“Well, then I suggest you get to work so as not to spoil my bedroom résumé,” she said, “and if I can help in any way, let me know.”
“That I will do,” he said. “I really appreciate—”
Kay pressed her lips to his and cut off his sentence, her hand unbuttoning his trousers.
“You’ll have to smoke that outside,” Kay said, her body glistening with sweat. “It’s a nasty habit.”
Pilate nodded and struggled out of bed. He put on his underwear and made his way through the French doors, out onto the small balcony of Kay’s apartment bedroom. He lit the cigarette and squinted at the Key West sun.
“John?” Kay said.
“Yeah?” he said, his back to her.
“Who’s Simon?”
“Later,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pilate meandered down the street, heading away from Kay’s small apartment, toward Trevathan’s place.
“The walk of shame. Delightful,” Simon said.
Pilate let the words hang unanswered in the space between his ears. He wandered past a gaggle of tourists, who took no notice of his rumpled clothes, three-day beard growth, and haunted eyes. He shaded the screen on his cell phone to see if there were any messages; Kate had not called or texted, and he felt relieved for that.
“Lucky, lucky, boy,” Simon cooed.
Pilate rounded the corner to Caroline Street and took a seat in Pepe’s Café. He ordered a steak omelet and coffee, deciding that the French toast would have to wait until next time. He skipped reading the newspaper this time and rubbed his eyes irritably until his food arrived.
“No suspects. Can you believe it?” a voice cawed from over his shoulder. “Musta been fifty people in that bar, and nobody saw nothin’.”
Pilate looked over his shoulder. A fit, salt-and-pepper-haired man in his fifties stabbed at a copy of the Citizen with his fork, runny egg yolk dribbling down his scraggly stubble; it looked like he’d been avoiding the razor as long as Pilate had. His companion was a tan, pretty, tired-looking woman at least fifteen years his junior. She shook her head and cupped her coffee mug in both hands.
“That’s pure-dee bullshit, Jordan,” he said. “There’s a cover-up. That’s the Taters Malley Theory on that.”
Despite himself, Pilate laughed—not too loudly, but enough for the man to hear.
“Sir, is something funny?” Malley said, but the smile on his face didn’t quite match his tone.
Pilate shrugged, turned to him, and said, “I’ve just never heard of anyone named Taters, that’s all. Sorry.”
The man’s eyes widened, as if he was thoroughly insulted. He put his fork on the plate of eggs over easy and what was left of a piece of soggy toast. “And that’s funny?” he said.
“Okay, Vernon, that’s enough,” Jordan said, rolling her eyes. She really was very pretty.
“Well, yes,” Pilate said. “The word ‘taters’ is amusing to me. I’m sure many people would.”
The waitress brought Pilate a cup of coffee.
“Thank you.”
“Well, Taters is my nickname, sir,” Malley said, more a statement of fact than a challenge, “and I’m not laughin’.”
“I see,” Pilate said. “Well, I can’t say much. I have a funny name myself.”
“Oh really?” Malley said. “Dick Head or Jack Ass?”
Pilate laughed. “No, Taters—may I call you that?” Pilate didn’t wait for a response. “My name’s John Pilate.”
“Pilot? What, like a boat or plane driver?” Taters asked.
“Nope.”
“Pilate, like the guy who gave Jesus the death penalty?” Jordan said, drinking her coffee without looking at either man. When neither answered, she felt the need to explain herself. “Sunday school.”
“That’s right,” Pilate said, drinking from his mug.
The man who chose to refer to himself as an abbreviated form of a starchy agricultural product regarded Jordan, then Pilate, then his eggs. “Well, you got me there, then, sir.” Taters stood and offered a hand. “Nice to meet you, John Pilate.”
Pilate took the man’s hand; it was solid and callused. “Likewise, Taters Malley.”
“This is Jordan,” Taters said. “Jordan Malley,” he added in a “hands off” tone.
She raised a hand in greeting, glancing at Pilate with the weariness endemic to being the wife of a gregarious man.
“How do?” Pilate said. “So, care to explain why people call you Taters?”
Taters stroked his yolk-stained chin a moment and winked. “’Cause Mama was fresh outta corn.” He laughed heartily and went back to his seat.
Pilate smiled and returned to his coffee. He sipped the brew, then turned back to Taters and Jordan. The pair stood by the table, and Taters was flipping wadded-up bills on the mousetrap.
“You done with your paper?” Pilate asked.
“Have at it,” Taters said, handing it to Pilate. “It’s got a little egg on it.”
“No worries,” Pilate said. “Guess we both got a little on our faces too.”
“Come on, Jordan,” Taters said, disregarding what Pilate thought was a very clever use of an old cliché. “Back to the boat,” he said.
“You have a boat?” Pilate asked.
“Yup. Charter. Fishin’, sightseein’ what have ya,” Taters said. “Jordan don’t go out much, but she runs the office. If you need conveyance across the waters amongst the Keys, Mr. Pilate, you give me a call.” He offered Pilate a wrinkled business card from his wallet.
“Malley Tours?” Pilate read aloud. “I may just call on you.”
“Hope you do, John Pilate,” Taters said, holding the door for Jordan. “Let me be the pilot for a day.”
The pair left Pepe’s Café just as Pilate’s omelet was placed before him. He took a few bites as he scanned the news article about the murder at the Hog’s Snout Saloon. “No leads,” he mumbled to himself.
“Perhaps you should ‘chip in’ on this investigation,” Simon said. Simon’s face smiled on a piece of burnt toast like a tabloid-story Jesus.
Pilate ate the toast, savoring every buttery bite.
Pilate ambled back to Trevathan’s place and met the locksmith. He replaced the broken sash locks and put steel bars on the alley window.
“What do you mean somebody broke in?” Trevathan bellowed down the phone line.
“Well, like I said, I got back from my walk, and the alley window was broken in,” Pilate explained. “They didn’t get anything though, from the looks of it. I think somebody scared them off.”
“Well, shit! As long as you’re okay,” Trevathan said. “Geez, John, I figured Key West would offer you a little nightlife, a little living on the wild side, but not to the extent of you getting robbed.”
“Nightlife it has,” Pilate said. “The getting-robbed part is just one of those things.”
“Well, be careful,” he said. “Talked to Kate?”
“Yeah, but not today,” Pilate said.
Trevathan cleared his throat. “She misses you, I think. God knows why.”
“God knows.” Pilate chuckled mirthlessly, his mind cast back to Kay Righetti’s whispers and moans the night before.
“Well, we’ll all be down there in a couple more weeks,” Trevathan said. “Kara has never seen the ocean. You know that, John?”
“I didn’t,” Pilate said. He felt guilty as hell as it was, and the thought of sweet, innocent Kara was a punch in the gut that he didn’t expect.
“Well, she’ll get her taste of saltwater soon,” Trevathan said. “I’ll get my boat out, and we’ll hit the water, maybe do a little fishing while we’re down there.”
“Sounds good,” Pilate said. “That’s a pretty intense process, right?”
“Fishing?”
“No. Getting your boat out of dry dock.”
“Funny. Anyway, she’s not in dry dock really—just been put away for the winter. But, yeah, it takes a day or two to get her dragged out
and seaworthy again,” Trevathan said. “But no worries. She’ll be making waves soon enough.”
A few moments of chitchat later, Pilate hung up. He dialed Kate’s office number, and it rang right through to voicemail. “Hi, babe,” he said haltingly. “Just, um, wanted to say hey and tell you I miss you. Talk soon.”
“You’re a shit, John.” Simon said.
No argument there, Simon. I guess we’re both rats.
Pilate actually turned to working on the book for the rest of the day. He hated outlines, but it had become a necessary evil if he was to get the book done by the deadline. The new situation with Jack Lindstrom’s suicide plagued him. Do I add an addendum or integrate it into the book from the get-go? Hmm.
He fiddled with his cigarette lighter a moment, resisting the urge to light up. The sun would soon be setting over Mallory Square.
“John, are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Simon said.
“Road trip,” Pilate said.
“Well hello, lover,” Kay said, her voice warm. She was obviously happy to hear from him.
“Hi. How are you?” he said.
“A little sore, but in a good way,” she cooed.
Pilate looked at his cell phone a moment before putting it back to his ear.
“I worked out pretty hard at the gym,” she said. “Oh, wait…John, did you think I meant from—”
“Never mind, Kay,” he said. “Listen, do you know anything about Naples?”
“I assume you mean Florida…and no, not really,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I’m working on some background for the book, and one of the main perpetrators of all the bad shit in Cross has a condo there—or had, I guess I should say. He took his own life a few days ago.”
“Whoa! That’s heavy,” she said.
Her police radio crackled in the background; he remembered that same static and virtually indecipherable chatter from the radio of the now-defrocked Sheriff Scovill back in Cross. “Do you need to get that?” Pilate said.
“What? The radio? No. That’s just the usual chatter.”
“Oh, okay. Anyway, he killed himself, and I was curious about the kind of place he lived in. It was a bay-front condo, on a canal. That’s about all I know.”
“You want me to ask around a bit?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t mean…well, I don’t want you to do anything you’d be uncomfortable with, so—”
“John, I can see what I can find out about what happened, though my powers as a Key West patrol officer are pretty insignificant when it comes to getting info on investigations outside our jurisdiction.”
“I understand. Of course. I was just hoping you might know a little more about it than a guy from the middle-of-nowhere,” he said.
“Let me ask around,” Kay said. “Now, tell me about this guy.”
Pilate was in the middle of writing a blow-by-blow description of his near-fatal shootout with Cross Township’s crooked mayor when Kay called back.
“John?”
“Hi, Kay. You got something for me?”
“Sure do. Turns out the guy lived in a fashionable development called Barabbas Colony Bay,” Kay said, reading off a notepad. “Place costs a pretty penny, the bay-front version of a pricey gated community. You can either get in through the front gate or at the canal dock. Each condo has dock access.”
“Okay. So it was a fancy place to live, with plenty of privacy,” he said.
“Yup,” she said. “And it looks like he probably didn’t do the property values any favors.”
“Yeah,” Pilate said.
“So this guy was the big cheese, the one behind all this mess you were in? I thought the mayor you shot was the problem?”
“Well, you’re right,” Pilate said, sighing. “Lindstrom was up to no good, but I think he was more of a con artist, an opportunist, than a criminal mastermind. Of course, I’m still trying to figure that out.”
“Well, the condo indicates he had money,” Kay said.
“So, how long will it be a crime scene, do you suppose?”
“Huh? You mean how long will it be off limits?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Probably not long,” she said. “They’ll conduct an investigation, maybe do an autopsy, then leave it to the next of kin to clean up the mess. They can hire somebody who specializes in that kind of thing.”
“So not long?”
“Right,” she said, her radio crackling again. “Why? Is it important to the book?”
“Well, it would help if I could get a feel for the place,” Pilate said.
“You’d need the family’s permission for that, and only after the PD and ME are done,” Kay said. “For now, don’t go traipsing around up there, John. It’ll just be a waste of time.”
“Thanks, Kay,” he said. “So they do autopsies on suicides?”
“In cases like this, where there might be some questions, usually,” she said. “They’ll try to determine the direction of the wound, distance from muzzle to target, and so on. Specimens are also obtained during the autopsy for drug and alcohol testing. It’s all pretty routine stuff. But if it looks pretty cut-and-dry at the scene, they may sign off without one.”
“Any way I can get my hands or eyes on a copy of that autopsy report if they do one?”
“Not right away,” she said. “Maybe a few weeks from now. You can apply with the county ME. You won’t get any photos without a court order, and I doubt your book will qualify as a good enough reason.”
Pilate’s stomach lurched. “I’m not interested in photos—just curious about the whole thing.”
“Well, that’s all I have for now,” she said. “If you need that autopsy report, you should call the medical examiner up there and put in a request now.”
“Thanks, Kay.”
“So,” she said, “what are you up to tomorrow night? Or are you sore too?”
“Marlene, does Rick’s boat go to Naples?” he asked over the heads of bar patrons at Sloppy Joe’s.
Marlene shouted over the din, “Sometimes Naples or Fort Myers, but he likes to keep closer to home.” She slid drinks on the pass for the servers. “Sometimes heads out near the Marquesas, but not very close—too shallow. Why?”
“I’d like to get up to Naples, and I figured it might be easier and more relaxing to take a boat instead of hassling with a rental car and driving.” Not to mention less of a paper trail.
She nodded, drawing a pitcher of beer. “Yeah, it’s a boring drive except for the part through the Everglades,” she said. “Well, I don’t think he’s going anytime soon. He’d need to pack the boat with tourists to make it worth his while. The ferry trade gobbles up most of that business, but I can still ask for you.”
“Okay,” Pilate said. “I’ll check back with you tomorrow. You on?”
She shook her head, simultaneously taking another drink order. “Doing Rick’s booze cruise in about half an hour. We catch the sunset around Mallory. I’m off tomorrow, but I’ll be back the day after that.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll check back with you then,” he said. “Thanks.”
“No problem…and hey, like I said, that cruise leaves in a half-hour if you want to go along,” she said, raising an inviting eyebrow, “over on Duval at the dock.”
He nodded, smiled, and left. On the way out, he caught a glimpse of Ernest Hemingway, drink in hand, on the wall mural.
“Mr., it’s a little late to plan a trip to Naples,” Taters Malley said from the rear deck of his old but capable-looking wood-hulled boat, the TenFortyEZ.
“Yeah, I know,” Pilate said. “Pretty boat you got there.”
“Thanks,” Malley said. “She’s an old Connie.”
“I see that.” Pilate nodded, trying to pretend he had reasonable knowledge about boats.
“Chris-Craft Constellation. Thirty-eight footer. Built around 1960. Wood hull. Still have the original teak decks, ‘cept for some recent repairs astern. Had to take out my fishin’ chair
s for a bit to reupholster ‘em. Should be back in soon though,” he said, indicating the spot with his tan arm. He pointed aft. “Twin Chrysler V8s. Sleeps four comfortably, six a little uncomfortably,” he said, chortling.
“What do you usually do on your charters?”
“Fishing, sightseeing, snorkeling, diving,” he said, putting his foot up on the deck rail. “Just a little of the booze cruise shit, but that don’t matter anyway, though, ‘cause the big cats get most of that business anymore. My Connie’s too small to make any real money on that kind of party. Can’t say as though I miss it anyway though. Got a little sick of cleaning puke off my nice decks. Good riddance, far as I’m concerned.”
“TenFortyEZ, huh?” Pilate said, looking at the blue script on the brown wooden stern.
“Yep.” Malley laughed. “I was a CPA for a long time—hated every damn minute of that number-crunching shit. As my business grew—in the Naples area, incidentally—I bought this boat, and remodeling her became a hobby. I finally got sick of counting beans and piles of paperwork, sold my business, and ran off with my receptionist.” The tan crow’s feet around his eyes crinkled. He was a good-looking guy under all that sun- and wind-battered skin, beard, and bluster.
“Every man’s dream at one point or another,” Pilate said.
“Aye. That it is. That it is,” Malley said, his smile fading. He scratched absently at his shoulder for a moment. “My wife is actually deceased, by the way. She helped me build the business, and frankly, I didn’t want to do it without her anymore. Cancer—a real goddamn wake-up call, that shit. Yessirree. Woke up the day after the funeral and decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life crunching numbers for nobody.” He looked out on the harbor, then turned back to Pilate, winked, and said, “But I like to say I ran off with the hottie working the phones anyway.”
“Of course. So,” Pilate said, folding his arms, “what about tomorrow? Think you could you take me up to Naples?”
Malley looked around at the dozens of boats on the dock. “Just you?”
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