He looks up from the casket. His face is wet and twisted. In the pouty voice of a spoiled child, he just says, “No.”
“You have to, Marco,” Callie says.
“Why? To be despised? To rot in jail?”
“To stand trial,” Master says. “Face it like a man.”
“Like a man,” mimics Marco. He says it with scorn, like what’s the big honor? Frankly, I think he has a point.
“There’s no other way, Marco,” Pete says while sort of randomly waving his pistol. “Come out or we’re coming in.”
“Try,” he taunts.
So Master does. He tugs and pushes at the bronze door. It doesn’t budge. He pulls the window grate. It’s heavy steel and double-bolted. He looks back at the rest of us and shakes his head.
Callie says, “Marco, think it through. There are things you still can fix. It’s not too late to make amends. It never is.”
“Don’t start with the goody-goody bullshit.”
Sarge says, “What about the songs? You can at least give back the songs.”
“They’re mine.”
“They’re not yours,” says the young man. “They belong to everyone.”
“They’re mine. My mother gave them to me.”
“Your mother stole them,” Pete points out.
“She gave them to me. That’s all that counts.”
There’s a brief stalemate, then Master says, just sort of conversational, “That notebook they were in. I saw that notebook back in ’64. D’ya know that? The day of the paradise gig.”
“I don’t give a shit about your memories, old man.”
“It was pretty ratty. Stained. Beat up. Nothin’ special. Would be nice to see it again, though. Where ya keep it, Marco?”
“Where?” he answers, almost smiling now, back in control, a bratty kid in possession of something the other kids want. “Where would you think?”
With that, he slowly bends down and slides open a stone drawer built into the pedestal below his mother’s casket. The drawer makes a rasping, grinding sound as it opens. The rasp echoes for a second. When the tormented guy stands up again, he’s clutching a treasure lost to the world for over half a century, a battered old binder with corners of wrinkled and uneven paper sticking out the sides. For a teasing moment, he holds it up for show. Even in the dim lamplight you can see the coffee cup rings and cigarette burns, the faded canvas worn thin in places, cardboard showing through. He puts it on the marble slab that seals his mother’s casket. “What more fitting place?” he says.
Master’s eyes are glued to the notebook and I think maybe they get moist. Who can even guess what the thing means to him, him especially, remembering it from so many years ago, when he was so much younger, so much more a part of the big world all around him, when he chatted with The Beatles, him and four nice kids at poolside. He says to Marco, “Lemme hold it. Just for a minute.”
“Nice try, old man. But there’s no way. Not now. Not ever. It’s mine. It belongs to me.”
“Come on, Marco,” says Pete. “Do the right thing here. For once in your life, be decent.”
“Decent,” he repeats, like maybe he’s mulling the concept for the first time ever. “The decent thing. The fair thing. Now what would that be? I can only think of one.”
There’s a pause. Crickets rasp. A moth flutters through the grated window. Then Marco slowly reaches up to where the oil lamp is hanging on the wall. For a moment, he holds it at the level of his face. The flame puts a leaping orange glow on his skin and in his eyes. Then he tips the lamp like he was raising a glass of fine champagne and begins to pour oil from the reservoir onto his clothes. The oil snakes its way down the front of his sweater and shimmers on the black cloth.
Callie runs up to the grated window, grabs the bars, and cries out, “Marco, don’t. There’s no need.”
“Ah, but there is,” he says. “A need to do the decent thing. Just for the novelty of it. And also a spiteful thing. Because that’s the way I’ve lived my life. Because that’s who I am.”
Without hurry, he pours more oil onto his chest and sleeves. He saves the last drops for the notebook.
Sarge screams, “Please!”
“Please,” mimics Marco. “Begging. Pleading. From a talented young singer. I like the sound of that. It’ll be the last thing I hear.”
He fishes a lighter from a pocket and sets on fire The Beatles’ precious notebook. For an instant he stands there watching it burn and then he touches the flame to his own clothes. We hear crackling and an ungodly sound that’s somewhere between a moan and a muffled burst of deranged singing.
Everyone runs forward, throwing themselves against the door, yanking at the grate. It’s no use. Flames lick at the suicide. He stumbles or maybe just shrinks down as though he’s melting. The notebook shrivels, the ragged pages filled with stolen genius blacken and curl up. The smoke billows, a greasy, meaty, swirling kind of smoke, and there’s not a damn thing we can do but step away and watch the orange flashes through the window.
Epilogue
W ell, so like I said from the beginning, you just never know what’s going to happen when you go out on the beach.
A beach day in Key West can start off seeming perfectly ordinary—green water, hissing wavelets, footballs, Frisbees, people’s spray-on sunblock blowing all around. Then one unusual thing can happen—like, say a woman gets tipped over while standing on her head—and right away you’re off on a completely unforeseen adventure. Though I must admit that the adventure just related is a fair bit wilder than your average unforeseen adventure, and I must also admit that Master and me are more likely than the average duo to fall into such adventures, due to the fact that Master just can’t help being friendly and curious and sticking his nose into other people’s business whether they ask him to or not.
Anyway, it’s now been a couple of months since the memorable fiasco of Marco’s party, and it occurs me to that readers might perhaps be interested in hearing a little bit about how things have shaken out and what’s happened to the characters since that crazy evening. I believe this is known as the human interest angle, though why it couldn’t just as easily be called the canine interest angle is beyond me, since canines are every bit as interesting as people, if you approach the matter with an open mind.
Be that as it may, let’s start with Marco. Yes, he’s dead, though the cops and the coroner never reached a definite conclusion about whether his demise was suicide or mishap. Some of the uncertainty came down to the question of whether there was a suicide note. Suicide notes, I gather, are a big thing with human beings, who like to get the last word in no matter what. But no one ever found a goodbye-cruel-world from Marco. So that suggested that his death was accidental. On the other hand, among the charred rubble that the authorities raked through in the mausoleum were three cheap steel rings like those found in looseleaf binders, so some people believed that there must have been a suicide note inside the incinerated notebook. Why else would there be a notebook in a mausoleum? Fair question.
Of course, Master and Pete and Callie and Sarge could have settled the whole mystery in a ten-minute sitdown at police headquarters, since we’d seen the whole thing happen. But Master, based on long experience in a previous career, is what you might call allergic to police, just like Pete is sort of allergic to being taken seriously as a detective, which I guess could happen if he went around unraveling complicated crimes and showing off. Besides, all of us were way too shaken up to hang around the crime scene, so we just quietly slipped out of there, retrieved Master’s ancient Cadillac, and headed home well before the cops arrived.
Which put us into something that I think human beings would call an ethical dilemma about the tall guy and the short guy, who recovered pretty well from their interrogation in the hot tub. Should we turn them in? They’d been Marco’s henchmen, after all. They’d helped him set up two killings and were helping him set up a third when the scheme was finally thwarted. Shouldn’t they go to prison? On
the other hand, they’d already been punished pretty much. They’d lost their eyebrows, they’d spent the evening in a sort of do-it-yourself electric chair. Plus it seemed legit that they hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, not at the start, at least. So what was their crime, really? I guess it was that they wanted a career so badly that it blinded them to everything else, including that they had no talent.
Anyway, the conversations about what to do with the tall guy and the short guy got pretty deep. Justice versus mercy. Redemption through remorse. A lot of this gray area human stuff that I am not equipped to grasp. I saw it in more practical terms. Would sending these guys to jail bring the dead kids back to life? In the end, it was decided that we wouldn’t squeal on them, that we’d leave them to make peace with what they’d done. What did they likely have ahead of them anyway? Probably an endless cycle of Tuesday evening karaoke gigs with hardly anybody listening. We figured that would be suffering enough.
Moving on to Sarge, he hung around Key West for a couple of days, then went home to Atlanta. We heard through Callie that he’d decided to go back to college. He’d seen the music business up close—true, a fucked-up corner of the music business, but maybe not entirely untypical—and decided it was not for him. He planned to keep on writing songs because it made him happy to write songs. Maybe he’d do small gigs, jams, open-mic nights now and then. He hadn’t quite decided.
There was one thing, though, that he knew he had to do. He still had the copy of “Gone Tomorrow” that Marco had handed him at that first audition, and he wanted to restore it to its rightful owner. So he put it in an envelope and mailed it to Sir Paul McCartney in care of his record label. I don’t know if he’s heard back.
On the romantic front, it seems that Pete and Callie have been spending a fair amount of time together. I’ve seen them on the beach a couple times. Their towels overlapped, which I think tells you something right away. They were putting sunblock on each other, not the spray kind that any stranger could do for you, but the kind that people rub in with their fingers. They spent quite a while rubbing the cream into each other’s neck and back and legs and shoulders, and, excuse me, but beyond a certain point I don’t think it was about sunburn anymore. Then again, what do I know about human men and women, how they find each other, get attracted, maybe fall in love, maybe screw it up, maybe try again? Most humans don’t seem to understand it either, so how the hell should I?
Anyway, we’ve also seen them out for dinner together. They were holding hands across the table, and Pete didn’t take his hand away even when he’d noticed that Master and me were looking. I found that interesting. Pete didn’t used to strike me as the kind of guy who’d be comfortable holding hands in public. So I guess he’s loosened up a bit. He was drinking wine. Callie was drinking soda water. Everyone seemed happy with their beverage. Master chatted with them a few minutes, and I remembered that, the first few times I’d met Callie, almost every other word she said was an apology for something. Well, she didn’t seem to do that anymore. The guilt and the I’m sorry’s—I guess she’d finally gotten them out of her system. She looked peaceful. She looked calm. With her looking calm and Pete acting looser, I like to think they maybe have a shot together.
As for me and Master, well, what is there to say? We’re back to our daily routines, not exciting maybe, but comforting and pleasant. We go to the beach, we go for walks around the neighborhood. He shortens up my leash each and every time we cross a street. He’s always looking out for me. I feel it and I’m grateful. And what I really hope is that he knows I’m looking out for him, too, and every bit as constantly. I can’t show it in the same ways he does. I can’t feed him, can’t provide a place to live, can’t carry him through puddles when there’s a thunderstorm. But still, I’m always watching over him, trying my best to help.
Isn’t that what friendship is? Not both sides doing equal stuff, that’s not how it works, but everybody caring and doing what he can. So like, for example, I’m not big enough or strong enough to catch Master if, God forbid, he falls. But I can sniff out things he might trip over, maybe nose them aside and spare him a slip, or give a warning yap when we come to a pothole or a curb. I can lick his hand when I sense he’s feeling low, snuggle up when I can tell he’s lonely in his bed. Small things, maybe, but it’s what a dog can do between adventures, until the next time Master starts sticking his nose into other people’s problems and puts us in the middle of some new craziness or other. It probably won’t take him very long to do that. It never has before.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurence Shames is the author of fifteen Key West Capers, as well as many other works of fiction and nonfiction. As a ghostwriter, he has penned four New York Times bestsellers, in four different categories, under four different names. Formerly a columnist for Esquire and The New York Observer, he has contributed hundreds of articles and essays to publications including Vanity Fair, Outside, Travel & Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and he is a recipient of the United Kingdom’s Macallan Last Laugh Dagger for his comic mystery writing.
To learn more, please visit https://laurenceshames.com
Works by Laurence Shames
Key West Capers—
Nacho Unleashed
One Big Joke
One Strange Date
Key West Luck
Tropical Swap
Shot on Location
The Naked Detective
Welcome to Paradise
Mangrove Squeeze
Virgin Heat
Tropical Depression
Sunburn
Scavenger Reef
Florida Straits
Key West Short Fiction—
Chickens
New York & California Novels—
Money Talks
The Angels’ Share
Nonfiction—
The Hunger for More
The Big Time
The Paradise Gig Page 19
