Ray Yates tried to breathe. The air smelled like the inside of a fish and there seemed to be big splinters underneath his ribs. But he had somehow moved past fear, fallen through the bottom of it into some horrid but clear place that was like already being dead. "You're gonna kill, Mr. Ponte," he said, in a voice grown weirdly even, weirdly certain. "You kill me, you get nothing. You kill him-"
The debtor's words were swallowed up in a watery mayhem. At a nod from Charlie Ponte, Sal had thrown the second fish into the tank. The hammerhead rocketed up to meet it, its appalling face came so close to Ray Yates's that he could see the bilious color of its yellow eye, the bent, in-sloping arrowheads of its vile teeth, could hear the sickening crush and grinding of its jaws. A wave flew up around the thrusting shark, it arced and billowed like a wake thrown off a boat. It drenched Ray Yates as the shark plunged downward, and by the time the gambler could see and hear again, his tormentors were gone and he was left to scramble down from his precarious perch alone.
32
Key West is justly famous for its sunsets, but most people do not realize that its moonrises are at certain seasons equally sublime. In summer, the waxing moon migrates toward the southern sky. When full, it emerges powdery salmon from the flat and open waters of the Florida Straits. Those waters, in the humid, windless dusks of June, take on an unearthly texture, part mirror, part soup, and dully gleam like brushed aluminum. If one is very lucky, one can sometimes see the very first flash of light as it peeks above the tabletop horizon. The mottled moon takes a long time to climb out of the ocean, and once it has, its color changes, lightens every moment, like a big wet yellow dog as it shakes itself and dries.
Saturday the twelfth was the full-moon evening, and Augie Silver, feeling spry and restless, took it in his head that he wanted to go to see it. "Come on," he said to Reuben an hour or so before the great event. "We'll throw an easel in the car. I'll sketch awhile, and who knows-it might be one of life's great moonrises."
They were in the backyard. Augie had been reading and Reuben was picking up the sticky brown pods that fell from the poinciana tree. "I think maybe it is cloudy," the housekeeper said. But it wasn't cloudy. It was perfectly clear, albeit with the electric shimmer of a summer haze.
Augie looked at him. "You don't want to go?"
This was difficult for Reuben to answer. He wanted to do whatever Augie liked. But his mission was to keep the painter safe. Then again it was hard to protect someone if he could not know he needed to be protected. Nervously, the young man wiped his hands on his apron. "We can go. Only-"
"Only what?"
"Only, Nina-"
"It's late night at the gallery. We'll be back way before her. Maybe we'll bring home stone crab for dinner."
So Reuben loaded the old Saab. He laid Augie's easel and pad across the back seat. He put in a cooler of mineral water in case Augie got thirsty, some fruit in case he got hungry. He put in a jacket, though a jacket was unthinkable in the unyielding mugginess. He noticed nothing unusual on Olivia Street. Dogs lolled next to car tires. Bicycles went past. Here and there clean undented convertibles were parked, their frivolous colors, tinted glass, and lack of rust marking them as rentals. The palms were still and limp, even the Mother-in-law tree was silent.
It was seven-thirty when they set out, Reuben driving, slowly. The light was soft, the roads were quiet. What traffic there was, was mainly heading the other way-downtown, west, toward the gaudier, commoner spectacle of sunset. On White Street, old Cubans sat on mesh chairs in front of empty stores and slid dominoes across the cardboard boxes that served as make-shift tables. On Atlantic Boulevard the pink and aqua condos stood like blocks of giant candy. Australian pines lined the wetlands, looking dejected and enduring, like people who are always moaning and complaining yet will outlive all their friends. The air smelled of frangipani.
"You know," said Augie, "sometimes I forget how much I love this town."
"Is a nice town," Reuben said, without taking his eyes from the road. He leaned slightly forward over the steering wheel. He regarded driving as a grave adventure that required all his concentration. He took no notice of the turquoise convertible with tinted glass that stayed a steady hundred yards behind him, moving at a sightseer's pace with its top up.
"It's very… specialized," Augie said. He considered this as they turned onto A1A. The road was twenty feet from the Atlantic Ocean and maybe eighteen inches above it. "There are towns, you know, for making money. Towns to start a career. Towns to go to college. Towns to raise a family. Key West is no damn good for any of that. Key West is to feel good and be happy. That's all. Don'tcha think?"
"Si, yes," said Reuben absently, his attention riveted to the pavement. "Augie, where you like me to stop?"
"Over past the airport," Augie said. "Where the island curves around. You get the biggest sweep of water there."
Reuben put his blinker on a long time in advance and started driving even slower. Alongside A1A-a continuation of it, really-there is a broad concrete promenade that in certain places fronts the beach and in others ends directly at the seawall. This promenade is used by bicyclists and joggers, prostitutes both male and female. Windsurfers sometimes park their vans there, fishermen sometimes leave their pickup trucks along it and launch their dinghies over the rampart. At the spot Reuben finally edged off the road, there was no sand, the green water came right up to the barricaded island. Beyond the thigh-high wall, scattered mangroves perched atop their tangled cones of roots, stilts and egrets gawked around for food.
"Good," said Augie as Reuben turned off the Saab's ignition and the turquoise car slid slowly, silently past them and continued north. "This is good."
Reuben sighed with relief that the drive was over. Then he clambered out and reached into the back for Augie's easel. The painter, still brittle and unaccustomed to sudden movements, took a moment to unfold himself from the car. His knees were stiff beneath the ever-present khaki shorts, his shoulders felt tight inside the faded purple shirt. He stood with one hand on the Saab's warm roof and looked around. In the west, the sun was an orange ball that had lost its fire and dangled just above the low shrubs of the salt marsh; the sky above it was streaky green. In the east it was a different sky, satiny, already dim and sweetly modest, as if a shy bride was turning off the lights before she would receive the moon.
Augie meandered. That's what he always did, it was some fundamental part of his looking at the world, some basic ritual of settling in. He wandered to the seawall, he wandered to the edge of the road. He wandered past the car, backtracked, then did a lazy pirouette and sauntered off again. Reuben zigged and zagged behind him, the easel on his shoulder. Finally the painter found the place that felt right to his feet and looked right to his eyes. He put his hands in his pockets and sniffed the air; it had the good mud smell of limestone and the tang of sun-baked shells.
The pad and easel appeared in front of him and the artist started to draw. He sketched a feeding egret, captured the unlikely splayed angle of its stick-figure legs and the lightness of the feathered crest raked back from its head. He caught the shrewdness of the lidless eye and the strength in the darting neck that could unravel and strike as fast as any snake.
Reuben moved a respectful twenty feet away and watched. He was in awe of Augie working, not just the skill but the mysterious boldness it took to draw a line, the confidence and the belief that were needed to leave a mark. Reuben knew that he himself would never have such boldness. He liked to make small changes in things that already existed: arranging flowers, plumping pillows, setting dishes perfectly on a table; he made things more beautiful and it pleased him. But to start from nothing…
"Reuben, look," said Augie, pulling the young man out of his thoughts. He gestured quickly toward the west, abandoned by the sun, then made a sweep across the flatly glowing water to the east. "Should be any minute now."
The painter smiled, excited, and Reuben was happy for him and happy for himself, happy to have a friend who, even though his ha
ir was white, even though he was not young, was excited at the thought of seeing moonrise.
They watched, scanning the horizon for a telltale gleam. On the seafront promenade, l ife streamed by around them. A jogger pushing a stroller ran past Augie's easel. A knot of screaming mopeds zipped by on the curbless shoulder of A1A.
Then Reuben noticed a turquoise car driving slowly toward them on the broad walkway. In Key West, a town of hazy boundaries, where storms confused the ocean with the land, where friendships sometimes crossed over into hatreds, where sidewalks slipped without a curbstone into roadways, it was not unusual to see a car among the joggers. Everyone wanted front row on the sea, and Reuben's only fear was that the vehicle, now perhaps a hundred yards away, would intrude on Augie's moonrise.
Reuben didn't want to let that happen, and imagined that by vigilance he could prevent it. He watched the car and left the blank and promising horizon to his friend. The painter, rapt, gazed toward the east. The air was dead still and the temperature of skin; a pair of ibis flew down and landed with a skipping splash. The tires of the turquoise car made a sudden squeal just at the instant that a blood-red cuticle of moon poked through its dark envelope of ocean. Augie turned and pointed, his face ecstatic, as the murderous vehicle hurtled toward him. Reuben, low, lithe, afraid of nothing, threw himself across the car's trajectory. His shoulder caught Augie in the solar plexus and the two men flew over the seawall and into the mangroves as the easel was reduced to matchsticks and the indifferent moon threw red beams that skipped across the water and tracked the turquoise convertible in its escape.
Part Four
33
"He saved my life," Augie Silver softly said to Nina.
It was around 10 p.m. Reuben, bruised and soaking wet, had gone home. The painter was propped on pillows in his bed. It had taken him a long time to get his breath back as he lay stunned among the mangroves and the fleeing birds, and now he was unpleasantly aware of the weight of his lungs; they heaved in his chest like sacs of lukewarm gelatin. His arms ached, his leg muscles twitched in their loose wrappers of empty skin. His wife sat next to him and stroked his dry and feverish forehead.
"Damn drunk drivers," she muttered.
Augie briefly closed his eyes, swallowed, opened them again. "Nina," he said. She waited for him to continue, and as she waited she glanced toward the window. As on the evening Augie had come back to her, the thin curtain was blanched by moonlight and billowed softly on an unfelt breeze. He took her hand. "Nina, listen. I don't think it was a drunk. And I don't think it was an accident."
The former widow pushed out breath as though to speak but found she had no words. Augie paused, then with great effort lifted himself onto his elbows.
"I didn't want to say anything," he went on. "I wasn't sure. I didn't want to scare you. But ever since Fred, that tart, now this business with the auction…" He looked at Nina's face, her wide-set slate-gray eyes, and understood that no more needed saying. "You knew?"
"I suspected. I didn't want you to worry. Manny Rucker said-"
"Aren't doctors fabulous?" Augie interrupted. "They prescribe no stress and think life is gonna obey their orders."
He managed a parched smile that his wife could not return.
"I went to the police the day Fred died," she said. The words, long overdue, spilled out now. "They thought I was crazy. They told me to call the ASPCA. Maybe now they'll believe-"
"Believe what? That someone tried to run me over with a turquoise convertible? Half the cars in town are turquoise convertibles. Rented and identical."
"At least they'll know you're in danger."
Augie tossed his head on the pillow. "So what will they do? Put a patrolman at the door? Keep me under house arrest for my own protection? For how long? There's only so much-"
"Augie," said Nina, and there was a letting-go in her voice, a half-groan like muted thunder very far away. "I've been so afraid. I've been so afraid for so long now."
She leaned against him and he held her. The only comfort he could offer was the attempt at comfort, and in giving it he could almost forget that he was terrified as well. But then another thought occurred to him. He pictured Reuben, odd, shy, swishy Reuben, streaking across the path of the speeding car, his own young body perhaps three feet from its fender as it throttled toward them. "And Reuben? Reuben knew?"
"He knows," said Nina. "I had to tell him."
Augie slowly shook his heavy head. "Reuben is amazing."
Joe Mulvane was a man who knew how to fill a doorway. His broad shoulders in their out-of-place suit jacket nearly brushed against both sides of the frame, his thick thighs prevented any light from slicing in between his legs, and his mordant posture made it clear that he did not appreciate being called with a paranoid tale at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning and asked to pay a mercy visit.
Nina Silver greeted him, looking prim, composed, not obviously hysterical. She led him in and offered him coffee, which mollified him somewhat. He leaned against the kitchen counter as she poured him a mug. He jerked a thumb toward the living-room walls. "These your husband's paintings?"
Nina nodded, then braced herself. People always felt obliged to make some comment. It was a nuisance.
"They're big," said Mulvane.
"Yes," said Nina Silver. She handed him his coffee, led him through the living room and out the French doors to the pool.
Augie was sitting there, an untouched slice of melon and a plate of mango muffins set in front of him. His color was bad, a yellowish gray, and his skin hurt, his body throbbed like a headache all over. "Darling," said his wife, "this is Sergeant Joe Mulvane."
The painter didn't rise, just held out a hand. "Hi,
Joe," he said. "Augie." He said it with the same sort of utterly disarming informality that had allowed him to sit on Nina Alonzo's office desk the first time they had met. People should rest when their feet were tired. They should call each other by easy names. Why not? Mulvane seemed to understand. He slipped off his jacket and took a chair without waiting to be offered one. He drank his coffee.
"Have a muffin, Joe," said Augie, offering the plate. "I'm not hungry."
Mulvane, a Bostonian, knew from muffins, although they didn't have mango way up there. He broke off a piece and appraised its texture.
"Joe, listen," Augie went on. "I'm sure my wife was right to call you, but I can't help feeling we're wasting your time. There's so little to go on. I didn't see the driver or if he was alone. I didn't see a license plate. Neither did Reuben."
Mulvane swallowed a piece of muffin, looked quickly for a napkin, then discreetly licked his fingers. "But both of you-you and Reuben, I mean-are sure it was intentional?"
"The guy sneaked within thirty yards of me and floored it."
"And it was one of those turquoise ragtops?" the detective asked.
"Spanking clean," said Augie.
'That's a renter," said Mulvane. He blinked his sandy eyelashes, looked around the Silvers' yard. The swimming pool and plantings reminded him how perilously enviable the well-to-do Key West life could be. "And you're not aware of any enemies?"
Augie shook his head.
The detective thought back to his first conversation with Nina. "But you have a lotta friends," he said.
Augie looked down, his color went a shade more sallow, his deep blue lighthouse eyes went dim. "Yes," he said, "I do. And in some crazy way, that's what bothers me more than anything. That it could be a friend."
Mulvane dove into his coffee. He was a homicide cop; hurt feelings did not come very near the top of his list of human tragedies. Yet there was something in Augie's pain that got to him. An intimate betrayal was itself a kind of murder. "Well, let's not assume-"
Nina cut him off, following her own insistent train of thought. "What else could it be? The paintings. The prices."
The artist recoiled at the words but could not deny them. Murder, after all, generally came with a motive.
The cop had a piece of muffin in his hand
and realized suddenly that he had lost his appetite. He put it back on the plate. "Maybe you should call the auction off," he suggested.
"Impossible," Augie said. He wore a look Nina was not sure she had ever seen in him before, a look not exactly of helplessness but of sour despairing. 'There's this huge machinery already cranked up. Sotheby's. Advertising. Sellers. Buyers. My agent."
"Agent?" said Mulvane. "What's he do?"
"She," said Augie. "Shows the work. Publicizes. Coordinates."
"Takes a cut?"
"Of course."
"She's in New York, this agent?"
"Based there," Augie said. "She was here a couple of days ago."
Seemingly from nowhere Mulvane produced a small and crumpled notebook and a cheap and capless pen. "What's her name?"
Augie squirmed in the heightening sun as though he himself had suddenly come under suspicion. "Joe, really-"
"Claire Steiger," Nina said. "S-t-e-i-g-e-r. She was here with her husband, Christopher Cunningham. Goes by Kip. They were staying at the Flagler House."
"Did they rent a car?" the detective asked, the butt of his pen against his freckled lower lip.
Nina looked at Augie. Augie shrugged. Neither had noticed how their visitors arrived.
"When did they leave town?"
Augie shrugged again. 'They might still be here, for all I know."
Mulvane took a last pull of his lukewarm coffee, held the ear of the mug with the pen and pad still twined between his fingers. Then he slid his chair back and got up.
"Sergeant," said Nina, rising with him and trying to keep her tone free of panic, "are you going to help us?"
Mulvane made an involuntary sound that was halfway between a sigh and a growl, the gruff and weary complaint of one who always seemed to end up caring more than he wanted to and doing more than he told himself was worth it. "Officially, no," he said. "We have two open murders and a suspicious suicide on the books. I go to the chief, he's gonna tell me no crime has been committed, leave it alone. I'll do what I can. But quietly."
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