it looked like the brothers had fought over the thing before going their separate ways. And that face: seriously, I used to catch clocks trying to avoid eye contact. Still, it was the face I was given, and it certainly belonged to a guy who would call himself Foggy. So there I was.

I decided to walk to the hospital. It was only five blocks, and I thought the air and the exercise would wake me up. The wee hours of the night were always quiet in our little berg. This particular night the streets were slick because of the rain and shiny because of the moon, which was full like a big white snowball. Which, by the way, they never saw around those parts: snow. Still, it was plenty cold, and I got the shivers, which made me walk faster. Because I was from parts north, I always underestimated the ability of a cold night in Florida to ice me up. I never wore an overcoat. I always thought to myself, You're from Brooklyn! What do you need with an overcoat in Fry's Bay?

These were the thoughts I was having as I walked along the chilly, wet streets toward the hospital. There was no other idiot out of doors. Everyone else had sense enough to come in out of the rain. Still, it was my job, and I tried not to complain.

I rounded the corner of Broad Street and saw the Emergency sign for the hospital a block away. It was all red and misty, hanging in the air above an empty parking space where ambulances might hang out. I had to prepare myself to talk to night nurses about a stolen baby and a junkie mother. I was not an overly sensitive guy but, still, a conversation like that took a moment of steeling up beforehand.

I was wet, so I shook off a little before I sauntered in through the emergency door. I was greatly relieved to see Maggie Redhawk at the nurses' station. I knew her, she knew me. That was going to make things a little nicer.

Maggie Redhawk was a fifty-year-old woman of what she said was mixed ethnicity, which meant she couldn't decide if she wanted to write African-American or Native American on her census form. She and I had bonded because of my somewhat unusual looks. She thought I looked more like a Seminole than she did. Now, in fact, I was actually almost entirely a Russian Jew in the heritage arena. But, to Maggie, I looked a little like a Seminole, and we had several discussions about the lost tribes of Israel. We mostly talked about other things such as the weather and, on this particular night, a missing baby.

She saw me walk in. She was dressed in her usual hospital uniform, so large on her that she looked like a big white pillow with a black wig on.

'So,' she said. 'You're wet.'

I nodded. 'Yes. And I am also cold.'

'You're here about the missing baby.'

No small talk. That was interesting to me because Maggie was a big one for the small talk.

'I am,' I told her. 'And the missing mother that goes with her.'

'The baby's the problem,' she allowed, 'because, if it doesn't get its medication in just about three hours, it's dead.'

'That is a problem.'

'We ain't really got time to kid around, Foggy,' she told me, more serious than I had ever seen her.

'So tell me about the mother,' I said, sidling up to the nurses' station.

The emergency waiting room was about as per usual for that time of night. It was not much bigger than a living room. Four or five guys were bleeding in chairs under very harsh fluorescent lighting. The place smelled like rubbing alcohol and vomit. The floor was smeared with the black traces of gurneys and wheelchairs and heel marks. And Maggie smelled like powder, a nice white scent.

'The mother's a junkie, like I said,' Maggie told me matter-of-factly. 'Had the kid in her apartment. A neighbor reported it. They both would have died otherwise.'

'She came here when?' I asked.

'Last Thursday, not quite a week ago.'

'So, this baby,' I concluded, 'it's really in bad shape.'

She nodded.

'All right.' I rapped my knuckles on the countertop between us and made as to leave.

I was halfway to the door before she objected.

'Wait. Where are you going?' she wanted to know.

'I am going to the apartment of the mother with all due haste,' I told Maggie, without turning around. 'It seems like a good place to start.'

'Her apartment?' she queried. 'And where do you think that is?'

'I'm guessing,' I told her, my hand on the door, 'that it's the address listed beside her name on that paperwork in front of you. Right where it says "patient's residence".'

'How the hell —' she began to ask me.

I didn't hear the rest of her question, because I was already outside and on my way to the address of one Lynette Baker, an apartment on Pine.

Another nurse passed me as I stepped on to the sidewalk. 'Tell Maggie that I can read upside down. Tell her I'm not as stupid as I look.'

The nurse looked up, caught my face, recognized me, and smiled. 'Yeah, I'll tell her. But I think she probably already knows the second part. I mean, it would just be cruel if you actually were as stupid as you look.'

'Comedy after two in the morning,' I rejoined.

'You have to do something to keep from crying,' she said, shoving on the door to go into the hospital, 'don't you?'

I nodded, even though she didn't see me, because I figured she had a point.

Shortly after, my fist was saying blam on somebody's door. It took a while, but somebody answered.

'What?' she wanted to know.

'You're the concierge of this establishment?' I held up a badge.

Now, if she looked at it too good, I'd maybe have to wade through half an hour's worth of explaining what a task force was and sometimes even what a battered child was, though I always found that the phrase was fairly self-explanatory. If she was sleepy, she might mistake my badge for a cop badge, and everything would be Jake.

She squinted past the door chain. 'Oh. You're here about the junkie.'

'After a fashion,' I confessed.

She unbolted her door. She was dressed in a fright wig and chenille bathrobe. Her feet were adorned with the dirtiest slippers I'd ever seen. She reached up to a nail by the door for a ring of keys.

'Come on.' She muscled past me, down the hall, and up a flight of splintery stairs.

Even though it was pressing three o'clock in the morning, there was a stereo on somewhere, playing Los Tigres Del Norte very softly. My Spanish was rusty, but the song was about a woman who shot a drug smuggler and stole his money. Somewhere else gave off the smell of cooking onions, and it made my stomach growl. A woman was crying in D-7 as we passed her door. The shower was running in D-9. The super stopped at D-11 and shoved the key in the door without knocking.

'This is her place,' she said loudly. 'But she ain't in, I can tell you.'

'How do you know?'

'Because she's in the hospital.'

She flung the door open. Immediately a stench assaulted my considerable nostrils that made me think maybe I was in a slaughterhouse.

'What the hell is that?' I asked haltingly.

'What?'

'That smell?'

'What smell?'

'OK,' I said, trying to ignore it.

'After you,' she said.

I took a tentative step into the lair, and was presented with something worse than the smell: the scene that was causing the smell. The dump was a one-room affair; sometimes they call it a studio. There was a sofa, a side table, a lamp, a large photograph of a penguin hanging on the wall, and seventeen years' worth of accumulated garbage. In addition to the empty pizza boxes and moldy cottage cheese containers, there was a significant amount of blood and guts on the sofa. My guess was that our girl had her baby right there.

I took one step farther in, and I could see the stove and fridge side-by-side to my left, and a bathroom without a door on it. The sink was filled with dishes and the tub had water in it.

There was a window, but it had plastic over it, to keep out the cold I was guessing.

'You hear the ruckus a few nights ago?' I asked, trying not to look anyplace in particular. 'The baby being born?'

'Me? No. It was Gerard.'

'I see. And where is Gerard?'

'D-10,' she told me. 'Right across the hall. But he ain't in either. He's still working. He's a stripper. A male stripper. You ever hear of such a thing?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Now, about Lynette.'

'She's a junkie.'

'You already told me that.'

'She's always late with the rent.'

'And yet, you let her stay.'

'It ain't my place,' she said, rolling her eyes. 'I get to live here for free, and all I gots to do is take in the rent, notify people about this and that, and call the cops on a regular basis.'

'You call the cops last Thursday night when Lynette ...?'

'Gerard came to me,' she sighed. 'I went to the cops, yeah. But I knew there was something more to it. You don't bleed that much just from having a baby.'

'You've had a baby?'

'No,' she said, adjusting her chenille robe, 'but I seen it on the television.'

'I'm going to look around in here now, for a minute,' I said, swallowing.

'Help yourself,' she told me. 'I'm going back downstairs to have a little nightcap.'

'Perfect.'

She left. I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about the scene in that room when the baby was born. I was just hoping to find something to tell me where the girl, the junkie, Lynette Baker might be hiding.

I opened my eyes, and all of a sudden I could have kicked myself for not asking what the baby was named. It would be nice, I thought to myself, to be able to say the baby's name to the junkie mother. Sometimes when you personalized things, a junkie would soften up. A little.

I took a moment to stare at the picture of the penguin on the wall. It seemed hilariously out of place, though I did not, at that moment, feel much like laughing. I decided that it was the only thing out of place in the dump, so I should start by examining it more closely. Sometimes you got lucky.

I took the few steps farther into the apartment that were necessary for me to grab the picture frame. I lifted the picture off the wall. There was a nail and a sizeable hole in the wall around the nail, like somebody had hit the nail so hard that the nail went all the way in and the hammer left an indentation, a little crater. Otherwise, there was nothing hidden on the wall.

I looked at the back of the picture. There was a very old slab of corrugated cardboard that was held in place by four finishing nails, one in each corner. I bent two of the nails a bit and slid the cardboard out of the way. A postage-stamp-sized baggie dropped to the floor. It was sealed with scotch tape and almost completely flat, but it had a nice white powdery substance in it. I scooped it up and pocketed it. Then I saw that, written in very light pencil in the corner of the backside of the cardboard, it said Jody and gave a telephone number.

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Excerpted from Cold Florida by Phillip DePoy. Copyright © 2016 Phillip DePoy. Excerpted by permission of Severn House Publishers Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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