EQMM, September-October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "A ‘mean Cuban’ could fit Avila."

  Barry nodded. “There was no address for Avila on Anders Hewitt's invoices. Not much description of what Hewitt was buying, either—just ‘work of art.’ Did your two CIA pals mention whether Avila was an artist?"

  "They said he was a killer.” Hands tucked into my back pockets, I watched the water. A couple of porpoises had come into the sheltered area herding baitfish. “They've got a source in your department, you know. A couple hours after Bennell got shot, Gloria and Parker were waiting on my boat, pitching the idea that Avila did it. There was a pretty good bet I would tell you."

  * * * *

  We drove back to town. Barry put a description of the Morning Glory out to local marinas. If you're going to start searching for a single boat in the Lower Keys, you might as well also try naming frigate birds. He queried the national crime database on the name Hector Avila, got a dozen small charges from the ‘nineties and an array of old mug shots. The most recent picture showed a narrow-faced man with long black hair. The men at Sailhook described their Cuban as over six feet, short-haired, and scrawny as a wood stork. The database had no current address on Avila.

  Finding Tom Parker was easier. He had a suite at the Hilton looking down onto Mallory Square, where the pagans gather to celebrate sunset. Barry decided we should visit Parker in his room.

  Two steps off the elevator, we heard a door open. A porky fellow in a gray suit stepped into the hall. I got a glimpse of a black brush cut, pug nose, bee-stung lips. He said a few words to someone in the room, then turned away from us and headed for a back stairway.

  Barry unfroze. “That's Lieutenant Kilgallen. He's LeMoye's assistant."

  "Assistant what?"

  "Whatever the deputy chief needs, Larry Kilgallen fetches."

  "What do you want to bet, that's Parker's room he came out of."

  "I wouldn't bet."

  "Let's go see."

  "Let's not.” He turned and pushed the elevator button. The car hadn't gone anywhere. We went down to the lobby, out onto the square. It had turned into a bright, hot day, and a cruise ship was unloading a couple thousand tourists onto the pier, each of whom might buy a T-shirt or lunch, or get his pocket picked more directly, in any case contributing to the gross domestic product of the Conch Republic. The town had called itself a republic ever since a short-lived confrontation with the feds a quarter-century ago proved its rebellious spirit. When Dad took me on a boat ride out toward Fort Jefferson, spotting the sunken drug planes, he pointed out that none of them had carried untaxed English tea. He thought Key West should be called the Contraband Republic.

  It was close to lunchtime. Barry got us a table on the square, ordered a Bloody Mary that put a little color in his cheeks. I had a diet ginger ale. “What do you think?” I said.

  He found things to look at that didn't include my eyes, which usually distracted him. The question hadn't really come up, but I had assumed Barry Irvington was an honest cop, however you define that. He might look the other way for a friend—he had done so when I was getting wrecked saying goodbye to Dad—but I didn't think he would look the other way because someone slipped him money.

  His glance finally got around to me. “If Kilgallen and LeMoye have something going on, I don't want to know about it. I could get used to living without my badge. Maybe I could get along without a pension. But I don't want DEA getting a tip and finding a half-kilo of dope in my car. If it happened, nobody in the Department would jump up and say, ‘No, they got it all wrong, Irv's a good cop.’”

  "What about Parker?"

  "Do you know Parker from before?"

  "No. Dad didn't bring his coworkers home. Parker says he's retired."

  "Call him up and invite him down to lunch. I'll be somewhere else. Tell him you need a few bucks so you can keep looking for Avila's boat. Bat your pretty eyes at him."

  I used the Hilton's house phone, and Parker came downstairs ten minutes later. He joined me at the table Barry had vacated. In daylight he looked older and flabby and the white beard had a yellow tinge. He was wearing a baby-blue guayabera shirt, cotton ducks, leather sandals over argyle socks. I wondered if this was a CIA-approved disguise. “You're buying lunch,” I said. “I'm tapped out."

  "I think I can manage that, kid."

  "Also, I need a couple hundred on account."

  That widened his eyes. “On account of what?"

  "If you're looking for Avila, it'd help to put out word in the Cuban community. I can do that."

  He understood. There were bars in town where Anglo hombres weren't welcome but an Anglo chick would get free drinks. “Also, if there's money for whoever dimes him, it might go faster,” I said.

  "Okay, two hundred."

  "You better make it five for the tipster. They need to believe you're serious."

  He looked like he was passing a kidney stone. “All right. But the info's got to be good."

  I ate a big lunch at Parker's expense, collected two hundred dollars, and left him fumbling a credit card onto the check. A block later, Barry fell in beside me. “You'd better stay out of his way. He'll know he was had. Parker had copies of police reports on last night's murders. I'll bet Larry Kilgallen left his prints on them."

  "You hit Parker's room?"

  "Crudely, too. Turned the place upside down. Borrowed an envelope at the front desk and mailed the reports to a lawyer. Parker also had mug shots of Avila, a nice little Walther .380 with two magazines. Hasn't been fired for a while. Couple of phony ID's. This guy is a clown."

  "He knows where my boat is,” I pointed out.

  "Move in with me, he'll never find you."

  "I'll move in somewhere, but not with you."

  He tried not to look disappointed. I liked him a lot, but the poor guy was in his fifties.

  * * * *

  I cleaned the stuff I needed out of my boat, made a deal with Babe McKenzie for a couple nights’ bivouac for a hundred dollars. She reminded me I owed her a hundred for the other night. She had a one-bedroom apartment in a decayed mansion close enough to Old Town that I wouldn't need transportation. She let me have the couch and a corner of the fridge that wasn't stuffed with cat food.

  I met Barry at Anders Hewitt's gallery and we took another look at the invoices made out to H. Avila. There were eighteen of them. None had an address or tax-ID number for Avila. The descriptions of the art Hewitt was buying were as skimpy as Barry had remembered, but the recorded amounts weren't small: between eight thousand and twenty thousand dollars.

  "That stuff should stand out even here,” Barry said. He led me through the gallery. There were five rooms. The blood spill was confined to the front gallery, where touristy stuff was on display. It was still high-end. The oil paintings of breaching killer whales—and when has anyone seen those off Key West?—were glossy and big, the kind hotels might hang in the lobby. Another room held paintings that didn't have a local theme—still-lifes, landscapes, portraitists’ samples. Next-door was a den full of glass sculptures, some of them extraordinarily beautiful if you went for that sort of thing ... and didn't live on a rocking boat. There was a big, blue cresting wave so convincing that I looked for a surfer atop the glass. A little card beside each sculpture identified the artist and title and the nature of the glass. Beside the price was a small number-letter code.

  "Are there numbers on Avila's invoices?” I asked Barry.

  He flipped through the pages. “A series: PC47, PC51, PC52, PC55, and so on."

  A large room at the end of a hall was filled with works tagged PC. The letters might have stood for pre-Columbian. H. Avila's PC52 was a fat, malevolently ugly stone head the size of a pumpkin. The discreet little card said it was an Olmec deity, from circa 1,100 B.C. The price was fifty-five thousand dollars.

  "Rents are high on Duval Street,” Barry murmured.

  We scouted the rest of the room. There were twenty or thirty other items, most of them smaller than the head. They stood on tables, on Lucite shelve
s, in clear boxes. My guess about the meaning of “PC” was probably wrong. Some looked Mediterranean, others Asian. The lowest price was ten thousand dollars.

  We couldn't match any of the other items to Avila invoices. “Maybe Avila's pieces sold,” I said. “Do you think the stuff's authentic?"

  "Maybe I'd better get someone in who knows,” Barry said.

  As we reached the front, a voice snapped, “What's she doing here?"

  Curtis LeMoye's sparse pink comb-over looked like it had just come in from the rain instead of from the sunny sidewalk. He could bake in the desert for a week and still look moist. The deputy chief had been leaning on a desk, studying an eight-foot-long nude painting that looked like a Modigliani. Maybe he planned to open a bar and needed a conversation piece.

  "She has information that may help us,” Barry said. He told LeMoye that a man fitting Hector Avila's description had briefly parked a boat at Bennell's marina. “It looks like he also provided art to this gallery. That links him to both murders."

  "Do we have a picture—a description?"

  "The photos are ten years old."

  "He's Cuban, right? I'll run him by some of my contacts.” He looked at me. “I wish the CIA stayed out of Key West."

  I didn't know how to answer that, so I told Barry I was glad to help and got out of there.

  * * * *

  Gloria Hasty had a nineteenth-century house of Honduran mahogany facing Eaton Street, with two cottages around back behind a twenty-foot swimming pool. The cottages were where she put up her occasional boys, as she called them. There was no point in ringing at the front door. I opened the gate and went around back.

  Gloria was in her swimming pool.

  She was still wearing her midnight-prowler gear, minus the watch cap, so the red hair was a spiky halo. The pool was about eight feet deep at this end, and light and shadows wiggled on the surface, making it hard to tell exactly what I was seeing. Gloria appeared to have a spear of some kind through her chest. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. The alarmed girl on the pool apron with the sky behind her must have looked remote and useless from Gloria's perspective.

  "Turn around, dammit."

  I turned and came face to face with someone I hadn't expected to see again. He wore a few days’ gray stubble, hair and brows were salt-lightened, cheeks were deeply sunken. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun. His eyes were hard and, for just an instant, murderous.

  Still, it was the face I knew best, and missed most.

  I said, “Hi, Dad."

  * * * *

  I wanted to hug him and blubber as if I were ten years old. But I was twenty-two and knew I had to make adult judgments about people, even him.

  "Where did you get the shotgun?"

  "From the house. Meggie, I heard you were down here. You look good. How's your mom?"

  Dating someone stable, I almost said. No point in taking cheap shots.

  "Why were you in the house?"

  "Looking for Gloria."

  "She's in the pool."

  He took two steps, looked, muttered, “That's great.” I couldn't tell how he meant it.

  We did our catching-up in one of the cottages. Dad perched on a chair where he could watch the yard. He was impressed that an old drinking buddy had towed the KeyHole, bemused that I was living aboard at the same slip he had used. He asked how I was making a living, and when I told him, he laughed a little. But the laugh was feeble. For the first time, he looked not just old but worn out.

  "What happened to you?” I asked.

  "Gloria and I took the boat out, and she pushed me overboard. She and I were—well, you know, spending time together. We had a lot in common."

  "I see,” I said crustily. Loyalty to Mom and all that.

  "I was doing a little job, keeping an eye on some of the locals here. Gloria saw an angle.” He shrugged. “I was in the water two days, got picked up by a freighter headed for Tampico. It took a couple of months in the hospital before I was half-fit. One bullet messed me up a little."

  "One bullet?"

  "She shot me a few times. Thorough lady, when she put her mind to something."

  "What did she do with the KeyHole?"

  "Probably set it adrift a few miles out and took her Zodiac. She brought the inflatable in case we wanted to explore the mangroves. Nobody knew we'd gone out together."

  "She told me last night she was looking for Hector Avila."

  "Yeah?"

  I told him about what had happened in town, and about Gloria and Parker's visit.

  "Describe the guy calling himself Parker."

  "Bearded, heavy, six-one, big wedding band, talk of not being housebroken, officially retired, called me kid.” I added, “He said you would be sorry you didn't go out in combat."

  "But I did.” His smile was ragged. “The Parker description could fit a half-dozen guys I can think of. If he's any good, he changes his appearance anyway."

  "According to Parker, Avila is running stolen boats to Mexico. He and Gloria said they were working an insurance angle."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "No. Avila was supplying art to Hewitt's gallery."

  "Avila's not in the art trade. He launders money for wise guys in Miami. He uses a boatyard, Hewitt's gallery, probably a dozen other businesses that will do anything for ten percent. Gloria decided to take him out. She offered me first crack at the deal."

  "You didn't agree?"

  "I told her that messing with Avila was a fast way to get dead."

  "Tell me how the money-laundering works."

  "A guy like Anders Hewitt picks up a bunch of junk art, doesn't matter what sort, creates a history. Supposedly it's on consignment from an importer. It's garbage. In a real sale, you couldn't unload it for five grand. But he writes up a bill of sale for a hundred thousand, runs the money through his bank account, keeps ten or fifteen as his fee. Avila gets eighty-five thousand of his clients’ money back. Bingo, the capital is on deposit in Lauderdale or Miami for an import company owned by the wise guys. It started off as maybe racetrack skim or vigorish. Now it's clean enough for casual inspection. The gallery owner's biggest problem is deciding whether to report the fifteen thousand as income.” He yawned hugely. “I've been running on empty for a week. Got in twenty hours ago on a shrimp boat. Can I crash on the KeyHole?"

  "Parker knows about the boat.” I told him about Sergeant Irvington ransacking Parker's room. “He also had a visit from Lieutenant Kilgallen, who slipped out the back way like he didn't want to be seen. Barry says Kilgallen is Deputy Chief LeMoye's man."

  "Larry Kilgallen is one of the locals I was asked to watch."

  "Who asked you?"

  He cracked an ugly grin. “People who knew I would work cheap. I don't think they know Parker's involved. And I never got a chance to tell them about Gloria."

  He slept for three hours while I kept watch. None of Gloria's occasional boys was in residence. Nobody came around looking for her—or to clean the swimming pool. The only person besides us who knew about the body was the person who had put it there.

  While he slept, I kept looking at him. I thought about calling Mom with the news, but she had had enough of this man for one lifetime. What had started out as heroic and romantic had gone bad. He had signed on during the Cold War believing everything, and had ended up believing nothing. And now ... he had been in town twenty hours. Twenty hours ago, Bennell, Hewitt, and Gloria had been alive.

  He got up late in the afternoon. When he'd had a shower and some coffee and food, we talked about stuff that had nothing to do with the case. He didn't apologize for being a lousy husband or absent father. He had taught me to sail, and to shoot, and maybe to be too independent. Looking at me, he said he thought he'd done a good job.

  After dark, he went into the water and pulled Gloria out. Wrapping her in a sheet, I saw more than I wanted to. The shaft through her body was a long African tribal knife, but it hadn't made her only wound. She had been tortured. I went behind a tree
and threw up.

  Dad carried the body into the main house. Then we spent two hours in Bahama Village, making the rounds of places where he had friends. Twice we heard that a fat white guy without much money also was asking around. But nobody had seen Hector Avila in more than a week. That crazy Cuban? Oh, yessir, Mr. Danny, he likes them Chinese prostitutes upstairs of the bike rental. Yessir, that's Hectorcito, same one as cut Shem the Tailor's hamstring, Shem who specializes in pharmaceuticals.

  It was a matter of time before Parker heard we were out there.

  About one-thirty in the morning, a kid with a shaved head, awning-striped shirt, black trousers, shiny black tap shoes, and red suspenders came up to the bar at Puccini's and handed Dad a note. The boy waited until I gave him five dollars, then ran out the door. Dad showed me the note, which said: 4 A.M. Room 407.

  "That's Parker's hotel room."

  He nodded.

  "We don't want to go there,” I said.

  "You're not going. Parker and I've got business. Let's camp at the boat for a while."

  I sat on deck in the dark while Dad used the head. He came topside carrying the knapsack I usually kept my paints in. Without asking I knew he had a gun in it. Under my breath, I said, “I'm coming with."

  He sat beside me. “You've never shot anyone, have you?” He took my silence as assent.

  "We should be calling the cops."

  "Probably,” he agreed. I couldn't see his eyes in the darkness, couldn't tell what was there. “But that's not how Parker and I play."

  "I thought you didn't know him."

  "I don't, but I know the type."

  Of course he did. The type was just like himself.

  * * * *

  Colonel Tom Parker wasn't alone, but we hadn't expected him to be. Even indoors he was wearing the big safari hat. He also had a body-armor vest on his torso, the Walther holstered on his hip, and a small machine pistol hanging from his shoulder. But he had the courtesy bar open, and he was making a show of being hospitable, putting out whiskey and mixers alongside a can of nuts. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said.

  Lieutenant Kilgallen sat at a table near the window, watching us from slitted eyes, puffy lips set, a reef of cash in front of him held together with rubber bands.