by Tom Corcoran
I said, “Four men from Rhode Island went to Vegas or Reno a long time ago.”
“Assume it’s four dudes in Vegas,” said Liska. “What’s with Rhode Island?”
“Maybe all four of them grew up there,” I said. “They met by chance at a blackjack table and decided to commemorate the occasion.”
Liska shook his head. “Too nice a souvenir, especially if they bought one apiece.” He dropped it face up on the porcelain table. “A home state can’t be that goddamn important.”
“I was on a ship in the military,” I said. “Three hundred men aboard, but I knew which ones were from Ohio. You stood the midwatch, you bullshitted to kill time, and home states were important. Don’t ask me why. Maybe a base point for pointless conversation.”
“Okay, the military,” he said. “Vegas isn’t exactly a liberty port.”
“So they were Air Force. Maybe they worked at that secret air base in the desert out there, Area 351, or whatever it’s called. Maybe they were test pilots or UFO controllers.”
Lewis shook her head. “Your brain is running away from you.”
“You were in the service,” said Liska. “You ever take a vacation with two other guys?”
“No,” I said. “Except for a half-day train ride in Europe. Maybe it was the other way around. Four men from Nevada were assigned to a Navy ship out of Newport, Rhode Island.”
Liska turned to Lewis. “Detective, was the medical examiner going to perform back-to-back autopsies?”
Lewis checked her watch. “Forty minutes from now. I should go.”
“Can I make a suggestion?” I said.
Bobbi turned her head and stared at me. “You look awful, Alex. I suggest you go back to bed.”
It was not a good time to tell either of them about Tim. I stared back.
“Okay,” she said, “make a suggestion.”
“Ask Larry Riley to consider two perpetrators while he works. I know it’s not the examiner’s job, but…”
She looked for Liska’s reaction, as did I. Liska didn’t move.
“I’ll ask him,” she said.
Liska watched her walk to the county vehicle. I saw his eyes drift below her belt line, then to her face when she turned to get into her car.
Backing out of the lane, Lewis had to swerve her cruiser to allow another vehicle to pass. Johnny Griffin—my new tenant—in his rented van. He was head-to-toe khaki with wraparound sunglasses on a string and zinc oxide on his nose. Ready to fish all day. He looked up the lane, watched Lewis’s unmarked Crown Vic turn onto Fleming. When he opened the porch door, I introduced him to Sheriff Liska.
“Are we all friends,” said Johnny, “or do we have an issue here?”
Liska looked bored. “We need to discuss your misdemeanor lease of this residence. Four local ordinances will be trampled the instant you carry your suitcase into the house.”
Griffin blanched. “I’m out of here.”
I fought back quickly. “Hold on,” I said. “The sheriff used to be my deal killer, but I fired him yesterday. His job is out in the county. Right here, he’s just another slug on the porch.”
Griffin still looked confused. “So I stay or don’t stay?”
“I’ll help you carry in your gear,” I said.
I stepped outside to follow Griffin to his van. Just loud enough for me to hear, Liska said, “I’m a fucking slug.” He remained in a funk while Johnny and I unloaded duffels, two briefcases, bags of groceries, and boxes of business files. Liska’s sulk didn’t reassure Griffin, and I feared I might have to make a monetary concession to ease Johnny’s mind about Liska’s petty prank. But I kept my mouth closed. Before Johnny left I swapped him a set of keys for a narrow bank envelope full of hundreds.
“Thanks for welcoming my friend to the tropics,” I said.
Liska was back to staring through the screen, studying my yard. “Did he hook his sense of humor on light tackle?”
“I think he borrowed it from Detective Lewis.”
“She’s my best detective,” said Liska. “Intense and eccentric, but good.”
“She was trying to accuse me of having an affair a long time ago.”
Liska turned, tried to read my eyes. “That she was, so let me talk straight, two things, package deal.”
His deals tended to go lopsided in his direction. “My curiosity awaits.”
“I see officers come and go,” he said. “I’m a crusty cop and set in my ways, but I’m not so stupid I could slap aside a man who…what the fuck word do I want, contributes? Stands up? You saved my ass three times in recent years. Cases got solved, you were the unsung hero, and I got the official recognition. Whatever you’ve got, most never will. So, thanks a bunch, and that ends my ‘attaboy’ session. Part 2, and I might get into your space here, but I know you pretty well, so I apologize in advance. Lewis was burned pretty badly about three years ago. He was a hot-dog lawyer from Dallas with one of those seven-figure houses on Truman Annex. She took the initiative, fell in love, and had a mad fling. Fifteen weeks into it, not only was he killed in a private-jet crash, but his wife showed up in Key West to close out his affairs. The dude never mentioned a wife. Since then she’s dated two or three gents, but her cold feet ruined the deals. If she invents jealousies and starts arguments, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing the right things. It’s her issue, and you have to stay steady.”
I felt mild relief and surprise. In his abrasive way, Liska had boosted my spirits. “Thanks for the background,” I said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“It’s my back,” said Liska. “I tried to carry a heavy box while I was on my cell phone.”
“You were shoulder-holding with your chin, right?”
“I turned my spine into a question mark.”
“And your next ten days, too.”
“Today I see the chiropractor and go for massage therapy. Tomorrow, the acupuncturist and the reflexologist. The day after that, the healer. If worse comes to worst, I can go to a real doctor.”
“You ought to hit the evidence locker for a muscle relaxer. Save you a lot of driving around. Or is that what you already did?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have noted your disdainful approach to crime busting.”
“I may not be perfect, but there’s not a soul in this county that can do better at what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Except you. Listen to the word supposed.”
“Maybe I’ve been experiencing a failure of passion.”
“Little trouble in the bedroom?”
“My dick does fine, when I can get it employment. This is on-the-job.”
“You don’t give a shit?”
He jerked his head aside and wouldn’t look at me.
“Twenty-four hours ago you wanted me to be the great cop of the future,” I said. “Two minutes ago you said I had the right stuff. This long-faced follow-up tells me that police work is not a dream occupation. Is this depression your loneliness at the top or facing the daily grind?”
His eyelids drooped as he stared at the floor. “Maybe both, maybe something else. But you’ve got the wrong impression of your side of the table.”
“What do I become, your secret stand-in?”
“Something like that,” he said. “My eyes and ears. I might even be able to put you on the payroll, something administrative.”
“Which of us campaigns for reelection?”
“I’m not thinking past next week. If I’m not careful, I’ll screw up today or tomorrow. If I confessed all this to an employee, I’d crunch my propeller.”
“I can’t stand behind your office chair whispering cues,” I said.
“I think you’re scared of real work.”
“Not true, Sheriff. If I ever, in my life, take a true job, I want my phone to ring at least half the time with good news. If I took this job, every fucking call would be another dead person in the county.”
“You’re exaggerating, and you’re underestimating your talent. I
know how you are. You go on a mission, you never let up.”
I laughed. “That’s how Bohner described Millican yesterday. He sinks in his teeth and never lets go.”
“Millican’s a subject I don’t have the energy to discuss. But I will say this. From this moment onward, if you happen to follow your nose, I don’t want to learn any new developments in the Citizen. I will be your first ear, and that’s an order, not a recommendation. If I were a mental and physical basket case, I’d still have the muscle to put you in a world of hurt.”
Liska threatening? This was too far around the corner. “If I learn anything,” I said, “it’ll be because it fell in my lap.”
Liska bit his lip, shook his head, and looked down at the page of paper he’d been holding the whole time. “I’m sorry now that I sent you up there with Billy Bohner. This written report you didn’t finish? You didn’t get the simple shit right. It wasn’t Tenth Street South.”
“My evidence is empirical. I read the sign. That’s where we turned.”
He pushed himself out of the lounge chair. “Your eyes are failing you.”
“I’m a photographer. My life’s in the details. Bohner made a fast approach to Tenth, jammed his brakes, and cut a Mario Andretti turn like he knew where he was going.”
“I do details, too, and I was in the dispatching room when the call came in as Thirteenth Street. The officer on the horn is the superstitious type. He wouldn’t say the number. He wrote it down and said, ‘Corpse, Unlucky Road.’”
“I stand by my version.”
“Why argue?” Liska pulled out his cell phone, punched a number. After a short wait and a ten-second conversation, he snapped the phone shut. “The call came in wrong, so I told him Thirteenth Street. How did Bohner know where to go?”
“Maybe it showed on his computer.”
“Good, but not true,” he said. “With two deaths so much alike, I didn’t want a media feeding frenzy. I ordered Web and radio silence on the location. It was word of mouth or landline phone only.”
“What time was the call?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“You were in your office that early?”
“I was at the Freeman Substation on Cudjoe. I had a breakfast meeting with the Border Patrol, which meant I brought coffee and doughnuts. That’s where we got the call. Why did you tell Lewis to think about two killers?”
“Did you get your prints from Hall this morning?”
“Yep,” he said. “I passed them to her. Something you saw?”
“The noose knots are identical, except they’re reversed as if one was tied by someone right-handed and the other by a lefty. But they both learned at the same school.”
“Do we know how to find you?”
“Al Manning’s place on Little Torch. Call here, it’ll jump to my cell. I’ll fax an invoice with my temporary address. Lewis has the other number.”
“That’s too much info, Rutledge. We’ll chase you down if we need to follow up on this chat. Other than that, I’ll take you at your word. If your phone doesn’t ring, it’s us.”
He swung open the screen door, stepped out, and let it slam shut behind him. I couldn’t tell if he was faking or hobbling with pain. Just before he got to his car, he reached for his cell phone. He looked back at the porch as he spoke, locked eyes with me, and appeared to make a mental decision. I saw him say no to his caller, and could tell by the way he moved his head that he was issuing orders.
I had understood his wanting to be secretive over the years, to hold his cards close during his city time and his short tenure as sheriff. But this was the first time I’d seen him so far out of character, the first time I had seen him act suspiciously. His voice had given him away more than his actions and words. I hadn’t heard the sluggish tone of an injured or depressed man. I had heard quivers of anxiety.
At least his job offer was off the table, relegated to history. And I was commencing, as the Navy called it, my “holiday routine.”
I stuffed my shaving kit and cell phone into my camera satchel, watered a ficus, and stopped for a minute before I locked up to picture young Pokey Fields, not three years out of high school, standing in my main room. I looked around the house—gathering memories just as she had—and thanked my lucky stars that I’d hedged the truth with Bobbi Lewis in describing my relationship with the girl.
My next week would be neither routine nor holiday.
7
I rode the Triumph away from Key West into damp air under broken midlevel stratus. Whenever I rode in humid weather, my shirt doubled in weight and salt caked my skin. It felt like a fine way to begin a vacation. A swollen cumulus line above the reef resembled far mountains and reminded me that I’d forgotten to call the ad agency in Naples.
Nearing Boca Chica, I watched a succession of jets drop for touch-and-gos, then launch eastward to altitude. Their percussion split the sky, their grace inspired a traveler’s freedom. The highway that skirted the naval air station became my course to calmer waters, its odd dips and rises mimicking the lazy chop of open ocean. All I needed was a steering vane and a guiding dolphin at my bow. I didn’t need a roadblock. Or complications.
The northbound traffic off Big Coppitt picked up speed as it passed Boca Chica Road. Riding the incline past the entrance to Shark Key, I looked south to sailboats anchored in Similar Sound. A sole angler poled a pale blue skiff west of Pelican Key. I turned my head forward just in time to see a brake light, and throttled down before I pancaked myself on the ass end of a Honda Odyssey. Traffic slowed to a walking pace. A minute later, from the Channel #4 Bridge rise, I saw vehicles crawling to Bay Point and red and blue flashing lights declaring an emergency up the road.
Probably the phone call Liska received as he left my house.
I had no wish to wait for a wreck mop-up. I began to turn back for a crab-cake lunch at BobaLu’s but decided that any move away from an afternoon’s quiet on Little Torch was the opposite of progress. I opted for patience and tried not to fry my clutch. Twenty minutes later I reached the flashing lights. A squad of deputies had blocked Bay Point’s entrance roads. Deputy Bohner motioned me toward him, no doubt assuming that I had been called to the scene. He was in civvies, grabbing a few overtime hours.
I stopped between two cruisers and loosened my helmet strap.
“Ever get suspended?” he said.
I thought about high school, my brother Tim’s constant after-school detention. I had pulled the same juvenile crap, but I was never caught. Then I matched Bohner’s words to his odd sense of humor. “Do we have another davit job?”
“You could specialize, Rutledge,” he said. “Your own gallows portfolio. No matter what, we got our wind chimes.”
Glaring truth from Billy Bohner, of all people. With “gallows portfolio” he had defined in two words my collective work in law enforcement.
“How’s Liska dealing with it?” I said.
“From a remote location,” said Bohner. “No sign of him yet.”
“How far down is it?”
He directed me onto West Circle Drive.
I passed the tennis courts and ran the stop sign. As I slowed to turn right and cross the bridge to the trailer subdivision down Beach Road, a deputy waved me farther down Bay Drive, toward the more exclusive neighborhood. “What I heard, they don’t need you down there,” he said. “It’s on the left.”
If a link existed, the killer had changed his pattern, found a victim with a fatter wallet. The large, elevated home sat on raised ground on a double lot. Beyond its white five-foot fence, healthy palms, and new shrubs sat a dark green BMW convertible and a black Ford Expedition. Two edgy but quiet Yellow Labs paced around stakes in the side yard. A Carolina Skiff with a Yamaha engine rested on a trailer under the house. The oversized mailbox was awash in surreal, hand-painted tropical fish. I parked across the street, shut off the motorcycle but remained seated. Gawkers hovered two houses away.
Bobbi Lewis had set up a mobile office on the hood of her Cr
own Victoria. She was surrounded by uniforms. She looked up, perplexed, and said, “You’ve surprised me, Alex. Liska said he wasn’t sending you. He asked me not to call you.”
“Are you the only one here who knows that?”
“I assume so.”
“Why would the sheriff make that decision?” I said. “I’d have been the only person to view all three crime scenes.”
She bought time, looked around, scratched her neck. My words forced her to confront a fact that already bothered her. “You can hang,” she said, “but please stay over there.” She pointed to the next house to the north, a ground-level bungalow built before insurance companies, via the feds, mandated elevated living spaces. “Leave your camera bag in my trunk so nobody will mess with it.”
“Including me?” I said.
“Orders are orders.” She reached through her car-door window and pressed the remote trunk-release button.
I set the kickstand and put the bag in her car. She told the uniforms I didn’t require an escort.
The first thing I learned was why they didn’t need me.
Bixby, the new city photographer, paced the concrete apron behind the high house. In cargo shorts, zippered vest, and hiking boots, he was a 170-pound peacock in high strut. He screwed a lens onto his camera body, changed his mind, chose a shorter lens. He half-crouched, fired off eight or ten clicks on his autowinder. His moves and mock decisions may have looked professional, but his positioning sucked. He was wasting film. Wasting a crime scene.
The victim looked well fed; his neck had stretched perhaps twice as much as Kansas Jack’s or Milton Navarre’s, and his eyes bulged as if he had tried to stare down death as it approached. He wore bathing trunks and what looked like a pajama top, though, with Keys styles, it could have been a formal supper shirt. I took him to be in his late forties. No duct tape, smashed teeth, or ripped buttons. The rope was the same color as that used on Ramrod and in Marathon, but it wasn’t knotted to a true noose. If there had been two fewer loops, the victim could have fallen from his death collar, fractured his ankles, and crawled away alive. I wondered if his weight had caused the rope to twist him around and around until he quit saying to himself that he hadn’t guessed that twirling would be part of it.