by J. A. Kerley
I smiled, figuring Derek was referring to one nurse in particular, the good-looking Patrick White. “It’s not memories I’m calling about, Derek. The man who tried to abduct you is named Donnie Ocampo. He has a twin brother in Miami named Gary. Gary’s been completely distraught through the whole affair. It’s way off base, but Gary feels a responsibility for his brother’s actions. He’d like to meet you for a few minutes.”
Silence. Was it shock, or did he need time to process the information? Seconds ticked by. “Gary never knew he had a living brother until recently,” I added, hoping to enlist Scott’s aid. “By the way, he says he’ll give you some videos.”
A pause. “Excuse me?”
“He says you can have a choice of videos. Or comic books. You can take your pick.”
I held my breath as Scott mulled the offer.
“How can I p-pass that up, Detective?” he said after several seconds ticked by. “Tell Mr Campos I’ll stop by this afternoon. No, let me call him.”
“Sure,” I said, relieved. “And it’s Ocampo.”
“Oh-camp-oh. Let me write that down. And the address t-too.”
I called Gary with the news that Scott would set up a meeting. Gershwin was continuing to check Eisen’s background and comparing it to the other victims’ histories, hoping for points of convergence. It was needle-in-a-haystack work, but had to be done.
It was mid afternoon and I was about to call Vivian. Desperate for a break from the case, I could free maybe forty-five minutes for dinner and needed to see a friendly face across the table. I was pulling my phone when it rang.
“I’ve freed a slot in my schedule, little brother,” Jeremy announced. “Come out tomorrow and we’ll talk. Say eleven a.m.”
“Out where?”
“Key-freaking-West, Carson. I need an abacus to keep track of the times I’ve told you that.”
“I checked. You don’t—”
“You’re getting tiresome. While you’re on your way, I’ll message you the address. It’s in a ritzy part of town, so if anyone stops you, tell them you’re auditioning to be my valet.”
“What?”
But again, I was speaking to an empty phone.
35
I took Vivian to Tiki Tiki, a restaurant owned by Connie Amardara, one of Gershwin’s many aunts; the aunt, she’d told me the first time we’d met, tia numero uno. She had raised the kid for much of his young life and I had never asked the circumstances.
We exited the Rover beside a sprawling single-story brick building painted pink and expressing its Polynesianality via an ersatz thatched-straw bouffant shaded by tall palms. We entered though a foliage-filled courtyard, a fountain spraying water over stones. A sound system played “Over the Rainbow” by the late Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.
Flaming torches flanked a gangplank to a front door more Camelot than South Pacific. Inside were weathered wood walls, ropes and hawsers strung from the ceiling, with false windows fashioned like giant portholes overlooking Gauginesque women carrying coconuts to the ocean.
“I love it,” Viv said, echoing my words when first entering a year ago.
We saw a roped-off booth in a far corner, the table set, a fresh candle burning brightly beside a vase holding a huge spray of tropical flora, the only table so embellished. Though the place was only two-thirds full, a squat and muscular waiter of Hispanic extraction stood before the rope line with arms crossed as if daring anyone to look that way, much less sit there. Viv studied the scene. “Looks like the place is expecting VIPs, Carson. The Queen of England, maybe.”
I sighed. “It’s our table, Viv. Get ready.”
“For what?”
“Carson!” a voice trumpeted and I braced myself as a short woman nearly as round as tall rushed up and wrapped my middle in a hug that would have embarrassed an auto-crusher. Per usual, she was dressed in a floral muumuu, her wrists and ears clattering with bangles, jangles, and various thangles.
“My amigo, mi mensch, mi Sherlock Holmes de azúcar,” she crooned to my chest.
“Sherlock Holmes of sugar?” Viv said.
I unwrapped the woman from my midsection, and presented Connie Amardara to Vivian Morningstar.
“Oy caramba, such pretty eyes, this one.” Connie took Vivian’s hands. “But then, I had heard already in advance that Carson’s lady doctor could shame the stars with her beauty.”
“Ziggy,” I said.
She crossed her heart. “Ignacio told me almost nada, I swear. Just that you spent a whole year sneaking looks at her backside until she stole your heart while dancing.”
Morningstar giggled. I whispered, “I’ll kill him.”
“Such a spread I’ve prepared for you two lovebirds … puerco browned in schmaltz then roasted in rum and lime, arroz con chopped liver …”
“Liver?”
“I add just a smidgen of chopped liver while sautéing the rice.” Connie kissed her fingertips. “Magnifico! Plus your favorite platanas in mantequilla con azúcar y crèma.”
“It sounds incredible, Ms Amardara,” Vivian said.
She canted her head as if hearing an unknown sound. “Ms Amardara? Who is Ms Amardara? To you, Señorita Morningstar, I am Connie, always Connie.”
“And I am always Vivian. Or Viv.”
“The name means life, no? Vivian?”
“Si.”
Connie turned to me and waggled a no-nonsense finger. “The name is a sign to you, Carson. And not to be taken lightly.” Connie bustled away to the kitchen and the waiter, transformed into a smiling man named Oracio, took our drink orders and zipped away as we wriggled into the booth.
“Sneaking looks for a year?” Morningstar said as she unrolled her silverware from a linen napkin. “My backside?”
“Connie exaggerates. It was more like ten months.”
“The woman obviously thinks the sun rises and sets with you, Carson.”
Oracio returned with Consuelo’s Delights, rum drinks that were Connie’s secret specialty. I pushed my lips through froth and sipped the blend of three rums, fruit juices, and a touch of cloves, magnifico.
“I think Connie believes me responsible for Ziggy’s good fortunes at the FCLE. Like everyone else, she probably expected him to last about a month.”
Morningstar sipped her drink and looked ceilingward in ecstasy. We’d have one, then switch to lighter fare. Two Delights would loosen your knees and unhinge your eye-strings.
“Is Connie right, Carson? Are you responsible for Ziggy’s success?”
“I put his feet on the ladder. He’s done all the climbing.”
The food arrived and we lost ourselves in gastronomic delights. But even the incredible meal and company of Vivian Morningstar lacked the force to push tomorrow’s supposed rendezvous with Jeremy from my mind. Somewhere nearing dessert it hit me why he would text his address when I was well on the road: to keep me from calling the local constabulary and asking who’d bought a house at that address.
His manipulation was irritating, but upped the odds that he might actually be in Key West. Of course, he might know I’d think that, thereby lulling me into thinking he was there when he wasn’t …
Circles containing circles set spinning within a Mobius: my brother at work.
I felt Morningstar’s hand touch mine. “You suddenly seem distracted, Carson. Are you all right?”
“It’s my brother. He’s cluttering my thoughts. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, you’re concerned about family. Is Jeremy all right?”
It was a jolt hearing his true name from another’s lips. I nodded. “He’s just being his usual cryptic self. And elusive. He enjoys playing games.”
“But you’re still hopeful of a reconciliation?”
“I don’t know what I’m hoping. Or expecting.”
The dinner got back on track. I pushed aside my bleaker thoughts and concentrated on the moment: I was in a restaurant owned by a woman who thought I pulled the sun into the sky in the morning while sitting across
from a woman who actually did, at least by my lights. Your life is assembled from pieces of magic, I thought as we walked to my car and I tossed Viv the keys, two drinks past driving, If it ends tomorrow, you’re still one of the luckiest humans to ever walk this beleaguered planet.
36
I rose in the morning with the first roseate hues of the sun across the cove behind my home. Morningstar and I didn’t spend the night together, she having a meeting with her staff and several new personnel members to prepare for her fast-approaching departure. I had headed back to my home with my own agenda to consider: I was destined to travel to Key West, starting the trip at eight a.m.
If my brother’s vanity showed anywhere, it was in his dress, always fashionable, and after twenty minutes of study I selected a cranberry-hued seersucker suit purchased years ago from Lansky’s in Memphis, a crisp-collared white shirt, no tie. At the bottom I tied tan bucks, at the top I set a straw Panama embellished with a blue bandana knotted in back. I stood, knees-bent, before my mirror and experimented with the hat until finding the perfect, rakish angle.
Valet this, Brother …
Driving from Upper Matecumbe Key to Key West became a trip back in time, starting at the present and regressing. When I turned west on to Highway 1, I was thinking about Jeremy’s current games and obfuscations somehow involving “foundations”, “girlfriends”, and a presumably fictional existence in Key West. I figured he would either not be there, or have a temporary residence at a rental cottage or hotel. My money was on the former.
When I passed through Long Key, I’d moved into the near past, to Kentucky, my brother living in backwoods isolation and working the stock market.
By the time I crossed Marathon Key my recollections had moved two years earlier, Dr Evangeline Prowse mysteriously helping Jeremy escape from the Institute to New York, sparking a fierce manhunt for my brother, who wreaked havoc before vanishing.
By the time I passed through Big Pine Key, I had just started college and learned my older brother had been arrested for the savage killing of five women and would be incarcerated for life. I quit school, invented a new life and name, and returned to college to gain a Masters in psychology. Only now do I understand that I undertook the study to make sense of my family.
Touching Big Coppitt Key, I recalled the day the police found our father’s disemboweled corpse in a nearby woods. I was ten, my brother sixteen.
When my tires crossed the bridge to Key West it was but one week earlier and my wild-eyed father was holding me to a wall by my neck, telling me, “I made you, I can kill you.”
I don’t often drink to calm down, a dangerous path. But my first stop in Key West was at a tavern where I chased a double shot of bourbon with a beer. Though it was not yet ten in the morning, I was far from alone, but it was Key West, a locale the writer John Dos Passos once described as “agreeable, calm, and gently colored with Bacardi”.
I had left earlier than needed and while rising from the bar stool heard my phone signal a message. Expecting the worst, I was surprised to see an address. I shifted to my map function and was further surprised to see the address was real, on a side street on the southwest side of the island, near the ocean.
My heart generating a mix of dread and anticipation, I crossed the island. Nearing the site, I moved from an avenue of bungalows tucked within greenery to a street bearing stately, capacious homes I judged to be worth at least two million dollars if on the smaller side.
I stopped before a tall and imposing home of pastel yellow, its vertical orientation enhanced by a wide cupola topped with a conical spire and rising above the roofline. The structure was half concealed behind sixty feet of landscaping, azalea and bougainvillea spanning the bases of regal palms. A white picket fence ran the front of the property and turned, but midway to the back of the lot it stopped at high white walls which I figured surrounded a rear courtyard.
I exited my vehicle to the buzz of the gate lock disengaging, my brother wanting me to hop to his whim. I ignored the gate and jumped the fence. Instead of walking to the door I meandered the front yard, sniffing flowers and finally leaning against a towering Royal palm and studying the street. After a minute I heard the front door open.
“You’ve made your point, Carson, whatever it is.”
I climbed several steps to a full porch furnished with rattan chairs and a swing. The door swung fully open and I saw my brother. Per sartorial expectations, he was resplendent in an ice-cream suit, blue shirt, a red tie patterned with tiny parrots, his loafers the hue of café au lait. Gone was the whitened mustache and goatee and hair, gone were the facial wrinkles deepened by a light daily rubbing of mascara. His hair was now its natural sandy blond, neatly cropped, and his dancing blue eyes outshone the Key West sky. His new infatuation with exercise was obvious in his thickened arms, neck and chest. All in all, Jeremy could have passed for forty, and given the stress of the recent case, I probably looked like the older brother.
Because few things pleased my brother more than startling me, I hid my surprise behind a false yawn. “Hello, Dr Charpentier,” I said, patting my mouth, stepping inside the entryway, and handing him my hat. “I take it your name’s not on the deed.”
Without looking, he neatly Frisbee’d the Panama atop a rack a dozen feet distant. I yawned again.
“You really thought I was lying about moving here?” he said.
I jammed my hands in my pockets and glanced at the surroundings. “Seeing it, I still have doubts. Auguste Charpentier owns no land in Key West.”
Jeremy walked into a high-ceilinged and mostly bare living room: a long blue sofa of creamy leather, matching chair, a low teak table. A stack of unopened packing boxes ruled one corner. “Charpentier has dissolved into the wind, Carson. Those few who believe they knew him think he has moved to France. He never allowed them close enough to care to check.”
“You’ve changed your name, then?”
“Oui, mon frère.”
“To what?”
An enigmatic smile. “How about I give you the nickel tour, starting upstairs? You’ll have to pardon the disarray.”
We climbed stairs and he displayed several unfurnished rooms, bright and high-ceilinged. The polished wood floors shone under light streaming from the tall windows. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“I purchased it three months ago but had to handle tasks elsewhere. I’ve lived mostly here the past month.”
He took me to a gorgeous oak staircase spiraling to the top room of the cupola, his office, a round space with a half-circle desk before a view of the ocean framed by palms, two computer monitors on the desk, two more on a flanking table. Additional boxes sat to the side.
“You’re still operating on the assumption that the market has just two states, scared child and boastful drunkard?” I said.
“It continues to make money. I’ve also reached the point where just money makes money.”
He showed me the main bathroom, containing a shower in which I might have parked half of the Rover, a dozen heads angling in from every direction but below. There was a Jacuzzi sized for two, a standard toilet and a bidet. The floor was white marble flecked with green, the walls gently olivine. A white silk bathrobe hung on a brass hook inside the door.
We returned to the first floor and he took me to the spacious kitchen – where he expected me to comment on the pleasant peach color of the walls, but I did not – then led me through a dining room to a two-story solarium overlooking a walled-in courtyard bright with flowers and shaded by palms.
“Here’s an interesting item,” Jeremy said, a strange note of pride in his voice as he pointed above my back. High on the room’s sole non-glass wall hung a painting at least six feet tall, five wide, a semi-abstract rendering of strident, multihued flowers against a jungle-ripe background of flowing greens. Color gave it presence, composition gave it force, and the piece seemed perfect for the venues, both Key West and the room.
I thought I figured out the pride in
his voice. “A designer didn’t select that painting,” I said, impressed. “You picked it out on your own.”
“Actually, I painted it last week.”
“No way.”
He smiled. “My artistic side seems to be opening up, Carson, though it did take two tries to get right. Would you care for a drink? Or did the ones you’ve had suffice?”
I had chewed a pack of gum on my trip from the tavern to cover the scent of alcohol. My brother had entered the Institution with normal senses, but something inside had honed them to a preternatural state. I figured it was a self-preservation mechanism. He had once told me he could detect psychosis by its smell, and I’d never argued.
“An ice water for now.”
He strode away and I ambled through the downstairs to the front window, seeing a herd of camera-laden tourists walking the avenue. In one day in Key West my brother would encounter more humans than in a year in Kentucky. I wondered how he would deal with it.
He found me and handed me a tumbler of water. It hit me that he’d not made a single allusion to his vaporous lady companion.
“So where’s your girlfriend today?” I said. “Peaches?”
“Don’t be so dismally cute, Carson. I told you Peaches was paint. My friend has various chores in Miami, including shopping for furniture. She’ll return early next week. You probably passed her on the way, though she would have been several thousand feet above you.”
“Does not-Peaches have a real name?”
He walked to a mirror and straightened his tie. “I’m beginning to think you don’t believe in her existence.”
“Photos then, a shot of you and your paramour lazing on the beach and making dreamy eyes at one another.”
He turned from his image. “Our relationship doesn’t resemble your body-centric succession of temp workers, Carson. It’s more …” he frowned in search of a word.
“Fictional?” I supplied.
“Cerebral.”
I smiled and made the motion of advancing a pawn. “No sex then, just endless games of chess?”
He started to speak, stopped, changed course. “There was a reason for your visit, correct? Have you brought me something to consider?”
