by Tom Corcoran
Chicken Neck snorted but I could see calculations in his eyes. “There’s one other thing. I filed this morning to run for Tucker’s job.”
That one took me by surprise. Tommy Tucker had been Monroe County’s sheriff, essentially the top enforcement job in the county, for eleven years. I could understand any career officer wanting the job, the prestige, the power. But Liska had taken aim on an elective office. Catching crooks and running political campaigns were two different things. “I figured you’d ride out your longevity here in your own little empire. Where you make all the rules.”
“Not as many as you think.” He sat and went back into the drawer for another sheet of paper.
“You’ve survived what, fourteen years? You forget you live in paradise?”
“Who says survived? I pay dues. I got enough trouble, my colon, without this city shit.” He paused to scowl. I waited for him to continue. He squinted, flattened the center crease of the paper, and tried a new design. “As you well know, the sheriffs office lost two detectives a few months ago through what’s being called ‘unorthodox attrition.’ I applied for one of the jobs. In so many words, Tommy Tucker told me to stuff it.”
“He must hold you to blame for the morals of his scumbag and murdering detectives. Because you were the arresting officer. Modern logic.”
“Jerk-off logic.” Liska ran a fingernail down the top folds. The man could concentrate on several subjects at once. He’d designed this paper airplane more like a jet, with its surfaces converging to a sharp point. “The city found out I’d applied …”
“Makes sense, Tucker’d let that gem be known.”
“ … so my name is mud. City hasn’t been much fun, anyway. Salesberry’s been kissing the city commission’s ass for seven years. They see him as the ideal chief, a great administrator, a man of the people. He’s glued to the job, I’ll never sit in that seat. So I’ll go take Tucker’s job. Anyway, that short time the ex-wife was married to Avery Hatch, she liked the sheriffs department health plan better than my old one.”
“Maybe that’s where she got the idea you could afford counseling.”
Liska finally chuckled. He flung the airplane and it flew through his door, out of sight down the hallway.
“It’s going to change your life dramatically,” I said.
Liska went in for a third sheet of paper. “Working and campaigning at the same time?”
“You’ll be up against Tucker’s clout. People are always scared to buck an incumbent. They know the guy could win and whip out retaliations. Plus, if you lose, you’ll be unemployed.”
“You’ll be there right with me.” His phone rang. He grabbed the receiver. He was right, either way. If I campaigned on Liska’s behalf, I could lose my crime-scene gigs at the county. If I didn’t help him, I’d probably lose my city job anyway. Politics in the Keys resembled minimal-rules games with sudden-death overtimes. Outside his office window the torn fronds of a tall palm fluttered. I imagined dollar bills blowing away through the trees.
Liska grunted and looked disgusted. “Incoming emergency call and the doofus puts me on hold.” My face must have broadcast concern. He looked downward to create a perfect bisecting fold. “I meant what I said, bubba.”
“I heard you twice the first time. You really think you can win?”
“Only one way to find out.” He perked up, pressed the receiver tighter against his ear, then hung up. “Mother of Christ. Next thing, the Southernmost Point’ll fall into the ocean. Get this. The Conch Train pulls out of the fuckin’ depot and a guy keels into the intersection, Front and Duval, dead as your chair. Some guy not dressed like a tourist. Officer on the scene says fatal stab wound.”
The Conch Tour Trains—re—modeled Jeeps towing strings of trailers made to look like passenger-train cars—carried tourists throughout the island.
I said, “Was the victim wearing a watch?”
“What the fuck kind of question is that?” Liska crumpled his unfinished airplane and chucked it into the trash can. “You beg for bones, bubba, I just put you to work. Go home and get a camera.
“What about Cootie Ortega?” The city’s full-time crime photographer had earned a broad reputation for blowing assignments. As the mayor’s wife’s first cousin, however, he could claim solid job security.
“Cootie’s got the flu.”
“I saw him downstairs when I came in the building.”
“Cootie doesn’t know he’s got the flu.”
“I’m on my bicycle.”
Liska hit the intercom. He asked Teresa Barga, the police department’s new media liaison director, to take me home for my cameras. He then asked her to deliver me and herself to the Conch Train Depot as fast as she could move it.
2
“Let me warn you, the climate control in this son of a bitch needs help.” Teresa Barga circled the sun-weathered Taurus, swinging open doors to let heat escape. “They tell me this piece of crap used to be a detective unit. Got those black wheels, poverty hub caps shaped like Ozzie and Harriet spun-aluminum salad bowls, that stupid 1-800-STOP DOPE sticker. Park it anywhere, it screams, ‘The Man.’” She aimed her city-tagged key at the rear bumper. “You run out of numbers after you dial STOP DOP. What the hell’s dop? So, I asked the chief two days ago, do air-conditioning repairs cost more than employee turnover? He loved it.”
“Salesberry’s not into sarcasm,” I said.
“Righto. His face said, ‘Oh, no, another uppity female.’ The chiefs what we cultured college people call a butthole. He thinks a woman’s proper place is wherever it was in 1955—preferably barefoot in the kitchen or facedown in the bedroom. You’re gonna get the wrong impression by my dirty mouth.”
I laughed and shook my head. A sense of humor opens more doors than bitterness. Better bad language than a bureaucratic Kewpie doll. We stood in the shade behind the police department’s Angela Street parking strip next to the Tilton Hilton Guest House. Teresa Barga came within three inches of my sixone. Her wind-tossed shoulder-length brown hair and slender face made her look classy but not stuffy. She knew enough not to make the newcomer’s mistake of trying too hard to make an impression. The simplicity of dark slacks, a cream-colored blouse, light makeup, one silver bracelet, and small silver earrings presented a professional appearance not often seen south of Islamorada.
“You in a hurry?” she said.
My mind flashed an image of Zack Cahill on the Front Street pavement, no watch, no wallet. “The victim’s already dead.” A dull shiver ran up my spine. “Hurry can’t change that. But Liska probably wants us there now.”
Teresa slung her hip to slam the left rear door. She started the car while I closed the other rear door and climbed in. The seats had concaved, the thin upholstery had absorbed fast-food odors and body stink from years of hot-weather stakeouts and patrols. Coffee and leaking ballpoints had stained the sun-bleached dash. The carpet had been smoothed, then shredded by brogan heels. Even the top half of the black steering wheel had faded to milky gray.
Teresa drove across Solares Hill, cut the tight left onto William, dodged pedestrians, and handled the city’s narrow streets and bike riders like a local. I asked where she was from.
“The University of Florida gave me a piece of paper ten weeks ago. Minor in Criminology, major in Corporate Communications.”
I was impressed. Only in recent years had a degree meant squat in Key West civil service. In the past, it was who you knew, or who your family knew. Small-town business with a public paycheck.
“I probably would’ve stayed with Criminology,” she said, “but I interned after sophomore year, up on the Panhandle. A reality taste, how they don’t like girls on the front lines. Also, becoming a cop is like building your own glass ceiling. Where you going to be when you’re forty?”
“What makes a Gator pick Key West?” I said.
“Climate.”
Her abrupt tone signaled an end to my casual interrogation. I was drifting elsewhere anyway, bugged by the strang
eness of Cahill’s disappearance. He’d been coming to Key West for twenty-five years and knew the town as well as a resident. I could comfort myself with the fact that it made no sense for Zack to be on the Conch Tour Train. But then, it also made no sense for the man to whoop it up in Sloppy Joe’s at breakfast time.
I shuddered with the thought that I might have to make an awful phone call. Claire Cahill would be devastated.
To thwart the island’s perennial B&E pigs, I keep my camera bags locked in the false base of a plain, unobtrusive cabinet. The large bag is packed with gear I need for extended assignments. I chose the smaller one, outfitted for short-notice gigs like this. Two camera bodies, three lenses, a flash unit, extra film, spare batteries, a packet of lens paper. I put Cahill’s Rolex in the stash box, resecured it, then checked my answering machine. No messages. The gardening tools on the porch table looked like a bad idea in the midday heat.
Teresa Barga looped around to Eaton and drove toward the murder scene. I did my best to shield direct sunlight as I loaded film.
“You own the house?” she said. Conversational tone.
“Bought it in ‘77, back when normal people could afford to.”
“Live alone?”
I looked. She stared straight ahead through the windshield. Her turn for interrogation. No hint of expression. Was she nosy or just ballsy?
“Right now I do.”
“But not always?”
“‘Bout half the time,” I said, “the way it’s worked out.”
“I follow you. That’s the way I went through college.”
After a minute or so she said, “You gay?”
Okay, she was ballsy. “No,” I said, then returned her serve: “You?”
She didn’t flinch. “‘Bout half the time … the way it’s worked out.”
We rode in silence down Caroline, and across Simonton. Teresa parked in a delivery zone adjacent to the Hyatt, a block from the scene, but as close as we would get. Even with the wind that pushed us toward Duval, visible heat radiated from the sidewalk. Teresa hurried ahead. Perspiration trickled down her neck, clear as a mountain stream. I succumbed to base male urges. She turned for an instant and caught me with my eyes below the equator. She said nothing but walked faster. I caught up so I wouldn’t give the impression of continued ogling. At Front and Duval she joined Marnie Dunwoody, a Key West Citizen reporter and my friend Sam Wheeler’s roommate.
The dead man was not Zack. My relief gave me instant detachment. The victim lay with the inconsequence of a discarded gum wrapper, face-upward in the litter-filled gutter, under a row of rusting newspaper vending boxes, his head twisted to an unnatural angle. It was the ace in the white, banded-collar shirt who’d taken his nervous lunch at Mangoes, no less ugly with life gone from his face. The perpetrator of his murder had an escape cushion. Every police patrol car on the island had converged on the intersection, along with several hundred middle-aged couples in matching pairs of Hawaiian outfits they’d never wear in their hometowns. Gawkers jockeyed for position with video rigs and yellow cardboard cameras, seeing the man’s death as a prime Kodak moment. One woman got pissed when I stepped in her line of sight.
Chicken Neck Liska hunkered inside the fluttering yellow tape. His stare shifted upward as I approached. He’d ditched his white suit coat, still wore a cranberry polyester shirt. He slowly stood. Sweat covered his brow. “What took you so goddamn long?” Behind his cigarette breath, I smelled alcohol.
“I wasn’t driving.”
He observed Teresa Barga and Marnie Dunwoody wedged into a sliver of shade next to the Quay Restaurant. “She took Monty’s office.”
Monty Aghajanian, a Dredgers Lane neighbor in the early nineties, had vacated the police department’s press liaison job months earlier after being accepted to the FBI Academy. He’d recently graduated from basic training at Quantico. I’d heard that he wasn’t pleased with his first duty posting, chasing truck thieves in Newark, New Jersey.
“How long will she last, outspoken like she is?” I twisted the zoom and took a profile shot of both women—good posture, hair flying, worry on their faces. At least Teresa had had the sense to connect with Marnie.
“She can talk as much as she wants, bubba. She’s Paulie Cottrell’s stepdaughter. Also, so far, she’s been good at the job.”
So much for the resourcefulness of the college graduate. Cottrell had been the city’s zoning inspector for at least fifteen years. The primary reason for his longevity had been his tempered honesty. He wasn’t famous for intellect, but he understood simple nepotism as well as twenty-eight thousand other permanent residents.
The police had emptied the Conch Train’s open passenger cars. Liska peered at the multi-hued wall of onlookers and made a raspberry noise with his mouth. “More palm trees on these shirts than on the island. Looks like this guy got poked by a hypodermic full of caca. Hustle a bit. We need this train out of here, make room for Forensic and the ME vehicles.” He tilted his head toward the northeast. “We put all the potential witnesses on the second floor of the Burger King. We don’t know who this guy is.”
I walked the perimeter, the triangle made by the west and north cross walks at Duval and Front, only fifty yards from where, two hours earlier, I’d begun my search for Zack Cahill. I shot with a wide-angle lens, posting the location of the orange “caboose” and the adjacent yellow car, surreptitiously including faces in the crowd. I’d read somewhere that bank robbers and other criminals occasionally attempted to conceal themselves among post-crime onlookers. Maybe I’d luck into documenting the person who’d killed the mystery man, maybe put a feather in Liska’s hat. Uniformed officers recognized me, pushed people backward to make room. I felt like a stage player entertaining those who’d come to witness outrageous sights in the tropics. At one point I caught in the lens an elderly sport whose T-shirt read, SEE THE LOWER KEYS ON YOUR HANDS AND KNEES.
After the empty train departed I changed lenses and concentrated on details of the corpse, reminded again that I preferred shooting jimmied door locks, crunched fenders of stolen cars after joy rides, transoms relieved of boat motors, wrecked mopeds. Death had not brought peace to the victim. His rictal grimace resembled a panicked rodent. He’d been DOA at the gutter, hadn’t had motor functions to cushion his fall. The skin on his forehead had been scraped away, his nose flattened. One eye had locked open, frozen with bewilderment, focused well into the distance. I positioned my reference ruler and snapped photographs of dried blood and the dark bruise to the left of his windpipe. I shot several angles of the European-style shoes and remembered to tap the victim’s pockets to check for the cash wad that Jesse Spence had mentioned. The roll was there, left front. The cops could rule out robbery.
Liska found me and leaned over my shoulder. “Hurry the fuck up. Even in this goddamn windstorm, the street smells like cheap perfume. Blame that cruise ship’s damned duty-free store. Get close-ups of his hands.”
I’d missed the scars of tattoos clumsily removed from the backs of the corpse’s eight fingers. Probably the jailhouse L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E cliché. A thin blue crucifix adorned each thumb; an emerald ring rode the little finger of his left hand. His knuckles had been smashed so often they’d doubled in size. As I leaned down for a better angle, I spotted another tattoo under his watchband. I pushed the steel band aside. A quarterinch-wide braided-rope design in black ink circled his wrist.
I caught a whiff of apricot. Marnie Dunwoody knelt next to me. Probably bath oil, and not inexpensive. Crouching to chat in her tan jeans and blue polo shirt, she carried athletic grace, style, self-confidence. She also wore a shallow-brim straw hat, as islanders did a century ago. “The pasty-skinned bastards,” she said. “They all come down here to act like piggies.”
I agreed. “Getting their five bucks’ worth. They’re gonna be bored at sunset. How can the fire juggler out do a real-live corpse?”
“I’m beginning to think, in this town,” said Marnie, “that self-immolation might be a solid career
move, for the right bucks.” I smelled alcohol on her breath, too. A surprise, but who was I to judge, after beers at Mangoes?
A woman yelled out, “Is he somebody famous?”
Marnie lifted her hat, shifted her collar-length light brown hair to one side, and turned toward the nearest semicircle. “He was a cult leader, lady. He recruited his followers in tourist traps. He seduced ignorant schmucks who needed to get a life. You oughta hustle back to Akron and tell ‘em about it. Oink your ass off.”
The woman stared as if someone had goosed her, and she was trying to process the information. Several women gasped and repeated Marnie’s oink remark to their husbands.
“You’re setting the Chamber of Commerce back eons,” I said.
“My move for ecology,” said Marnie. “I’m tempted to write this one like it is and force the bastards to slide me out of reporting, into my own column.”
“Woe be unto anyone who’s ever made you mad.”
“Yes, woe unto those. Woe unto my boss, who’s lately been treating me like a rookie. Look, I’ll let you concentrate. I’ve got everything I need, except the guy’s name. By the way, you’ve got a piece of lettuce on your tooth.”
I used a fingernail to flick it away. “We were so poor growing up, our only second helpings came from flossing out leftovers.”
Marnie cracked a grin. “My heart cries out. We had it tough in the old days, too. My parents believed equally in the Second Coming and the Second Depression, My sisters and I had to share clothes and bikes. And toilet paper, but only for number one.
“You’ve come a long way.”
“I guess. Sam’s even taking me to La Trattoria for dinner on Friday.”
“Sounds like an attempt for extra points. Why doesn’t he just cook you dinner?”
“He’s playing catch-up. His ratings are down this week. He’s in trouble and he owes me a big one. Check the tattoo on the stiff’s wrist. Subtle touch.” She stood to fold her notepad into her briefcase. She looked unusually tired. She hurried away.
I finished up, running the mental checklist of shots required for crime-area analysis, event reconstruction, foolproof court cases, and other official butt covering. Thanks to digital technology, simple color prints did the job. Computers could convert scanned photo images to black and white or even into transparencies, if needed. I dictated notes into my Pearlcorder regarding wind direction, time of day, ambient temperature, cloud cover, plus supertrivial details—the serial numbers of my camera body and lenses, filters in place, and such. I added remarks about having seen the man in Mangoes. I estimated the time frame of his quick meal. I also mentioned that his hard appearance held the essence of a mortician or a professional basketball coach. It occurred to me that his nearly opaque sunglasses were missing. No doubt they’d been glommed by a tourist. The ultimate souvenir.
