by Tom Corcoran
“You called me for photos.”
Spence stood and paced around behind the desk, fiddled with a calendar dated February 1996, a picture of a poufy auburnhaired country lovely with outsized breasts pouring out of her hitch-up overalls. He turned and crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “You’re the only link to whatever bad shit’s going down. Right away, you smell. So I get you over to snap pictures and you almost caught on. I didn’t really need pictures. I just wanted to see how you’d act, if you’d say something to give me a scope on this dicked-up mud bath. I really liked that touch you gave it, suggesting I call the police to verify my insurance claim. You knew I’d never call the police for anything. Ex-cons do everything possible to fly under their radar. Then you borrow my phone and you suddenly know the name and life story of Omar ‘Joe Blow’ Boudreau.
“So I came to your house the next morning. The way you talked, I knew you were trying to throw off suspicions. You tell me about Zack’s call from Sloppy’s, his lunch meeting. Then you talk about meeting a woman at Louie’s the night before who knew about the agreement but no details. Then you say you don’t mind not being rich. You’re happy making short money snapping pictures. I think, this has got to be bullshit. Then you talk to somebody on the phone. You say Cahill’s name, you hang up, you claim it was Detective Liska. Triple bullshit. Red flags galore. We drive to Publix in the rain so you can drop off film. You see this mystery woman at the bus stop, I see your head whip around. I caught a look, too. The biggest red flag of all. Big as a Moscow parade. Lunch, Monday, you in Mangoes looking for Zack, and she was sitting by the waiters’ station.”
The logic had lost me in the weeds. “Watching me or the guy now dead?”
“She was facing Angela Street, staring at tourists. But she could see the whole patio. I noticed her, alone, ripe for the pickins.”
Had she been there to cover Zack’s back—during the meeting with Jesse that never happened—or watching for intruders like Boudreau? Or fingering Boudreau for the hit? Or had she been there with Omar Boudreau?
I looked again at the roach crap stuck to the plaster, the splash-pattern stains. “What makes you think I didn’t know her then?”
“Oh, I figured you did. So we find out she’s been shot, you ask me to take you to the hospital. You let me wait in the car.”
“I’m the bad guy.”
“Sure as hell. And jammin’ your case to the detective.”
“Back to the beginning. Why am I alive?”
“The geometry stumbled. Your story about meeting her at Louie’s could have been true.”
“I got my own doubt about it being just by chance. Nothing else has been a coincidence lately.”
“Good guess. I remembered one more thing, unfortunately after Scotty and I left you with Fortay. I remembered why you went to Louie’s.”
For the comfort of alcohol. “To meet Sam Wheeler.”
“And you got his message on my bugged phone. Because you asked me to join you. You offered to buy me a drink. Whoever worked the tap knew you were going to Louie’s.”
“And I got picked up by Abby Womack.”
“Which might not have happened if I’d been with you.”
“That makes Abby the bad guy.”
“That it does.”
New rules. “Does Abby Womack know Samantha Burch?”
Spence sat again in the rank red chair. He nodded, slowly. “If she was privy to the agreement, she could’ve known that Buzzy had a kid.”
I needed to call Olivia as well as Sam. I wanted to freeze time in Key West until I could get back and sort out the crap. “Did you kill Chloe Tucker?”
“Shit, no.”
“You might want to fax an alibi.” I explained how Liska had followed up Marshall Hofl’s flip remark about the kicked-apart apartment, then linked Spence’s criminal record and the downtown rumor that Jesse and Chloe had been doing the deed.
“I’m embarrassed anyone even knows I tapped it. She’s so goddamned street. It’s too bad she’s dead, but there was every known reason in the world for it to happen. None of them are mine.”
“I still can’t get over one thing,” I added. “They ruined that photograph of the shrimp boats.”
Spence looked at the dingy office walls. “A Laessig original. I also lost a Bibby watercolor—a five-by-eight of the Pierce Brothers Grocery that used to be at Fleming and Elizabeth—and a Jerry Miller pen-and-ink of Yaccarino’s Overseas Fruit Market, that old wood shack at Truman and Grinnell. Hell, think about it. The grocery’s gone, the fruit market’s a restaurant patio, and the Key West shrimp boats have all moved to Stock Island. My own Museum of Island History. Now it’s a pile of crap. Trashed art.”
My turn for self-pity. “I got a trashed spine.”
“Can you travel?”
Spence helped me off the shuffieboard alley. It hurt to stand. I lifted my shirt to armpit level while he swabbed Icy Hot on my lower back, around my cracked ribs. “All we got is aspirin and Absolut,” he said.
“Sounds like a lethal combination. I’ll take it.”
He steadied me as we walked from the windowless room. No wonder it had no windows. The whole bar had no windows. I hadn’t noticed the three dim bulbs that lit the place, probably the only ones not pilfered by departing tenants. Fortay sat on the floor near the door, back against the wall, Walkman earphones fixed in his ears, a Bud bottle balanced on his knee. Scotty “Cool” Auguie sat mid-room in a red vinyl chair, his feet propped on an upright beer case, his pistol on his lap, reading a paperback of A Pirate Looks at Fifty. He threw me a cold stare.
I said, “Thanks for not using that popgun.”
“You think I’d go away for shooting a fucknut like you?”
“I don’t know what you’d do.”
“Did our Outward Bound boost your character and inner self-worth?”
“You used to be a nasty prick. Good to see your years in prison gave you such a friendly, positive—”
“Cut the shit,” barked Spence. “Let’s get out of this dump.”
Outside, darkness. A Chrysler four-door next to Fortay’s Monte Carlo, which now looked like any other Chevrolet with fancy wheels. The door locks snapped open. A man who could have been Fortay’s twin sat in the driver’s seat. Cool Auguie and Fortay joined him in the car. The Monte Carlo left quickly, spraying gravel.
I said, “Where does all this leave Tazzy Gucci?”
“Tazzy’s lucky he’s undamaged. Cool wanted to give him a Middle Eastern reprimand. Cut off his right hand, cook it up in a gumbo, make him eat it. He may still do it. Right now, Tazzy’s fate’s in limbo.”
“Funny choice of words. What the hell time is it?”
“One A.M.”
“Jesus.”
“You had a nap.” Spence helped me into the Chrysler’s backseat, then slowly drove out of the saloon’s rutted parking lot.
My beneficent captors, in a moment of poetic nonsense, had decided that I would return to Key West by departing Pensacola rather than New Orleans. This move, of course, for my own safety, after their employee had splintered my back, turned my brain into a mush melon. Jesse Spence would deliver me to Pensacola, then continue to Tallahassee, where his lawyer would contact the Key West Police Department and provide an alibi for the time of the Chloe Tucker murder.
The decision to avoid the New Orleans airport failed to foresee the washboard ride through Mississippi on Interstate 10. Road ripples modulated my wrenched back and aching head. I kept closing my eyes and seeing elongated streams of cockroach shit on red velvet curtains. Even lane changes put tears in my eyes. In Pascagoula, Spence pulled off the highway to buy pain pills. He hit up a trucker for an unlabeled bottle. My mood improved.
“It’s four in the morning. We’re an hour from the airport.” Spence’s voice echoed from down a long tunnel. I opened my eyes. He sat only five feet away in the driver’s seat. “Your flight’s at seven-thirty.” Still the echo. “We’re on a bridge in Alabama, just east of
Mobile. We get to the end of this bridge, you want to stop and eat?”
I had dreamed about phone calls. I needed to send warnings, in advance of my arrival in Key West. In order of importance: Claire Cahill, Olivia Jones, Sam Wheeler. I wanted to hear Teresa Barga’s voice. I didn’t dare call. I had no way to know whose phone had been tapped, whose answering machine might be monitored. One thing certain: I wouldn’t find anyone awake at four A.M. I had better make sense with my warnings.
“Let’s stop near a telephone, see if I can walk. How did you hook up with Fortay, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Started, he saved my life. Some administrative error, I got sentenced to thirty-six months, but by mistake sent to Atlanta. Maximum loony bin. I’m in the washroom, a deranged Marielista jumps me, goes for my throat. Fortay walks in, pulls him off, swabs the floor with the fucker. Everything he could do but kill him, in fifteen seconds flat. He tells me to get the hell out of there, all the noise, somebody’s going to solitary. He said, ‘I can take the hole. You can’t.’ So I split and he gets thirty days of dungeon. Through my lawyer, I sent his wife in Baton Rouge five grand cash. Fortay got out of the hole, learned what I did, I never had another problem, the two more months it took me to get transferred. Believe it or not, ever since he got out, we’ve stayed in touch. He even sends Christmas cards, pictures of his grandchildren.”
Spence turned off Interstate 10 onto U.S. 98, a four-lane divided highway. He parked alongside a pay-phone kiosk in front of a construction site. A huge sign read, COMING SOON MOTEL. Brilliant. The chains had begun promoting their places with laughs instead of free Raisin Bran.
Jesse helped me out of the car. I called my own number. I got my machine. I said, “Claire, it’s me. I’ll see you soon,” and hung up. I called Sam Wheeler, got his machine. I said, “Sam, it’s me. Sorry about the time. Pick up, please … Waiting … Still here …”
I hung up, afraid to leave a cryptic message for fear my words would be too cryptic, too confusing. I also didn’t have the strength to remain standing at the pay phone. Spence helped me slide back into the Chrysler’s rear seat. We drove a few hundred yards and stopped again. I kept my eyes closed.
Minutes later Spence woke me with a tall orange juice and a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage. “What‘d’ya know,” he said. He poured at least three ounces of Absolut into the juice. “A Waffle House, in Daphne, Alabama. Here in the middle of friggin’ nowhere. Drink this, eat this, fly south. You’ll be a brand-new man by cocktail hour.”
“Brand-new?”
“You got it.”
“With a longer dick and a bigger brain?”
“Sorry. It’s one or the other.”
22
I deplaned in Orlando, hunched over to negotiate the center aisle, down the ladder one step at a time, then shuffling up the incline. Like walking on soft-boiled eggs, trying not to jar my rib cage. Sitting and standing required awkward, suggestive contortions. The drug-vodka buzz turned into a hideous spike-brain headache. Squealing tots, arriving, exploding with Disney anticipation, were replaced in the concourse by weary, pissed-off tots wiped out by days of long lines, hyper-energized by themepark junk food. Parents, terrorized by the cacophony, became more childish than their rampaging offspring. Some days I wondered why America didn’t just lop off Florida like a diseased thumb and send it floating to another hemisphere.
I went for a phone bank on a wall near some lockers. Two wrong numbers. I hung up before they charged my credit card. Finally, my fingers worked in my favor. My own voice on my own machine. No messages. Odd. One more call. Olivia Jones had just walked into her office.
“Any reward takers?”
“One flaky call that I knew was a hoax. Some Conch kids. I tried to get you at home. These guys were calling, pestering me, trying to scam the reward. I finally said, ‘Screw it,’ and passed it to the lady in the motel. Let her get rid of them. I’ve got another one, though, and this one’s promising. Still pending.”
“Meaning, you didn’t pass it along?”
“Right. This one, I wanted to call you first. It just came in. I should say, he just came in. You’ll never guess.”
“Don’t say a name on the telephone.”
“You’re sounding weird.”
“And don’t call the motel at all.”
“You’re costing me money.”
“When I have fun, I have fun.”
“I know you that well.”
“Well, I’m serious right now. I’m talking genuine danger. Can you take him somewhere, anywhere, and not let him out of your sight? Call me around two. Don’t leave a message. Keep calling until you talk to me directly. I’ll cover your lost reward, your expenses, your exorbitant hourly rate …”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good. Now’s the perfect time for it. I’m scared, too.”
A long silence. “I can take him to …”
“Don’t tell me, please. I’ve got a better idea. Get a contact number to your client …” How to describe Liska? “When’s the last time you heard ‘Stayin’ Alive’ in a bar?”
Olivia hesitated, but said: “I know who you mean.”
“Don’t tell the contact anything except how to find you. Go now.”
TVs played “Headline News” at the departure gate. The waiting passengers were a mixture of khakied weekend warriors, scurrying to the Keys for thirty hours of booze and debauchery, and foreigners—German and Brit kids. Young men weary, defiant. The women awkward, with huge potential for moodiness. There must be a European “been there, done that” checklist somewhere, the Requirements of Fulfillment that dictated walking the length of Duval Street in heavy sandals with backpack. Do two miles, sleep in the hostel, jump the next plane out. It was their shallow business, the hit-and-run tourism, but they’d worn out their welcome on small aircraft with their refusal to budget soap and deodorant.
The takeoff prompted another of Jesse Spence’s mystery pills. After the medication took, the droning became an enveloping Magic Fingers, the vibrations lulled me into surrealistic vignettes, ponderings that gave to half-awake, abbreviated dreams. The same question kept forcing its way to the head of the line: Why had Tazzy Gucci invited me to New Orleans?
An attendant raised her hand to adjust my pillow. I flinched. She checked my wounds, quickly apologized, and offered me a microscopic bag of peanuts. I conned her out of six, and asked if anyone northbound had left a Key West Citizen in the cabin.
She found a front section. Marnie Dunwoody’s mission had paid off with a lead story:
DOCUMENTS INDICATE CRIME COVER-UP
Howard Tucker, son of Monroe County Sheriff Tommy Tucker, and husband of Wednesday’s murder victim, Chloe Tucker, is no stranger to jail cells. His rap sheet includes such pastimes as crack cocaine sale and possession, petty larceny, motor vehicle theft, alleged domestic abuse, aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, and possession of stolen goods. But documents gathered from seven South Florida law enforcement agencies suggest that Tucker’s convictions represent only “the tip of the iceberg,” says retired Monroe County detective Nestor “Pepsi Cola” Lopez.
Computer data suggest that Howard “Little Howie” Tucker has avoided prosecution almost four times as often as he has faced a judge. His jail time, for eleven misdemeanor and seven felony convictions, totals fewer than fourteen months. State Attorney Lyle Johnston yesterday refused to confirm that the impaneled Grand Jury has reviewed evidence linking Monroe County Sheriff Tommy Tucker to his son’s preferential treatment.
Sheriff Tucker, asked to comment on allegations that he systematically pressured law enforcement officials to grant favors and leniency to his son, called them “trumped-up bilge water and pansy-assed political backstabbing.”
Broward County detectives yesterday linked Howard Tucker to pawned jewelry items possibly stolen from Chloe Tucker in the days or hours immediately preceding the discovery of her body in the Key West Cemetery.
Marnie had handed Chicken Ne
ck Liska the election break he needed. The kid had been “hands-off” in politics for fifteen years. Tucker’s opponents had assumed no proof existed that could tie him to Little Howie’s invulnerability. Suddenly, a weakness. The sharks would swarm to attack, and Tucker’s allies would vanish like steam off Cuban yellow rice. The Lower Keys had built a history of eleventh-hour vote swings. This shift would be founded on more than the standard mud-slinging.
The plane avoided the mile-high cumulus cloud that hovers near Wisteria Island in late August. A routine west-east approach, quickly descending, past astronomical real estate on the postage stamp once called Tank Island. No one had derived the name “Sunset Key” from a Spanish or Seminole phrase. One still saw blank spots in Old Town where huge ficus and banyan and other non-native trees had toppled during 1998’s Hurricane Georges, though indigenous vegetation and most full-time residents had quickly bounced back.
We touched down on schedule, at precisely one-ten P.M.
My paranoia produced an ugly dividend: with my fear of contacting anyone by phone, I had failed to ask anyone to pick me up at the airport. On the other hand, in my condition, I didn’t particularly want to see a familiar face.
Outside the Arrivals gate, a pack of cabbies stood in the shade of an overhang, bullshitting, kicking the dirt, flicking their ashes downwind.
“Cab downtown, sir?” said a short black man in a referee’s striped shirt. Then he looked at me as if he’d changed his mind, gone off the clock.
My mini-zoom camera hung from its neck strap. My carry-on bag was as good as empty. The cabbie stared at my pocked face. I’d checked the multiple scabs in an Orlando Airport men’s room. Two had been draining. No telling what they looked like coming off the flight into Key West. The cabbie saw me as another cheap-ass, bad-tip tourist, arriving drunk at the party, a bona fide risk to puke in his hack.