Mangrove Squeeze

by SKLA

  He ran a hand through his hair. Suki watched the curls wrap around his fingers, one by one. "No," he said. "Not at all."

  He put his fork down for a moment and looked at Suki's face. Her unlikely blue eyes were toned down to slate gray in the dimness, her lips stayed just slightly parted, as though she herself was speaking, as if listening had a breath and a language of its own. Looking at her, it seemed suddenly to Aaron that it had been a long, long time since he'd really spoken with anyone.

  "One thing bugs me, though," he said, refilling both their glasses. "I don't think I ever made her understand."

  "Understand?" said Suki. "Or want the same thing you did?"

  "Okay, okay, fair enough. But there's one conversation I remember, it still frustrates me no end .. . But wait a second, you don't wanna hear this."

  "I do," said Suki. "Really."

  "Really? . . . Well ... I guess it was one of those conversations that couples sort of have a thousand times, and then one night they really have it. I said, 'Okay, that little B&B we always talk about, let's go for it, let's do it now.' She looked at me like I was nuts. 'Now?' she said. 'Not now. Much later, when we retire.' 'When's that?' I said. 'Come on, let's leave our jobs, leave Manhattan ...' And she freaked of course, turned the whole thing upside down. 'Why are you so frightened by success?' 'Frightened by success?!' I said. 'I'm frightened, yeah. Wanna know what scares me? What scares me is that I'm barely forty, and I don't want the whole rest of my life to consist of a few dumb things I already know I'm good at. T-bills. Matching my socks to my tie. Which cross-town streets to take. Twenty years from now I know nothing but those same few things? I wanna do some things I'm bad at. Hammer boards and see them crack. Plant shrubs and watch them die... "'

  "And she said—?"

  Aaron pushed some pasta around his plate. "She told me I was having a midlife crisis."

  With a vehemence that surprised them both, Suki said, "Now that's an evil deadly phrase."

  Aaron had to smile. "It is, now that you mention it."

  Suki got more Mediterranean; her arms came up, her shoulders dimpled as she gestured. "Someone wants to change his life, it must just be a nervous breakdown. Give it a label and stop listening. Otherwise ... otherwise, change might get contagious too, and wouldn't that be terrifying?"

  Aaron sipped wine. "You sound like someone who's heard that stuff herself."

  "Something like it," Suki said. "A long time ago. You had a midlife crisis. I was a dropout. Same kind of thing, I guess. A tag that's in style to explain away the crazies and the misfits who don't want what other people want. Hey, face it—there's gotta be something wrong with someone who doesn't want a house with a garage and a baby dressed in Gap and the kind of job that gets you frequent- flyer miles."

  Aaron said, "So when you left that, was it hard?"

  "Leaving Jersey? Hard?! Pfuh. I was a kid. Parts of it were hard, I guess. Hard to tell my folks I wasn't gonna finish college. That was a big deal to them. Slinging all that hash to help with the tuition. The rest? I didn't really have a life yet. What did I have to leave? You—you had a lot."

  "Seemed that way at the time," admitted Aaron. He reached up, scratched his neck. He looked at Suki. The kitchen was not romantic. The light was flat and neutral, there were no cut flowers on the table. He said, "But it doesn't matter what you leave. It only matters what you find."

  "I'll drink to that," said Suki.

  She raised her glass. They clinked. The glasses were not crystal, there was no one to clear away the dishes and leave them staring soulfully at one another. They looked at one another anyway, until Aaron was defeated by her improbable blue eyes and dropped his glance. And if the kitchen hadn't been so unromantic, and if the threat of murderous Russians wasn't looming over their emotions, it might have dawned on them to reflect on how extraordinary it was, how quaint and ripe with promise, that they were sharing a roof and sharing food and telling stories, and weren't lovers yet.

  The big school windows of the Island Frigate office had a crisscross pattern of iron bars in front of them, and Tarzan Abramowitz was briefly stymied in his determination to break in.

  He stood a moment on the metal landing, his crowbar tapping edgily against his thigh, the strap of a leather satchel paralleling the wide suspender on his shoulder. Above and behind him, the light of a bright orange street lamp was swallowed up by the leaves of a banyan tree; below him the street was quiet. He cursed the windows and worked his crowbar between the door frame and the door.

  The process lacked subtlety, but Key West break-ins didn't require a great deal of finesse. Alarms were few; back alleys were many; police response time was on an island schedule. Tarzan got a grip and started prying with his beefy arms. Paint twanged off the jamb, you could see a lot of different colors beneath the present gray. The molding bowed and started breaking free, and then the bar bit deeper, down to where the wood was too sodden and decayed to splinter, but could be scraped away, grated almost, like a raw potato. Abramowitz grunted and squeezed, and when the door fell open the lock was still intact, just not attached to anything.

  Inside, the office was dark save for the sickly glow of a computer monitor that Peter Haas, the restaurant reviewer, had neglected to turn off. His screensaver had flying toasters on it and these annoyed Tarzan Abramowitz. He smashed the computer with his crowbar. The toasters shattered along with the glass and left behind a fugitive green glow that seemed to come from nowhere, that hovered in the air like fog then flashed and faded like a lightning bug smeared against a sidewalk.

  He turned his flashlight on and tried to determine which desk belonged to the woman who could not live.

  On one desk he found a cupful of cigars; he cleared the surface with his elbow, monitor, smokes and all. At another he found drawers full of old Playbills, which he dumped out on the floor. Finally he turned his beam on a desk that was topped with little stacks of invoices and proofs of ads. He scanned it quickly for a note pad, an appointment book. Finding nothing that gave an immediate hint of Suki's whereabouts, he started stuffing things— business cards, receipts, her Rolodex—into the leather satchel.

  Then, without particular hurry, he headed for the sundered door. Halfway there he stopped, like a man who's forgotten his hat. He'd decided to smash one more computer. He cocked his crowbar and savored the shatter, then walked unharassed down the metal stairway and around the corner to his blue Camaro.

  Chapter 30

  "Look," said Officer Carol Lopez, "it's just a break-in. Why you wanna talk to homicide?"

  "Just a break-in," Donald Egan murmured.

  It was morning. He'd arrived at work with a double Cuban coffee in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. He'd seen the front door hanging open just a crack, and his first thought was, Good, someone came in early for a change; he wouldn't have to rearrange his hands, he could simply push through with his shoulder. That's when he noticed that both halves of the lock were sticking to the door, and the door frame had been hollowed out.

  "It isn't just a break-in," the editor went on. "That's the point."

  Lopez was a woman but she had the same flat but spreading ass that male cops always had. Maybe it was the pants they made them wear, or maybe the weight of the holster on the hips. "If it's not a break-in—" she began.

  "There's nothing here worth stealing," the editor interrupted. "No cash, no drugs, no television sets—"

  "A grudge then?" said the cop. "A controversy? Like a white trash letter to the editor?"

  "Getting warmer," Egan said.

  "Still. A grudge, I don't see where that's homicide."

  Egan patted the empty pocket of his shirt. He badly wanted a cigar. He squatted down and combed through the rubble around his desk—the papers and folders and dangling wires—until he found one. Straightening up, he said, "I think it's connected to an unsolved murder on your books. Lazslo Kalynin."

  Lopez used her forearm to push her hat back farther from her brow. "Lazslo Kalynin. I saw that
stiff. Wasn't pretty. But the connection, there you lose me."

  Donald Egan lit up, pulled cigar smoke deeper down his lungs than cigar smoke was supposed to go. He looked around his trashed premises as the vapor hit his bloodstream. Smashed monitors glowered back at him like vacant eye sockets, and he knew his leveraged business was going down the tubes. Yet in that moment, with the rank nipple of tobacco tickling his gums and the narcotic sting of smoke scratching at his passageways, this failed and disappointed man was almost happy. This was the beauty, the near-salvation, of addiction. With sudden calm, he said, "I know I lose you there. This is why I want to talk to homicide."

  Officer Lopez frowned. People tended not to take her as seriously as she thought she should be taken, and she didn't know if it was because she was a woman, or because she was only a patrol cop, or because she was a woman patrol cop in a town where people didn't take much seriously. She sighed and raised a clipboard.

  She started filling out a form. Egan smoked. He narrowed his eyes, clamped his throat shut to hold the precious cargo in his chest. The universe shrank down to that wet red horizon where the welcome poisons rubbed against his membranes.

  "A report," said Lopez, tearing the top sheet off a triplicate and handing it to him. "You'll need it for insurance."

  Egan blinked at dead computers, battered furniture. "I don't have insurance."

  "Boy, you really should." She reached into a back pocket and came out with a pamphlet. She handed it to Egan.

  "Victims Rights," he read. He spit a fleck of tobacco onto the littered floor. "Bet you hand out more of these than I distribute papers."

  "Better reading maybe," Carol Lopez said. "I'll ask Lieutenant Stubbs to stop by later."

  Pineapple had never been to a hotel before, and he didn't know how to act.

  That, and his shoeless-ness, and the fact that he was carrying his sign with parking written on it, was making him extremely self-conscious. But he was determined to visit Suki, to see how she was and to ask if there was any more that he could do for her. So he screwed up his courage and climbed the porch steps of the Mangrove Arms.

  He hoped to see Aaron before he had to talk to anybody else, but, instead, there was an old man sitting at the desk. Piney considered fleeing, but fought the impulse. He hesitated just an instant then shuffled quickly toward the counter, trying to hide his crusty feet before the old man saw them. "Hi," he said. "My name's Pineapple."

  Sam Katz looked up and smiled.

  His own life had changed invisibly but dramatically over the past few days. The guest house finally had some customers; they were harboring a refugee; and he felt that Aaron needed him. This belief was bracing beyond words, more galvanizing than some exotic medication. So Sam had been begging his brain to concentrate, pleading with his circuitry to carry messages truly, so that he might be of help. He was determined to be alert and businesslike behind the desk. He said, "Ah, Mr. Pineapple, welcome. You have a reservation?"

  This flustered Piney, he changed the angle of his parking sign. "First name," he mumbled. "First name's Pineapple."

  Sam smiled benignly. "How interesting. Were all the children in your family named for fruits?"

  "Didn't really have a family," Piney said.

  "Ah," said Sam. He tried to give comfort. "Sometimes, ya know, it's really just as well. So. What can I do for you?"

  Piney's feet were damp against the sisal rug. He leaned across the counter with an elbow very near the little silver bell. Softly he said, "I'd like to please see Suki for a minute if I could."

  Sam froze. His heart bounced around inside his skinny chest. His eyeballs itched. Suki wasn't there. That was the first, main, most important thing he had to remember. No Suki. Never heard of her. Now here's this person asking for her. Either it was some kind of a crazy test or it was big-time trouble. He tugged a tuft of hair, fiddled with his hearing aid. "Suki?"

  " Ya know," said Piney. "Aaron's friend."

  Sam thought fast. "Aaron?"

  "The owner. He brought her here. She stayed with us before. Me and Fred."

  "Oh yeah? And where do you live?"

  "In a hot dog."

  "Hot dog?"

  "In the mangroves. Old military property. By the airport."

  Sam remembered, sort of, driving past the airport on the morning they picked Suki up. But he wasn't quite convinced. He narrowed his eyes, said, "Shkulski pudenska."

  Piney said, "Wha'?"

  "I called you a filthy name in Russian. You didn't flinch."

  "Why would I?" Piney said.

  Slowly, Sam got up from his chair. "Wait here a minute. But I have to tell you, Cantaloupe, you scared the shit outa me."

  "Found the car?" said Piney. "I kept telling Fred we oughta find a better swamp."

  "Better swamp," said Suki, "I would've drowned."

  "God. I didn't think of that."

  They were standing on the widow's walk outside of Suki's room. The fig tree threw a dappled shade, leaves scratched dryly at the railing when the breeze blew. Piney leaned far over, craned his neck toward Whitehead Street. "I change the place I sit a little ways," he said, "we could wave to each other."

  "I'd like that," Suki said.

  There was a pause. A plane went by. Piney said, "So I guess you're sort of stuck here, huh?"

  "Looks that way."

  "I'd do anything to help, ya know."

  "I know you would. Thank you."

  Piney looked away, grabbed a little dangling branch and let the leaves rub on his shoulder. "Fred says it's 'cause I got a crush on you, but it isn't. It's philosophy."

  For that Suki had no answer. A breeze moved the shadow she was standing in and sunshine warmed her face.

  Piney went on, "Fred'll help too. He says he won't but he will. That's just Fred."

  Suki nodded and Piney turned around to face her. He met her eyes for just a second and then he dropped his head a little and looked beneath her chin. Thin strands of muscle were moving in her neck, and watching very closely he could see the pulse surging underneath her skin. "Healin' up nice," he said.

  "Coming along," said Suki.

  "Well, gotta go," said Piney, and he gathered up the parking sign that he'd leaned against the railing. "I'll wave to you."

  "I'll wave back," Suki said.

  "You need anything," he said, "I'm sitting there."

  Chapter 31

  "'Nother donut?" said Dunkin' Dave.

  "Fuck yourself another donut," said the thickly built Lieutenant Gary Stubbs. Since Dunkin' Donuts moved to Southard Street, just around the corner from the station, the waistband of his pants had started folding down across the top half of his belt, his thighs had filled in the last pucker of his boxer shorts, and he walked around all day with an oily feeling at the corners of his mouth.

  "Come on," said Dave. "'Sa last one onna tray."

  Stubbs looked at the donut. Hot grease had pocked its surface beautifully, it had a perfect mix of sheen and craters. He took it. "Only 'cause I'm having such a shitty day."

  It was a slow time, just around eleven in the morning. Cops had crazy schedules, that's why Dave could talk to them. He rested the corner of the tray against the counter. "How come shitty?"

  Stubbs had dunked his donut, coffee dripped back out of its honeycombed insides. "Ever had a cat sleep in your motor?"

  "Huh?"

  "Cool nights like lately," said Stubbs, "the strays, they climb up underneath your car and sleep on top the motor."

  Dave rearranged the angle of his paper hat. " Whaddya know."

  "'Cept this morning," Stubbs went on, "some asshole cat, he's sleeping in the fan. Go to start 'er up..."

  "Oh shit," said Dave.

  Stubbs made a clattering but glutted sound.

  "Cut'im right in half?"

  "Thirds," said the lieutenant. "His tail was wrapped around. Some fuckin' way to start the day, huh? Pieces a cat glued to the radiator. Then they find a body out around Cottrell."

  "Cottrell? W
ay out in the Gulf?"

  "Fishermen found 'er. Thought she was a bundle a rags. Red sweater, gray skirt. One black shoe. Ever seen a body been drowned a coupla days?"

  Dave shook his head. Making donuts all night long wasn't any picnic but it was better than a lot of jobs.

  "'S weird," the cop went on. "No two are alike. Sometimes the skin pops open. Ya know, like a plum that's overripe. Usually there's pieces missing. Shark eats a leg, the nose is nibbled off. Eyes, the gulls sometimes—"

  Dave hadn't eaten since last night, he had a lot of acid in his stomach. He raised a hand. "Accident or someone killed her?"

  "Hard to say," said Stubbs. "Had one big bruise across her chest. Narrow, even—not like from a punch. Too high up to be a gunwale. Coulda been a boom swinging across, but she wasn't dressed for sailing. No other signs of struggle and she was breathing when she hit the water."

  "Any idea who she was?"

  "No ID," said Stubbs. "Not much face to tell the truth. One little kinda crazy clue."

  "What's that?" asked Dunkin' Dave.

  "Her underpants."

  "Underpants?"

  "The label," said the cop. "Seems to be in Russian."

  Dave had been at work since midnight, sweating under bare light bulbs, tending fryers big as kiddie pools, squirting jelly, squirting cream. By late morning he sometimes got a little giddy. "Exhibit A," he said. "The victim's underpants."

  "Not funny," said Stubbs. He dunked his donut deep down in his tepid coffee, and then his cell phone started ringing.

  Dunkin' Dave picked up his tray and moved discreetly toward the kitchen, going slow enough to hear the homicide detective curse then drop some money on the counter.

  Gary Stubbs and Donald Egan knew each other vaguely, in the way that cops and newspaper guys were acquainted. They were usually cordial and they didn't trust each other worth a damn; they traded information and if the swap was even someone felt like he had lost. Cops were big on order; editors made their livings from freedom; they were dogs latched on to opposite ends of the gristly bone of power, and neither dog was programmed to let go.