by Tom Corcoran
Years ago I had opted for the opposite of restoration and spent money to make my genuine Shelby look unattractive to thieves. I had removed its original emblems, bought a flat brown paint job, stashed the original aluminum wheels in a closet, and bolted on junkyard shoes with blackwall tires. These days the car looks like any old fastback on its last legs. But I can drive it without being challenged, and I can park without having it vanish. If it fooled a car nut like Wendell, the money was well spent.
“I drive that old Buick over there,” he said, “but I always dreamed of owning a Shelby. Hope you paid a right price.”
“I paid for a Conch cruiser, Wendell, and that’s what I drive.”
“Maybe so, but it sure sounds like an F-18. You doing okay?”
“Peachy, Wendell.”
“I didn’t want to stick my nose where it don’t belong, but I saw that bullshit go down on Saturday. It just didn’t look right, I mean, a friend of Al’s getting tapped by the man. I hope you didn’t mind I made a call.”
“Not at all, Wendell. Matter of fact, thank you. You a mechanic?”
“Machinist. I was in the tool-and-die business.”
“You ran a lathe?”
“That’s part of what I did.” He began to edge toward the road.
“Here in Florida?”
“Up north, years ago,” he said. “I gotta go.”
I couldn’t believe I was getting off that easy. “Anything wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “These random killings have the whole Lower Keys spooked.”
“Consider yourself lucky. You don’t have davits.”
“Sure don’t, Rutledge, but you do, so watch yourself. Glad you’re not mad about that call I made.”
“Keep it between the beacons, Wendell.”
I drove to the highway, ran it through the gears. I couldn’t believe my feeling of escape. There’s something about being arrested, chained into the back of a cruiser, and beaten up by a cop that makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Like rolling down a window, flicking a turn signal, applying the brakes. I watched flags whip in the wind at Dolphin Marina, checked the wind direction in South Pine Channel.
I was back in the high life again. I was going to Marathon.
Traffic moved quickly on my side of the road. Typical of a Monday, southbound was more delivery vans and semis than cars and SUVs. I approached the west end of the Bahia Honda Bridge with my usual dread. Several years ago I was sent there to photograph a Jane Doe, and I recognized a former lover in her death mask. At that time a dense hammock and two lovely palms marked the beach. After Hurricane Georges it was one struggling palm and a patch of depleted shrubs. When the county finished sanitizing the scenic view, the hammock was history.
Score one more for turf farms and the pavers.
Such was the power of the county. It could sanitize a hammock and wrap up the Milton Navarre killing. It could do what it damn well pleased with an ex-con like Tim Rutledge.
14
The man smiled, then barely moved his mouth to say, “Hey, dude.”
When I told him my name he narrowed his grin, told me he was Simply Bud.
“Great place you got here,” I said.
“I don’t make excuses,” said Simply Bud. “Mac and Joe’s is Marathon, Florida’s prize dump.” He swung his arm to present faux-neon beer ads, gray walls, grimy windows. It was a no-frills slopchute with the stink of a holding cell.
“At least we can soak up the air-conditioning,” he said. “You’re walking kind of stiff. Mind if I ask?”
“Police brutality.”
“Are you the guy from the accident? The grapevine’s full of you.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I didn’t know that at all.”
Simply Bud was in his late thirties, stocky and scruffy but sharp. I asked about the bar’s name. Mac and Joe were three owners ago. Mac went down to diabetes and Joe was doing hard state time in the Carolinas for selling Costa Rican weed out of a custom van in a KOA on the coast. Bud paid his ex-father-in-law four years’ construction wages for the place. He never met Mac, saw Joe maybe once.
“This town’s growing and I’ve got a plan. Some day this space will lease to Staples or Avis, or some other deep-pocket franchise. The rest of my life, I’ll cash fat checks. I can cruise out in my yacht and catch innocent fish in the Gulf Stream. My first mate will work naked, and one of her jobs will be to bait my hooks.”
I asked about Milton Navarre.
“Piece of work, that rummy-ass drizzle dick. Not to speak ill of the dead, but the fucker was a broken record. Every day it was ahoy, and abaft this, astern that, and decks and bulkheads and aloft. Like he was a swashbuckler out of a Patrick O’Brian novel.” Bud looked for surprise on my face, and found it. “My one vice. I’m a bar owner who doesn’t drink. I read books.”
“He was a regular?”
“I regular kicked him out. Is that what you meant?”
“Is that what happened the night he bought it?”
“His pal, Rudy Downer, carried him out. Threw him on the hood of his car, their usual deal.”
“Like a shot deer?”
“One time he tried to get him in the front seat, it was like putting a drunk hooker in a paddy wagon. Somebody said booze made Milton claustrophobic. After that incident Rudy would push him onto the hood. What did they have, three hundred yards to get home?”
“Maybe Milton fell off the car, was killed by mistake. The hanging was a cover-up.”
“No way,” said Bud. “They were a well-tuned act. Milton was too big for Rudy to heave up there without a little cooperation. He was never too drunk to hold on to the windshield wipers. Some nights he’d ride home that way close to sober, after only six or eight beers. He didn’t fall off.”
“Did Milton get into fights?”
“Only with his mouth. Some big deal about not being second-class. He wanted first-class respect. He’d tell other drunks not to call him sir, but to treat him like sir. Twice since the first of the year he was run out of here by Deputy Hard-On.”
I caught myself before I asked. He meant No Jokes Bohner. “You call the deputies on many customers?”
“Once, since I bought it,” said Bud.
“Which means one of those times Bohner was already here.”
“Right. He likes the stool where you’re sitting now. When he comes in to drink, he’s not in a good mood.”
“In his civvies, I assume.”
“Yep, strictly on leisure time. But that doesn’t diminish his power trip.”
“Why did he need to run Milton out?” I said.
“He’d kick him to the curb when he’d heard enough of his fo’c’sle-and-blimey hogwash.”
“Man named Millican ever come in here?”
“I don’t know the name,” he said.
“Bohner always come in alone?”
“Once, no, twice with an older guy,” said Bud. “A guy with a crew cut and an attitude.”
“Any idea where Milton earned his drinking money?”
“Odd jobs, handyman shit like plumbing and wiring. I guess he did magic tricks for the water bills in that trailer park. People down there don’t want it talked about. They can’t afford rent and utilities to start with.”
“Or basic vices?”
“Right, cheap bourbon. They can’t even scrounge haircuts for their kids. They got a hard-times monkey on their backs, they don’t need the meter police on their asses. Can I sell you one?”
“You got ahead of me.”
“I ain’t selling meter police.”
I tossed a five on the bar. “Pretend you sold me a six-pack?”
He palmed the fin. “Throw a sawbuck, I’ll pretend I sold you the bar.”
“You stock Amstel?”
“An import? Don’t be foolish.”
“You pick.”
He grabbed a bottle of Bud Light, twisted the cap, and put it down. He made change in a cigar box, handed me back three
ones. “The county’s got Rudy now. I guess they didn’t buy his alibi.”
“Did he come back here after he took Milton home on his hood?”
“Oh, man. I’d have to think about that. We’re talking four, five days ago, they all start to blend together. I’ll say this. It wouldn’t have been unusual.”
“He’s done it before?” I said.
“Rudy calls himself a recovering sleazeball. He’s one to stay late, sniff out the action, hit on a straggler or two. I don’t believe age or size matter to him. He hangs in, specializes in the late harvest. No woman is too ugly for Rudy.”
“What time do you close?”
“Depends on the crowd. Also, whether I can keep my eyes open. I never lock up before eleven. Most nights it’s close to one-thirty.”
“Rudy get lucky with any regularity?”
“You’d be surprised,” said Bud. “He was probably exaggerating, but he once said his batting average was right up with Sammy Sosa’s.”
“He’d take them back to his trailer?”
“I never asked. I know which trailer it is, but I’ve never seen inside. Why all this shit about him?”
“He told the deputies that he gave Milton a ride, came back, and took drunk himself, too drunk to walk. He told them you drove him home.”
“They forgot to tell me I was his alibi.”
“I think you’re it,” I said. “Who called you from the sheriff’s department?”
“Some lady. I told her what I told you. It’s only four or five nights ago, and I might have done that, but I can’t exactly recall. What time did I drive him, supposedly?”
“Real late.”
“That’s about as likely as him killing Milton. But if it would help get him out of the clink, I’d remember him wearing pink tights and a tutu. Pain in the ass that he is.”
“Even the next day, after you heard about the murder, nothing from that night stuck in your memory?”
Simply Bud wiped sweat and shook his head. “Gimme a card. I’ll call you if anything unsticks.”
I didn’t have a card. I wrote my name and number on a bar napkin.
I drove into Florida Straits Estates, eased past the turquoise dolphins with their smiling cherry lips. Another artist had logged a visit, painted an X over each dolphin eye. I decided to park near the road, faced outward for a quick departure, just in case. I also tripped the hidden fuel-pump shutoff switch.
I wasn’t sure where to start. Going trailer to trailer would get me a fist in the face before I found useful info. Finding someone outdoors in the midday heat also would be a challenge. I hadn’t walked fifty yards before getting the sense that I had entered a foreign country. Discolored homes and fractured concrete mocked the perfect blue sky. No vehicle in sight looked capable of making it to Miami or even Key West, but that was not their purpose. There was a chance I spoke the local language, but no guarantee.
I aimed for the ratty seawall where the davits stood, passed a slender woman in a plastic chair facing outward from three feet inside her mobile home’s door. Her setback limited her peripheral view, though I doubt she cared. Her eyes clicked onto me, her expression didn’t twitch. I didn’t see her as a hot source of intelligence. If I skunked, I always could check back.
Forty yards later I waltzed through a pot cloud riding the sea breeze. I took it as a stronger sign of life than the seated woman. I heard a thwock, then a quiet, urgent man’s voice said, “Point, point!”
The seven-foot chain-link fence was lined with a cheap rattan screen, the trailer’s yard shaded by an awning made of four bedsheets knotted at their corners. Someone saw me through the rattan.
“Say your name, or I’ll shoot your ass,” said a man with a gruff voice.
“My name is Rutledge. Looking for Rudy Downer.”
“He’s one mile north, behind where you get your driver’s license.”
“Talk to you a sec?”
“Fuck off. We ain’t nothing but registered sex offenders. You might be our next victim of love.”
Someone else in the yard drawled, “Or rectum of love.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “If you had a hammer that big hanging over your ass, you wouldn’t smoke dope in the open air.”
A section of rattan fell away. First came the nose of the pistol. Next, the nose of the ex-linebacker type. It was the mullet-cut I had seen at the trailer court entrance on Thursday. The panther still crawled his shoulder, under a tank top’s strap. Behind him sat a small dude with a thorny rose tat on his upper arm, a longneck in his fist. Stringy hair, a dirty goatee, an anchor earring, a one-inch roach clamped in his teeth like a cigarillo. Next to him, slouched on a rear seat from a minivan, was a skinny boy with slicked-back blond hair and a thousand-yard sneer. He was the smart-looking one. He held a five-foot length of inch-thick PVC pipe.
“Saw you with the badge man.” The mullet breathed through his mouth, wiggled the pistol. If he was going to shoot me, he’d have done it before I scoped the panorama. “You rode in with the fat shit to see the dead man swing.”
“They dragged me up here from Ramrod. They thought I knew Milton, which I did, a little. But I didn’t tell them that. I came to see Rudy Downer, see what he knows about all this.”
“Which means?”
“I’d like to know who it is that needs to be hanging people I know.”
“Which also means you want first shot, before the cops?”
“There’s your criminal mind at work again.”
“And you know all about that?”
“I never did a day behind the door.”
“Oooh-wee. You use the word door like that, you done seen it.”
I had passed a secret test. I was now okay. The pistol went out of sight.
The skinny boy behind him raised the PVC pipe parallel to the ground and blew through it hard. It was a blow-gun. His homemade dart pinned a fat cockroach to a trellis hung from the trailer. “Point,” said the boy. He lowered the pipe and lifted a can of Bud. “Four for seven.”
“You want to buy in to the game?” said mullet.
“I’m on a mission,” I said.
“From God or the devil?” said the mullet.
“Depends how it ends,” I said. “You hear that davit creak in the night?”
“I did,” said the skinny sharpshooter. We looked at each other. Neither of us said a word.
“Around here,” said mullet, “we don’t go outside for noises after three A.M.” He paused for my reaction, then said, “We ain’t afraid of shit. By that time, we’re too fucked up to get off the couch.”
His teammates laughed their approval.
“Check that puke-green Argosy house trailer.” He wagged his head to his right. “See if the queen of darkness will give you two minutes of her time. If you get past three minutes, fuck her for me.”
15
The well-maintained Ford Escape looked out of place alongside the Argosy trailer. I knocked on an aluminum door that was missing its screening. A woman in her mid-twenties appeared. She looked like a five-three goth girl with a Lands’ End account. Black polo top, khaki tennis shorts, red high-top sneaks, jet-black short hair.
I said, “Is this the former residence of Milton Navarre?”
“It’s where he crashed when he could make it home. If you’re a bill collector, his net worth was a flat piece of bug-holed driftwood with a shrimp boat painted on it.”
I peered inside and saw negative net worth. She would have to pay someone to haul it away. The wall paneling had been scavenged from numerous scrap heaps. Wet weather had attacked the sofa before its current installation. The armchair, with its stained bed-pillow booster, confirmed that curb shopping paid off. The room smelled of cat piss and a stale AC filter.
I refocused, checked out the young woman. Tough, with a pixie face.
“What did you expect to find?” she said. “A crack whore?”
Yes, I thought, with runny eyes and crappy clothes. I held out my hand. “My name is Alex Rut
ledge.”
A surprise punch: “The photographer?”
The look on my face must have been affirmative.
“I’ve seen your work in my dentist’s office and my lawyer’s,” she said. “How did you get to photograph Jack Hemingway with Gregorio Fuentes?”
“Lucky timing, I guess.”
“It made for a great picture. I’m Gail Downer.”
“Rudy’s daughter?”
She squinted with puzzlement. “I’m not trying to be unfriendly, Mr. Rutledge, but can I ask why you’re here?”
“I had to photograph Milton Navarre while he was still in the air. I sometimes do that for the county. I also was here when they put Rudy in the squad car.”
“So stupid,” she said. “I guess they needed an instant scapegoat.”
“Well, it probably made sense to question him. But he shouldn’t still be in custody.”
“I’m glad someone agrees. Technically, I’m his stepdaughter, but I was too young to know my real daddy. He went to Jamaica on a drug scam and never came back. Rudy was a good replacement. He was the first mate on a charter yacht and kept food on the table and shoes on our feet. My mother left him for a lesbian.”
Gail let that news hang. I said nothing, soaked up scenery.
“I’d offer refreshment,” she added, “but there’s nothing here you’d want in your stomach. I was just about to go around back to defrost the bait fridge.”
I followed her to the postage-stamp fenced yard. “Do you live in Marathon?” I said.
“My husband and I are on Grassy Key, but I keep an office here in town. I’m a tax accountant. Rudy and I keep our distance. I get calls on my birthday and Christmas and whenever he’s in jail.” She rapped on the ice that clogged the top section of the bait fridge. “I’d pry this out but I don’t want to puncture the cooling coils.”
“I take it Rudy stopped working charters.”
“Rudy fell in with a crowd of losers, started staying out all night, sucking the sauce. His job went south inside a month. That was two years ago. Now he’s locked up because somebody put a crazy idea in a detective’s head.”
I wasn’t about to admit that I was that somebody.