The Naked Detective

by Laurence Shames

  "He mentioned a friend," I stammered at last. "But I guess I thought—"

  "That it would be a man," she said. "You figured he meant lover and you figured he was gay."

  She had me there. Silly Pete, leaping to conclusions just because a fellow wears a frilly bra.

  "He wasn't gay," she said. "He cross-dressed now and then. Two very different things. He was a complicated person. A dear person. Can we talk?"

  I looked down at a lime-green weevil chomping on a leaf. I didn't feel like talking, not about Kenny Lukens at least, but I was raised to be polite and I didn't see how I could kick this person off my porch. "Listen," I said, "I really don't want—"

  "Please," she said, her voice dropping to a companionable whisper. "You and me—you realize we might be the only two who know that it was Kenny out there?" She gestured in the general direction of Tank Island—excuse me, Sunset Key.

  "Us," I put in, "and whoever killed him."

  She ignored that. "Isn't it weird to be the only ones who know?"

  "Yeah. It is. But I still don't see—"

  "What we have to talk about? What it would accomplish? It won't accomplish anything. Kenny's gone. It's finished. That's why I feel like talking. Understand?"

  I didn't understand. But already I was getting to like this woman's voice. There was something in it that reminded you that it was made of breath. "What's your name?" I asked her.

  "Maggie."

  "Nice name." I paused and sipped my drink and looked at her some more. She had steady gray eyes, innocent of makeup, and her top lip was prominent, Egyptian almost; the center of it dipped down into a sensuous nub. She had a depth of tan that only locals get, a tan that, like the polish on good marble, seemed to reach a ways beneath the surface; yet her skin looked very supple, faintly moist with herbal things. "Can I tell you something, Maggie? I just got home from Lefty Ortega's bedside, and I'm feeling pretty lousy."

  "He talked to you?" She seemed impressed. I guess that was my compensation.

  "He raved at me. He's on morphine. I have no idea what any of it meant."

  "It's a start."

  "It's a finish." I said it more harshly than I'd meant to, and then, of course, I felt bad.

  She took it in and nodded gently. She paused then said, "I like grappa too."

  "How you know it's grappa?"

  All she did was close her eyes and deeply sniff the still and humid space between us. Looking back, I guess that was the moment I began to fall a little bit in love with her. No, wait—that's glib and quick and overly dramatic, exactly the kind of thing a detective story makes a person say. Let's just leave it that I was impressed as hell that she could divine the presence of grappa vapors in the air; and intrigued by the guiltless pleasure in her face as her eyes fell closed.

  "Come on inside," I said. "I'll pour you some."

  We went into the living room. She claimed a corner of the sofa, sitting diagonal and crossed- legged so that her long dress stretched across her knees and made a basket of her lap. I fetched grappa. We clinked glasses and then I retreated to a chair. She gestured toward the walls, which have some pictures on them. Not museum grade but not crap either and some care had been taken with the framing.

  "Nice place," she said. "You have a trust fund?"

  It was such a marvelously gauche question that I snorted. Clearing liquor from my sinuses, I said, "Excuse me?"

  "Come on," she said. "No one makes money in this town. You live like this, either you're retired or you have a trust fund."

  It so happens that my father was a furniture salesman who died broke. I didn't have a trust fund. "Let's leave it at retired."

  "What from?"

  "Nothing important," I said. The under-statement of the year. I sipped my drink and changed the subject instantly. "Where do you live?"

  For some reason she seemed surprised I didn't know. "That's how I met Kenny. I live in the boatyard."

  Brilliantly I asked, "On a boat?"

  "Broken-down old trawler," she said. "Cheap and roomy. Propped in a cradle. All the romance of living aboard without the nuisance of actually being in the water."

  "Ah," I said.

  That seemed to wrap up the discussion of affordable housing, and there was a lapse in the conversation. Lapses are dangerous.

  "Pete," Maggie said—it was the first time, except for introductions, that she'd used my name, and she helped herself to it just like she'd claimed the corner of the couch, with an utter lack of formality or self-consciousness—"did Kenny tell you he was being followed?"

  I felt my fingers clench around my sweating glass. "Now wait. I thought you said—"

  "That it's over. That there's nothing to accomplish." She gave a pained little smile that was not quite an apology. "I know, I know. But it haunts me. . . . Did he say anything to you about it?"

  I blew some air between my lips and tried to remember. The effort made me realize that I'd had a lot to drink. "He might have mentioned something," I vaguely said, and drank some more. "I don't think he gave details."

  "Well, I'll give you a detail. These people who he thought were following him—I think they were the same people who came snooping around the boatyard right after he disappeared."

  "Two years ago?" I said.

  She nodded. "The boatyard's like a little village. Everyone knows everyone. People look out for each other. Someone's there who doesn't belong, it's noticed. Right after Kenny took off, two guys started hanging around. Someone caught them boarding Kenny's boat, called the cops. The cops never showed."

  Made sense, I thought, if the intruders had ties to Lefty Ortega.

  "And you think these same two guys came back?"

  She nodded. Only her head moved; there was a wonderful stillness in her neck and shoulders.

  "How did they know Kenny was in town?"

  She just looked down at her lap and shook her head.

  "Then what makes you think that it's the same two guys?"

  "There was something very strange about them," she said, and sipped some grappa. "Strange two years ago. Strange a couple days ago. Too strange to be coincidence."

  I leaned forward in my chair and waited for her to tell me what this strange thing was. She shifted her hips. She smoothed her skirt. By now I was leaning so far forward that my shirt pulled away from my chest.

  Finally she said, "They were wearing snorkels."

  "Snorkels?"

  "Snorkels."

  I took a moment to process this. Hit men wore trench coats. Bank robbers mashed their faces in stockings. Snorkels I did not know what to make of. "And flippers?" I asked.

  "No flippers. Just snorkels and masks. You know, boatyard and all, I guess they figured they'd blend. Lot of people wear snorkels when they're scraping barnacles, brushing off algae."

  I rubbed my chin sagaciously. "But isn't that if the boats are in the water?"

  "Exactly."

  "Exactly what?"

  "These guys weren't in the water. That's why they looked strange."

  I scratched my ear. "More grappa?"

  "I shouldn't. I have a class. Well, maybe just a little."

  I got up to fetch the bottle.

  As I was tipping it into her glass, she said, "You think about it, it was a pretty good disguise. I mean, everybody looks the same in a snorkel. Have you noticed?"

  I refreshed my own drink and conjured images of guys in snorkels. Lips puffed out like clowns' around the chunky mouthpieces. Bundles of salty hair plastered inside foggy masks. Pastel plastic breathing tubes that always went askew while glaciers of snot came oozing from tormented noses. "I've noticed that everyone looks like a horse's ass," I offered. "These guys can't be too bright."

  I'd made it to the freezer and was stashing what was left of the bottle when Maggie said, "So it shouldn't be too hard to find them."

  I took a step back toward the living room. "Don't even think about it."

  I reclaimed my chair and glass. I took a swig and looked hard at my
guest, almost daring her to push me on this one. She didn't, which I found disarming. She just stared gently back. Her unadorned mouth was calm and still, and at the edge of my vision, though I tried to shut it out, I saw a tuft of tinselly red hair protruding through the cleft between her arm and chest, and I tried not to admit I found it awfully sexy.

  Maggie looked past me to the changing light through the window. It's how she told time, I guess. "I have to get to class," she said, and without hitch or hurry she was on her feet.

  Less gracefully, I rose to walk her to the door. "What kind of class?"

  "Yoga," she said. "I teach. At the Leaf Shed. That's what I do."

  Aha, I thought. So that explained the exquisite posture and the measured breath. Boy, I was getting to be a shrewd observer.

  She looked down at my hips as we stood there in the doorway. "You should do some yoga. You walk all stiff."

  I didn't see the point of telling her that at that moment I was walking stiff so that I would not fall down.

  "Well," she said, "I'm sorry to barge in on you. But I feel better for having talked—don't you?"

  I didn't have to think about it long. "No," I said. "I don't."

  She just pressed her lips together and moved smoothly down the porch steps. I watched her climb onto her bike with the yin-yang on the chain guard and pedal off.

  7

  Next morning I got beat again at tennis, this time by an old slicer-and-dicer whose forehand is a tic and whose backhand is a weaselly, contorted little push—a guy I really shouldn't lose to. Not to make excuses, but I had a couple of pretty good ones. For one thing, I was hung over from the grappa. For another it was sort of on my mind that maybe I was wanted for murder.

  On my way to Bayview Park, I'd stopped, as usual, before the rank of newspaper machines in front of Fausto's market. And there, above the fold in the Sentinel, was word that Lefty Ortega was no more.

  I should not have been surprised—though of course I'd wanted to believe that the docs would get the tough old bastard stabilized, that he'd resume his wigged-out drifting toward the end, and that the crisis precipitated by my visit somehow wouldn't count. So I forced myself to act like I was shocked, riffled quickly through a weak repertoire of amazement—the caught breath, the tsking of the tongue. Then I dug two quarters from the bottom of my tennis bag, and, in what was quickly turning into an unhappy and life-draining habit, I bought the goddamn paper and read it standing on the sidewalk.

  The article did not specify the time of Lefty's death, but said that it was afternoon. This sent me delving into morbid subtleties. If he was dead by the time the running medics reached his bedside, did that mean I killed him? How about if he jerked and gurgled another twenty minutes? How about an hour? Did some kind of buzzer go off when the period of guilt expired? But come on, the guy was dying anyway. Then again, everybody murdered is dying anyway. Maybe the miserable bully had one kind and charitable thought left in him, one instant of joy, one spoonful of redemption. When could you say with certainty that somebody was finished?

  This philosophical muddle soon gave way to practical considerations, in the midst of which I vaguely realized I was thinking like a criminal. Who'd seen me at the hospital? I'd asked for Lefty at Intensive and at Critical. There was a duty nurse in Hospice who'd probably noticed me hanging around; there was the smiling woman with the cart of magazines. And there was Lefty's daughter—at least I assumed that's who she was. We'd exchanged a glance when she came out of the room, and it had seemed to me that her eyes were dry enough to see through. All these people were witnesses, potential enemies. I wasn't used to having enemies. I wasn't used to feeling furtive. And, now that I thought of it, I'd never regarded myself as an unhealthy person to be around. Why was everyone I met suddenly dying?

  Distractedly scanning the rest of the front page, I noticed a small follow-up item about the killing on Sunset Key. The cops had still not managed to identify the victim. Big surprise. They were asking anyone with information to come forward. Fat chance. No chance now. Let them figure out on their own who Kenny Lukens was, and that these two deaths were, in some murky way, connected.

  I threw the paper in the garbage, as if by trashing that one copy I could erase the day's events. A homeless guy came along and plucked it out ten seconds later. I continued on my way to tennis, and of course I played like shit. Who wouldn't have?

  But the strangest thing about that tennis game was that I didn't go home afterward. I always go straight home from tennis. Get out of my sweaty clothes, have a soak or a swim, analyze, regroup. This, I realize, may seem like just some aimless, trivial routine. To me it's much more serious than that. It's ritual, one of those carefully evolved, scrupulously repeated patterns that define a life, that make it recognizable to the person living it. Violate those rituals, disrupt those private ceremonies, and who knows what else will go ker-blooey?

  Still, when I'd packed up my gear and dropped it in the basket of my bike, I just couldn't get the thing to steer toward home. It pointed stubbornly downtown and toward the harbor. Gradually I understood that it was pointing toward Redmond's Boatyard. I felt I had no choice but to follow it, even though I couldn't tell if it was Kenny Lukens or Maggie the yoga teacher I needed to get closer to.

  Redmond's is at the north end of the Bight, at a nick in the shore that not long ago was known as Toxic Triangle. The old electric plant looms over Toxic; the gigantic coast guard pier hems in one side of it. The water part of the Triangle used to be a seedily carefree place where nobody paid rent and hardly anyone had all their teeth. Derelict boats tied lines to tilted pilings or settled gently into dockside muck; their denizens nailed lawn furniture onto splintery decks and lived on six-packs and pork rinds. People slept in hammocks slung from masts, and scruffy dogs ran around with fish heads in their jaws.

  Local wisdom had it that Toxic was too funky and too outlaw ever to be gentrified. Ha. It's called North Haven Marina now—another of those places whose former moniker has been officially expunged. Costs two bucks a foot to park your boat there for a night, and dock girls trained to call everybody Captain come running up to pump your gas.

  A small irony is that Redmond's dry dock used to be the upscale part of Greater Toxic. People actually paid for space there. There were showers, electricity—it was practically suburban. Now, next to the gleaming new marina, Redmond's seemed a blot and an embarrassment. The yard was dusty and unpaved; the vessels anything but yachty. How long till the city found a way to worm out of the lease?

  I pedaled through the rusty street-side gate, clattered over potholes and lumps of coral rock. Boats loomed all around me in untidy rows, propped in cradles, suspended from canvas straps, resting precariously on spindly jacks. Maybe it was just my mood, but I found an awful pathos in those landlocked boats. They seemed defeated, punished with exile for their failures. Paint curled on their desiccated bottoms. Their waterline stripes looked futile in the unbuoyant air. Rudders waved at nothing; keels spiked downward to no effect.

  I rode and looked around, and after a couple minutes I found Kenny Lukens' sailboat.

  I was sure it was his, though I could not have recognized a Morgan forty-one. It was the name on the transom that made me certain—though Kenny had never mentioned the name. It was stamped in gold block letters framed in navy blue, and the honest truth is that it broke my heart. It was called Dream Chaser.

  There was a fellow standing by the boat, working on it, fairing the hull with a small hand sander. He was spare and lean and his skin had tanned to a rosewood color; his hair was so blond it was white; it stood straight up. He wore flip- flops and a tiny orange bathing suit flecked with paint. I pedaled up to him and said hello.

  "Your boat?" I asked.

  "Oh yawh," he said happily. His eyes changed to slits when he smiled. His sun-bleached eyelashes all but disappeared.

  "She's beautiful."

  He beamed. "Oh yawh."

  "Had 'er long?"

  "Fife months. Buy her almo
st soon as I arrife." There was pride in his voice, wonder on his flat frank face.

  "Where ya from?"

  "Riga," he said. "Latvia. Latvian I am. My name is Andrus."

  "I'm Pete. You're a long way from home."

  "Denks God. Latvia, your ass it freezes off."

  "The boat—you bought it here?"

  "Right vere she is sitting," he said. "Good deal too. Only unpaid bills is vat I'm paying."

  I smiled for the Latvian's good luck though this made me very sad. Why did it always seem that one guy's bargain was another guy's tragedy? I was suddenly troubled by how little was left of Kenny Lukens, how little anybody knew of him, how little it seemed to matter that he'd passed this way. "Know who owned it before?" I asked.

  "I tink a local couple."

  "Why you think that?"

  "Clothes they leave behind," he told me. "Men's clothes, vimmen's clothes."

  "Ah. Can I ask you something else? A couple days ago, were you out here working on the boat?"

  Cheerfully, he said, "Every day I'm vorking on the boat."

  "Did you happen to see a couple of guys hanging around in snorkels?"

  "Shnorkels? On the land?"

  "Right. Here around the yard."

  "Vy shnorkels in the yard?"

  "Like, you know, a disguise."

  "Ah. Like Halloveen. Pumpkins. Vitches."

  "Something like that."

  Andrus rubbed the dusty white stubble on his cheek. "No," he murmured. "Shnorkels, no." Then he added, "Vait! Two, three days ago, a couple fellows come racing up on yetskies."

  I wondered if he'd noticed that he'd lapsed into his native tongue. "Yetskies?"

  "Yawh. You know." He made a motion like revving up a motorcycle.

  "Oh. Jet Skis."

  "Exectly. This is vat I'm saying. On yetskies they come racing up and shnorkels they are vearing. And I remember I am thinking, Vait, either you are going shnorkel or you are going vit the yetski. Vy both?"