The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  Avery Hatch had heard me coming. He glared over his shoulder. “Those city wussies sent your ass to give us county men a hint.” Spittle and flecks of cigar-wrapper tobacco rode his lower lip. “We’re stinking up their show and they’re late for coffee break.” He turned back around and used the palms of both hands to smooth the hair above his ears. A quick application of brow-sweat hair gel. A webbed plastic chair suffered under his weight.

  Billy Fernandez, an equally unsociable Sheriff’s Department detective, slouched, bored, in a similar chair next to Annie Minnette. Billy was in his early thirties. I’d watched his hairline work its way backward an eighth inch every twelve months since I started part-time work with the county ten years ago. Billy’s thick mustache made him look as if a black caterpillar had crawled onto his upper lip and died there. I hadn’t seen him change his expression in years.

  Annie gave me a narrow-eyed “What are you doing here?” stare. I looked away. A rusted washing machine occupied a concrete slab next to the back door. A mildewed Pawley’s Island rope hammock hung between two sapodilla trees.

  “So?” said Fernandez.

  “Thought I’d get a few before Riley’s people arrive.” I pulled a small flash unit from my bag.

  Hatch turned again. “Look here, Rutledge. Cootie Ortega left ten minutes ago. He was trying to beat the black-bag squad, too. And you know what? He even had on a shirt, official as hell. It said ‘Crime Scene Unit’ on the back. Blue shirt, white lettering. You’re not wearing an official shirt. Did the city call you, or is it you need snapshots for your personal collection?”

  Avery had always thought of me as a post-hippie beach bum who couldn’t possibly deserve a job with the county. The idea that his income and mine came from the same till didn’t fit his self-image. He waited for my response. It was a good question. Neither Monty or Liska had mentioned Ortega.

  I locked him eye-to-eye. “Most of us understand that Cootie’s the mayor’s wife’s cousin,” I said. “Nobody at the city has the balls to fire him. Every time he works, the evidence gets trashed in court. Like Forsythe working out of your Marathon Substation. Marathon’s a big town now. You ought to be able to find somebody with a brain. But the county calls me only when Lester’s busy. The city calls me when they don’t want their case flushed down to Castro with Cootie Ortega’s evidence and the rest of the city’s shit.”

  “Gentlemen.” Annie stood. “It is time for our talk to end.”

  The pain and finality in her voice settled it. Fernandez dragged himself out of his chair, and Hatch flipped through a small steno pad to amend his notes. Annie walked toward the rear of the yard.

  I let myself in the jalousied back door, wondering whether Annie Minnette was grieving for her lost roommate or reminiscing about the night she’d spent with her tight alibi. I could learn his identity without much trouble. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I sure as hell would rather hear it from her.

  The kitchen smelled of paella. Odors and steam from five generations of Cuban meals had impregnated the walls. A Fantasy Fest poster from 1985 hung between varnished pine cupboards. My boat shoes squeaked on the hardwood floor in the narrow hallway. A pair of black-and-neon-yellow Rollerblades lay against a discount-store stereo. Pictures of strangers sat on glass-topped wicker tables. A peace lily in a red clay pot needed watering. Someone had stepped on a video cassette of Angel Heart.

  I had made it inside. I had bullshitted my way into documenting a murder scene for no good reason. I had no real desire to view the deceased, no need to build a corpse portfolio. So much for curiosity. This job made those sensitive portraits of rock stars and authors a piece of cake.

  Ellen Albury’s body lay between two chairs in the living room. Someone had found the charity to cover her face with a section of cloth. I had to lift it to take the photographs. Aghajanian had warned me. I am sure that he had meant facial similarities, though death had distorted her features, but there were others. Either Ellen owned an identical Mickey Mouse T-shirt or she had borrowed the one that Annie treasured. She had Annie’s high cheekbones and shoulder-length brown hair. Even the hipbones were the same, the high-rise underpants, the shape of her thighs, the pubic outline.

  “Hey, Rutledge!” Billy Fernandez ambled down the hallway twirling his keys on one finger. “Different anchors have different names, right?”

  “Yeah.” I gathered my composure.

  “Whad’ya call that one, bubba?”

  I looked over to check. “A fifty-pound Danforth.”

  “Ah, yeah. How you spell that?”

  It occurred to me to spell f-i-f-t-y. Someday I would print bumper stickers to distribute in Florida that said, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE WAY AHEAD OF ME! I spelled “Danforth.”

  Billy wrote it down. He left without a thank-you.

  Once I started photographing, I viewed objects in the room, including the late Ellen Albury, as items in the viewfinder. I’ve learned to use my camera as insulation. Documentation requires objectivity: you remain detached, an arm’s length from the situation. I worked with both cameras and framed out a series of overlapping shots with each one. I took note of furniture that appeared out of place or too perfectly placed. I shot details of cigarette stubs and debris like the chewed toothpicks and disassembled Bic lighter on an end table.

  I finished the color film first and dropped the OM-2 into my bag. I exited the back door, found no one in the backyard, took a shot of the hammock in black-and-white, and walked around to the front. Larry Riley, Monroe County’s ponytailed medical examiner, leaned against the picket fence and sipped from a ceramic mug. No sign of Annie’s Volkswagen. An ambulance had claimed its parking spot.

  Chicken Neck Liska emerged from his climate-controlled Taurus and began to escort two younger investigators into the house. He held out his palm. “Give me the film. I’ll have Ortega develop it for us. Quicker that way.”

  The last person I wanted touching my work was Cootie Ortega, the cousin of the wife of the mayor. He was an odds-on bet to overdevelop, expose, or scratch my negatives. But Liska had me in a bind, and the film was my ticket out. If he wanted it, I had to give it to him. Or explain in detail what I was doing there in the first place.

  “I shot a roll of black-and-white.” I turned my back to the sun, rewound the film, and popped open the OM-4. “Favor. Don’t hold it in the direct sunlight.”

  “Invoice me. The usual.”

  I recalled Liska’s inaccurate but constant reminders that I made more in an hour than he did in a day.

  “It’s only nine o’clock, Rutledge. Have a nice day at the beach.”

  I packed my photo gear as I walked back to the motorcycle. I couldn’t help thinking: What if Annie had been home? What if she’d walked in as the murder was happening? She may have treated me like crap, but she didn’t deserve harm. A bigger question also loomed. If the two women were so similar, could Annie have been the target instead of Ellen Albury?

  Annie’s wake-up knock on the door had been a surprise. The next ninety minutes had shot my day to hell. The beach did not sound appealing.

  Nothing sounded appealing. I headed back to the house.

  3

  For the past four or five years, Sam Wheeler and I have met for lunch on the Wednesdays he hasn’t had a charter. He tended to be fully booked; our routine tended toward the Wednesdays with the nastiest weather. For a while we’d skipped around, field-testing new restaurants as they appeared on the island. But the skimpy gut luggage posing as cuisine, promoted as healthy, had driven us back to our old standby, the Half Shell Raw Bar at the old shrimp docks.

  Back when Bob Hall shucked thirty dozen a day and Cowboy Ron sang country classics, locals had kept the place alive. Even after the Half Shell had become a popular tourist spot it never lost its dependable menu. The place was decorated with road signs and hundreds of old vanity license tags lined up to read as statements. Eight on a wall near the entrance stated: OOH YEP KILROY GONE HOP ON ISLANDS DAILY. Two plates above the re
stroom door proclaimed TINKLE CRISIS.

  In recent years the Half Shell had become center stage for a mischievous day-shift bartender. A survivor of the Fort Lauderdale party-bar circuit and the mother of two grade-schoolers, Peggy Sue Peligrosa dispensed seafood, street directions, drinks, slander, and off-the-wall gossip. Anyone not an island resident was a Griswold—after the family in National Lampoon’s Vacation. A tourist with a sense of humor and a respect for the tip jar could gain acceptance. Locals got the worst of Peggy Sue’s jokes, honesty sessions, and hangover harassment. Her voice was loud but not grating, and Sam and I came for the entertainment as well as the food.

  I met Sam at noon. He climbed out of his ’69 Ford Bronco as I coasted my bicycle onto the tarmac at the foot of Margaret. Sam’s rust-perforated truck had evolved into rolling poetry: a starboard list, aluminum cans a foot deep in the pickup bed, a coat-hanger antenna, and its interior awash in business cards, unopened credit-card offers, and sun-roasted coffee cups. Wheeler earned top dollar as a light-tackle guide. He lived in a modest house and collected military retirement pay. He could afford ten Grand Cherokees, but he took pride in sticking with the old seacoast refugee. He’d hired a local artist to paint “Eddie Haskel Edition” under each windowsill.

  The Bronco’s hinges were shot. Sam lifted the driver’s-side door to hook the latch. “I spilled steaming café con leche in my lap,” he said. “I braked to miss some dimwit from Broward, and I can’t sue for groin damage. Pepe’s doesn’t have a million dollars.”

  I wedged the bike into a rack near the wharf’s edge and chained the frame to a crossbar. Sharp odors from the basin—rotted fish and decay—wafted on the fluky breeze. “I got up early and I saw a dead person.”

  “You got involved in that, too?” Sam tugged on his long-billed ball cap. “I lost a charter with Monty Aghajanian. He wants to make it up next Tuesday. I think I got a conflict.”

  “He told me that he’d missed the trip. Genuinely pissed.”

  We worked our way past a clutch of elderly tourists crowded in the Half Shell’s doorway. A Little Feat song played loudly as a hostess with a crew cut pointed us toward two stools at the far side of the bar. Peggy Sue sounded an ahh-ooga horn and reached into the beer cooler.

  As we reached the empty stools, Sam twisted his face into a scowl. “How come this place always smells like last night’s beer?”

  “I don’t know, Sammy.” Peggy Sue turned to someone behind the oyster bins. “Hey, Backassward, was it slow last night?”

  “Yep, slow,” someone mumbled.

  “There you go, Sam. You called it. We’re still serving last night’s beer. I always said you had a good nose.”

  Sam’s grin became an uncharacteristic leer. “That’s not what you raved about a couple years ago.”

  Peggy Sue planted a hand on her side-slung hip. “You remember that far back, big boy? You got me when I was a baby. I didn’t know any damn better. Why is a new husband like linoleum?”

  Sam shook his head. “I’ve heard it. But first I lived it.”

  Peggy Sue grinned and snapped open our beers. She dropped them on coasters in front of us and turned to another customer. “Corn and slaw with that flounder, ma’am? Put hair on your chest. Make you horny and dance in church.”

  Wheeler had ten or eleven years on me, but his physique—that of a lacrosse or rugby player—went beyond the picture of health in the Keys. He was thick through the neck and shoulders, with huge forearms and beefy hands. You could not accuse Sam of being unkempt, but his sandy hair never looked as if a brush had come near it. His rugged face stayed tanned except for the reverse raccoon areas around his eyes where sunglasses shielded the skin. He went tropical formal: always a threadbare but clean denim work shirt, long khaki trousers, Topsiders without socks, and a pair of high-dollar polarizing specs, either on his face or suspended on a nylon lanyard.

  Sam had been to Vietnam and preferred not to discuss it. After years of friendship, I knew only that he had received the Silver Star for bravery. He’d never offered details. Other vets had told me that a Bronze Star was special, but a Silver Star, if you lived to pin it on, indicated a whole other level of action.

  “The dead girl was Annie’s new roommate.”

  Sam perched his cap on the counter. “How did they do her?”

  I told him about the duct tape, anchor, cable cord, and handcuffs.

  “Came equipped for the job, eh?”

  “And I just realized that something bugged me about that anchor. It was identical to the one on Barracuda, the boat I rode to Mariel.” The Mariel Boatlift, the odd influx of Cuban refugees in 1980, had almost cost me my life. It had filled the media with emotional hoopla and flooded South Florida with immigrants. I was paid two thousand dollars for taking pictures, but I’d spent ten days in a Cuban harbor trapped on a boat with four other people and barely survived a vicious storm during an overnight trip home with another twelve refugees aboard. It had cured me of war-zone journalism.

  “Mariel.” Sam turned to face the waterfront. His eyes squinted and he looked to be conjuring up volumes of ancient details. “Long time ago.”

  “Stamped indelibly in the gray matter.”

  “Where was Annie when the roomie got it?” said Sam.

  “Spent the night elsewhere, according to Aghajanian.”

  “Meaning not your place, either.”

  “Correct. And now she wants to move back in.”

  “And that’s okay with you?”

  Good question. “Call me ambivalent. All this caught me by surprise. You catch me thinking about forgiveness, remind me to be pissed.”

  Peggy Sue approached with an order pad. “You talking about that murder on Olivia? I heard it on the radio. Kinky girl that worked for the lawyers?”

  Sam quit staring at the docks. “Kinky?”

  “Not being kinky myself, I don’t know firsthand. You spank me if I’m lying. But you know, you hear stories. By Cayo Hueso standards she was normal as apple turnover. She came in every so often, sometimes for lunch with people in office-worker clothes. Sometimes at night with different guys. She was fun to have around.”

  Sam and I ordered grouper sandwiches, and Peggy Sue drifted down the bar to chat up two ponytailed carpenters from the wood shop on Caroline. Sawdust was sprinkled in one guy’s beard. The man with the blue bandana around his head was missing the tips of both index fingers.

  Sam turned again toward the docks. “What kind of inquiry was going down on Olivia Street?”

  “You ever see those photographs of five or six toothless hillbillies in hitch-up overalls and crooked ball caps, leaning on shovels and grinning like idiots? The caption goes, ‘Our Helpful and Courteous Staff Is Always Ready to Assist You.’”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “In the Army the MPs were the ones too dumb to scrub latrines.”

  “Sam, this is an island. Connected by road to that thumb of a crowded mainland, but a real island surrounded by salt water. With cruise ships, speedboats, shrimp boats, Navy ships, and regular old motorboats.”

  Sam waved his arm toward the waterfront. “Lobster boats, sailboats, and big white yachts.”

  “And houseboats and dinghies. Billy Fernandez grew up here, and the dummy doesn’t know a Danforth from a trailer hitch.”

  “Much tradition has washed out to sea. The brains of the forefathers are out there energizing the phosphorescent plankton. These days they know more about frozen pizza and remote controls, and less about navigation and tidal action. Sad, sad.”

  Two more beers appeared in front of us. Sam’s broad, sunburned hand pushed his empty to the far edge of the bar, then grabbed the fresh bottle like a lifeline. “I gotta quit this three-beers-at-lunch bullshit. This is a day’s quota.”

  “You make it sound like doctor’s orders.”

  Sam toned down his voice. “Last time I saw him, he asked about my habits. What’ve I got to hide? I told him four or five beers a day, which I’ve been proud of since I quit
the hard stuff. ‘What about weekends?’ he says. I tell him, ‘Pretty much the same.’ So he says, ‘About a case and a half a week, then?’ and I agreed with him. So he taps on his calculator for a minute and says, ‘That’s seventy-eight cases a year. A hundred and seventy gallons.’ That’s what got me.”

  I tried to imagine the weight of a hundred gallons of beer.

  Sam waved his bottle at me. “What percentage of my last fifteen years has been spent taking a leak? How many hundreds of hours with my pecker in my hand, waiting for my used beer to rejoin the ecosystem? Hell, I’ve even carried beers into the john so I could keep drinking while I peed out the last one. Go into Fausto’s and check out gallon milk jugs. Whatever they got, imagine a hundred and seventy of them and think of your kidneys.” Sam hoisted his Amstel, took a long sip, and said: “Monty Aghajanian told you about Annie’s alibi?”

  I looked over and nodded.

  “Aghajanian’s pretty straight, isn’t he?”

  “I’d trust him down to the wire,” I said.

  “Tell me the deal on the city getting sued by that car thief.”

  “The city’s insurance paid the twenty-five grand, except the guy isn’t spending his money the way he wanted. He’s supposedly up in Raiford for an armed robbery on Big Pine.”

  “I can’t remember why it all went down.”

  I had to think for a minute. “It was right after Monty joined the force, nine or ten years ago. Out near Searstown he blue-lighted a Firebird with no headlights. The joker bolted over Cow Key Channel, past Boca Chica, all the way up to Summerland. Some deputies stopped traffic on Big Pine and two FHP troopers wedged their Mustangs onto a bridge to form a blockade. The Firebird stopped, but the jerkoffs in the car wouldn’t get out.”

  Sam laughed. “They took themselves hostage?”

  “Monty parked so they couldn’t retreat, and he’s in a big adrenaline huff. He tapped his flashlight on a side window to get their attention. The window shattered. It wasn’t intentional, but Monty reached in and unlocked the door and pulled one guy out of the front seat. A minute later three guys are facedown and cuffed on the pavement.”