Gumbo Limbo

by Tom Corcoran

  Rain makes for long days in Key West. Streets flood, sidewalks crumble, electric power becomes intermittent. Pervasive humidity promotes mildew, and mildew spreads across exposed surfaces like creeping weed. Craziness flourishes, tropical cabin fever sets in. After three days of no sunlight, normal people tended to join the island’s whacko majority. The longer the spate of inclemency, the larger the yachts in divorce lawyers’ dreams.

  Another lightning flash. Sharp thunder banged the windowpanes, echoed off the hardwood floor. So much for quiet.

  The wall clock said six-forty. Cuba called: I scooped Bustelo and toggled the machine that ruled my mornings. I felt no hangover pain, though after rum I deserved both varieties: sharp neck tightness and deep cranial ache. No pain, but a certain fog. I hoped my mental haze would burn off by noon. I didn’t need a full day of dumbness.

  For damn sure I didn’t need to hear my brass doorbell. Two minutes into the day, too early for business. Jesse Spence stuck his head past the screen door. He looked like he hadn’t slept. He looked like he’d just witnessed a car wreck, or participated in one.

  “Coffee?” I waved him in.

  “I got a problem.”

  “I photographed that yesterday.”

  He stepped inside and sank into the closest chair. “My place was creeped by somebody good. A pro.”

  I already knew that. “Well, the alarm thing …”

  “All that crash boom bang was a diversion to cover spook shit. No fucking way it was teenybopper vandalism. The bastards went into sealed boxes on my closet shelves, through all my old files. They retaped it all, so I wouldn’t notice what they’d done. I can’t even tell if anything’s missing.” Spence stuck out his leg so he could reach into a front pocket. He slid out a Ziploc bag. It held a small metallic object. “Here’s the frosting. From the phone.”

  A miniature listening device. I had used Spence’s phone to call home for my messages. I’d also called Duffy Lee Hall to schedule the film drop-off. “You sure you want to keep this under your hat? Who’s to say these pros won’t be back for a second helping?”

  “Right now, it needs to stay close to home.”

  “So we can have an ingrown investigation …”

  “So I can think about this a day or two. Make some calls.”

  I slowly poured two cups. “You mind if I ask a couple of questions about the old days?”

  Spence averted his eyes. “That could get off-limits real quick.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s ancient history.”

  “Best forgotten. For twenty years I’ve specialized in forgetful.”

  I handed Spence a mug and sat opposite him. “Listen to yourself, man. Your house just got tossed. Somebody’s trying to slap your memory.”

  His mouth formed a tight slit. His eyes lost focus as he juggled those years of secrets, shifted them to the present, readjusted his tolerance for instant profits and worldly adventure.

  I gave it a shot: “You privy to an old investment partnership?”

  His trancelike expression remained. “I never thought your Chicago friend would blab. I talked to him last week. Everything was cool. He was going to meet me in the restaurant yesterday. I gotta tell you, I got the heebie-jeebies when you showed instead of him.”

  Bingo. Zack’s important lunch, a meeting with Spence.

  “You didn’t get the heebie-jeebs when that player walked in, the one I asked you about?”

  Jesse turned and looked me in the eye. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  “This sudden interest … What’s in it for you?”

  I shook my head. “Zack didn’t blab. He called me from Sloppy’s yesterday morning. He said three things. He asked me to join him there. He had a lunch date at Mangoes. And he wanted me to help him celebrate something, but he didn’t say what. By the time I got to Sloppy’s, he’d disappeared. I don’t know if he meant to vanish, or if somebody spooked him, or somebody forced him into something.”

  “How do you know about this stuff from the past?”

  “Adding two and two. A lady who helped him invest that money found me last night at Louie’s. She’s looking, too. Worried because she can’t find him. She offered a sketchy outline of the arrangement, but no names. She wouldn’t let loose any details.”

  Spence looked stunned. He wise-toned: “Ethics are important.”

  “Hey, the partnership’s not my concern. I’ve got no opinion, other than I don’t want my friend in a jam. But this woman thinks something’s gone weird. She thinks somebody’s trying to toss a wrench in the works.”

  I shut up and let Spence bat the facts around. I hoped he’d weigh the false safety of silence against the concept of teamwork.

  Jesse stirred. “I’ve been patient so many fucking years … Now it turns into cowboys and Indians.” He looked up. “So you came into Mangoes looking for Cahill?”

  I nodded, then added conjecture to prime the pump. “The person from back then that I associate with you is Buzz Burch. How much does he stand to get out of this?”

  “We were fraternity brothers at the University of Georgia. We shared a farmhouse outside Athens. The Watergate era. Party central. Moonshine and LSD and the Allman Brothers. We worshiped the fucking Allman Brothers.”

  “Where’s Burch these days?”

  “Behind bars at Marianna, up near Tallahassee, last I heard. They’ve bounced him around the system. Talladega; someplace in Kentucky; another time in Missouri. The last fifteen years, he’s traveled more than I have, and I’m a free man. He’s due out sometime in the next couple of weeks.”

  “Long time to spend at camp.”

  “They threw him the whole menu. Started out, he paid off a DEA boy in West Palm to tip him when the net was about to fall. He and the wife—I don’t know if you knew Katie—and their little daughter were living in a beach house up in St. Augustine. He got the warning call and chartered a Lear. Next thing you know he’s drinking Perrier Jout on a beach in Barbados. Fucker left so quick he forgot a shoe box of money in his kitchen cabinet. A quarter million. The feds had their own beach party on that lump. They reported it as sixty-five thousand.”

  “A lot of money to kiss off because it slipped your mind.”

  “This doesn’t blow up in our faces, he oughta be okay.”

  I recalled two times when Buzzy Burch had done me favors. I’d accepted a short-notice photo job in the late seventies, a series of brochure shots for a sailboat manufacturer in Port Orange, south of Daytona Beach. I’d chartered a plane to Miami so I could catch a connecting flight to Daytona. My pilot had failed to show. I learned later that he’d been drunk for two days in the Boca Chica Bar. I was grateful for his having missed our appointment. Burch had spotted me waiting at Flying Fish Aviation and asked why I was hanging out at the flight facility. He offered me a ride. He was being picked up and taken to Charleston for a business meeting.

  Three hours later the twin Beechcraft dropped me in Daytona. The pilot had even called ahead to arrange my rental car. I hadn’t inquired about the nature of Burch’s meeting. I also chose not to share the Marley-sized spliff that he’d sucked down during the flight; I recalled that the stereo had blasted the Marshall Tucker Band, over and over again, from takeoff to landing. Two weeks later I bought Buzzy a couple beers in the Full Moon Saloon, and he declared us even, debt repaid.

  The other favor, perhaps the same year, followed my failing to buy tickets for a Mose Allison concert at the Harbor Docks. They’d gone on sale when I was out of town and had sold out in a day. For weeks beforehand, I’d counted on making the concert. Somehow Burch had found me two front-row seats.

  “Why didn’t he stay in Barbados?” I said.

  “The feds were pissed that they’d missed him. They sicced Interpol on his butt. He got word of that, too, and he skipped around the islands, partying like a zombie on a mission. He sent the wife and kid back to the States. The cops finally knocked on his hotel room door in Singapore. They
confiscated four million in bank-deposit slips from his suitcase, kept him in some shithole prison for a year before the extradition got straightened out.”

  “A blaze of glory. Where’s the family these days?”

  “Katie’s always stayed nearby, wherever they sent him. She rents a house, gets a job, does all this networking with other jailhouse widows. Gotta give her credit. All these years, she’s waited for him. I think Samantha’s in college, up in Gainesville, last I—”

  The phone rang. I’d forgotten about Duffy Lee Hall. I got it on the second ring. Chicken Neck Liska, pumped: “Yesterday, in my office, you asked did a name cross my desk.”

  “You blew me off. Abe Lincoln wouldn’t mean squat.”

  “My one-liners come back and bite me in the ass. What was that name?”

  I flashed on telling something awful to Claire Cahill. “Another body?”

  “Not today.” A two-beat pause. “Not yet, at least.”

  I couldn’t think of a way to dodge. I said Zack’s full name. Spence’s head snapped around, but he didn’t look directly at me.

  “How you know him?” said Liska. “Something pertains to your sideline?”

  “He’s an old Navy chum. We go back twenty-five years. Why do you ask?”

  “None of your business. You’re a picture taker … Wait a sec …” He put me on hold.

  Why none of my business? At least Liska hadn’t asked me to name next of kin. Spence stood, walked slowly to the porch without looking at me.

  Liska came back on. “Unless you missed your darkroom ace … You there?”

  “Barely.”

  “We’re screwed on that crime-scene film. A fire on Simonton last night, in the pharmacy. My guess, Duffy Hall’s out of business.”

  “I missed him. The film’s still here at the house.”

  “When you fuck up, bubba, your timing’s perfect. Take it to Publix at Searstown. Ask for Marshall Hoff, the manager. Tell him it’s police work, and tell him I sent you. Then stand there while they run it. Don’t let that friggin’ film out of your sight.”

  I’ve always preferred pressing the shutter button to working a darkroom. I’ve never pretended to have the patience. But it can take years to build rapport with a dependable darkroom technician. Turning photos into quality negatives and decent prints takes teamwork, mutual respect, expertise, and a certain amount of telepathy. If Duffy Lee Hall was out of business, my job had just become a huge pain.

  Two sucker punches in sixty seconds. Good goddamned morning.

  Third problem. The lightning had become more intense. Rubber tires are supposed to provide insulation for vehicles, but I’ve never felt compelled to prove the concept aboard a Kawasaki. Spence stuck his head back in the door. “You drive over?” I said.

  “You were talking to who?”

  “Detective Liska at the city. I asked him yesterday—after I left your bar—if he’d seen Cahill’s name come across his desk. He blew me off.”

  “And now he’s suddenly interested?”

  “He wouldn’t say why.”

  “Lemme ask once more.” Spence’s voice was firm, but he grinned slowly as if to imply that he wouldn’t be angry if I admitted to a scheme. “No bullshit, now. What’s in it for you?”

  “Zip,” I said, “for the same reason I didn’t climb aboard a pot-smuggling sailboat twenty years ago. The old cliché, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ I couldn’t have functioned in prison. Not so much for being inside, but the mental confinement …” It spooked me even to consider the risk. “Back then I was just like I am now. Not rich, but comfortable. Happy making money snapping pictures.”

  Jesse scowled, but accepted my explanation, for the moment. I switched off the coffee machine and palmed the canisters that held the crime-scene film and the film I’d shot at Spence’s place. We hustled into the chill rain.

  I squeezed myself into the Sunbird’s passenger-side seat and immediately wished that I’d risked riding the cycle, or called a taxi. It was obvious that the convertible top had been left down day and night, in all weather, for years. Mold had captured the interior, had slimed every surface. The carpet reeked of rot, wet dogs, and cat spray. The vinyl upholstery exuded sour smells of age. The underside of the cloth top dripped sticky cobwebs, heavy spores, dead leaves. The chromed plastic glove-box insignia had cracked and pitted.

  The dank surroundings matched Spence’s mood. “This Pontiac doesn’t like rainy weather,” he said.

  “Me, too.” But beggars can’t be choosers. I tried to ignore the funk and froze in place, fearing that quick movements or a sneeze might unleash a fog of biological bullets.

  Jesse drove to Eaton under a spatter of raindrops, then turned toward North Roosevelt. Low clouds scraped the tops of taller trees. A frigate bird led us across the Garrison Bight bridge, above the charter-boat docks. A bad day for the fishing business. Determined joggers in Day-Glo shorts fought the wind that had put everything in motion: hair, clothing, fronds, skittering trash and leaves, torn awnings, tree limbs, telltales in sailboat riggings. Mangrove shrubs under the U.S. 1 bridges tossed in whipping gusts. A day to rename the island “Five Thousand Flags Over Marl.” Along the monotonous fast-food gauntlet: black-and-red Texaco flags, diver-down and hemp flags, pirate and POW/MIA flags, cigarette banners, Florida and Conch Republic flags, yellow Formula Shell flags, American flags around a used-car lot, “ATM Inside,” and “Abierto” flags, Canadian, Brazilian, German, and British flags that pandered blatantly to tourists.

  “Can I ask how Zack got hooked up with your friends?”

  Spence slowed behind a smoky moped. “I’ll have to think about that for a while. I’m not trying to be evasive. I’m not sure I remember.”

  I wanted Spence to exercise his memory without pressure. I switched directions. “Who else was in on this?”

  He winced.

  “Look, I’ll ask questions all over town until I find Zack. I’m going to ask about Buzz Burch’s partners. You tell me names right now, my inquiries stay low-key.”

  Spence understood. “You remember a guy from Virginia named Ernie Makksy? Nicknamed Tazzy Gucci?”

  “Vaguely.” I remembered the name, and that the man had been addicted to fancy shoes. I recalled someone bitching about him late at night in a bar years ago, complaining that Makksy had worn hard-soled loafers aboard a sailboat, that the shoes had scarred the yacht’s teak decks. He’d also had a reputation for hanging out in bars beyond the ciry’s four A.M. dosing time, handing out cocaine after the doors had been locked, hosting private parties, and taking his pick of the women drawn by free drugs. My memory couldn’t bring up Tazzy Gucci’s face.

  “You remember Cool Auguie?”

  “Sure.” A barfly and skirt chaser of the first order, Scotty “Cool” Auguie was known in the seventies for his sense of adventure, especially on boats, and his upbeat nature. He’d never been able to shake his college nickname. I recalled once hearing a group of women comparing notes on his stamina, his fascination with salad oil during sex. He’d once single-handed a sailboat across the Atlantic so he could collect a sizable delivery fee and not have to split it with a crew.

  I’d always suspected that Buzz Burch had moved some marijuana into the country. It was easy to believe that Tazzy Gucci had played the game, too. But I’d never known about Scotty Auguie. It made sense, in retrospect, but he’d never been flamboyant, never broadcast his wealth, never acted the pirate.

  The storm had worn itself out. The rain let up slightly. Palms still tossed in the Blockbuster parking lot. Smells of Pizza Hut mixed with the Sunbird’s musty stench. Though my mind was wandering in the past, something across the street caught my eye: Abby Womack, inside a Plexiglas bus-stop shelter in front of the Howard Johnson Motel, straddling my bike in tight bicycle pants, talking into a cellular phone. Thigh and bun with a dancer’s tone. Managing her accounts from my two-wheeler, I assumed. The dampness patterns in her shirt suggested perspiration as well as having been
caught in the rain.

  Zack, how could you?

  Zack, how could you resist?

  I couldn’t ask Spence to stop. We were wedged into the far right-hand lane. Traffic in both directions was bumper-tobumper, pushing forty. She hadn’t told me where she was staying. I didn’t know how to reach her.

  Jesse parked fifty yards from the grocery’s door. At nine A.M., the smell of fried chicken hung heavy in the damp air of the parking lot. We fought our way up the access ramp, then inside to the photo-processing counter. Supermarkets have become the three-ring circus of the Modern Age, performers jockeying their carts for position as if each aisle were its own stock-car race, each purchase decision a high-wire act. The types were universal: blue-haired women terrorizing other blue-haired women with overfilled buggies; straggling husbands lost in a maze of soaps and cereals; toddlers whining for candies; befuddled men looking for short lines to check out their cold cuts and razor blades.

  I told Marshall Hoff exactly what Liska had ordered. Hoff was all business. He’d personally supervise the film. Spence and I stood aside to escape the hubbub—people scratching lottery tickets, contemplating carpet shampoo rental, the Rand McNally map display, the Duracells, the Omni-Copy machine. A few perusing sunglasses on a rainy day.

  I nudged again: “You come up with a recollection of how Cahill came to be included in this money deal?”

  Spence stared off at the magazine racks. “I’ve got this picture in my mind: the three of them and me sitting at that cable-reel table that was outside the Chart Room. You and your friend wander out of the bar and sit in the two empty chairs, those ugly olive-colored vinyl jobs. It’s around lunchtime. Your friend’s wife had gone home that morning, I think to Illinois. He was leaving that afternoon for a business meeting in Texas. We all shoot the shit awhile, we all knew him from other times he’d come to visit you. Then you leave to go someplace. Were you working for the radio station?”