The Naked Detective

by Laurence Shames

  He looked at me without a shred of remorse, and I felt a grudging sympathy. The fellowship of disappointment, the brotherhood of frustration. The rare dream that is accomplished sets a person apart; the usual, thwarted dream makes a bond, brings home to us our baleful kinship.

  "Bar business," he went on, "everybody steals. Forty, fifty bucks a shift. Pays the rent but it doesn't get you launched around the world. So I got impatient. One night I faked a robbery."

  I sloshed in the tub. "Don't tell me," I said. "Please. I don't want to hear it."

  "I had the thing thought out," he rambled. "It was a weeknight. After midnight I was on alone. Only got the hard-core regulars then—mostly tough and mumbly guys who talked like they all had different deals going with the owner."

  I heard myself say, "Different deals?"

  My visitor shrugged. "Who knows? Treasure salvage, gambling—the guy seemed to be involved with lots of stuff. Anyway, the closing routine was simple: Get the assholes out, lock the front door; balance the register, put the cash in one of those bank-deposit pouches; put the pouch in the safe, and leave through the back. So I bagged the money and opened the safe. There was a second pouch in it. That was unusual, but I figured it was the take from the shift before. So much the better. I took both sacks, slipped down the alley to the harbor, got in my dinghy, and sailed across to Tank Island. Buried the two bags, sailed back. Took all of twenty minutes. It was after four a.m. and I don't think anybody saw me.

  "I let myself in the back entrance, trashed the office, tore my shirt, called the cops, and made up some bullshit about two strung-out black kids with a gun. As far as I could tell, they bought it."

  "They didn't suspect?"

  Kenny Lukens sucked his orange lips into a dismissive smirk. "Who knows what they suspected? Who cares? They weren't the problem. The owner was the problem. Lefty Ortega. They phoned him. He came down and right away I knew I'd fucked up big-time. This was not someone you messed with."

  "You didn't know that before?" I asked.

  "I got hired by a manager. I'd never met the man. I don't think he'd actually worked the bar in years. But now he came in and I was scared from the very first second. His eyes were never still. They flicked around, they jabbed. He had a thick neck with a flat pink scar on it. Hulking shoulders, hairy hands. The cops sucked up to him. He treated them like personal servants. There was some chitchat, then he sent them away, dismissed them.

  "Now it was just the two of us," Kenny Lukens continued. "Lefty paced around the office, looked thoughtfully at the empty safe. Very casually he said, 'So, you blamed it on the niggers. Not very original,' he said. 'And not very smart. The niggers don't steal from me. Know how I know that? Three years ago I had a holdup. Couple fucked-up crack-heads. Took me a while but I tracked them down. Had their fingers cut off and delivered to people of influence in Bahama Village. Word got out. Don't fuck with Lefty. So I know it wasn't niggers and I know you're full of shit.'

  "He kept pacing, but slowly. He wasn't any bigger than me but I knew he could destroy me. He had that kind of violence that just makes you freeze. I said, 'Lefty, I'm telling you the truth!'

  "It sounded feeble even to me. He ignored it altogether. He said, 'If it was just that one pouch, we wouldn't have a problem. I'd fire you. A day or two later you'd get beat up. People would hear. That would be enough. But that second pouch, she never should have left it—' "

  "She?"

  "Hm?"

  "You said she. Did he say she?"

  Kenny shrugged, let his hands slap down against his thighs. "I said she? Jesus, who remembers? What I remember is that then he lunged at me. Grabbed me by my torn-up shirt. My shirt and the skin of my chest. He pulled me close and yelled, 'You piece of shit! Did you look inside that pouch?'

  "His breath stank of onions and he was spitting in my face. I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make me sound guiltier. He stared at me then pushed me backward. A desk caught me behind the legs and I sort of half sat down on it.

  " 'Listen, scumbag,' he went on. 'Noon tomorrow, you meet me here with that pouch. You don't, you're dead. The bag's been opened, you're dead. You understand? Now get the fuck out of my place.' "

  Kenny Lukens paused, and I knew it was my chance to bolt. Spring up naked from the hot tub, dash into my house, find a door with a lock on it, and hide. I'd successfully run away from my own dreams and at least most of my own problems. What sense did it make to become a hostage to some other jerk's? But I didn't bolt. I sat there and kept poaching.

  "So I left the office," my visitor resumed, "in a total panic. Tried to think straight. Couldn't. I kept seeing Ortega's eyes, and I just kept thinking, pouch or no pouch, this lunatic is going to have me killed. He can and he will.

  "By now it's five a.m. I had an hour of darkness left, and an hour of a good hard tide. Suddenly my mind was made up: Get out, period. I faked the robbery, might as well fake suicide. I loaded some food and water in the dinghy. Sailed around to the Fort Zack jetty and left some things on the beach. Got back in and sailed to the Bahamas."

  "In a dinghy?"

  "I'm a good sailor; Mr. Amsterdam. And it isn't very hard. People do it all the time in fishing skiffs, inflatables even. Catch the Gulf Stream and away you go. Find an out-island with a quiet harbor, keep a low profile, get another bar gig off the books ..."

  "And the money, the pouches?"

  Kenny Lukens looked down and shook his head. By now I was almost accustomed to the crew cut above the lipstick and the made-up eyes. "Left them where they were," he said. "Was afraid I'd miss the tide, get caught by daybreak. All I wanted was to get away."

  "And you got away," I said. I shifted in the tub.

  Water lapped, the puny waves of a stay-at-home.

  "So why'd you come back?"

  The needling tone crept once again into Kenny Lukens' voice. "Don't you read the paper, Mr. Amsterdam?"

  "No," I admitted. "Not anymore. In fact, I don't get why anybody reads the paper. But maybe we'll save that conversation for some time when I'm dry."

  "Lefty Ortega's dying," he informed me.

  "Ah, so there's a happy ending after all."

  "Liver cancer. Going fast."

  "This was news in the Bahamas?"

  "A friend sent me the Sentinel."

  I tried not to look surprised that Kenny Lukens had a friend. Not that he didn't have a certain magnetism, even a wacky dignity. But he hadn't been in town that long before he'd disappeared, plus he was such a bundle of competing oddnesses. Then again, who wasn't? "So you're back to fetch the pouches?"

  "I can't do it," he said, a little breathlessly. "I'm dead and I'm a thief, remember? Besides, I think I'm being followed."

  "Followed? You've been gone two years. You're wearing a dress—"

  "Maybe I'm imagining it. My nerves are shot, okay? But look, I can't risk being seen out there. There's people on Tank Island now. Security guards. It's not even Tank Island anymore."

  Even I knew that. Marketing maneuver. Typical. Tank Island was a man-made pile of coral and muck that had been spooned up from the shallows when the navy dredged the harbor. In the forties there were oil tanks on it, hence the good blunt name. Abandoned, it had sprouted mangroves and Austrian pines, just like the natural Keys. But by the late nineties the developers had got hold of it. Like shit transformed into Shineola, suddenly Tank Island was reborn as Sunset Key. It had fences on it now, and million-dollar houses, and sand barged in from God knows where, and a beach club complete with striped umbrellas.

  "Sure your pouches weren't excavated, built over?"

  "I rowed right past last night," he said. "The trees I buried them under are still in place. Eight feet from the high-tide line. Just against the fence."

  "Rowed?" I said. "You came back in your dinghy?"

  "I worked my way back in a fishing boat. I stole a dinghy."

  "Still stealing, Kenny? Even after all this shit?"

  He did the Garland shtick again. "I still ha
ve my dream, Mr. Amsterdam. Who knows what's in that other pouch? Maybe it's enough to outfit a sailboat, make it up to myself for the time I've lost. Dig it up for me, and I'll give you a third."

  I thought about it for some part of a second. Pete Amsterdam, private eye. Specializing in retrieving stolen property for felonious transvestites. "Kenny," I said, "you don't need a detective. You need a child with a yellow pail and shovel."

  "I'll make it half," he said.

  "It's not about the money. I just don't want to do this."

  He bit his orange lip and for a second I thought that he would start to cry. "You're my only chance!" he railed.

  "Then you're screwed," I said, and in the next instant regretted being flip. "Look, I hope you get to sail around the world. I really do. But this is not for me."

  He stared for one more moment, then finally gave up. Pouting, he retrieved his wig from the chaise; it dangled from his hand like a trophy of some barbaric war. At last he turned to go. He'd made it to the sliding door that led into my house when I once again noticed the falsies on the hot-tub rim. "Hey Kenny, you forgot your tits!"

  But my would-be client just kept going.

  4

  By the time I climbed out of the hot tub, my hands and feet were gray and my private parts resembled something simmered much too long in soup. I lay down on a lounge, draped myself in towels, and waited for my blood pressure to revive.

  I tried not to think about Kenny Lukens but I couldn't manage it. What I thought about was his insane and singular allegiance to his dream. After everything he'd bollixed up, after the lost years and the dislocations and the excruciating setbacks, he still keyed his every move to the fantasy of sailing around the world. There was a certain futile grandeur in it that I couldn't help admiring. Most people would have segued into a smaller, safer dream by now, or found a way to live without one. That was maturity. That was realism. Wasn't it?

  Pondering that made me very ready for a drink. PI's always have an office bottle, right? Generally some execrable scotch or no-name bourbon that they swig straight from the pint or from smudged and dusty glasses or, God forbid, from paper cups. Well, fuck that. I pulled on a sweatshirt and headed for the wine room—half of the "office" I'd added on back when this detective farce began.

  The wine room was a mock cellar in a house that happened to be built on solid coral. It was temperature controlled, humidity controlled, damped against vibration. Built to be perfect for a single, simple purpose, it was one of two rooms in the world I considered wholly satisfactory. Soft lights threw peaceful gleams on patient bottles. A whiff of cedar from the racks prefigured the wood in the wine. I moved to the section where the imported whites were stacked, and grabbed a bottle of Sancerre. Sancerre is perfect for aprés hot tub. The acidity sizzles on the slightly swollen palate, and the figgy aftertaste sweeps away the lingering smart of vaporized chlorine.

  I poured myself a glass and took it to the world's other perfect room, the music room. Key West is not a quiet place. Planes clatter not far above the roofline, drunks and parrots scream, imbeciles on mopeds are always blowing horns. I'd had the music room constructed with a double set of walls and insulation eighteen inches thick. There's a carpet on the floor and felt around the edges of the door. There are two chairs—though admittedly one of them is generally empty. For those rare occasions when I can bring myself to watch a movie, there's a TV set and a VCR. But the room's focus is a vintage set of Dahlquist speakers—still, to my ears, the sweetest ever made.

  I went into the music room and tried to decide what I would listen to. A lot went into the decision. My mood, of course, but also what I was drinking and the time of day. Brahms, for instance, seldom works in daylight and never with white wine. The same may be said of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and Mahler. On the other hand, Mozart and Louis Armstrong, sublime though they are, sometimes fail to fill the hollow of a troubled attitude. Only the absolute greatest of the great are oblivious to the clock and transcend all frames of mind. So I put on Bach. Art of Fugue. I settled into my silent chair; sipped my figgy wine, closed my eyes, and let those first eight monumental notes carry me away from the puny screwups, the niggling irritations and distractions life is made of.

  If I'd been smart I would have just stayed there in the music room, drinking and listening and tucked away, because this would be my last peaceful, undistracted time for quite a while. That night, scratching in the sand on Sunset Key, Kenny Lukens, the guy who almost became my very first client, was murdered.

  ———

  I learned of it next morning, bicycling to tennis.

  Like I said, I don't read newspapers. But I do check out the headlines in the rank of vending machines in front of Fausto's market. There's something bracingly illicit about a quick, unpaid-for peek at the Times, the Journal, The Miami Herald. It pleases me, as well, to refresh each morning my profound incuriosity about what lies beneath the fold; let a banner announce the arrival of Judgment Day, I'll read the first two paragraphs and pedal on.

  On this particular morning, however, the headline on the Sentinel grabbed me by the throat, put a burn in my stomach, and sent me scrambling through my tennis bag for quarters, man in woman's clothing killed on sunset key.

  The article was brief, because the cops knew almost nothing and the reporter had been squeezed against a deadline. Just after midnight, as the shift was changing for the security guards, a woman had been discovered, crumpled and apparently passed out or asleep, against the metal fence that separated the foreshore from the private property. The patrolling guard, suspecting a homeless person of the type that used to litter Tank Island with soup cans and rusty shopping carts and the remains of campfires, called to the woman, then shook her, then finally realized, when the wig came loose and rolled away, that she was a man, and dead. The police determined that he'd been strangled, then shot in the back, and that he'd been dead about an hour. They had not been able to identify the body. They had no clues and made no surmises about the killing. There were a few details about the crime site: A shallow hole had been dug in the sand, as though someone were burrowing beneath the fence; the victim's arms were stretched out toward the hole; an unregistered dinghy had been pulled up on the beach.

  I read this standing on the White Street sidewalk, the heightening sun on the back of my neck, my bicycle balanced between my thighs. I read it and felt . . . what? A sharp though more or less impersonal sorrow that Kenny Lukens wouldn't get to sail around the world. That, and—can I admit it?—some whisper of morbid envy that at least he'd gone with his dream apparently intact. But more than either of those things, I just felt strange. Strange that I'd spoken to someone hours before his killing. Strange that I knew more about it than the cops did, more than the newspaper was able to report. It scared me, this knowledge. I had no idea what to do with it.

  I put the paper in my tennis bag, and for a while I just stood there, looking at the ground. Sandals scratched past on the sidewalk. People tied up their dogs and went into Fausto's for groceries. At length I continued rather numbly on my way. Life goes on, right? I didn't know what else to do; I followed my routine. Seeking calm and focus in the magnificent geometry of a tennis court, I showed up at Bayview Park and whipped out my racquet and somehow sleepwalked through two badly losing sets.

  Afterward, my opponent, Ozzie Kimmel, said to me, with his usual sportsmanship and tact, "You played like a fuckin' spaz today."

  I retreated into the shade of the peeling wooden enclosure where the waiting players sat. "Thanks," I said. "Got a lot on my mind."

  "You?"

  I ignored the sarcasm. I ignored a lot of things about Ozzie Kimmel, which is why we could still play tennis together and, up to a point, be friends. Ozzie was one of those people who'd been in Key West so long—since the early seventies, when he'd drifted in as a drug-taking, tambourine- banging hippie—that he'd become utterly unfit for living anywhere else. For one thing, he lacked the wardrobe. He played tennis shirtless, in a puke-gree
n bathing suit; I'm not sure he owned a real pair of shoes. His manners and his self- control had atrophied; most people considered him an abrasive loudmouth. Most people were right. His natural mode of communication was the profane, relentless tirade, and he didn't care who he offended, if he even noticed. But what can I say?—I liked him. I'd never heard him say a single thing he didn't mean. And he had a beautiful half volley; he invented it each time with a lack of hurry that was pure Zen. Ozzie drove a cab, had for probably close to twenty years. He knew the town as well as anyone who wasn't born there.

  I asked him if he knew anything about Lefty Ortega.

  "Why?" he asked me back.

  The simple question caught me by surprise. I understood at once that I couldn't answer it. Suddenly I had a secret. Suddenly I was supposed to be discreet, on guard. This was new and awkward and I hated it. "Just curious," I said.

  "Old Conch family," said Ozzie. That was the local term for Keys natives. It carried great pride or great derision, depending on who was saying it. "Ya gotta love the Conchs," he volunteered.

  "All they do is bitch about the island changing, but do they ever miss a chance to get in bed with a developer? I mean, if they hate change so much, why don't they get off their fat ass and get a fuckin' job so they can afford to keep their land?"

  "So, the Ortegas ..." I prompted.

  Ozzie reached into his bag and came out with a shredded piece of orange towel. He wiped his neck and lint stuck to his skin. "Right. Came over from Cuba, what?—five, six generations ago. Cigar makers. Stayed on when the industry moved to Tampa. Married with some of the old wrecking families, got political. I think one of the Ortegas was mayor during the thirties. Not that being mayor of this shithole is any great distinction. Buncha fuckin' clowns. Remember the one who water-skied to Cuba? Or how 'bout that midget that was indicted half the time?"