by Tom Corcoran
I didn’t agree with “Not too bad.” I saw an attempted break-in as too close to the real thing, a violation of space, though I’d gotten off light compared to Spence. “A man’s home used to be his castle,” I said.
“This time it’s a target. You wanna talk about it?”
Carmen coughed gently, to interrupt, to get Liska’s attention. “He saw a black turtleneck,” she said. “Long sleeves, dark gloves, dark pants and shoes. Long dark hair or a black knit cap. The side of the man’s face reflected in the window glass.”
“Enough to recognize?”
“Enough to tell it was a white man.”
“And the weapon?”
“There was something …” She looked again at her father. Hector’s eyes were fixed on the floor. “My father went into his house and got his gun. When he came back outside, a cat in my father’s yard made a howling. The man turned toward my father. Something in the man’s hand reflected. Something metal, about four inches long.”
Liska fiddled with an unlighted cigarette and nodded slowly, appearing to believe every word of it. “Was this metallic object aimed at your father?”
Carmen nodded, yes, then looked away, through the screen and into the quiet lane that had been her home for years.
“We’ve got us an obvious self-defense deal here, Lieutenant. I want you to write a report to that effect, and check back with Ms. Sosa if you’ve got any questions.” Liska ushered Hector and the lieutenant off the porch. I squeezed Mr. Ayusa’s arm and nodded a thank-you. For the first time, Hector smiled.
But Carmen’s face had gone sullen. She had been wedged into protecting her father from prosecution and liability. She knew that I understood her displeasure. She also knew that Liska had choreographed the procedure in her father’s best interest.
She changed the subject: “Out being desperate, were we?”
The rules of our friendship permitted this sort of admonition.
“Not completely desperate,” I said. “After all, it could have been you.”
The hint of a smile on her lips. She faked a punch to my belly. “Ah, but it wasn’t.”
“Not this time.”
She checked her watch. “I want details but I’m late for work.” She patted my stubbled cheek and ran to catch up with Hector in the lane.
I stepped into the yard. The crime-scene van had returned. Liska briefed two technicians as Cootie Ortega dropped the city’s tripod into the trunk of the Lexus. I could tell from a distance that he had used a telephoto lens with a polarizing filter. A short lens and a stepladder would’ve done the trick. He’d probably set his camera to “automatic.” The scene techs lugged evidence kits into my house. Ortega trailed, fighting to attach a massive electronic flash apparatus to his 35-mm Canon.
“Your friend, the fugitive, has quite a history.” Liska waved an inch-thick file folder in front of his face, a two-pound fan.
“What’s that, his twenty-five-page rap sheet?”
Liska guided me back to the porch, out of direct sunlight. “We’ve got a physical exam from his application for a private pilot’s license. Fingerprints, photograph, all the crap the FAA requires. He’s a Certified Financial Planner. This is a copy of his securities trading license. Here’s a real estate broker’s license. He’s vice-commodore of a yacht club, some fancy little village north of Chicago. We got mortgage papers on his high-ticket primary home, and a vacation home in Wisconsin, both paid in full. I’ve got this stuff coming in by the pound. He can’t hide too long.”
“Left himself quite a trail for someone who contemplated a criminal life.”
“Ask me if I’ve ever made sense of why these assholes go bad.”
“I’ll tell you two things, to add to what I said yesterday. He’s not an asshole and he’s not a bad boy. I also think you’re the least of his worries.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Look at his background. He didn’t get where he is by ducking problems. He’s an expert at meeting trouble head-on. If he had the slightest inkling that he was a murder suspect, he’d have been in your office this morning to clear it up. That’s how he works. It’s not you he’s hiding from.”
Liska’s cell phone rang. “I want to know more.” He stepped into my living room to take the call. The evidence gathering involved sticky tape, a tape measure, plastic baggies, and larger, garbage-sized bags. Ortega had finished with his part of the task. He stared at the art on my walls, the bookcase full of first editions, their jackets protected by archival plastic covers. He eyeballed the stereo, the VCR, even the convection oven in the kitchen, as if calculating potential resale. I wondered how many black-sheep cousins he had on the island, fellows willing to help me dispose of all this extra personal property. The techs departed, carrying the two bloodstained cushions from my couch. Liska shooed Ortega outside, then beckoned me to the porch as he ended his phone conversation.
A taxi with a loud radio and squeaking springs pulled into the lane and stopped behind the Lexus. Its trunk lid popped open. The driver scurried out to grab the luggage. I could see the passenger through the windshield.
Liska said, “You didn’t have enough last night. You gotta import fresh?”
“It’s Cahill’s wife.”
“Wonderful. I’d love to hear her side of the tale.”
“She doesn’t know a thing. She’s looking for him like we are.
“We? You forming a posse?”
“If he was your friend, wouldn’t you be worried?”
He finally lit his cigarette. “Look, I got something I need to get done. Don’t let her ride your bike on North Roosevelt. You’re buying lunch at the Banana Café, noon sharp. Bring the nice lady along.”
10
Claire Cahill looked travel-rumpled, but wonderful in the midmorning brightness. Her northern tan looked healthier than the dark chocolate of many Keys residents in summer. She wore her hair shorter than I’d seen it, perhaps darker, too. She stood about five-five, shaped—to my recollection—as she had been twenty years earlier, plus five or eight pounds. She wore knee-length khaki shorts, a white cotton polo, form-fitting sandals. She’d parked her sunglasses above her forehead. A soccer mom in the tropics.
The taxi and the Lexus disappeared up Fleming as Claire unhooked her belly-pack and placed it on top of her duffel. Her Mona Lisa smile broke the ice. We kissed hello and held our hug for a half-minute. My mind churned, spun for lack of traction. It refused to manufacture credible insulation for me or for Zack. The surprise visit, her ambush, had worked.
Claire pulled back to look me square in the eyes. “Alex, your face looks like a funeral.”
“I’m whipped. For a variety of reasons.” I hoisted her bags and started for the house. Fleming Street and Dredgers Lane were oddly silent. Even the breeze lay still. I said, “You’ve deserted suburbia.”
“Well, you know,” she said softly. “He’s gone somewhere.”
By including the words “you know,” Claire confirmed that she suspected my complicity. She stepped ahead to open the screen door for me, then sank into a porch chair. I carried her duffel inside, straight to the bedroom. From where she sat, she couldn’t see the living room mess.
Her eyes nailed me the instant I returned to the porch. “Was he here?”
“You mean in Key West, or here at the house?”
She bit her upper lip. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d answered her question. I looked away, studied my wilted porch plants. I, too, needed watering. An hour in the shower, minimum. Anything to dodge Claire Cahill’s silent accusation of betrayal.
Change the subject. “You must have flown red-eye. Did you sleep?”
“Three hours. Dealing with O‘Hare wore me out. I could nap if I hadn’t chugged that awful coffee thirty minutes ago. Who were those men?”
“The police.” I stretched for sympathy, waved my hand at the living room. “A problem here, before dawn. I wasn’t here when it happened.”
She stood and peered in the door, at t
he damage made worse by evidence gathering. “Oh, Alex.” She scoped the whole room. “Why?”
“I photographed a murder victim the day before yesterday. My guess, somebody wanted the prints and negatives. My neighbor shot the intruder, but he got away.”
She digested that info, then said: “Do you know where Zack is?”
“No.”
Claire’s turn to droop. She leaned against the doorframe and hugged herself. Carmen’s Citizen lay on the porch table. After a moment, Claire put her finger on the headline: DRIVE-BY SHOT WOUNDS WOMAN. Marnie Dunwoody’s byline, three shallow columns. A chill of dread came over me. How in hell could I explain Abby Womack?
Claire stepped into the house for a closer look. “What’s going on around here?” She sounded pissed. “A lady on the flight told me about a murder on the Conch Train. Then there’s a drive-by shooting, and now this …”
“I’m not sure.”
“Mr. Rutledge, you’re tiptoeing around the truth. I know you too well. There’s blood on the wall, and you’re trying to protect me with words.”
No shit. I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“I want you to start from the beginning,” she said. “Let me ask this, first. Is Abby Womack involved?”
That stopped me cold. I pointed at the “drive-by” newspaper article.
“Abby’s the wounded woman?”
“She’s in the hospital on Stock Island.”
Claire’s jaw tightened. Stalwart, but calculating. “My dear friend Pamela once described those years as ‘young Zack Cahill, out-sourcing nookie in the trailer trash.’ The whole episode is history, Alex. It took more forgiveness than Zack deserved, but our marriage survived. But Abby Womack still dreams of reconciliation. She thinks of herself as Zack’s long-lost business partner.” Claire opened my narrow kitchen closet and found the broom. “I’ll sweep and you talk. I’m sorry I yelled.”
I’d have fallen asleep if I sat, so I busied myself with two glasses of orange juice and the coffeemaker. Claire cleaned up broken glass while I ran the chronology. Sloppy’s, Mangoes, Omar-in-the-gutter, Spence’s junk heap, Abby Womack’s bare bum, the pharmacy fire, obviously arson, Spence’s bug-out, and Hector’s nighttime target practice. I linked the dots with my speculative scenario. In an open-minded attempt at fairness, I suggested that Abby Womack may have helped Zack dodge the unknown, unseen danger. I left out Teresa Barga—a topic for later discussion and counsel. My narration shifted from the casual approach, for its shock value, to histrionics, to release my frustration.
“Can I play devil’s advocate a minute?” she said. “Could the prowler have been after the Rolex?”
“Bonnie the bartender’s golden. Sweet and trustworthy. The kind I’d ask to house-sit, if I ever had to go away for a long time.”
Just saying the words “go away,” gave me dread shivers. Pot smugglers, in the seventies, had euphemized prison sentences as “going to camp,” and “going away,” and “out-of-town for thirty months.” Sam Wheeler had asked if I’d be setting myself up as an accessory to one or more felonies.
Claire shoveled the dust pan into a paper sack. “You think Zack is dead?”
I couldn’t answer her.
The temperature in the house had climbed. It made no sense to turn on the central air with the broken window wide open. We carried our OJs and coffees to the porch, in search of a breeze.
“I got something yesterday.” She opened her belly-pack and pulled out a folded sheet of fax paper. The miniature code across the top said “G3,” the default signal for a sending unit having no phone number identifier. Two words were typed on the page, one below the other: “Barnes” and “Crumley.” The spacing looked imperfect. I guessed that it came from an old typewriter.
“What does it mean?” she said.
“Crumley’s an author. I collect his mysteries. If we’re talking authors, Julian Barnes, in England, also writes mysteries, under a pseudonum. I think it’s Dan Kavanagh. A woman named Linda Barnes also writes mysteries.”
“What have they written?”
“James Crumley wrote The Last Good Kiss, The Mexican Tree Duck, The Wrong Case …” I went to my bookcase. “Here’s one called Bordersnakes.”
“What did the Barnes woman write? You collect her?”
“Yep. Let’s see. Steel Guitar, Snapshot, The Snake Tattoo, Cold Case …”
Claire said, “Relax. He’s alive. And he wants you to know that, too.”
“How can you know that?”
Claire took her turn on the soapbox. “Two years ago, before he went off on a junket to Moscow, Zack sat me down. He told me things that I already suspected, that I’d worried about silently. I’d read about kidnappings, and other attacks on high-profile international executives.”
Zack and I had talked about it, too. “He told me that the bank had sent him to a two-week training seminar. He called it yuppie escape and evasion.”
“That was the course in Virginia. He went to another one near Pittsburgh, called ‘Defensive Driving School.’After that, we set up our codes. It went like this. If, for any reason, he’d been out of touch for more than forty-eight hours, I would pay attention to everything in the news, or messages from people at the bank. If I saw or heard the word ‘fontelia,’ it meant, ‘I’m alive. Need help.’”
“Fontella?”
“That sixties song ‘Rescue Me.’”
“By Fontella Bass …”
“The real bad one, ‘soul music,’ translated, ‘I love you. Pray for me.’ But if I saw the word ‘snake,’ it meant, ‘I’m okay. Keep quiet.’”
“Bordersnakes and The Snake Tattoo. He sent you the code, and he knew I could decipher it.”
“We’re a team. We’re supposed to keep quiet.”
Bingo. On two counts: Abby, after her shower, before we’d gone to sleep, had held out her hand and said, “Team.” Also, because Claire had received the coded fax, she knew the good chance that Zack was alive. Her light-touch query—“Was he here?”—moments after her taxi had pulled away, was to test my worthiness as a teammate.
I recalled an old song lyric: “I want a smart woman in a real short skirt.”
“There’s one other item.” She slid another page, a tri-folded letter-sized piece of paper, from her pouch. “I don’t know if this means anything to you. Last night I opened our home safe, out of curiosity. There’s a section for my jewelry, a section for his knife collection and some coins his father owned, a folder with some old stock certificates, and a stack of business papers. At least that’s what been in there, as long as I can remember. But this time the business papers were gone. Except for this page, stuck way in the back.”
A photocopy, with a diagonal tear at the upper left corner. It had been the last of several pages stapled together. It showed two lines of an address in Marianna, Florida—Ford Road, Zip Code 32446—and two other addresses: Scotty Auguie’s address on St. Barthelemy, French West Indies, and Ernest Makksy’s address in New Orleans, noted “as of 8/1/99.”
“The same names your friend Spence told you,” she said. “I guess Zack really did this investment thing. I hope the man’s figured out how he’s going to explain this to his children, when he’s sitting behind bars.”
“Let’s not jump that far, yet. If he’s here, he’s hiding. For a reason that he, at least, appreciates.”
“So, how do we find out why he’s hiding, and where he is?”
“We work with what we’ve got. Have you got the energy to have lunch with that detective that just drove away? A big smile and some bullshit?”
I dialed Dr. Larry Riley to cancel our lunch date. He’d been called out of the office. They’d try to let him know. The message I left on Wheeler’s box asked if the carpenter who’d rebuilt his porch in July could fix a busted window in a hurry. Then I left Claire at the house—under the certain and watchful eye of Hector Ayusa—and rode the Kawasaki downtown.
Olivia Jones, a slender black woman in her thirties, had owned Dun-R
ite Grafhcks since the early nineties. She designed small sales catalogs, business logos, brochures, ad pages, and point-of-purchase displays in her studio near Duval and Fleming, above the Key West Island Book Store, in a building of five first-floor shops and four second-floor offices. We’d worked together on many occasions, most often when she needed local photos and her clients’ budgets were limited. She had grown up in Atlanta, and had left town the week the newspapers reported that the average rush-hour speed of traffic on the 1-275 loop was between 85 and 90 miles per hour.
“You’re sweet,” said Olivia. “I love it when I get to pay back favors during the dead time of the year. I know it’s slow when I’m cleaning out my files and listening to G. Gordon Liddy on the radio.”
I gave her the two strips of color negs that held the crowd images from Front and Duval. She fitted the first to a plastic film carrier and slid it into a Nikon digital scanner. A minute later, my picture filled the screen of her color monitor. In another thirty seconds, she’d zoomed so the sky and the tops of buildings were gone. Faces in the crowd appeared larger.
“Shit focus,” I said. “I don’t usually screw up depth of field. The people are blurry as hell.”
Olivia waved off my concern. “The scanner tends to diminish sharpness, but watch this …” She pulled down a menu and released her mouse at the word “unsharp.” The photograph, section by section, repositioned itself on the screen. “This program’s Adobe Photoshop. I’d be out of business without it.” Faces in the crowd suddenly became clear. Details stood out. It blew away any trick I’d ever seen in a darkroom. It gave me exactly what I needed. To my relief, I could not find Zack Cahill. Olivia’s fingers moved across the keyboard at the speed of light. By the time she’d finished her craft, seven razor-sharp, high-resolution photographs had been saved to her hard drive.
“It’ll take two hours to run proofs of these.”
“I don’t need prints until late afternoon,” I said.
“Soon as they’re done, I’m at Fort Taylor Beach. I’ll leave them down in the bookstore.” She wore a diaphanous natural cotton blouse over a neon-coral nylon top. A bathing suit. I should have known.
