by Tom Corcoran
My most vivid memory of Sally Ann came from a Halloween party. She had dressed as a conehead Brownie Scout. Late in the night, in full costume, she had danced a credible hula on a local dentist’s kitchen counter. She’d always been fun. I had lost track of her, and I wondered how she had wound up in a dumpy trailer on Stock Island.
At the bottom of the proof sheet, almost as an afterthought, Forsythe had included four more photographs. The rope and knots that held Sally Ann. Double half hitches at each chair leg. Perfect, identical, double half hitches.
“Appreciate your time, Lester.”
“Mind if I ask what you’re looking for? If it’s the rope, I already checked and it’s different from that girl on Bahia Honda.”
“That’s what I was looking for, all right. Should’ve asked you first.”
“This girl, she looked kind of slutty, if you know what I mean.”
“Right off, I don’t know what you mean.”
“The black underwear. It’s a sure sign.”
“You’re quite the detective, Lester.”
Forsythe looked pleased with himself. At this point, blowing him out of his job would be my prime incentive to continue working with the detectives.
“One last thing,” I said. “Has there been official determination of rape in any of these recent murders?”
“I have no idea,” said Lester.
I could tell that Lester had a perfect idea, but wasn’t about to let on. And I had to wonder: If the Sheriff’s Department or Medical Examiner’s Office knew of a rape threat in the Keys, in addition to a possible serial killer, why hadn’t they told the newspapers?
Annie looked a wreck. Her eyes were discolored and puffed, her hair flipped askew as if she had been combing it with her fingers. Her expression looked too exhausted for fear, but lost and dazed.
“My poor convertible. The poor bug. Like a cigar that blew up and tore itself halfway back to the end by the lips. The emergency-brake handle went through a window at Island House.”
She stood and I held her in my arms. “At least you weren’t in it.”
“I feel like I was. I feel like a peeled grapefruit.”
We held each other for a minute. On Carmen’s advice to be calm, I held back fifty questions I wanted to ask. For almost a minute.
“How long were you away from the car?” I said. “Can you figure it out?”
“I was almost late for the funeral. I was at the Embrys’ house, and I made the mistake of stopping one more time at the office. Then I made the mistake of taking one call from a client.”
“At the office, where did you park?”
“Around the corner on Fleming, in front of the real estate place. When I got to the house, I had to use the bathroom. I changed my shoes and walked to the cemetery, the Frances Street entrance. The service lasted, what, twenty-five or thirty minutes?” She looked over my shoulder at Carmen. “All told, I was away from it forty-five minutes, a little more.”
I couldn’t imagine someone having the brass balls to plant a bomb in a car in broad daylight on Dredgers Lane.
I asked what was next on the calendar.
Carmen spoke up. “Sam offered us accommodations on Mobile Bay. But we had another idea. Less of a drive.”
Carmen and Annie exchanged conspiratory glances. I could tell that they had formulated an invincible plan. I saw the glitter in Carmen’s eye. The ladies had planned a road trip. This would be their move. Their ideas would prevail.
Annie pitched the basics. “Carmen has a cousin, a gay guy. He lives in a quiet area in North Miami. Like a compound of elegant houses.”
“It’s called the Enchanted Forest.” Carmen offered a smirk of irony.
“It’s not as far to drive. We can sit around the pool. No one will bother us, and no one will find us there.”
Sam couldn’t resist. “Aren’t you afraid little fairies might spring out of the glens and hollows and steal your suntan oil?”
“Cute, Sam,” said Carmen. “We don’t tell fag jokes anymore.”
“I know. I live in Key West. But you name a subdivision the Enchanted Forest, you’re asking for it. I don’t care how enlightened we are.”
“Well, that’s where we’re going.” Annie tried to give me a pleading look. It came off as desperation. “Can I borrow your car?”
Carmen wrote down the address and phone number in North Miami. We arranged to pass messages through Carmen’s mother, Cecilia Ayusa, and, as backup, through Sam’s dockside answering machine. Carmen asked us to help the police find the murderer. If she missed work beyond Wednesday—she pronounced it Wen-ez-day, like a true Conch—she would be docked sick time. She preferred to use her sick time shopping the malls in South Miami in September.
Annie and I spent another couple of minutes in the substation parking lot before we went our separate ways. The north wind rattled the grove of palms in front of the library next door.
“I was going to cook pasta and clam sauce tonight,” she said. “I never got to the store. I wanted to sleep next to you. I wanted to explain more about the last two weeks.”
“Three weeks.”
“Okay.” Her hand slid down my back. Her thumb hooked into my belt.
I said, “I wanted to sleep next to you and not ask questions.”
“I love you, you know.”
Another sucker punch. This one connected. Then I remembered something. “Call me when you get to Miami, okay?”
She said okay.
“Ellen Albury’s current boyfriends? I assume Liska got their names from you. Tell me over the phone. I want to write them down.”
As we kissed good-bye a tree bat flew past our heads.
13
Sam drove the Bronco slowly out of Marathon. After a BMW passed us in the double-yellow stretch over Knight’s Key, he stuck the speedo needle on fifty and steered to counter crosswinds over the Seven Mile Bridge. I couldn’t think of anything to talk about. I wasn’t so much taken by the nighttime ocean view as run dumb by a long day. At the south end of Bahia Honda, Sam flipped his signal, waited for a northbound van to clear, and turned into the parking area where that morning I had run into Detective Billy Fernandez.
“This it?”
“Yes,” I said, and wondered again why Fernandez had returned to Bahia Honda. Certainly the deputies had cleared the scene of all possible evidence. Billy hadn’t been surprised to see me walk uphill from the tide line. Obviously he’d run my license tag through the Sheriff’s Department computer.
Sam yanked the emergency brake, took the keys, and walked the incline toward the stubby end of the old bridge. Instead of following, I retraced my path from that morning. In less than a minute I’d figured out what I should have guessed earlier. The headlights of cars approaching from either direction could be seen from just above the clump of vegetation where the murderer’s vehicle must have been stashed. With patience, anyone could have carried Julia’s body undetected to the beach.
I got my suit coat from the Bronco and caught up with Sam on the seawall between the bridges. In the lee of the abutments, the water’s surface looked as if someone had scraped it level with a spatula. We were far enough from the newer bridge so that little road noise marred the peace. The stars were clear in the dark sky and Orion’s Belt hung over the reef. The Pleiades, the pint-sized daughters of Atlas, danced above us.
Sam began with the questions. “What was that hurry-up meeting with Lester Forsythe?”
I told Sam about the knots in each set of photos. He asked a few details and agreed there could be a link, a psycho with nautical knowledge and a strange category of victims.
“It still could be a fluke,” he said. “Coincidence.”
I waited. In spite of the Pepper Neice connection, I was back to my original theory. Assuming I could count on Carmen, there was a chance that I might recruit my second ally.
Sam watched the lights of a motor cruiser in Hawk Channel. “I learned years ago not to trust coincidence,” he said. “What
do we do on boats? Go with worst-case scenario. We pay too much for equipment. Over-prepare for safety. We buy extra food and fuel in case we’re out longer than we expect. So let’s call the psycho concept our worst case and roll with it. Where does it go?”
“That’s the bitch. What makes anybody want to kill my old girlfriends? ’Course, with a psycho, it’s a bad start to look for a logical motive.”
“You think of anyone’s got it in for you?” he said. “Somebody out for a shot of revenge? You ever screw somebody out of fifty bucks? Eighty-six a drunk when you worked on Duval? Cut somebody off in traffic? Fuck a married lady?”
“For living where I do, the way I do, I don’t get into much shit. You know I don’t play games, Sam. I mean … I said to Annie yesterday, the day before, I hate to deal with fuzzy information. I want positive and negative. I want black and white. Up and down. Yes, no, hot, cold. Sweet or nasty. I’m a fool for definitions. Oh, goddamn … did you warn Shelly Standish?”
He waved a hand to calm me down. “I talked to her. You got calls to make besides that one.”
I’d already thought of that. The prospect hadn’t sat well. “Shit, I never kept a little black book. There can’t be many of my old flings around, anyway.”
“Just call and tell ’em straight: ‘Your life may be in danger.’”
“What did Shelly say?”
“She said she could handle herself. Look, if your theory holds water, the threat is survivable. These ladies can go away until something’s solved. They can arm themselves. Take precautions.”
“Well, there’s no dodging it. But here’s the real pisser. If I’m right about this, they’ll regret ever knowing me. If I’m wrong, they’ll all figure I’m two degrees shy of a right turn. There’ll be talk. I’ll never get laid again.”
Sam chuckled. “On the subject of fucking,” he said, “what happened between Annie and Anselmo? She confess to something?”
“Not until she was forced to.” I wished Sam had not brought it up. Once again I found myself dealing with the mental picture of Annie bouncing under the faceless attorney. “It came out during a face-to-face with Avery Hatch, yesterday morning on my porch. He was prowling around town the other morning after Ellen died and kept running into Annie. One place was Anselmo’s office. He’d also established that she’d called 911 from Anselmo’s home number. The other pisser is, I can’t decide how to react. I want to forget it’s happened. But it has. And I can’t.”
“The ability to forgive has its limits. Go back five spaces. Why was Hatch at your house?”
“He had some background questions on Julia Balbuena. Said he wanted to form a picture of her in his mind. He thought it would give him a better feel for the case.”
Sam shook his head and kicked a chunk of seawall into the shallows. “He’s full of shit. How long have you known Hatch?”
“A few years—five, maybe seven years.”
“If anything, he knew Julia better than you did.”
I couldn’t imagine two worlds more different. “You’ve gone a step too far for my brain.”
“Follow this,” said Sam. “Before he was a deputy, in the mid-seventies, Hatch was a charter captain out of Garrison Bight. We all knew him. He owned a boat called Bamboozle, which he renamed Barracuda. He went broke gambling on college football, the second-worst-kept secret on the docks. He sold the boat to Ray Kemp to pay his debts.”
“The worst-kept secret on the docks?”
“Kemp’s source of purchase money.”
“You mean what I think?”
“He ran a goddamn flotilla for two years,” said Sam. “I knew about one shrimp boat for sure. There was talk he’d bought two of them at a bankruptcy auction up in Tampa. He was supposed to’ve had three crews in thirty-five-foot sailboats running to the Guajira, hauling bales of pot back up to Key Largo and Hilton Head and the Chesapeake Bay.”
“How could I not have known that? I made a point of not paying attention to him, I suppose because of Julia. But Jesus, Sam. Boatloads?”
Sam puffed his cheeks and exhaled. “Ray made a bunch of money before it got to be cocaine and guns and body bags. Then he dropped out. He was one of the few who never got caught. Far as I know, he skated like a hockey star.”
“I saw him today.”
Sam glanced in momentary disbelief, then turned back to the water.
“Looking his age,” I said. “Paunchy, gray, receding hairline. Said he’s been out in the Northwest, fishing workboats. Here’s the weird part. He didn’t look like a seafarer. I made a call before I left Miami. He’d rented his car under a false name. Frank R. Johnson of Saginaw, Michigan.”
Sam laughed. “Probably easier to come up with a new identity than to launder Samsonites full of cash. He’s living on a yacht somewhere, what’ll you bet, having his meals catered, manicures, eating grapes one at a time.”
“What the hell, Sam. I was around. I knew what was going on back then, who was involved. Kemp went big-time and I had no idea?”
“Craniums have only so much room for storage. They get full, they either reject the incoming or unload old stuff. People get amazed I don’t know one TV star from another. Hell, I memorize the top ten tunes, I might forget to brush my teeth, wipe my ass.”
“You think Kemp’s still hot? I don’t know how the statute of limitation works.”
Sam shrugged. “My understanding, crimes go away except for murder and tax fraud. You should stick to armed robbery and declare your income.”
“Did Ray ever sell Barracuda?”
“Matter of fact, to a maniac I knew from the war. I introduced the two of them. Ray practically gave the boat away. My buddy was going to run it out of Ocean Reef. Come to think of it, I never heard from that guy again.”
The mention of Ocean Reef reminded me of something else. “I almost got killed this afternoon, up around Mile Marker 80.”
“Don’t tell me. A drunk pulled out of a restaurant parking lot.”
“Close. A truck pulled out northbound. I jumped the center line. Another one pulled out southbound. Almost as if it had been timed that way.”
“Now they’re after you instead of the women.”
I ran that idea through the risk tables. Long odds, but I’d promised myself to unstack the “ifs.” “You think Hatch pretended not to know Julia in order to gather evidence?”
“Or to gather evidence that he wants to hide. Or wants to orchestrate so he looks like the ultimate sleuth. Wasn’t he up here, too, when she was still on the beach?”
“He was here when Riley and I drove up. We arrived, he was just ducking away for a smoke break.”
“I thought you made the official identification of the body.”
Even down low, out of the wind, I felt a chill. “Politics. I don’t know.”
“Avery would know his knots,” said Sam. “All the time he spent on the water. He’d know his knots.”
“And he may have had a hang-up with Julia, back somewhere in the past. But that doesn’t give him a motive to mess with Annie or the others.”
Sam looked off toward the southern horizon. “I remember in the Bull and Whistle, when it first opened in the early seventies, a folk singer would play a tune called ‘The Devil’s Took Miami, and He’s Movin’ Up the Coast.’ That tide always stuck in my head. I figured he had the right idea, but he fucked up his geography. Key West is where the devil did his apprenticeship.”
“The bartenders are shrinks, the shrinks are all hopheads, the hopheads are vegetarians.”
“Right you are. The machine works between the left wall and the right wall. No such thing as right or wrong, or yes or no. Makes me think of the half hour before sunup, the false dawn. It isn’t light, it isn’t dark. It’s ten thousand shades of gray.”
“Nice speech,” I said. “A good book title, Ten Thousand Shades. Where does it leave us?”
“You’ve made a connection between three murders that the police may not have made. We suspect that Hatch can’t be tru
sted, for whatever reason—good guy, bad guy, conniver.”
“Conniver for certain, whatever the rest of it.”
“It’s a strong shot that there’s someone killing women who are connected to your past and your present, but the police may not want to buy it. We know something’s fishy with Ray when he rents a car under an assumed name. And we can tie Hatch and Kemp together in the past, with the boat sale.”
“Back to, where does that leave us?”
Sam started up the slope to his Bronco. “It’s time to circle the wagons and shoot back. You’ve sworn a hundred times you’d never do police work. But like it or not, you’re involved. So … I’ll help.”
We drove across Cudjoe Key, then past the Sugar Loaf Lodge. I asked about the friend, the old fishing buddy Sam had visited.
“Doyle’s gone back to Bloomfield Hills to kick the bucket. A good man, I swear. Truly a good man.”
In spite of the higher speed limits, the last twenty miles into Key West are the longest.
14
My T-shirt was drenched in sweat when the alarm jolted me awake at six-thirty. A neighborhood rooster urged the sun to toast away the gauze, then a siren wailed down Eaton, paramedics en route to another pre-dawn heart attack in one of the hotels. After kicking and tossing all night I had slept maybe three hours. My dreams had swirled with boat hulls pounding into arching waves, explosions, laugh tracks, and Annie riding an old-fashioned bicycle along paths in the cemetery, through pastoral, sunny sections and gusty downpours. I had wanted to open my eyes and find her next to me, or performing her reverse strip tease in front of the mirror. No dice. My eyes were still fatigued from my round-trip to Miami. A chalk taste filled my mouth.
I called Monty Aghajanian to arrange a seven-thirty meeting and breakfast. He was barely awake: “For this on a Saturday morning,” he said, “I will fish two days with Sam.”
