Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  "Did they rent a car?" the detective asked, the butt of his pen against his freckled lower lip.

  Nina looked at Augie. Augie shrugged. Neither had noticed how their visitors arrived.

  "When did they leave town?"

  Augie shrugged again. 'They might still be here, for all I know."

  Mulvane took a last pull of his lukewarm coffee, held the ear of the mug with the pen and pad still twined between his fingers. Then he slid his chair back and got up.

  "Sergeant," said Nina, rising with him and trying to keep her tone free of panic, "are you going to help us?"

  Mulvane made an involuntary sound that was halfway between a sigh and a growl, the gruff and weary complaint of one who always seemed to end up caring more than he wanted to and doing more than he told himself was worth it. "Officially, no," he said. "We have two open murders and a suspicious suicide on the books. I go to the chief, he's gonna tell me no crime has been committed, leave it alone. I'll do what I can. But quietly."

  "Thank you," Nina said.

  The beefy detective waved the gratitude away like a fly. "First thing," he said, reaching for his jacket, "make a list. Anybody here in town who has paintings—"

  "They're friends," said Augie. "The pictures were gifts. They wouldn't be selling . . ."

  Mulvane didn't want to be around while Augie dragged himself to the bitter end of that line of reasoning. He kept on talking to Nina. "I don't care how much you think you trust them—I want the names. Call me later. We'll check car rentals. After that . . ."

  He hunched his shoulders, and the movement made him realize that his cop-blue shirt was already damp, another sweaty day in Key West had begun. He squinted toward the sun, it rudely pawed its way like hot hands between palm fronds and through the gaps in branches. He glanced at Augie and Augie met his eyes but didn't say a word. A lousy thing, thought Joe Mulvane, to be bumped off by a friend; and since he didn't have anything to say to make it seem less lousy, he walked unescorted through the Silver house and back into the relentless sunshine on the other side.

  34

  The way it worked, the cars were put in neutral and then hooked one by one to a conveyor chain. The chain ran under a metal groove that was like a knife gash in the earth. There was an electric eye that started the water when the cars pulled even with the washing frame. Then the jets hissed all around, above the cars and on both sides. The water came out hot but went lukewarm almost instantly as it vaporized. It vaporized into little fuzzy globes like dandelions, and sometimes rainbows cropped up in it; the vapor moved but the rainbows hung in space where they had started. After that the brushes came down, they squeezed in softly but insistently like a fat aunt's arms and didn't let go till they had felt the car all over.

  Then the water stopped and the car paused in the metal shed between the wash frame and the rinse frame. That's where Jimmy Gibbs stood, in the clanging, steamy place between cycles. He wore green rubber boots and held a rag. He worked the vehicles' starboard side, and his job was to rub away the dirt and stains too stubborn for the brushes: the bird shit that sometimes needed scraping with a fingernail, the exploded bugs that congealed to the color and consistency of baked-on egg.

  People wanted a clean car when they rented. Spotless. That fact had been drummed into him from the instant he'd applied for this idiotic job. Didn't matter if the engine pinged, didn't matter if the body rattled. The car had to look good, festive, vacation-like for the off-season deadbeats with their cheapie vouchers and their plastic nose protectors. Was it part of what made it feel like vacation, Gibbs wondered, to look as ridiculous as possible? To wear a nose protector, a flowered shirt, and to drive around in one of these silly-looking ragtops in their frippy Florida shades of plum, persimmon, turquoise?

  Wave on wave the cars came through the shed, a dreary parade of dripping doors and fenders emerging from a fog of mildew and the smarting stench of strong detergent. Gibbs's toes itched maddeningly inside his rubber boots. He'd wanted to work barefoot, give his cracked and soggy dogs some air. The boss wouldn't let him; some insurance bullshit. That was the thing about working on land—there was always some rule, some regulation, some suit making it his business how you had dealt with the fungus between your toes. They blocked you from the light, these land jobs; they stank up the air worse than fish guts ever could. In all, going from sea to land seemed a terrible descent, a punishing demotion.

  Jimmy Gibbs had come down in life. He admitted it, in some crazy way he savored it, it confirmed the way he'd always figured things would turn out. Except he wasn't finished yet—that's what no one realized. He had a plan, and this jerked-off job was part of it. A big part. Gibbs had to laugh. Could anyone imagine that he was standing melting in this metal hell of steam for the four-fucking-thirty-five an hour they were paying him?

  Another turquoise convertible rolled dumbly up to him and waited to be scrubbed. He clutched his fraying rag and attacked a patch of guano on its windshield. All alike, these rented cars, alike as fish in a school. That was the worst thing about them, and the best. Gibbs rubbed some limestone grit off the vehicle's sleek flank as the conveyor yanked it past him. Hell, he thought, these cars aren't even from a place; on the bottom of the license plate, where the home county was stamped, these just said Lease. Lease County, famous for its cheapskate deadbeats. Cars from nowhere, going nowhere.

  Unlike himself. Jimmy Gibbs was moving up. He'd sunk low, he'd sink a little lower still, but after that he knew that he was springing to the top. This job was going to do more for him than the boss man with his dry hands and his tie clip could ever have imagined. With a wet hand Gibbs patted the yard keys in his pocket. Satisfying, the feel of those keys. He raked a forearm across his streaming hairline and turned back, just slightly refreshed, to the unending line of ridiculous convertibles.

  At around four o'clock that afternoon, the telephone rang at the Silver house. It was Joe Mulvane. He'd done some checking up on the list of names that Nina had called in to him a few hours before. She switched on the speakerphone in the living room so that she and Augie could listen together, sitting on the couch. With the speaker on, Augie thought, it seemed less like talking on the phone than listening to the radio, passively taking in a news flash not on one's own life but on some stranger's.

  "The agent and her husband," Mulvane said, "they checked out of the Flagler House around two p.m. yesterday."

  "Ah," said Nina. "So they were gone."

  "No," said Mulvane. "They didn't fly out till nine-thirty. But they didn't rent a car. I checked both names."

  Augie let a long breath out.

  "Of course," the detective went on, "there are other ways to get cars. Theft is popular. Fake I.D.s. But in the meantime, somebody did rent. Ray Yates. Rented a ragtop, turquoise, Friday night, and hasn't been seen or heard from since."

  "Maybe he went on vacation," Augie said.

  "His employer didn't know about it," said Mulvane. "I called the station. Yates phoned in yesterday morning, he didn't say from where, and told them he didn't know when he was coming back."

  "Can you find him?" Nina asked.

  The answer was quick and definite. "No. I checked his boat, I asked some neighbors. I don't have the resources to do more."

  There was a pause. Augie caught himself staring at the speaker and felt suddenly pathetic, having a conversation with a plastic box, looking to the box to solve his life for him.

  "Maybe we can find him," Nina said.

  Mulvane cleared his throat. It was a skeptical sound that seemed to go with the lifting of eyebrows, the rolling of eyes. "We might be dealing with a killer here," he said.

  The words hung in the air; Augie tried to get his mind around them. Ray Yates a killer? It seemed preposterous. But then, was it any more unlikely than the notion that the would-be murderer was his agent, or Clay Phipps his oldest friend, or any of the other buddies with whom Augie had drunk and sailed and fished and eaten? No, Yates was neither more nor less fantastic as a vill
ain than the others. As in a nightmare, everything was taking on a tinge not only of horror but of a dread perverted flatness; all things were equally misshapen and equally possible. The painter, suddenly dizzy, let his head swim backward onto the settee cushion.

  After what seemed a long time, Mulvane continued. "If you learn anything, through friends, whatever, call me. Don't do anything crazy."

  The plastic box seemed to be waiting for an answer, but Augie and Nina just stared at each other, and after a few seconds Joe Mulvane hung up. A moment passed, then the dial tone kicked in. It was a rude and ugly sound, urgent as a siren as it blasted through the reedy speaker. Nina got up silently to turn it off. "What now?" she said.

  Augie blinked up at the ceiling. Fear and bafflement had combined in his brain to produce something verging on indifference, a numbness that allowed for certain threads of clarity running through a fabric whose larger pattern had stopped making sense. "Let's call Natchez," he suggested. "He'll know where Ray is, if anybody does."

  Nina dialed. Then she switched the speaker on and nestled next to her husband. The phone rang two times, three times, and on the fourth it was picked up; there followed the telltale pause of an answering machine.

  Then the poet's voice, somber and imperious, filled the Silvers' living room.

  "You have reached the home and workplace of Roberto Natchez," it said. The R's had a lot of tongue, the O's were round as sea-tossed stones. Augie and Nina stared first at each other, then at the phone.

  "I do not often take calls," the message continued. "I make no promise to return them. I have much to do. You may leave a message if you wish."

  In the short space before the beep, Augie tried without much luck to collect his thoughts. "Natch, it's Augie, call me" was all he could manage to say.

  Nina went to the phone, pre-empted the intrusion of the dial tone. "He sounds deranged," she said.

  Augie didn't answer. He was thinking at that moment not about Natchez's sanity but his own. Not so many months ago, he'd been walloped on the head, had a concussion and amnesia. His brain had been blood-starved, sun-baked, desiccated. How sure could he be that he'd ever quite recovered? Suddenly he was scared in a different way than he had been before. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. His voice was soft and a little shaky.

  "Nina," he said, "if something was wrong with me, with my mind I mean, you wouldn't hide it from me, would you?"

  She moved to him quickly, her feet made no sound on the floor. She squatted down in front of him and took his hands. "I don't understand."

  "I would want to know. If I was going crazy, if I was crazy. . . . Promise me you'd tell me, you'd help me understand that much at least. Promise."

  She held his eyes. In her gaze was love and respect and no false kindness.

  "Good," said Augie. "Good. 'Cause, Nina, all of this is seeming very strange to me."

  35

  It was the same shy, modest Reuben who knocked first, then unlocked the front door of the Silver house at eight o'clock on Monday morning. Heroism had not changed him, because it hadn't dawned on him that he was a hero. What he'd done did not require courage, as he saw it, but only vigilance and loyalty. Those qualities the young man did credit himself with having, but he didn't regard them as anything that should be thought of as rare. They were the basic things a friend should be. If bold acts followed from them, it was only because circumstance had allowed a friend to be a friend.

  He was surprised, therefore, when Augie, dressed in shaving coat and slippers, came sweeping out of the bedroom and took him in his arms. The painter pressed the housekeeper's lean chest against his own, swayed with him a moment as in a slow dance, and kissed the top of his head. "Reuben," he murmured. "Reuben, what a fellow you are. Machisimo."

  The young man allowed his hands to rest lightly on his friend's back, his cheek to he against the painter's shoulder. Augie smelled like soap and toothpaste, the moist warmth of a shower was still pulsing off him in waves. Reuben was happy. He felt that he was getting back more than he possibly could have given. When Augie at last withdrew from the embrace but still held on to Reuben's arms, the young man's eyes were gleaming, his heart was healed, his lips arced in a small smile that was as solemn as it was joyful.

  "You are feeling all right?" he asked.

  Augie did not immediately answer. Rather, he spun toward the living room, an unaccustomed manic edginess making his movements angular, abrupt. "Today?" he said. "Today I feel fine. Full of fight. But yesterday, Reuben, yesterday was one of the worst days of my life." He perched briefly on the arm of the sofa, then sprang up again, weakly but not without a certain jauntiness. "Did you ever have a day, Reuben, when it suddenly seemed that you'd been kidding yourself your whole life long, that you've been mistaken about everything and everyone, that everything you've believed in has been wrong?"

  Reuben looked at him. He was sorry Augie had felt bad, glad that Augie was telling him. It did not occur to him that maybe the question was not meant to be answered.

  "No," he said.

  Augie pulled up short.

  "The things I believe," Reuben went on, "there are not many, but I never doubt them. Maybe they are not possible. But I know that they are right."

  The words soothed Augie like a rubdown; the tightness went out of his posture and he sat. "Yes, Reuben," he said abstractedly. "Yes. Damnit, that's exactly as it should be."

  There was a long silence except for the dry rattle of the palm fronds, the soft scrape of leaves against the tin roof. Then Reuben said, "Where is Nina?"

  "In bed," said Augie. "She had an awful night. Come here, Reuben. Sit down."

  He patted the sofa next to him, and the housekeeper very tentatively parked himself on the edge of it.

  "I know what's going on, Reuben," the painter said. "Nina and I have spoken. We've talked to the police."

  The young man looked at the blond wood floor between his feet. "Were we wrong—"

  Augie waved the question away. "Not at all, not at all. But Reuben, here's the thing. Yesterday I was so glum, so rattled, I almost forgot to be pissed off. Then all of a sudden I said to myself, Wait a second, someone's trying to kill you, and your reaction is to get depressed? That's too much philosophy where your balls should be. So I got mad. Very mad.

  "Reuben, the auction is one week from today. Between now and then, I'm gonna find out who's after me, I'm gonna find out why, and I'm gonna put that person out of business. I don't know how, but I'm gonna do it. Nina's closing the gallery for the week. We'd like you to be here with us. Can you move in for a while?"

  The young man puffed with pride and sat up very straight. "Of course," he said. "Of course. Later on I'll get my things."

  Then he stood, moved lithely to the kitchen, and put his apron on. Hero or no, it was still his job to dust, to do the dishes, plump the pillows, and arrange the flowers.

  Art happens when a person of talent is seized with nervous energy and discovers that he or she has nothing to do except create.

  At around 9 a.m., pacing aimlessly along the blind paths of his newfound rage, Augie decided he wanted to paint. He wanted to work on something big, something bright, something that would confirm him in his resolve while at the same time providing respite from his preoccupation and his fear. He asked Reuben to scavenge through the storage room and pull out the largest easel he could find, along with a huge canvas, eight feet by five, that had been stretched and gessoed ages ago and never used.

  Not till the canvas had been set up in the shade of the poinciana tree did Augie have the faintest notion of what the painting's subject would be; and then he knew at once. It would be a picture of Fred, an hommage to the murdered parrot who had died as a proxy for its master.

  "Green," the painter said to Reuben. "I'll need a lot of green. And a ladder. I'm starting at the upper left. There's jungle there, can you see it, Reuben? Vines with purple flowers. And berries tempting as tits. Parrot heaven. Maybe some monkeys peeking out, very small."r />
  He climbed the ladder, his wizened legs twitchy in the khaki shorts, and he began to work. Extravagant leaves appeared, veined and pendant; suggestions of muted sunlight filtered through from everywhere. Augie hummed as he painted; he didn't seem to know it. He smacked his lips as here and there he plopped down dollops of bright red among the foliage: succulent fruits full of sun-warm juice. He painted, and he thought of nothing, yet in that fecund blankness certain things became clear to him. Suddenly he understood that whoever was trying to kill him was an awful coward. A poisoned tart that killed a bird, a car as murder weapon; these were craven stratagems, and in that realization was both a comfort and a warning. Augie now felt confident that no one would confront him, no one would appear before him with a loaded gun. He understood too that no ploy, no deceit would be too abject or too crass for this enemy. He painted. The gloriously tangled canopy of leaves took shape, trumpet flowers in orange and magenta were strung along the vines, and after a couple of hours Augie realized quite abruptly that he was happily exhausted. He came down from the ladder on stiff knees, handed his brush and palette to Reuben, then walked on feet that tingled to his bed.

  *

  When Augie awoke from his nap, Reuben had already set lunch on the shady table near the pool, and Nina, who had slept late but was still frazzled and unrested, was on a rave.

  "I tried calling Robert again," she was saying. "Same crazy message. And I just think it's really shitty that he doesn't even return the call."

  Augie looked down at the plates of sliced fruits and cold seafood. Painting made him hungry. That was one of the things he loved about it. "Maybe he's away. Maybe he didn't get the message."

  "It's not like we're wasting his precious time with chitchat," Nina went on. "If he knows where Ray is . . . And come on—he's not away. He's got no money and nowhere to go. He's just being—"

  "Being what?"