by Tom Corcoran
“For every good act, two bads? I know it all by heart. I loaned Tim cash to drive up the Keys, to pay back that gas-station owner.”
“That’s the good act after the fact,” I said. “Maybe too little too late.”
“I told him to pay the man before he stopped for his first six-pack.”
“What time of day did you meet him Thursday?”
“Two in the afternoon, two-thirty. Rick’s Bar, watching a shitty baseball game, checking out drunk tourist chicks.”
“You don’t work?” I said.
“Don’t have to. It’s a short story because I worked my ass off for just a few years. It’s amazing how much you can earn if you put your mind to it.”
We watched a cormorant drift the canal, cruising for lunch.
“This county’s been hopping the past few days,” said Branigan. “Are we waiting for the next poor son of a bitch to have a short life crisis?”
“Three deaths, and the cops don’t have squat,” I said. “The one who wrecked the car tried to link Tim’s bad card to the bullshit.”
Tanker twisted another top. “The fact that Tim’s a liar doesn’t make him an evil person. I’m not sure I can rebuild him, but I’d like to help.”
He caught my hesitation.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re thinking, the missing link just offered to help me shrink my brother’s brain. I may look scary and scummy, but these days you have to look the way I look to chase honey. And I like the ladies.”
“What do we do?” I said. “Make a list of rules, a working script? Or do we nail his feet to the floor?”
“We set him up to succeed.”
“That won’t work unless it’s equal odds that he fail,” I said. “He’s a fuckup, but he’s not stupid.”
“We tilt the odds in favor of the fuckup,” he said. “It’ll make his success that much sweeter.”
“I was right about a script?”
Tanker nodded. “I have a rule. Don’t get angry, get even.”
“How do we get him off the couch?”
“Give me the green light,” he said.
“I appreciate your wanting my permission, but I don’t govern my brother’s life. He’s been out of mine for more than half of my life. I’ve wanted it that way for a whole lot of those years. The green light is not mine to give.”
“How many years have you lived in the Keys? You can’t call the shots on your own turf? You kicked him out. That’s a form of control.”
“I told him not to come back to my house. A block away, he’s out of my control.”
“But you issued orders, right?”
“Right,” I said. “But my point is, if you want to help him, go for it. It’s your operation. If it works out, that’s great.”
“It’ll work out,” he said.
“Also, I don’t want to owe my soul to a bondsman. Please don’t get him arrested.”
Tanker smiled. “Not getting arrested is my top talent.”
11
That afternoon I washed down a pain pill with warm Coca-Cola and began to read a dog-eared copy of John D. MacDonald’s Cinnamon Skin that someone had left in the room. The book’s first line was “There are no hundred percent heroes.” It was a great jump start to a novel, but conjecture more than fact. Assuming it made sense—and JDM was good at that—what about the bottom end of the scale? No hundred-percent losers, either. I closed my eyes and decided, in spite of my swellings and strains, to allow Tim a chance to turn around. I silently wished good luck on Tanker Branigan.
I came awake during a dream in which my cell phone dialed 911 whenever I sensed danger. I pissed off a yard wasp. It brought a police vehicle to Dredgers Lane. The squad car’s vibes brought another, then two more until cruisers clogged the lane. My neighbor Hector Ayusa told them I was living on Little Torch, and I had lost my cell phone.
Someone was knocking at the door, not in my dream. I rolled from the bed, peeked through the jalousie slats. Marnie Dunwoody’s Jeep Wrangler sat eight feet away.
“Hold on…I’m finding my trousers,” I said.
“Why be formal?”
I popped another pill, sloshed it down with flat warm Coke, and twisted the handle.
Marnie waltzed in holding a Mountain Dew. She wore flare-gun red shorts, a backward ball cap that read SHELL-FISH across her forehead, and a man’s shirt with its tails knotted just above her belly button.
“Jeez,” she said.
I watched her eyes go from spark to awe, as if watching a house burn down.
She checked my face, then my taped torso. “You look like shit.”
“I think I drank my painkillers this morning,” I said. “You look like a young, vivacious woman in the Keys.”
“I came straight from karate class.”
“I thought you’d quit karate.”
“I let it slip last year and I got way out of shape. I’m starting to regain lost ground.” She tossed me a Baby’s Coffee T-shirt. “I figured you might need this. Put on your shorts and think of me as a reporter.”
I lobbed the shirt back at her. “Go knock on the door and start over.”
She sat on the only chair. “Why shouldn’t I write your story?”
“Nothing to tell. Except I need a shower and another nap.”
“A law-enforcement officer kicked your ass. You’re a white Rodney King. A potential one, I should say. The feds’ll jump all over this.”
“My life is fine without notoriety. Trouble brings trouble, you know that.” I sat on the bed, fit my legs into the shorts, and stood to pull them up. “This is a county full of cousins. Everyone is someone’s brother-in-law. Isn’t there a scandal you could write about? A funky lease deal on prime city property? Winos living in surplus sewer pipes? The school board going to Nassau for their budget meetings?”
“My boss is a traditionalist,” she said, “and an old Conch. He remembers this Millican guy from thirty years ago. I got the impression that Millican wasn’t squeaky clean at the time.”
“That was then, this is today,” I said. “Two lapses in judgment and he caused a traffic accident.”
“I’m hearing this crap in your free hotel room.”
“I won it in a contest.”
“And your injuries?” said Marnie.
“I fell off my bicycle.”
“I get the picture,” she said. “Liska traded you a job for your silence.”
“Where the hell did you get that?”
“It’s going around the county offices. He wants to make you his new admin assistant.”
“He offered me a job on Thursday. His description of my duties was so loose, I wasn’t even sure it was real work. Whatever it was, I turned him down.”
“Okay,” she said, “you didn’t trade your silence for a job.”
“Take off your reporter’s hat, and we can talk.”
Marnie looked out the open door, thought for a moment. “It’s off,” she said. “But I’m keeping it handy.”
“Heard from Sam yet?”
“No, but this is about you. How did you get yourself arrested?”
“Simple mistaken identity. Things escalated before I had a chance to explain.”
Her cell phone rang. Marnie checked the incoming number and elected not to answer. “My editor, looking for a hot headline. Tell your side now. Let me put my hat back on.”
I shook my head.
“So I go home with no story?”
“Things like this tarnish the reputations of good cops just as much as the ones who’ve screwed up. But I’ll give you this. If Liska doesn’t fire Millican, I’ll talk a mile a minute. For now, let’s fly under the radar.”
“Did you get mistaken for your brother?” she said.
Oh, shit. “Where did that come from?”
“I asked Sam a couple years ago if you had brothers or sisters. He told me about Tim. Teresa mentioned him today. Smiling, I might add.”
“I can’t think of two people more perfectly matched,”
I said. “If Tim’s into her thing, he’ll be out of my hair. She can have all the smiles she wants.”
“When did he get here?” said Marnie.
“Why don’t you let it drop?”
“So the credit-card story fits his travel schedule?”
I concentrated on strips of sunlight shimmering on the motel-room wall. Then I flashed on an image of Tim holding a pistol to his forehead.
“Why get worked up over a minor scam?” she said. “By what Sam told me, it’s nothing new for your brother. It’s going to come out sooner or later.”
“Later is better.”
Marnie began to speak, hesitated, then said, “Are you afraid he did something else, too?”
“They’d probably like to think he did. The ballbuster is the timing, early Thursday morning. Millican already speculated on a possible tie-in, the credit card to the hangings.”
“We normals would call that an extreme long shot,” she said.
“In Millican’s stubborn head it’s pure chain logic.”
“Oddly enough, I can believe it. Some cops think the world around them is one big crime scene. Do you think your brother did worse than slide a bad card?”
“I have absolutely no idea, but you know the system,” I said.
“He could be accused of anything that’s handy.”
“Sooner or later Liska or Lewis will link the surveillance video with the fact that Tim arrived in town that morning.”
Marnie agreed. “That’d be step one in a long process. When did you tell Bobbi he was here?”
I went back to studying the wall.
“You’re trying to keep the fly out of the web,” she said, “and Bobbi’s going to be hurt and pissed, two different things. You can’t hide it indefinitely.”
“As bad as he’s been all his life,” I said, “I can’t believe murder’s in him. I also doubt that the real killer will confess in the next few days, so the pisser—”
“I’m ahead of you,” said Marnie. “If Tim’s arrested and they connect the circumstantial dots while he’s in custody, he’ll lose ground he’ll never make up. Florida’s a bad state for a mess like this.”
“He’ll be charged with murder, simple as hell. Conviction’s a baby jump.”
“What happened to proving people guilty?” she said.
“You know because you’re a reporter. This century’s version is ‘guilty until someone finds time to show otherwise.’ If it’s inconvenient, God help you. The prisons are run by yes-for-profit corporations who need growth for survival.”
“Which means we need to prove that he’s innocent before they latch on to him.”
I laughed at myself. “Unfortunately, you’re right, but for you it’s optional. I have no damned choice.”
“What makes that funny?” said Marnie.
“I swear every time that I won’t allow Tim to complicate my life. The son of a bitch got me again.”
“Alex, it’s Bobbi. I wanted to check on you.”
“I’m feeling foggy,” I said. “I’m a vegetable.”
“A vegetable locked in fog?”
“Floundering in fog. A fog-floundering vegetable beats a rope-strangled manatee.”
“Do you need anything?” she said.
“A glass of rum?”
“Sounds like you’ve already had one or two. Go back to sleep, Alex.”
She hung up. By that time I was awake.
Twelve weeks before this all began, a Sarasota ad agency hired me for a photo gig on Grand Cayman Island. Bobbi Lewis—at that point a friend but not a lover—learned about it, flew down a day ahead of me, checked into a luxury room, then called Key West to suggest we split the hotel bill to save money. We shared a bed the night I arrived, but we kept our shorts on. She had a rule about making love on a first date. I played along, and she more than made up for the one-day delay. I knocked out the job in two days, sent my film to the States, and stayed a day shy of another week. Our vacation flew by, with fine meals, sightseeing, laughter, and bed. We became the tourists we’d habitually scorned in Key West. Her big surprise launched our whirlwind affair.
We came home refreshed and began to blend our lives.
During our next few weeks we discovered common interests outside the bedroom: back streets for biking, restaurants one of us knew but the other hadn’t tried. Our times together were intense, but slowly, almost imperceptibly, became less frequent. I spent a whole week working in my yard, and her work schedule got tougher, made her moody, sometimes testy. Two or three times I sensed a distance between us.
What had Liska told me? If she invents jealousies and starts arguments, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing the right things. It’s her issue, and you’ve got to stay steady.
Now, on a summer Sunday evening, a caring call. It inspired me to quit my self-indulgent recuperation, to rejoin and embrace the ambulatory world.
I could’ve said that in three words: I wanted rum.
I took a classic Navy shower: washrag, warm water, motel soap on the face and pits. Two swipes of a floral, value-sized off-brand deodorant from the front desk. A reed-thin toothbrush and miniature tube of paste, also from room service. I pulled on the shirt that Marnie had brought me. No use trying to brush my hair. At that moment, appearance was low on my checklist.
I walked the tarmac, crossed the dolphin-pond bridge, felt sweat itch my bandages in the heat of dusk. An orange-pink sunset was fading to pale purple and gray. A James Taylor sound-alike sang “Terra Nova” for seven people at the open-air bar. I chose not to fight mosquitoes. I continued on to the lounge adjacent to the resort’s main restaurant.
A smarmy “My Way” came through the saloon’s dark glass, by a crooner I couldn’t name. I saw only the bartender and one customer inside. I yanked the sliding door with my back at an odd angle, and felt spine creaks and tendon snaps. Food smells tumbled through the half-open door. The crooner was aided by sugary background strings and female voices on melody rather than harmony, to mask grit in the smarm.
“Who’s this jitterbug?” said a shrill woman at the far end of the bar. “He’s already bought himself a souvenir T-shirt. It still has its factory wrinkles. If he’s a tourist, why doesn’t he have that black-socks thing going?”
The bartender, a heavy, middle-aged man, checked me out. “He’s a hotel guest, ma’am. Mind your manners.”
“I could tell he’s not local.” She sipped from a collins glass and turned to me. “Why do you people insist on filling up our restaurants?”
“My Way” faded into “September Song.” Another unknown vocal stylist. Stuffed fish on the wall and the alleged music force-fed me the fact that if I could walk to a saloon, I could climb Al Manning’s stairs. It was time to leave the high life.
For the moment, I still wanted a drink.
Four tall captain’s chairs faced south, under a green navigation light. Eight faced east, a red nav light at their far end so regulars could find their way to safe harbor. I slid onto a south-facing stool and pointed at the rum-bottle lineup.
“Cuba Libre?” The bartender stood closer to me, wheezing through his forced smile. He glanced at my stitches, my missing hair.
“Mount Gay and soda, tall, lemon,” I said. “Light on the ice.”
“Obviously, this man has come to Sugarloaf to be rude,” said the woman. “He won’t even answer a simple question.”
The bartender free-poured the rum, squirted generic soda from a sticky-looking mix gun. “Tinky, let him get his first sip, okay?”
Tinky?
She was dressed for a day of yachting. White shorts and shirt over a blue-striped T-shirt. Her light brown hair was curled and frizzed, and her tan looked high-maintenance. Designer sunglasses hung from a neon blue neck string. A small gold watch on one wrist, a collection of gold bracelets on the other.
My sip provided her cue. “Well? Do we get an answer?”
“Are you an old-timer in the Keys?” I said.
“What kind of slam is tha
t? I am thirty-eight fucking years old, and I am a goddamn widow. Start over, and tell me. Do I look like a widow to you?”
Tinky was Tinkerbell. “You don’t look like others I’ve known.”
“So I look like a fucking ‘old-timer’?”
“I don’t mean you look old,” I said. “An ‘old-timer’ in Florida means someone who’s been here more than five years. You could be seventeen and be an old-timer. Did you lose your husband recently?”
She looked at her watch.
The bartender said, “Mr. Haskins was killed two days ago outside their home.”
“Sorry,” I said. “An accident?”
“Not hardly,” said Tinkerbell. She ran a gathering ritual, picked up her drink, lighter, cigarettes, napkin, and purse. She slid off her stool and, unsteady but determined, made her way around the bar’s chevron shape. She was about five-six and stocky. Not fat, but strong-looking, as if she could handle a sailboat halyard or a heavy fishing reel. She boosted herself onto the stool next to mine. “Murder by boat lift, like those other two killings this week. You’re not from here, you don’t know about them. Some fucker hung my lard-ass husband right outside my bedroom window. Like to piss me off. Notice my mourning clothes.”
I also noticed the care she took to hide alcohol-induced slurring. I went for a pensive look and stayed silent. By her remarks and language, Tinkerbell had thick skin. I couldn’t get a reading of its texture. She could have hidden Tampa beneath her blush-colored makeup. I suspected she was masking her emotions, too, with a fog of cynical bullshit.
She caught me studying her face. “I’m actually drunker tonight than I normally am. But I’m fine.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“You agree?” she said.
The bartender raised his eyebrows, walked to the distant end of the bar.
“I agree with all of the above,” I said. “You’re fine, you’re tipsy, and you’re a widow. How long were you married?”