Tampa Burn

by Randy Wayne White

  “Serious as a snake bite.” The old detective pointed his walking stick at me, and jabbed it, saying, “But I think you’re a bad’un for your own sake. You got a full dose of Gatrell snakiness in you, boy. You’re a little too cute and tricky for your own good. Well, sonny, you ain’t got me fooled. So you want to talk, jes’ the two of us? Or you want me to talk public?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it.

  I looked behind me: Tamara Gartone was sitting in her car, hunched over a clipboard, waiting. Balserio, the two Nicaraguans, were gone, presumably on their way to be arraigned and then to jail. The last two squad cars were pulling out.

  I looked at my watch. The sky was grape and molten brass through the lace of limbs, but I had to squint to read the numerals here in the swamp gloom: 8:42 P.M.

  With luck, I’d be back at Dinkin’s Bay Marina around eleven. Maybe in time to have a beer with Tomlinson before . . .

  But no. Tomlinson, I remembered, was at the Miami Radisson with Pilar. Pilar was maybe getting a break from all the terrible stress. Probably having a few glasses of wine, spending quality time with her new best friend, my randy Zen Buddhist pal who was always eager to offer solace and comfort to distraught ladies—me, the hypocrite, thinking hypocritical thoughts.

  I made Merlin Starkey walk with me deeper into the logging trail before I said to him, “Go ahead and talk. But no more comparisons with Gatrell, O.K.? I’m not a fan. I never was.”

  He snorted. That nasty chuckle again. “I know about that, too, sonny boy. I know why you hated the man.”

  “Oh?”

  “Um-huh. It’s ’cause of what you think he done to your parents. They was killed in a boat fire back when you was a kid. I knowed ’em both. Not well, but I’d met ’em. Good folk. You always faulted Gatrell for the fire. You decided he’d installed one a his idiot inventions as a fuel valve. A bad valve coulda caused that boat fire.”

  Suddenly I was straining to listen to his every word. “You’re right. How do you know that?”

  “’Cause,” Starkey said, “I was one a the deputies who investigated the deaths. Gatrell’d already ruined my career by that time, and I was itchin’ for ways to hang the slippery dog. Involuntary manslaughter at the least. I wanted to get him.

  “I studied that fire from every angle. Found out you was doin’ the same—just a young kid at the time, but smart. I’ll give you that. You and me even met once. I come to your uncle’s place to look at what was left of the boat. You’d been piecing her back together. Remember?”

  I stared at the old man; studied his blotched, penetrating old eyes. It jogged a vague recollection of a young, athletic-looking man, military haircut, business suit and briefcase, who seemed to know in advance that my uncle was away. I’d gotten the impression he wouldn’t have visited otherwise. But it hadn’t been that many decades ago, and Merlin Starkey looked ancient.

  As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Time don’t scar a man nearly as bad as his failures. I failed to get my revenge on Gatrell. I wanted to prove he was to blame for your folks dying. Instead, I proved to myself he warn’t.”

  After a pause, he added, “A different person was to blame for that fire, that’s what I figured out. So you’ve been wrong all along. I was so disappointed, I lost interest and let ’er drop. I warn’t in charge of the case anyway. No one asked my opinion.”

  Unaware that I’d even moved, I’d walked so that I was now standing face to face with the old man. He was leaning against the silver trunk of a cypress tree, and had his stick braced beneath one hip like a sort of unipod stool.

  “Who was it? The person who killed my parents. Was it . . . accidental?”

  Starkey smiled, his head bobbing. “Whoo-wheee! I just saw somethin’ behind your eyes there, sonny boy, that I don’t like. I seen it before. Men on death row up to Raiford, they got the same little thing that flashes back there. Not all of ’em. Just the good’uns, the real pros. Kind of a glow, like water over ice.” He hooted again. “Whoo-whee!”

  I said softly, nearly whispering, “Knock it off. I asked you a simple question.”

  Starkey held up an index finger, correcting me. “My propers. Show proper respect when you’re addressin’ me.” He’d plucked a tin of Copenhagen snuff out of his shirt pocket, and thumped it between his fingers, waiting.

  The old asshole was enjoying the leverage he now had on me.

  I said impatiently, “O.K., Detective Starkey. Tell me what you found out. Who was it? I’d . . . appreciate your help.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you. But first, you stand there and listen to a few things just so you know you ain’t so smart—Doctor Ford. Tamara Gartone? I reckon she’s just about the finest young woman ever to come to our department. She got the brains, she got the heart to do anything she wants. If I had me a daughter, I couldn’t want her to be no finer person than Miz Tamara.”

  Confused—why was he now on this tangent?—I said, “I agree. Ten minutes ago, when I was telling you how impressed I was, you wouldn’t answer me. What’s your point?”

  “You lied to the woman, that’s my point, sonny boy. That story about shots bein’ fired at you from the Chevy. Pure cow manure. They never fired a round. But she believes you, and she’s sent men to jail ’cause of it. You’re settin’ her up to make her look like a fool. I don’t know what you’re into, but if it’s bigger’n it seems, it could come back and hurt her. Ruin her career. Just like your uncle did to me.”

  The old man was still looking at me, but seemed uninterested in my response. He knew the truth. Because he knew, there was nothing to learn from my reaction. But how did he know?

  I said carefully, “If that’s supposed to make sense, you lost me. Even if it did, I wouldn’t intentionally put her in jeopardy. I just met her, but I like her.”

  “But that’s exactly what you’re doin’, boy. Which is why you’re gonna go bang on her car window right now and tell the lady what really happened. Don’t mention that I give you a boot in the pants. I don’t want credit. People in the department now, they think I’m half-senile, which is just the way I like it. So you set her straight like it was your own idea.

  “After that, then maybe we’ll get together and I’ll tell you what I learnt about that boat fire. After all these years, you’ll finally know.”

  He had the snuff tamped down between cheek and gum now. He cleaned his fingers on his pants and spit, waiting.

  There had been a time, long, long ago, when I was obsessed with discovering the exact cause of the fire and resulting explosion that killed my mother and father. Now, I seldom thought of those two.

  I thought of them now.

  To celebrate their twelfth anniversary, my parents took a cruise into the Ten Thousand Islands along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The last time I saw them, I was standing on the dock of the Rod & Gun Club, Everglades City. My father was big-shouldered on the fly bridge, and my mother was facing me, waving goodbye.

  I hadn’t tried to recall that parting in years. Now a forgotten scene came back to me. I remembered how pretty my mother looked in the light of a morning river. Her face, her beauty—the clarity of those few seconds—was so vivid that I could smell the water, could hear her voice. Then my father turned toward me. He grinned and flashed a hand signal that he said only the two of us knew.

  The memory was so detailed, the emotion so powerful, that I was startled. A weird feeling.

  The vessel they were aboard had an inboard gas engine. If someone tampers with or damages an inboard’s fuel system, gas fumes collect easily in the bilge. An arcing spark then becomes a detonator.

  I spent more than a year after what was dismissed as a boating accident reassembling bits and pieces of that boat like a puzzle, fixated on determining the exact cause of the fire. Who was responsible?

  I have been relentless about assembling meticulous data, observing and recording precise detail, ever since. That stuck with me, too.

  THE old man said agai
n, “Sonny boy, Miz Tamara’s in the car all alone. Tell her the truth, and I’ll tell you the truth. The person responsible is no one you ever suspected, I promise you that.”

  The rage to learn who or what had killed my parents was still in me, I realized. Surprising—I’m not a sentimental person. Yet, I wanted to know. The desire swept through me in the same way fear or fury sweeps through the nerve tendrils. I felt like grabbing the old man and shaking the information out of him. I also gave serious consideration to giving him what he wanted.

  But I couldn’t. I’d promised Pilar that I wouldn’t involve law enforcement, just as she had promised Lake’s abductors. More compelling, I couldn’t put the safety of my own son at risk just to satisfy the obsession—or maybe put right the wounds—of the boy, and the son, I had once been.

  Balserio had to stay in jail.

  I was shaking my head—a private reply to Merlin Starkey—as I said, “You seem so sure. Would you mind explaining why you don’t believe me?”

  “That’s ’cause I am sure. You want to play it tricky? Then I’ll spell it out for you.” He grinned again—he’d wanted me to ask. “You swore to our deputies the tall one was the shooter. The one you called Jorge. Say you saw him clear in your rearview mirror.”

  I said, “That’s right. But when Detective Gartone asked me, I changed my—”

  “I know how you changed it,” he interrupted. “I know why, too. Let me finish!

  “When I searched the Chevy, it was before we met, but the deputies told me your story. You swore the tall one fired from the passenger window. Which sounded O.K. until I noticed that both front seats was slid way forward. Our people didn’t move them, so I asked the suspects. They all said the same. The two Nicaraguans are short, but Jorge’s six-four, six-five. He always rode in the back with them two up front, seats way forward.”

  I shrugged. “I was scared, confused. I made a mistake. So Jorge must have fired from the back seat. If it was him.”

  Starkey was still enjoying it. “That’s not the only mistake you made. All the spent brass we found landed on the right shoulder of the road. That worked in real good with your story about him firing from the passenger window. It still works in pretty good with him firing from the back seat, right side. But I noticed something different about Jorge. Know what that was? ”

  I gave it a moment, thinking, then swallowed hard—uhoh —because I was remembering how Balserio handled the knife, passing it back and forth from hand to hand.

  “What I noticed,” Starkey said, leaning toward me, his voice rising in a sort of victorious intensity, “is the man you say fired at you woulda never done it the way you said. There ain’t no way in Hades. That’s because the man’s left-handed. Ain’t no way a left-handed man is gonna fire from the right window of an empty back seat.

  “Just to be sure, I had the deputy undo the tall man’s cuffs. I made him take the little test where you sight a target through your fingers with both eyes wide open—” The old detective formed a circle with thumb and index finger, holding it away from his face, to demonstrate. “Close your left eye, and if the target stays in the circle, your right eye’s strongest. Jorge’s not only left-handed, but he’s got a dominant left eye. No lefty with a dominant left eye shoots right-handed. Ever. So I knowed you was lyin’ even before we met.

  “You staged the whole dang business, Ford. You fired them rounds. That spooky old Sig Sauer with no serial numbers we found in the Chevy was planted by you. For some reason, you want them boys jailed real bad.”

  I was thinking to myself, Tucker Gatrell outsmarted this guy? as he continued, “I told Miz Tamara all that before we got you in the car. But something clicked between you two. Man and woman stuff. I seen it happen to some of the best. They get a gut feelin’ about who they can trust, and their brain stops. I knowed it when she started askin’ questions in a way so you knew how to answer. Poor girl didn’t even know she was doin’ it. So I’m gonna give you one last chance to do the honorable thing. The right thing.”

  I shook my head slowly again—No—saying, “I’m not involved in anything that’s going to hurt her or her career, I promise you.”

  He snorted, spit as he banged his stick on the ground hard, like a gavel. “That ain’t gonna cut it. So here’s the deal: If she takes any grief because of your lies, I’m gonna come down on you like a marble ceiling. I still never got my revenge on your uncle. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I’ll get ’er through you.”

  I looked at my watch—8:57 P.M.—then looked at the black cypress canopy above, a pearling sky beyond, thinking, All I want to do is get home. Back to my fish and boats and books—and find my boy.

  Even so, I still had to ask the question. Had to ask because I needed to know how much hatred I was dealing with. How far was this old man willing to take it? In getting him to talk, I also hoped maybe he’d soften a little and give me a few hints about who was responsible for the boat fire.

  Even though I was exhausted, I tried my best to sound empathetic when I asked Merlin T. Starkey about Tucker Gatrell, and how, exactly, that old con man had managed to ruin his career.

  And he told me.

  FOURTEEN

  AS I pulled onto the Tamiami Trail, headed west toward Sanibel, I got the number from information and had the girl at the Miami Radisson’s front desk ring Tomlinson’s room.

  No answer.

  The first time, I left a message for him saying, “I’ve got a classic Tucker Gatrell story that you’re not going to believe. Actually, you will believe it. It’s so typical. Plus there’s interesting news about the black car.”

  I think I sounded upbeat. Not a hint of suspicion in my voice.

  How Tucker had ruined the career of Merlin T. Starkey—I told myself that was the reason I tried Tomlinson’s room again ten minutes later, then redialed a third time a few minutes after that. Told myself I was eager to share the wild tale, and also confirm that Pilar and Tomlinson were safe. That seemed reasonable. Hadn’t I told them not to leave the room?

  True, Balserio, Hugo, and Elmase had probably already been booked into Collier County jail. But my friend and my former lover weren’t aware of that. They should have been inside the Radisson with the bolts latched.

  I checked my watch: 9:30 P.M.

  So where were they?

  Or . . . maybe they were in the room, but ignoring the phone. Inside all alone, but having too much fun to answer.

  Yeah, that was certainly possible . . .

  I plucked up the cell phone, hit redial again, and told the irritable desk clerk, “This is kind of important. Would you mind trying that room one more time?”

  Nothing.

  My primary concern was that they were in some kind of trouble. Someone had gotten to them. But I was also aware of an undercurrent of adolescent-grade suspicion.

  My behavior, I lied to myself, had nothing to do with Tomlinson and how he behaved with women. I also told myself it wasn’t because of the secret, sexual Pilar that tumbled out under a lot of stress, and after a couple of glasses of wine.

  I simply wanted to let them know that it was safe for them to unlock the door and leave Miami. That maybe they should get on the phone and grab the first fast cab back to Sanibel.

  I’m not the suspicious type. Too mature, too rational to be jealous, so that’s not why I kept calling.

  That’s what I told myself.

  I also wasn’t already regretting exchanging my Sig Sauer for Balserio’s freedom, nor did some secret part of me consider that gun a mighty good-luck talisman.

  Right.

  In the next few minutes, I received two calls. But it wasn’t the missing couple. First time, it was one of Tomlinson’s Zen students, who told me in a rush that she felt the mantra he’d assigned her just wasn’t working because, she now realized, it was similar to the name of an old boyfriend.

  “Please tell the respected Daishi it’s becoming a real downer, picturing that asshole’s face every time I work on my sutra.”

 
I said I’d pass the information along if and when I ever spoke to the great Daishi again.

  The second caller didn’t pause even when I tried to interrupt.

  “Hey, man, how’re you doin’? Nothing urgent but my outboard’s about bone dry. Hear what I’m tellin’ ya? We need it at the Marco Island store. I hear a buck fifty a gallon sounds right. So I’ll take two bags. Gallons, I mean. Only if it’s high test, though; got a big race tonight. Catch you at the shack. Same place—and tell your delivery boy not to be late this time.”

  As I said “Huh?” he hung up.

  AT ten till ten, I slowed for the orange blinker and gas station fluorescence that is the turnoff to Everglades City at the intersection of Route 29. Down that rural two-lane was the Rod & Gun Club, the classic old fishing lodge where I’d waved a last goodbye to my parents.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about Tomlinson and Pilar anymore.

  To the southwest, beyond mangroves, the lights of the village reflected off clouds. Once again, the image of the departing boat, my father, my mother, her eyes and smiling face, appeared. My father’s secret hand signal. Once again, the freshness of detail startled me.

  Had that scene ever come into my mind before?

  No.

  I was certain it hadn’t. Not as an adult, anyway. Yet, how could I have forgotten a moment like that?

  It seemed impossible, but I had. Until today.

  It was a psychological anomaly that I’d never experienced.

  I have little patience for nostalgia; seldom linger in the past. I’ve lived an independent, self-reliant life in which family hasn’t played a role. After so many years on my own, my recall of those long-dead people had faded more completely than the photo I’d found of Ervin Rouse.

  Yet on this day, they’d reappeared, alive in memory.

  I found that puzzling and remarkable. It also seemed somehow important.

  Why?

  I couldn’t fathom. What I’d learned about Tucker Gatrell wasn’t a factor. No, it was more personal than that.