by Tom Corcoran
I looked past him, at another driver, and recognized a gnarled face, black Greek captain’s hat, smoker’s complexion, and gray ponytail. The Five-Sixes driver who’d delivered Abby Womack and me to my house the night we’d met at Louie’s Backyard. He looked back and, biting a fingernail, gave me a once-over, then turned away. I walked up to him.
He said, “Y‘okay, buddy?”
“Sprained my back yesterday. I’m moving slow.”
He motioned with his arm toward the black man. “Gentleman over there’s first in the hack line.”
“But today I want to do business with you.”
He shrugged and led the way to the pink cab with its wingedwheel door logo. I carefully slid into the backseat.
Over his shoulder, “Can I ride you around, show you the budget hotels?”
“Shitcan it, man. I live here.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Shame, that guy kickin’ the bucket.”
“Which one is that?”
“Guy from Saturday Night Live.”
Had there been news I hadn’t heard? “You mean Belushi?”
“I mean that comedian.”
New travels slowly in the Keys. I took another stab: “Phil Hartman?”
“That’s the one.”
“Quite a while back, right?”
“Right. His old lady zipped him with a pistol. He was asleep. Clocked with a Glock. She probably bought it on his charge account. Shame.”
He must practice his ditz rap, must imagine it improves tips. He’d come to paradise to live in his own little world.
I gave him precise directions to the house. I wanted this trip to end. My list of chores got longer each hour. I wanted, more than anything, to be in bed. I wanted to recuperate in a private high-ceilinged room with sand-colored plaster walls, on natural cotton sheets, with green leaves reflecting sunlight in my window, a soft breeze, moderately humid, fluttering the gauzy curtains, polished hardwood floors, a constant nurse—Teresa Barga, in a white bibbed uniform—begging me to once again be whole. Amend that. The uniform would include a thin cotton skirt cut above the knee so my prying hand, in spite of my pain, might explore the seams and textures of her underwear, the smooth contours of her …
Twice, the cabbie got into the wrong turning for the most direct route to my house.
“How long you been in Key West?” I said.
“Two weeks, actually.”
“Still learning the city?”
“You might say.”
The cab stopped on Fleming, ten feet from the Dredgers Lane stop sign.
I said, “The other night you brought me here.”
The driver reached to fuss with the fare meter. “Tell you the truth, pal, I didn’t remember your face.” He started to turn toward me, but remembered how I looked and twisted forward. “But I remember this drop-off. With a lady in white shorts, right?”
“The other night you didn’t want to drive into the lane.”
“Like right now. I made that goddamn mistake earlier that same day. What was it, Monday morning? Wore out the goddamn power steering trying to get around, to leave.”
“This lane or another lane?”
“Like I said, this one.”
I handed him a five. “Man or a woman?”
“Man. Stank like a brewery.”
“Where’d you pick him up?”
“Caroline and Duval.”
I handed him a ten. “Do me a favor. Show me which house he went to.”
I already knew the answer. I could have saved myself the ten.
Sam Wheeler’s Bronco was parked in the lane. I hobbled twenty yards to the house. My blown-out window had been repaired. Trimmed and painted, a light anti-UV film on the glass. Easy open and close, a special security lock. Better than ever. An invoice was taped to the frame. Two seventy-five for one window. Extrapolate it out, materials and labor, a million and a half to replace my home. I felt another two seventy-five shy of wealthy.
Sam sat on the porch, wearing the rattiest sneakers I’d ever seen. I saw the Bud bottle in his hand. A shudder went up my back. “Same people make your footwear as made your truck?”
“I’m a plain fool for comfort. You’re walking like you got a ten-pound sash weight up your ass.”
I steadied myself on the porcelain-topped table as I sat on the lounge chair. “I was dragged into a foreclosed bar. A man the size of Boca Chica Naval Air Station broke my back and knocked my brains into my sinus cavity.”
“Where, exactly, did this transpire?”
I turned my head to the neighbor’s yard. “What’s that tree with the peeling red bark?”
“The gumbo-limbo. What are you talking about?”
“Great name for a restaurant, Gumbo Limbo. What time you fishing her in the morning?”
“The future Mrs. Wheeler?”
“You may want to think again.”
“Yesterday was her last day.”
“She’s Buzzy Burch’s daughter. She’s tied into all this crap.”
Sam nodded as if to say it all added up. We both knew it didn’t. “She said you looked preoccupied, worried. But don’t worry. I didn’t let loose of anything.” He thought for a few seconds, pushing his emotions, his disappointment, to the back burner. “She knew a lot about the stock market, I’ll give her that much.”
“Maybe she was planning to get rich sometime soon.”
“Isn’t it hard to murder and loot when you’re in a boat all day?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. You know how to reach her?”
Sam shook his head. “A couple things she said … I assumed she’d leased a condo or was staying with friends. Whatever, it gave me the impression she wasn’t in a hotel.”
“Any names? Or the genders of friends?”
“It was more like … One thing, she joked about trying to carry milk and orange juice and cranberry juice and bottled water on her bicycle, all at once. Balancing the weight.”
“How about Marnie and Claire?”
“Claire’s due at three-thirty, in from Chicago. She got the needle from the haystack, a videotape from a cruise-ship passenger. And Marnie’s finishing part two of her expose piece.”
“I saw part one.”
“She says the rest’ll blow the roof off the county.”
“I knew the underbelly. I never knew the roof.” I took a deep breath. It hurt. “I need your help.”
“Do I complain?”
“I think Zack’s hustle on Monday morning, disappearing from Sloppy’s, was a ploy to get me out of the house. In which case, he knew I’d search for him and not find him. I think he took a cab here, used his key to get in, and hid something.”
“Like, what?”
“Could be anything. Something as large as a briefcase—full of legal papers or cash or financial statements—or small as a key. Could be a piece of paper. Probably documents.”
“What do we do if we find them?”
“Confirm my theory.”
“Will said documents help us find Cahill?”
“Probably not.”
“So, screw it. What’s to confirm? Whatever it is, leave it right where it is. Spend your energy in another direction.”
Like contacting Olivia Jones. “I need to find Liska.”
“Fifty cents, he’ll be here any minute. He was talking to Marnie, he told her you were on the one-ten. That’s how I knew you were back in town.”
“Was he talking to Marnie about her bombshell?”
“We’re not allowed to know anything. But, yes.” Sam stood and waggled the empty beer bottle, offering to get me one from the fridge. He held out his hand for the house key, noticed the window-repair bill in my hand. “By the way, Waller, my carpenter buddy? He said your prowler was trying to cut his way through the glass. Dumb ass should’ve checked. The window was already unlatched.”
I rarely opened that particular window. I never forgot to latch it. If Zack had hidden something in the house, he wouldn’t have unl
ocked it. Who else? Who else besides Abby Womack?
I looked around at the window repair. I turned too quickly. My back was going to hurt for weeks. Friendship has its limits.
Then I thought, no, it doesn’t.
Sam came back outside and handed me a cold Presidente, the bottle’s green glass a subliminal comfort. He said, “What’s the next step?”
Teresa Barga answered his question. “The city of Key West needs Alex Rutledge’s expertise.”
I hadn’t heard her arrival. She stood at the screen door, a cool sight in the heat of the day, her hair shorter, her face a grimace of frustration. Her height surprised me every time I saw her.
“Hello, lovely woman. What kind of crime?”
“A floater in the Green Dolphin swimming pool. God, you look awful.”
Abby Womack’s motel. “Drowned?”
“Shot, through the neck, sometime between noon and twelve-thirty. As one officer on the scene said, ‘Perpetration was in broad daylight.’ Perpetration always sounded to me like something you’d do in graduate school.”
“Anybody identify the victim?’”
“It’s not who you think it is.” Teresa looked into my eyes, then back out through the screen door. “She checked out this morning.”
23
I brushed my teeth and changed into a shirt that didn’t smell like basketball practice. I recruited two assistants.
Call them allies. Liska would display ill humor.
Sam Wheeler removed my camera gear from its hiding spot while Teresa Barga helped me walk to the city’s Ford Taurus, eased me into the backseat. She did not react to my attempt to hug her, to squeeze her waist. I assumed her silent message was “a time and place for everything,” so I quit the lonely-teardrops monkey business to focus on the job ahead. I would deliver photo expertise, fueled by airline peanuts and pain pills washed down by beer.
Driving on Key West streets requires agility. It also requires memory, but that part becomes second nature on the manhole-cover-and-pavement-patch slalom. Teresa bumped the Taurus’s wheels against every obstacle. Flinching with each pain spasm, I weighed her newcomer status against the odds of intentional bouncing, the chance that her silent message actually had been “cease and desist.” We followed a Volvo station wagon for six blocks down Simonton, never exceeding twenty miles per hour. New Hampshire tags: LIVE FREE OR DIE. The Volvo’s brake lights remained constantly lighted.
Ask the corpse in the pool. You can’t be too safe.
A motorcycle cop with a body shaped like an inverted pyramid manned a barricade at United Street. The corner smelled of charred wood and plastic, and melted rubber. The burned pharmacy, Duffy Lee Hall’s ruined darkroom, now in the hands of the lowest-bidding contractor. A rapid-hammer attack, highpitched, metallic cries of table saws. Another barricade farther down, at South Street, flashing red and blue patrol-car strobes. A yellow Labrador retriever trotted the Simonton center line, skylarking, taking advantage of the odd absence of traffic. Teresa drove around the United barricade and wove past a jumble of official vehicles to get me closer to the motel entrance.
Liska stood between a uniformed lieutenant in a starched white shirt, enough belt equipment to stock a Circuit City, and a burly detective, a ninja wannabe, pumped from weightlifting. He wore black pants with boot holster lumps at his calves, a black T-shirt barely concealing the bulletproof vest, a subdued silver star on its breast pocket, a black belt hung with a Lexan pager, a Lexan phone, handcuffs in a Lexan case. This hotshot, in the dead heat of summer, had to be filling his pointed-toe cowboy boots with perspiration. His wife must love laundering his socks. Hovering nearby, the Key West stringer for the Herald, a grad school ace who thought his occupation deserved MTV coverage.
Liska understood that his campaign was on a roll. He wore a striped necktie of unfashionable width and an asymmetrical knot, a short-sleeved white shirt, dark-colored permanent press pants. I did my damnedest not to laugh, or to limp. Sam trailed me, my camera bag strap looped over his shoulder. Teresa separated herself from us.
“What‘d’ya think?” Liska gave it a morose twist. I could tell already, he was leading me to a place where he could make me suffer.
“A lot of dead people for one week. How’s that reconciliation going with your ex-wife?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, Rutledge?”
“That’s not the question, Liska. Who the fuck do you think I am? You talk to me like tonight’s my big splash on America’s Most Wanted.”
The officers to either side tensed perceptibly.
“I do what I want. I’m the cop.”
“Now we’ve gotten to the core of the problem.”
Liska remained calm. “I gotta say, your face all chopped up, you look like the nameless lady in the hospital who we now know as Elizabeth A. Womack, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These some kind of self-inflicted sympathy wounds?”
“I’ve never been into pain for pain’s sake, Detective. I was kidnapped and assaulted.”
“I’d call that shit luck.” His bored eyes shifted two blocks to the ocean’s pastel inshore waters. The south wind off the beach was hot and damp.
“Knowing the basic lameness of the justice system,” I said, “I decided not to report it. Also, it wasn’t in your jurisdiction. Don’t worry that I might have added trivia to your workload.”
“You bring me the Chloe Tucker murder negs?”
“I forgot ‘em at the house. We going to work here?”
“Communications problem. Sorry to put you to the trouble of bringing your helper, all your high-tech equipment, all your light meters and clever lenses. I wanted you here to identify the floater we yanked from the pool. See if you know this guy. Do your citizen’s duty to assist law enforcement, make the system all that more effective.”
“Always happy to help.” He was leading me somewhere, all right. Into a setup. I didn’t want to view the corpse. This could be nothing but ugly news. My brain whirred like the Skil saws down the block, sifted awful possibilities. Abby Womack had been staying at the Green Dolphin. Olivia Jones had had her heart set on collecting a reward. Had Olivia taken a chance and called Abby, instead of going into hiding? Then it struck me. If someone had killed the reward-seeker, what had they done to the innocent Olivia Jones?
Liska told Sam Wheeler to stay put. The uniformed lieutenant, a Cuban named Alonzo whom I recognized as a third-generation local, led me up the motel driveway, past a crime-tape jubilee—yellow stringers everywhere, from phone poles to skinny palms to the posts that supported the office overhang. I braced myself for the six steps up to the pool. The pain pills were failing to deliver. Fortunately, the tiled steps weren’t tall.
I looked into the blue water. The body had been removed. A professional-looking canvas and aluminum lean-to shielded the oblong package from direct sunlight. I’d expected to see a reddish tinge in the pool. But if the victim had been killed, then dumped, there’d have been no heartbeat to pump blood. I stepped around a three-foot chain-link gate and focused on details other than the body. A narrow concrete walkway and white ten-inch lighting globes on short posts surrounded the pool. A makeshift cabana at the far end sheltered lounge chairs and an Ocean Spray vending machine. Two access gates. An open shower at the southwest corner. A NO DIVING sign. Tell that to the corpse, too. People up north waited and saved cash fifty weeks a year for their turn in tropical heaven.
Off to the left, a circular table with four wood-slat chairs. Cootie Ortega on the far chair, staring at me, two cameras on his lap, baking in the hot sun. A tourist family of four stood on the near side of the electric-blue pool. Fair Nordic skin turning beet-red. The stench of Noxzema in the air. Probably the lucky ones who found the dead man. The teenage daughter wore black running shorts with the word DEFENSE across her bottom in bright red. The son fiddled with a disposable camera. Exotic snapshots to pass around study hall.
Two women from the medical examiner’s office hovered near the sheet-covered victim. They had wra
pped him like a downtown cigar, and not in a long package. I tried to think of short people who might be involved, mentally ticked off names like a team roster. Nobody came to mind. The lieutenant nudged me toward the body. Okay, let’s get on with it.
Then chill dread ran through my bones. Hector Ayusa must be five-five. Targeted for revenge, the least guilty of all those dancing at the edges of legality.
But the sheet was tubular. Hector was oval.
The lieutenant directed the assistant examiners to peel back the wrap. I turned my head for a moment, inhaled through my nose. Except for Ortega, natural beauty all around. People in the parking lot or near their rooms, a few talking on cell phones. Hot news. I looked back down. They peeled the sheet off his feet first. The man lay facedown. An elaborate seaweed tattoo twined out of his still-dripping lace-up street shoe, up his right leg. He wore a pair of old wino-plaid Bermudas. His cheaplooking polo-style shirt had pulled out of the shorts. He wore no belt. Something about the polo-style shirt rang a distant bell. I knew who it was in the instant before they exposed his shattered head, rolled him sideways so I could look into Ray Best’s lifeless eyes. Three eyes, counting the new one in the middle of his Adam’s apple.
Tazzy Gucci’s son-in-law, and the next thing I saw was an emerald pinkie ring, identical to Omar Boudreau’s.
“We live in strange times.” Liska leaned to catch my expression. His tone told me that he knew I’d recognized the man. “Everything bad, blame El Nino. Everything good, thank St. John’s Wort.”
I moved sideways toward the white slat chair that Ortega had occupied, then noticed Cootie near the fencing, setting up for a shot of me. I gave him a snap wave, a distinctly Cuban order to back off. He sheepishly obeyed.
Ray Best was the husband of the former Angel “Muffin du Jour” Makksy, Samantha Burch’s best friend. Putting together only the facts I knew, I could not picture Samantha shooting him in the first place, then carrying him to the pool. But facts were facts.
“Do I hear you talking to me?” Liska sat two feet away.