Gumbo Limbo

by Tom Corcoran

  I told Chicken Neck who he was, where he lived, where he worked.

  “Like the other guy with the emerald ring,” said Liska. “New Orleans.”

  “Omar ‘Joe Blow’ Boudreau once worked at the same place.”

  “This is the shit you’ve been holding out on me?”

  “I learned all this in the past thirty hours. This is shit I bought with my personal health and well-being. You’re welcome.”

  “Tell me about the photo you dropped in my ‘in’ basket Wednesday.”

  I’d almost forgotten the “arson suspect” three-by-three that Olivia Jones had generated from the Conch Train crowd scene. I explained Stapleton’s mention of a man with a burned hand the morning that Abby Womack had been shot, and his later ID of the man in the crowd-scene proof.

  “That’s just great,” said Liska. “All your helpful legwork, you know, you’ve built a nasty case against your friend Zachary Cahill. What did you call him, an ‘expert at meeting trouble head-on’? My take is, he’s expert at hooking up with trouble. Did Boudreau and this guy work for Zack Cahill?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t imagine so.”

  “He left a trail at the airport.”

  “A trail.”

  “We traced his credit card charges. Last Sunday night—re—ally, Monday morning—he chartered a Cessna Citation jet, New Orleans to Key West.”

  “Funny,” I said. “Nothing clandestine, no attempt to hide his movements. Didn’t Tommy Tucker snarf that case away from you?”

  “Right. And my sources on Stock Island tell me that the deputies called the charter service, talked to the pilots, nothing unusual. The passenger was a ‘real estate executive’ who, quote, had a breakfast meeting, unquote. This meeting so goddamned important that a forty-four-hundred-dollar airplane ride made good economic sense.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Lemme continue. Dewey Birdsall comes up with an analysis, via the FDLE’s lab on the mainland. The gasoline from the pharmacy fire is actually jet fuel. He and I take your photo to the airport, we hit bingo. Two refuelers, early Monday, were topping off a chartered Citation about to deadhead back to New Orleans, this guy in work clothes approaches, cons them into filling a three-gallon container. Says his backhoe’s been idle for a year, the almost-full tank of gas has less oomph than kerosene, and he needs high-octane stuff to dear out his fuel lines, clean out his carburetor. He reasons it’s better than dumping thirty gallons of sludge into the mangroves. The refuelers agree. He slides them twenty bucks each, boogies back over the safety fence, which no one pays attention to before seven A.M. So the fuelers take a look at the photo, and there’s our bingo. Now tell me the connection between Zack Cahill with the Platinum Visa Card and John Doe with three gallons of jet fuel headed for Stannis Pharmacy.”

  He had me. “I fucking don’t know.”

  “I didn’t think you would. Now tell me why his wife hasn’t filed an official missing persons report.”

  Chicken Neck Liska wasn’t as dumb as his name. “I got two more things for you,” I said. “A suggestion and a fact.”

  “You’ve had a rough time with facts lately. Start with the suggestion.”

  “Find the Blockbuster counter clerk with Christmas decorations all over his ears. Get him to identify this dead fellow over here as the shooter who missed Abby Womack. Back up the ID by confirming that Ray Best rented a white Mustang convertible on the day it happened.”

  Smug: “The clerk’s name is Tree Toad. We got to him an hour after you did. He loved your fancy car.”

  “You still wouldn’t have made the connection.”

  “You got something else?”

  “Jesse Spence didn’t kill the girl, Chloe. He was in Tallahassee that day, and his lawyer’s faxing you proof of the fact.”

  Liska gazed around at the motel grounds, the medical examiner’s people hoisting the body into their van, the onlookers with bored faces as if waiting for a punch line or a commercial. “Look,” he said. “Based on the past however many days, it’d make all the sense in the world for me to warn you that, for the next seventy-two hours, minimum, someone will be watching every move you make. That could be any number of people.”

  “You don’t have that power.”

  “We’ll see. I got a message for you.”

  “An address or a phone number?”

  Liska shook his head. “Two words. ‘Beer thirty.’ Sounds like fun, sport.”

  Before I left the Green Dolphin, I shuflied into the motel office and asked to use a phone. Liska’s mention of Dewey Birdsall had reminded me of something. Birdsall was in his office. He gave me the number of his brother-in-law, Gil Salter, the term life insurance salesman. Salter answered his phone on the second ring.

  I introduced myself, then said: “You know anything about risk tables?”

  “Everything there is, for life insurance.”

  “How about health insurance?”

  “I know some. Just took a Florida brush-up course. Try me.”

  “Know anything about statistics to prove that a gunshot victim is at much higher risk for another gunshot wound?”

  “We talking civilians, or jobs like law enforcement and security?”

  “She’s a civilian.”

  “Misconception. It’s car accidents that repeat. Gunshot wounds, it’s the opposite. Assuming mental health, if someone survives a wound, they usually take special care to avoid future gun situations.”

  “So there’d be no jacking up the premium for someone who’d been, say, a drive-by victim or an innocent bystander.”

  “Nope. Unless, of course, it happened a second time.”

  Our ride leave without us?“

  “In a flash,” said Sam. “She informed Liska that she’d previously asked for the afternoon off, and she was already an hour into her personal time.”

  I went back inside, begged one more use of the phone, and called a taxi. Sam and I waited at United and Simonton, where the burly motorcycle cop micro-managed the intersection, strutted about, directing pedestrians and drivers to continue in the directions they’d intended, but only with his permission. During a traffic lull he showed brilliant condescension in his reprimand for my supporting my weight against the city’s sawhorse barricade.

  Sam stared at the officer. “Go broke peddling common sense in this town.”

  I checked the time and temperature sign a block away at First State Bank. Ninety-one degrees, 2:46 P.M. “Like selling discount igloos. White hats, too.”

  “Good guys are that scarce?”

  “This was never good guys and bad guys. We’ve been attacked by deadly no-see-ums.”

  “We fight back with aerosols?”

  I wiped sweat from my upper lip. “We pray for freezing weather.”

  24

  I slid out of Sam Wheeler’s ‘69 Bronco alongside the Western Union berth. An aluminum can clattered to the pavement behind me. It hadn’t fallen out the open door; it had gone through the Bronco floorboard.

  “Kick ass.” Sam U-turned to park in the lot behind B.O.’s Fish Wagon.

  I was afraid to kick air, fearful of stubbing my toe.

  The leeward side was becalmed, yachts, rigging, and dock lines unmoving in the island’s north harbor marina. Tourists moved at quarter speed. Listless gulls loafed on boardwalk railings. Diesel exhaust and damp barnacles owned the humid air. Slow time in the off-season, the middle of Saturday afternoon. Lost in the eye of an invisible hurricane, I took my only comfort from the waning aid of illicit truck-stop pain pills, the close-athand promise of rum.

  A faded blue-and-gold Conch Republic pennant hung limp from the fore spreader of a traditional-rig, wood-sticked Alden yawl. Fringed telltales aloft drooped downward, matching my state of mind. A bilge pump began to spit into the harbor water. The sound reminded me of the sucking noise Ray Best had made as he’d finished his iced tea at Guy’s Po’ Boys on Magazine Street, the sound he must have made though the hole in his throat as he died.<
br />
  A ninety-percent-local crowd had jammed into Schooner Wharf. A guitar picker sang an obscure, poignant Steve Goodman song with the proper spirit, an emphasis on lyrics, a chuckle in his voice, perhaps too strong on volume. Three ceiling fans pushed cigarette smoke from the roofed section. Vicky ran a hundred miles an hour, keeping regulars’ drinks filled, powerwhispering off-color jokes, uncapping longnecks for table servers, boosting high-gear patter and laughs. Her smile could brighten the waterfront; the gleam in her eyes beckoned ships to shore. I barely had the strength to step off the boardwalk, into the saloon. People glanced at my facial wounds and shifted their eyes, assuming I’d fallen while drunk or had been disciplined by a jealous person. No one wanted to embarrass me by staring or asking, judging my condition too edgy for comment.

  They sat at the shady end, away from the patio, under the dark orange Hurricane Chaser life ring. One-liners and verbal jabs were flying. Olivia Jones had morphed into a slurring blend of Whoopie and Oprah; Dubbie Tanner countered with George Carlin’s hippie-dippy weatherman. I could see that the bar tab would be huge. They’d invented a low-key version of stacking dead soldiers: precarious piles of bottle caps teetered between them. I’d worried about their lives being endangered. I should have sweated their ability to reach the rest rooms without damaging themselves or the furniture.

  I leaned against a wooden roof support and surveyed the bar. I couldn’t put names to the faces, the grizzled, salty characters one finds in Schooner’s, but, one by one, I could eliminate each as a threat in the three-ring circus that had trailed Zack’s disappearance. For some reason, just then, an ill feeling gripped me, a spooky, reenergized fear, a premonition that Cahill was dead and that my efforts and injuries had amounted to nothing more than pissing up a rope.

  Tanner saw me first. His mischievous grin compressed into a tight-lipped grimace, I read his lips: “What’s he doing here?”

  Olivia turned. Her smile wilted as her mind shifted gears. Skewed by her beer intake, she slipped from her revelry into recalling the undefined danger I’d mentioned on the phone. “He’s come to pay our tab …”

  Tanner tried to push himself from the barstool. His legs and arms weren’t cooperating. “You tell me no cops, fuckhead,” he shouted, pointing at my chest. “Then, what, parked next to your house? Goddamned sheriff’s cruiser and two uniforms, bigger than shit …”

  The whole place froze at his words. Even Vicky and big Chris, behind the bar, stopped to check on us. In a weird piece of timing, the singer ended the Goodman song and segued into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The bar patrons were not timid, quiet folk, but they did not come to this place for antagonism. They were likely to take sides, if only to end the confrontation sooner, return the mood to friendly bedlam. Unless I shifted or stopped the dispute’s momentum, I could become a target for their unified wrath. I felt the center of attention, the man in the spotlight. I sensed that a few were taking the opportunity to check me for less obvious damage, to search weak spots should I become a noise problem.

  “Somebody dropped a dime,” I yelled. “That’s why the cops came to my door. I know who put ‘em on me, fucker.” My turn to point. “It was you.”

  Tanner was defenseless. No short denial or explanation would placate the eavesdroppers. My appearance backed my words. Someone had roughed me up; no reason it couldn’t have been police officers. It suddenly fell to Tanner’s self-interest to lower his voice, to back off the aggression. In less of a hurry, he had an easier time getting off the stool. He motioned that the dumbfounded Olivia and I should follow him out the side door, to the alley behind the bar. Wary drinkers cleared us a path, held their beers aside so we wouldn’t bump and spill them or, crazies that we were, arbitrarily knock them to the ground.

  We crossed the pavement and faced off. Olivia stood aside, mystified and wobbly. Looking wan in direct sunlight, Tanner leaned against a stained blue BFI Dumpster. “That quiet doctor doesn’t want any part of you, dude. Right now, I don’t, either.”

  “This doesn’t concern the doctor.”

  “If it’s about the reward poster, it’s cash up-front.”

  I stared at him, let him ponder his unreasonable demand. Fifteen yards away, with the huge Wyland mural as backdrop, Sam Wheeler sat on a bike rack, observing, keeping his distance.

  “I seen your boy.” Tanner tilted back his beer, waved the bottle toward the harbor, then flung it backward. His blind shot hit its target, clanked into the Dumpster, broke. “Three or four days ago on a sailboat. The Blown Aweigh.”

  I pulled the photo of Samantha, Angel, and Ray Best from my shirt pocket. The singer’s musical dirge plodded on, with the line about wives and sons and daughters. For an instant I saw the faces of Claire and her children. “Know anybody here?”

  Dubbie Tanner snatched the print and looked. His gaze held for an extra second. “Going to cost you.”

  “You’re a wealthy man.”

  “You’re going to forget anything you ever knew about me.” He handed me the print with his thumb under Samantha’s face. “She came into the bar two days ago, alone.” He stuck his thumb toward Schooner Wharf. “Ordered a Corona, NFL. Chugged it, had another, then split.”

  “NFL?”

  “No fucking lime.”

  Sweat streamed down my face, burned the cuts, the scabs. “That the only time you ever saw her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.” He waved his arm again, this time in the direction of the big hotels. “Down by the boat-tender mooring behind the Hyatt. She got out of a cab with two full Fausto’s sacks, loaded up a gray Zodiac inflatable, and went out across the channel. Laying in groceries.”

  “Which boat?”

  “You got shit in your ears? The same one, but I didn’t see your poster boy. Haven’t seen him in two days.”

  “You’ve never seen them both at the same time?”

  “Never.”

  “What kind of boat?”

  Tanner slowed, became respectful, let his words show his admiration for the craft: “A classic sharpie ketch, maybe forty-five feet, maybe fifty, beamy, a low cabin with twin solar panels on top, and a big drop rudder. Her sticks are unstayed. Hundred-year-old design. Perfect rig for the Keys. She looks almost new. You bet, some greedhead’s mass-producing knock-off replicas.”

  “Where was she anchored?”

  “Out beyond the Sea Ya. East end of Christmas Tree.”

  I twisted my head to peer. A useless move, with the view northward to the outer harbor obscured by the old red tugboats at the A&B pier. One tug, the Avon, about the same age as the Presto design that Tanner had described.

  Tanner added: “Got under way yesterday.”

  “You see her go?”

  “No. Saw another boat on the mooring. An old Rhodes fonyone, clean as hell. Nobody would’ve gone out the Northwest Channel. There’s weather coming down the Gulf.”

  That left Hawk Channel or the backcountry; though, given the sailboat’s design, she probably could handle anything coming down the Gulf of Mexico. If she had gone out front, she could be in Miami for dinner. “There’s nowhere to go out back except the Everglades.”

  “Depends. If the captain knows the waters, that boat could make it out front through Moser Channel. On the other hand, the bayside tidal channels, the Snipes or up past Little Torch … Be a great place to hide, for a while,” Tanner drunkenly looked around to the northeast. He changed his tone, perhaps having sensed alarm in my insistence. “Or maybe scuttle a boat, you know, destroy evidence. Dump a body or two.” He looked back, tried to look into my eyes. “These people the types to take an ecology tour?”

  Olivia skittered sideways to sit on a giant rusted plow anchor. She had a sick look on her face.

  I offered help. “You need to get out of the sun.”

  She shook her head. “The rewind … I mean, the reward? It may already be gone. Those Conch kids I sent to the lady at the … whatever, the motel? One kid kept making asshole remarks on the phone, kept mouthi
n’ about getting blown away. I didn’t know the little shit was playing words, saying ’blow him away,’ saying what you just said, the name of that sailboat.”

  “The Blown Aweigh.”

  “Yes.”

  Wonderful. Within three minutes, after a week of turmoil, I had tracked Cahill to a sailboat, linked Sammy Burch to the same boat—though, perhaps, not at the same time—and learned that Abby Womack had a half—day jump on my connecting with any of it. I wanted more than a rewind—Olivia’s nervous, drunken slip of the tongue. I wanted to thumb selective delete, drop rude and ugly from the timescape, put Zack and Claire back in Chicago, leave Teresa, Mamie, Sam, and Carmen intact in Key West. Go back to last Sunday night, twelve hours before Cahill’s ominous call from Sloppy Joe’s, stretched out on my couch with my face buried in The Perfect Storm.

  Oh, give me relief from life’s little ironies.

  I snapped back to the moment. Dubbie Tanner had slumped farther down the side wall of the Dumpster, but he held out his open hand, indicating that something needed to cross his palm.

  I stuck my hand into my pocket. “I’d have never told a soul about you, Dubbie. I believe in live-and-let-live. I just forgot everything.” I pulled out Tazzy Gucci’s five not-so-crisp hundreds that Spence had returned to me in Pensacola. I peeled off two for Olivia, two for Tanner, then handed the last one to Olivia. “Will this cover the beers and the tip? Plus one more round?”

  The color returned to Olivia’s face. Her smile stretched from Jabour’s Trailer Court to the abandoned City Electric plant.

  Sam Wheeler joined us in the bar. A good thing, because the designated hundred covered the tab but not the tip. Sam graciously loaned me a fifty. Most of the other midday drinkers had forgotten the outburst, though a bearded man in a BETTY FORD OUTPATIENT T-shirt lifted his cup to salute our peaceful return. The singer finished “Southern Cross,” the Crosby, Stills, and Nash song, then introduced one he wrote for Key West called “I Just Came Down for the Weekend, Twenty-Five Years Ago.”