***
"You look like shit, Thorn. Week-old shit."
Thorn took a sip from the bottle of seltzer water he'd brought along and gazed at young Andy Stutmeyer. Months ago, Jeanne had insisted that if Sugarman had to hire a secretary, then by god it was going to be a guy. And the only male who'd answered the ad was Stutmeyer, a gangly kid who hovered somewhere in his early twenties, but who was usually as snotty as a boy half his age.
"I seen eighty-mile-an-hour, head-on collision victims look better than you," Andy said.
During his first couple of years out of high school, Andy had ridden shotgun on the tow truck for Wheaton's Texaco, and now he looked back on that time, all the carnage he'd witnessed, as a touchstone, his version of war experience.
Andy had a magazine spread open on the desk in front of him. Black-and-white photos of heavy metal stars. Skinny guys with faces painted in gruesome masks. For a moment Andy squinted up at Thorn, shaking his head at what he saw, then he drummed his fingers on the desk and turned back to his magazine.
"Sugar in?"
"He's with somebody." Andy flipped to the next page.
"Buzz him, tell him I'm here."
"He told me never to bother him when he's with a client unless it was urgent."
Andy scowled up from the magazine, and Thorn could feel his headache begin to tighten again, his eyes resuming their dance of pain. Andy's desk was placed squarely in front of Sugar's office door. The boy was big-boned enough, and Thorn was just frail enough at this moment, to put them on equal footing.
"Do me a favor, Andy, okay? Buzz him, tell him it's me, and let him decide if it's urgent."
Andy stared down at an ad for punk paraphernalia; spiked bracelets, studded suspenders, nose and nipple rings. He bent the corner of the page over and flipped to the next.
"It's not how it works," he said without looking up. "You gotta tell me what it's about, and I decide it's urgent or not."
Thorn took a step backward, glanced around the cheap paneled office. One green leather couch across from Andy's desk, old copies of Florida Sportsman on a table beside it. There were three underwater photos on the wall, and Sugarman's high school diploma and his degree from junior college. A couple of his police citations, some photographs of presidents vacationing in the Keys, and a few war heroes. Sugarman's civic pride collection.
When the shopping plaza was new, this storefront had been a loan company for a year or two, then it became a dive shop briefly, then a check-cashing business. Two years ago it was part of the beauty salon that was still next door. About the time the beauty business started shrinking, Sugarman was looking for office space. So now he was there, sandwiched between the salon and a store that sold inflatable rafts shaped like exotic animals.
Quidnunc Enterprises. That's the name Sugarman had chosen for his private investigation agency. A quidnunc was, as Sugarman explained it, a busybody, someone who needed to know everything that was going on. Sugarman liked the word, how it sounded, ever since he'd come across it in one of his vocabulary books. Thorn said at the time that nobody would know what the hell it meant. Especially in the Keys, where the average vocabulary was about twenty words, most of them having to do with fish, sex, or booze. I want something unique, Sugarman had said. Something with spice. I don't want to be just another boring private cop. So, you're going to be a quidnunc? Thorn said. And Sugarman, getting huffy, said, Yeah, goddamn it, that's right. Quidnunc Enterprises. So there.
Sugar and Darcy had been business partners. Sugarman quitting the Monroe County Sheriff's Department after ten years of service and starting up Quidnunc. About the same time Darcy had left her job as meteorologist for Channel Six in Miami. A TV weather lady. She'd returned to Key Largo, fallen in love with Thorn, and moved in. But she found the noiseless routine of their days didn't fulfill her. Up early, Thorn tying flies every morning, fishing the back country in the afternoon, reading at night by lantern light. Lots of sky watching, cloud meditation. Hammock time. An occasional drive deeper into the Keys to fish new flats. It had been good for Darcy for a while, but finally one day she informed Thorn that she wanted action, noise, something to get her blood pressure back up. So she'd gone in with Sugar, and had been spending a lot of time in the last few months driving her car up and down the Keys, pitching their services to the small businesses. Less than a year she'd been at it, but Thorn had detected a new heat in her. An improved disposition. She was back in the world, and her blood was flowing again. Until that problem came up. Something she wanted to handle on her own.
***
Andy Stutmeyer was bent lower over his magazine, bobbing his head in time to the rock and roll noises he was making in his throat.
Thorn glanced over at the underwater shot, one of Sugarman's wide-angle attempts at capturing Carysfort Reef on a sunny day. A school of grunts, some wrasse, the shadow of a large barracuda hovering in the background behind a mound of coral.
Thorn stooped over, took a grip on the bottom edge of Andy's oak desk. He gathered himself, drew in a long breath, blew it out, and straightened up, bringing the side of the desk up with him. Andy's pens and radio and magazine spilled onto the floor. Thorn lifted the desk all the way up with as much force as he could muster, and he heaved the goddamn thing toward the cheap paneled walls. It tumbled to the right and nearly took out the side window. Came to rest on its side, drawers hanging open.
"Shit, Thorn. Look what the fuck you did."
With a wild, disheveled look, Andy was sprawled in front of Sugar's office door. Before he could say another word, the door to the inner office swung open, bumped him in the back of the head, and a woman stepped out. Early forties, striking. She looked down at Andy, then turned her large blue eyes on Thorn. White-blond hair, milky translucent skin. Her eyebrows thick and darker than her hair, with a slight arch over her right eye that gave her a skeptical but amused expression, as if she'd just heard some outrageous lie that was nevertheless charming and clever.
She wore a burnt-orange sleeveless blouse with wood buttons. A matching pleated skirt that was short enough to display her chiseled calves and narrow ankles. A dancer's legs and a supple, powerful body. A woman who looked like she could spring into the air and hold herself there as long as it suited her.
She stood there for a moment, two yards from Thorn, then gave him a faint smile and walked out the door.
"Boy," Sugarman said when the door was shut. "Now, there's a woman who deserves life's finest pleasures."
"Yeah," said Thorn. "Looks like she may have enjoyed one or two of them already."
Still looking at the door she'd shut behind her, Sugar said, "That's Doris Albright. Albright Seafood."
Then Sugar glanced down at Stutmeyer.
"Hey, Andy. Could I get you to keep your work area a little neater, please? Makes a bad impression on our clients, things all thrown around like this."
***
Sitting in the chair across from Sugarman's desk, Thorn said, "Darcy was upset about something. She said it was something she'd run into at work. It was making her act strange: serious, very quiet. Not like her at all."
Sugarman ran his eyes over Thorn's face and was silent. He was wearing a white shirt today, and an orange madras plaid tie that seemed to jangle when it caught the light. Sugarman rested his forearms against the edge of his desk and leaned his weight on them. He toyed with a silver letter opener, tapping it against his green ink blotter.
"Upset? She was upset?"
"That's right. But she wouldn't say what it was about."
Thorn looked around at the walls of the office. The same paneling as outside. A wooden hat rack in one corner with some of Sugarman's baseball caps on it. On one wall were some trophy fish: trout, a nice sailfish, bonefish. And a watercolor Darcy had painted of Thorn's house, with the four of them, Gaeton, Sugarman, Thorn, and Darcy, all sitting on the upstairs porch.
Behind Sugarman was a large, dark gray tinted window. It was positioned so it gave them a view down the row o
f swivel chairs of the Hairport, the beauty shop next door. The window was a remnant of the beauty parlor's better days, when the previous owner of the shop sat where Sugarman was now, adding up her profits and keeping an eye on her workers through the one-way mirror.
Sugar's office smelled of perm solutions and dizzying acrylic fumes from the nail-sculpting cubicle at the back. The noise seeping through the wall was always fierce, a dozen competing voices, blow-dryers and razors, the phone ringing and ringing. Yet Sugarman had decided not to wall-in and insulate the cutout section. He said the mirror helped him pass the slow hours, looking in at the ladies in dryers, the shampoos, the constant snip-snip. And, as he'd confessed, there was something mildly sexy about it. No nudity or anything, but a chance to look at a world he'd never witnessed, not to mention the fact that he could hear through that pane of glass a lot of very high-quality gossip. Sugarman believed he was now better informed about certain aspects of Key Largo social life than any man in town. Something any quidnunc would value.
"Well," Sugarman said, his eyes searching the air just above Thorn's head. "I don't know what the hell it could be. I only have the two clients. Murtha's Liquors and First Federal Savings. And all they are is employee surveillance. Watching rolls of videotape to make sure nobody's stealing. A bullshit job. She was out on the road, passing out brochures and talking to people, trying to drum up business, and once or twice a week she'd watch some of the videos we shot. That's all it was."
Sugarman tapped his letter opener against the blotter, and looked off at a mounted bonefish on the wall.
"That's it? Two clients?"
"Yeah, sorry to say."
"That woman just walked out of here? She one of the two?"
"No, Doris just walked in today. I haven't decided if I want to take her on. It's a strange case. Wants me to find her ex-husband. I'll tell you about it sometime."
"Okay," Thorn said. "I want to know every store she's been in the last few weeks, and then I want to see those videotapes."
"You're kidding."
"If that's what Darcy was doing with her time, then I want to know about it."
"You want a list of every business Darcy went into to hand out business cards and brochures?"
"That's right."
"That's nuts, Thorn. I don't have any idea where she's been. We didn't keep a log or anything like that. She just went driving. Stopped at places, chatted, like that. Totally random."
Thorn tapped his foot fast against the tile.
"The videos, then. I'll start there."
"You want to sit in my living room and watch Milly Pickles and Jane Etheridge cash social security checks? Watch Murtha sell Chivas Regal to Republicans? That's what you want to do?"
"I'll be by tonight."
"It's hours, Thorn. Hours and hours of the same bullshit, grainy film, nothing happening. If you want to do it, hey, fine. But I'd bring something to read."
"When's a good time to get there?"
"All right," he said. "Come at seven. Jeanne's got her bonsai class tonight."
"Bonsai?"
Sugarman said, "You know, clipping the roots off these trees and plants and stuff. Making midgets out of them. She's doing that now. The house is full of these teensy oak trees and stuff. I'm starting to think I should shop around for a steel jockstrap."
Thorn forced a smile. Sugarman didn't.
"What happened to her ballet class?"
"Jesus, where you been? That was months ago. Since then we been through guitar, organ lessons, and candle making. Last month it was writing limericks. Hell, she even won some goddamn contest. The International Limerick Association sent her a certificate. Honorable mention. You sure I didn't tell you about this?"
Thorn shrugged. He hadn't heard it before and didn't want to hear it now, but Sugarman was tapping the letter opener fast, taking stabs at the ink blotter. Ventilating.
"The contest was a goddamn scam," Sugarman said. "These people tried to sell her a copy of the book her winning limerick was going to be published in. Fifty bucks. You believe that? Buy one for each of your friends, share the gift of limericks."
Thorn was watching things in the beauty salon over Sugarman's shoulder. Shirley Marx wearing a white robe, leaning her head back into a shampoo sink. A young man in a flowered shirt washing her hair.
"Assholes trying to get rich off limerick writing, for godsakes. I guess I'm lucky Jeanne didn't have two dozen friends to buy them for. As it was, she bought three copies."
Thorn made a commiserating noise.
Sugarman said, "There was something else after the limerick phase, but hell if I can remember what. I mean, that woman's had more hobbies than the Pope has beads."
Thorn glanced again at the watercolor. The four of them, old friends, laughing, sipping wine, Thorn stretching his hand toward the last shreds of an extraordinary sunset dying on the horizon. A real day. Not something imagined. Not some romanticized event she'd dreamed up for a painting. A real day, a true sunset. Probably even those particular laughs had been real.
Sugarman looked over at the painting with him. Then lowered his eyes and shook his head.
"Sooooo," Sugarman said, drawing the word out, clearing away all the memories, ready to get back to business. "Where do we start?"
"You're the detective."
"Don't bullshit me, Thorn. Which way you headed?"
Thorn stood up quickly and felt his headache take a sharp whack at his frontal lobe. He walked over to Sugarman's side. Sugar was looking up at the plastic replica of a ten-pound trout he'd caught early one rainy morning back in Tarpon Basin. Thorn had been there that morning. Thorn had been there for all the fish on the walls in this room.
"Thought I'd run back out to the reef. Have a look at the scene of the crime. You want to come?"
Sugarman said no, then turned from the fish. There were wrinkles in his forehead where usually it was smooth as toffee.
"Now, look, Thorn. You keep me in the loop, man. I know you're upset. You're grieving. So am I. But don't get rash on me, run off and do something without talking to me about it first. Let me be your designated thinker, okay? Can we agree on that?"
Thorn nodded.
"Say it, say it out loud."
Thorn stepped over to the office door.
"I promise," Thorn said. "I won't be rash."
"Okay, then I'll see you at seven. We'll watch those videos. Sugarman Cinematic Productions. No car chases, no buildings exploding, no bodies riddled with bullets. Just life at the bank in Key Largo, Florida, a few weeks in the nine-to-five lane. You never know, Thorn, you might learn something about the real world."
"I'll bring the popcorn."
Sugarman gave him a long look, and said, "Nothing rash."
"Rashless," Thorn said. "Completely rashless."
Sugarman shook his head sadly while Thorn held his gaze for a moment, then left.
On the way across the parking lot, Thorn flattened a beer can under his shoe, and kicked it along ahead of him for a few paces. Then he took a hop-step and sailed the thing into the scraggly grass behind the Amoco station.
Okay, so he wouldn't do anything rash. He'd promised. But what he didn't tell Sugar was, he didn't know exactly what rash was anymore. In fact, he doubted there was anything he'd consider rash as long as it helped him find the bastard who'd clutched Darcy's hand until she had no choice but to draw in a lungful of seawater.
CHAPTER 8
A fifteen-knot breeze out of the southeast was muscling up the swells. To the west the sky was thick with ash and smoke from a fire smoldering in the southern Everglades. Overhead the clouds had turned to a gritty iron, stealing the sharp blues and greens from the sea. Herons, egrets, gulls floated over the mangrove islands as Thorn idled out the main channel past Pennekamp Park.
Taking the thirty-foot Chris-Craft today, partly to handle the rougher seas, but mainly because he wasn't ready to board the skiff again, didn't want to stumble across some stray object still haunted from that mor
ning. He didn't want to remember anything about that day. Or for that matter take any unexpected detours into the past, relive another moment with Darcy Richards. She was gone. He'd had his chance and had failed her. Now, goddamn it, those memories were going to have to stay shut inside the heavy book in his heart.
As he wheeled the sluggish Chris-Craft around the last turn of the channel and wallowed out to the open water, gulls screamed close overhead and dove into his wake. His passage had stirred to the surface a school of minnows, ripe for the taking. Thorn glanced up at the dizzy gulls, listened to their hungry screams, watched them streamline themselves and plunge on their silver prey. He turned his eyes away, focused on the markers before him.
It took half an hour, idling back and forth across Broken Conch Reef, before Thorn found the spot Darcy had led him to. He anchored, and the boat swung around, bow into the wind. It rocked against the current, but the anchor held.
He looked off at the shallows where that other boat had approached, and tried to picture it again. To see the shape of its hull, any markings, a name perhaps, bringing it out of the fuzz and static of memory. But he could recall only the sleek lines of the Grady White. Twenty or twenty-two feet. Must be a few thousand identical fishing boats registered in these waters. Nothing unique about that particular vessel. One person aboard, throwing an anchor over. Nothing more than that.
Thorn stared out at the water, falling into the lull of the rise and fall of the sea. He thought he might hypnotize himself, sink into the past, recapture that moment, haul up some trifling detail, anything. Getting down deep where the chemistry of remembrance fermented, where the foaming cells kept everything alive, every piddling second. Every scent, fraction of gesture, each smile and word and darkening of eye. All of it passing endlessly through the circuitry of consciousness.
But try as he would, there was nothing more he could see of that single boat. A vague anonymous craft piloted by a faceless, sexless person who had kept himself exactly far enough away.
Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3) Page 7