The Naked Detective

by Laurence Shames

  Some assertions are simply too peculiar to argue against. So I just said, "And it still goes on?"

  "What are you, a newcomer? 'Course it does."

  "What gets smuggled now?"

  Ozzie blew a dismissive, farting sound between his lips. "Aah, it isn't what it was. No demand for reefer. Hard shit's all moved up to Miami. What's left? Haitians? Cuban cigars? I don't really know."

  We reached the peeling wood enclosure. Ozzie produced a frayed rag with which he began to dry his hairy chest.

  "Well, let me ask you this," I said. "Other than smuggling, can you imagine why a pair of Jet Skis would approach an anchored boat at four a.m.?"

  "You saw this?" he said. "Jet Skis at four in the morning?"

  "Let's just keep it hypothetical."

  He didn't answer right away. He daintily picked lint from the rim of his navel, then gave in and really reamed the thing. "Jet Skis. That's interesting."

  "Why?"

  "No real room to stash stuff on a Jet Ski. What they're smuggling would have to be something really small."

  The power of suggestion instantly kicked in. I pursed my lips and pictured emeralds. I pictured pearls. I pictured super-fast computer chips. Then I said, "Wait a second. I have no idea if they were really smuggling."

  Ozzie snickered as he reached into his bag for one of his appalling tank tops. "Okay," he said, "they weren't smuggling. They just felt like going for a little ride at four a.m. What were you, born yesterday?"

  The question hung there as Ozzie's head briefly disappeared into his torn and faded shirt. I had a moment blurrily to reflect on all the things that had surprised me lately, all my recent blind-sidings by the unwholesome and illicit moves that people made. "You know," I said, "sometimes I think I was."

  25

  Finally I got to go to sleep, and you can bet I made the most of it.

  I didn't toss. I didn't dream. I stayed down till 3:00 p.m., by which time the full heat of the day had collected and compressed in my upstairs bedroom, and I woke at last, as puffy and moist as a dumpling in a steamer. The pillow was wet beneath my head. The sheet was wet on top of me. This might sound gross but it felt totally wonderful. It was a jungle feeling, generative and raw. It suggested vines and parrots and lovemaking on piles of hot leaves.

  I lay there awhile, savoring, then threw off the sheet and rolled over to a dry part of the bed. A new batch of sensations followed, no less delicious than the first. Evaporation cooled me; I tingled at the collarbones and hairline. I felt moisture wicking off my back, the skin shrinking ever so slightly as dampness was coaxed from it. Truth was, I could have been perfectly content for several hours, just lolling there, rolling, folding arms and legs in different combinations, trying out various configurations of sheets and pillows. Why not? Out in the world, things were befuddling and frustrating and complicated. Here, all was simplicity and peace. What's wrong with avoiding aggravation?

  But finally, reluctantly, I rose from bed. I headed for the shower, then decided, no, I'd start off with a cool plunge in the pool. I grabbed a towel and went downstairs. Padded through the kitchen and out the sliding door to the sun-baked deck.

  But I never made it into the water. I looked down and saw a pair of dead rats floating there, spinning lazily on the current from the pump.

  They were palm rats—smaller and less filthy than their urban cousins, but rats nonetheless, and plenty unappetizing. They were just beginning to bloat. Their sparse fur had corkscrewed into tufts between which were lewd bare patches of stretched skin whose color was an ugly pinkish taupe. Their eyes were closed but the lids were an appalling red; their ears seemed to have grown soggy, and futile whiskers floated on the surface. Their tails had been tied together.

  With a disgusted fascination, I watched awhile as the rats spun in their morbid circuit, and tried to figure out the meaning of this. Why two rats? Why tied together? Did they symbolize the two murdered men? Lefty and Lydia Ortega? I watched them and pondered. Sometimes their tails stretched out full length, then twanged back, pulling the corpses close together as in a dance routine. Maybe I was reading too much into this. There were two to make it twice as nasty. They were tied together so that I would know a human hand had intervened, that these were not simply unfortunate or klutzy rats that had fallen from a tree. They were supposed to scare me.

  They did scare me, but in a delayed-reaction kind of way. I was still too groggy to get frightened all at once. Besides, I had practical matters to deal with. I had to get the rats out of the pool before they decomposed and gummed up the works.

  I went over to the shrubbery and started looking for a stick. Call me squeamish—I don't like to touch dead things. If this is a superstition, it's a pretty primal one, I'd bet, based on the notion of death itself as a contagious particle, the mother of all germs. In any case, I found a fallen frond with a good hard spine, then waited for the rats to do a final do-si-do over to my side of the pool. I scooped them by the knot in their tails; they hung down like a pair of sausages; water dribbled from their mouths. I flung them back into the bushes. They spun slowly like the weighted snare that cowboys from the pampas use, then crashed through leaves and twigs and came to rest somewhere out of sight.

  I shuddered and tossed away the frond. I looked down at the pool but there was no way I was getting in it so soon after death had visited. It occurred to me to put an extra chlorine tablet in the bobber. Then I sat down in a lounge chair; and finally the fear caught up with me, slow and whispering at first, then clamorous and strangling.

  I'd just been put on notice that someone capable of killing was extremely pissed off at me. And all at once it seemed that, in everything I'd done so far, I'd been stupidly cavalier, careless and unserious. My approach had been pure Key West. Which is to say I'd been blundering along through a haze of heat and goofiness as though the standards of the outside world did not apply, as if doing things smilingly half-ass was good enough, because the whole thing was basically one big joke. To an extent that seemed suddenly incredible, I'd overlooked the simple facts that violence was violence, and murder was murder, and death was death, wherever you happened to be.

  I sat there for a while. Bugs buzzed; lizards posed on rocks. Then, spinning off my fear; a strange thing happened: Even though I absolutely knew I hadn't touched the rats, I became obsessed with the worry that I had rat on my hands. I splayed my fingers and held them out in front of me so that I wouldn't accidentally touch my mouth or eyes. Then I stood, and used an elbow to slide the screen door open, and moved in a quiet panic to the kitchen sink.

  Using lots of dish detergent, I washed my hands over and over again. Scrubbing, wringing, I suddenly understood something that I hadn't grasped before: that there is no paranoia quite like island paranoia. Here I was, stuck on a flat, bare hunk of rock four miles long by two miles wide, with a deadly enemy who knew exactly where I lived. I'm no crusader. I'm a guy who's largely given up on the world. How in Jesus had I done this to myself?

  I rinsed my hands and went to dry them. But then I was unsure I'd scrubbed them thoroughly enough, that I'd gotten to the tiny webs deep down at the bases of my fingers. I soaped them once again. And told myself I'd been a fool from the beginning for imagining that I could dip into this business, play detective for a while, then pull away whenever I decided that I'd had enough. Life and death were a shade more serious than that, even in Key West.

  Naked at the sink, I turned the water off at last. Reached out for a dish towel and dried my hands. Dried them vigorously, roughly, to hide from myself the fact that they were shaking.

  PART THREE

  26

  Say this for Lefty Ortega's daughter—the woman had some outfits.

  I went to see her soon after pulling the dead rats from the pool. I'd finished washing my hands, then gone upstairs for a shower and washed them some more. Dressed, I choked down some toast against a faint but lingering nausea. Then I hopped onto my bike and rode through the stagnant heat of late afternoon to
the giant oceanside condo.

  I reached her door and rang the bell. A moment passed, then I heard the little shutter open on the peephole. The deadbolt slid free. The door swung open and there she was.

  She was wearing backless, high-heeled silver slippers whose open toes framed ranks of bright red toenails. Her hair was a little bit askew; her lipstick overreached the boundaries of her lips and was just slightly faded. Covering her body, sort of, was a pink though mostly see-through tunic over tiny patches of polka-dotted undies. "Ah," she said, "it's my little private eye."

  Sometimes diminutives suggest affection. Other times they're just... diminutives. I didn't feel like I was being complimented. But I didn't take time to brood about the slight. Still standing in the doorway, I said, "Lydia, we have to talk."

  She looked at me harder then. "You seem pale."

  I couldn't be sure, but I had the vague impression that she took a certain mean pleasure from the fact that I seemed pale, as if my being shaken vindicated her somehow.

  "Have a scotch?" she asked.

  I realized that, having once asked Lydia for scotch, I was doomed to drinking scotch with her forever. On the other hand, scotch at that moment did not seem like a bad idea at all. I nodded, and she led me toward the living room, regal on her silver slippers.

  On the way, apropos of nothing, she said, "I'm just up from the pool."

  "Ah," I said. Ridiculously, I was both deflated and relieved to gather that her polka-dotted undies were in fact a bathing suit. What the hell difference did it make? Then again, it made a difference.

  She glided to the wet bar and started making drinks. I sat down in the armchair that was farthest from the AC vent. After a moment she delivered another of her heroic highballs. We clinked glasses and she folded herself down onto the sectional.

  Once she'd settled into a pose of suitable languor, she said, "So. You're checking in. Like a good little detective."

  The bantering tone again. The banter, the scotch—Lydia got cozy with a pattern and there she wanted to stay. Except the banter wasn't working for me now, had become an irritating habit I was bent on breaking. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. "Lydia, listen. You haven't hired me. I'm not working for you. I'm here to ask some questions. You're going to answer them."

  She sipped her vodka and shot me a subtly infuriating look, the mock-impressed look that a woman gives a cocky boy when pretending to take him seriously. She wiggled her ass against the couch. "Ooh," she said, "we're masterful today."

  I left that alone. "Someone's harassing me," I said. "Telling me to get lost. Which I would gladly do, except there's no place I can go. So I need to get this settled. What's in the pouch, Lydia?"

  She shot me another of her coy and cool and goading looks, but this time I thought I saw just the narrowest little crack in it. Behind the courtesan's blitheness I sensed a hint of vacant desperation, a patch of something as dark and empty as a starless swath of midnight sky. She tried to cover it over with cuteness. "I thought it's the detective's job—"

  I cut her off and sought to pry open that little chink I'd seen. "Your father was still fretting about it on his deathbed. That mean anything to you?"

  Her only answer to that was a look that seemed intended to slice off the top of my head.

  I went on. "So I doubt that it was only money. Dying people don't need cash. It was something more important than that. More important to a number of people. A woman put it in the safe. I'm betting that woman could only have been you. What was so important, Lydia?"

  She held my gaze a moment, then dropped her eyes and rattled the ice cubes in her drink. For an instant this seemed a species of surrender, but quickly her face turned petulant, impatient, as though she were trying to convince us both that none of this was of real consequence; it was just a petty annoyance, hardly worth discussing. Then, into a scene that was already excruciating, she injected a note of the surreal. She gave her shoulders a bothered lift and said, "This top's a little damp. Excuse me."

  She set down her vodka, leaned slightly forward, and with an impressive elasticity of limb, she reached behind herself, underneath her tunic, and undid the clasps of her strapless bra. Tension went out of the polka-dotted cloth, but the cups did not immediately fall away from her breasts. They clung for a moment, attached by heat or moisture or some more mysterious affinity, then fluttered down at last with the dreamy slowness of open parachutes. Tan lines appeared. Pale flesh billowed, swelling ripely before it tapered once again toward dark, emphatic nipples, which seemed to be the only part of Lydia that noticed the coldness of the room.

  After a time she pulled the now-shapeless bit of cloth from underneath her tunic and dropped it on the coffee table. For a dizzy instant I was more fascinated by the empty garment than by her body. I stared at it with awe and terror, as though it were the hollowed pelt of an animal I had known when alive.

  Struggling to hold my voice together; I said, "Listen, Lydia, you look great but it isn't going to work. I need to know what's in the pouch."

  She reclaimed her drink, reclaimed, along with it, the goading tone. "Ask Mickey Veale."

  "I'm asking you."

  "Have you met him yet? Talked with him?"

  "As a matter of fact I have. But—"

  "And what'd you think of the fat bastard?"

  I sighed. I did not want to be distracted by her boobs, and I did not want to be sidetracked by her relentless talk of Mickey Veale. Still, the question, her insistence on asking it, reminded me of a couple things. First, that there was something more than passingly sick in the relationship between the two of them, something that went beyond dislike to obsession; it suggested a case of adolescent thrall, in which miseries are linked, in which every wound is savored, every insult cataloged. Second, that I hadn't quite got around to sorting out my impressions of Veale. His largeness and his in-your-face manner made it difficult to see him in detail, to be confident of a few true things to say. But now, without really analyzing, I said, "Crude, crass, tries too hard. A buffoon." I surprised myself by adding, "And maybe sort of harmless in the end."

  Did I really believe it? Or did I say it just to tweak her? In any case, Lydia seemed genuinely affronted by the word. Her features all pushed forward on her face; a flush spread up her neck and down between her breasts. "Harmless! Pete, you just might be an idiot."

  Very likely true, but neither here nor there. I sipped some scotch. I eased my shoulders and tried to make my voice more coaxing, less aggressive. "Lydia—why do you hate him so much?"

  She stared at me. Her eyes seemed almost to throb, as though they were being pushed from behind. But the impulse toward candor, if that's what it was, didn't last long. Her mouth curled into a mordant and challenging smile; she tongued the edge of her glass. With a phony nonchalance she leaned far forward so that her breasts, diddled by gravity, seemed to float free of her torso, became separate from her, took on pendant and compelling lives of their own. She said, "You want to touch me?"

  I chewed my lip. I said, "No. I mean yes. But I'm not going to. I need to know what's in the pouch."

  She held my eyes. She pursed her lips into something between a pout and a sucking shape. She mimicked my tone. "You need to know what's in the pouch. You need to know why I hate Mickey Veale. I take it you've never been blackmailed."

  This made me blink. It was a long deep blink that momentarily erased the world, and when my eyesight returned, nothing looked quite the way it had before. Blackmail? On top of murder, and smuggling, and Kenny Lukens' stupid larceny that had set all this in motion? The little universe in which I spent my days and nights seemed suddenly like one big ransacked room. Numbly, I said, "Mickey Veale is blackmailing you?"

  Lydia reached up and cupped her breasts and gave them a little rub. "Did I say that, Pete? No, I didn't say that. Besides, you think he's harmless."

  Like a drowning man I flailed after something to grab on to. "No," I said. "Blackmailing your father. It must go back that far."
/>   Lydia pinched her nipples. They looked purple against her bright red fingernails. "Touch them, Pete. I want you to."

  I said, "What's in the pouch, then—is it the payoff, or is it whatever it was Veale had on Lefty?"

  Lydia sighed, and rustled her behind against the sofa, and abandoned her breasts, and went back to her drink. She took a reckless swallow then shot me a stare that was sardonic and desperate and held, perhaps, some shred of beaten hope.

  "Ask your harmless friend," she said.

  "For right now I'm asking you."

  She ignored that. Her guard was up again and all she wanted was to taunt me. "Or are you too afraid?" she said. "Too afraid to touch me. Too afraid to ask your questions to anybody except a woman. Are you always such a coward, Pete?"

  "I guess I am," I said, and rose to go.

  Her insults dogged me as I went. I was gutless. I was sexless. I looked back once from the living room archway. Lydia's eyes were wide with fury and her body had hunched like she was throwing punches. All I could think of was a drowning swimmer who would flail and claw and fight off any chance of rescue.

  27

  If I'd been pale when I arrived at Lydia's, I was paler when I left.

  Nothing was making sense to me. No, that's not true—certain things were beginning to fit together, I just didn't like where they were taking me. I'm basically lazy and I'm basically chicken— Lydia, damn her, had got that right. I'd wanted a quick and easy answer as to what the pouch contained, not another sordid wrinkle about blackmail. I'd been looking for a facile breakthrough that would get me out of danger, not some tangled hints that sucked me in still deeper. And the last thing I'd wanted was to be pushed into a confrontation with Mickey Veale.

  Yet as I climbed onto my bike in the shadow of 2000 Atlantic, it was pretty clear that that's what needed to happen next.

  Suddenly I had a bellyache. Maybe it was dread at the thought of sitting down with Veale, maybe it was the sludging up of little tubes and valves that occurs when sexual arousal goes too long unfulfilled. It seemed like twice a day I got sexed up and weirded out by Lydia, sexed up and shot down by Maggie. This could not be good for a guy's fragile plumbing.