The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  The first two calls were for Annie. Mrs. Embry, still looking for that bike, and a client looking for some paperwork. Sears wanted to sell me top-of-the-line aluminum siding. Duffy Lee Hall had an OM-2 and two lenses for sale. Laura Tate said to come by the Packet Inn for a drink later in the week. The police needed photographs of vandalism at their K-9 Training Center. Another business message for Annie. The final one was from Marnie. I called her back.

  “Bernier gave me the green light on some of the stuff we talked about the other night,” she said. “So I rang that state representative who tried to buy me away from bothering Anselmo.”

  “You lay out the skinny on the payoffs?”

  “Laid the skinny on thick, if you can do that. About his granting Witness Protection to a noninformant, the possible payoffs, his meddling in Florida Department of Law Enforcement board activities. Plus, Sam told me about Anselmo’s trip to West Palm. That means the taxpayer paid for his clandestine rendezvous with a lady friend. ’Course, it’s your lady friend.”

  “Her status is under review.”

  “Good. Anyway, this political toe dancer backpedaled ninety miles an hour. Changed his tune big-time, and said he’d personally look into the Aghajanian decertification case. He would also petition the governor to reconvene the Board of Training and Professional Standards to initiate reinstatement proceedings. He said he’d report back to me on a daily basis until the entire matter was cleared up to the satisfaction of the voting and taxpaying public.”

  “Sounds like a load of shit.”

  “Loads of shit are what these people deal in. I’ve been rolling in it, secondhand, for years. This is a good sign, believe me. You got lunch plans?”

  “I’ve got a date with a bar of Pure and Natural. After that I’m a free man.”

  “Monty says he’s buying. An early celebration of getting his badge back. No matter what he says, Sam and I are picking up the tab. But I don’t know where we’re going. We’ll come by and get you.”

  “Call Bob Bernier first. Billy Fernandez was found dead this morning. Off the record, there’s a chance he killed Mary Alice Noe.”

  “Oh, God. What is happening in this little town of ours?”

  “His body was found in Miami. My guess is the Balbuenas.”

  “We’re selling so many newspapers, we had to delay printing three of the contract weeklies. People are scared to leave their homes. Even the grocery stores are losing business. Now this.”

  “Maybe this will be the end of the storm.”

  “I hope so. Take your time in the shower. It may take a while for me to file this story. After that we’ll all take the rest of the afternoon off. I promise.”

  30

  Shower time. Bernier’s people had not fixed my hot-water heater. Lucky to be in Key West. The cold spigot was warm enough to make a production of it. A moral dilution obvious: I suspected that an FBI agent had swiped my shampoo.

  Someone once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song about playing the field in the singles scene: waking in sundry apartments, not looking for the ideal mate, but in search of the perfect shampoo. The world turned on surplus and scarcity. Some people had buckets of shampoo and no mangoes. I was out of shampoo in a yard with a tree. Some people have too many lovers. I had been accused. I kept thinking about Chicken Neck and Avery Hatch fighting over their wife. I tried not to think about Michael Anselmo, the four-for-four, wide-swath cocksman.

  I had fashioned a drainage system from PVC pipe that funneled runoff to the bougainvillea and fruit tree. I’d hung a spring-hinged door and lined the stall with teakwood hooks for loofah sponges and shelves and soap caddies, plus a fancy mirror. There was room for two, standing up or sitting on the slat bench. For a while, stereo speakers had hung under the eaves. But there was no way to change tapes during a shower if the music failed to match or improve my mood. The speaker cones had rotted in the island humidity and I’d tossed them. I could sing in the shower if I needed music, my own bluesy opera under the open sky.

  I bobbed around in my redwood cubicle as a breeze rattled surrounding treetops. I tested pattern and angle of spray, did the conditioner, lathered the body scrub as sunlight stabbed through high fronds and the mango tree’s lower limbs, watched fuzzy shadows dance the rear wall of the house, dared invisible mosquitoes to dive-bomb exposed skin. A long rinse. Birds flew overhead. A line of slender cumulus clouds to the north, a twin-prop plane on eastbound final to the airport. When I got a chance I wanted to sit and think about the strange and sudden tragedies of this town, to ponder reasons for all of its lunacy. To answer nagging questions about logic and timing and motives.

  If Avery’s convoluted tale was accurate, for instance, and if Ray Kemp had structured his revenge scenarios to match affronts, as his pseudonymous short stories suggested, why had Kemp killed Julia in the style of Twin Peaks? For that matter, why had he killed her at all? Why hadn’t he killed Michael Anselmo, strangled him with a bra, or beaten him to death with a forty-pound law book?

  Why hadn’t Anselmo done anything to protect himself after he’d received the cryptic postcards? I had warned Annie about Kemp, so Anselmo must have learned through Annie the source of those threats.

  Why had Billy Fernandez, a former smuggler who’d covered his tracks with a law-enforcement career, a man with a kid in the Little League, arranged to have me crushed by a dump truck on U.S. 1? All he stood to do was beat me out of five thousand dollars. With his knowledge of Palguta and Carlos, their violent ways, why would he try to scam Raoul for a measly five grand? Why would he go for small potatoes? Why would he dare scam Raoul at all? Or did he have some other knowledge that might be worth bigger money?

  Why, for another half-assed instance, was Avery Hatch not around when Sam Wheeler was being detained in the Monroe County jail? Why, suddenly, did he have to check out that storage shed? Unless he wanted to make sure that all that gear in the shed was finally gone. Unless he just wanted to get away from the action back at the jail.

  Why had it taken me three years to realize that Annie’s refreshing beacon of honesty came equipped with a dimmer switch?

  One thing about a cold shower, the water doesn’t get any colder. A bird I couldn’t identify warbled in one of the taller trees. A cloud floated under the sun. On a cool draft under the cloud I caught a whiff of something sweet, nonfloral, like one of Liska’s vintage discotheque colognes. I’ve never been able to identify scents, but a name drifted in with this odor. Why did the men who used Brut always wear too much?

  Like a bad tune on the stereo speakers, the heavy smell yanked me out of my mood.

  I turned off the shower, toweled my hair, and wrapped the towel around my waist. The shower had delivered its therapeutic relief. I checked the faucets to make sure they didn’t drip, stuck my toes into the rubber sandals and pushed open the shower-stall door. Carlos Balbuena was sitting in the yard pointing a gun at my chest.

  I was about to die in my flip-flops.

  Balbuena’s neck remained nonexistent. His dark face was relaxed but his eyes were focused, sharp as ice picks, ready to witness my death. He’d started a beard. A small gold ring hung from each earlobe. A Polo logo on his shirt.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  He didn’t care. “Get it, worm. You the smart one, we the dumb ones.” With each sentence he lifted his head, poked out his chin. The universal badass.

  “I did your father two favors last night.”

  “You so dumb to think Raoul might eat that bullshit about some other man there in Georgia to see me and Emilio. But that man got no name. You say that shit to protect your ass. We hear that ten million times.”

  The neighbor’s spaniel whimpered through the fence. Something—a lizard or a palmetto bug—crawled across my right foot. I didn’t dare look down, away from Balbuena’s icy hard gaze. Keeping Carlos locked eye-to-eye prolonged his bragging session, prolonged my life.

  “I’ve had twenty-four hours to tell a lot of people about it.”

  �
��Right. That’s how a story work. But not how it work in trial and with the testimonies. You not there in that court, bubba, they got no evidence. Zip shit. No witness, no conviction. Right? Who’s smart, bubba? Who’s dumb now?”

  He was right. Brains don’t mean shit without evidence. I had no leverage. My mind shot off on eddy currents, thinking how Annie might not grieve, how no one would understand the value of my Shelby. Sam had found a good woman. Monty would get his job with the FBI. Laura Tate was a missed opportunity. I’ll take a rain check in heaven. If I thought about those nipples I’d lose my focus on talking Carlos out of this.

  “We know you hungry for the five K that other boy tried to fuck us on.”

  “He got it straight through the heart.”

  “Ahh. That’s another case, bubba. No proof, with you gone away.”

  The mango tree hovered over us. In periphery I saw everything in the yard. Under the expensive new tarp, my toys, the Kawasaki and the Cannondale. Long spears of midday sunlight painted the patchy grass. My own world, a long way from facing down a Kalashnikov and wrestling a Gulf of Mexico nor’wester. I couldn’t vouch for fun in either episode. The Mariel Boatlift was forty percent of my life ago. Nothing was different. I would leave thousands of slides with no copyright stamps. My legacy would become public domain. Fat ladies sang of a shampoo shortage in the mango opera.

  I groped for a way to reach him. I heard my phone ring. “Your sister knew I was a friend.”

  He lifted the gun a fraction of an inch. “All this Key West bullshit kill that pretty little girl. You just as bad as that cuckoo man with the phony name that twisted her neck…”

  “So it was Kemp who killed her?”

  “That coward cry because we show him what happen to worms.”

  “You punched his ticket?” The phone rang again.

  Carlos grinned as if recalling a dirty joke. “Fuckhead having trouble walking. I’m hungry for my fuckin lunch. I gotta go.” His eyes had not lost their evil glint. Carlos leveled the gun, pointing it at my nose. The tendons in his forearm bulged, his fingers moved, clenched the pistol grip, settling their alignment for the squeeze. Any emotion he might have possessed fled his expression. He had expelled me from humanity, turned me into a cardboard target. I waited for my life to flash before me, waited for my lights to go out. All I got was an intense view of the backyard. Time slowed. A third ring from the phone. The machine would get it next time. The sun glistened on individual leaves behind the man. Wind in one shrub, then another. Why wouldn’t the dog bark, just once? Why was I lost for anything to say, anything to prolong the talking, to add an extra minute to my life, an extra thirty seconds? Suddenly I got a brainstorm about the identity of the murderer. No use now. The fourth ring cut short by the machine.

  The gun went off.

  The whole right side of his head went away. Charlie Balls Balbuena tipped sideways, looking puzzled by where his life had gone. He rolled into the sandy grass, shaking the gun as if it were stuck to his hand, hot as the blazing sun. A small hole next to his left ear dribbled blood. I felt cold, out of breath.

  Monty Aghajanian crouched in the shadows alongside the screened porch, the satin black Walther firm in his hand. He slumped forward and squeezed his forehead with his other hand, then jumped up and ran toward Carlos with the weapon extended. He kicked the pistol out of the man’s lifeless grip and leaned down to confirm that he was dead.

  “Thanks for leaving this in your bookcase.” Monty laid the Walther on a plastic table.

  “Did you have to make it so dramatic?”

  “I barely had time to plant my feet.”

  Someone would have been listening to my voice on the answering tape the instant I died.

  31

  My life had not flashed before my eyes. No reruns, no grim reminders, no highlights of yesteryear. I sat on a cobwebbed redwood chair under the mango tree with the towel around me, wondering about the parameters of luck. In the past three days I had dodged a bomb and a bullet. I wasn’t given much time to be introspective. City police swarmed into my yard. Two accusatory officers I didn’t recognize started to order me around. Monty backed them off with some departmental mumbo-jumbo. I went inside to get dressed.

  Marnie was on the phone to her office. “Look,” I heard her say, “if you won’t bump down the dogcatcher story for this, Russell, I’ll file my piece with the fucking Miami Herald. Don’t think I won’t, you kiss-ass dipshit.”

  Sam sat in the front room, pensive and distant, an arm’s length from the window fan though sweat drenched his denim shirt. He nibbled hangnails and stared at a magazine. The police had blocked Dredgers Lane to traffic. Bright yellow crime-scene ribbon snapped in the wind like party decorations. The flat-toned speakers of two-way radios broadcast constant chatter. All the activity prompted indignant barking from the neighbor’s dog.

  Cootie Ortega arrived and unpacked a bag of dirty cameras. I offered a packet of lens-cleaning paper and let him do his thing. Larry Riley’s team from the Monroe County ME’s office arrived in two white Cherokees and a van. An EMS vehicle bore a bumper sticker: HAVE YOU FLOGGED YOUR CREW TODAY?

  Marnie went out to get statements from Riley and the neighbors. Hector Ayusa ambled across the lane to make sure everything was okay. He lifted his guayabera shirt to show us the pistol stuck in his belt, to assure us that he could handle any aftershocks. Sam hurried Hector back over to his house.

  “Weird,” said Monty. “All this revenge and no arrests.”

  “Only paybacks,” I said. “How’d you know Carlos was about to send me to Happy Hour?”

  “I had to drop some papers at Nathan Eden’s office, so we came up Eaton instead of Fleming. When Marnie turned onto Grinnell, Sam noticed Dade plates and gold hubcaps on a green Mercedes parked by the Paradise Cafe. A man was in the car. Sam guessed the other guy was headed for your house. Marnie made the light at Fleming and turned left, out of sight of the Benz. I sprinted up Fleming and Sam ran back to the pay phone in front of Cobo’s.”

  The ringing telephone.

  “How’d you find us in the yard?” I said.

  “I sneaked onto the porch and heard his voice out back. I almost couldn’t remember the name of that book that Bernier said was in front of the gun.”

  “Legends of the Fall.”

  “I remembered.”

  “Did Emilio get away?”

  Sam opened the porch door and cracked a grin. “Marnie made the ultimate sacrifice. I was on the phone at Cobo’s when I heard the gunshot. The boy in the Mercedes heard it too. He cranked up his car and floored it up Grinnell, ran the light and hooked a left onto Fleming. Marnie timed it perfectly. She whipped her Jeep away from the curb and crashed the Benz on the left front wheel and the driver’s door. She played it like she didn’t know who he was. She got out and acted hurt and stumbled around. I’m running up from Cobo’s, the bad guy scoots out the passenger side of the Mercedes with a big nasty gun in his hand. She’s leaning over, whimpering, holding her ankle. Next thing you know, she karate-kicks his Adam’s apple. Out went his lights, just like that. Whammo.”

  “I believe you’ve got a keeper, Sam,” I said.

  “Superwoman. I’m in love.”

  “Where’s Emilio now?” said Monty.

  Sam laughed. “We grabbed his keys and stuffed him in his trunk. It smelled like puke and piss in there. Kemp must’ve had a nasty ride. I looked down the lane a minute ago. Emilio’s in the backseat of a cruiser, bunch of kids standing around sticking their tongues out at him.”

  Monty asked to borrow my micro-cassette recorder. His civilian permit to carry a weapon would get him off the legal hook on the shooting, but the department would require a statement. Why spend an hour, he said, pounding the computer? Or two hours writing a police “white paper” in longhand? He walked into the bedroom and closed the door.

  Sam went back to his chair by the fan.

  As I put away the clean dishes that Bernier’s team had left in the sink rack, I watch
ed the yard through the kitchen window. Every uniformed city cop wore a mustache. Someone had appropriated the tarp from my Kawasaki to cover Balbuena’s body. As if the city couldn’t afford their own body blankets. To hell with it, I thought. A small price for being alive. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t hose off the stains. I’d have all day tomorrow to put my world back into kilter. All week next week. All year long. I could buy a replacement tarp. Carlos couldn’t.

  I felt no desire to call West Palm Beach to tell Annie what had happened. Judging by Carlos Balbuena’s comment about having taught Kemp a lesson, I figured Annie was out of danger from that direction. If we could believe Avery, Anselmo never had been a threat. She could read about it in the newspaper, or watch TV. Still, in all the confusion, something didn’t ring right. I felt convinced that Kemp had killed Ellen and Julia, and had planted the bomb in Annie’s VW. That much was clear. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that a piece was missing from the puzzle. I tried to recall what had occurred to me just as Carlos was pulling his trigger. I didn’t know what it was or where it went.

  Carmen stuck her head in the front door, her face a funereal grimace. “My mother called me at work. That Cuban boy tried to kill you?”

  “He was deep in the process of killing me.”

  Carmen gave me a hug. It lasted long enough to let me know that I needed it. “Monty had to shoot him?” she said.

  “Monty found out this morning that he’s probably going to get his badge back,” I said. “I don’t think he wanted to celebrate like this.”

  “This is probably old news,” said Carmen in a quieter tone. “And I’m sorry I waited to tell you, but I talked to Larry Riley the other day like you asked me to. He said, quote, ‘Your friend’s on the right track.’”

  The place was turning into Grand Central Station. Bob Bernier barged in with his all-purpose black FBI briefcase. “We found Kemp in Marathon,” he said, out of breath. “Fishermen’s Hospital, intensive care. A beachcomber found him at the south end of the Bahia Honda Bridge, right where they found Julia’s body. He was wrapped in plastic. They castrated him. He almost bled to death.”