Gumbo Limbo

by Tom Corcoran

  Arthur Stapleton lived in a plain, south-facing bungalow in the 2500 block of Fogarty. He needed no lawn mower. He owned more unattractive, shaggy banana trees than I’d ever seen in one front yard. A swath had been cut just wide and deep enough to park his ‘93 Buick Century snug to the front steps. Salt and sun had eroded the sedan’s silver paint. Huge, dark rust scabs had spread randomly across its hood, roof, and trunk. Two bumper stickers stuck to the paint above the rear bumper gave fair warning of Stapleton’s politics. One was a faithful modernday reproduction of the old John Birch favorite, IMPEACH EARL WARREN—GET US OUT OF THE UN NOW! The other, more sunfaded, said BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE AND BILL AND HILLARY.

  Stapleton sat in a white plastic chair sipping from a Coast Guard mug. He wore a red sleeveless shirt and grease-stained khaki shorts. He’d plastered his front porch with homemade wood plaques—every right-wing slogan and epithet ever devised, each on its own license-plate-sized board, some hand-painted, some etched with a wood burner, some routed. I noted with relief that he either was not a bigot or possessed the wisdom not to broadcast his views on issues of race or sexual preference publicly. As I approached he made an exaggerated point of tapping the grip of a Sig Sauer pistol that lay on a small metal table. The Key West Citizen lay across his lap.

  “Name’s Rutledge,” I said. “I spoke to you in the hospital yesterday. When they brought in the woman who’d been shot in the hand.”

  “The photographer without a camera. You went off talking with that disco cop. I hope he dances better than he dresses.”

  “I’ve never witnessed it.”

  “You’re better off. What‘d’ya need?”

  “I want to show you a few pictures, see if you recognize faces.”

  “Having to do with that lady with the mouth on her?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Lemme see.” Arthur Stapleton held out his hand. He carefully inspected each of the seven prints. He shuffled three to the bottom of the stack he held and handed four back to me. He studied one particular print, a crowd shot angled down Duval toward the south. Olivia Jones had done wonders with this one; most of the faces were shadowed by hat brims or by the direction of the sunlight. Olivia had brightened the shadow areas and done something to make facial features more prominent.

  “We got us a conspiracy, don’t we,” said Stapleton.

  Oh, boy. “How so?”

  “I recognize three in this picture.”

  “Standing together?”

  “No. This here’s the city zoning pisshead who told me I couldn’t open a machine shop out back the house here. Like me working the garage is gonna fuck up property values in this white-trash neighborhood. This here’s a guy used to hang out at the Tides Inn. Weirdo. Always quotin’ some magazine called Harper’s. I think he and Castro was butthole buddies. And this boy over here was the grommet, the other night, who told me his burns was from falling asleep with a cigarette, lighting up his bedsheet. Like I told you yesterday, I know cigarette burns when I see them.”

  “Why are they different?”

  “Cigarette burns get in between fingers. Gasoline, other fluids, the shape of the burn is different, spread around more. Shit, I can’t explain it. I just know the difference, is all.” He handed me the remaining three. “You take pictures for the cops. I hope not the feds.”

  “City and county, part-time.”

  “So these snaps are from that dead man on the Conch Train. What’s this zoning dork got to do with it? And this Moynihan liberal? What’s the lady with the hurt hand got to do with it?”

  “All three, don’t know.”

  He rattled the newspaper. “Suspicious fire at Stannis Pharmacy?”

  “Right.”

  The man was fast. As quickly as I had confirmed a nagging suspicion that the fire was linked to my crime-scene film, he’d linked the burned hand to the Conch Train murder. He’d be ecstatic to know about Jesse Spence’s wrecked apartment and bugged phone. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “I get it.” He tapped again on the pistol’s grip. “Your job’s not to solve ‘em. You do your bit and go home.”

  “Speaking of which, you see another gunshot wound, early today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Which hand did the man burn?”

  He thought a second. “His right hand.” He regarded me with skepticism. “Back to my conspiracy. Who are the most dangerous people in America?”

  There would be no correct answer for this man. It had been a long day. Arthur probably had loads of insight to add to our national dialogue, but I wasn’t ready for a litany of popular theories. I said, “People who operate gas-engine leaf blowers. Too many of them earn hourly wages just moving dirt, one location to another.”

  “Like the justice system, in general?”

  He was quick, too.

  As I stepped off the porch, a woman’s face appeared behind a dirty front window. I half-recognized her, but wasn’t sure. I kept going without smiling or waving. The brain flash hit as I started the motorcycle: LaDene Sumter, the fire-breathing emergency room duty nurse.

  I had to fight my way through end-of-day traffic at Publix. Marshall Hoff took charge of my cemetery film, though I wasn’t as concerned for its welfare as I had been for the earlier murder photographs. More than concern, I felt relief that the graveyard violence was not connected to the Cahill whirlpool.

  As an alternative to twiddling my thumbs, I shopped for my usual buggy-load: Bustelo coffee, lemon-pepper linguine, pretzels, and a jar of Classico sauce—enough to carry on the Kawasaki. I also bought two boxes of cigars, a thank-you for Hector Ayusa. Hoff handed me my processed film and prints in the checkout line.

  As I rode home I considered Stapleton’s conspiracy beliefs. Maybe the man wasn’t so off-the-wall. For sixty hours flak had flown at me from multiple directions. Maybe I needed to look over both shoulders at once, grow eyes in the back of my head. Maybe the answers I needed were right in front of me, and I wasn’t taking time to look at them.

  Like pictures, a matter of focus.

  12

  I passed the turnoff to Dredgers Lane and continued down Southard with the clerks and restaurant servers bicycling to their night shifts. None of my groceries needed immediate refrigeration. I decided to gamble on Liska’s not being in his office, drop the crime-scene prints on his desk, postpone his inevitable bluster, maybe bail Claire out of a tedious interrogation.

  As I waited for the light at Simonton, a thunderous Harley pulled next to my Kawasaki, then edged forward to claim a jump on the green. An Ohio tag. Black T-shirt. Bass Weejun loafers. An anesthesiologist, arriving early for the annual Key West Poker Run. He let fly a few harsh and unnecessary throttle burps. The light changed. He stalled the hog. I weaved around, went left, took myself up to thirty miles per hour, then coasted into the municipal parking lot.

  Marge Sayre, the city hall receptionist, buzzed me through the access door. Marge’s perennial cheer had departed a few weeks earlier, along with her third husband. She’d quit doing home-decor craft projects and begun, once again, reading paperbacks with Fabio covers. If she held to pattern, a new love and a fresh smile would appear by early January, the third week of the tourist season. Marge signaled to warn me: Liska, upstairs.

  The second floor hall smelled of Old Spice and cheap pizza. Most of the detectives were gone for the day. One straggler with his feet propped on an evidence retrieval kit studied a copy of Guns and Ammo. No sign of Teresa Barga.

  Liska sat at his desk. Cootie Ortega hovered behind him, hunched over, stupid-looking. The men were reviewing Ortega’s s pictures of my shattered window and trashed living room. A stranger to exercise, Ortega had thrown the fight to gravity: his rounded shoulders, world-class slouch, and gray skin made him look like a timid Hispanic Homer Simpson. Nothing in the of fice suggested that Fred Liska had begun campaigning for the top elective job in county law enforcement. Chicken Neck’s eyes flicked my way. His head didn’t move. “Though
t you’d be at the beach by now.”

  I parried. “This place looks empty without your racing bike in here.”

  Cootie’s face showed the strain of a looming conclusion. He suddenly understood that Liska had lied when he’d denied owning the Cannondale. Chicken Neck wanted to wise-remark his way out of it. He eyeballed the sack of food that I’d carried into the building. “You bring a late lunch?”

  “It’s all that low-fat food you wanted me to get for you.”

  Ortega’s eyes glazed over. Now he’d pegged Liska as a health nut.

  Chicken Neck sneered and went back to studying the pictures. He began to hand each photograph to me as he finished with it. Cootie’s prints were so spotted, I wondered if he hadn’t spilled coffee grounds in his darkroom. It crossed my mind to beg copies for an insurance claim. Ah, but there wouldn’t be an insurance claim. If the repairs weren’t under the deductible ceiling, the lift in future rates would cancel out all possible benefits.

  One of Ortega’s straight-on shots, an underexposed photo with bleak contrast, held my attention. It centered the bustedup window on the exterior wall. Oriented vertically, it included the roof overhang, up high, and, down low, the ground under the house. My eyes kept drifting to the bottom of the frame. At first I thought Cootie had added the dirt spot below the window for flavor. But dirty negs produce white spots in positive prints. This was a dark spot, not full black.

  “Great job, Ortega.” Liska fanned out three of the better exposures, held them closer to compare them. “But no use pursuing this case until we get the victim to cooperate.”

  I dead-panned: “You mean, of course, the man who got himself shot.”

  Liska leaned back in his chair. He lifted his eyes to his discolored ceiling. “How many times a year your place get burgled?”

  “First time since I’ve owned the house.”

  “You should be offended. The thieves are eyeballin’ the place as a dump, not worth the effort.”

  “Perfect.”

  “What’s in your house, all of a sudden, important to a thief?” said Liska. “Bear in mind, I’m asking this forty-eight hours after your dear friend Cahill became a murder suspect.”

  I shook my head. Anything important to thieves was either hidden in my camera stash or too old to have value in a pawn shop. Burglars rarely went after books and lithographs. The spot in the photo gave me the best clue to why the prowler wanted in. It’d take too much explaining.

  “Cahill’s wife is right outside the door, correct?”

  “My houseguest went for a long walk to collect her thoughts. Why don’t we do lunch tomorrow? You bagged out today. I recall it being your invitation. The Banana Café?”

  Liska looked up. “You didn’t read their sign, bubba. They close tonight for their annual thirty-day vacation. Case you didn’t notice, it’s the off-season. Make it breakfast at Harpoon Harry’s. Dutch treat. Seven-thirty sharp.”

  I had given up knocking on Olivia Jones’s locked second-floor office when she appeared at the top of the stairs. “No damn way.” She stopped to catch her breath. “The favors went ‘tilt’ before I finished those proofs.”

  “I understand.”

  “So you brought a checkbook.”

  I asked Olivia to bring up two of the scanned photographs on her monitor. I found the one Stapleton had pinpointed. “Can you zoom in on this guy?”

  “Yes. But the closer we get, the more pixilated it gets.”

  “Pixilated.”

  “In film talk, grainy. There’s only so much digital information in a given area. Think graph paper. Every little square is a separate pixel. Big squares, grainy picture. Small squares, less pixilation. High resolution means small squares. When you zoom, the squares get larger.”

  The American educational system needed Olivia. “Can you test it to see how far we can go?”

  “Let me try. I may have to re-scan it. Have you got the negative with you?”

  I shook my head.

  On her computer monitor, Olivia trimmed the photograph to a three-inch square. I saw recognizable facial features on the burned-hand man. For a split second, the face looked vaguely familiar. I couldn’t attach a name.

  I begged for a print. Olivia countered with symbolic whining, but went to work. The image size allowed her to fit four copies on one sheet of proofing paper. It would take twenty minutes.

  Before I left Dun-Rite Grafficks, I wrote, “Arson suspect/no name avail/call me” on a Post-it Note, then stuck it to one of the three-inch-square blown-up pictures of the burned man. I slid the photo inside a five-by-seven envelope that I’d bummed from Olivia, and rode the Cannondale to the police station to leave the envelope for Liska.

  The watch commander, a lieutenant named Garrett, a former WICWF disc jockey, told me to go ahead upstairs. Through Liska’s open door I recognized a local attorney in the visitor’s chair. I got Liska’s attention. His face locked into the chill of contempt. I waved the envelope. He watched me slot it in the box outside his office. He nodded and returned to his discussion. On the way out of the building, I checked my watch. Only fivethirty.

  I rode home, coasted the Kawasaki into the yard, and went straight to the ruined window. I had guessed correctly. Down in the dirt, plain as could be. I still had the Ziploc in my pocket that Spence had handed me, the one that held the miniature transceiver he’d found in his phone. Identical to the one down in the dirt. I added the new one to the baggie.

  Odd that the technicians had missed it. Not so odd that Cootie Ortega hadn’t seen it. Beyond linking my incident to Spence’s, it confirmed the fact that Hector’s bullet had allowed me to dodge a bigger one. My intruder would have rampaged to cover his tracks, done his sick, attention-diverting dance of destruction.

  Only one thing linked me to Jesse Spence. My friendship with Zack.

  My house smelled of lemon and tea. Claire had housecleaned, moved a few pieces of furniture. The plants looked freshly watered. Perhaps someday I would discover the fundamental imbalance in my surroundings that compels my women friends to rearrange things.

  I heard voices out back. I leaned over the kitchen sink to view the yard. An illogical perfecta. Claire Cahill and Abby Womack, sunbathing. They had positioned two lounge chairs in a pocket of sunlight in the northeast corner. They were wearing only panties—except for Abby’s bandages—and sipping from tall glasses, chatting like old friends.

  Claire had been adamant. Abby Womack still dreams of reconciliation. Suddenly the girls were off by themselves, yakking, sunbathing, dishing the dirt. My yard had become no-man’s-land. Zack Cahill, at that moment, whatever his condition, was glad not to be wearing my salt-weathered sneakers.

  She thinks of herself as Zack’s long lost business partner.

  I put the groceries in the cupboard, Hector’s cigars on the porch table so I would remember to take them across the lane. I considered taking the color proofs out back, but the images probably wouldn’t mean anything to either woman. Plus, something troubling had slipped back into my mind: Abby’s refusal to give her name at the hospital. I locked the Omar Boudreau—scene proofs and cemetery negs in my cabinet-base stash.

  I didn’t want to burst into the tanning zone like a peeper looking to tally four bare ones in a Hash—two that I had seen two nights ago, two that I had seen—and silently lusted after—twenty years ago at a drunken picnic on Ballast Key. I didn’t want to call out that I’d arrived home; they would bust me for already helping myself to the view. I waffled. I slammed drawers, made other noises to make my presence known. I turned on the stereo and cranked up Huey “Piano” Smith. “You give me high blood pressure …”

  I peeked again through the kitchen window. Claire wiggled two fingers at me. A little “gotcha” wave.

  I opened a beer and carried a bowl of pretzels to the table between them. I tried to ignore the lazy nipples, tiny pools of sweat in their belly buttons, immodest tufts escaping underwear elastic. I put down the beer, pulled up a chair, then unbuttoned and rem
oved my shirt. Why be the only one clothed above the waist?

  I smiled at Claire. She returned my smile. I smiled at Abby. She did the same. Pleasant as three folks meeting in church. The temperature had gone down a degree or two. The light breeze kept the foliage in motion. Everyone acted as if everything was normal. The neighbor’s spaniel whimpered through the fence. I agreed.

  I locked eyes with Abby Womack. “Pretty short stay in the hospital.”

  “I took it upon myself. Like checking out of a hotel. I got dressed, called a taxi and paid my bill, cash on the barrelhead. Can’t say much about the room service.”

  “Are you okay? Do you have to go back for anything?”

  Abby sneered at her gauze-wrapped right hand, then waved it at the right side of her head. Tiny scabs had formed where at least a dozen fragments of the cell phone had cut her facial skin. “Someone shot a hole in my hair. I was just describing to Claire, I remembered, right before it happened, something caught my eye. A flash or a quick movement. If I hadn’t turned to look”—she aimed a finger into her ear—“the bullet would have gone in this way. I’d be catching rays in the big tanning booth in the sky.”

  “They got a dress code up there.”

  Abby laughed. “Everyone in gauzy angel gowns, but full slips. No see-throughs.” She wiped a trickle of perspiration that ran down the middle of her chest. The movement caused jiggling. The sun caught the metallic finish of the bracelet on her left wrist. “You got your bike back.”

  “You must have put a leg-lock on it while you were waiting for help.”

  “I fell on it.” She pointed to a black-and-blue patch low on her hip. Dead center on her left cheek. “My bottom hurts as much as my hand.”