“I guess I’d better take you home,” I indicated as I started the car. “There’s not much more we can do until we meet with Langdon at Crabby Bill’s tomorrow. I hope he is at least a little bit helpful. If he gets stubborn, or he just cannot help us, we’re in big trouble.”
I looked over at Mia and realized how bleak a picture I was painting. We needed some positive spin and distraction. “I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that he was willing to meet with us at all. How do I get to your place?” Now there’s a distraction.
For the next ten minutes I again followed Mia’s directions. From the perspective of notable sights, we seemed to be heading deeper into an even seedier part of Tampa. Forty minutes earlier, I would not have believed that that would have been possible. Mia asked a few questions about what help we might expect or hope to get from Langdon. I could give her the questions that we could start with, but I couldn’t give her any answers to satisfy her. I just didn’t know what to expect from the old ex-cop—who might have been ‘drunk or hung-over since Viet Nam’. Finally, she lapsed into giving me simple directions—turn here—left at the light—that sort of thing. I knew she wasn’t happy that we hadn’t learned more. She was also worried because I simply couldn’t assure her that Langdon was going to be really helpful. Perhaps it had become apparent to her what our chances of success were.
Actually, if I was in Langdon’s shoes, I didn’t know how forthcoming I would be. I mean what has he got—a foreign ex-cop turned obituary writer for the last five years and an ex-stripper turned hooker trying to find a solution to an unsolved crime involving the murder of the ex-stripper’s younger sister. It was almost laughable. But for Langdon, helping us was also a “lose—lose” scenario. We could get our hats handed to us by treading where we shouldn’t go. If that happened, the police department would be giving him some hard looks because now they have some more dead bodies—ours. Or we could solve the thing and make him and the major crimes unit of the Tampa City Police Department look like a bunch of incompetent schmucks. Was I missing something here?
Around eight minutes after we left Burger King, we pulled up in front of a shabby low-rise apartment building in an entire neighbourhood of run-down buildings just like it. They might have been all the rage in the mid-forties, but I doubted it. They were depressing enough at this time of night when I could barely see them. I guessed that they would be even worse in the light of day. The magic phrase “housing slum” and all its attached connotations jumped to my mind. A call out to investigate a crime in the infamous Toronto’s Regent Park housing slum was something like going into an Afghanistan battle zone and, if at all possible, earnestly to be avoided. Tampa cops probably felt the same way about this neighbourhood. I sat and said nothing. Reluctantly, I killed the headlights, and I turned off the car’s ignition. Mia just sat there—her head bowed—not moving.
“I’ll walk you to your door okay?” I said after a few quick moments of hesitation.
“Your Jaguar might be gone by the time you get back,” she mumbled followed by a short mirthless laugh.
“I was thinking that myself,” I replied absently as I set the location into my GPS. Then I realized how hurtful my reply had been. I smiled weakly trying to disguise my gaffe.
“You’re right Joe! It’s pretty dismal isn’t it? It’s sometime called Little Beirut and not because it’s an Arab community.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” I bluffed.
“Not in this case,” Mia replied sadly. Then she suddenly brightened; inspiration had struck. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I just run in and pick up some stuff? I can go back to the beach with you and then we can go together to meet Stuart Langdon at lunch. That way you don’t have to drive all the way back over here tomorrow morning. You probably wouldn’t be able to find the place again anyway unless that G.P. thing really works.”
“I guess,” I started to reply uncertainly, “but my place is kind of limited …”
“We’ll think of something,” she replied quickly as she jumped from the car and hurried up the minefield of broken walkway. The cramped doorway to her building was not lit. I lost sight of her almost immediately as she rushed to the front of the worn out apartment building.
I sat there in the dark staring into the void where she had disappeared. I was quietly wondering if I should go in and help her or at least meet her to walk her back to the car. Then, I became distracted thinking about how I could accommodate her in my small rooming house. I recalled my first conversation with the rental agent—no overnight guests he had said. “No problem,” I had replied. “I don’t know anyone here anyway.”
Suddenly, something slammed into the passenger side of my car.