by Tom Corcoran
“I love it that you never lose sight of the important things in life.”
“Tell me that at two A.M.” She changed her expression, and her tone of voice. “You know some cops, don’t you?”
“Most of them by sight. A few better than that.”
“This detective came to me the other day …” She pulled a layout comp out of a broad, flat drawer. It was a LISKA—YOUR SHERIFF poster in miniature. “I can’t get any juice flowing on this design. You know the guy?”
“You remember how floors in discoteques had clear panels with different colored flashing lights under them? John Travolta, the Bee Gees …”
Olivia’s large eyes lit up—like disco strobes. “Say no more.”
“You still hang at Schooner Wharf?” I said.
“I’m a noon regular. A beer to get me through the afternoon. I usually go back for a vodka at sunset. This time of year, if anybody decent’s on stage, I sometimes sit until, if I have one more, I can’t walk home.”
“Dubbie Tanner been around?”
“I’ve seen him. I don’t think he had gas money to roll north this year.”
“He still doing his millennium version of On the Road?”
Olivia laughed at the irony. “He’s got life dicked, to be frank about it. He mooches one beer an hour, fifteen hours a day. I’m always good for one. My little move for charity. Late at night he tries to pick up tourist girls so he can sleep and shower in their motel rooms. His cop-out line is he lives with his grandmother.”
I knew W. B. “Dubbie” Tanner’s big secret. He lived the homeless life, odd-jobbing the bars, sleeping on the beach, bumming drinks, sofa-surfing, dirt-napping, and washing at friends’ apartments. He lived out of his car, had a big stainless New York City trunk lock on his ratty old four-door Chevrolet, his whole life in there with the spare tire. In past years he’d migrated around the country according to the weather. He’d called it “packing the tepee and following the buffalo.” He always made it back to ground zero, at Mile Zero. A few years ago there’d been a short-lived rumor that Tanner had written a book and had it published.
Three years ago, an out-of-town friend asked my help in locating a boat that had been stolen from the marina behind the Half Shell Raw Bar. My friend had been worried more about retrieving the boat than catching the thieves. He’d heard that a bum named Dubbie Tanner supposedly had bragged about seeing the yacht get under way. But Tanner, out of fear, had declined to recall the night in question.
I’d looked up his name in the library computer. An author named W. B. Tanner had published and still wrote a successful series of children’s books, the Ski-Jump Series, where a kid builds himself a tiny skate ramp in his backyard, and in each tale flies off to imaginary worlds. Beach bum Dubbie Tanner probably pulled down royalties of $40,000 to $60,000 a year. I had informed Tanner that I respected his privacy. I’d acknowledged that creative people gleaned inspiration from varied circumstances and locales. I also suggested that life among the deadenders had allowed him to see into the darkness, recognize dog shit on the soles of fancy shoes. I’d assured him that I’d hold his secret secure. But, light touch, I’d made him squirm. He’d told me a name. Indirectly, the name had led to the missing yacht.
“Think I can find Tanner at Schooner Wharf?”
Olivia nodded. “This time of year, you cannot find one without the other.”
“Do me one more favor? Don’t show these scans to the detective?”
“Does that count as another payback?”
Claire Cahill sat alone at a faux-marble four-top in the bright front room of the Banana Café, staring at the sea-foam-green ceiling. She hadn’t touched the Chardonnay in front of her. Her fork rested atop an elaborate salad, also unsampled. She had changed her shirt and pulled her hair under a tiny-brimmed ball cap. The restaurant’s front doors were closed to the Duval heat, but jalousie-shuttered side windows and French doors to the patio were open. Ceiling fans and a breeze from the Atlantic—four blocks away—made the air feel ten degrees cooler. I sat, pointed at the Chardonnay, and received permission. I left her a quarter-glass of wine. A waiter offered a menu and removed an empty Dos Equis bottle from the table.
“The singer on the stereo is a Paris favorite, Michel Jonas,” said Claire. “Pam plays his tapes in her fabric store.”
“Liska?” I pointed to the salad.
She handed me her fork. “We were together all of four minutes. Do you know where he keeps his cell phone?”
I nodded.
“He and the lady detective went to the cemetery. He asked me to send you there with your cameras. The northeast corner, closest to your house.”
“Lady detective?”
“Was her name Teresa?”
“She’s the police press liaison officer,.”
“The way she asked about you, I assumed she was a detective.”
“Why would any detective want to ask questions about me?”
Claire lifted her glass ceremoniously and slugged down the last of the wine. “Is that tender young morsel your love life these days?”
“It’s a new development.”
“Girls that age, Alex. Are you going to marry her or adopt her?”
“Very funny. Let me ask again. Why would a detective want—”
“Your best friend’s a money launderer and a murder suspect.”
“I can’t have my teammate talking that way.”
“Well, that’s your side of it. Right now, talking or walking, I can’t have my husband. Imagine how I feel.”
“I can’t.”
11
The punks have a name for it: coffin clouting. Ripping off the defenseless. Robbing modern tombs, as if decent jewelry ever made it beyond hovering relatives and into the box. All this crap going down, people’s lives spinning backward, clocks out of sync with the sun. Liska had mentioned graveyard vandalism. He’d also promised a brick wall for my crime-photo career. I saw little chance that I could focus, but I needed to bank the income while I could.
I rode the Kawasaki home to get my gear, the taste of salad onions in my mouth. Sweat puddled above the padding in my helmet. Claire had wanted to walk around town, smell flowers, look in shop windows, see how the island had changed. I knew that she needed to gather opinions and decide how to deal with a husband in danger and a rival in town. I asked her to pick up my color proofs from John at the Island Book Store.
Hector Ayusa had nailed plywood over my busted window. Great privacy, so-so aesthetics. I opened the house long enough to flip on the air and brush my teeth. One of these days I would have breakfast. I kept hearing sirens in the neighborhood. I wished for a moment that I could call the hospital, to ask about Abby Womack.
The cemetery’s Frances Street gate is three blocks south of the house, a five-minute walk. I carried my camera bag, a sixteenounce water bottle, and three rolls of color film. With Duffy Lee Hall’s darkroom out of commission, I’d have to go to Publix, where they don’t understand that black and white is still being manufactured. A Conch Train passed, its driver spewing rote, the set speech I heard at varying levels and accents, every fifteen minutes, every daylight hour, every day of the week: “ … that brass plaque is awarded by the Department of the Interior, which places the home on the National Historic Register of Homes. Out of three thousand wooden structures here on the island of Key West, three hundred …” For some odd reason the train turned east on Angela, the narrowest street on the island.
I spotted the county’s oldest EMS vehicle, my first hint that I hadn’t been called to a plundered grave. The county’s newer units transport emergency cases. The beater is assigned to Larry Riley’s people at the county medical examiner’s office. I noticed the city and county squad cars on scene. Heavy action. I wondered if they’d found Jimmy Hoffa, or the fugitive and legendary ex-Key West fire chief, missing for over twenty years.
Several groups stood apart from each other, the Key West police and the Monroe County deputies, maybe fifteen total. Al
l of them doing the nerves dance, flexing their chests, posing, wiping handkerchiefs on inner hatbands, barking jargon into epaulet-mounted radio mikes, glancing behind themselves. Chicken Neck Liska huddled under a spindly shade tree with Teresa Barga, two portly men in city uniform, and Bobbi Lewis, a respected female Sheriffs Department detective. The county boys stood twenty yards distant, in the shade of a tin-roof shelter next to a mausoleum. Teresa stared in my direction. Her eyes said “I know you’re here,” but no more. I would have to explain Claire as soon as possible.
Liska approached me. He smelled of the mouthwash he kept in his glove box, this time masking the Dos Equis he’d downed at the Banana Cafe before getting the call. He couldn’t resist delivering his funny line: “It’s not every day you find a dead body in the cemetery.”
But that ended his humor. His pose of detachment wilted. “It’s Sheriff Tucker’s daughter-in-law. A city maintenance dude lifted a grubby tarpaulin. Her eyes were staring at him, all bloodshot. Somebody did her before sunrise. Probably about the time old man Ayusa hosed your night creeper.”
Liska looked at the maintenance worker, inviting my gaze to follow. He understood the implications. A close family member of a political opponent, murdered inside city limits. Even if Liska solved the case before sundown, he could never erase the massive black mark, the fact that it had happened at all. The sympathy factor among voters would favor Tucker. A week ahead of the primary, Liska’s election campaign was in the toilet. His burned bridges at the police department would have his job down the crapper, too.
“Tommy Tucker’s kid, isn’t he kind of a …”
“Shitbag?” said Liska. “You bet, bubba. On the street they call him ‘Little Howie’ Tucker. Two-bit fuckin’ fence. One of those drug dealers with no pride in product quality. I thought about using his history against his daddy. Even me, I’m not low enough to do that.”
“Is he here?”
“We can’t find him. If he killed her before breakfast, he could be in Rio by now. He could be crashed on the men’s room floor at Renegades. He’s never been particular about where he sleeps.”
“I meant Tucker.”
“The sheriff’s lunching aboard the cruise ship. Some VIP function, civic brownnosing. He passed word he’d get here, ah … ‘presently,’ was the word he used. We can assume the victim is not his favorite daughter-in-law. We can assume he views her more as a political free throw than a human being.”
I stepped sideways for another look. I recognized the supervising scene analyst from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Cootie Ortega had spread equipment across three grave sites. Again, he worked from a tripod. Lester Forsythe, the county’s salaried forensic bumbler out of Marathon, had positioned himself for better detail. But his sense of lighting sucked, and his darkroom work was a joke. “Sort of a crowd by the body,” I said.
“Everybody knows it’s a blue-chipper. Go get some pictures we might actually use. Find the good shit those boys are sure to miss.”
“It’s time for me to raise my prices.”
“After this week I won’t be able to authorize Sweet’n Low for the coffee mess. Your hourly rate balloons, I’ll make you run for sheriff and I’ll fuck with the focus and the button.”
I fitted a 40mm lens to my Olympus OM-4, screwed on a UV filter, then a lens hood to shield the film from reflective flaring off adjacent marble tombstones. The early-afternoon sun would give my photos more contrast than I wanted, and my fill flash wouldn’t synchronize with the shutter speeds I needed in the brightness. Marnie Dunwoody arrived just in time. I borrowed a PBA Picnic poster from the trunk of a city patrol car and pressed Marnie into service, showing her where to position the poster to reflect sunlight into the shadow areas. The arrangement also gave her access to the corpse, a direct link to the story she needed. Marnie kept quiet. She looked healthier than she had the morning before. And calmer.
I noticed there were no sounds of birds.
We knew the victim’s first name. She’d strung an inch-high gold pendant on her gaudy gold necklace: “Chloe” in rounded cursive. She wore an Adidas T-shirt that she’d chopped midway between her bra and belly button. Purple shorts. Purple everything else: sneakers, fingernails, lipstick. Her murderer had tightened her thin purple belt around her throat, crushing her windpipe. I snapped a shot of the loose end of the belt hanging by her right ear. Her hair had been dyed black, though a thin layer of brown showed close to the roots. Her narrow, harsh jawline brought to mind Appalachia. Her eyes and full lips suggested Latin roots. The essential toughness, even in death—and more accurately, an emptiness—told me that this island girl had weathered her share of street life.
I found another useful angle. Faint tan lines on the fingers of both hands indicated that she recently must have worn eight or ten rings. Odd that she’d have been robbed of the rings but not her gold necklace. One antique-looking ring remained on her left hand. Perhaps it had been too tight to remove.
“Somebody messed with her,” said Marnie. “A deputy over there told me that when the guy found her, her shorts were around her knees. She wasn’t wearing panties.”
I looked down. The shorts were up to her hipbones. The fly was partially unzipped. “Shit, that’s evidence. Who pulled them up?”
“He wouldn’t say. But he seemed to think that her family would not have been able to grieve properly, knowing that her privates were exposed.”
“That’s what he said, ‘grieve properly’?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Someday I want to read the grieving rule book. I’m sure there’s a chapter on pubic protocol.” I wondered if the deputy had mentioned the other death buzz word, “closure.” No way to have closure with open trousers.
The close-up of Chloe’s teeth gave me my toughest challenge. I directed Marnie to hold the white reflector at a slight angle behind me. With precise focus I could show fresh chips in the victim’s upper and lower front teeth, and three lateral cracks, two upstairs and one down. The woman had been hit before she was killed, punched out with an uppercut.
Marnie and I finally took a break. She stood in the shade of a tree and watched Larry Riley arrive in his military-green 1957 Jeep. “Hell freezes in the Southernmost City,” she proclaimed. “The hip coroner finally cut off his ponytail. Let me talk to Dr. Larry before he gets deluged.”
“Zack’s wife, Claire, arrived this morning.”
“How is she?”
“Pissed, worried, jet-lagged … I don’t know … tan. Tell Riley about the pants around her knees.”
I had shouldered my camera bag and begun to walk toward the Frances Street gate when Liska stopped in his wine-colored Lexus. “Get in. I want that goddamned bicycle out of my office.”
Liska turned right out of the gate. “That bike, I’m getting a reputation for being a health freak. Bad enough, two people notice I cut back on smokes.” He turned right on Truman. Political posters hung in store windows and on sides of buildings. Most of them said, TUCKER: ALWAYS THERE. One homemade sign declared, VOTE FOR TUCKER, NOT THE OTHER MOTHER. The few for Chicken Neck said, FRED LISKA FOR SHERIFF—SECURITY FOR ALL THE KEYS. Wordy, mundane. He’d better hope that Olivia pulled through.
Liska’s air-conditioning blew full cold. Some Floridians don’t grasp the comfort concept. If it’s ninety outside, they chill it to sixty indoors. You bake or freeze. They probably figure it averages out.
“I don’t know if she’s a true Conch,” he said, “but she grew up here. We get two guesses. Dope deal or dope revenge. The scrappy end of the food chain.”
“Whatever happened to good old Cuban crimes of passion?”
“You ever hear that song?” He drove in silence for a block or two, then said, “Got enough to worry, without passion crimes. I got a spooks-and-spies homicide on the foremost tourist attraction south of Monkey Jungle. I got a bushwhacked lady on the boulevard, trigger-happy citizens enforcing the neighborhood watch. I got a dead slut who’s kicking my political c
ampaign in the cojones, and no choice but to do my best to find her murderer. I got my job disintegrating like a rusty scupper. And I got you associated with three incidents. I told this lady who got shot off your friggin’ bicycle that we don’t have anonymous crime victims around here, only anonymous criminals. Flaky bitch slid out of the hospital last night. No damn forwarding address. We never found the serial number plate from her cell phone. Like, maybe it never had one. And you stand there this morning and tell me this Cahill ain’t a killer, even though, with that fingerprint, he’s connected, one way or another. So I figure you’re not telling me something …”
“I have no idea where he is, or why he’s hiding.”
“So you get a burglar coming in your window, and he gets shot, and then Cahill’s wife pulls up in a cab. That looked like a heart-to-heart reunion this morning. You fucking the boy’s old lady?”
In the past year, Fred Liska’s wife had been unfaithful, had divorced him, and had come back to him.
“No,” I said. “No way. Not ever. You want me to be more precise?”
Liska shook his head. He told me to take the film to Marshall Hoff and get it back to his office before five. “Bring her along, too. We can chat. She can file a missing persons report.”
I rode the Cannondale home and locked it in the yard. The bike smelled of cigarette smoke from Liska’s office. Claire was not in the house, but she had remembered to pick up Olivia Jones’s handiwork. I found the sealed envelope on the kitchen counter. The computer-generated proofs looked even better on paper than on Olivia’s monitor.
One Stapleton in the book. From his readiness to clock out after they’d wheeled Abby into the emergency room, I figured that his Gurney-Jockey shift ran something like two A.M. to ten A.M. I could only guess his sleep schedule. Rather than call and wake him, I wanted to cruise his house, look for activity, confront him before he could temper his reactions. I pulled off my sweatdrenched T-shirt, put on a long-sleeved shirt, tucked the packet of proofs inside it, and rolled out the Kawasaki. On a whim I went six blocks out of my way to pass Jesse Spence’s place on Seminary. The expensive blinds in the apartment’s upstairs windows still hung broken in disarray. The ragged-out Sunbird sat angled into its spot, its top and windows still up.