Stairway to the Bottom - a Mick Murphy Key West Mystery

by Michael Haskins

  I guessed the topic of what one could have for dinner was important.

  When would I begin remembering was important to me?

  • • •

  Even with the sleeping pill Nurse Palty woke me up to take, it was a restless night. She came in three times to take my vital signs. Dr. Schreiber had been in after dinner and the bottom line was time heals all wounds. My CAT scan showed no damage to my brain. I wondered if that meant I was empty headed. He made me feel better with the news, but I wanted my memory back now.

  Richard Dowley followed the breakfast tray into the room. It was early, way too early, for Richard.

  “What brings you here?” I uncovered my breakfast—only artificial sweetener for the coffee and no hot sauce or real salt for the scrambled egg whites—healthy but tasteless.

  Richard smiled and when the orderly had gone, he pulled a small paper bag from behind his back. He took out two café con leches. You gotta love him in spite of himself.

  “How’s the food?” He handed me one cup.

  “Not as good as this,” I said between sips. “Thank you.”

  “What can you tell me?” Richard sat on the end of the bed, listened to my story of waking up in the mangrove without a memory.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I read Deputy Herrin’s report and talked to Bob Pearlman. He doesn’t think much of you.”

  “It’s a long story about me and the sheriff. Knowing Becky, her report was thorough,” I said and realized I remembered more about the deputy.

  “What’s the smile for?”

  “I remember Becky,” I said. “And I remember not remembering her yesterday.”

  “Your memory is coming back.” He grinned. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Yeah,” I said quickly and surprised myself. “I was coming back from Harpoon’s after breakfast and three guys in a van were in the marina parking lot.”

  I told him what I remembered. I remembered the punch to my stomach, the hood over my head and throwing up in it. I remembered thinking I was on Stock Island and I remembered the bee stings.

  “They weren’t bee stings, they shot you with a Taser,” he said. “About five times. If it had been on full power, you might be dead. They wanted something from you.” He looked at me with his serious cop expression. “And they used torture, Mick. It must have been something they wanted badly.”

  “It was about Walsh, they wanted to know what he told me.” I almost yelled, excited because I remembered. “That’s not his real name.”

  “Do you know his real name?”

  “Yeah.” I frowned because it was on the tip of my tongue, but wouldn’t come.

  “Pearlman said the area you were found in is known for drug sales,” Richard said. “Finding you beat up and missing clothing made him feel it was a drug buy gone bad.”

  I stared at him and believed that’s what the sheriff had said. Forget torture.

  “I know you, Mick,” Richard said with a tight expression. “You might drive when you shouldn’t but I know you don’t do drugs, so why would you buy them.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I walk to the marina if I’ve had too much to drink.”

  “That and you’re too cheap to take a taxi,” he said with a smirk.

  “My Jeep’s at the marina.”

  “I know. And I know it seems like I’ve avoided you in the past few days,” he said. “I’ve been up to my ass in alligators.”

  “Marshals?” I barely tasted my breakfast, but savored the café con leche.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “They’re used to getting their way.”

  “Have they found him?” I was trying too hard to remember Walsh’s real name.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “The Coast Guard has used helicopters. Hell, no one has even found the Jet Ski.”

  “He has a boat,” I said and pushed the breakfast tray away from the bed.

  “You know this?”

  “No, I didn’t see it, but he had a new cell phone…”

  I told Richard about meeting Walsh on the boat, how I’d been ready to give him the tapes and wash my hands of the whole thing.

  “You should have.” He paced by the foot of the bed.

  “They were such assholes.” I complained about the marshals at the dock and the police station and then had an epiphany. “I know who did this.”

  Richard stopped pacing and his face turned cold,

  “Who?”

  “Dudley,” I sneered. “The son-of-a-bitch. It had to be him. All his questions about Doyle Mulligan,” Walsh’s true identity popped into my head. “That’s Walsh’s real name.”

  “I know,” Richard said. “It wasn’t Crabtree.”

  “What do you mean it wasn’t him?”

  “I was with Marshal Crabtree from late morning until midafternoon,” he said and frowned. “It couldn’t have been him. When he wasn’t with me, he was with Luis.”

  “Where were his storm troopers?”

  “His deputies? I don’t know.”

  “I do. They were on Stock Island.”

  Chapter 25

  It was easier getting into the hospital than it was getting out. Doctors Boros, Norris, and Meitz had to see me before signing release forms and then I had to sign a release form. Hell, I don’t know what I signed, but I scribbled my name at the bottom just to escape.

  Richard had brought me an orange jumpsuit from the jail, so I would have something to wear home, and left to keep an appointment. My memory had returned in dribs and drabs as I was in and out of sleep. By morning, I knew where I lived, who Tita was and most of my past. The kidnapping remained fuzzy.

  The cabby gave me a strange look but let me in when I showed him the money. I figured the jumpsuit was the sheriff’s little joke. Deputy Herrin had promised me something to wear, so I assumed this was it.

  I am a prisoner of technology—aren’t we all? Without my cell phone, I couldn’t call anyone. I didn’t know anyone’s phone number, I kept all my contact numbers installed in the cell’s memory, not mine. I could recite my home number from when I was a kid—Mayflower nine, zero, nine, two, two—but I didn’t have a clue to what Bob’s cell number is, or Richard’s or Tita’s.

  However, since I’ve dropped more than one cell overboard while sailing, I finally put everyone’s number in a computer file. The fun part would be copying each one to a new phone.

  I approached the Fenian Bastard cautiously because if the kidnappers were bold enough to snatch me, I figured they searched my boat too. Most people at the marina leave their boats unlocked, so getting in wasn’t a challenge. There’s always someone on the dock and it was unlikely a break-in would go unnoticed and unreported, but not impossible. Dock residents noticed strangers.

  If anyone had been onboard, I couldn’t tell, everything seemed in place, on deck and below. I went to my hidey-hole in the bulge. It had stood up—by that, I mean American and Cuban Customs officers hadn’t discovered it—since being installed. Inside were the tapes of Walsh’s conversation, along with my Glock, extra magazines and my mad money.

  I showered and changed into cargo shorts and a Hawaiian wedding shirt. Richard was on the dock as I was about to leave and buy a new cell phone.

  “Going someplace?” He held a brown paper bag, again.

  “Beware of cops bearing gifts.” I climbed back into the cockpit.

  “Another con leche and some cheese toast.” He handed me the bag and climbed onboard. “I need to get that jumpsuit back before the sheriff has an arrest warrant issued for theft of county property.” He was only half kidding. “And I’ve eaten hospital food.”

  “The jumpsuit is all yours.”

  “I also want to listen to the tapes,” he said. “No marshals, just me.”

  The tapes were on the chart table, below, the Glock clipped into the waistband of my shorts in back, and I was curious.

  “Why?” We went below to the main cabin.

  “Maybe I’ll learn something about what’s going on that Cr
abtree has forgotten to tell me,” he said with a grin. “He’s still here, even though there’s been no sign of Walsh or Mulligan or whatever name he’s using. Why is the search going on here? Why did the guy run from his protectors?”

  “You think Crabtree might be responsible for what happened to me?” I put the bag down and took out the con leches and cheese toast.

  “Crabtree was with me.” Richard sipped his coffee.

  “It makes for a good alibi.”

  “So I could be right.”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  “I don’t have any doubts about it, Richard.”

  We ate cheese toast and drank strong, sweet coffee.

  “I do,” he said between bites. “But I have an open mind and some unanswered questions.”

  “Whoever used the Taser didn’t want to kill me.” I recited what I’d been thinking since early morning. “They kept ski masks on to hide their identity and used a voice synthesizer when they spoke to me. Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I could recognize them,” I said. “I knew when they kept the hood on me they weren’t going to kill me.”

  “They wanted information on Walsh.”

  “Yeah and they used a Taser to get it, but they already had what I knew,” I said and finished my cheese toast. “They wanted to be sure I wasn’t holding back and kept the voltage low enough not to cause cardiac arrest. Why would bad guys care if I lived or died?”

  “They’d do what it took to get the answers.”

  “Right, but these guys went out of their way to keep their identities hidden and from killing me.”

  “Let me hear what Walsh says on the tapes,” he said. “I don’t like your scenario, but maybe Walsh will say something to change my mind.”

  I put my small recorder on the salon table with the stack of tapes. I explained how I numbered the tapes, so he could listen to them in order.

  “You’ve got a little more than three hours of tapes.” I warned him. “Lots of cussing.”

  “I can use the fast-forward button,” he said.

  “I’ve gotta buy a new cell.” I stood up to leave. “I’ll bring back some sandwiches from El Siboney. You’re gonna be here awhile.”

  “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out,” he teased as he started the recorder.

  I left, but of course, there was no door.

  Chapter 26

  I was able to get my missing cell phone turned off, buy a new one, and keep the same number, all in less than an hour. The clerk tried to sell me something with all the bells-and-whistles, but I only wanted a phone with text messaging capabilities and not a mini computer moonlighting as a phone. They didn’t have one, but I bought the closest thing to one.

  Everything, if you’ve paid attention and most haven’t, is being compacted today, including the world. Whatever happened to the rotary phone with the round dial that you put your finger in and turned, dialing all the numbers individually for your call? If that still existed, I’d be able to recall everyone’s number. But no, we’ve given in to the easy mechanical memory and we let it do the work for us. I keep hearing about that artificial intelligence, maybe this is it.

  When I have computer problems I call on the kid down the dock. He’s in high school and all this technological mumbo-jumbo is his world, his future. I feel sorry for him because I don’t believe life is supposed to be easy, you’re supposed to do some of the work yourself.

  A phone should be for making and receiving calls. Yeah, and a hot dog with relish, onions and hot mustard tastes so great it must be good for you. In another time that was true or at least we believed it.

  I used my new phone to call El Siboney and ordered two ham and cheese sandwiches to go. Ham and cheese sandwiches, all the way, on Cuban bread are the best at El Siboney. I brought them back to the Fenian Bastard where Richard listened to the last of the tapes.

  “That was fast,” I said, surprised he was through listening in less than two hours. I brought Mexican Bohemia beers from the cooler.

  “Lot of ranting.” He frowned while opening his sandwich. “Walsh is a sociopath, but had interesting things to say in between all the bullshit.”

  Richard chewed on the sandwich and washed it down with dark beer.

  “You know in the movies when the hit man says, ‘It ain’t personal Sal, it’s business,’ then shoots old Sal?”

  “Yeah.” I grinned at his analogy, because I knew where he was going.

  “That’s what he’s saying throughout this whole damn thing, it was only business. How the hell does someone like that walk our streets?”

  “You tell me, you’re the cop.” I ate my sandwich and after my hospital meals, it was scrumptious. The Mexican beer was cold and good going down.

  “You know another interesting thing?”

  There was so much to choose from, I was curious what Richard found interesting and shook my head.

  “He said if the marshals wanted him they could have found him.” He frowned as if thinking hard. “He said he wasn’t hiding.”

  “I thought that was interesting, too. He was in the public eye here in Key West, chamber of commerce luncheons and then some.”

  “Yeah, when you consider their job is to find escapees, people on the run,” he said with a trace of anger in his voice. “I wonder if Dudley really didn’t know where he was.”

  “Why not pick him up if they knew?”

  Richard was thinking like a suspicious cop and it was getting interesting.

  “I did some background on Whitey Bulger, I know someone who read ‘Black Mass’ and they gave me a synopsis of the book,” he said. “The Internet is full of background materials.”

  “I’ve read the book and surfed the Internet on Bulger.”

  “You know about all the FBI agents he met with in Boston and New York then. Well, I can believe that more than one of them knew what Bulger was up to and condoned it, not only his handler.”

  “The handler’s in jail, convicted in Miami for something to do with the jai-alai guy being killed,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s just one, the fall guy. I was thinking along the lines of if you’re in the FBI, maybe high up in the echelon these days, and ready to retire, pull down a nice pension, you don’t want a scumbag like Bulger going to court with a witness like Walsh and ruining it all for you, would you?” He smiled at me.

  “Not me.”

  “The FBI has finally caught Bulger,” he said with an unpleasant laugh. “Hard to believe it took them all this time. And the marshals, they’re protecting the main witness against Bulger and lose him, what, three years ago?”

  “And your point is?”

  “I’m listening to this sociopath and begin thinking way out of the box.” He finished his sandwich and took another long swig of beer. “Way out of the box and wondered if old FBI agents, even retired agents wouldn’t benefit from Walsh’s death.”

  “Doyle Mulligan,” I corrected him.

  “Whoever,” he grumbled. “They don’t want anyone on the stand, talking about the bad old days and their involvement,” he said with a foul grin. “I wouldn’t.”

  “You don’t have any bad old days,” I joked.

  “I got you instead.”

  I hoped he was joking.

  “They’ve got Bulger, but who’s gonna talk?”

  “The agents who found him had nothing to do with those days in Boston,” he said and finished his beer. “The new guys focus on the girlfriend, run a TV ad around the country and find Bulger in less than forty-eight hours. Maybe they want the credit for catching a public enemy the old guard couldn’t.”

  “The trail had to be so misleading…”

  “On purpose,” he said. “Yeah, I thought of that but with today’s technology they could cut through all the bullshit, probably instantly and they did.”

  “And caught Bulger.”

  “Yeah.” He yawned and stretched. “Law enforcement technology has to have some of t
he old guard nervous. Look at how they’re closing cold cases using DNA, clearing capital murder cases, setting death row inmates free because of old evidence.”

  “Free prisoners on death row, who would’ve thunk it?” I said and watched him frown.

  “I have some questions for Dudley, you want to come along?”

  “To an interrogation?” I was seeing a new side of the chief of police.

  “Hell no, a friendly discussion in my office.” He grinned.

  Chapter 27

  Someone, somewhere has probably designed a program where you can copy contact numbers from a list on a computer into your cell by clicking on a couple of keys, but I didn’t have it. Richard left and said he’d call when Dudley was coming. I sat below deck with a printout of my contact list and began manually installing the names and numbers into my new phone. It was time consuming, monotonous and I began by putting in the numbers that were important to me.

  My memory was slowly coming back as I filled the cell’s memory with information. I saw names and had to think about who they were and, in most cases, I was able to. A few remained a mystery. Maui Deb, who was she? I didn’t recognize the area code or phone number. I fought the desire to call. I would probably embarrass myself. Ann Cote, Celine Ezpeleta, Kathy Shea, Carol Tedesco, Seanise—and a short list of others I must have known but couldn’t recall how I knew them—more women than men on the I-can’t-remember list.

  Richard called a little before five and I forgot my dilemma.

  “Dudley’s on his way, you coming?” Richard said without any formal greeting.

  “Does a hungry man wanna eat?” I could ignore formality too and hung up.

  Rushing on deck I felt a little lightheaded and stopped to take deep breaths. I had to slow down. I looked around and saw boats coming back into the marina from a day of fishing or diving or just being out on the water. You could read the bumper sticker on many of the vehicles in the marina: A Bad Day on the Water is Better Than a Good Day on Land.

  The sun was slowly dipping to the west but it was still warm and there was no breeze. Mike and Karen walked up the dock from Drifter, their sailboat, and the Colonel watered dockside plants by his trawler.