EQMM, September-October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  A job meant money, which I desperately needed.

  "Nothing right now," I said.

  "Good, you can stake out my flight club. Somebody broke into the office last night."

  His flight club was actually an air-charter business, named by some long-ago eccentric who had flown rum over from Cuba. Hub's business, so far as I knew, consisted of hauling tourists seventy miles out into the Gulf of Mexico for snorkeling trips among the Dry Tortugas.

  We worked out the terms—that is, Hub told me what the gig was worth and I said okay. Then I called my sometime helper Babe McKenzie, who always needs a few bucks to feed her cats and her boyfriends.

  Before dark, I hunkered down in Hub Bennell's office, and Babe hid herself in the converted boathouse that served as a hangar for two island-hopping Cessna 185s. While we were doing that, somebody came ashore at my client's stilt house two miles up the island and shot Hub deader than a crab leg.

  I spent a lot of the night talking to the police.

  * * * *

  Barry Irvington was my favorite cop when he was looking after me in a paternal way—not so favorite when he felt lonely and thought he needed a girlfriend thirty years younger than himself. Tonight he was red-eyed and rumpled, in a tan suit that belonged in a ‘forties movie (one where the emotionally damaged hero washes ashore in the Tropics), his hair damp and finger-combed forward, his breath redolent of cigarettes. He wasn't pretty and he was all business. Bennell had been a successful Key West businessman. He'd also been part of the political establishment. Right there, two strikes against me.

  "He said he was worried about theft,” I repeated.

  "Tell me again. Neither you nor the McKenzie woman saw anything?"

  "There was a raccoon about eleven o'clock,” I reminded him. “But nobody out to steal an airplane."

  He was my friend, but he was also a cop. Five minutes into the interview, he'd checked my gun to see if it had been fired. It hadn't been, not since I'd taken it out to the range two months ago, to satisfy myself I hadn't forgotten everything Dad taught me about shooting. If you're going to do security gigs in Florida, where everyone who isn't officially a criminal or insane can get a carry permit, it's stupid to work unarmed. I was carrying a Beretta .380 autoloader, which was a little too big for my hand.

  Barry and I had already gone through the stuff about how Hub had acted: not like he expected someone to shoot him. Babe was getting the third degree, or at least a cup of coffee, in another detective's car.

  There was a tap at the window, and the deputy chief of police climbed into the backseat. Curtis LeMoye gave me a sour look. He hadn't liked my father, and he saw no reason to like me.

  "Why don't you have her in handcuffs?” he grumbled.

  Barry replied, “If she tries to escape, we can shoot her."

  LeMoye looked away from me. “We're going to wrap this up, Irvington. I'll leave a couple of guys on the scene. Zelda's done with the body. Thinks he took two straight in the ticker, two in the head."

  He got back out into the rain. Barry gave Babe and me a ride back to her pickup truck at the flying club. As she cranked up the engine, she said, “Meggie, did Bennell pay you anything on account?” I had promised her a hundred dollars for the evening.

  "No, sorry."

  "You're not much of a businesswoman. Always get something on account.” She was in her mid forties, chesty as a sailing ship, blond as a swamp fire, opinionated as anyone's mother. In upstate New York, she had been a sheriff's deputy or a hooker, depending on how she felt when she told her story.

  "I'll make it up to you,” I said.

  "I don't see how,” Babe responded, and drove off.

  * * * *

  Barry took me farther down the Atlantic side of the island to Hawkes’ Marina, where the masts of my father's ten-meter fiberglass sailboat slashed the smudgy predawn. Boats can't have premonitions, but this one looked as if it knew it had reached its last berth. Everything about it leaked. My father had been a serious drinker who hadn't had time for boat maintenance. If the bilge pump ever died, the decks would be awash in twenty-four hours.

  Dad hadn't been great at family upkeep, either. My mother and I had been living in Connecticut when a cop called and asked if we were related to the Daniel Trevor who had been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Sailing alone, sixty-eight years old, probably with a celebratory glass of something in hand, toasting the windy sunset, toasting the frigate birds, stumbling on a coiled rope—something like that, dying stupid. A fisherman who came across the drifting boat towed it back to Key West. He refused a salvage claim because he thought Danny Trevor had been a hero. If you hit the right bars in the Lower Keys, CIA pensioners lean on their elbows recalling glory days on the Mosquito Coast. Or they try to remember the name of the guard who wired them up at Isla de Pinos. Like high school jocks reliving the big game of ‘68.

  Mom wasn't interested in a half-sunk boat. I was four months out of college with no job in sight, so I came down to clear up the estate. Initially I thought there was nothing but the old ketch, which he called KeyHole, thinking it was funny painting a secret code word on the transom. Later I found the compartment in the ceiling, where he had stowed two handguns, one Ithaca side-by-side with jammed works, a couple of gray blocks of something that I knew, having never seen it before, was plastic explosive, and a fully automatic rifle without serial numbers. Altogether, enough to get me twenty years just for being an heir. What had he been planning?

  I hadn't told anyone about the compartment. Since the KeyHole wasn't seaworthy, I couldn't even haul the contraband out to the Gulfstream for disposal. I didn't know what else to do with it. I could guard a lot of liquor stores without needing a cake of C4. My ex-boyfriend was back in New Haven, and I didn't bear enough of a grudge to send him an exploding package.

  When Barry dropped me off, the marina was quiet.

  The man sitting in the cockpit of my boat didn't belong there. He wasn't trying to hide, maybe just the opposite, because the cigar tip glowed as I came down the walkway that Mimi Hawkes kept promising to repair. “Meggie,” he called—and I recognized the voice and stopped thinking “he."

  Apart from the cigar, Gloria Hasty could have been invisible in the dark. Black watch cap, black turtleneck, tight jeans, she was decked out for prowling. The watch cap hid short hair dyed so deeply red it looked metallic under the neon lights along the town's main drag, where she bought dinner for tough boys who could have been her grandsons. We were a mile from Duval Street. Gloria stood up, and the cigar lit one hand well enough that I saw that it was all she was holding. The other hand was pushing back her watch cap.

  "I've been waiting here for hours,” she complained.

  "You should have called.” She was one of the few ex-Agency people my father counted as a friend. But it was after four in the morning and my mood was sour. “What do you want?"

  "I got a sudden urge to buy one of your paintings, dear. Something with gulls and pelicans. Do you have any like that?” Her tone mocked both of us. My paintings were junk. She might hang one in one of the bungalows where her young men slept. A bad painting would be amusing, like the human curiosities. There was a flicker of light behind a curtain in the boat's main cabin. When she saw that I had noticed, Gloria said, “I want you to meet someone, Meggie. Come on out, Tom! Switch on the deck lights."

  Blinking as the deck lights popped on, I moved a step closer.

  "Tom's housebroken,” Gloria announced as a shadow came out of the companionway and onto the aft deck. The shadow was tall and bearded and wore a big floppy safari hat, a black T-shirt, and a blazer with buttons that flashed almost as bright at Gloria's cigar butt. He nodded across the space between us.

  "You're a pretty bad painter.” His beard was mostly white, and behind it he wore a big squinty grin.

  "You broke into my boat."

  He gave a little shrug. “I'm not really housebroken. I'm Colonel Tom Parker.” He didn't expect me to believe him. The name was one of those lit
tle jokes, like KeyHole, an all-purpose introduction as secret as a two-finger handshake while tugging your left ear: Langley calling.

  Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I said, “Pleased to meet you."

  * * * *

  "Your old man was one of the great ones,” Tom Parker said. Having turned down coffee, he was sitting at the galley table, hands folded, showing a thick wedding band and clean fingernails. “He'd be sorry he didn't get to go out in combat."

  If my father was sorry about anything when he died, it would be that he hadn't had time for another Margarita. I didn't think Parker had known him very well.

  "Is that how you feel?” I asked. “Hoping to go out in combat?"

  "Well, honey—officially I'm retired. Unofficially, I'm still in the game. Both me and Miss Gloria."

  Miss Gloria nodded vigorously. “We'd better tell Meggie what's going on. A man named Hector Avila killed your client tonight, honey. Hector steals boats. Your client, Hubbard Bennell, has a boatyard. Guess what happens there?"

  "I don't know."

  Tom Parker stepped in. “The stolen boats get a new profile, fresh paint, brand new nameplate, made-to-order log books. Then some wetback takes ‘em across to Veracruz—that's the city named for the True Cross, kid—and they get sold to South Americanos who can afford both a hundred-foot boat and two mistresses. Hector Avila would steal the eyeballs off a corpse if there was a peso in it."

  "Where's the boatyard?"

  "Little east of Stock Island."

  "And why do you care?"

  "CIA pension don't stretch that far,” said Colonel Tom Parker. “But the marine-insurance people pay us pretty good. If we disrupt Avila's export business, recover the last boat he pinched at Little Palm, me and Miss Gloria will clear about seventy-five K."

  "So you broke into my boat looking for Avila."

  "Naw, kid. I broke in ‘cause I got bored waiting. Now the good news. If you want to help us, we're good for a few hundred bucks. Help us a lot, there's more.” He glanced around the cabin, which probably smelled musty if you hadn't been living there. “Danny's old boat looks like it could use repairs."

  The KeyHole needed more than repairs. The slip fee was due. My phone was running out of minutes. I had about seventy dollars to my name. For some reason—maybe it was the cold snap—tourists weren't buying my paintings. I had been looking forward to a check from Hub Bennell.

  "Why did Avila kill Mr. Bennell?” I asked Gloria.

  "There's no honor among thieves, Meggie. Even less with Hector-cito. I believe Tom is going to have to take him out."

  Tom nodded confidently.

  Colonel Tom and Gloria shoved off before dawn, plowing across the small harbor in a Zodiac. I checked the hidden compartment, but there was no sign Tom had discovered it. His poking around seemed to have been random—correct that: eighty percent random, twenty percent perverted, which served me right for leaving personal items where the old creep could find them. I caught a few hours’ sleep with the hatches open, to blow out the stink of Gloria's cigar.

  By morning, the breeze pushing through the boat was warm, with a taste of Havana in it. I kicked off a sweaty sheet, plodded down to the marina for a shower, and then went across the road to the Carbuncle, a bikers’ dive, and ate chili for breakfast. Lem Samuel, the half-owner, claims the same kettle of chili has been simmering since the afternoon Nixon resigned. He had been letting me eat free because I was working on a portrait of him. His gray-streaked hair was almost Biblical in length, his bloodshot eyes could have been traced with red liner, and jailhouse X's were tattooed on the backs of his fingers. I would have painted him for free.

  "You want a beer?” he said.

  It was eight-twenty in the morning.

  "I can't afford a beer."

  "You dance here on Friday night, I'll pay you a hundred bucks."

  "A hundred wouldn't cover the antibiotics."

  "Eat the chili, Meggie, it cures everything. Look at me. I don't do doctors.” He leaned on the bar. “You hear about the murder?"

  I waved him away. I didn't want to talk about it.

  "They say he was stabbed a dozen times right in his shop on Duval Street."

  I put down my spoon. “Who are we talking about?"

  "Art dealer, important guy, Anders Hewitt. I don't suppose he sells your paintings.” Grinning at close range, Lem showed me teeth that should have been in a mummy case. “Now let me ask you, what's a rich guy doing in his gallery at five in the morning? That's when he called the cops and spilled out onto the sidewalk."

  I still couldn't face a beer, but I ordered a strong cup of coffee. That pot, too, had been brewing since the day Nixon resigned.

  * * * *

  Duval Street commerce was at its finest. There were baby sharks in bottles, President bobbleheads, T-shirts with stale obscenities, then the art galleries—only one of those was roped off with yellow tape forcing pedestrians to walk into the street. A biker chewing on his wrist strap had one foot down, leaning toward a sweaty cop, whom I recognized as one of Deputy Chief Curtis LeMoye's boys so I steered clear. There were blood spatters on the sidewalk outside the gallery, and the cop had his left heel in one of them. He was too busy chatting with the fellow on the V-8 to notice me peering in the shop window. The Last Island Gallery specialized in high-end art, oil paintings by people who had reputations, sculptures that looked liked they had come from Mayan ruins. Anders Hewitt, the late owner, got his picture in the newspaper every time the Arts Council donated a dollar to the homeless.

  Barry Irvington came out of the gallery.

  "Tell me you weren't guarding Anders Hewitt,” he said.

  "I wasn't."

  "You want breakfast?"

  The chili rumbled in my stomach. I shook my head. “What happened to Hewitt?"

  "Fourteen knife wounds, started bleeding inside the store, made it to the sidewalk.” Barry walked me down the street, away from the biker and the cop. “We've got no weapon, no video, about a thousand fingerprints. I was hoping it's a domestic thing, then there'd be a chance of solving it. But Hewitt lived with his sister, who says he was as sexless as a bee. No beefs with artists or customers. A wide circle of friendships, nothing intimate."

  For a minute I thought he was talking to himself, running through all the things he didn't have. Then he said, “One of his friends was Hubbard Bennell."

  He was doing his job, trying to solve a couple of murders. I was doing mine, trying to make a living—which Tom Parker and Gloria's gig promised to further. When I thought of one man with four bullets in him and another with fourteen stab wounds, I knew I was out of my class. I said, “Has the name Hector Avila turned up?"

  "Where did you hear it?"

  "Gloria Hasty paid me a visit last night. She had an old CIA type tagging along. They said Avila is a boat thief and that he killed Hub."

  Barry made a sour face. “How does Gloria know that?"

  "Does Hub have a boatyard?"

  "Yeah...."

  I told him Tom Parker's version of boat hijacking and refitting. As we talked, he thumbed through his notebook. “A couple of invoices at Hewitt's gallery show payments to an ‘H. Avila’ for art."

  "So struggling artists survive stealing boats."

  "Avila isn't struggling. Hewitt paid him an average of fifty thousand a month for most of last year. In fact—” he leafed back—"since April the payments added up to almost exactly fifty a month. Before that, it was thirty-five. Steady as rain. What does that have to do with stealing boats?"

  * * * *

  We drove in an unmarked car across the bridge onto Stock Island and spotted the sign SAILHOOK MARINA arching above a side road like a leaping marlin. The sign offered boatyard services and storage. A handful of slips beside a concrete pier were empty except for a couple of pontoon boats with open, empty decks.

  In the repair yard, two men were spray-coating the bottom of a cabin cruiser. When they saw Barry they removed their masks and switched off the compress
or. He didn't need to flash a badge. He probably didn't need to put his fists on his hips, pushing back his jacket to reveal the gun on his hip, but he did.

  "Who owns the boat?"

  The smaller man was round, pale, and half bald. He wore a basketball shirt that exposed the red hair on his shoulders. “Calvin Bordreaux owns her, has for twenty years. You know Calvin?"

  Barry looked the boat over. It didn't fit the description I'd got from Gloria of the yacht stolen from the resort at Little Palm Island. It was stubby and old, needed varnish, and even with a clean bottom it looked too shabby to motor into a high-end resort. “What's Calvin use her for?” Barry asked.

  "He takes his wife out on Florida Bay and they listen to the radio. Maybe pretend to fish."

  "Have you had anything bigger in the yard? Say about fifty-five feet, Danish design. Called Bay Stomper?"

  The other man, whose neck tattoos twined dripping daggers with skulls and butterflies, pointed to the boat slips. “Mr. Hub had one like that in the marina ten, twelve days ago. We didn't do any work on it."

  His companion nodded. “Nice boat, but not the one you want. This was Morning Glory, out of Boca. Not much crew, one real mean Cuban. Told me to stay away from his boat."

  Barry was still sizing them up. For a yard that was supposed to refit stolen boats, the men seemed too relaxed. “You fellows usually work on boats like that?"

  "I'd sure like to,” said the tattooed man.

  "Have you worked here long?"

  "Three years. But we do mostly small jobs, right, Hank?"

  The red-haired man nodded.

  As we walked around the yard, Barry said, “If this is a marine chop shop, I'm Jimmy Buffett. I've seen Hank at bars. He's a lay preacher of some sort."

  "In bars?"

  "Where would you expect to find lost souls? Next time, don't believe everything Gloria Hasty tells you."

  "What about the Bay Stomper? And Hector Avila? Avila could have painted a new name on."

  "First, we only have Gloria's word a boat was stolen. It hasn't been reported to the Coast Guard."