by Tom Corcoran
Key West is a four-by-two-mile island halfway between Puerto Escondito, Cuba, and Marco Island, south of Naples, Florida. It’s attached to America by a constricted hundred-mile asphalt umbilical cord, and it’s smack in the middle of nowhere except the Gulf of Mexico.
My ‘70 Triumph T120R Bonneville is a 650cc twin rated at forty-six horsepower. It has a four-speed transmission and weighs 600 pounds with me aboard. When new it would do better than 100 mph. I baby the old beast these days and try to keep it under 85. I store its original seat and carburetors in a box in the house. I’ve added turn signals and fresh rubber, but I kept the drum brakes and wire wheels. It rarely fails to jack my mood, blow dust from my brain.
I stupidly ignored the fact that a trip to Smathers Beach would take me past The Tideline condos. It wasn’t as if I could have worn blinders, and Beth might forgive the image from the past:
For some reason Teresa and I started early one morning. She worked five days a week. I tried never to schedule clients before ten. On the day that came to mind, our best shot to beat the clock was to share my outdoor shower. As lovers will, we messed around, did everything we could dream up to make ourselves late. It was her idea to put her feet on the bench seat and face away from me. She got hers first then tried to get fancy. It worked like she knew it would. When my knees buckled we both went down like playing cards in a failed stack. We spent more time laughing than we did having sex. I can’t recall if either of us got to work on time.
Maybe, when he found time, my budget shrink in the mirror would explain my desire to sift through brambles and barbed wire to find the thoughts of Teresa that most effectively crushed my heart.
My restorative ride took me to the smells of distant fish and coconut skin lotion. Folks quitting their beach time carried oversized towels and folding chairs from the sand back to their vans. Hot dog vendors were packing it in for the day. A young couple leaned against their car and dumped sand out of their shoes. A die-hard paraglider headed ashore. License tags on parked cars were from Michigan, New York, Delaware. The island joke: What do you call people who swim in January? The answer: North Dakotans.
The city derives great income from vista gawkers who creep above thirty. This was not a race against the clock. I rolled slowly eastward. I kept to the left lane to avoid chuckholes. Salt spray, cops and thousands of gawkers have played hell with the slow lane’s surface. I scanned the horizon, let my mind drift. A bad idea on a motorcycle, but traffic was light.
“Have you any idea who will catch the next bullet?”
Leaning through the bend where A1A curves to the north, I passed the stretch of waterfront where the original Houseboat Row lost its fight to Hurricane Georges in 1998. I rode by the hotels and condos built since then, buildings whose scenic views would have been spoiled by a line of funky houseboats. Many islanders would prefer, of course, the houseboats, but we cannot argue with the weather. Nor the passing of time. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a shrimp boat in the main harbor. I wished I could hear Captain Tony say one more time, “All you need is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego. Brains don’t mean a shit.”
My thoughts about Key West dodge the maudlin, for the most part. I have felt for years that my future holds promise for experiences equal to those in my past. Not the same events, which risks boredom, but fresh ones. Not the same me, either, which I can accept most of the time.
Nostalgia has its moments. The trick, I believe, is to shed regret.
Liska had guessed correctly that Tanner and Fecko were answering to me. And he was right about the danger of not knowing our adversary. Until law enforcement could determine the killer’s identity or a hint of his motive, the Aristocrats were at risk. But I couldn’t see how any trail might lead back to me. I was simply a messenger boy. The sheriff also had skipped over, practically swerved to avoid the fact that Greg Pulver hadn’t died alone. Emerson Caldwell and Teresa Barga had died in the same condo the day Pulver was found.
The sheriff had no real reason to discuss Caldwell. There was nothing messy and threatening about cardiac arrest or, from what I knew, death by poisoning. But he hadn’t described Teresa, how she looked after being strangled and having her neck snapped. His silence sent the exact message he wanted to plant in my brain. He knew that my photographer’s mind would provide sufficient impact and horror. He also believed that his left-field approach would keep me from acting the rebel, tracking mud into his department.
Chicken Neck was a detective at the city when I met him. He didn’t promote his own reputation. He didn’t have time for that. It grew from his crime solutions, case closings and convictions. I had worried that he might slack off after his election, get discouraged by the office routine and supervisory chores, get caught up in politics or human resource flaps. But as Monroe County’s sheriff, he had proved himself effective and worthy.
Maybe his health-food regimen was making him smarter. He set up our lunch chat as a one-sided debate. Having armed himself with details, he delivered his barrage, pushed procedure, stayed away from jerking tears. He had tried to bully me into backing off.
He almost made it work, but he left me with two huge questions. What could we do to screw up his investigation? How could we endanger ourselves or his officers? We weren’t out pounding the streets, walking solo in iffy sections of town, cruising bad alleys at night. We were gathering data. They, Wiley and Dubbie, were gathering data while I was going around in circles.
Maybe Liska was trying to keep us clear of the FDLE or the Feds.
I pulled over at the east end of Flagler, made a call.
“What was the address, the house number?”
It took Wiley a moment. “Sixteen, thirty-three.”
Six minutes later, just west of the dogleg where George intersects Seidenberg, I slowed the Triumph to absorb the view. Gone were the fake cable company van, the deputies with their hard hats and toolbelts. Without making myself obvious to the neighbors or lens, I checked a nearby utility pole. A thumb-sized video camera was poorly hidden among a half dozen steel boxes and cylinders. I looked away before I entered its field of view. Ocilla’s green Honda Element was in the yard, tucked into a leafy car cave. Nothing outside the house offered a clue to the resident. The only other vehicle in sight, parked across the street, was a bronze Hyundai four-door. Something about it, perhaps its cleanliness, made me think it was a rented car.
Except for confirming my guesses, I learned nothing from the drive-by. With no pressing appointments, even with incoming weather, I wasn’t in a hurry to return home. In the past three days my porch had hosted too many odd meetings, suffered too much bad news. Photographers are accustomed to rainy holidays.
I rode downtown and juggled my choices for skulking off. I needed anything but food. Almost anything. I didn’t want noise beyond rain on the roof. Nor loud music or a majority of tourists or, God forbid, video games at skull-splitter volume. I would suffer a beverage or two, or more. There was the former Che Che’s, now Don’s Place, on Truman. Too many TVs to suit my mood of the moment. The Bottle Cap had the clattering pool table, and more nostalgia. The fine photo of the old bar on the wall. Virgilio’s would smell too much like dinner prep at La Trattoria. Schooner Wharf was guaranteed to be too raucous for what I needed. The Green Parrot stood a chance of being peaceful but I would think about nights I danced there with Teresa. I might get busted for sniveling.
I had argued myself into the second-story Tower Bar at Turtle Kraals.
I found a parking spot on William, just south of the Red Doors Inn, an off-plumb pillar of Key West history. In the shrimping heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the joint knew flailing cue sticks and thirty-five-cent beers, knives in the boots of fishermen. Women who earned piecework wages deheading shrimp in the stifling heat of slimy waterfront processing plants, women who waited ashore for their men to show up with slim paychecks, and women who waited for men who never returned from sea.
The air smelled of rain and the Calda Bank flats.
I hurried northward past West Marine, admired again the undersea mural at the former Waterfront Market and hoped it would survive transition. Wind gusts warned me, started a clatter in the rigging of sailboats along the bight’s south docks. Crews on charter boats hustled to stow ad placards and clean-up gear. Sailors in ponchos snapped covers onto their inflatables at the dinghy dock. Heavy, cold raindrops hit my shoulders and arms, made quarter-sized splotches on the boardwalk.
I climbed the Tower Bar stairway, worked my way to the back side of the bar, the leeward end of the action, and took one of four vacant seats.
“Hey, Alex,” shouted Elizabeth Ann, a bartender I had known for years. She was swamped by customers anxious but too late to beat the storm. The downpour slapped loudly on the bar’s roof. The fair weather drinkers scrambled to settle their tabs and leave. At mid-mêlée Elizabeth Ann deserted them, walked toward me with her eyebrows raised. She knew that I sympathized, and servers on the island know the drill. Locals put extra green in the jar.
“Barbancourt, soda, please,” I said, knowing she would pour with a high elbow. “Piece of lemon.”
Where the hell had that come from? I had intended to stick to two, maybe three beers, but my mouth had overruled me. Bad enough that the Triumph was parked in salty rain. I don’t slash my wrists and I don’t ride with rum in my system. I would have to figure a way to get the bike home.
By the time I had been served and the register was quiet there were only four or five people under the roof. Except for the lovely Elizabeth Ann, I knew none of them. Half of my drink had gone down in the first sip. If I had any tension left in me after the beach ride, it vanished when the rum hit home. I was about to zone out staring at a rain-splattered neon beer sign, wondering why it wasn’t shorting out, but I thought of four calls I wanted to make, a couple of errands I had let slip. Why the hell did my mind jerk into gear when my body went slack?
As skilled saloon ambushers will do, he waited until I had taken that second gulp and placed my glass back on its coaster. I saw him coming, a typical lonesome tourist. He would tell me about his gas station in Ohio. Ask about the best boat to charter for shark fishing, or where we locals chased pussy after midnight. He wore a plain black form-fitting T-shirt that showed off his muscular build.
“Rutledge?” he said. “We’ve never met. I expect it’s inevitable. I’m Marsh.”
Darrin Marsh, the cop boyfriend. He must have heard Elizabeth Ann call me by name. He held an almost-empty Corona bottle, didn’t offer to shake hands. Right away his body language offered clues to his grief.
“My sympathies,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“She was a keeper,” he said, “but who am I telling? You’ve been there too.”
His statement didn’t require a reaction. I faced him and waited. He showed his empty to Elizabeth Ann, ordered another. She didn’t look happy about it.
“They did her right in the Citizen yesterday,” he said. “Loyal city employee and all that. They get some of her background from you?”
I shook my head. “Probably Paulie, her stepfather.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “She sure had a nice ass.”
Oh, Darrin Marsh, you’re a class act, I thought. It was the first time I had heard a woman’s derrière discussed in memoriam within hours of her tragic death.
“Teresa kept herself fit,” I said. “She looked younger than her age.”
“She once told me that her boyfriends were like paper towels,” said Marsh. “They could only absorb so much of her. She knew when it was time to rip off a new sheet.”
“She never told me that one,” I said. “You must have been up to the job.”
He shrugged. “She wasn’t always a walk on the beach.”
I thought, Don’t say a fucking word. He looked like a poster boy for high blood pressure. He brought to mind a boss I had in the Navy, an Academy grad who bullied himself out of his dream career. I heard at some point that he died of a stroke before he made forty.
“You don’t agree?” said Marsh. “No walk on the beach?”
His body language had shifted to aggression. I had misread Marsh’s posture from the get-go. He hadn’t been grieving, he had been bluffing. Working himself up even before he told me his name. I needed to calm the asshole before he got out of hand. I needed to remind him he was a cop.
“If I hadn’t started with a high opinion, Officer Marsh,” I said, “I wouldn’t have spent time with her.”
“Right on,” he said. “It was her opinion of you that ended your deal.”
“That a fact?”
Darrin inhaled deeply, went for flex effect. I wondered about the testosterone content of the sweat dripping down his face. I looked around in hope of spotting someone I knew. Two men at the far end of the bar were paying attention but they were strangers.
“Lot of humidity this afternoon,” I said. “Strange for January.”
“Fuck weather talk. I know what you’re all about.”
“I can’t imagine she sat around and discussed me,” I said. “What did you do, Marsh, read her diary? I know she kept one.”
His face told me I had nailed it by chance, with a wisecrack. I saw a disconnect in his eyes, his pupils the bulging cue balls of a meth freak. His nostrils ballooned from narrow ovals to full, dime-sized circles.
He spoke with a sneer. “She said you got a brass bell outside your house.”
I wished I could retract the diary remark.
“You got brass balls, too,” he said. “Your high opinion of yourself, being much too good for everyone else.”
I would need to think about that. Again, no need to respond.
He put his empty on the bar, didn’t notice that Elizabeth Ann had yet to deliver a fresh one. He began mouth breathing, working his jaw as if he was chewing his thoughts. A city cop would have to be worse than stupid to bust me up in public in broad daylight.
“No comeback on that, Mr. Rutledge?” he said.
“Put it this way,” I said. “It’s a quality-of-life thing. It’s sometimes tough in this town, but I like to keep my distance from disagreeable people.”
“You ignored my size? I could do you horrible damage with my bare hands.”
“Is your threat supposed to change my mind?” I said. “What’s wrong with my having strong beliefs? Looks like you’ve got your share.”
Marsh turned to his right to flick away sweat. He also telegraphed his punch. I saw it coming, stood to avoid catching it smack in my face, tightened my stomach muscles. That saved my teeth but brought ungodly pain to my stomach muscles.
The men at the far end of the bar yelled, “Back off, buddy!” and, “Whoa just a minute, mister.”
“You’re out of here, Darrin,” shouted Elizabeth Ann. “I’m dialing right now.”
I knew that fistfights take a toll on finger bones. There would be no whoa in the action. Marsh rocked back on his feet to assess the damage he had caused me, and I aimed the heel of my left hand at his upper lip, the lower part of his nose.
He answered with his left, an open-hand slap that almost turned out my lights. With my vision blurred I didn’t see his incoming right-hand shot to my solar plexus. The next punch almost pulped my shoulder. He went sideways, kicked backward, and broke out two or three slats under the porch railing. If I had thrown a punch at that moment, I would have hurt myself more than him. Or missed.
A gust of wind scattered napkins, straws, plastic cups. The champ was getting his ticker-tape parade. Marsh backed off, crouched and grabbed a railing spindle, a two-foot section of one-by-four. My mind slipped into slow motion, but I couldn’t figure out a way to grab the slat without taking hundreds of splinters or snapping my wrist. Marsh raised his arm, wavered a split second, then struck downward. I jammed my head against his chest just as the slat hit the top railing hard enough to split it into drumstick-size wands. He whirled and flung away the pieces still in his hand. I heard them land in the yard behind the restaurant.
I
wasn’t sure what had crossed Marsh’s mind, made him quit the fight. Then I heard the sirens that he must have heard first. Marsh shook his head, spoke to no one. Blood streamed down his chin. He turned to the bar, peeled open his wallet and counted out four hundred-dollar bills. He disappeared down the stairway to ground level.
“Nice meltdown,” said Elizabeth Ann. “Are you okay?”
John Wayne would have had a snappy response. I had a bar napkin stuck to my elbow and nothing to say. I felt like crap, probably looked worse, and Elizabeth Ann didn’t press for an answer.
The two men that had shouted down Marsh were gone. The neon beer sign went fuzzy for an instant, then returned to normal. Next to it I saw Dubbie Tanner, his camera at chin level, probably still filming a video record of my losing battle.
Shouts came from ground level, heavy footsteps on the wood stairway. I signaled Tanner to hide his camera. He got it into his pocket as the police arrived.
When the lead officer questioned the 911 call, Elizabeth Ann had an answer for him. She proved why top bartenders are valued. “Our power went out for a minute,” she said, “and my register got stuck open. This schitzo guy at the bar was checking the cash drawer, scaring me, I mean really piss-scaring me, so I called. He blew out of here, like, two minutes ago. Bad-looking dude, so thank you for responding. I was shitless for, like, three or four minutes.”
“Which way did he go?” said the officer. “Did you notice?”
She pointed at the stairs and tilted her finger downward.
Another cop stood next to the broken railing. He held a bouquet of wood splits. “Anything you can tell us about this, ma’am?”
“Must be from last night,” she said. “It was there when I came to work and I’ve been slammed, until it rained. I forgot to call our maintenance man.”
The cop nodded slowly, half-believing her. He sized up my dazed appearance then took a long look at Dubbie Tanner. “Everything else okay here?” he said.
“Perfect,” said Elizabeth Ann. “Wish all my customers could be like these guys. You boys come back when you’re off duty, you hear?”