Octopus Alibi

by Tom Corcoran

  “That’s a good way to play it. You should never crap in your front yard.”

  The classic motto of the thief, I thought. “I never did that until yesterday, at the ATM.”

  I could almost see calculations going on in his head, wheels in motion behind his glazed eyes. “What happened?” He forced a straight face. “Your card tilt?”

  “No, my image did, in the video monitor. Me and a cab driver, and you weren’t in sight. The card you had me run was hot.”

  He nodded, went pensive. “Are you suggesting I leave town?”

  “You need to get your story in order.”

  Randolph shoved things around on the countertop, found his wallet. He pulled out the card he had handed to me at the bank. “I’m not believing I did this.” He put his fingernail on the name. “See? It’s my fucking card. I lost it, reported it lost, and the bank sent me a new one. Meanwhile, I found it and I tucked it in here so no one could rip me off.” He fiddled around in his wallet, pulled out another with the same graphics. “I grabbed the old one. This is the one I should have used.”

  “How did the PIN work?”

  “Ask the bank. Why should I worry? I used a card that I reported stolen from me?” He walked around, gathered items that he put in his pockets or stacked near the door. “Look, I’ve got a couple things that need attention.” He held up his car keys. “Maybe we could continue this over a beer or two, later today or tomorrow, anytime you like.”

  “Randy Whitney talked to the county medical examiner yesterday. You know the guy?”

  He nodded, quit his quick comebacks. He let his guard down a moment, let me see that he was nursing a hangover. He put his keys and ball cap back on the counter. “I like to play games. Put-on games, play-acting. Harmless, of course, but I’ve been doing it since high school. Now you know one of my secrets.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “I peaked out in Atlanta a few years ago. I forget the name I used. I made it all the way to the CEO’s office at NationsBank, before they became Bank of America. I pretended to be a high-priced consultant. I spent a half hour on the top floor talking Lear Jets with the boss.”

  “Are you interested in the mayor’s death?”

  He halted, refocused on me. “Your girlfriend thinks it’s more complicated than sucking gun barrels. I offered to help ease her mind.”

  “Your picture’s in the paper today, with Gomez.”

  “So it is. I was in a bar a few days ago, in the early afternoon. The bartender and I were matching coins for drinks. In walked the mayor and a dude with a camera. I guess they were looking for a photo op. The mayor made a joke about us not gambling in front of a city official. I asked for a shot glass, filled it with beer, told him to take his ten percent. It was a Key West payoff for closing his eyes. He loved it, put his arm around me, and knocked back the shot. Right after that, the flash went off.”

  “You had a new best friend?”

  “More or less. Short-term, as it turned out.”

  “You missed his funeral.”

  “I don’t do funerals,” he said. “Especially funerals of suicides.”

  “So you took a walk.”

  He finished his drink, to buy time. “Teresa got bad vibes at the man’s house. She had her shorts in a knot about bad evidence. Blame it on her criminology courses. I didn’t agree with her, but I offered to help, to find out what I could. She asked me not to drag her into it, hence my fake name.”

  “You drop by my house ninety minutes ago?”

  More surprise on his face. “You were leaving town, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to do the funeral. I wanted to come by to offer support. Your house was closed up, so I left.”

  I pulled the small envelope from my shirt pocket, slid a photo from the sleeve. His Z-3 on Grinnell, from the Kodak Max. “Someone else died the other day. I wonder why Naomi Douglas had a picture of your car.”

  For an instant he looked like a rat in a corner. He shook his head. “That one hurt. Naomi was hoping to invest in my Fort Myers real estate deal. A storage building on the outskirts of town. Frankly, I was counting on her investment.” He looked again at the photo. “I don’t know why she took that picture. Maybe her friend took it, the dead mayor. He didn’t seem like the jealous type.”

  “You knew they were friends?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Didn’t everyone?”

  “Why didn’t you agree with Teresa, murder versus suicide?”

  “A pet peeve of mine. Too many people try to read mysteries into everyday events, conspiracy into the mundane. Why does there always have to be a story behind the story? We can thank the media for that. Which takes us back to my asking if you had HBO.”

  “Your peeve convinced you that the mayor shot himself?”

  “He cashed his own check. Gomez was a nice guy, too nice a guy to make a mess. Is there such a thing as a suicide that doesn’t leave a mess for loved ones to clean up? From what I’ve read, bodies leak like crazy. If a guy sails into the sunset, it takes years for families to get him declared legally dead. That’s a mess, too, and tougher to clean up. Do me a favor, Alex. Let me know if you ever find a clean way.”

  “You planning something?”

  “No. But I like to keep my options open.”

  “You’ve got an answer for everything,” I said. “I bet your investors can’t wait to get in line.”

  “Okay, Rutledge. Forget class. Take it down a notch. Let me tell you something you don’t realize. A mirror won’t tell you this, but you telegraph yourself. If you’re working from knowledge, you get this cold look on your face. If you’re guessing, you turn to humor. Now, here you are, upset about my diet and pissed because you can’t punch me. You’ve tied me to two dead people, with no possibility that I had a part in their deaths. Why don’t you save yourself stress by staying the fuck away?”

  “You’re right about the stress,” I said. “And there’s no telling what that tension might make me do.”

  “You people down here are so insulated. The distance from the mainland may come off as romantic and adventuresome, but I’ve had better times and squandered more smarts than half this island ever dreamed of having. Can I ask you something?”

  “You want permission?” I said. “Why start now?”

  “What time did Naomi die?”

  “In her sleep, whatever that means.”

  “So, say, before eight A.M.?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And Gomez, what time?”

  “Judging by when they called me, in the early to midafternoon.”

  “So six hours apart, minimum? But they could have died twelve or fifteen hours apart, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re suggesting the deaths are linked? That’s a far fetch, don’t you think?”

  I nodded.

  “If it’s any consolation, Rutledge, I feel bad about Steve Gomez gargling the buckshot, and I feel awful about Naomi Douglas. I have sympathy for anyone that knew them, double sympathy for anyone who knew them both, and that includes you. I will assume your stress explains this visit. No hard feelings.”

  A rooster crowed in the parking lot. Local color on the hoof.

  I looked through the window and glimpsed Teresa’s blue scooter racing toward the condo lot’s exit gate. I had to guess that she’d made it to Randolph’s door, heard us talking inside, and beat it.

  Randolph followed my eyes to the window, perhaps sensing what I had seen. He retrieved everything he wanted to take with him. The last thing he grabbed was the plastic water bottle full of vodka. “Now it’s time to bid adios.”

  “You always on the go?” I said.

  “I’m a high flyer.”

  “Don’t pack your own chute.”

  I went east on the walkway, dodged a woman and a dachshund, and tried to assess how Randolph had blocked all my shots. I had arrived with plenty of tricks and had failed to score. With his time-of-death speech, he had slipped past me and dunked one. The s
ecurity gate began to swing. The BMW squeaked through the instant it could fit, turned left, zipped out of sight. As the gate shut, I hurried out to Thomas Street.

  Someone honked at me. Dexter Hayes, in his city car, the stupid-looking Caprice, across the street and five spaces south. I walked up to his window. He was reading a paperback novel of the fist-thick Clancy variety. He turned his head toward me but focused on some point just past my shoulder. He said, “What’s up?”

  “How you doing?”

  He said, “What’s going on?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “What?” said Dexter. “We wait till they write another beer commercial so we can finish our chat?”

  “At least we’re not frogs who talk.”

  “Climb in, old buddy.”

  Old buddy, my ass.

  19

  DEXTER HAYES’S UNMARKED CRUISER smelled of spilled coffee and stale cologne. The upholstery was worse than smooth. It looked as if someone had cleaned the fabric with Simple Green. A Car and Driver lay on the cola-stained passenger-side floor, under several Nestlé Crunch wrappers. A two-inch speaker crackled with police message traffic, codes, acronyms, and slang. I tried to roll down the window. The crank spun around free.

  I said, “Did a blue Shimano come out that gate?”

  “I didn’t see a thing,” said Hayes.

  “Right,” I said. “This street’s not paved, and it’s pouring rain. People who work together don’t rat each other out. Which way did she go?”

  Dexter twirled his index finger, which meant anywhere. “What do you think of Mr. Randolph?”

  “I think he’s an octopus,” I said. “His arms go eight directions at once, like his alibis, and dozens of suckers grab his prey. Makes it worse, he’s got the brains to keep up with his bullshit.”

  Hayes nodded his head. “I got him for a jellyfish. Ugly up top and down low he’ll sting your butt bad. He’s dangerous where you can’t see it coming.”

  “Obviously you know more than I do.”

  “One or two things,” said Hayes. “It’s meaningful shit, let’s put it that way. He acts like he comes from money. But he looks like he comes from hunger.”

  “You don’t want to reveal your inside information, right?”

  “He was bill collecting the other day.” Dexter counted his fingers. “Four days ago. We had a solid tip, but we held back on nabbing him. Since then, we’ve watched him close.”

  “Bill collecting?”

  “He goes out in the morning, after people go to work, and boosts mail. He works it like he’s got an address list, full-time locals with big money. He beats the carrier to the outgoing letters.”

  “And what, of value, would be in that mail?”

  “Bill payments. Checks made out to utilities, phone companies, credit card companies. You name it. The guys who run this scam stack up the best checks, for the highest amounts. They open a bank account with a phony driver’s license, fake name, and a local address. They use chemicals to blank out the payee’s name, and write in the fake name. They deposit the checks early in the bank’s statement cycle, then pull the money from ATMs. It takes a few weeks for people to realize that their payments aren’t getting where they’re supposed to. By the time they complain, the fake account’s cleaned out.”

  “Randolph’s doing this?”

  Dexter Hayes nodded. “Sure as hell.”

  I felt questions bouncing in my brain. Why would Whit Randolph let me see all those Post-it notes? What did Deputy “No Jokes” Bohner’s stakeout at Camille’s three nights ago have to do with city business? I couldn’t imagine the county and city coordinating efforts on a fraud case.

  “I saw stuff back there in his condo that supports his scam. Can I ask why you don’t bust him?” I said.

  “Piss on it,” said Dexter. “Fraud means paperwork and permanent court cases. The world’s insurance companies can deal with that shit. We want to find the bastards making phony licenses, fake IDs, that kind of crap.”

  “So he skates?”

  “Right up to when he cashes one big enough for grand theft. If he stays small potatoes, he can roll. But he’ll screw up, you count on it. This time of year, a lot of big checks go to Internal Revenue. If we can hook him to one of those, it’s an FBI case, their paperwork, and major camp time.”

  “A world of shit,” I said.

  “Right. And I’m glad you understand, because that’s what you’re in if you can’t explain meeting with him in the Hog’s Breath Saloon last night. Just now, in our records, you’re a ‘known associate.’”

  He started the engine, eased the shifter down, and cut a U-turn. We drove into the section of town that real-estate brokers and black entrepreneurs call Bahama Village. It was the last repository of island tradition that had not been remodeled and resold. I feared its time would come soon. The first bad sign came three years ago, when city employees tore up pavement and modernized the sewer and water mains. I take that back. The first bad sign was the crack cocaine epidemic, and the second bad sign was sewers.

  Why did I feel like I was getting sucked into the business end of a huge Hoover? I was baking in a cop car and could not imagine how the Caprice might fit between all the parked vehicles, cars with their hoods up, or resting on one or two jacks.

  Hayes rolled the stop sign where the street names Angela and Thomas were stencil-painted on a utility pole. The bare-wood building on the southwest corner had looked too ruined to stand fifteen years ago. It looked worse now, but still stood. We stopped in front of Blue Heaven, catty-corner from Johnson’s Grocery. There was no traffic, so Hayes sat a moment and kept talking. Three men on the corner stared at us.

  “You familiar with webcams?” he said.

  “Constant movies that run on the Internet?”

  “Or still pictures that refresh every five or ten seconds. Like with the cameras mounted in various spots around town. On Mallory Square, or at the Environmental Circus, and inside the Hog’s Breath Saloon.”

  “And there I was…”

  “Knocking back shots, having a big old talk with Mr. Randolph. Matter of fact, you did most of the talking. Any chance you want to tell me what was so important you had to dominate the discussion?”

  “Coexistence,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “I was explaining how all types of crazies and misfits get along on a three-by-five island. Sort of a modern sermon.”

  Dexter said, “What’d he do, bad-mouth a gay waiter?”

  “You’re smart about some things and dumb about others,” I said.

  “Was that the tone you used with him? Bet you made a lot of mileage on the brotherhood front.”

  “Whatever I said blew by him like a jet airliner. He’d rather see two men holding guns than two men holding hands.”

  “Men get set in their ways,” said Dexter. “He’s one, needs a profit motive to warm up to tolerance.”

  He cut the wheel, went right down Petronia. People sat on chairs in front of the Swingers Club, eight feet from the car. They stared openly, and I felt like a trespasser. We rolled a half block farther, and I watched money change hands on the corner of Emma, saw the dead end at Fort Street, the old Navy building, the green eight-foot chain-link with barbed wire up top. Dexter veered away from two chickens, turned right onto Emma, then right twice more. We had gone in a tight spiral, wound up on Chapman Lane. We drove past a mess of thin, unspooled cassette tape that had snagged in a busted picket fence and fluttered in the wind. One strand had looped around a large yellow hibiscus blossom. We stopped in front of a small house bordered by a stubby concrete wall. The place needed paint, but its yard was neat and its roof looked new. A chunky, elderly black woman sat on a high-backed rocker on the front porch. She stared at us with no expression.

  I said, “I guess we’re here, huh?”

  Dexter nodded his agreement.

  Next door, two middle-aged men sat near the curb in plastic-web lawn chairs. They chewed cigar stu
bs and drank from paper cups. They refused to acknowledge the city car.

  I said, “Why?”

  “My father’s sister made up for my half-assed upbringing. When you talk to her, take your time. She’s never been in a hurry in her life, but she knows more about this island than you and me and ten others put together. Don’t be fooled by her walking cane. It’s a weapon, not a crutch.”

  “To hell with catching criminals,” I said. “We’ll do family visits today.”

  “Her name is Mary Butler. I call her Auntie Bee, and she’ll tell you to call her Miss Mary, so do it. She was Naomi Douglas’s cleaning woman.”

  “Thanks for remembering.”

  “Get out of the car.”

  Mrs. Butler didn’t resemble her brother, Big Dex Hayes, or her nephew, Dexter Jr. Her broad, fleshy face forced her eyes, nose, and mouth to a tiny group at center. She wore a big print dress and a sun-faded New York Yankees nylon jacket.

  Dexter introduced us. She repeated my name, perhaps to run it against her mental roster of old Conch names, and reached out to shake my hand. Her grip was firm. She held on for about ten seconds. I had a feeling that she was sizing me up, or downloading vibes, or whatever wise old women do that lets them see into your soul and know all your secrets.

  “I heard your name,” she said. “You’re the man Miss Douglas wanted to settle her affairs.”

  How would a cleaning woman know the terms of her employer’s will? She held her hands with her fingertips resting against each other as if she was about to start the church-and-steeple child’s rhyme. Her fingernails were trimmed short, uniform in length.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am, I’m the executor.”

  “You call me Miss Mary, like she did. And tell me what’s so wrong with her affairs you got to come and pester me. And why you got to come with this nephew policeman I got.”

  Straight talk only, I told myself, and keep it fluid. Dexter would not have brought me here if he didn’t think I could learn something. The lightbulb came on. Dexter Hayes was a cop. I was supposed to make a connection with the woman that her nephew couldn’t make. I was there to learn something that he couldn’t learn on his own.