The Naked Detective

by Laurence Shames

  It was an odd moment to embrace, after all. We'd been discussing blackmail, murder. Maggie had been not just tough-minded, but almost hard and cynical in her shrugging off of Mickey Veale's denials. And it had been her idea to send me out into the ocean in a tiny craft in the middle of the night. True, she volunteered to come along, pretended, even, to insist on it. But she must have known that I'd say no to that, that her clamoring to accompany me would only strengthen my resolve to go alone. Alone, where there was nowhere to hide and no witness to see, within easy reach of an enemy who'd just threatened me to my face.

  I thought about the kiss, about the salt and raspberry flavor of Maggie's mouth, the texture of her flesh against me. If the kiss, and the promise of more to come, was, by some wild and appalling chance, part of a plan to set me up, I couldn't imagine how she might have done it better.

  29

  At home, I thought of napping but was far too wired even to imagine keeping my head down on the pillow.

  So I cracked a bottle of old-growth zinfandel, laid out a plate of crackers and pate, and settled into the music room. If I couldn't stop the world with lovemaking, at least maybe I could keep it at bay behind thick walls and a heavy door with felt-lined edges.

  I put on some Schubert—the string quintet that has two cellos. There is nothing more serene than Schubert; he never fails to calm me. Or he never had until that evening, when the gorgeous melodies and effortless transitions were wasted on me. Worse than wasted—in some crazy way they pissed me off. How could he bushwhack through such complexity and emerge without a scratch, in a triumph of grace and balance? There was something smug about it, something of the African explorer returning from the heart of darkness with his mustache trimmed and the crisp crease still centered in his khakis. So I yanked that disc and switched to Brahms, who oscillates between the poles of rage and heartbreak, with few punier or more resigned emotions in between.

  The wine was good, the music was great, but still the time went slowly. Nine o'clock. Ten. I corked what was left of the zin and made some coffee. Then I thought of something that made my fingers itch. I went into the living room and moved a watercolor of a mangrove islet and opened up the wall safe behind it. My unfired pistol was the only thing in the little metal box suspended between two studs.

  A cup of coffee in one hand, I laid the other across the gun. It was neither warm nor cold, but there was something clammy in the way it felt. I lifted it out into the light, felt its falsely reassuring weight. Stainless steel, it hadn't tarnished, though there was a handsome gray patina on the pebbled butt. The gun was loaded, and reloading had at one time been explained to me—something about a magazine that snapped into the handle. Then there was a sequence that you went through to get the trigger ready. My tongue poised at the corner of my mouth, I made a weak try at remembering, at tracing the logic of levers and springs. But my heart wasn't in it. I just didn't like guns; I never would. Life or death, I'd be the guy who froze and couldn't shoot, and felt like a sucker for not shooting.

  I put the pistol back into the safe. Spun the lock and put the watercolor back in place. And felt, once again, a compelling need to wash my hands.

  By now it was eleven. The wine in my veins was breaking down to sugar, the caffeine was kicking in, and I was getting very jumpy. I took a lukewarm shower and got ready to go out for the night.

  ——

  I put on fresh shorts and a clean shirt and a cotton sweater. I unlocked my bike from the palm I always chain it to, wiped the tiny beads of condensation from the seat, and climbed aboard.

  I'd gone three or four blocks when I began to suspect that I was being followed.

  The suspicion took shape only gradually, deriving from an oddly constant spray of headlights that fanned out from some vague but nearly steady point behind me. Their glow stuck to the shrubs on either side of the street I rode on; when I turned, the lights raked almost audibly against white picket fences, as though a child were dragging a stick along the planks.

  I swallowed, and kept pedaling, and told myself not to speed up, not to panic. I'd only gone a little distance, after all, and I was on a not- untraveled route that led downtown. Then again, it was nearly midnight on a Tuesday out of season. Houses were dark. Locusts were the loudest sound. Little was moving except for cats, scratching their flanks against warm curbstones.

  Vigilant now, I began to steer a more eccentric course. Down narrow vine-choked lanes that tourists wouldn't know. Along the curved perimeter of the west side of the cemetery. The head-lights stayed with me, slicing through the vines, panning dully across the mausoleums. My mouth went dry. My churning knees got stiff, and I wrestled with the question of whether I should turn around and face my pursuer.

  At a stop sign, I finally did—though without resolve, just peeking meekly back across my shoulder. All I saw was a dark generic car; a Chevy or a Chrysler or a Ford, discreetly crawling a block behind. I waited; it slowed still more. It slipped beneath a street lamp, revealing nothing but a windshield tinted a sinister purple. The car stopped altogether now, and idled, as though its driver would wait all night for me to carry on. Or as if he was taunting me, daring me to approach.

  I didn't have the nerve. I sucked a breath and started pedaling again. Then, with guilt and horror; I realized that I was leading my pursuer straight to Redmond's Boatyard, straight to Maggie—who, if she wasn't part of some grotesque conspiracy, was an unselfish, almost saintly friend.

  Needing badly to believe it, I told myself that no harm had yet been done. So far, I could have been headed almost anywhere—Duval Street for a beer; Mallory Square to hear some old songs badly played. Toxic Triangle was only one of many destinations in the extended arc of my meandering. Still, at the next corner I turned away from the harbor. I started making random lefts and rights, launched upon an itinerary as aimless as Key West life itself. The dark car stayed with me, harassing, although its driver had to know by now that I was leading him to nowhere.

  Finally I lost him in a lane behind the library, a stanchioned dead end for cars but with a narrow rocky path that bicycles could slip through. I clunked along the coral knobs for a hundred yards or so, then stopped in the still and fragrant no-man's-land between two streets, a tiny patch of jungle in the midst of town.

  Overgrown, it was primordially dark in there. Straddling my bike, I caught my breath and listened to the crickets and the toads, heard lizards and small snakes slithering under brittle leaves. For a moment I was pleased with my resourcefulness in finding this haven; then all at once I realized it was the dumbest place I could have stopped. It was visible from nowhere. The going was slow and essentially blind; a killer on foot had every chance of overtaking a bike that had skidded on a root or crashed against a stump. I'd cornered myself. My heart began to pound. Did I only imagine that I heard the dry click of a car door; the crunch of hard shoes on gravel, the swipe of undergrowth at pants legs?

  I jumped on my pedals and took off. Straining to see the thin and rugged coral swath between the vines and shrubs, I bounced and leaned and fishtailed. Thorns slashed at my arms and shins; spider-webs stuck to my face; my scalp was grazed by an overhanging limb. I humped till I reached the alley that gave onto Elizabeth Street, then slowed just enough to pluck the burrs out of my sweater and shake the bugs out of my hair.

  Mostly confident that I'd shaken my pursuer, I still took a long and circumspect meander to Redmond's Boatyard.

  ———

  It was nearly twelve-thirty by the time I'd locked my bike and was jogging toward the dinghy dock. I didn't see Maggie right away. That's because she wasn't standing on the dock, but sitting in a dinghy. Waving up to me, she said, "I was getting worried."

  Worried. The word seemed oddly mild. How about scared shitless? "Sorry," I said, "I was followed."

  "Followed?" She narrowed her eyes and looked at me more closely in the ugly pink light from the security floods. "Your wrists," she said, "your legs. You're bleeding."

  It was true. Th
e thorns and sedges had got me pretty good. I was crosshatched with long and shallow cuts, the kind that bulge and pucker with lines of blood that stop just shy of overflowing. They didn't hurt, just itched. I shrugged them off and pretended to be calm. I don't think I pretended very well. I couldn't stop my feet from shuffling. My throat felt constricted, and my voice didn't sound exactly right.

  "Who followed you?" she said.

  My shoulders lifted to my ears. "Veale's people? Lydia's people? I don't know."

  We looked at each other. It was a caring, comradely look and I guess it should have bucked me up. In fact it only multiplied my misgivings, reminded me how out of my depth I was, how trapped. Too late, I realized that of course I should have brought my gun—what kind of idiot liberal does this sort of thing unarmed? Not bringing it was the fundamental blunder of a person simply not up to the job. I was inadequate, and inadequacy now cast a sickly pall on everything.

  I frowned down at the boat Maggie was sitting in, the boat in which I was supposed to track down smugglers. A pitiably inadequate craft. Maybe ten feet long, made of the same cheap galvanized aluminum as garbage cans. The seats were metal slabs with neither backs nor cushions. There was no steering wheel, just a stem on the ancient, sun-beaten engine. The tub's forlornness seemed to match my own. Masking desperation with wryness, I said, "On television they use speedboats."

  "We're a cheap boatyard, not a yacht club," Maggie said. "Climb aboard."

  "I'll wait till you get out."

  "I'm not getting out," she said.

  "Maggie—" I began, though I understood by now that I would lose this argument, that I'd already lost it hours before. Secretly, I was thrilled, of course. My nerves were shot. I wanted company. Still, I launched into some mumbled protests.

  Maggie didn't wait to hear them. She swiveled toward the stern, vented the gas tank, and squeezed the priming ball. After three hard pulls on the starter cord, the motor grudgingly turned over.

  Gratefully defeated, my small wounds stretching and throbbing as I bent, I clambered down into the skiff and uncleated the skinny line that held us to the dock. I pushed us back; we lightly clunked against the other dinghies. Maggie pointed us toward the broad entrance of the Bight at Toxic Triangle, and, preposterously, we headed out to spy on the presumptive killers aboard The Lucky Duck.

  30

  Night on the water with Maggie.

  Hard to imagine anything sexier. I could envision whispered confidences and languid kisses beneath a spray of shooting stars that mirrored the mystic flash of ocean phosphorescence. The dampness of the predawn air rendered incubator-warm by the mingled heat of limbs and hollows ...

  But in the actual event, circumstances challenged sensuality. I was bleeding and afraid. Maggie seemed solemn. As we scudded across the resting harbor; our motor sent up a hideous whine that jangled the nerves and obliterated conversation. The dinghy vibrated like a beaten gong; my backside soon went numb against the trembling of the metal seat. At the harbor mouth, currents collided, setting up a small but steep and surging chop that rocked the skiff and made the engine labor. I gripped the gunwales and watched Maggie steer. She was wearing roomy drawstring pants, a loose sweater with billowing sleeves. A small muscle was twitching in her neck.

  Beyond the harbor the currents diffused and the ocean went improbably flat. With the growing distance, Key West, already small, seemed ever dinkier and more insignificant, its buildings thin and frail as matchbooks, its street lamps faint as dying candles. Back to the east, a red smudge on the horizon marked the place where a waning moon would soon be rising. Huge in the south, Scorpio crawled across the sky, dragging its fearsome tail.

  We putted along for what must have been an hour. A pink moon came up, pocked and gauzy, more than a crescent, less than a half. My mind went as numb as my rear end.

  Finally Maggie brought the engine down to idle and pointed beyond our bow. I swiveled and saw The Lucky Duck, perhaps a third of a mile farther out. A chartreuse gleam came from its portholes. "I don't think we should go closer," Maggie said. "Go ahead and drop the anchor. Don't throw it— ease it down."

  Her tone, its certainty, made me careful to do as I was told. The anchor settled slowly, as though falling through Jell-O. Maggie cut the motor.

  The skiff stopped vibrating and the night went magnificently quiet. Quieter than silence. Wavelets licked at the hull. Now and then a faint laugh or a cough or the ring of coins came across the water from The Lucky Duck. But somehow these ghostly sounds did not disturb the quiet; rather, they pointed up the vastness and the texture of it. It was a velvet quiet, an embracing quiet. It muffled everything except the present moment in the present place. Things finally felt sexy after all.

  Maggie scuttled forward and sat down next to me. The boat rocked with every lean and gesture; we realized that we couldn't move much. But our bodies touched at the hip and at the outsides of our thighs. I put my arm around her back. She rested her head against my shoulder. Her hair had taken on the salt tang of the ocean.

  For a long while we just sat there, sharing warmth along our flanks, not speaking. We vaguely watched the gambling boat. Through our fatigued eyes and with the limitless expanse behind it, it seemed at moments insubstantial, painted on a backdrop. I felt time passing, and was reminded that time isn't just an empty bowl in which events are mixed. It's a thing unto itself, has a flavor and a weight, and as it passes it drags a breeze as soft and melancholy as the memory of everything you've ever lost.

  Maggie nestled closer up against me, whispered, "Wonderful out here."

  I squeezed her waist and nodded.

  The late moon climbed and whitened. A jackpot on The Lucky Duck was announced by a flat and trivial tinkling.

  A while later Maggie turned her face up toward me, kissed me underneath my jaw. "Why do I like you, Pete?" she said. "I don't know anything about you."

  I ran my fingers up and down her amazing spine. "Maybe that's exactly why," I said. Then I added, "But hey, you know some things. You know I'm the worst detective in the world. You know I hate to get mixed up in other people's problems."

  "That's what you say, but here you are. I can't figure it out."

  "I can't either."

  Stars wheeled. A big fish or a manta ray trailed green-gold streamers just beneath the surface.

  Time breathed in and out. Maggie gently touched the dry cuts on my hands. I found this wildly intimate and maybe just a little bit perverse.

  "Tell me about your life before," she said.

  "Before?"

  "Before Key West."

  I sighed. I stalled. I didn't want to talk about it. Not that I was being strong and silent. Just the opposite. I was afraid that if I started talking I wouldn't stop, that I'd be sucked into a whirlpool of whining and regretting, launched upon a litany of rancid old frustrations and ill-digested disappointments. "What's to tell?" I dodged. "It was a pretty standard life."

  "Always lived alone?" she prompted.

  I felt the rasping birth of a laugh I knew would come out bitter. It would have been rudely out of place in the empty and accepting night, and I tried my best to choke it back. "Basically," I said. "Especially for the six years I was married."

  "That bad?"

  "Not all of it, no," I said. "For a while it was pretty nice, in fact. But it got kind of uncomfortable once my wife made up her mind I was a failure."

  Maggie straightened up a bit. I felt sympathy and indignation in her posture. "Why'd she think that?"

  "Because I was."

  "I don't believe you."

  I looked down at the water. I wiped mist off the gunwale. Then I said, "You know what? I didn't believe it either. I thought I was a success that hadn't happened yet. I really believed that. Slow learner. Late bloomer. But I'd get there. I knew I would. I believed it for years. I really thought I'd do it."

  Maggie's eyes were wide, her face a pattern of gleam and shadow in the moonlight. She said, "Do what?"

  Right. I hadn't expl
ained, had I? But Maggie's simple question made me shy. A nervous laugh escaped me. To my great surprise, the laugh did not sound bitter. Baleful and nostalgic, maybe, but almost peaceful, almost resigned. Was it possible that old poisons were dissipating, old defeats losing their sting? How did that happen? Was it the velvet quiet of the ocean, or the sweeping breeze that time trailed like a gown? Or was it Maggie? Was it possible that this woman was not just lithe and supple but could be really good for me? "You know," I said, "it's so typical, such a cliché, I feel silly telling you."

  "Nothing wrong with feeling silly."

  For an instant I thought this was just a quip, then I realized it was far more than that. It was a credo, a statement of a kind of wiggy and unjudging faith. Nothing wrong with feeling silly. A giddy sense of freedom made my hairline crawl. Relief flowed in the form of a flushed heat that came streaming past my collar. I belched out a pure ecstatic childish laugh and decided, what the hell, I'd go on with my silly tale.

  Except I didn't get to.

  By the time I was ready to speak again, a new sound had started scratching at the quiet. It was a high nattering buzz, faint and distant but becoming less so.

  Maggie and I stiffened like hunting dogs. Scanning the ocean, we saw nothing but wreaths of vapor doing a weird slow boil on the surface, rising up to meet faint damp curtains that weren't quite clouds. But small craft were approaching; there was no doubt of it. We felt more than heard them as they thumped and whined, tugging at and wrinkling the carpet of the sea.

  A minute passed, two minutes, then finally we saw the rooster tails, tinselly silver in the moonlight, cresting and dissolving like the spray from city fountains. There was a pair of them, as I thought there'd been the night before. They were approaching from the east—from the direction of Key Largo, Miami, the Bahamas, a million other places. Maggie reached down and grabbed the binoculars she'd borrowed.

  I watched The Lucky Duck to see if there would be some signal, a flash of warning or of welcome. But tonight there was no beacon, and the Jet Skis kept approaching. Two hundred yards or so from the mother ship, they slowed to idle speed. The rooster tails subsided; the craft rocked with the last of their momentum. The drivers, as far as I could tell, were wearing short-sleeved and short- legged wet suits; the big plastic zippers glinted in the moonlight. Their goggles did too, and made them look unearthly.