Scavenger Reef

by Laurence Shames

  Gibbs sipped his beer. "Ain'tcha curious why I'm lookin' for Matty?"

  Hogfish looked away, watched a cormorant baking its wet wings on a piling. "My business," he said, "it don't do to be too curious."

  "Yeah, yeah," said Gibbs. "Well, I need to make sure the Fin Finder is still for sale."

  "Far as I know it is," said Curran. He paused, then crossed his ropy forearms and leaned in a little closer. "But Jimmy, what good's it do ya? That auction thing, the painting—you told me it was all screwed up."

  Now Gibbs was having fun. He'd managed to pull Hogfish in. He sipped beer, watched a cloud of gulls trail out behind a returning boat. A mate with a rubber apron and no shirt was cleaning the catch. "Is screwed up," he said at last. He swigged again, then gestured toward the swarm of flying scavengers plucking entrails from midair. "But there's more'n one way to gut a fish."

  The twinkle in Gibbs's eye had become a glower, he was clutching his beer bottle like it was a bludgeon, and Curran didn't like the look of things at all. He put his hands flat on the bar and leaned in even closer. "Jimmy, you ain't gonna go and do somethin' stupid, are ya?"

  Gibbs let go of his beer, grabbed his shot glass, and tossed the bourbon down. Then he grimaced. His gums had seen enough alcohol over the years so that a shot of booze no longer made them burn; still, the grimace was part of the ritual of drinking, a visible reminder that the shot had registered. He waited for his face to settle back down before he spoke. "Nah, Hogfish, nothin' stupid. For a change, in fact, I'm doin' somethin' smart."

  40

  Arty Magnus did not often pull rank on his subordinates. It made for bad morale around the newsroom, and besides it was extremely rare for there to be a story that the editor had the faintest interest in personally covering.

  But when Joe Mulvane called late on Tuesday to say that Nina Silver had asked his advice about who her husband should speak to at the paper, Magnus decided to assign the interview to himself. Famous painter returns from dead to real or imagined attempts on his life. This was a cut above the promotional pap and small-town politics usually covered by the Sentinel; this might be of interest more than a few mile markers up the road. Freddy McClintock, the eager and deficient young reporter, would briefly sulk at his boss's usurpation, but he'd get over it; young reporters always did.

  The interview was scheduled for three on Wednesday afternoon.

  In preparation, Reuben had taken down most of the paintings that had hung in the Silvers' living room since the eve of Augie's memorial. The painter no longer wanted them there. If he was bothering to give interviews, he didn't want to talk about the past but the future—the new phase of his work that was being exuberantly launched with the huge odd portrait of Fred.

  Not quite finished, the flamboyant canvas had been moved near the sofa, it leaned back on its spattered easel and dominated the house. There was a lot of birdness in it, Augie thought, but he allowed himself to feel there was more in it as well. God knows how, he had managed to put some disturbing knowledge into the parrot's red eyes, some wisdom about the lush and sensual death grip that was the dark side of the seduction of the tropics. Then again, it was hardly a tragic painting. In fact, minus the solemnity that seized people when they thought they were beholding Art, it was more or less hilarious: a giant bird the color of some sickening candy, out of all proportion to a berserk forest full of fake fruits and sham creatures. . . .

  "Nina, what the hell am I supposed to say about this thing?"

  She patted his arm as he leaned back on the couch. "You'll think of something clever, something quotable," she said. It was a quarter till three. Ceiling fans were giving an illusion of freshness to the stultifying air. Reuben was putting up coffee. Nina looked with pleasure at the oleanders in their vases. She was glad people were coming to the house. It was nice to have some distraction, to be doing something, anything, besides worrying about her husband dying.

  Punctually at three, a pink taxi pulled up in front of the Silvers' home and Peter Brandenburg got out. Fussily handsome and almost as tan as a local, he was wearing an off-white linen suit over a shirt of cotton oxford; he carried a notebook bound in cordovan leather, along with a German tape recorder of space-age design. He paid the driver, straightened the collar of his jacket, and was approaching the porch steps just as Arty Magnus pulled up on his bicycle. It was brutally hot and Magnus was wearing shorts and sandals. In his bike basket was a cardboard-covered spiral notebook, the kind with the wire that always catches things. "Hi," he said. He held out a hand as he deployed his kick-stand.

  Nina had apparently been right: Brandenburg seemed miffed at having to share his interview time and appeared to loathe his small-town colleague on sight. He shook hands briefly and limply. "Peter Brandenburg," he said. "Manhattan magazine."

  This last was without doubt an act of aggression, meant to establish his dominion over the other man. Magnus, a graduate of Columbia Journalism, did not roll over.

  "Arty Magnus. Key West Sentinel."

  They went together to the front door. Reuben ushered them through to the living room, where they stood awkwardly for a moment, dwarfed by the painted parrot and uncertain who should speak. Magnus introduced himself, shook hands with Augie and with Nina, and Brandenburg, in another gambit to assert his preeminence, made it clear that they had met before. "You've lost weight," the critic said to the painter.

  Augie ran a hand over his sunken chest and wizened tummy. "I've put a fair bit back on," he said. "But sit down, sit down. Coffee? Wine? What would you like?"

  "Nothing for me," said Brandenburg. He picked a solo chair, took a gold pen from an inside jacket pocket, and started setting up his tape recorder.

  "Coffee'd be great," said Magnus. He plopped down on the edge of a love seat and shook a stub of pencil out of the spiral binding of his notebook; the metal flange that held the eraser had been bitten flat.

  There was a moment's small talk, then Peter Brandenburg crossed his legs, straightened his linen trousers, cleared his throat, and gestured noncommittally toward the looming canvas. "Why don't we begin," he said, "with your decision to start painting again. How did that come about?"

  Augie ran a hand over the crests and troughs of his wavy white hair. "Well, it happened when I was stranded down in Cuba—"

  "You were shipwrecked, weren't you?" put in Arty Magnus. "Marooned?"

  "Yes," said Augie. "Right. I guess I really should begin with that. Back in January . . ."

  The New York critic briefly shut his eyes, shifted impatiently in his chair. He was there to talk about art, not shipwrecks. He knew as much of the shipwreck tale as he needed and he had a tight deadline to meet. Besides, he'd already decided what the gist of his story would be; all he needed was some quotes to flesh it out.

  "... so by the time I came around," Augie was concluding, "I'd decided I'd been a perverse and arrogant ass to give up painting. I felt that I was shirking in some way. Not a way that mattered to anybody else—"

  "Apparently it does matter to someone else," the local newspaperman interrupted. "Isn't it true that there've been threats against your life?"

  Nina was sitting next to Augie on the couch. They took a moment to consult each other's eyes. They hadn't been able to decide in advance how public they would go, what, if anything, they'd refuse to divulge.

  "Something about a poisoned bird?" pressed Arty Magnus. "About an attempted hit-and-run?"

  Peter Brandenburg dropped all pretense of hiding his restlessness. He squirmed, his face grew petulant and sour. "Excuse me," he said, "but I thought we were here to talk about your work, not indulge in sordid gossip."

  The tone was meant to offend, but the sharpness of it was blunted by the humid air, heavy as wet wool, and Augie answered not with umbrage but with a languid irony. "It would be nice to have the luxury to separate the two."

  There was an uneasy silence. Arty Magnus sipped coffee, Peter Brandenburg watched his tape recorder futilely turn. Nina tried not to sound like she was
scolding. "Peter, if Augie's in danger, that's more important than any—"

  "Of course, of course," said Brandenburg. He tried to sound conciliatory and almost managed. "But in the meantime—"

  "In the meantime you've got your story to do," said Augie mildly. "I understand. So let me say this about the work. I live in the tropics. Almost the tropics, if you want to be technical. And fact one about the tropics is that they are unbelievably fruitful. Everything grows here. Everything overgrows here. And not all of it is beautiful. Or gentle. Not by a long shot. You've got ugly choking vines, rubbery things with varicose veins. You've got soupy marshes that stink and reflect a putrid glare. You've got biting spiders, carnivorous plants, fish with spike teeth, shrubs with barbed thorns. And the lesson that goes with that? It doesn't so much matter if something is pretty, if it's benign; it matters that it's there, that it hangs on, that it produces—"

  "So you're saying," Brandenburg coaxed, "you want to be as prolific as the tropics?"

  Augie cocked his head and let that settle in his ear. "That's impossible," he said. "But yeah, it'd be a worthy thing to shoot for. As prolific and as accepting."

  For the first time in the interview, Brandenburg wrote something in his leather notebook. But when he looked down to do so, Arty Magnus recaptured the initiative. He gestured toward the unfinished, unframed painting on its vast untidy easel. "This picture," he said, "this bird here. This the bird that ate the poison?"

  Brandenburg stiffened. He'd finally worked the conversation around to art, and now it was being dragged down again to gutter level. He slapped his pen against his notes and lectured: "It's obviously a universal—"

  "No," said Augie, "it's not a universal. As a matter of fact, it's Fred."

  Stung at being contradicted, the critic fell instantly into a sulk. Nina saw the narrowed eyes, the tightened lips, and flashed a look of mute advice to her husband.

  Augie backpedaled. "It's both, of course," he said. "I mean, it started as Fred, but then . . . Look, if you only paint what you already know, you're in a rut. Why bother? You paint to find out what you know. You see what I'm saying? I painted this to find out what I knew about Fred. What I know about parrots. What I know about feathers. What I know about green."

  The New York reviewer rallied somewhat and started taking notes again. Arty Magnus held his stub of pencil against his lower lip and waited for the pendulum to swing back his way. Augie paused for breath, then went on with the untrammeled directness of a man thinking out loud.

  "You paint to find out what you know, but then the painting outsmarts you, ends up knowing more than you do." He gestured toward the monumental canvas, toward the parrot's down turned beak and frozen gaze. "Look at those eyes, that stare. Is it accusing? Resigned? Is it serene or is it mocking? For the life of me, I can't tell. But I know, without a doubt, that bird knows something I don't know."

  For a moment everybody stared at Fred. In the thick and shimmering light, the parrot's plumage was velvety, its unsettling red eyes appeared to pulse.

  Then a soft voice was heard from an unexpected direction. It was Reuben. He'd kept a discreet distance from the guests and was leaning over the kitchen counter. "Maybe he knows who is trying to hurt you."

  Augie twisted and looked at his friend across the back of the settee. "Maybe. Maybe he does. And maybe someday he'll tell us."

  41

  Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane had seen countless crime scenes in his life, and they never failed to depress him. The scenes of homicides, of course, were especially appalling: the oddly metallic smell of blood, the ghastly chalk-drawn silhouette showing where and in what posture the dead guy had fallen. So often they fell with one hand reaching out. Probably they were just trying to hit the bastard that killed them, but it didn't look that way when they chalked it on the floor, it always looked like the victim was making one final grab at something good and beautiful, something he would never capture, never touch.

  But even when nobody got hurt, when the crime was just some dipshit burglary or apparently aimless B-and-E, there was something bleak about the scene, something that made Mulvane feel gloomy. It had to do, he figured, with waste. Waste and stupidity. Shattered windows; smashed crockery; clothing pulled from ransacked dresser drawers and either torn or stretched all out of shape—these morons destroyed more than they stole. And there was something that never stopped seeming pathetic about a broken thing: a trashed room, a cracked mirror, even a busted coffee cup. You couldn't say those things had ever been alive, but still, when they were broken they were as full of death as any corpse.

  Mulvane was feeling the crime-scene gloom at first light Thursday morning as he stood on Ray Yates's gangplank on Houseboat Row and saw what had been done to the radio host's floating home.

  The louvered front door had been wrenched out of alignment; it hung limp and useless on a single mangled hinge. Inside, all was havoc. The living-room upholstery had been slashed with knives, white fiber stuffing poked out of it like hair from an old man's ears. The drawers from a file cabinet had been yanked out, the files dumped in a chaos of paper. Liquor bottles lay smashed on the floor, brandy fumes wafted from shards of green glass. In the bedroom, the closet had been decimated, the palm-tree shirts thrown in a pile and stomped with dirty shoes. The medicine chest was torn off the bathroom wall, the shower curtain ripped from its rod. In the tiny kitchen, a rotting fish had been left on the counter near the sink; flies clustered on its clouded eye. Above the fish, a terse note had been scrawled on the wall in red magic marker. It said No Deal, Ray. Clean Up Your Own Mess.

  Mulvane looked at the fish, the note, and the beat cop who had called in the crime. "Probably Ponte," he said.

  "Dust for prints?" asked the cop.

  "If you enjoy that sort of thing," said Mulvane. "You won't find any."

  Later that morning he drove to Olivia Street. Feeling grim himself, he expected others to be feeling grim, and he was faintly put out to find the members of the Silver household positively chipper. Reuben answered the door in a crisp new apron, candy-striped. Smiling, he led the detective through the house and out toward the pool. Nina was swimming laps. Her legs scissored evenly and powerfully, her hair streamed sleekly back behind her, and when she lifted her face from the water, the tension seemed to have washed out of it, eased by exercise and chlorine. Augie was sitting at a shady table. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and a sketch pad on his lap. He wore a straw hat and was chewing on a toothpick.

  "Ah, Joe," he said. "Beautiful morning. Cup of coffee? Muffin maybe?"

  "Just coffee," said Mulvane. He lifted a chair and turned it backwards, then straddled the seat with his beefy thighs and rested his forearms on the back.

  "Did that interview yesterday," Augie said. "With your friend Magnus and this big-deal critic from New York. Got a big kick out of it, I have to tell you."

  "That's nice," Mulvane said.

  If Augie caught the lack of enthusiasm, he didn't let it daunt him. "It's a game, talking to press. I'd almost forgotten how amusing it is. They ask you questions about what you do, and you're supposed to pretend you can explain it. Then they pretend they can explain—"

  "Augie," Mulvane interrupted, "listen, I'm sorry to rain on your parade here, but Ray Yates—how close a friend is he?"

  The words, the tone—they killed the mood sure as turning the lights up in a bar. Nina was standing at the edge of the pool, her elbows on the wet tiles; her face socked in again, you could see flesh moving, tightening around her jaw. Augie slapped his sketch pad onto the table and threw the jaunty toothpick on his saucer.

  "Joe," he said, "that's exactly the kind of question I don't know how to answer anymore."

  "His place was trashed last night. Not a burglary. Whoever did it left a fish on the counter."

  "A fish?" said Nina.

  "Quaint Mafia calling card," said Mulvane. "There was also a note about a deal."

  Reuben came out with the detective's coffee. It took him no time at
all to see that his friends were unhappy again. The spring went out of his step, his face took on a remorseful look, as if he were somehow to blame for the morning's high spirits being dashed.

  "What kind of deal?" asked Augie.

  Mulvane shrugged. "Loan sharks kill people who welsh on big debts. Yates owns paintings which, if you're dead, are worth enough to bail him—"

  "Are you suggesting," Nina said, "that Ray Yates got the Mafia—"

  "No," Mulvane said. "If he'd got the Mafia, Augie would be dead by now."

  "Is that supposed to be comforting?" she asked.

  "Well," said Mulvane, "yeah. Sort of. But what I'm suggesting is he might have tried to get the Mafia. So I'm asking how well do you know him? Is he someone who could do that to a friend?"

  Augie and Nina looked at each other and riffled through their impressions of Ray Yates. Plump, easygoing good-time Ray, Ray who'd always have a drink, another drink, a conversation. Ray with his mellow voice, his flattering talk-show way of asking everybody questions and showing a practiced interest in their answers. Ray who always tagged along. Ray who tried to out-local the locals. Ray who went from place to place and thing to easy, temporary thing, and was a different person in every setting: Ray who was soft and scared and soulless in the middle.

  "Poor bastard" was all that Augie said.

  "So you think that means—" said Nina

  "It means nothing," said Mulvane, "except that he's a crumb." He put his untouched coffee on the table and stood up from his backwards chair. "Good news is, the police are now officially looking for him. Just to tell him he's been the victim of a crime."

  The cop left. Nina shivered, not from cold but from a spasm of disgust. Her skin felt itchy, oily, soiled with the guilt of others. She dropped underwater, kicked out to the middle of the pool, and stayed down as long as she could, cleansing herself, fending off the bright and scorching surface, hiding.