by Tom Corcoran
I didn’t have the balls to admit to Duffy Lee Hall that his livelihood had been destroyed because someone wanted film I’d failed to drop off. I left him to his chore, rode two blocks down Simonton to a pay phone, and called my message machine.
Sam Wheeler: “A break in this horseshit weather. My new client needs a couple hours in the Mud Keys. Come by the dock at three-thirty.”
I hit Chicken Neck’s office at exactly three o’clock, Omarscene photos in hand. No sign of Liska. My Cannondale had been shoved against a wall between two windows darkened by stained white miniblinds. I’d arrived on the Kawasaki; the bike could wait another day. The room smelled of a recently puffed cigarette. A sure sign of a short-timer: breaking city rules, inside the police station. Fred Liska burning bridges long before election day.
I sorted through the stack of photos. Omar’s verminlike face—a nose well-engineered for snorting Bolivian power powder—and his fancy shoes. I’d shot the crowd pictures with a 28-mm wide-angle, so onlookers’ faces were too small to recognize on four-by-six prints. But the wide-angle lens also meant that depth of field, the focus front to rear, would be sharp.
I left the photos with a Post-It note and walked a block down Angela to Mangoes. I needed to tell Jesse Spence about the fire, warn him of probable escalation. I needed to pick his brain, too.
Crowded. People waited for tables at the restaurant’s sidewalk entrance. I didn’t see Spence behind the bar. A young black man in a waiter’s polo-style shirt scrambled to make drink orders for other waiters and the two dozen customers on stools. I asked for Spence.
“Yeah, well …” The young man gestured, a broad wave to show me the packed patio. “He quit.” He finished mixing a Bloody Mary, then turned back to me. “Came in, worked ten minutes, then faded. Asked for his paycheck, too. Told the boss lady he was having psychological problems and needed a month off. Something about cabin fever. She told him, an early check, make an appointment with the accountant.” The fill-in bartender almost fumbled the drink shaker. “Cabin fever’s for Colorado, Idaho, the Montana boondocks. It’s not like we’re snowed in, Key West, in August. You need a job?”
I shook my head. “A sudden decision.”
“They’re all that way. Every bartender I ever knew, the Al-Anon Syndrome. At least one alcoholic parent. Lots of time both, if they had two. Impulsive, selfish, full of self-importance or riddled with insecurity. Know what I mean?”
“Never thought about it.”
“Think about it. Blame the parents.” He’d poured short on ingredients and had too little to fill two margarita-rocks glasses. He dropped in a few extra ice cubes. “You see Jesse Spence, tell him his job went out the door behind him. Nobody on this shift’ll forget. The door slammed real loud.”
I stared at the table close to Duval Street where Omar had sat staring at the sidewalk. Not much for aesthetics. It fell in with the logic: he’d been there for a reason. He’d been looking for someone. The concept of coincidence had come to gravity.
I went back to the Angela Street police station and fire house. I had a few questions for Dewey Birdsall, the Key West Fire Department’s fire marshal and chief investigator. The joke around town used to be that Dewey spelled his first name D-U-I. He’d come to Key West in the early seventies, a fireman on vacation from Connecticut, and had opted for local employment. He didn’t mind the fire department’s traditional motto: “We’ll save the house next door.” What did people expect on a windy island packed shore-to-shore with century-old wooden structures? He liked best that, in winter, the water used to extinguish fires did not turn his feet into chunks of ice.
Dewey and I had become friends when we—along with Duffy Lee Hall and a diverse cast of other maniacs—had spent many foggy wee hours in the Full Moon Saloon, when the bar had been located on United. Birdsall had since quit drinking. A court-ordered acquaintance with Alcoholics Anonymous had put him on the right track. He did his job well and with pride.
I found him in the fire station’s main office straightening his desk, piling papers in what looked to be an end-of-day ritual.
“Señor Rutledge,” he said. “I thought Dracula never saw daylight.”
“Don’t we all slow down, Dewey?”
“If we want to stay alive. How can I help you?”
“Duffy Lee did all my film work. Personal stuff and the jobs I shot for the detectives. Stuff for the county, too.”
“Weird fire. No accident, no act of nature.”
“Electrical, or what?”
“More like kids playing with matches, until you look at the evidence. High temperatures. The torch used an accelerator, but not plain gasoline.”
“Any way to analyze it?”
“Triple answer, Alex. Yes there is; residue samples are already at the state fire marshal’s office in Tallahassee; and proof of it being incendiary probably won’t make a case against anyone.”
“How about matching residue to a perp’s clothing, if it spilled?”
“Possible. Difficult. Circumstantial.”
“Shit.”
“I know where you’re at. Hall’s my friend, too. I’m paying extra attention to this case. I’ve requested firebug info from the statewide database on repeat offenders. Couple other angles. I’ll keep you posted. By the way …” Birdsall reached to hand me a business card. “My sister and her husband just moved to town. He’s selling insurance. You ever need term life, give him a shout.”
I stuck the card in my pocket. Since the Navy, I’d kept current on a small life policy, so no one would have to shell out their own bucks to turn me into ashes. Odd product name. “Term life” sounded like a prison sentence.
I sat on a PVC chair, feet on Sam’s dock locker, sipping a beer wrapped in a paper towel, waiting for Fancy Fool to coast in. Most of the Garrison Bight charter boats had remained in port; the morning weather had killed a day’s income. Bilge soap and WD-40 vapors told me that a few crews had taken the opportunity to catch up on maintenance. For a handful, Wheeler included, the sun’s late-morning reemergence had invited a half-day stab in the least-murky backcountry waters.
Other dock smells rode the wind—diesel and gas fumes, open fish boxes, barnacles left high on pilings by the dropping tide. Once in a while burgers and onions floated from the fast-food box across the boulevard. The humidity enveloped me like an extra layer of clothing. The eight-minute shower I’d taken after lunch had given me perhaps ten minutes of relief. I’d take another after dark. At these latitudes, this time of year, everyone perspired around the clock. The trick was to smell like today, not yesterday. I’d placed my ball cap upside-down in direct sunlight to dry.
My watch said quarter to four. Every ninety seconds a plane passed overhead, adjusting flaps, dropping power on final approach to runway 9. Exhaust heat shimmered behind them, tainting the afternoon sea breeze. Even my dark Serengetis struggled with the brightness. High-rev mopeds and blatting Harleys crossed the Garrison Bight bridge. Pickups with throaty glasspacks climbed the bridge in second; those coming the other direction used their transmissions to brake downhill to North Roosevelt.
Prospects, tomorrow’s clients, crowded the marina’s bordering sidewalks. Forty yards away, three beginners, scarlet-skinned for having misjudged the midday sun’s intensity, posed in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts near the logo-emblazoned stern of a deepwater fishing yacht, laying unified claim to four adolescent nurse sharks. The souvenir photographs would impress the secretaries back in Wheeling. The sportsmen would be facedown in conch fritters before dark, forgetting the name of the cabbie who’d promised he’d take them down to the titty bars for a flat rate, off the meter.
Three or four offshore charter boats filed under the bridge, returning to their slips. The captains faced astern, worked levers behind their backs, playing their twin V-8s, alternating forward and reverse as they backed into slips. Easy as wedging their bottoms into reclining chairs.
Sam sneaked up on me. I didn’t notice the flutter of his 90-horse Y
amaha until it shut down. I turned just in time. He’d tossed a dock line at me. Sam stood forward in Fancy Fool, his bare sixteen-foot Maverick Mirage, a flat-bottomed skiff designed for chasing the permit, bonefish, and tarpon that feed in grassy shoals and winding flats channels. He braced himself, a foot atop the forward platform. A striking young woman in white shorts and a T-shirt stood calmly at the stern, holding a pair of coiled dock lines.
“Say hello to Sammy,” said Wheeler.
I put my beer on the pier and wrapped two turns around a piling. After I’d bent a simple knot—Sam, the nautical perfectionist, would resecure anything I might tie—I stood to help the client onto the walkway. She declined. She’d already looped the far stern line to its post. With confident sea legs she timed her step ashore, then whipped around to take a turn in the other stern line. She handed off the bitter end so Sam could gauge his slack, fix a light-duty chafing sleeve, and snug the hitch he’d used daily for twenty years.
The young lady demonstrated competence and crew courtesy. Her face showed determination and suggested uppermiddle-class genes. As much as sexiness, her lovely shape exuded strength and the health brought by good eating. She had pulled her blond hair into a practical twist. Her extra-large shirt read, VISUAL.IZE WHIRLED PEAS.
“Decent day out there?” I fought to quit staring.
“Depends who you ask,” said Wheeler. “She did better than some regulars who think they’re hot shit.”
“Shit’s the word. And I apologize for that.” Sammy’s magnolia tones, in eight words, carried the history of the Deep South.
“Tomorrow, all hits, no misses.” Sam freed the lock on his dockside box and raised the lid. Sammy lifted out a folding bicycle with small wheels, quick-adjust height clamps for the seat and handlebar, and a mid-frame hinge. She rigged the bike, pulled a set of keys from her pocket, and strung them on the handlebar. A tiny float on the key ring. The yachting crowd and fishing crews knew the huge advantage of not losing keys dropped by mistake in the water. A half-minute later we watched her pedal west on the Roosevelt sidewalk.
“Accustomed to boats,” I said. “Unsinkable keys.”
“But she’s deep-sixing my heart.” Sam’s jolly mood evaporated. He began his post-charter cleaning ritual in a sudden, heavy funk. He paid too much attention to the task at hand. I asked if he had a few minutes to hear me out.
“I can’t stop what I’m doing. My ears are all yours.”
I didn’t want to push him; if he wanted his mind elsewhere, I’d waste my words. I sat on the concrete walkway and, for three or four minutes, watched him hose down the boat, running spray under the forward platform, down the gunwales, over the controls. He broke first, released the nozzle trigger: “Look, I’ll listen and I’ll help. I promised I would. I’m just saying I got a problem, too.”
“Something beer might dilute?”
“I’ll take anything to postpone going home.”
“I hear my porch calling.”
“Beats pissing around in the hot sun.”
I left for Dredgers Lane as Sam began to close up Fancy Fool
No messages on the machine. In normal circumstances that would be a perfect relief. With so much violent crap happening at once, the lack of word tightened me up. I wasn’t sure whom I’d planned to hear from, but I didn’t like the void. I opened a few windows for fresh air, perhaps hoping for communication by that route. Hey, island. I’m all ears, too. No need to play my stereo. The Jackson Five’s Greatest Hits thumped from somewhere in the lane. “One-two-three-A-B-C.” A muggy floral breeze blew in from the backyard. An inbound twin-engine aircraft buzzed alarmingly low.
I dialed Jesse Spence’s number and let it ring twelve times before I gave up. I almost called Florida Keys Hospital to inquire about Abby Womack’s condition. Hell, they didn’t even know her name. I couldn’t muster the brass balls to call Claire Cahill; walking the tightrope of truth would push my shredded conscience too far. I spent two minutes in the outdoor shower. Sam Wheeler’s prehistoric Bronco squeaked and rattled up the lane as I headed for the fridge. I slid four bottles of beer into insulator sleeves, twisted all four caps, and carried them to the porch.
Sam eased the screen door shut, laid his ball cap and sunglasses on the porcelain table. The hat had pressed his sandy hair into a Bozo do. “You’re trying to ruin me, boy. I’m about to complain about the old lady’s drinking, you’re throwing me doubleheaders.”
“So I guessed right. She was doing a hangover this morning.”
“Shit. She’s been on Mars since Memorial Day. I met her how many, five months ago? I had a full wine rack the day I met her. Thiny-six bottles. I’m down to four keeper cabernets. I had to make it clear, she could lose an arm if she touches any one of them. It peaked out when I took her to California, that six-day vacation. We took a Napa-Sonoma wine tour. She bought ten Kendall-Jackson T-shirts, brought them back to town, handed them out to winos on Caroline Street.” Sam walked into the house and headed for the john, raising his voice as he went. “I stopped bringing white wine home from Fausto’s weeks ago. So she worked it through a wholesaler rep to buy three cases at a discount. Some dork she met through her job.”
I yelled, “Is it causing her to screw up at work?”
“Gotta be. She’s a disaster in the house. Breaking glass in the kitchen. The other night she was too fucked up to set her alarm clock. I offered to help and she got defensive.” Sam returned to the porch and took a long swig from one of the beers as he dropped into a chair. “You’d have thought I’d asked her to jump in front of a train.”
“If there’s some way I can help …”
“It’s mostly up to her. Even if we stop going out for drinks, for sunset at Louie’s, whatever, she can still get it some other way. I can’t lock her in a cage. She knows I’m pissed. She’s the one that’s got to change. What’s with your deal?”
I laid out the geometric pattern: Boudreau, Spence, and Abby Womack. Boudreau’s past, Spence’s split from work-perhaps from the island, too—and the attempt on Abby’s life. I kept coming back to Zack’s involvement.
Sam kicked off his leather deck shoes and flexed his toes. He lifted his head and looked me in the eye. “Lemme get this straight. We’re talking dope profits, right?”
“That’s what it was in the seventies.”
“And your friend has laundered and hidden and invested this dope money that now, presumably, is a whole lot of dope profits.”
“I think that’s what’s happened.”
“So a rational man might define it as tainted cash. Am I right so far?”
“From an alternative viewpoint, a moral man would look at it as tainted money. A rational man would see it as a shitload of bread.”
“So what’s your objective? Make sure a shitload of dirty dope profits gets distributed to a pack of convicted criminals?”
“No. I want to make sure that Zack Cahill doesn’t wind up dead, if he isn’t already. My secondary aim is to shield him from getting in trouble for what he’s done and what he’s doing. I don’t suppose there’s much I can do about that.”
“And you realize that, either way you go—keeping him alive or trying to insulate him from prosecution—the result might be the distribution of this wealth to some sorry characters.”
I nodded.
“So you’re going to make yourself an accessory to one or more felonies. Which one, take your pick.”
“I disagree. I’m not privy to the original agreement, I don’t know where the money is, and I know very little about the conspirators. I certainly don’t know squat about the murder and the attempted murder, if they’re connected to it. I’m on the outside, looking in.”
Sam thought awhile. “Zack’s not the first man to make a mistake.”
“True. My charitable take is, it’s a mistake that’s gone on for twenty years. But if you compare Abby Womack to Claire Cahill, it wasn’t his first mistake. That’s what I don’t get. He was living a dream existence. What would make
him want to … ?”
“What, the doctor who starts sampling his own drugs? Something to put him on edge, put extra fire into a mundane occupation?” Sam had flip-flopped. The devil’s advocate. Or else his charitable nature. “I think back,” he said. “Once every few years I catch myself ignoring common sense, staying on the water too long with ball-buster weather approaching. Maybe he needed a jolt. A challenge.”
“Unfortunately, I’m left sitting here waiting for the earthquake.”
“Meaning?”
“I know what I want to do. Protect Zack from death and from legal trouble. But it’s not like I’ve got a master plan. At this point, I’m powerless to find him unless he suddenly walks onto the porch. I’m beginning to think that Spence has dusted off into hiding. If I ever talk to Abby Womack again, it’ll be because she calls me. I’m like a nerd who waits for life to happen to him, instead of making it happen myself.”
“What in the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t do anything but feed me and pay the bills. The rest of my life is being lived by my answering machine. I exist vicariously through a tape loop. I am mapping the area code of my soul.”
“You are full of shit. You are so full of shit, you make me feel good about my problems. I thank you for that.”
Mission accomplished. I changed the subject. “I hope your thing with Marnie isn’t going down the tubes. Seriously.”
“Me, too. What’s that saying, a luxury, once tried, becomes a necessity? The car builders and home builders of America have known that for years. The people designing stereos and computers. I swear it applies to your love life. Once you’ve had a truly good one, it’s hard to go back to pretenders, to run-of-the-mill.” He checked his watch and downed the rest of his second beer. “It’s fifty-fifty she’s in bed by now.”