by Tom Corcoran
I came around a corner and caught sight of the murder victim. Like Kansas Jack, he was hung from a davit.
Bohner spit out his gum. “Christ,” he said. “They didn’t tell me he was a swinger, too. Couple more of these, we could make wind chimes.”
3
We approached a cluster of uniforms, hairy eyeballs from no one I knew. A stocky man who looked like a retired Marine turned to check us out. He wore slacks, an open-neck dress shirt, and a beige sport coat. He approached and reached his hand toward me.
Bohner butted in. “This is Rutledge, Detective. He’s—”
“I can see the camera, Deputy. Sheriff Liska called and said to expect someone special.” He half smiled and studied my face as if he wanted to recognize me. “I’m Detective Chet Millican. Dressed as you are, I take it you’re undercover FDLE.”
Local-level cops always held the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in awe.
“I’m a civilian,” I said.
Millican looked me up and down. “Ex-cop?”
I shook my head, tried not to stare at his military-perfect silver crew cut.
His patronizing smirk went cold. “Tallahassee consultant?”
“No,” I said, “I’m a freelance photographer. Anything but weddings and babies.”
Our discussion began to draw attention from nearby uniforms and forensic personnel. He shook his head and inhaled enough air to double his size. “Take your cameras off my crime scene. Deputy, take him back where he came from.”
“Call the boss,” said Bohner.
Millican sneered and exhaled to show his exasperation. “I still got a hard time calling him boss,” he said. “It was plain Chicken Neck back in the city. If I wanted it bad enough, I might take credit for making up that nickname. Why isn’t our surefire detective right here right now? You don’t see hangings all that often, unless they’re suicides in a locked room. In the old days this would interest the hell out of him.”
Bohner said nothing.
Millican quieted his tone. “I’m starting to think Fred Liska’s reputation exceeded him.”
“That makes him not your boss?” I said.
Millican jerked as if I had slugged him. He stared up an empty flagpole for a moment, then shook his head. “I’ve had a crew on hold for eighty damn minutes. I was waiting for a snotty civilian to fall by and nose around? This is too much bullshit.”
Bohner shrugged, a helpless gesture. “All due respect, sir, but put it in your report. The man told me to bring him here, and I’m betting he told you to grant access.”
“Stay put,” said the detective. He walked away and slapped his cell phone to his ear hard enough to knock himself sideways.
I changed my mind about not wanting to be there. I wanted to force my presence on the belligerent dickhead, wallow in his crime scene. For the moment I wondered about Bohner. He had fired back two good answers and given me words of assurance. That and his offer of gum put him out of character four times inside of ten minutes.
“Don’t mind Millican,” said Bohner. “Man likes to think he’s King Shit.”
“How come I’ve never met him before?” I said.
“Liska hired him about seven weeks ago. A long time ago, probably before you were born, he used to be a Key West cop. The last thirty years he’s been a detective somewhere up in New England. Florida draws these old guys, so I guess it figures he came back to the Keys. Hell, he’s got his retirement bennies plus a county salary. I heard Liska didn’t really want to hire him, but we were shy a qualified man in Marathon.”
Detective Millican walked toward us. He spoke with a scene tech en route, kicked some gravel, stared at me with a quizzical look, then motioned Bohner aside. The men conferred for a minute, then Millican ordered the uniforms to stand back.
“You’re clear to stay,” said Bohner. “Don’t get into their turf, but check it out. Get a feel for the crime.”
“That’s my job description? Get a feel?”
“I got it thirdhand. Have yourself a look-see, a little picnic. Maybe Liska wants insights. Good luck with that.”
“Is a look-see like a listen-hear?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll ask Millican. It might be like a fuck off.”
“What time was he found?”
“Just after sunup.” Bohner aimed his finger at a trailer with warped side walls. “The wine expert who shares his mildew palace came outside to barf off the stoop. He said he thought it was a davit repairman working early and he went back to bed. A woman in his dream told him it was a dead man noosed high. He came back out to look and went flippo, started screaming to the neighbors.”
“Dead man have a name?” I said.
“Milton Navarre.”
“A phony one.”
Bohner looked bored. “What makes you think that?”
“It’s an exit off Interstate 10, near Pensacola.”
“An exit?”
“Milton and Navarre Beach are towns up there.”
“Whatever. I worked in the jail, I had a prisoner named Bobby Detroit. I put him in a cell with a hophead named Gainesville. Everybody got a kick out of the Map Twins. This guy here, I see him like the stiff you photoed back on Ramrod. Another slug who doesn’t have to worry about West Nile virus.”
“You missed the sensitivity-training update?”
“Being this way helps me keep my bearings.” He looked at me like I had lost my mind. “I thought you had a sense of humor.”
“I sold it to you guys.”
“That may be true, but watch yourself. None of it trickled down to Millican.”
I wasn’t sure what the sheriff wanted, but Millican was right. Liska could’ve come to Marathon to get his own facts instead of sending me. Chicken Neck had made his rep as a city detective, then jumped away, won the election, and became sheriff. I had no police knowledge beyond what we all see on TV shows and the few tidbits I’d picked up working local crimes in recent years. I certainly had no methods for working up plausible theories. What weight could Liska give my opinion, anyway?
My task came down to a short agenda. I wondered how the men were connected; I had no doubt they were. Near-identical murders the same morning don’t occur by chance. With that fact given, I wanted to know whether two killers or one had hung the men. Also, had Kansas Jack and Milton Navarre known each other? Had they known their killers, simply answered their doors without suspicion? Or had they been wakened, pistol barrels to their noses, and marched outside to their executions?
The wind had picked up. Navarre swung like a dead-weight pendulum.
I took forty photos in three minutes—of the davit, the dirt under Navarre, his neighbors, his palace, the Dumpster, his distance from the dredged canal, and close-ups of his face and the noose. He wore the plaid pants common to street people and nothing else. He probably had gone five-eight before his air dance, close to six-even with his neck stretched. Kansas Jack had been low-rent, but Navarre, at best, was one step up from a weedsleeper. He had a carbo belly, but unlike Kansas Jack, he wore no duct tape. He may have been handsome once, but his new ruggedness spoke of tobacco, whisky, sunshine, and coffee. Dried blood coated his teeth and lips. Copper splotches covered his chest.
With so many cops and spectators, my shots of the general area would be useless unless the killer had returned to gape and gloat. I fitted a wide-angle lens, shot the crowd without even peering through my viewfinder, then quit and looked for Bohner. I wanted a beer more than a ride. I felt assured that my return trip to Ramrod would come first.
Detective Millican approached. “How would an expert like you describe the corpse?”
“No shirt, no shoes, no problems.”
“That’s the dead man’s point of view. Now he’s my problem.”
“Guess that’s the deal. I get to go home.”
“Tell me again why you came,” he said.
“If you find out, let me know. Are all these nearby trailers occupied?”
“If any
was empty,” said Millican, “some liquid-brain would find his way in.”
“Who owns the davits? Do they go with one of the trailers, or does the landlord maintain them?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
“How is the electric hooked up?”
Millican shrugged.
“Can anyone operate them, or is there a lock on the switch box?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Call ahead before you come next time.”
“I feel unwanted. It’s a shame because this is how I like to spend my Thursdays.”
“We’ll call you when we need to test another steel cable.”
Bohner left a circle of deputies, joined me at his car. “Navarre was a plumber, part-time if ever,” he said. “No one enjoyed his company. His income was lean and mean, but he had cash for cheap bourbon.”
“The goofball that found him,” I said. “He’s not a suspect?”
“He’s got a passive defense. He was in a bar on the highway at three A.M., too drunk to walk. The saloon owner drove him here, rolled him into the trailer’s front door. That lovely fact, and his knuckles aren’t beat up from tapping the vic’s teeth.”
I pointed to a trash can full of empty bottles. “Is the murder weapon in there, or was it chucked in the canal?”
“The murder weapon was a noose.”
“Then why no duct tape? Why didn’t the victim call out for help? Even if he was passed-out drunk, getting hung would’ve wakened him. He died before he was yanked up the davit.”
“Fuck.” Bohner pivoted on one foot, left me standing there, and strode the best he could back to Millican.
A minute later I watched the result of my logic. A black deputy with a grim face and rubber gloves pushed the dead man’s roommate into his cruiser’s backseat. I heard him promise the dude a shower and a shave. Two deputies began to string yellow crime-scene tape around the trash can. Detective Millican’s body language broadcast a massive grudge.
It wouldn’t spoil the rest of my day.
On the way back to Ramrod, I asked Bohner why Liska had fired the Marathon-based photographer.
“The boy heaved every time he saw blood,” said Bohner.
“How was his photo work?”
“Fuck if I know. You need to be blessed with genius to point and shoot? He was a jerk-off. I just hope you’re not his replacement.”
“I fit the same category?” I said.
“You’re the boss’s buddy. True or not, you’d be seen as a rat.”
“What’s to tattle?” I said. “Does everyone have a side scam? Or is it just laziness?”
“Don’t get the wrong idea, Rutledge. Things are clean these days, you compare it to the eighties. Worse than that, the seventies.”
“That doesn’t mean the Keys haven’t gone downhill.”
“You’re into another subject,” he said. “Like crime changes, the county changes.”
I shut up, listened to the tires on concrete, and didn’t attempt to decipher his analogy.
We came off the Seven Mile Bridge and slowed to pass a trooper who had stopped a Mustang convertible. The three men in the rental car looked half asleep, but we knew they were two-thirds blitzed. If they were lucky, the Florida Highway Patrol wouldn’t call in the drug-sniffing dog. One way or another, their holiday cash would be collected at the hotel with no reservations.
“You napping or thinking?” said Bohner.
“You must be thinking, too, or you wouldn’t have asked.”
“That call you made on there being a murder weapon. It’s the first time I’ve seen why Liska respects you.”
“I don’t know about respect,” I said. “He hires me, I work cheap, and I take good pictures. I shot four rolls on Ramrod. They’ll prove Kansas Jack was hung by his neck and not his ankles. I came up here with you and shot another couple rolls that will prove the same thing for Navarre. Hung by his neck.”
“You’ll collect your hourly rate,” he said. “What’s to complain?”
“When’s the last time you saw a davit hanging?”
“These past eighteen years I’ve seen and heard it all, but never a davit. I mean, in the Keys we got more davits than pelicans, but not hooked to people. Now we get two in one day.”
“That’s my point,” I said. “It’s too weird to be a coincidence. It’s a single crime with two crime scenes.”
“I don’t think anybody would doubt that, Rutledge.”
“Did you look closely at the victim on Ramrod?”
Bohner shook his head. “I was told to stay out on the street.”
“I’m a civilian?”
“Excellent point.”
“Then why am I the only person who’s had a close look at both of them? Why not two or three detectives investigating, comparing notes, all the shit they do? Where’s Sheriff Liska? Why isn’t he here in the car with us?”
Bohner forced a bored look on his face. “Ask me ten more I can’t answer. I do my job, and I do what they tell me.”
“Well, I didn’t beg for this, and I can’t stop thinking it’s going to bite me in the ass real soon.”
“Got me already,” he said.
I was going to let his statement hang, but he’d opened a door. “How so?”
“The last few years I get my kids four weeks every summer. The rest of the time they live with their bitch of a mother up in Raleigh. Last summer I was a dictator worse than the bitch. My twelve-year-old, going on eighteen, told me she never wanted to come back. The boy kept complaining about always being wrong, no matter what he did right. At first I thought tough shit, but it started to eat at me. I bit the bullet, went to the shrink the boss keeps on retainer.”
Hearing an introspective No Jokes Bohner talk about himself was as odd as having to view two davit hangings in a single day.
“The shrink have an opinion?” I said.
“He told me I was addicted to power but didn’t have any, so I overused my resources. In a word, I was pushy.”
Bingo, I thought. If I had to pick from the dictionary, pushy would be it. “That was it?” I said.
“He suggested I lose the push, and he sent me to meditation class.”
I couldn’t picture it. “For what?”
“To lower my blood pressure.”
“Did it work?”
“You bet. I can still be myself, but I won’t seize up and die from it.”
“Did they sign up Millican for the same program?”
Bohner sniffed and shook his head. “I expect his deepest thoughts come during TV wrestling. If they had dog fights, he’d watch them, too.”
“Sounds like perfect inner workings for a detective,” I said.
“The reason I brought up fighting dogs, I once heard him compared. He sinks his teeth into something, he doesn’t let go. Back there he got his feeding eye on you.”
4
I aimed my old Triumph motorcycle at the dropping sun, rode across the Saddlebunch, where concrete utility poles like prison bars hacked my south view. Along this stretch the preferred move was to look north to where shallow channels snaked out of the Gulf of Mexico into basins carpeted with sea grass, vegetation thrived, pockets of mangroves expanded as they had for centuries. Stark, stained boats had anchored in bay shallows not a hundred yards from U.S. 1, their boxy shapes pure function, their work gear simple and worn. A line of menacing clouds filled the gulf horizon and fed a gray squall that washed the Mud Keys. Even the stench of dead plankton at the tide line drew me to calm.
On Stock Island I looked for and didn’t find Liska’s car at his office. I U-turned and rode into Key West against the flow of mainland-bound single-day tourists and workday commuters rushing home to the Lower Keys. After inspecting two corpses and having my rational chat with Billy Bohner, I was too wiped to deal with the gas grill or a restaurant meal. I had emptied my kitchen stock so I could vacate the cottage and make room for Johnny Griffin. My best option was a chilly six-pack and slippery chicken from Dion’s.
“Why did Liska, of all people, bring me your film?” said Duffy Lee. “I figured you were in jail.”
I explained my day, the road miles and similar victims.
“Awful way to go,” he said. “I ran a proof sheet. I assume that geezer on Ramrod had to listen to the davit’s electric motor in the dark.”
“Wait till you see the shots on this new roll. Different rules, same result.”
“Liska was not wearing, by the way, a vintage polyester shirt.”
“He’s abandoned his seventies look,” I said. “Now that he’s more in the public eye, he’s working a new dimension.”
“He wants me to scan the best prints and e-mail him JPEGs.”
“Our nostalgia king is wiring himself into the future.”
“I don’t know,” said Duffy Lee. “He looked rough, like he was wired to a bad habit. Maybe all these years on the job have caught up with him.”
I shut off my motor and coasted past my porch into the backyard.
During the winter I had paid a carpenter to build a shed for my vintage Triumph. He made it sturdy, big enough to also hold my bicycle and a gas can. He strapped it to a concrete base and painted it two-tone gray. Its shingle-roof runoff goes to my mango tree. My neighbor in the lane, my dear friend Carmen Sosa, joked that if I ever fell short of cash, I could disguise it with trellises, hook it to cable, and lease it as a trundle-bed bungalow.
My small home on Dredgers Lane offers a credible version of paradise. I’m walking distance from saloons, fine food, not-so-fine food, a convenience store, a hardware, and a bike-repair shop. It felt great to be back, and I sensed my first twinge of guilt for having peddled my right to live there for the next eight weeks. Then I put the guilt in perspective: years ago I joked that all I needed was a boat outside my door and a canal with backcountry access. Al Manning’s stilt house on Little Torch would deliver those two perks in less than twenty-four hours. I looked forward to a change of scenery, however temporary. I also looked forward to cutting back on my work schedule, at least locally.
