The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  “What is it, ‘Friends and Family’? You never know, bubba. Hate, revenge, love, jealousy, and the weather. You tell me. I just type reports.” He waved me out and returned to his conversation.

  I passed through a labyrinth of four or five open cubicles where detectives faced dim computer monitors or stared at their desk calendars. The whole place smelled like a locker room. Not your standard television sleuths. I took the concrete stairway and waved to Marge Sayre on my way out.

  At the pharmacy Duffy Lee apologized for spilling the beans. “I owe Neck a lifetime of favors. He asked me, I had to tell him. I printed you an extra set of four-by-sixes. They’re in the bag with your negatives.”

  I bummed a manila envelope, sealed Liska’s prints inside, then dropped them off with Marge Sayre. I took a roundabout route home and passed the house on Olivia that Annie had shared with Ellen Albury. Someone already had posted a FOR RENT sign on the porch. The traffic up Truman went slow-motion, single-file. Yesterday’s tourists, fleeing the carnival. When I reached the four-lane stretch where it became North Roosevelt, I twisted the throttle and shot toward the next intersection. Frustration.

  Immaturity. And no left turn at First Street. I cut into the gas station on the right, hooked left into the rolling traffic on First Street to catch the green across Roosevelt, and sped over the Garrison Bight Bridge. Sam’s Fancy Fool bobbed in its slip, covered by a tarp. No sign of Sam or the Bronco.

  I found two messages at the house. Sam’s voice, weary: “Back to Sugarloaf to visit Doyle. The idiot wants to skydive before he dies. He’s hired a Cessna out by the Bat Tower. Got a cash client in the morning. Talk to you.”

  Annie said: “On second thought, I don’t feel like eating in public. Deal: You buy and I’ll fry. Anything in the white-wine category. Love you.”

  Love you? Her portion of the next mortgage payment?

  I chided myself for my cynicism and pledged to chill out. I had nothing to lose by wagering the benefit of the doubt. I biked to Fausto’s for a dose of island culture and a buggy full of groceries.

  * * *

  By the time Annie had parked out front I’d uncorked a Chardonnay, set out a plate of golden lumpfish roe, and brought the coals in the grill to a neon red. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Dr. John, Van Morrison, John Hiatt, and Michael Hedges rotated on the CD player. Supper would be grilled tuna steaks, green beans, and a chowder of shucked clams and corn kernels.

  I was invited to sit on a stool and watch.

  Annie spooned six or seven herbs into a coffee mug, then mixed in olive oil. “I guess I’m guilty of failure to communicate.”

  “Well…” I hesitated. I didn’t want to slam her admission by agreeing too wholeheartedly. “Not so much in frequency as substance.”

  “Which means…?”

  “While you were gone I missed seeing the message light every time I walked into the house.”

  “I get it. If your phone didn’t ring, it was me.”

  “You used to call me a lot. While you were gone, nobody did.”

  She stuck the olive-oil paste to the tunas and parked them in the fridge while she mixed the chowder. This involved serious prep work: a flail of onion and green pepper, celery, butter, cream, a vicious-looking jalapeño, flour, bacon, leeks, red and yellow peppers, bay leaves, tiny spuds, basil, sea salt, corn, and clams. Finally she took a breather. “You said you wanted to get to know me better.”

  “Yes. I want to pose tough questions and demand straight answers.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I want to know dirty tidbits about your sex life as an adolescent. I also want to know the beliefs and rules by which you face this gross, mundane world. I want to accumulate and stockpile facts, the better to manipulate you into never leaving me again.”

  “Fair enough.” She put some of the ingredients in a pan and stirred the rest into a tall pot. “I think that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of democracy. I believe democracy is the only efficient arena for capitalism. I believe that capitalism allows me to enjoy Quaker Oat Squares and Tropicana juice for breakfast. I knew how to masturbate on a bicycle seat when I was in grade school. I wore padded bras until I was fifteen years old. Aside from that, I can’t stand tailgaters in traffic, I hate the smell of Pine Sol, and I don’t like to fuck on a full stomach.”

  “Some of those I already knew. Everything but the bicycle seat and the Commandments.”

  We finished the first bottle of wine before the tuna steaks hit the grill. She was stone sober. I was having fun balancing on the stool. But I shaped up to face the food. It is the rare meal that provides a window to profound elegance. When all five senses dance, when fifteen flavors form a truce and six or seven scents dominate, you have symmetry. I wanted to race back through time and thank that tuna face to face. I promised I would wash the dishes and drive the VW to the Dairy Queen. She informed me that I could wait until morning to drive anything.

  After we stacked the dishes, she became morose.

  “Down in the face,” I said. “Thinking about tomorrow?”

  “The cemetery is where I like to walk. I was just thinking, I’ve never been sad in the cemetery.”

  “There’s a chance it was her father.”

  “They found out he’d been around?”

  Had I left the theater for two minutes and missed a shift in the plot? “You knew about him?”

  “I knew he’d been in jail. I didn’t know why. That’s why Hatch’s story shook me so bad. It explained a lot of her problems. That’s what I thought about all day, why I didn’t want to go out tonight. He came around a week ago. She told him he could have five minutes to speak his peace and then he had to leave. He was with some other guy who was driving a new pickup truck. The other guy waited outside. Her father wanted to say he was sorry in person. She accepted it and he went away, no problem. Ellen never mentioned him again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell this to Avery Hatch?”

  “I just wanted to get away from him. He gave me the creeps.”

  “I’m going to Coral Gables tomorrow for Julia’s funeral.”

  “I wondered if you might. I’m going to be busy with the Embrys and the people from work. And you didn’t know Ellen.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We talked about you. She remembered meeting you a couple of times. Once during a yard party at the Woods’ house and once in a restaurant. She thought you were a great guy but too tame for her.”

  “How am I supposed to take that?”

  “As right on the money.”

  10

  Annie awakened on Friday in a nasty-ass mood. She complained about sand on the hardwood floor, the shower temperature, the coffee temperature, a lost earring, dust bunnies under the bureau, and the neighbor’s spaniel that always barked at garbagemen. There had been no repeat of Wednesday night’s lovemaking, no morning-after tenderness. I had read that women do not want solutions to problems as much as compassion, so I locked my face into sympathy and kept my trap shut. After several more tirades, Annie announced that she wanted to work at the office before the one o’clock graveside service for Ellen Albury. The VW convertible pulled away. I began my day all over again.

  Julia Balbuena’s obituary had appeared in Thursday’s Herald. It had taken three tries to connect with an English-speaking employee at the Diaz-Suarez Funeral Home in Coral Gables. Four o’clock service, today, at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Palmetto Expressway to Bird Road, east to Red Road. There would be no cemetery service. They’d cremated the remains. I faced a five-hour drive, including time I needed for two errands en route. Then a four-hour return in Friday night’s southbound rush of weekenders.

  Transportation in Key West runs to the personal statement. Offbeat cars, wild paint schemes in paisleys, Day-Glo Mondrians, seascapes, and cartoon faces. Twelve years ago I paid a bargain price for a ’66 Mustang with a Shelby competition suspension, disc brakes, and a 306-horsepower motor. When new it had been a high-dollar, Candyappl
e Red, “special customer” Hertz rental unit at the Jacksonville airport. During the seventies its second owner had campaigned it in some kind of fender-bending sports-car circuit. Hence the bargain price.

  The curse: about ten years ago Shelby Mustangs shot up in value. First they became hot collector’s items. Second, they became ripe targets for theft. So I paid for a blah-brown paint job, stacked the flashy aluminum wheels in a closet, and installed primer-painted junkyard replacements. With its emblems removed the car looks like any other beat-up Mustang on its last legs. I can drive it up to America, park anywhere, and hold a speck of confidence that it will be waiting for me when I’m ready to drive home. Still, I pay five hundred a year for special insurance and I have to hide it in a run-down garage behind Carmen’s house. It costs about a hundred a year for speeding tickets in the Upper Keys. Factoring in the fun makes those tickets a bargain.

  I trust that the car’s appearance is not a reflection of my personality.

  Out of consideration for the neighbors I waited until after nine to back the Shelby out of Carmen’s yard. It took me an hour in front of the house to change the oil and check its other vital fluids. By the time I had showered and dressed, it was time to join the northward flight of feather-footed snowbirds on U.S. 1.

  The phone rang as I went out the door. I had the urge to let it go. I waffled.

  “Hey, sailor.”

  “I thought you had a charter.”

  “We started in the Marquesas,” said Sam, “but some funky weather came out of the north and churned the water. I got worried about a choppy ride home. My client was turning green, anyway. What’s up?”

  “I’m about to attack the long and ugly road. Thought I’d go to Calle Ocho and pay my respects. But there’s a bunch of stuff going on.”

  “I’ve got news, too.”

  “You go first.”

  “The lady at the Citizen? Marnie Dunwoody. She checked out Anselmo, made some calls, knocked on a few doors. Nothing hit until this out-of-the-blue call from a state representative, some mid-Florida progressive redneck. He talks up Anselmo. Asks if she doesn’t have better things to do than bother a man who’s dedicated his whole life to helping the little guy. Tells her he knows that she’s been shopping Orlando and St. Pete for a better job. Lets her know he’s always ready to help a hardworking journalist.”

  “The best freedom of the press that money can buy.”

  “Well, that sucker lit a fire that he’s going to regret. She’s on the damned warpath, and she figures that there’s something the public—that would be the ‘little guy’—needs to know about Michael Anselmo.”

  “Hot damn, Sammy.”

  “Match that, action man.”

  “I don’t know about matching. But Ellen Albury’s pervert father just got out of the Big House, and they found his fingerprints at Olivia, inside and out. That hurts my theory that some lunatic was snuffing my ex-girlfriends, even though Annie doesn’t believe he’s the one. Second, Mr. Anselmo has been the cocksman in the woodpile.”

  “Go back ten steps on the girlfriends.”

  “I found out yesterday, Sally Ann Guthery was the woman killed in the mobile home out by Oceanside last week. I go back so far with her, I remember the Bee Gees on her record player. Shelly Standish was attacked at Key Plaza on Wednesday afternoon. Attempted kidnapping, or carjacking at the least. I took her to the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1979. So with Julia, and then the odd chance that the murderer mistook Ellen for Annie, I generated this half-assed idea … You get the picture.”

  “You’re reaching, but I’ll hold judgment. What about Anselmo?”

  “That’s where Annie was spending her time.”

  “You mean … oh, hell. She needs to be disciplined like a child. Shave her head and cut off her allowance.”

  “I’ve got two hundred and eighty miles to think about it.”

  “I’ll talk to you in the morning if this weather keeps going downhill.”

  I remembered to call Chicken Neck with version two on Pepper Neice.

  The drive up the Lower Keys was a mixture of moderate traffic and great scenery. I got stuck on Big Coppitt behind a slow LeBaron convertible, a remnant of the Avis fleet that had swamped South Florida in the early nineties. I finally found a straight two-lane clear of traffic. The Shelby took to the quicker pace like a strong horse, wanting air as it crested smaller bridges. It squatted in sweeping curves and overtook in one jump a convoy of three minivans from Maine. The oil pressure and engine heat gauges remained in their comfort zones. The car did not break a sweat.

  I passed the old tollbooth location that Larry Riley had pointed out. It occurred to me that the highway patrol had created a new collection spot. On holiday weekends, at the south end of the new Bahia Honda Bridge, a dozen black-and-mustard cruisers took orders from an airplane at two thousand feet, the speed trap a bona-fide tribute to tax-supported enterprise. Where had the troopers been when someone was depositing Julia’s body on the beach, fifty yards from their cash-register operation?

  I pulled into the upper parking lot at Bahia Honda. I wanted photographs from different angles, from the highway and the bridge. It took twenty minutes to reenact for myself how someone might dump a corpse without being seen from the road. I stepped off the route a vehicle would take downhill from the turnoff. Thin grass grew through the pavement. Yellow and purple wildflowers decorated the slopes and Styrofoam and broken glass littered the ground, along with several Pampers, balled-up and ripe. The lumpy narrow surface made a sharp right and led to a graffiti-emblazoned concrete barrier. The aerosol scrawls informed me that an urban posse had visited. That made about as much sense as Ping-Pong in the space shuttle. To the right of the barricade a two-track path rose to a clump of tall bushes. The beaten saw grass led to a gravel section thirty feet beyond the barricade.

  I looked upward to the road. Passing drivers had a direct view in daylight. After dark it would depend on headlights and the moon. Tuesday’s rains had stopped late. The skies in the Keys had cleared. The moon was waning, so the visibility factor was a toss-up, but the silhouette of a person carrying a body would be certain to draw attention and passersby could easily have seen a car or truck down where I stood. I backtracked to the clump of high brush and fixed that spot as where the killer had concealed a vehicle.

  Anyone carrying a body toward the west, into the flat open area, would hit a dead end of dense berry brambles. The slippery rocks between the brush and the grassy spot where the Coastal Cleanup volunteers had found Julia would present even more problems. The only other choice was to backtrack fifty yards to the twin palms, then walk the open path that Larry Riley and I had followed two days earlier. Someone had taken a huge chance of being seen, or else had brought Julia’s body to the beach during the rainstorm. I wished that I had some photos to show whether her hair and clothing were rain-soaked.

  I walked around volleyball-sized lumps of algae-flecked brain coral, over sandy, torn sea grass, then westward on the ocean-scrubbed rock surface and turned the corner onto higher ground. Beer bottles and milk jugs littered the small mangrove and scrub-pine hammock. Off in the weeds lay a busted Igloo cooler, a child’s flip-flop, and a crusty old hibachi grill. A plastic grating from a window-mounted air-conditioning unit lay among some funnel-shaped sponges. Bumblebees worked the purple flowers in patches of shade.

  I walked to the waterline and stared off beyond Sombrero Reef Light in the direction of Mariel, Cuba. A dozen net markers floated within two hundred yards of the rocky beach. I ached with the thought of what had happened to her.

  Here’s to you, sweet Julia Balbuena. You deserved better than this.

  I tallied the pieces of the puzzle. The careful truss-and-wrap job made it obvious that the murder did not occur on the beach at night. The killer had not left Julia’s body in a Dumpster or in the trunk of a stolen car, or weighted it and dropped it into the sea from a bridge. It had been deposited out of sight, but not so far that no one would find it. The kille
r had wanted her body to be found. I would bet that whoever negotiated the hammock in darkness was familiar with the area.

  After-the-fact photos wouldn’t help at all. I headed back to my car.

  Billy Fernandez was sitting on the Mustang’s rear bumper. I recognized his angle of slouch. He wore new-looking jeans, a white T-shirt, and black plain-toed uniform shoes. A ball cap with a sheriff’s star was pushed back so its visor pointed upward. Billy played a ragged toothpick back and forth, from one side of his mouth to the other, as if tickling the feet of his dead caterpillar. He’d parked his copper Oldsmobile close to the road.

  “Looking for anything special, Rutledge?”

  “That’s right. Anything special.” I pointed to the bumper. “You mind?”

  Fernandez stood and brushed the seat of his Levi’s. “For someone so shook and tuned out the other day, you’re all of a sudden hot for details.”

  “I knew the woman, Detective. I have questions that need answers. I’m not trying to crowd your gig, if that worries you.”

  “You know this place? You and your girlfriend come up here for picnics and all? Explore the hidden trails? Quiet splash in the surf, moonlight walks with the sand fleas?”

  His angle had gone too far south. I didn’t respond.

  He shook his head and laughed to himself. “I try to be too much like the movies. That was a bullshit thing to say.” He paused for a second or two. “But you might want to practice answering that kind of question, you find yourself close to another one of these.”

  “Every minute you people at the county pay attention to me, you’re getting farther away from someone who kills people.”

  He spit out the toothpick and rubbed his mustache with his index finger. “You gonna make the funeral on time? Never seen you in long pants, bubba.”

  I took his remark as a good guess. I didn’t ask what he was doing there.

  Fifteen miles later I stopped at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Substation in Marathon, a single-story adobe-tinted building with a red-tiled roof and token palm-tree landscaping. I wanted to check out something in Lester Forsythe’s photographs of Julia Balbuena’s body. I slid the Mustang into the last parking slot out front. Inside the glass doors, an officious clerk with a severe crew cut informed me that Lester was at lunch and expected to return in ten minutes. After I’d waited fifteen in the welcome air-conditioning, the clerk offered the fact that Lester always ate lunch across the road at Dinah’s Kitchenette.