Octopus Alibi

by Tom Corcoran

  I made a show of checking the dials on his stereo system.

  “I keep my CDs in the glove box and here.” He lifted the lid of the center armrest.

  I read eight or nine jewel box spines. “I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve seen a Barry Manilow record, Sheriff. Maybe not since 1945. What happened to your disco fetish, your clothing collection?”

  “It’s on hold. I’ve got a new public image to nurture.”

  “You’re quite the politician.”

  “No, I’m quite the cop. I use politics as camouflage.” Liska whipped his wheel left, went for the center lane to avoid being smacked by a swerving station wagon. A small sticker on the wagon’s bumper advertised Jesus. Do unto others, if they’re in your way.

  People in Conch Cruisers, four-door heaps that locals favor, stared at us. In their minds we were outsiders with bankrolls come to turn islanders into subservient fetchers. None of them noticed the Monroe tags, the Hurricane Reentry Permit on the windshield. They didn’t want to know that we were neighbors, part of Cayo Hueso’s Human Family.

  “Why aren’t we flying commercial?” I said. “You’re a powerful man these days. Snap your fingers, you could’ve had two seats bumped for us.”

  “We got a meeting at the top of the Keys in a restaurant. It doesn’t have its own airport.”

  “Do I get clues, or do I have to guess cold?” I said.

  “I don’t know any details, but he’s charged with assault on a law officer.”

  I hoped Detective Odin Marlow got the worst of it.

  “Half this traffic, it’s city cops,” he said. “They drive patrol units home to Sugarloaf because they can’t afford to live in town. They think they got the right to do fifteen over the limit, and my deputies can’t bust them.”

  “A badge buys certain freedoms,” I said.

  “You get mixed up in a few more of these, you ought to get that badge I talked about. Sign up for courses at the college. You could be quite the cop, too. Put some stability in your life. You’ve got a problem on the romance front, I take it.”

  “Teresa Barga moved in a week ago. It’s been downhill since then. We’ve hit a seasonal change in our relationship. Summer into fall.”

  “Ah, yes, that psychological trampoline,” said Liska. “My wife and I did the big split, once and for all. When they’re there, you go through a lot more toilet paper and aspirin. When they’re not there, you go through a lot more frozen dinners and alcohol.” He toggled his window switch, brought it down three inches, pitched a flattened straw. “On second thought, be glad you’re not a cop. Why are some women drawn to losers?”

  “I have no idea. Fish to bait, moths to flame. Maybe she’s a scam victim, too. A different kind of scam.”

  We drove in silence across Boca Chica and Rockland Keys, then Liska said, “Off the rock, up here on U.S. 1, they put cute facades on every funky joint. You lose your bearings. You don’t know your way around anymore. The old roadside dives, these days, sell eighty foreign beers that after two or three you feel like you drank a box of glazed doughnuts. Mixed drinks have names like Key Breeze and Atom Smasher. The other day I heard a girl downtown order a Buck Naked Belly Flop. It took the kid five minutes and two machines to make her drink. What ever happened to Seven and Seven or gin and tonic? Show me the progress.”

  I could show him no progress.

  He said, “I don’t mind tourists, except they drive like tourists. The lead guy won’t put his foot in the carb, the next guy won’t pass him. What’s the plural of ‘doofus’?”

  I didn’t know.

  He pulled a fresh coffee straw from his pocket. “My goal is to quit this workaday life in Florida and move north to Canada. I’ll spend my leisure hours driving slow in the left lane.”

  I had heard it before, couldn’t muster a laugh. I hoped he was thinking about larger issues and filling the air with words. My thoughts kept returning to Naomi Douglas. She never had filled voids with idle chatter. She had led me to the artistic aspects of photography. Liska, on the other hand, had been the devil to whom I had sold my soul. He had been a city detective when he talked me into part-time police work, the mechanical, mindless side of my craft. Now the man who had dragged me into evidence photography was taking me to Miami. Bad omen.

  North of Summerland Key, six fishermen dangled lines into Niles Channel. One angler had rigged a bungee cord to hold his rod so he could gab into a cell phone. Pelicans went nuts in the northerlies, glided low over the road, played gusts, crash landed into waves, lifted moments later with lunch flipping in their beaks.

  Liska said, “What do you think about Gomez’s death?”

  “Let’s say he was killed away from his house,” I said, “then brought to the seawall. How could a murderer get him into his yard without drawing attention?”

  “Good speculation,” said Liska. “Keep going.”

  “The only way is through the garage, with a key or an automatic opener. Someone could unload his body with the door down. With no one across the canal, there’d be little risk carrying him to the seawall.”

  “More.”

  “It would have to be a car that the neighbors would know,” I said, “like Steve’s or Yvonne’s.”

  “His personal car, the Buick Regal, was in the garage, covered in laundry lint. Hadn’t been used in a while.”

  “It’s a two-car garage,” I said. “How about that white four-door? Was his city car still at the city lot?”

  “Yep. Does that leave Yvonne’s car transporting the body?”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “We checked. Her Acura was getting repaired at Moore’s. Some drunk kid sideswiped her car and two others last Friday afternoon. They were all parked on Southard. She needed a fender, a door, and a repaint.”

  “Shit.”

  “We found blood smeared on the vertical face of the seawall. We played with the idea he was brought home in a boat. But that’s good, Rutledge. I like the way you’re thinking.”

  “Why are you doing this for Sam?”

  “Let me answer that with a question,” said Liska. “A few months back, we had a nasty mess on Southard. What the Citizen tastelessly described as ‘a free-for-all shootout.’”

  “I recall.” I had been witness to it. I had been in the middle of it, without a weapon.

  “The FDLE did their usual crime-scene reconstruction.”

  “They came and talked to me,” I said.

  “You were a big help, no doubt.”

  “I never claimed to be a pro.”

  “Anyway, with their weapon count, a timeline, a string-and-glue web to re-create shots and trajectories, they came up short. They couldn’t account for three projectiles. Almost like another person was there, popping with a gun. Their viewpoint was that some mystery person was working for us. A good guy who dropped out of nowhere, then went back to nowhere. So I’ve been thinking, maybe you saw someone with a weapon that day. Maybe you saw some person drop into a hole in the ground. Or fly away above the trees.”

  Wheeler and I had never discussed the incident. Sam had fired a pistol, had saved two lives. He had elected not to “get involved,” and split before the confusion ended. He simply walked away. He may as well have flown above the trees.

  “You got thirty seconds to answer,” he said.

  “Oh, a quiz show. Why don’t you ask if a mouse lives on a far, distant planet?”

  He turned his head. I kept facing forward.

  He said, “Is that like you don’t know, or it’s out of your realm of understanding?”

  “I’m thinking, no matter the answer, it’ll never change our lives. Or anyone else’s.”

  “You’re flinging shit at me.”

  “You said it yourself. If there was a mystery man, he was a ‘good guy.’ Don’t you have enough ‘bad guy’ cases to work on?”

  Liska reacted with a loud silence, then a straw change. Out with the old, in with the new. He stayed quiet through Marathon traffic,
then most of the Upper Keys.

  As the sun set, green water and blue sky went to grays, steel-blue, and purple, then red and orange on the tallest clouds. Offshore islands became black worms at the dimming horizon, and distant lights spoke to me as they had to mariners two hundred years ago, as signs of life, possible enemies, navigation hazards. The ocean’s surface looked as if someone had spread an immense vinyl mat atop a furrowed field. Closer were modern beacons, the flashing bulbs on microwave towers, reflective mile marker signs, lane lines, road turtles. I couldn’t hear wind inside the Lexus, but felt us weave and yaw. The east wind carried mist, scattered leaves and paper scraps across the road. The evening looked cold. I knew it was seventy-five out there.

  I rode in luxury, looked south into blackness. Who died first, Naomi or Steve? Did they die for the same or different reasons? Had it been, as I had suggested to Marnie, a murder-suicide?

  Liska opened up again. “People in the Upper Keys have a great need to pull into traffic. They don’t intend to go anywhere. They just want to grab pavement and slow us down.”

  I agreed with him. Big mistake. It fueled an elaboration.

  “Some older people,” he said, “they got nothing left to do in their lives but obey signs. They think they’ll go straight to hell when they die if they ever get caught blowing the limit by two miles per hour. They obey to the fucking number. That’s their whole program. Not speeding and not making peepee in their pants.”

  Liska hung a right beyond Mile Marker 94. We parked in a rock-and-shell lot next to Snapper’s Waterfront Saloon. I smelled a lagoon and a kitchen. I could already taste beer.

  Three thoughts came to mind while I walked into the restaurant. Did Liska really think he owed a favor to Sam for his vigilante act? Or would he try to coerce incriminating info out of Sam in exchange for his freedom? And why, with each passing day, did I feel like I knew less about the world around me?

  None of this “Woe is me” crap, I told myself. I hadn’t joined the club, hadn’t earned the right.

  I wasn’t pissing my pants. I wasn’t dead yet.

  22

  SNAPPER’S WAS A PERFECT word-of-mouth hangout. Hidden from highway traffic, it had an oval bar and water’s-edge deck under five weathered fans and a thatched roof. This year’s snowbirds had fled north, so locals ruled and every table was full. Servers scurried, with no time to talk or to steer us in some direction.

  Liska grabbed a busboy and asked about a table. The kid pointed at a glass door. We went in, but a greeter turned us around, took us back out, and asked us to wait at the bar. I ordered a Corona, no lime. Chicken Neck said he wanted a Key Breeze. The woman bartender laughed, and Liska laughed with her. He settled for vodka and orange juice.

  Five droopy-looking people sat at the bar, apparent leftovers from lunch hour. They had little to discuss except the smoking and drinking of people not present, and the repercussions of those habits. Last night’s parties, last week’s parties, who got told by the doctor that his liver looked like Swiss cheese, her lungs looked like oil sludge. Liska pulled the straw from his drink, chewed it like the last plastic in the world. Give him three hours in this crowd, he’d flatten his teeth.

  I stepped away from the smoke and chatter. The U-shaped dock lined a south-facing cove edged by mangroves. A charter fishing boat bobbed in a slip. Signs promoted jet skis, skiffs, and pontoon boats for rent. I heard fish slap under the dock, saw large ripples and fat, twisting shadows. Tarpon scouting for scraps, I thought, and marveled at the power of french fries, the secret taming snack for the migratory beast.

  Away from boozers and diners, my mind retreated. I nursed my beer, looked to Hawk Channel, saw lights beyond the reef, two southbound ships, a single beacon. My thoughts bounced between Teresa and Naomi. For nine months I had believed that my affair with Teresa might last. We had stumbled into each other, connected, took it day by day. We thought alike, shared humor, swapped books. She knew current music better than I did, but rarely played CDs that I didn’t enjoy. She had surprised me with her knowledge of jazz titles and musicians. Once she had shocked me by buying, in the same purchase, Merle Haggard’s “Same Train, Different Time” and a Wynton Marsalis classical album. She even knew the names Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons.

  I’d done my best to introduce her to the pleasures of Keys life. Sam and Marnie had taken us twice to the Snipes and Marvin Keys. We had strapped kayaks onto Sam’s skiff so we could explore backcountry flats. The women had gone topless, come home with predictable sunburn. On the second trip we had lucked into a boater who had caught more yellowtail snapper than he needed. We even came across a pod of dolphin, and Sam had played a chase-and-run game with them that lasted ten minutes.

  I had shown Teresa the Cuban restaurants, the Jamaican place on Front, the No Name Pub on Big Pine. I had insisted she read The Young Wrecker on the Florida Reef, and Reap the Wild Wind, Oliver Griswold’s The Florida Keys and the Coral Reef, and McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade. We never questioned our pasts or worried about our ages. But I was old enough to be her father. If I had to blame one thing for our falling apart, beyond the awful idea that she liked Randolph’s company more than mine, I would pick the separation of years.

  Yet that was an element that attracted me to Naomi. She may have had twenty-five on me, but it was never an issue. Her knowledge fascinated me. She never had complained of pains or fragility. I felt attracted, never turned off. I loved the life in her eyes, the sparkle and energy, her good cheer and optimism.

  Liska rapped me on the shoulder. Someone led us to plastic chairs at a table under a Bud Light umbrella. A large man with styling gel in his crewcut approached us. Hair goo was a fashion stroke I had avoided.

  “He called me about your buddy,” said Liska.

  The man addressed Liska as, “Sheriff, sir,” and introduced himself as Denison McKinney. He ordered a virgin piña colada.

  Liska winced at the order. “How long you been with Fish and Wildlife, McKinney?”

  “I finished the academy three years ago this month.”

  “You specialized in what?”

  “Water rescue, off-road vehicle pursuit, and man-tracking.”

  “You wrote yourself a ticket to the ’Glades.”

  “I did exactly that, sir.”

  Officer McKinney looked to be in great shape, what you see in military men: endurance and muscle without a weight lifter’s bulk or the stringy, fat-free look of a distance runner. He was not a smiler, which told us he stayed on the serious side of everything. I blamed the paranoia that law enforcement people often develop, the result of seeing so much scum, of having no time or patience for civility, no room in the brain for the word “relax.”

  “Why all this for Sam Wheeler?” said Liska.

  “Hang with me, sir,” said McKinney. “It’s a long answer, but I’ve had a few hours to think it through.”

  “We’re here to listen,” the sheriff said.

  McKinney looked off to the mangroves. “I know my history,” he said. “A century ago the state’s game wardens guarded rookeries. They went after bird poachers, bad-ass rednecks harvesting egret plumes. It was a money crop that served the demands of urban fashion. Out in the sticks, for those wardens, it was dangerous. It still is, but it’s more complicated today. We’ve got procedures, regulations, oversight boards and a half-dozen conservation groups hanging over our shoulders. Still, in the swamp, you go on frontier judgment, like the old days. You size up men on first glance. If you’re wrong, you die, so you get good at it.”

  The piña colada arrived. I couldn’t peg an age on the guy. Call it thirty, plus or minus six. Early baldness had raised his forehead, unless he was forty-five and fooling us. I wondered if his squint masked his constant study of every person and object around him. He was trained for the Everglades, the skeeter-gator home to bear and panther. He was trained to find more clever predators as well, and deliver them to prosecutors and courts.

  “Where we going with this?” said
Liska.

  McKinney ignored his drink. “I’ve heard about Sam Wheeler for years. I never heard he was a flake. So when he tells me this and that happened, I want to believe him. I sized up Sam Wheeler, took into account his job, his reputation, the look in his eye, the words he spoke. I compared him to the Broward County weasels I heard on the radio. It was that simple. He said I should call you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Liska.

  “I’m glad I did it,” said McKinney. “I called some Lower Keys guides this afternoon, a blind check to see if they’d recommend him for a fishing buddy. Chris Robinson, Andy Brackett, and Rob Reaser. Each said that Wheeler’s straight ahead, a fish hawk, and a square dealer. No rage bubbling under his calm.”

  “What went down?”

  “He said his sister was missing, probably dead. He tracked down another guy whose sister was missing, probably dead. Same scenario at the Broward morgue, a misidentified corpse and the same investigator. Right there he saw too big a coincidence. One o’clock today, broad daylight, he’s pulled over by a Broward deputy in a road cruiser. No probable cause, every reason to think it’s a setup. A motorcycle unit stopped to help, and the first deputy manufactured a bogus, off-the-wall charge. Wheeler knew he was in danger. I don’t know how, but he got on the one officer’s motorcycle and ran for the county line. They fired weapons at him.”

  “Which county line?” said Liska.

  “He wanted to go through Miami-Dade and get into Monroe before he was caught. I was on patrol by the immigration prison, out by Krome. I heard an all-frequencies alert on the rolling cycle. Right away I see him, I think I’m on a chase I want no part of. I started at six this morning, I’m ten minutes from quitting time. Next thing you know, he lights his blue flashers, pulls over, and parks it.”

  “He turned himself over to you?” said Liska.

  “Yes, sir. He put his hands behind his neck, and said, ‘Listen to me good.’ He said his name and, right away, I don’t tell him I know his rep, but I’m open to listening. He tells me why he ran, and asks me not to give him up to Broward. I tell him he hasn’t broken the law in Miami-Dade. He says, ‘How’s this?’ and comes at me, swings a couple that don’t land. I’m thinking, stupid-ass me, I let a motorcycle thief get the jump on my ass. But he stops swinging and says, ‘Now can you arrest me?’”