by Tom Corcoran
“He came with us. But let me say this. I think Angel Best killed her husband, so both people holding guns are murderers. That doesn’t mean you should trust Abby Womack.” I pointed out Tazzy Gucci.
Detective Lewis hurried to Marnie’s Jeep, engaged Tazzy Gucci in deep talk. I leaned against the Benz in the carport until Frank Polan scurried over to demand that I rest my ass elsewhere. I looked in the Mustang’s passenger-side door. Maps and magazines. A yachting guide to cruising the Florida Keys. Trash everywhere. Richard Abbott had spent a bundle at Burger King. I sat on the car’s trunk. In the five minutes I waited, I counted the arrival of three FHP cruisers and two more sheriff’s vehicles.
Bobbi Lewis returned, talking on her hand-held to Liska, holding a megaphone-shaped hailer. “I’m about to say the most sexist thing I’ve uttered in five years. That includes working with ‘No Jokes’ Bohner, also known in the department as ’Limp.’”
“I can hack it.”
“You talk men out of standoffs, you use fear. Women, you work vanity. Got some tips from her daddy.” Keeping an eye on the waterfront, Detective Lewis worked her way to a corner of the house, stuck the hailer around a concrete pillar, tested its volume with a coughing noise.
I looked around. SWAT sharpshooters had positioned themselves in the yard next door. Distressed to the point of panic, Tazzy Gucci slowly walked away, back toward the roadblock.
“Angel Best,” Bobbi Lewis barked. “If you let her go, we can get you on Court TV. If you don’t let her go, we’re going to charge down there shooting. We’re going to riddle your body, but not kill you. We’ll make you ugly and make you hurt. All your perfect lines, your sweet face, your perfect hair, ugly. They’ll have to shave parts of your body to sew you back together. They’ll fix every hole in your body, you know what I mean? An amputation or two, some skin grafts. How would that be? Take pictures of you fucked-up and naked, for the doctors and lawyers and the jury. All the good things they do in hospitals. That’s what you’ll get if you shoot her.”
No response. I went to Lewis. “How is this helping Samantha Burch?”
“The man on the sailboat will think we’re concentrating on the dock instead of him. He’ll do something, to pitch his case for credibility.”
Like shoot Samantha? I poked my head around the pillar. Blown Aweigh‘s mainsail, still up, tight to the masthead, luffed in the light wind. Samantha had furled her mizzen sail around the aft boom. A topping lift cable from the peak of the mizzen mast to the end of the boom, a modern innovation—if my memory of the design hadn’t skewed—held the heavy boom at a thirty-degree angle to horizontal. Good idea, to make it easier for a single-hander to deal with one sail instead of multiples, to move around, unobstructed, in the open cockpit.
Bobbi Lewis and I saw Zack Cahill at the same time, swimming away from the sailboat, directly into the wind, not visible through the cabin’s side portholes. We also saw two feet of rope hanging from the starboard bow chock. Zack had cut the anchor line. Lewis put the hailer to her mouth. “Angel, don’t worry about that sailboat, honey. She’s dragging anchor. She’ll be out in the ocean in five minutes.”
Lewis had calculated correctly. The boat drifted to leeward in the fluky wind. Two heads popped out of the sailboat cabin. Samantha extended her arm, pointing to something along the shore, swinging her arm laterally to demonstrate the boat’s changing position. Richard Abbott’s lack of nautical skill would cost him.
“Detective?” Marnie Dunwoody stood behind Bobbi Lewis. She handed her cellular telephone to Lewis. Abby Womack had called back.
Lewis said, “How can I help you?”
I stuck my head farther around the post. Abby held a phone to her left ear. Angel Best’s pistol lay against the small bandage on the other side of Abby’s head. After Lewis’s “vanity” speech, Angel’s appearance was not what I had expected. Medium height, stocky, plain-faced, the long dark hair of a teenager.
Lewis said: “Honey, we’ll do everything we can. We want her safe, too. Can you hand the phone to the lady with the gun?” She turned and said, “Time for pictures. Start snapping and don’t stop until I tell you.”
Samantha Burch came out of the cabin, stood in the cockpit, pointed at several cleats, and at the bow sprit. She moved along the starboard deck, working her way forward, ostensibly to reset her anchor. Abbott kept his gun pointed at her. I zoomed to the lens max, pressed the button. For an instant, I shifted focus to the two women on the dock, snapped several, then aimed back at the ketch.
“Angel, honey.” Bobbi Lewis took a sympathetic tone. “Your father’s here, worried about you. He said to tell you, he swears on your mother’s grave, he’ll always love you. He wants you alive.”
Richard Abbott’s head, then the upper half of his body, appeared outside the cabin. Another photo. Samantha slipped a loop from a cabin-top cleat, looked forward as if to gauge anchor line tension. I could see that Samantha held the topping lift, not the anchor line. She let it go. The moment the thick boom struck Richard Abbott, Samantha rolled over the gunwale. And the moment Abbott stood, gun arm extended, looking for Samantha in the water, Angel Best removed her pistol from Abby Womack’s head, aimed quickly, and put a bullet into Richard Abbott’s chest.
From twenty yards, a dead shot.
Abby collapsed on the dock. Angel flung her gun, as if spinning a Frisbee, fifteen or twenty yards into the bay water. She then knelt to check the woman she’d held captive for almost three hours.
On Bobbi Lewis’s arm signal, the sheriff’s SWAT team swarmed the dock and launched two inflatable boats from Polan’s concrete ramp. One went for Samantha Burch, who swam from the confusion; the other circled the beamy sailboat to ensure that Richard Abbott had been incapacitated.
Five houses to the north, Zack Cahill climbed a ladder to someone’s dock. The property owner stood there, aiming a rifle at Cahill’s gut.
Zack sat on the planking and wept.
28
The SWAT deputies demonstrated shit judgment, worse seamanship. The first group pulled Richard Abbott’s body off the sailboat before I could take photographs. The other bunch trundled Samantha Burch all the way back to Polan’s dock before one of them confirmed her rant that Blown Aweigh was still adrift, dangerously close to a man-made rock wall. With Detective Lewis’s approval, Samantha booted the men off the inflatable, returned to the yacht, snared the severed anchor line, and slowly towed her craft to mid-bay. In shallow water—and because, I assumed, she’d taken a cross-fix when she first dropped anchor—she located her light Danforth, dived, surfaced with its line, and bent a taut square knot with the bitter ends. The last I looked, she’d tethered the dinghy astern of Blown Aweigh, and dropped the mainsail. Using an empty Bustelo coffee can, she scooped salt water onto the sailboat’s decks and hull, diluting stains of the late Richard Abbott.
Lewis dispatched a deputy to the neighboring dock, to rescue Zack from the gentleman defending his property. Another uniform recited the Miranda to Angel Best, then hustled her to a patrol car. Angel directed her concern less to the handcuffs than to Abby Womack. A diver went after the pistol that Angel had spun into the shallows.
“Please, please take pictures,” said Marnie Dunwoody. “That dipshit at the roadblock won’t let my photographer in.”
Abby’s grief took shape. She clawed her fingernails into a creosoted dock post, repeated the word “motherfucker,” for several minutes, expelling saliva, expressing anger, relief, amazement, bitterness, frustration, and, obvious to those near her, her opinion of her late brother. Her eyes pled for understanding. The message she’d left on my machine had said that her brother had made her do it. She’d never intended to injure anyone.
Nice beat, but I couldn’t dance to it.
Another deputy, helped by an FHP officer, guided Abby toward a county EMS van. I looked beyond the van. Two deputies sticking their hands into a McDonald’s sack. Behind them, Zack Cahill and Tazzy Gucci in business conference, Tazzy strangely calm for having watched his daughter
hauled off to jail. Perhaps his prison experience allowed him calm in the circumstance. He knew that a separation from freedom was not the end of the road. He knew lawyers capable of arguing that Angel’s part in the standoff and the shooting of Abbott fell under the umbrella of protecting Sammy Burch, her dear childhood friend. The murder of Ray Best would be a different story.
I stumbled across Frank Polan’s tiled patio, stepped behind a clump of crotons to take a leak. I should have done it hours earlier. As I zipped up, I heard footsteps.
Detective Lewis: “I wish I could piss in the weeds easy as you.”
“Be my guest.”
“Sure as hell, Polanski’d sue Monroe County for crop damage, or weather-checked aluminum siding. Look, thank you for being here. Tell your buddies I just gave Ms. Dunwoody a quote. I described the confrontation as a domestic feud.” Lewis began to unfasten the belt to her shorts. “This won’t wait. Stand guard and don’t listen.”
I turned to block any view others might have. I laughed aloud at her sigh of relief. She laughed back.
Liska met us in the pea-rock yard. He was closing out a conversation on his cell phone. He handed the sheriffs department radio to Detective Lewis. “Rutledge, I gotta say thanks. One of your graveyard pictures paid off.”
A forgiving voice? “How so?”
“It showed that a left-handed person had tightened the belt around Chloe Tucker’s neck. The sheriffs kid’s a lefty. When they confronted him with the picture, he fell for it. He confessed. She’d caught him stealing her jewelry. She was going to turn him in. He panicked.”
“That mean I can keep my job?”
“I’m still thinking about everything you held back. But I may have to thank you for that, too. I can see why your pal Cahill’s a business success.”
Weather moved in from the west, a single-cloud rain shower lighted by a red-orange sunset. An FDLE mop-up team arrived; Bobbi Lewis relinquished scene supervisor duty, handed over Angel Best’s weapon and a witness list. All deputies. She left off my name, Marnie’s, and Tazzy Gucci’s. While Marnie completed her interview with Polan, I borrowed her cell phone and dialed Teresa Barga.
“Alex, what happened?” Her voice groggy. “Is Samantha okay?”
“She’s fine. Zack’s fine. One man is dead, no one you know.”
“You sound better.”
“I’ve still got a twenty-five-mile ride back. Do you have plans?”
“Is Sammy going to Miami?”
“I don’t know. She’s on the boat. The deputies will ask her to stick around for a witness statement.”
“Call me when you get back to town.”
The action had dulled my pain. I needed no assistance climbing into the Jeep, little help with the strap. Zack and Tazzy Gucci hoisted themselves off the rear bumper, came over the stern. Bobbi Lewis, in her personal car, a Saturn coupe, followed us out Spanish Main.
“No Jokes” Bohner sneered the sneer of a man vanquished. But he’d won at least one victory. He’d barred Fortay’s Chevy from passing. The Monte Carlo SS, like my Shelby, a toneddown muscle car, was wedged next to a home owner’s chain-link fencing on the left shoulder. Next to it stood Jesse Spence, Scotty Auguie, Fortay—his elbow atop the open driver’s door—and a fourth man I didn’t know. The man looked physically fit, had a triathlete’s build, but the whitest skin I’d seen in Florida. Had to be a dedicated night owl. Or fresh out of jail.
Then I recognized Buzzy Burch.
Tazzy and Zack knew him in an instant. They tumbled out of the Jeep the same way they’d come aboard. Tazzy Gucci said, “We’ll ride into town with those criminals.”
Zack stopped and turned.
I said, “You and Claire, the house is yours. I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll do Breakfast Club.”
“I don’t want—”
“No argument.”
He shook my hand. I shook his back.
Detective Lewis pulled up to the Monte Carlo, looked at the group of men. Her face gave no clue to her thoughts. She beckoned to Fortay. The large man was halfway to her car when she said, “Warn you, friend. Those dark-tinted windows? This state, they’re an invitation to probable cause.”
Marnie left me at my house. No one home. I stashed my cameras, packed a small duffel, dialed again to Teresa’s.
She said, “I’m an orphan.”
“Your mother and stepfather live on Duck Avenue.”
“Samantha called. I told her that she and her dad could use my condo.”
“I gave my house to Zack and Claire Cahill.”
Ten seconds of silence.
“I slept with you after only one date, Alex Rutledge, and that was lunch. Now you want me again, before our second date?”
“My treat at El Siboney. We’ll phone ahead, order paella.”
Teresa said, “I love it. I’ve turned myself into a grits-for-grabs hooker. You call it. Any motel but the Green Dolphin. I’ll bring the toothbrush.”
29
I sensed an observer. I came awake without opening my eyes. Got my bearings, identified my surroundings. The scent of her, a combination of hair conditioner, yesterday’s deodorant, the brief sex of six hours earlier. I felt the bed shift. I moved my arm, the back of my hand found soft hair, decidedly untrimmed. I heard Teresa inhale, felt her lips touch my shoulder.
We’d eaten Cuban food, then, like tourists just off the Overseas Highway, walked into the Eden House, asked for a room. A hundred and fifty feet from my front door, I paid eighty bucks to spend the night. Thank goodness for the off-season. Key West is the only city in the country where the motels offer a “locals’” discount. Fountains, lush plantings, hinged transom above the door, ceiling fan, fluffy pillows. We’d bought a bottle of J. Lohr Cabernet in a store on White Street. We’d forgotten to bring our suits, but swam anyway. Back in the room, we had tried to get fancier than missionary. Fatigue had vetoed our success. Promising ourselves a pancakes pig-out at Camille’s in the morning, we’d drifted to sleep.
Her lips touched me again. I moved my hand. She tried to trap it in the valley, slid closer, giggled, “Good day, sir.”
“The best dawn all week.”
“How do you know yet?” Her head went under the sheet, immediately proved and ensured that fatigue would not encroach on our opinion of the morning. Soon enough, it came back to the missionaries, in exploring, wide-awake ways. Afterward, Teresa danced into the bathroom, twirling, singing, “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you …”
I called the house. Zack and Claire had arranged for a late-morning flight. Zack had already walked to the 5 Brothers Grocery. He invited me over for his special-recipe café con leche. Teresa called her condo. Samantha and Buzzy Burch asked her to meet them for breakfast at Camille’s.
We stood in the Eden House courtyard before we checked out, listened to three couples argue in French about how to spend their last day in paradise.
“So, I guess this is it,” Teresa said. “I have to go back to Paris, now that my work here is done. It was nice to meet you.”
I caught it on the fly: “They’ll want to send me back to prison, to serve out my life sentence. I’ll remember last night as long as I’m alive.”
She snaked her arms around me, pressed her face against my neck. “If you don’t take me to the movies tonight, I’ll never speak to you again.”
I can’t shave until my suntan fades. I’d look like a two-toned‘55 Dodge.” Zack Cahill rubbed his hand against his silvered beard, and ran his other thumb along an aloe’s stem serrations. He studied the plant.”Shaving’ll be the least of my adjustments.”
Zack and I sat on my side porch. The morning sun lit the screening, put a glow on the thirsty plant collection. From blocks away, church bells rang, in three distinct keys. Someone should effect a treaty, put them all in C major, Surround Sound instead of intramural clash. Claire Cahill trooped in from my yard shower, wrapped in the ankle-length silk robe that Annie, my ex-housemate, had sent months ago as a split-up
gift.
“I will be ready for the world in exactly fifteen minutes.” She disappeared into the house.
I said, “Is my house still worth a quarter million more than its appraisal?”
Zack’s pensive face sidestepped into guilt. “We took care of that last night. Look …”
“There’s plenty of time for—”
“No, you need to know. When was it—five, six years ago you went to Costa Rica, to photograph that magazine travel piece?”
“Six years ago June.” Not a great gig. “Heart of the rainy season.”
“I came down and used your house for a couple days.”
“That’s why it’s here.”
“I brought a friend. A carpenter. He installed a fireproof safe under your stove. Even if you’d moved the stove, you wouldn’t have been able to tell.”
I couldn’t decide whether to be pissed or not care. I let it go.
“Anyway,” he said, “last night I emptied the safe. I gave the boys back the original briefcase. It contained the exact amount of cash they gave me when this all began.”
“Their whole reward, their retirement?”
“Years ago, knowing that money was there to back me up, I made a few investments with my own money that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. I took some risks. One went sour, one broke even. The one that made good, I bought a small boat-building operation in Ft. Pierce, Florida. We design and build sailboats based on the Biscayne Bay sharpies that Commodore Ralph Munroe created before Miami was born.”
“Like the Blown Aweigh …”
“ … which belongs to Buzz Burch. Auguie and Makksy and Jesse Spence all own identical boats. They’re sitting in dry dock, ready to be rigged. As of last night, Auguie, Makksy, and Burch also own the boat-building firm. The deal’s over. I walk away with guilt and satisfaction. And shame. I’ve waited for this day since the morning after I agreed to play their dream. If repercussions ever come along, I’ll stand up. The end.”
“How did all the shit start?”