by Tim Dorsey
“Did you kill him?”
Fussels shook his head emphatically. “I swear I didn’t! He was already dead! You gotta believe me!”
“We believe you,” said Bob the accountant. “But you have to tell us everything you saw.”
“I didn’t see anything. Just a big pool of blood and this butterfly chair facing the other way. So I crept around it and there he was, shot through the eyes!”
“They were sending a message,” said Sop Choppy.
“What kind of message?” asked Bud.
“I don’t remember the message code. But I think that’s a strong one.”
“All of you, shut up!” said Bob.
“What am I going to do?” pleaded Fussels.
“Just stay calm. We might be able to work this out. Is there any way they can connect you to this? Think hard! Did you leave any clues?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay, we need to get you out of town—”
“You mean like falling in the blood?”
“Yes, like falling in the blood. Did you get any on your hands?”
“Just the palms and fingertips.”
“But you didn’t touch anything….”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Does the desk count?”
“Yes.”
“Then the desk…. And the doorframe and the railing on the stairs, and the butterfly chair when I slipped again, and one of the legs of his pants pulling myself up, and on the ransom note that I dropped when I fell again and left behind in all the excitement….”
The gang got up and started backing away.
“What?” said Fussels.
The screen door opened again.
Deputies Gus and Walter came in. “Is there a Gaskin Fussels here?”
They all pointed.
Gus produced handcuffs. “Gaskin Fussels, you’re under arrest for the murder of Douglas Fernandez.”
33
Captain Florida’s log, star date 385.274
Starting to have my doubts about this marriage thing. Thought it was going to take me to the next level, but so far all it’s been is moody obedience school. First Coleman breaking in during our Star Wars game, then more shit for going to the pub until three A . M . Didn’t think it could get any worse. Was I wrong! Had a full day planned with Coleman, but Molly wanted to pick out bathroom towels. I’d already packed my gear and told her I’d be happy with whatever she picked out. Next thing I know, I’m fucked without a clue. All this negative body language and those slamming doors again. I run after her and say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ And she says, ‘Nothing.’ But doors keep slamming. That’s the thing about marriage—I haven’t deciphered it yet. But I’ve just figured out the first thing. “Nothing” really means “something.” If it actually is nothing, they’ll tell you all about it, just yap and yap and yap about the most meaningless tripe while you’re trying to watch a documentary on Czar Nicholas, and finally I say—real nice—“Baby, I’ve kind of been looking forward to this show all week….” So now all of a sudden Czar Nicholas is more important than she is. Like a stupid idiot, I had to say he was—you know, Russia, dynasty, big turning point in global history. I’d tried climbing out of that hole but anything I said was just pulling more dirt down on myself. I called a married friend of mine in West Palm Beach and asked him what the hell was going on, and he said, “Are you nuts?” Turns out I’m supposed to pick out towels with her. It’s part of the marriage bonding. I didn’t know this. So I go to the department store, and she’s happy again, and we’re walking the aisles and pretty soon I want to cut my fucking head off. If I’m going to buy a towel, I walk in, grab a towel and buy the goddam thing. Then I wash with it. End of story, fade to black. But I find out that in marriage, the towel selection becomes some kind of introspective chick flick with Holly Hunter that lasts three hours and never goes anywhere. Molly keeps holding up towels and asking if I like them, and I nod impatiently, glancing at my watch. “Perfect. Love ’em. Let’s go.” And she says, “You don’t like them. I can tell.” And she picks up some more. “Love ’em. Spectacular.” “You’re just saying that.” It goes on like this for twenty more towels until she finally decides on the very first ones she showed me. We go to the counter and—get this, the little hand towel in the set is nine dollars! I say, “Holy cow! In some countries you can get blown for nine dollars!” Apparently this isn’t what she wanted to hear. What am I, psychic? It’s an around-the-clock minefield. Like whenever there’s a bunch of blood on my clothes—automatic question time. Oh, and friends. That’s another thing. I’m not allowed to have any. They’re bad influences. And she really hates Coleman. Doesn’t want him coming around anymore. I say he’s my best friend. She says she works hard to keep a clean home and can’t have him throwing up all over the place. I say, “But that’s what he does.” And whenever he is here, she’s always calling me aside for secret conferences, like, “What’s he doing?” And I say, “Drugs.” Come to find out it wasn’t really a question at all; it’s a rhetorical question—another curve ball! But here’s the biggest caveat: Actually, I can have a few friends, but they have to be married to her friends. After the towel travesty, there was this dinner at the head librarian’s house where I was supposed to meet all my new, approved buddies, like a forced marriage in Nepal. Guys who wear plaid sweater vests. Jeffrey, Ronald, Ned. I tell myself, “Don’t prejudge.” The women are in the kitchen, and we’re out back by the barbecue with glasses of Lipton having loads of chuckles, and then we go in the garage looking at tools and golf clubs and I’m bored as hell until I realize, hey, we’ve got everything here to make pipe bombs. In short, everyone got way too emotional in the emergency room, and now I’m the bad influence. I tell my wife, look, I didn’t want to hang out with the noodle-dicks to begin with…. And that’s why I’m writing this on Coleman’s couch. Still looking for the sorcerer’s key that unlocks it all. Night-night.
34
T HE MORNING SKY was threatening a slight drizzle. The local fishermen stayed in, but the tourists still went out in their rental boats, arrays of fishing poles sprouting from their holders like antennas. They wore bright yellow and orange rain slickers and fought uphill against the choppy tide in Bogie Channel with a style of seamanship suggesting future Coast Guard rescues. The weather wasn’t that bad today, but tourists were known to go out even under storm flags. Vacation would not be denied.
Two people watched the bobbing vessels through the back patio windows of a waterfront ranch house on Big Pine Key. It was one of the older homes, built on the ground before flood-plane ordinance required stilts. The streets on this side of the island had names like Oleander, Hibiscus, Silver Buttonwood. The front yard was a field of little brown river rocks because fresh water was scarce for lawns. The rocks had an unintended security feature: You could always hear people driving up. In the middle of the yard was the centerpiece, a faux nineteenth-century ship’s anchor. That’s how visitors were given directions—“Just look for the anchor”—one of those big, three-hundred-pound jobs with a new antique verdigris finish, festooned with fishing nets and strings of colorful Styrofoam crab-trap floats. The nautical kitsch was surrounded by rings of cheerful lavender and pink flowers that had recently opened and would soon be chewed to the stems by night-feeding mini-deer. The original owner had known the bridge tender who was killed when a trawler struck the old Seven-Mile Bridge and was honored by a memorial plaque at the top of the new span that nobody could read because they were going by too fast and weren’t allowed to stop. A baby-blue sea horse sat over the numbers by the door. A dark sedan was parked half a block up the street.
The two people watching the boats were sitting at the kitchen table. They had been there since long before dawn. Periods of intense conversation or awkward silence. This was one of the quiet spells. The table had a glass top with a pebbly surface and a round, white metal frame. It could be used outdoors. There were two coffee cups on the table. Bottle of scotch. Pair of dark s
unglasses.
“I need another Valium,” said Anna.
“You need to slow down.”
“Are you going to give me one?”
The man opened his wallet and scooped out a pill.
Anna tossed it in her mouth and chased it with the contents of her coffee cup.
“It’s all going to work out,” said the man.
Anna set the cup down. “I feel even worse now.”
The man put a hand on hers in the middle of the table. “It’s over. You’re finally safe. Time will heal.”
“We could get the death penalty.”
“We’re not going to get caught. As long as neither one of us ever says anything. You can do that, can’t you?”
“I knew I couldn’t go through with it,” said Anna. “I knew I couldn’t shoot someone.”
“Then what were we doing there?”
“Jesus, you shot him in the eyes!”
“I was just aiming for the head.”
Anna’s stomach spasmed. “I’m getting another panic attack.”
“The Valium hasn’t kicked in.”
She poured more scotch.
“You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“I’m sick right now!” She fiddled with the sunglasses on the table. Her two black eyes had reached full bloom. She looked out the back window at the patio, which was the roof of the cistern. Her nose flared at the faint indication of the sulfur sticks that had been dropped in the tank for mosquitos. The man reached for her hand again. Drops of rain ran down the windows.
She pulled her arm away. “Why’d you grab the gun? Why’d you shoot him?”
“Because you didn’t.”
“I changed my mind. You heard him. He was ready to negotiate. And he started saying stuff about my brother that made no sense, a lot of stuff that made no sense, but you shot him before he could—”
“You think this is some kind of game? You think you can point a gun at someone like that and not shoot?”
“But we had his word….”
“You still don’t have any idea the type of person we were dealing with! He’s going to say anything! He’s not going to be grateful for sparing his life! He’s going to come after us first chance he gets!”
“So fucking what? I was already on the run.”
“But I wasn’t! I tried to talk you out of this, remember? Then I’m standing there watching you lose your nerve, and I’m like, shit, that’s my ass right there! Once you raised that gun, you wrote the future. Him or us.”
Quiet again. No lights on inside the house, just what was coming through the windows from the overcast dawn, suspending the house in an off-balance gray. It was actually a pretty nice day to be alive in the Keys. Curl up with a book, listen to the rain, watch the weather.
“I hate this. It looks like shit out there.”
“Are you going to be able to keep it together?”
“Why?” said Anna. “Are you going to kill me, too?”
The man looked down.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“You don’t need to say anything.”
“No, you’ve been too good to me.”
“I’ll always be there for you. You know that.”
This time, her hand reached across the table. “That’s why I called the other day. That’s why I called before, you know….”
They looked at each other. History. Countless sobbing phone calls when Billy started hitting her up in Fort Pierce. More tears in person at coffee shops. Then, lovers.
Anna grabbed the scotch. She decided not to pour and put it down. “The Valium’s working.”
“Good.”
She began picking at a corner of the bottle’s black label. “I recognized him.”
“Who?”
“Scarface.”
“You did?”
“Up in Fort Pierce. From the marina. He was one of the guys who came around a couple times. But he was just one of the loaders. I don’t get it.”
“He did that sometimes.”
“You said he never met anyone.”
“Not as Scarface. Because he didn’t trust anyone. But since almost nobody knew what he looked like, it allowed him to move invisibly through his own organization to make sure nobody was skimming, which they always were. A lot of guys ended up dead and never knew why.”
The man checked his watch. Getting near eight. He grabbed the scotch.
“I thought you weren’t drinking.”
“So did I.” He looked across the terrazzo of the vacation home that used to belong to Anna’s brother. “You decided to stay here after all.”
“With Scarface gone, there’s no reason not to.”
The man drained his cup and poured again.
“You’re making up for lost time.”
There was a purpose. He finished the second drink and let it work. The clouds finally let loose outside. Rain pounded the windows at a hard angle.
“I have a confession to make.”
Anna stretched and yawned from the medicine.
“My motives weren’t entirely pure.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wanted to protect you and everything. I really liked your brother….”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the rumors I told you about? Rick putting money away with Scarface—Fernandez, whoever. It wasn’t a rumor. I knew it for a fact.”
Anna looked confused.
“For some reason Fernandez liked your brother. Or at least trusted him. Or didn’t. But your brother was sharp. He knew this wouldn’t last forever…he had to put something away. Sometimes we’d go drinking after bringing a boat in. Fernandez was always asking him questions about money. He finally let your brother know who he really was. That might have gotten him killed.”
Anna’s breathing shallowed. She grabbed the scotch again. Rain sheeted on the glass.
“Fernandez and Rick got some money together. I know you didn’t know. It’s at least three million, maybe four. I don’t know where it is. Well, I do, sort of. There’s a safety deposit box—”
Anna raised the cup to her mouth with both hands.
“The box contains instructions in case anything ever happened to Rick. Some of the money was your husband’s, except your brother knew Billy would just gamble it. So he put it away for you. There are four names on the deposit box. Fernandez, your brother and his wife. And you—you’re the only one still alive to claim it.”
Anna was grabbing the edge of the table. “H-how do you know all this?”
“Your brother knew about you and me being…together. He could just tell. It almost made him feel better knowing I was there for you because he’d already given up on Billy. A few times he came close to killing him over the beatings he gave you. He came to me one day, asked if anything happened to him, that I’d tell you about the box. Made me swear.”
Anna just sat there; too much to process at once.
“You’re going to hate me for what I’m going to say next, so I’m just going to say it….” He looked her straight in the eyes. “I want Fernandez’s share. You can have the rest.”
“Jesus, Jerry!”
“I don’t like this any better. But I’m practical. We don’t have much time before the police find out their guy in the morgue has a deposit box. Then it’s gone for good.”
“But how can you think about money at a time like this?”
“I’ll tell you how! I’ve been sitting here for years, watching Fernandez over in his fancy house getting rich and fat while I work a shitty job fetching drinks for a bunch of tourists I have to pretend to like. That’s how. I want mine! I deserve it!”
Anna pressed back in her chair. “What’s wrong with you?”
Jerry the bartender poured another scotch. “You have to go to the bank.”
“I’m not going anywhere!”
“Yes, you are. We’re in this together now.” He raised the cup to his mouth. “You will be going to the bank
.”
“But what about the murder? Shouldn’t we be lying low?”
“We don’t have to worry about that.”
“Why not?”
Jerry reached in his pocket and set a brass bank key on the table. “I fixed it so they suspect someone else.”
35
Monday evening: six-thirty
S ERGE WAS IN the living room of the love nest, checking his wristwatch. Molly was in the bathroom. A car honked outside.
Serge looked out the curtains. Coleman.
“Honey!…I’m leaving for my meeting. Love you!…” He grabbed the doorknob.
“Wait a minute,” called Molly. She walked into the room holding one of the new hand towels. It was dangling between her thumb and index finger like a used diaper.
“What is it?” said Serge. “I’m running late.”
“Did you use this?”
“Yeah, I washed my hands.”
“You’re not supposed to use this.”
He grabbed the doorknob again. “Right, right…what?”
“You weren’t supposed to use it.”
“It’s a towel.”
“You don’t use these.”
A car honked.
“Sure thing.” He opened the door.
“You don’t care.”
“I do so care.”
“I’m not finished talking about this.”
“Can we deal with it when I get home? I’ve got people waiting.”
“They’re more important than our marriage?”
“Of course not. But the meeting starts at a specific time. We can discuss your towels later.”
“What do you mean, ‘your towels’?”
“I didn’t mean anything….” Glancing at his watch. “…Come on, don’t stare at me like that.”
Honk.
“Shit.” He stuck his head out the door. “Coleman, knock it off. Be down in a minute.” He closed the door. “Okay, let’s talk.”
She stood there.
“I thought you wanted to talk.”
Still standing there.
“Okay, see you tonight.” He opened the door.
