Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

  “Well, what’s it say?”

  He kept his eyes on the traffic. The light finished its cycle, turned yellow, then red. Five of the cars just ahead of her turned left after the red. She halted at the head of the line and the guy behind her leaned on his horn.

  “It’s not like it was very complicated. The first number in each set refers to the page, the second number is the line on that page and the last few numbers are the words on that line.”

  “Five minutes and you figured that out?”

  “You could’ve figured it out, Mom. It was that simple.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Randall swallowed and licked his lips. He slumped deeper in the bucket seat.

  “What is it, Randall? What’s wrong?”

  “I haven’t written out the whole thing. But it’s like a story. Whoever did it pulled out a few words here and a few more there, you know, like sentence fragments or whatever, and it’s like, I don’t know, like he’s telling a story.”

  Hannah watched the traffic streaming across the intersection.

  “Some wacko,” she said. “Just forget about it.”

  Randall tucked his chin against his chest.

  “What’s wrong, Randall? Talk to me.”

  He took a deep breath and blew it out, fluttering his lips like a horse.

  “I didn’t read the whole thing. I stopped.”

  “Okay, so tell me what you read.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. Of course not.”

  “It starts out with three guys,” he said.

  “Three guys, okay.”

  She glanced up at the red light, then looked back at Randall. He lifted his eyes and met hers and the flesh on her arms rippled. The boy’s face was rigid, lips pressed tight. Her son was terrified.

  “What, Randall?”

  He shifted in the seat, looking down at the toes of his shoes. His voice was far away.

  She got the green arrow and immediately the asshole behind her honked. Hannah stayed put. Looking at Randall as he stared blankly out the windshield.

  “Three guys dressed like house painters,” he said. “They sneak into a house in the morning and shoot a man who’s getting dressed for work and his wife making breakfast. That’s as far as I got. Three guys dressed like house painters.”

  The man behind her continued to blast his horn through the complete cycle of the green.

  EIGHT

  “It’s just some crazy fan,” said Gisela. “That’s all it is. A weird guy with a rotten sense of humor.”

  “No,” Hannah said. “I don’t think so. I think it’s a lot more than that.”

  Hannah lifted her squat glass and swallowed more of the potent margarita. In the last few minutes her tongue had gone partially numb, but so far the drink had done little to relax the bear-hug pressure around her chest.

  Eyeing her uneasily, Gisela took another sip of her margarita and set the glass on the plastic side table. Gisela had heavy eyebrows, dark drowsy eyes, and full lips. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a lime green shirt with avocado and mango slices printed on it. Leaning back in her aluminum chair, she propped her feet up on the chrome rail.

  They were sitting on the roof of Gisela’s houseboat, the Margaritaville, which was anchored in slip A-12 at the Dinner Key Marina. To the west the sunset’s crimson sheen was spreading across the harbor like a gorgeous oil slick. All around them the halyards tinkled in the light breeze, while twenty yards off the bow of Gisela’s boat laughing gulls plunged into the still water after a school of bait fish, then climbed back into the air and plunged again.

  “Randall seems pretty upset.”

  “He’s shaken, yeah. I told him it was just some kook, but I don’t think he believed me.”

  Randall stood at the end of the dock staring out at the sunset. He’d been quiet ever since decoding the list of numbers. Eyes straight ahead. Answering in monosyllables. Now he had a hand on one of the pilings, keeping his back to her. But she knew he was probably sailing beyond the watery landscape, drifting back to that mid-July morning when he’d stepped into his grandparents’ house and found their bodies, then tunneled into a pile of Hannah’s clothes and waited for the police to arrive.

  From the galley below, Gisela’s tape deck pumped out Jimmy Buffett’s mindlessly soothing voice, song after song celebrating pirates and booze and long torpid days. Gisela was a parrothead—a devoted follower of that simple-minded Key West blend of acoustic guitars and the jingly steel drums and plink-plonk of cruise ship reggae. A double margarita and Jimmy B. blaring from the tape deck was her evening antidote to her daily overload of sleaze.

  Last month Gisela had had the Margaritaville painted a mustard yellow with cherry trim, and now it looked like a gaudy Haitian riverboat that sold jerked chicken from one village to the next. Brightly painted gewgaws were crammed on every shelf and nook throughout the cabin below, goofy paraphernalia from Key West tourist shops. Sculptures of macaws and purple manatees, giraffes and zebras, and a vast collection of fanciful animals formed out of blown glass. On her dining table sat a large sand-filled terrarium where a band of miniature pirates fought a never-ending battle against an array of plastic dinosaurs.

  “Three guys dressed like house painters. They break into a house at breakfast time to shoot an old couple. All those words came from First Light?”

  “They’re my words, yeah. But he took them completely out of context Like someone snipping up a newspaper to make a ransom note.”

  “Randall figured that out?”

  Hannah said, “He took one look at that list of numbers, he knew it was some kind of code. I’m sitting there waiting for a red light and he solved it.”

  “He’s some kind of whiz, isn’t he?”

  “Well, yeah, he’s smart, but this didn’t require any genius. Take a look at it. It’s like some code from a second-grade puzzle book.”

  Hannah handed her the book and the scribbled page, a single paragraph she’d extracted from First Light, using the code. She’d pulled off in a Shell station and gone through the list of numbers, finding each word, adding to the paragraph. By the last sentence Hannah could barely hold the pen, her hand was quivering so badly.

  Three men dressed like house painters enter the house early in the day. The wife is cooking breakfast, the husband is getting dressed for work. The tall killer aims and shoots the wife three times then goes after the husband. The old man has a gun but doesn’t fire. He is wearing a white shirt, a tie with blue sailboats. Three shots kill the old man. Then the killer fixes his own face to the victim’s face. Now he waits for you. 2649 Bayshore Drive, at nine tomorrow morning. Your name is the next key.

  When Gisela finished reading, she took another sip of her margarita and waved hello to the guy puttering down the channel in an inflatable raft. The man wore a red bandanna around his throat and his miniature collie had a matching one tied around its neck.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty transparent,” Gisela said. “So tell me, why the hell does somebody bother putting something in code, if the code’s so easy to break, even idiots like you and me can see through it?”

  “Good question.”

  “Okay, okay, so if it’s not some wacko fan,” Gisela said, “then what is it?”

  Gathering her hair in one hand, Hannah lifted the hot mass off her neck and let the sluggish breeze move across her flesh for a moment. She took a breath of air but it didn’t seem to fill her lungs. She blew it out and tried again with the same result. She let go of her hair.

  “I think it’s pretty obvious. Somebody wants to turn Fielding in.”

  Gisela snorted and brought her hands together in a T.

  “Whoa there, girl. Time out, slow down.” Gisela had a quick sip of her drink and set the glass on the table. “Turn Fielding in? How the hell you figure that?”

  Hannah listened for a moment to the Buffett song, its bouncy beat, its studied gaiety.

  “If there’s another expl
anation I’d like to hear it.”

  Gisela was tapping her foot on the rooftop to the beat of the island music.

  Randall had his arm around the piling and was gazing out at the western horizon where a small thunderstorm was hiding within a band of purple light, pulsing and sending flecks of red and gold into the stringy clouds above.

  Hannah picked up her margarita glass and took the final swallow. She stood up and moved to the rail.

  “Okay, so who is it? Who’s sending you this secret note?”

  “Either J. J. Fielding himself or somebody who knows where he is. Maybe one of his accomplices is feeling guilty and wants to see Fielding go to jail. Maybe Fielding screwed him out of his share of the money and he wants some kind of revenge. Who knows?”

  “Hannah, Hannah. Any number of wackos could’ve read all that stuff about your parents’ murder in the newspaper, then put it into that kindergarten code. Found out you go to see Janet English every Monday afternoon, snuck in there, and left it on the table for you to find.”

  “A lot of this stuff wasn’t in the newspaper.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “Nothing about house painters. Nothing about the shooter being tall. Blue sailboats on my father’s tie, no one knew that except the ME and a couple of homicide guys with Miami PD, but no one in the public. Even the thing about J. J. Fielding’s news photo, that was never released to the press.”

  Gisela stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the page.

  “Okay, what about this other thing? ‘Your name is the next key.’ What the hell’s that about?”

  “Part of the riddle, I suppose.”

  Hannah shook her head, staring up at the silhouette of a distant frigate bird hovering in the twilight sky like the blade of a black scimitar.

  “In my limited experience,” Gisela said, “somebody wants to give himself up, or turn somebody else in, he calls the police. He doesn’t scribble in a book and leave it on some shrink’s coffee table.”

  Hannah watched Randall lean against the piling. A laughing gull was strutting down the dock behind him.

  “What you should do,” Gisela said, “you should take this book down to the department, show it to one of the homicide guys, Dan Romano or somebody. Get some reality therapy. Dan would be like, ‘Oh, you got a long column of numbers in a book you found in a doctor’s waiting room, and now you’re convinced that your parents’ killer wants to talk to you.’ Yeah, Dan would love to get his hands on this. He’d stand up on his desk, make an announcement to the whole squad room. Get everybody going.”

  “Yeah, he would.”

  “Damn right. And he’d get a hell of a laugh too. See what I’m saying, Hannah? This is just some kind of joke. A very bad practical joke. It’s too screwy.”

  Gisela rose and walked over to the little table where she’d set the blender. Hannah leaned back against the chrome rail.

  “So is that what you’d do, Gisela? Toss the book in the waste can, walk away, not even try to get to the bottom of it?”

  Down below Jimmy Buffett was crooning a song about a girl he’d met in a bar, a sexy lady from Caroline Street.

  Gisela shook her head in sad disbelief and poured herself more margarita.

  Randall let go of the piling and sat down at the end of the dock. He hung his feet over the side and bent forward to stare down into the water.

  Gisela said, “So tell me, girl, let’s say for some totally freaking off-the-wall reason J. J. Fielding or one of his accomplices wants you to come looking for him. Then why the hell go to all that trouble, marking up your book, take it to a doctor’s office on the off chance you might pick it up, and decode his little message? Why doesn’t he just pick up a phone and give you a call, or send you a telegram?”

  Hannah leaned against the rail and watched the purple bruise in the western sky grow darker by the second. A squadron of gulls drifted overhead with barely a movement of wing.

  “Maybe he likes games.”

  Gisela looked over at her for a long moment before she spoke.

  “Maybe what you need to do, you need to talk to somebody.”

  Hannah brought her eyes back from the sunset.

  “I am talking to somebody.”

  “You know, like Janet English, somebody like that.”

  Hannah drew a long breath, held it for a second, then let it go in a rush.

  Gisela wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “All I’m saying is, maybe you should talk to a professional before you go launching off on something like this.”

  “What? To get the shrink’s approval? Are you kidding? I’m not some fragile ego that needs protection.”

  “No,” Gisela said. “But he is.”

  She lifted her chin and motioned toward Randall.

  Down the row of boats someone turned on a television, the evening news. The long list of the day’s horrors rendered in the glib voices of the professional news readers. Randall was still bent forward, communing with the water. Plinking pebbles into the still harbor.

  “Listen,” Hannah said, turning to her friend, and trying to calm the quiver in her throat. “I know this whole thing sounds nuts, but you have to understand, if there is even the slightest possibility this is for real, I’m going to have to follow it to the very end.”

  “Remember last time when you were so sure it was Fielding that murdered your parents? You were running all over town, looking here, looking there. In a real manic state. And remember what happened?”

  “I stopped.”

  “Yeah, and why did you stop?”

  “Because Randall asked me to.”

  “That’s right You were scaring him. You were scaring everybody. You nearly lost it, Hannah, you were so worked up, in a major lather. But because he asked you to, you stopped. You put it away and you went back to writing your books and your life and Randall’s life got a lot better. Turned out you didn’t need to find the people who killed your parents to be happy. You could be happy doing the things you liked to do. It was simple. And it’s still simple. So I don’t see why you’d want to risk everything you’ve got by starting all this up again.”

  Gisela looked at her for a moment, then her gaze wandered off to the fading sunset.

  “All I’m saying is that you should consider Randall before you get in another uproar like last time.”

  “I am considering him. He’s still afraid. He doesn’t sleep. You know him, Gisela, the boy is in pain. He’s never going to be a hundred percent secure until the killer is caught and put away.”

  “A hundred percent secure? Tell me, who do you know that’s a hundred percent secure?”

  “I’ve got to do this, Gisela. I have no choice.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But don’t kid yourself. You’re not doing this for Randall. You’re doing it for yourself. Because it’s a bone stuck in your throat.”

  Hannah gazed into the half-light. A breeze tickled across her sweaty back. Out across the bay the twilight was losing its hold, darkness advancing quickly across the water, closing in like a dense fog.

  The concentric rings Randall had made were widening out across the marina. Beautiful ripples spreading, one after the other, moving out toward the open water.

  * * *

  Hal was wearing a white Panama hat. He was wearing a yellow shirt with speedboats on it and a light windbreaker over that. Green-and-red plaid Bermudas that came to his knees and sandals. Clothes he’d bought at the airport when he landed. Everything still stiff, just a few hours off the rack. He had a camera and he was snapping pictures of the sunset. He was standing on the seawall looking out at the bay and taking photographs he would never develop.

  The woman had a boy. She had a son and she took him with her when she went places. They were on the docks now. Hannah Keller was on the roof of a houseboat, big and square and painted bright colors. She was talking to another woman, dark hair and pudgy. The boy was standing on the dock, looking back toward the shore where Hal was standing. Hal took t
he boy’s picture, then he turned and took a picture of a seagull.

  Hal was not a dork. He was only dressed like one. A tourist dork. A pale Yankee sightseer down in Miami for a few days to get a tan and take lots of snapshots. That was the story his clothes were telling to anybody who looked his way.

  The Keller boy was tossing pebbles into the water. Hal watched the rocks ruffle the smooth surface of the marina. Little waves from the rocks were headed right for Hal. He took a snapshot of one of them. The tiny wave ran into the rocks that were piled up next to the seawall, then it disappeared. There one minute, gone the next Just like Randy Gianetti. Just like Hal. Now you see him, now you don’t.

  Hal took another picture of the sunset. It was purple and green and red and there were colored bands running high up into the sky like the streaks of fat that spread through meat. Hal had seen postcards with pictures of sunsets. People thought sunsets were pretty. They stood around and watched them. They sent people postcards with sunsets on them. Hal wasn’t stupid. This was how you knew what the pretty things were. The things they put on postcards, the things that people stood and watched while they said nothing. It was possible to figure these things out, to learn from watching people. To understand all the difficult things by being observant and putting two and two together. This was what Hal did in his free time. He observed people. He watched and learned what it was like to be human.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” a woman said.

  She had come up beside him while Hal was busy with the camera. She had white curly hair and was slumped over with a hump in her back. Bones gone soft. A lonely old woman who wanted to talk.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Hal said back to her.

  The woman took a look at him.

  Hal raised the camera and snapped another picture of the sky. It was starting to lose its colors. The dark leaking back around the edges.

  “The sunset is over,” Hal said.

  “Oh, it’s only pretty for a second or two,” the old woman said. “I suppose that’s why we like it so much. The ephemerality, the briefness.”

  Hal watched as Hannah Keller walked down the dock with her boy.