by Tom Corcoran
Sam looked around. “My first time in this place in daylight. Bad town for a dentist to make a living.”
“Great place for a bar, though,” said Tanner.
I sipped my rum and soda, supported myself by one elbow on the sticky bar, and juggled the link-ups based on new info: Samantha, the daughter of Buzzy Burch, friend from childhood of Angel Best. Angel, daughter of Tazzy Gucci and married to a dead man. Ray Best’s body found at the Green Dolphin, where Abby Womack, Zack’s former mistress, had stayed. The matching emerald pinkie rings suggested that the late Ray Best had been, perhaps, more than just a business associate of the late Omar Boudreau.
What more did I know about Angel Best? Had she gone to college with Samantha, at the University of Florida in Gainesville ? How had she met Ray Best? Had Best done time in prison with any of the three main players?
The folksinger finished his song and took a break. The synthesized intro to “Jet Airliner” by the Steve Miller Band wailed from the big speakers in the cluster of grass shacks and barstools. I felt a kinship to Tazzy Gucci, stuck in limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen. I tapped Tanner and motioned him back outside where we could talk without shouting. The others followed us out.
Sam said, “Gotta leave you folks. Olivia asked me for a ride home, and I promised to pick up Claire Cahill at the airport …” He checked his watch. “In seventeen minutes.”
“I’ll get home, somehow,” I said.
“You look dizzy,” said Olivia. “When was the last time you ate?”
“Or had an X ray?” said Sam.
My mind had clicked on a connection. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I didn’t feel as bad as I looked. I waved off their concerns.
As Sam and Olivia walked away, a pedicab—a three-wheeled cycle with a single seat for the driver and two in back for passengers—coasted around the corner from William Street. I flagged down the young woman driver and said to Tanner, “Ten more minutes of your time?”
“Probably not.”
“Just down by the Hyatt. Help me look for a certain inflatable boat.”
Dubbie checked his surroundings, judged the propriety of his being seen in my company. The blatant luxury of a pedicab ride didn’t fit his image. “I’ll walk on down,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
Tanner had new cash in his pocket. Part of those ten were budgeted for one more pass at the bar.
A quasi-official city sign designated the Dinghy Storage Beach along the Hyatt’s western property line at the foot of Simonton. The narrow stretch of marl and sand provided the only public access to salt water on the north side of the island. A profusion of other signs—NO DMNG, BEACHES OPEN 7 A.M. TO 11 P.M., and a reflector-enhanced DEAD END—surrounded the stubby, useless launching dock. Various signposts had become hitching pilings for five or six bright kayaks, canoes, and rowboats. One Zodiac stood out among them. I had guessed correctly; Tanner’s confirmation would be redundant. But I’d asked him to meet me, and I would wait.
My pedicab driver, the type Wheeler referred to as a “hardbody” blonde, in short shorts and a bright orange haltertop, accepted an exorbitant tip and agreed to wait a few minutes. She told me her name was Margarita. She did not look Hispanic. I asked if she had been given that name by her mother. She admitted her name was Andrea. It had always sounded unexciting, so she’d decided, instead of buying breast implants, to rename herself. So far, she was pleased with her decision. “I can always go back to Andrea,” she said. “Like, if I go back to school in Gainesville. The other things, they wouldn’t be so easy to, like, change my mind.”
Every woman in the world had gone to school in Gainesville.
Ten minutes passed. Tanner showed no more than two minutes later, doing the wiggle-wobble, a stupid, happy grin on his face. He looked at the Zodiac, said “Gong,” then turned back toward Schooner Wharf.
Damn, but I wanted to lie down next to Teresa Barga. I’d be useless and pitiful, but an hour of rum and sympathy would certainly clear my mind. I couldn’t get my hopes up. I probably couldn’t get anything else up, either. But I wanted to know why she’d been so pissy and all-business en route to the Green Dolphin.
I stared at Margarita. The connection slipped into place like two perfectly machined chunks of heavy metal. Sammy Burch had attended the University of Florida in Gainesville. I suddenly needed to act on a hunch. A small chance based on the idea that there are only forty-three people in the world who just keep meeting in different places.
“Can you take me to the Shipyard condos at the Annex?”
Margarita climbed aboard her three-wheeled taxi. “You call it, I’ll pedal.”
“Well, I was also thinking Jamaica.”
25
I’d warned myself to look over both shoulders, to grow eyes in the back of my head. Maybe that’s why I checked. A city car, a block behind Margarita’s pedicab. Two buzzards, an Hispanic and a black, in an ivory-toned, unmarked Malibu. Chicken Neck had promised a tail.
I felt a rush, and attributed my energy surge to the idea that the KWPD, on Liska’s word, had found me that important. I tried to imagine their observing the drunken meeting at Schooner Wharf’s Dumpster. Cop logic would fail.
I thought it imprudent to lead them to their fellow employee.
I ordered Margarita the wrong way through post office parking, from the drive-thru drop boxes near Fleming back toward the central walkway, then out the Eaton entrance. We collected four horns, three middle fingers—one from a blue-haired lady in an Oldsmobile, who gave it the old up-and-down-motion—and a staged, exaggerated swerve. The diversion succeeded. The detectives missed our show. Traffic at Mile Zero forced them left at Fleming, to a succession of slow signals and one-way streets.
Margarita retraced our path on Whitehead, pedaled against the one-way flow of Fleming, and turned south on Thomas, behind the courthouse. In less than a minute we reached the Shipyard entrance. I coaxed the gate code from the bar floor of my memory.
Teresa Barga’s town house looked more imposing in bright sunlight than it had four midnights ago. I gave Margarita thirty dollars. I asked her not to split until I’d made it inside the condo door. I suggested she depart the Annex via the Front Street gate, a half-mile north, away from the buzzards’ lost-tail grid search.
I didn’t hear a bell when I pressed the button. I knocked and, through the curtain, confirmed my long-shot hunch. The folding bicycle that Samantha Burch had ridden from Sam Wheeler’s dock slip four days ago.
I knocked again. Then, again.
Teresa answered. She wore a short terry-cloth robe, a beet-red “caught” look on her face. She held a “shush” finger to her lips. Her eyes said, “Not now.” She waved me away.
“We need to talk.”
A nasty tone: “I’ve got company.”
Nasty begets jealousy: “Male or female?”
“Both.”
A rooster crowed in the parking lot behind me. I checked the robe’s short hem, looked back at her thin lips, the lack of perspiration on her upper lip, the falseness of her mussed hair. Her breasts stuck out unnaturally for someone nude under a wrap. The thrust of a bathing suit top or a bra. I looked down again. Sneakers. Better traction in the silk sheets?
“So, you took the afternoon off for a hot date? An after-themurder, after-lunch three-way? Is that it?”
Teresa stepped back, began to close the door. “None of your business.”
I felt a draft from the air conditioner. “Now your name starts with a ‘B.’”
She cracked it back open. “Don’t you dare call me a—”
“It’s for ‘Bullshit.’”
Her face hardened. She wouldn’t answer me. I envisioned Sammy Burch in the living room, feet up, sipping wine, thumbing through a J. Crew catalog. Or in the bedroom, on the highlevel queen-size, identically flushed.
“Okay, what’s going on in there is not my business. But if you took me to bed for some con-game setup …”
“I did not.”
Teresa looke
d near tears. Once again I’d guessed correctly. The con was the alleged three-way.
“You get to know Samantha up in Gainesville?”
Teresa hissed: “You’re being followed. You can’t be here.”
“The jokers in the Malibu stopped for a beer.”
As I said the word “beer,” the dead bolt hit the doorframe like a sledge. Pain returned to my lower back. Paybacks for the hurry-up pedicab ride. I looked behind me. Margarita was long gone, with the nearest coin telephone two blocks away. Maybe Teresa would do me a favor. Call the department, get word to the buzzards that I needed a ride from Thomas Street. I stepped off the porch to the shade of a flowering acacia tree.
“Rutledge? I think you better come in.”
I’d wanted to hear his voice all week long. Now I wasn’t so sure.
The all-new Zack Cahill. Thinner, deeply tanned, in shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. He looked healthy and younger, in spite of the dominant white hair in his new beard. By Chicago standards he needed a haircut. His sun-weathered ball cap advertised THE SALTWATER ANGLER. He could pass for a ten-year local. Probably even had sea-grape stains on the seat of his shorts. The great fatigue around his eyes offered the only clue to his anxiety.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Well, here I am.” His face told me he’d heard my first four words as I’d meant them: half curse, half epithet. Still, I felt pure relief. I wouldn’t have to inform Claire Cahill of her husband’s death. Not yet, at least.
I returned slowly to the porch.
Zack stepped back to let me inside, extended his arm to shake hands. “The cluster-hump snowballed on me, Alex. I can explain some of it. I won’t waste your time with an apology.” The old Zack Cahill.
“Try me. And don’t grab my hand too hard. I’ve got broken bones I didn’t have a week ago. You don’t know one-tenth the shit you’ve caused.”
He rechecked the parking lot, shut the door. “It’s been hell on this end, I assure you.”
“And you wanted to invite us all down?”
“I assume you know some of what’s been happening.”
“Maybe most of it, from Jesse Spence and Abby Womack.”
“Are you in touch with Abby?”
The new Zack Cahill.
“Let me see if I heard you correctly. You just asked how Claire is doing.”
A flicker of shame: “How’s she doing?”
“Better than you deserve.”
“True since the day I met her. Teresa told me she’d been here.”
“For one day, your fax in hand. Then she left, but she was due back this afternoon. Dial my number.”
Zack hesitated, sat in a rattan chair, then reached for Teresa’s cordless. A can of Mountain Dew on the table next to him, along with a yellow legal pad, a felt-tip pen, and a matte-silver Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol. Relief warmed my legs as I eased onto a wicker rocker next to Teresa’s bookshelf. A shelf of Florida mysteries. My best friend now qualified for inclusion.
“Your face, Alex …” he said.
“Long story. On second thought, don’t dial. Lately, it’s best not to trust the phone lines.”
Cahill settled back. “Abby’s a problem.”
I agreed. Only two hours earlier, I’d decided that she had unlatched my window before bunking on my futon Monday night, offered access that my prowler had missed. “She told me you brought her in early, then dealt her out of the deal. Why wait for the finale to bring her back?”
“That’s not exactly it. Let me double-back to what happened first.”
“Anything for clarity.”
“Six weeks ago, Samantha Burch came to my office in Chicago. I knew her father was due for release, so I’d contacted Scotty Auguie in St. Barth’s and ‘Tazzy Gucci’ Makksy in New Orleans. We’d all planned to meet in Key West. But Samantha told me that Buzzy Burch had heard on the prison grapevine that a couple of mopes were going to knock down a money stash belonging to Tazzy Gucci. Tazzy’s no tycoon, so it could only mean the distribution of trust assets coming from me. I called back to Tazzy. He got vague as hell, couldn’t figure how anyone outside the circle would know anything. My impression at the time, he sounded embarrassed.”
“Now that people are dead, he’s admitting his mouth,” I said. “A few years back, in the slam, he thought he was going to croak by heart attack. He asked somebody to tell his daughter about the trust, make sure she knew. He told me the guy’s name. Joe Mental Block. It’ll come back to me.”
“Anyway, next step, I ran into Abby, in Chicago, about a month ago. She showed up in a club I go to fairly often. I guess our talk rolled back to the old days, when we …” He stalled. At least he was hesitant to brag on it.
“Just keep talking.”
“She mentioned the Key West deal, asked if it felt good to have that crap behind me. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I told her it wasn’t behind me yet. So I guess she got worried about me.”
“Why go to New Orleans?”
“I wanted to believe that Buzz and Samantha were wrong. I went to push Tazzy Gucci, to make sure the alleged danger was just prison talk. We were only days away from the end of this stupid adventure, and I wanted neatness. No complications.”
“But you split.”
“Somehow, Abby learned I was going to New Orleans, my flight number and arrival time. She’d come in one flight ahead, my own personal volunteer, making herself useful. She’d followed me when I arrived, like a self-appointed bodyguard. She called my hotel right after I checked in, told me she’d seen a man following me. Told me to get the hell out fast. I called Tazzy Gucci. He hadn’t told anyone I was coming. It all smelled like fish, so I decided to skip the next morning’s meeting and beat feet. I still don’t know how she knew my travel plan.”
“Spence connected her to the mess at his house. He also thinks his place got hit because Tazzy’s phone was tapped. That makes Abby the number-one problem.”
“Except for one thing. What did she do, shoot herself for credibility?”
Good point. “She found out you’ve been aboard the Blown Aweigh. She’s out looking for you right now. I assume she’ll find Samantha.”
He hefted the Mountain Dew. “It’s a big ocean.”
A new Cahill, indeed.
“On the other hand, if Abby’s legit, she could be in danger, too.”
“She’s an uninvited guest.”
Indeed.
Teresa appeared next to my chair. She began to swab my wounded cheek with peroxide. I am only human. I took my time confirming that, indeed, she wore a bra under the robe. A fleshcolored silky number designed for altitude and visibility. The medication and air-conditioning began to dehumidify my brain.
I said, “Tazzy Gucci’s daughter, Angel Best. With us or against us?”
“Samantha thinks against us. It goes back to an agreement they made as teenagers, about paybacks for being without fathers so long. They invented a conspiracy to blackmail their parents, to make sure they got compensated. Samantha grew up and came to understand that her mother, Katie, deserved it more than anyone else. Angie’s life hasn’t been the best. We’re not talking about a spring of motivation. She’s a school dropout. Samantha said she had turned into a narrow-minded ‘yat.’ I think that’s bad.”
“Angie may have recruited Omar and Ray to do her bidding.”
“Correct. Or maybe one and not the other. One to hijack her so-called inheritance, with the odd man out wise to the scheme and trying to weasel it away for himself.”
“Do we know who killed Omar Boudreau?”
Zack looked me in the eye. “No.”
“Do we know who killed Ray Best?”
“No. But he might have taken that shot at Abby.”
“Could Samantha be responsible for any violence?”
“Your thoroughness is getting distasteful.”
Maybe so, but under the circumstances I wanted to ask the same question about Teres
a. “Is Buzzy Burch orchestrating this crap from his prison cell?”
“Nope. Burch walks out of prison tomorrow morning. By suppertime, he’ll be aboard the Blown Aweigh, enjoying the sunset and a glass of wine with his daughter. At Dinner Key Marina, in Miami.”
“No halfway house?”
“He took his whole sentence to the door.”
“What did you hide in my house, Zack?”
Teresa was climbing the stairs to the loft. Cahill waited until she’d moved out of earshot. “A quarter of a million dollars.”
Where in hell could he have hidden it?
The old Zack Cahill read my mind. “You’re better off not knowing.”
I’d have been better off not having experienced the past six days of my life. “How could you do this?”
“A question that’s been trailing me like a ghost for years.”
“Sounds like a line from Death of a Salesman.”
“I’ve always blamed it on the mood of this town, in the late seventies, the early eighties. Remember when Claire and I stayed at the old Hibiscus Motel, before they remodeled it?”
I remembered. They’d gone out on their own, on an evening when I was too exhausted to party. At two-thirty A.M. Claire had phoned in a panic. Zack had been arrested. They had stayed late at the Full Moon Saloon. John-John, the bartender, had known they were friends of mine, had bought a few extra drinks for the Cahills. Walking to the motel, Zack had leaned into a croton bush to take a piss. A patrol car had stopped. With no one but Claire in sight, an officer had charged Zack with indecent exposure. I recalled her voice: “They said it’s a sex crime, Alex! The computer will list him as a pervert for the rest of his life.” It had taken two phone calls to get Zack released. The next day, Zack had been astonished, not only to have been released, but to have been driven back to the Hibiscus by an apologetic arresting officer.
“You experience things like that, you think the whole island’s one big ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
I said, “You play what you’re dealt. It’s hardly ever free.”
“So, three guys tossed me a challenge. I took the gig. I agonized over that decision a long time. A lot of two-day hangovers.”