Christina said, “It’s just a theory.”
Timmy Gavigan shifted under the covers and turned slightly to face her. “He had a brother, was that in the file?”
No, Christina said. Nothing about a brother.
“Probably not,” Timmy Gavigan said. “It didn’t seem important at the time. I mean, the doc wasn’t even a suspect.”
“I understand.”
“But he did have a brother, I talked to him maybe ten minutes. Wasn’t worth typing it up.” Timmy Gavigan motioned for a cup of water and Christina held it to his lips.
“Jesus, I must be a sight,” he said. “Anyway, the reason I mention it—let’s say the doctor croaked Vicky. Don’t know why, but let’s say he did. What to do about the body? That’s a big problem. Bodies are damn tough to get rid of, Jimmy Hoffa being the exception.”
“What does the doctor’s brother do?”
Timmy Gavigan grinned, and color flashed to his cheeks. “That’s my point, honey. The brother was a tree trimmer.”
Christina tried to look pleased at this new information, but mostly she looked puzzled.
“You don’t know much about tree trimming, do you?” Timmy Gavigan said in a teasing tone. Then he gulped more oxygen.
She said, “Why did you go see the doctor’s brother?”
“I didn’t. Didn’t have to. I met him right outside the clinic—I forget the damn name.”
“The Durkos Medical Center.”
“Sounds right.” Timmy Gavigan paused, and his free hand moved to his throat. When the pain passed, he continued. “Outside the clinic, I saw this guy hacking on the black olive trees. Asked him if he was there the day Vicky disappeared, if he saw anything unusual. Naturally he says no. After, I ask his name and he tells me George Graveline. So like the genius I am, I say: You related to the doctor? He says, yeah, and that’s about it.”
“George Graveline.” Christina Marks wrote the name down.
Timmy Gavigan lifted his head and eyed the notebook. “Tree trimmer,” he said, “Make sure you put that down.”
“Tell me what it means, please.”
“No, you ask Mick.”
She said, “What makes you so sure I’ll see him?”
“Wild hunch.”
Then Timmy Gavigan said something that Christina Marks couldn’t quite hear. She leaned over and asked him, in a whisper, to repeat it.
“I said, you sure are beautiful.” He winked once, then closed his eyes slowly.
“Thanks for holding my hand,” he said.
And then he let go.
Whenever there was a bombing in Dade County, somebody in the Central Office would call Sergeant Al Garcia for help, mainly because Garcia was Cuban and it was automatically assumed that the bombing was in some way related to exile politics. Garcia had left orders that he was not to be bothered about bombings unless somebody actually died, since a dead body was the customary prerequisite of homicide investigation. He also sent detailed memoranda explaining that Cubans were not the only ones who tried to bomb each other in South Florida, and he listed all the mob and labor and otherwise non-Cuban bombings over the last ten years. Nobody at the Central Office paid much attention to Garcia’s pleadings, and they still summoned him over the most chickenshit of explosions.
This is what happened when Dr. Rudy Graveline’s black Jaguar sedan blew up. Garcia was about to tell the dispatcher to piss off, until he heard the name of the complainant. Then, fifteen minutes behind the fire trucks, he drove straight to Whispering Palms.
What had happened was: Rudy had gone to the airport to pick up a potentially important patient, a world-famous actress who had awakened one morning in her Bel Air mansion, glanced at herself naked in the mirror, and burst into tears. She got Dr. Graveline’s name from a friend of a friend of Pernell Roberts’s poolboy, and called to tell the surgeon that she was flying to Miami for an emergency consultation. Because of the actress’s fame and wealth (most of it accumulated during a messy divorce from one of the Los Angeles Dodgers), Rudy agreed to meet the woman at the airport and give a personal tour of Whispering Palms. He was double-parked in front of the Pan Am terminal when he first noticed the beat-up old Chrysler pull in behind him, its rear end sticking into traffic. Rudy noticed the car again on his way back to the beach—the actress yammering away about the practical joke she once played on Richard Chamberlain while they were shooting some miniseries; Rudy with a worried eye on the rearview, because the Imperial was right there, on his bumper.