Octopus Alibi

by Tom Corcoran

  The message was cut off.

  Teresa, criminology major, was portraying Randolph, grift champion, as a victim. Did she know that he was a murder suspect? Or had she forgotten that detail?

  Annie’s voice, again: “And I hate people who don’t have call waiting. I don’t have the energy to go through all the paperwork to find Sam’s home address, so the package and the bill will arrive on Dredgers Lane no later than Tuesday morning. I would appreciate your attention to the invoice. My company closely tracks our billings.” She hung up.

  If law school taught her anything, it taught her how to use adverbs.

  Teresa, again: “Funny, I’ve never left you a message long enough to find out there was a time limit. I forgot what I was going to say, anyway. Did you hear me say that Bobbi Lewis is being watched by the county’s internal affairs group? I know you trust her, but be careful. Call me soon. Really.”

  Forgot what she wanted to say? She was going to suggest a hand-holding session so she could explain why cheating is a symptom of growth. Perhaps she would call a third time to warn me about Lewis. Were the calls meant to deflect suspicion from Whitney Randolph? Was his long criminal past being glossed and sugar-coated and minimized? Was I the only person around who wanted Lewis to be innocent?

  The phone rang while I still held it. Jack Spottswood said, “You were going out of town. Why am I catching you at the house?”

  “Your first chance in three days,” I said.

  “I just got a call from Mrs. Douglas’s brother, one Ernest Bramblett.”

  “From Texas?”

  “From Grinnell Street. Somehow the FBI got word to him that his sister had died. He just called me from Naomi’s front porch. He wanted me to tell the neighbor lady to give him a house key.”

  “You want me to go over and…”

  “Please,” he said.

  “I don’t want to get tied down with this guy all day.”

  “I can open a slot for Monday. Put him off until then.”

  I put down the phone. It rang. How did it know? I capped my desire to chuck it in the yard.

  Sam said, “I’ll pick you up for lunch. We need home cooking away from home.”

  “Save yourself running circles on one-way streets,” I said. “I need to walk that way, anyway. I’ll meet you there. Give me a ten-minute head start.”

  * * *

  Bramblett looked to be in his sixties, and harried by travel as opposed to grief stricken. “The neighbor let me in,” he said. “I assume the house is mine now. I’d feel foolish wasting money on a hotel room.”

  Was that my thanks for showing up? This stuffy fucker needed my permission to stay in the house. I clammed up. I needed his help to settle the estate.

  Bobbi Lewis had said, “He’s dead, too. Or the killer.”

  By his attire and manner, Ernest Bramblett looked out of place. He wore dress trousers, faint pinstripes on charcoal gray, and held his suit coat over his arm. His starched pink dress shirt had collar tips sharp enough to draw fingertip blood. He’d loosened his Repp tie. His face was smooth as a baby’s ass, and showed the blush of someone fighting blood pressure. Bramblett probably had not lost much hair since his youth, but it had turned brilliant white.

  His cell phone, a briefcase, and a business envelope rested on a chair cushion. A note was scrawled on the envelope. On another cushion was a stack of magazines, mailers, junk offers, flyers.

  “You’re the executor, Mr. Rutledge?”

  “Yes.” My stomach growled.

  “You might have held her mail, for security reasons. So the home did not look unoccupied.”

  “You’re right. My mistake. This has been a hectic few days. That detail slipped past me.”

  “You’re the fine-art photographer?”

  “Naomi appreciated my work,” I said.

  “I hear the past tense, sir. Did she change her mind?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Perhaps she grew tired of your pestering her?”

  “Pestering? About…”

  “About managing the new civic art museum. She said on the telephone that you’d become a nuisance.”

  “I never discussed the museum with your sister,” I said.

  “Never?”

  “Not one time.”

  “I must have the wrong man. Have you time for a walk-through?”

  “I need to spend time with you, sir, but I didn’t expect you to arrive today. Can we talk Monday morning at the lawyer’s office?”

  He scanned his new yard and porch furniture. I saw the neighbor doing a surreptitious check. Her face read, “Don’t look at me, I’m ignoring you.”

  “If that’s what works for you, Mr. Rutledge, that’ll be fine. This grubby damned town is not my idea of paradise.” He laughed without smiling, without a trace of humor. “I’ll spend tomorrow finding a real-estate broker.”

  31

  I WALKED GRINNELL, TURNED west on Caroline. The new ferry terminal made me ashamed of the island. The shrimp boats were gone forever, their rigging and spidery masts banished to low-rent wharves on Stock Island. That was a function of real-estate prices, but the bulldozing of tradition was greed. The island’s history was being edited for family consumption, was now a cheap commodity like T-shirts and keychains made in China. A dome over Mallory Square? Hell, turn the lighthouse into a Bungee-jump concession. Put a water slide on Solares Hill. There were too few of us left to fight. Attrition had been house by house for thirty years, and Key West had soaked up new money. We citizens hadn’t stepped back, grasped the picture, put up a united effort to stop it. So many old Conchs had migrated to Ocala that parts of that landlocked city were bilingual. If they painted the new Conch Harbor to match that cookie-cutter strip mall on Simonton, we’d know it was time to take to the boats.

  Sam pulled into a metered spot in front of PT’s. His Bronco had reached a stage of decay that worried me. I feared that it soon would be put down like a loyal pet, sent to the crusher in a shower of prayers and tears. Maybe he could donate it to an artificial reef. He saw me staring at the rusted rear bumper and taillight housing.

  “Marnie hinted in March,” he said. “She gave me a brochure for a VW Passat station wagon. Have I gotten fuddy-duddy?”

  “Maybe she’s trying to force-molt the crab. Hard-shell to soft-shell.”

  “Can you see me in a cute car?”

  “You could wear a palm-frond hat. Tie a coon tail to your antenna.”

  Sam said, “Blow yourself. It’d be dying an early death.”

  Inside PT’s a drunk approached us. He wanted to whine about his stolen bicycle. “Now I got to shell out money I ain’t got to buy another bike ’cause I didn’t have money for a lock, and still don’t. Is this American fair play, I ask you? Is this why I fought in Nam?”

  The dude wanted a handout, knew his game well. We would have to buy our privacy, but we refused to play. I forced myself not to rush the kitchen where I would grab anything nonhuman, nonmetallic and stuff it down my gullet. Chain-drinker’s quacking lasted until our food arrived.

  Sam deadpanned, “You didn’t go to Nam.”

  “Whatever,” said the drunk. He caught the steel in Sam’s eyes. “I thought about going there. I’m not a nice person, but I think nice thoughts.”

  “Think about distance,” said Sam.

  The man had just enough sense to follow instructions.

  I said, “Even the hustlers are victims.”

  “Especially the hustlers,” said Sam.

  We set to packing in chow and didn’t speak until we paid the check. We stayed in the booth and nursed our third beers.

  “I got a call from Goodnight Irene,” said Sam. “Eight-fifteen this morning.”

  “She want to meet you at Cheers?”

  “That first invitation, I think, was a freelance move on her part. Like she wanted to tip me off to the sting before I got my ass in a jam. Anyway, she said you bought our butts out of that Ops Box when you described Marlow’s bo
at. Up till then, they were going to mess with us, hold us a few days to yank our chains.”

  “I was grabbing at straws,” I said.

  “I guessed right, too. She said Marlow withdrew two hundred from an ATM in Deerfield Beach, about the time Simmons cut us loose. He tried a machine an hour later in West Palm, outside a marine supply store. The bank told him he’d maxed his daily limit. Their next stop going north could be Jax or Savannah.”

  “Don’t forget he took interest in that company we bought into. We could run into him at Captain Tony’s. Or we could see Macho and Marv in there, for that matter. Maybe Irene was calling from a booth on Duval.”

  We left PT’s and crossed the street. Sam pushed five quarters into the meter so he could leave his Bronco in the parking slot. He wanted to walk to the Sea Store on Greene. Bill Ford has sold nautical artifacts for thirty years, a perfect coda to his Navy career. He’d been through phases of binnacles, wooden blocks, glass bottles, brass portholes, and exotic driftwood. During the past fifteen years he’d pushed Patrick O’Brian novels and conversation. He was holding an antique chart for Sam.

  We hit the waterfront boardwalk, walked past Schooner Wharf. “The air tastes like twenty percent seawater,” said Sam. “A month ago we had hot sun and cold north wind. Turk bitched when he had to heat his house and air-condition his car.”

  “People claim we don’t have seasons.”

  Sam grunted. “We got changes up the wazoo. The island used to smell of shrimp heads, diesel, and barnacles. Now it reeks of garlic, hotel soap, and moped tailpipes.”

  “When I got here, nobody had heat in their house or air in a car,” I said. “The only carryover is cigars.”

  “Still, two things are different about them, too.”

  “The price?”

  “And the number of women smoking them.”

  “What you just said is politically incorrect.”

  “So is smoking, but it’s our last tradition.” Sam stopped and offered to help two people find their way.

  “I thought you hated tourists.”

  “As a species, I do,” he said. “Those were just lost people.”

  “You think Odin Marlow stuck around town after he was fired by the Key West police?”

  “Back in the Seventies? If he was a crook, he had two choices. He could hang in, cash blue chips, and chase poontang. Or he could go far away and spend his dirty profits without raising eyebrows.”

  “Maybe this time his ‘far away’ is right here.”

  Sam shook his head. “I was running down the front side, and I started thinking about those guys from the Seventies—Buzzy Burch, Tazzy Gucci, and the boys. They ran their marijuana wherever they wanted. The whole Coast Guard was looking for them, radars and what all. Nine boats made the beach for every one that got caught. Here I am, one guy looking for one boat. How fucked up is that?”

  “It’s a big ocean,” I said. “A boat like his, if he had the fuel, he could hide out there for days.”

  “But he doesn’t have the fuel, and that’s his weakness. That boat has to come ashore sooner or later.”

  I told Sam about Liska’s fresh suspicions of Bobbi Lewis’s actions.

  “How do you read it?” he said.

  “The short bridge between a crime fighter and a criminal.”

  “So you buy the possibility?”

  “Everything I know about her says it’s impossible. Everything she did on Wednesday and Thursday was off the wall. The coin’s heads or tails. No middle ground.”

  “Sounds like you and me,” said Sam. “You got a theory that might play better?”

  “My theory holds massive bias.”

  “Why would Randolph want to kill?”

  “Frustration. He may have seen this island as his masterpiece scam in the making. Who’s to say he didn’t set up Naomi one day, Gomez the next, then learn they’d put their heads together and shared their misgivings? If so, he saw the goose drying up and his golden eggs turning black. Maybe they told him to leave town, threatened to expose him. Maybe he killed them so he could stay in business.”

  “Assuming they were sharp enough to spot a scam…”

  “Naomi was a careful investor,” I said.

  “Sounds about perfect.”

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “a character on Cudjoe complained to the sheriff. The guy spotted Randolph for a hustler.” I saw a sudden mental picture of Frank Polan in his kayaking outfit and sun oil, and a gruff substation desk sergeant trying to keep a straight face.

  “That guy’s not dead, too?” said Sam.

  “Not yet.”

  Something nagged at me, a detail I was supposed to remember.

  Bill Ford’s shop was closed. No surprise. His schedule worked as a function of season, grandparenting duties, and nap time. I walked another fifty feet, then motioned Sam into the gift shop. Cristina Alcroft saw Sam first and openly regarded him as a potential shoplifter. Then she recognized me.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said. “A woman from the sheriff’s office came by yesterday. Funny attitude she had. She was dressed like she was going to a resort, but at least she came and asked questions.”

  “Do you recall what she asked?” I said. “Were the questions as odd as her uniform?”

  “She couldn’t have been nicer. You wish they all could be like that. She asked what I guess were usual police questions. How long I’d known Naomi, visitors lately, mood changes. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. Everything had been fine. Whenever we got together, Naomi and I would always laugh and say, ‘Ain’t life grand?’”

  “Did the deputy bring up the death of Mayor Gomez?”

  “Well, that was quite strange. She asked if Steven could have harmed Naomi. I told her the notion was ridiculous. He was wonderful to Naomi, devoted to her.”

  “So that was it?” I said.

  “The woman asked if Naomi ever had mentioned two or three Cuban-sounding names.”

  “Borroto or Brinas?”

  “Yes, Brinas for sure,” she said. “It sounded to me like Bina’s. That used to be the name of that small grocery on Fleming.”

  “Did she mention a Manuel Reyes Silveria?”

  “No. I would have remembered that one. I have a friend named Manuel, an elderly man who’s not well. One other thing she asked, she wanted to know if Naomi had employed a financial advisor.”

  “Was that something you could answer?” I said.

  “No, it was none of my business.”

  “When you say this deputy was dressed in resort wear…”

  “Oh, that’s too fancy a term, Mr. Rutledge. These days, ‘resort wear’ means expensive. This woman looked like she intended to spend the rest of the day out boating. She had those wrap-around sunglasses that fishermen wear. They hung from her neck on a fluorescent strap.”

  “I still share your worries about these deaths,” I said. “What you’ve said might help the detectives.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “And, again, this may not be the best time, but I still want to talk about putting you in my store.”

  “Why my photos?”

  “I admired the two in Naomi’s home. She spoke highly of you, and said you had a chest full of Key West pictures that you’ve been taking for years. I want that in here. History and craft and a feel for island light.” She handed me a small business card. “Will you please call me when we’re in a better frame of mind?”

  I agreed, and managed a smile.

  * * *

  Sam and I stood on Simonton and looked north. Only one cloud in the sky, but the haze a block away was a rain shower. If it drifted with the wind, we’d be soaked in three minutes.

  I said, “Captain Tony’s?”

  “Forget Macho and Marv,” said Sam. “Let’s head for the Bronco. I’ll drop you at the house.”

  “I just figured out what’s been bugging me for forty-eight hours. I left my bike chained outside the Green Parrot. That drunk’s speech about his stolen bicycle didn’t do my ner
ves any favors.”

  “You go that way, I’ll go this way.”

  “We never discussed our investment,” I said. “Our exit strategies.”

  Sam started toward Duval. “I’m in no hurry. Let’s hike.”

  We made it around Sloppy Joe’s, the Saturday-afternoon crowd listening to a guitar player with a sound system better than his voice. He did an old folk song and substituted off-color lyrics to cheer the high-noon drunks. They loved him.

  “I can take cute trash cans and brand-new old-style lamp posts,” said Sam. “I accept the fact that people who walk the slowest take up the most sidewalk. But the fucking pigeons.”

  “They’re living the good life,” I said. “Gourmet droppings from tourists’ fast food bags.”

  “When doves are too fat to fly, are they pigeons or rats?”

  “Which brings us back to our investment,” I said.

  “I don’t know how, but here’s my thinking. We were young, foolish, in it for the money. Now we’re older, and in it for the write-off. I don’t even know if we got documents. We don’t have canceled checks, right?”

  “I used cash tips from bartending,” I said.

  “I did a cash thing, too. Weren’t we the brilliant ones? Did we get some kind of receipt?”

  “I’ll have to think about that. I’ve got boxes in my attic, but it gets hot up there. My rule is to visit the attic only in December and January.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.” Sam started up Eaton Street. “Marnie requested a reunion before the sun goes down.”

  “Remember that gun you loaned me awhile back?”

  He nodded. “The Walther? It’s still in some evidence locker.”

  “I should pay you for it. It saved my life. You may never see it again.”

  “We’ll get square one way or another.”

  “It doesn’t have a brother, does it?” I said.

  “You’re thinking, if we found Odin…”