by Tom Corcoran
“See?” I said. “Progress. We raised it to a hundred and one. You were going to tell me about your situation in the city this afternoon.”
Our dancing shrimp arrived. Beth promised to tell her story after we’d given the shrimp proper attention. I made a remark about dead crustaceans doing the mambo in limbo.
Beth smiled. “Lewis told me about your iguana analogy. If Kansas Jack was an iguana and Haskins a manatee, what was Navarre?”
“An air dance wino.”
Beth lifted her glass to her lips, smiled over its rim.
We attacked the shrimp with a flurry of soy sauce, ginger slices, and wasabi and didn’t say a word for four or five minutes. When I came up for air, I said, “Tell your tale.”
“Your number-one suspect stepped in a bucket of shit. We may need your services at the city for a few weeks.”
“I’m someone you call when you can’t get another date?”
“Bixby tried to rig a drug buy on Whitehead Street. He overextended himself. He tried to get it on film and he tried to make a citizen’s arrest. The other two players took attitudes, with each other and with him. It was knives, not guns. They all survived.”
“Jesus.”
“The slashees have been sent for repairs. We have a damaged storefront, a parked car with a busted window and dented door, a moped on its side, and a picket fence with splintered slats. And one fewer city employees.”
“Trying to create his own headline,” I said.
“You won’t believe the irony and humor,” said Watkins. “Two days ago I considered hiring you as a consultant to bring Bixby up to speed.”
“What could I tell a kid with a master’s degree?”
“We’re in the tropics. He learned under different lighting conditions. Better than that, you could have given him pointers on dealing with locals, from a pro’s point of view.”
“It might have saved him some blood loss.”
“And camera loss, too,” said Watkins. “While he was being transported to the hospital, an EMT called the switchboard to check on his gear. No one had noticed the camera bag, so the city will mend his wounds and fire his ass, but he’ll have to file the insurance claim.”
“Someone needs to go back and look into those crimes he solved in college.”
She took a moment to show her empty glass to the server and point to my beer. “Did you ever read any books on JFK’s assassination?”
“A few, maybe five or six, half my life ago,” I said. “The Warren Commission report read like bad fiction. The others were okay in parts, far-fetched in others.”
“I lived in California with a guy who collected anything related to the subject. He got me hooked on the books that dealt with conspiracy theory. The most bizarre one of all was American Tabloid by a man named Ellroy. His style was jerky, his characters were over-the-top, and the connections he made were off the chart. But in the end, it was so believable. I finished the last page, closed the book, and said to myself, ‘That was exactly how it went down.’ Since then, every time I hear or see bizarre, I sift for truth.”
“So my being over-the-top and off the chart makes me a good teammate?”
She went back to eye contact. “Doesn’t hurt.”
We had finished two thirds of the sushi when Beth held still and looked puzzled.
“Something wrong?” I said.
She laughed to herself. “I suppose not. I always think coincidence is funny.”
“Which coincidence?”
“Your friend Carmen talked about that man who hung himself years ago on the Navy base. A case file came across my desk this morning at the city. I was supposed to review it and file it away. This is what I wanted to tell Bobbi Lewis today when she got short with me. Did you hear about a suicide on Olivia Street maybe three months ago?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I guess we can be grateful it wasn’t a murder, too. There was a suicide note, and his neighbors weren’t surprised he killed himself. He’d always been the mopey sort, down on himself, always negative. The guy dressed up in his old Navy uniform and tied a nylon rope around a ceiling beam, then jumped off his television. He almost screwed up because the nylon stretched. When they found him, his feet were only four inches off the carpet.”
“Tell me again, how long ago?”
“The first week of April. Maybe it will juggle itself into one of your theories. Anyway, I’m full and the bill is on me and I don’t need to ride my motorcycle home tonight. Can you drop me off on your way back to Little Torch?”
On Big Coppitt I coasted from U.S. 1 to Beth’s driveway and shut down the Shelby. Next door, Bobbi Lewis’s personal and work cars sat under her house.
“I can’t exactly ask you to come in for a drink,” said Beth. “You’ve got a relationship going with my cranky neighbor.”
I hesitated out of surprise more than indecision.
Watkins caught my delay. “I could come up to Little Torch and you can bring me home in the morning. She goes to work at six forty-five.”
“Then you and I would be the item and Bobbi would take a hike?”
She looked pouty. “All I offered was another beer.”
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Why did you look up my property at the county records office?”
She looked into my eyes, slowly nodded. “There went that mood.”
“I don’t know why I thought of it, but I guess it needs an answer.”
“I did it to see if you had a mortgage, or if you had paid cash for your home.”
“And if I had paid cash?”
“You probably earned it behind the scenes.”
“You mean illegally?”
“I’m the new cop in town. No one offered to fill me in on details that I consider important. I wanted to know what kind of freelancer the city had employed.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “Thank you for dinner.”
She opened the door, eased out slowly, and walked away, leaving the door open. I had to reach to close it before the Shelby filled with mosquitoes.
I found my share of bugs at the outdoor phone a block away, next to the Circle K on U.S. 1. I had promised Marnie I would have a go at Liska. I needed to catch him at home, away from his job, his point of power. I dropped coins, punched numbers, and decided that calling was a bad plan an instant before he answered.
“Mmyello,” said Liska.
“What the fuck is mmyello?”
“Oh, it’s you. That’s how cops in the movies say hi.”
“What’s your house number on Eagle?” I said.
“I’m not receiving visitors.”
“Navy personnel working full-time for the city, early seventies.”
“Unless he has a large pizza in hand.”
“You order it, and I’ll pay when it gets there.”
I hung up fast, before he could respond.
25
The house on Eagle looked neat but dark. King Hang-dog answered the door, pushed it wide, and stood back to let me in. The place was stuffy. His center of action was a reclining chair, a gooseneck lamp, and a large flat-screen TV.
“Maybe you could open a window and turn on a second lamp,” I said. “What the hell have you been doing in here?”
“Absolut vodka and the evening news.” His voice sounded like a rusty hinge on a hatch cover.
Many moods traveled on Chicken Neck Liska’s glum face. If you thought he looked sad or displeased, you could be dead wrong. He might be basking in tranquility, ready to write you a million-dollar check. If you chose to ignore his sour expression and let his words tell the story, you saved time and brain cells.
I opened the fridge. “Two left in this six-pack. Can you spare one?”
“I’ll take a few bites of that blueberry pie.”
I handed over the whole pie. “You didn’t call for a pizza?”
“It’s coming. I’ll save room.” He dug a forkful from pie cente
r, stuffed it in his mouth.
I twisted the cap from some kind of light beer. After the Kirin, it tasted like fizz water.
Liska quit chewing with his mouth half full. “Your reason for this house call?”
“This is Wednesday,” I said. “We haven’t seen each other since last Friday. As county sheriff, you would like to formally apologize for the brutal actions of your detective.”
“Right, your run-in with Millican. How are your nuts?” He put down the pie, tore off a paper towel, swiped it across his face. He sopped up more sweat than blueberry dribble. “Never mind my intrusive query. I presume your equipment worked fine three nights ago with the other detective.”
“I was convalescing, but my attorney will love your concern,” I said. “Let’s call those Millican episodes his run-ins with me, not the other way around.”
“Whatever you say.”
“What’s your opinion on why he risked his job to rough me up?”
Liska shook his head. “Maybe he was upset by the unique murder scene.”
“An old pro like Millican, upset?”
The doorbell rang. I walked across the room and opened up.
“Anchovies and mushrooms?” said the delivery man.
“That’s all the toppings we get?” I said.
“Double-extra cheese.”
Liska ate three pizza slabs while I sipped watery beer. He finally quit and said, “Why did you come here?”
“I had a chat with my secret weapon,” I said.
Liska pondered that a moment. “The old Cuban who lives on your lane?”
“You’re still a fine detective.”
“He worked for City Electric, didn’t he?”
“He remembered the sailors who took jobs at the city. Marnie found archived news on the suicide—investigated by you and Millican. By your titles, Millican was senior, probably your boss. She also found mentions of the city’s missing money and its sudden ordering of maintenance inventories. I think it all ties together.”
Liska looked me in the eye. “So I bungled my first case as a city lieutenant. Now my fears of being exposed have shafted this current investigation?”
“I couldn’t have said it better, Sheriff.”
“What do I do,” he said, “erase everything and start over?”
“Might be the best approach, all the bullshit of the past few days.”
“And these are days which you spent snooping around, piecing together the puzzle so you can astound the establishment with your deductive abilities?”
“I asked a few questions,” I said.
“Rutledge, have you ever walked past a house with a dog in its yard? That dog barks at your approach, keeps yipping as you pass, then barks you good-bye. He stops when you’re out of sight. You ever wonder what that dog’s thinking?”
“That question fits our discussion?”
“That dog defended his turf and your departure proved that he succeeded. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t attacking, or that you were going down the street anyway. In that dog’s mind, he drove you away.”
“So everything I think I do,” I said, “you’re a step ahead of me.”
“You deciphered the mutt analogy.”
Liska tried again to offer me pizza, closed the box, and dropped it to the floor. He stared at me without speaking, looked away, then brought his eyes back to mine.
“Did you recognize Kansas Jack the minute you saw him?” I said.
“It took me a minute or two. When I asked you to e-mail me photos, it was to compare them to the old file. Once I got the five-by-sevens from your man Duffy Lee Hall, I knew for sure.”
“Did Millican call and tell you that he’d recognized Navarre?”
“No,” said Liska, “but he didn’t spend years studying the cold case. He didn’t say shit, so neither did I.”
“You think his memory’s gone soft after all this time?”
“His brain’s like that orange juice I like.”
“Not from concentrate?”
“Close,” said Liska. “I was thinking ‘Lots of pulp.’”
“How did the whole mess get stovepiped into a cold-case file?”
“Got time for a long lead-in?” he said.
I shrugged in the affirmative.
He reached behind his reclining chair, extracted the bottle of Absolut, poured a triple into a juice glass. “I got an education in hearing lies,” he said. “I took a job where all day, all year long, people tell you lies. Every criminal’s mission as a lawbreaker is to confuse the issue and bullshit the Man. But never did I hear lies like from our government officials. I’ve never been a revolutionary or an anarchist, and I’m not going to tell you that our system doesn’t work and that any toad on government pay is full of crapola. But the batch I ran into, in 1973, would rather climb trees to tell lies than sit on their butts and tell the truth.”
“Do tell,” I said.
“You turning the tables here, Rutledge? Doing a one-man good cop, bad cop on the old master?”
“I have no desire to be a policeman, or to mimic their acting techniques.”
Liska took a sip of vodka. “Get yourself that last fucking beer, Rutledge. I’m not going to sit here and drink alone.”
I returned to his sofa, raised the bottle a notch before tilting it back.
“Brick walls were a dime a dozen,” said Liska. “The city, the county, the Navy. I went to an FBI agent. He freaked out. In those days they didn’t like to tread on the military, or on any other agency for that matter.”
“That’s changed?” I said.
He shook his head. “I got one good sniff on that case. I forget the wee details, but I wanted to interview a few more sailors, and the Navy didn’t want to pull men off the ship. By then the Gilmore was in the Mediterranean. Something was going on. A multinational submarine and amphibious exercise, whatever. They insinuated that we had a lame case and they couldn’t spare the manpower. I thought someone like the local commander had gotten to the mayor, but he denied it. The sheriff, Bobby Brown, denied it, too. I asked the state representative and got no answer, so that’s when I knew it came from Washington. Come to find out, the Navy wanted so bad for us to back off, they threatened to renege on an offer to give the city their surplus land.”
“Truman Annex?” I said.
“You got it,” said Liska. “The biggest land fiasco in county history. Anyway, after all the horseshit, the prosecutors couldn’t have budgeted a drawn-out trial. It would have cost a fortune to fly men in for grand juries and trials. The city pulled everyone off the case.”
“Just like that, it was closed down?”
“Yep.”
“Did the Navy conduct its own investigation?” I said. “Or make arrests?”
“Hell, back then the Navy was lax on haircuts and beards. You think they kept decent files?”
“There’s something missing.”
“Justice?”
“No,” I said. “You’re leaving something out.”
“What might that be?”
“Your determination.”
“You mean my months of work and years of concern? You’re right. To me, down deep, it always was a cold case, always unsolved.”
“That was then and this is now. This is a new century, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t the embarrassment of a blown case that kept you quiet this week.”
He took a deep breath. “Not entirely, no.”
“Did you make yourself as dirty as the rest of them?”
“The Navy was good for and good to Key West. I was a green recruit, and I didn’t want to single-handedly screw up the relationship. I was cautioned not to make waves.”
“Waves, Navy. Good imagery. Did someone slip you a thick envelope?”
He tilted the glass of vodka, then let it rest against his lower lip. “A new roof on my mother’s house.”
“For that you would never go to jail all these years later.”
“Might lose my job.”
&n
bsp; “Who has the horsepower to fire you?” I said. “At worst, you retire early.”
“What would I do if I retired? I mean, what would fill my days? I’m packing too much bullroar in my head to relax. I’m better off working to the day I die. Otherwise I’ll go nuts.”
“Is anyone alive who even remembers that roof?”
“I don’t fucking know,” he said. “I mean, my mother died a year later, but I sure as hell couldn’t tell you who hauled shingles and pounded nails.”
“Don’t you think you would’ve heard from them by now, if they wanted to harm your reputation? When you testified against their cousin in court or when you ran for office?”
He tried to sip from the empty glass, then reached for the bottle. “You looking for me to unburden my soul, Rutledge?”
“I have a feeling that Millican’s name is coming back to our conversation.”
“He caught on to a scam run by some Navy guys who called themselves the Oblivion Division. He started taking little envelopes. I should have turned him in, but you know how that works. It got bigger and bigger. The envelopes turned into little brown bags like they wrap around beer bottles. There was plenty of cash going around, but I wouldn’t take any. Millican advised me to let them do my mother’s roof, so they wouldn’t see me as a risk. They almost got caught once or twice, for petty crap, but we smoothed it over. From then on, my silence as good as implicated me.”
“When did it fall apart?” I said.
“After the city and the Navy washed their hands of that flagpole hanging, I was plain disgusted. I didn’t care about being a cop, so I had nothing to lose when I told Millican he was history in the Keys. I told him, ‘You leave town, go away and leave my life, and this never happened.’”
“So he went up north and got a job?”
“One of those thieves was dead and Millican was scared shitless. He didn’t need much of a push.”
“Except he came back earlier this year and you hired him,” I said. “How did he pressure you into giving him a job?”
“The place he worked, he was right at mandatory retirement age. That wouldn’t have been a problem in my department. He had family down here, and I needed a good man. It was time to forgive and forget. Or let’s say I thought it was. I hadn’t done either one, and now I’m stuck with my decision.”