“So then?”
“So the state attorney’s office dropped the burglary charge on Mr. Football Hero, and nailed me for agg assault. He gets a scholarship to USC, I get felony arts-and-crafts. That’s the whole yarn.”
Pickney sighed. “And you lost your job.”
“The newspaper had no choice, Ott.” Not with the boy’s father raising so much hell. The boy’s father was Levon Bennett, big wheel on the Orange Bowl Committee, board chairman of about a hundred banks. Decker had always thought the newspaper might have rehired him after Apalachee if only Levon Bennett wasn’t in the same Sunday golf foursome as the executive publisher.
“You always had a terrible temper.”
“Luck, too. Of all the thieves worth stomping in Miami, I’ve got to pick a future Heisman Trophy winner.” Decker laughed sourly.
“So now you’re a… ”
“Private investigator,” Decker said. Obviously Ott was having a little trouble getting to the point.
The point being what in the hell Decker was doing as a P.I. “I burned out on newspapers,” he said to Ott.
“With your portfolio you could have done anything, R.J. Magazines, free-lance, the New York agencies. You could write your own ticket.”
“Not with a rap sheet,” Decker said.
It was a comfortable lie. A lawyer friend had arranged for Decker’s criminal record to be legally expunged, wiped off the computer, so the rap sheet wasn’t really the problem.
The truth was, Decker had to get away from the news business. He needed a divorce from photography because he had started to see life and death as a sequence of frames; Decker’s mind had started to work like his goddamn cameras, and it scared him. The night he made up his mind was the night the city desk had sent him out on what everybody figured was a routine drug homicide. Something stinky dripping from the trunk of a new Seville parked on the sky level of the Number Five Garage at Miami International. Decker got there just as the cops were drilling the locks. Checked the motor drive on the Leica. Got down on one knee. Felt the cold dampness seep through his trousers. Raining like a bitch. Trunk pops open. A young woman, used to be, anyway. Heels, nylons, pretty silk dress, except for the brown stains. Stench bad enough to choke a maggot. He’d been expecting the usual Juan Doe—Latin male, mid-twenties, dripping gold, no ID, multiple gunshot wounds. Not a girl with a coat hanger wrapped around her neck. Not Leslie. Decker refocused. Leslie. Jesus Christ, he knew this girl, worked with her at the paper. Decker fed the Leica more film. She was a fashion writer—who the fuck’d want to murder a fashion writer? Her husband, said a homicide guy. Decker bracketed the shots, changed angles to get some of the hair, but no face. Paper won’t print faces of the dead, that’s policy. He fired away, thinking: I know this girl, so why can’t I stop? Leica whispering in the rain, click-click-click. Oh God, she’s a friend of mind so why the fuck can’t I stop. Husband told her they were flying to Disney World, big romantic weekend, said the homicide man. Decker reloaded, couldn’t help himself. Strangled her right here, stuffed her in the trunk, grabbed his suitcase, and hopped a plane for Key West with a barmaid from North Miami Beach. She’d only been married what, three months? Four, said the homicide guy, welcome to the Magic Kingdom. Haven’t you got enough pictures for Chrissakes? Sure, Decker said, but he couldn’t look at Leslie’s body unless it was through the lens, so he ran back to his car and threw up his guts in a puddle.
Three days later, Levon Bennett’s son tried to steal R. J. Decker’s cameras outside the stadium, and Decker chased him down and beat him unconscious. Those are my eyes, he’d said as he slugged the punk. Without them I’m fucking blind, don’t you understand?
At Apalachee he’d met a very nice doctor doing four years for Medicare fraud, who gave him the name of an insurance company that needed an investigator. Sometimes the investigator had to take his own pictures—”sometimes” was about all Decker figured he could handle. Besides, he was broke and never wanted to see the inside of a newsroom again. So he tried one free-lance job for the insurance company—took a picture of a forty-two-foot Bertram that was supposed to be sunk off Cat Island but wasn’t—and got paid two thousand dollars. Decker found the task to be totally painless and profitable. Once his rap sheet was purged, he applied for his P.I. license and purchased two cameras, a Nikon and a Canon, both used. The work was small potatoes, no Pulitzers but no pain. Most important, he had discovered with more and more cases that he still loved the cameras but could see just fine without them—no blood and gore in the darkroom, just mug shots and auto tags and grainy telescopic stills of married guys sneaking out of motels.