by Tom Corcoran
Teresa stared at Lewis, then walked to her car, started it, and drove away.
“Was I the other person you needed to see?” I said.
Bobbi’s gaze went frosty. “I bust my brain to script an interrogation that allows me to clear your brother with a clean conscience. Teresa goes away pissed. You stand there like this is old news.”
“I’m getting hardened by all the drama.”
“You knew about Tim and Teresa, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You had a good idea where to locate his dark teal Chevy Caprice station wagon.”
“Key West is a small island.”
“You had all day Sunday to hire someone to retaliate against Millican.”
“I just ran this same kind of everyone’s-guilty gambit with Billy Bohner. Maybe you ought to arrest everyone and sort out the innocent.”
Bobbi nodded. “Then we could claim some progress.”
“Did you call it progress when you took that rope from the gold star to Tavernier?”
“I called it my job.”
She drove away with Tim in her rear seat. I told myself not to dwell on how at-home he looked as a prisoner.
He refused to look back.
22
Marnie and I moved our op center to Al’s kitchen. After I laid out paper towels, a beer, a Coke, and the cold fried chicken that Marnie had brought from Dion’s, she handed me a morning newspaper. “Check the personals,” she said.
The list was typical. “ATTRACTIVE SENSUOUS WOMAN WANTED,” “TANTRA CLASS ALL DAY,” “THE RUSSIAN BRIDE SERVICE,” “COMPUTER PROBLEM?” AND “BACKCOUNTRY TOURS.” The last bore the headline TENDER REUNION.
“You think a Russian bride will solve my problems?”
Marnie smirked. “Did you read that bottom one carefully?”
“No.”
“Read it out loud to me.”
“Tender reunion,” I said. “Attention all Bushnell and Gilmore shipmates. Big reunion scheduled. October in Key West. All hands on deck. Pass the word.”
“Sound like an opportunity?” she said.
“If we wait until October, we might learn a few things.”
“Is there a number to call?”
“Yes. Two nine four…it’s your home number.”
“It’s my ad,” she said.
“And?”
“Not a blessed peep so far. The odd thing is, there’s a legitimate Howard W. Gilmore reunion scheduled eighteen months from now in Seattle. I found the coordinator on the Web. He said I could plant the ad if I sent him contact info for anyone who responds.”
“Did he remember the hanging?” I said.
“He didn’t come aboard until after the ship left Key West, but he’d heard about it. He said the ‘Happy Howie’ was five hundred thirty feet long, which gave plenty of room for bad apples who didn’t fit the ‘military mode,’ as he called it. He also said that when the Bushnell went out of service in 1970, a lot of men lived in Key West with their families. Their kids were in school and their wives had local jobs. Several hundred were reassigned to the Gilmore.”
“Pretty standard,” I said. “In those days, at least.”
“The man said that the humanitarian transfers resulted in what he called ‘an overstock of tropical talent’ on the Gilmore. He said they were skilled in swapping favors and doing shady deals. Maybe you know the word he used.”
“We called it cumshaw when I was on active duty.”
Marnie nodded. “That was it.”
“It’s a barter system,” I said. “It supposedly skirts bureaucracy to benefit the military. All I ever witnessed was a mutant version that benefited humans.”
“But shady deals would have to come ashore to turn into felony arrests, right? Is that why you wanted to know if any Navy personnel had been nabbed by the city or county?”
“That was my thinking,” I said.
“Can we find a better view?”
I carried the chicken to the screened porch. Marnie inspected a rattan chair’s salt-crusted cushion, flipped it over, and settled in. “I went to the library this morning,” she said. “It doesn’t open until ten, but that man in the research room does me favors. He let me in at eight and let me sift through a stack of old newspapers. I started by reading the weeks just before and after the January flagpole hanging. I worked backward, then forward again. In the last four months of ’72 and the first two of ’73, the hanging was the only crime that wasn’t the usual crap. The Citizen ran with four major local stories.”
“Dirtbags and hippies leading the list,” I said.
“Nope. The State of Florida declared the island’s sewer system obsolete.”
“Thereby prompting a thirty-year repair job. What else?”
“Gas prices had driven down tourism, and Duval Street was a wasteland. The Treasure Salvors found the first signs of the Atocha, the silver coins and ingots. Finally, the Navy cut out all submarine activity, sent the Howard W. Gilmore packing in late January, reassigned to Sardinia, and declared fourteen acres of the naval station surplus.”
“Sardinia?”
Marnie nodded. “I noticed two other things during that time period. In October the city manager, acting on a tip, ordered a massive inventory of maintenance equipment. Then, in mid-November, the city was investigating a deficit in its accounts. Three hundred thousand bucks was missing. There was never a follow-up story, no mention of it ever again.”
“Nothing related?” I said.
“Not in the Citizen. From mid-September to the first week of February, I had to weed through Watergate horseshit, Paris Peace Accords, and gas-station lines. No missing-money follow-up, no crimes involving Navy personnel, no inventory results.”
“You’re very resourceful, Marnie. You should be a reporter.”
She shook her head. “I might have screwed up last night. I called Liska at home. He’s a very depressed man.”
“What was his side of things?”
“I asked about the hanging,” said Marnie. “It was like driving my Jeep into a mountain of Jell-O.”
“He stonewalled with fluff?” I said. “Sounds just like our sheriff.”
“He talked for five minutes, never said a thing, but the more he jabbered, the more depressed he sounded.”
“Did any details sneak out?”
“He tried to investigate the sailor’s death without calling it a suicide or a murder. His superiors gave him no support—I assumed that included Millican, but I didn’t want to ask outright and tip our hand—and the Navy was no help. A ship’s officer told him the higher-ups were afraid an investigation would delay the Gilmore’s deployment. Two city commissioners bought him a few drinks and told him he was working too hard. He even talked to a police counselor about it, and the woman told him to let it go.”
“Let it go?”
“Those were his words.”
“Well, it sure as hell came back to him on Ramrod,” I said. “Right about the time he saw Kansas Jack with a stretched neck.”
“Can I use that for my story lead?”
“There’s no story yet.”
Marnie’s phone rang. She took it to the kitchen, talked softly.
I used the break in our analysis to call Dave Klein’s direct number at the Broward Crime Scene Unit.
“I don’t want to be a pest,” I said, “but things down here are moving fast.”
“I forwarded the results an hour ago,” said Klein. “We pulled an image, but nothing too promising. Nothing we’d pursue at this level.”
“Thanks for your time.”
“I try to do a good job, and like I said, you had a favor coming. Gotta go.”
Marnie came back to the porch. “I have to be in the office by four.”
“I’ll be ten cars behind you,” I said. “I might have to evict my tenant.”
“That was a quick lease.”
“Two months reduced to five days. He moved in on Friday. According to Carmen, the party’s been nonstop sin
ce then. The neighbors blame me.”
“As well they should. You’re the slumlord of Dredgers Lane.”
“And don’t say—”
“Too late,” she said. “It’s too good a headline to pass up.”
“This kid Bixby at the city,” I said.
“How did we digress to him?”
“He must have a first name. Any chance you might…”
Marnie nodded, punched in a number, and told the city’s PIO that the Citizen planned a profile of the new photographer. She asked for a few preliminary details, hung up, and said, “E. J. Bixby.”
“No name? Just initials?”
“That’s it. He’s a big bundle of style, that boy.”
“Or bullshit,” I said. “Or evil.”
Marnie checked her watch. “What did we accomplish?”
My turn to shrug.
“We’re dead even,” she said. “You’re hung up on the Navy. My nose for news smells a story in the city’s maintenance-gear inventory and the single mention of missing money. If we blend our hunches…What if two or three sailors off the Gilmore stole a mess of city property just before the ship left port?”
“But why would people be getting killed thirty years later?” I said. “Three hundred grand…it’s not like they held up a Brink’s truck.”
“If it all ties together, there’s always revenge for some part of it that went haywire.”
“Like a murder made to look like a suicide?”
Marnie gathered her things to go. “It’s your turn to face down Liska.”
“I’ll go see him after I deal with my tenant.”
Marnie walked to the screen, stared at the canal. “Check it out,” she said. “Two girls in a tandem kayak, each wearing a Day-Glo bikini and a lightweight headset. The sweeties are adventuring in the wild Florida Keys.”
“Packing iPods and caffeinated spring water?”
“I used to live like that,” she said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay.” She laughed. “I never lived like that. Not even for one week.”
I walked Marnie down to her Jeep. She pointed out a county cruiser cutting a U-turn at the lane’s dead end. The big car rolled back past us, but the deputy kept his eyes on the road. “Think the sheriff’s watching you?” she said.
“I can’t worry about that. I wonder who’s watching the sheriff.”
The bastard chirped as I watched Marnie’s Jeep disappear onto Pirates Road. Area code 973 meant Monty Aghajanian in his FBI office.
“Alex, that forensic man in Broward County got a bingo on your duct tape. He e-mailed us a palm print.”
“No fingerprints?”
“Just a right palm, but it matches a partial print connected to a murder from four years ago. Indirectly, it hooks into two others that same year and one from three months ago.”
“Male or female?”
“Victims?” he said. “All male. The perp, too.”
“Where were the murders?” I said.
“That’s info we can’t let slide.”
“I’m a security risk? I brought you the tape.”
“I can tell you this,” said Monty. “They were all over the map, and not in Florida.”
“A nutcase?”
“A professional popper, and you need to back your ass off big-time. This boy’s on our ‘silent’ Most-Wanted sheet. It’s a list we don’t make public. We don’t want the cruds to know we’re on to their patterns. We also don’t think the public can help us without risk.”
I said, “A three-year gap between the first three and the fourth?”
“Right.”
“Were any hung?”
“Nope,” said Monty. “Numbers one, two, and four were electrocutions. We gave him the nickname ‘Sparky.’ The third was a sicko shot. He used a router on the vic’s kneecaps and hooked power winches to his arms and legs. The victim died when his left arm came off.”
“Electric davits fit the modus.”
“Good deduction, my friend.”
“Any of those four related to the Navy?” I said.
“No, Alex, but look,” he said. “I’ve already told you more than you need to know. Our people are southbound right now. Keep your distance from all of this shit, and don’t buddy up to anyone with sunglasses and a haircut.”
“I’m going to say three names, Monty. You do whatever you want with them. Are you ready to write?”
“Hold on,” he said.
Just then my cell phone’s second line beeped at me. I recognized the number as one assigned to the City of Key West, but I didn’t want to break away from Monty.
“I’m ready to write,” he said.
“Chester Millican, E. J. Bixby, and…you need spellings on these?”
“Not so far,” he said. “That’s only two.”
“The last one is…fuck.”
“What’s the matter, man?”
“The third name is Timothy Rutledge.”
Monty kept silent a few beats, then said, “Sorry you got dragged into this one, my friend.”
23
The call I’d missed from the city switchboard had been Beth Watkins: “If you get a chance,” the message said, “call me back in the next half hour or so.”
I scrolled the call log on my phone. Beth must have called me at least once from her cell, but her mobile wasn’t in my phone’s memory. I called her office line and was shuttled to the KWPD switchboard, a woman with impatience in her voice: “Desk.”
“I just missed a call from Detective Watkins.”
“She’s on an investigation.”
“It wasn’t three minutes ago, and she asked me to call her back,” I said. “Can you patch me through?”
“Hold.” The phone fell to a hard surface. I listened to thirty seconds of chatter, code calls, rogers, negatives, and addresses. “Detective Watkins is on an investigation. She can’t call back.”
“Can you give me her cell-phone number?” I said.
“I can’t give you that.”
“All I want is the detective to call me.”
“You can leave a message, but I can’t guarantee she’ll get it.”
“She doesn’t have a voice mailbox?”
“Of course she does, but she has to call in to retrieve her messages.”
“Is that something she usually does?”
“How should I know?”
“Can you get her on the radio and inform her that I responded?”
“No way, sir. The radio isn’t for personal use.”
“I hope to fuck this is being recorded.”
“It is, and you can go to jail for talking that way.”
“Good. Maybe the detective can find me there.”
The week’s miracle took the form of a Wendell-free exit from Keelhaul Lane, though I still had the feeling that he was peeking through the miniblinds, monitoring my moves, readying himself to pounce into conversation. I supposed that his free divorce had taken a toll in loneliness. Perhaps his love affair with the ocean helped to fill the void.
I hooked up with hellbound traffic on Ramrod and escaped the race by thinking through my meeting with Marnie, trying to dislodge details to illuminate the puzzle. Something we discussed wanted to float free of my subconscious fact trap. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it had lodged late in our chat. She had placed the Navy-reunion ad in the paper, spoken with Liska, studied four months’ worth of old newspapers. What else? Pieces of our conversation faded in and out, but nothing came to me. I only knew that I felt trapped by our dependence on ancient copies of the Citizen. We needed a human source.
I needed to test the memory of my Dredgers Lane neighbor, Hector Ayusa.
Crossing Harris Gap Channel my convoy slowed behind an old pickup with a two-story plywood camper teetering on its ass end. A sane person wouldn’t drive it in a fifteen-knot crosswind, much less on a bridge. Perhaps that explained its tortoise speed. My speed run had slowed from full tilt to snail’s pace, and my
pitted windshield magnified the sunlight’s glare. Hurry be damned, I would get to town when traffic wanted me there.
My phone rang as I passed Bay Point.
“Alex, it’s Beth Watkins.”
I locked on to the mental picture of a trigger finger shot tipless by a police hero.
“I tried to get back to you,” I said.
“So I heard. Look, this is a difficult call for me. I’m not a soap-opera fan.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Did you mention to Detective Lewis that I drove up to Little Torch on Saturday?”
“I believe so,” I said.
“I called her with some information an hour ago. She was more interested in being rude than hearing me out.”
“When she gets focused on a job she…well, she gets focused.”
“So maybe you’ll hear me out,” said Watkins. “Tell me if I’m on a wild-goose chase.”
“I’m all ears, Beth.”
“I’d rather have this be face-to-face,” she said. “Any chance you’re coming into town this afternoon?”
“I’ve got to play landlord in the next couple of hours.”
“Great,” she said. “Call me when you get free, and we can meet in my office.”
My memory coughed up an old news item on some cops in Philadelphia who notified by mail dozens of fugitives that they had won Super Bowl tickets. The winners simply had to show photo ID at a storefront office near the stadium to claim their tickets. The police busted each gullible fool who walked through the door and cleared dozens of warrants. With the past week’s talk of my being an accomplice, or tampering with evidence, or illegally renting my home, I didn’t want to fall for a similar scam.
“Could we meet at the Afterdeck?” I said. “Tell me what time to meet you there.”
“I rode my Ducati today. Can you pick me up?”
“I need to run an errand on my way in. I don’t know how long—”
“Call me when you pass Home Depot. I’ll be waiting outside the police station.”
“That sounds okay.”
“I get it,” she said. “You share the universal fear men have in dealing with women police officers. This is not a setup to detain you, Alex.”