The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  The no-necked goon with the leather pouch under his arm. It hadn’t been a gun or a cellular phone. He’d had a camera.

  The next photograph was a long-lens shot of Ray Kemp talking to me in the church parking lot, Ray facing and my back to the camera. A different angle. There’d been more than one photographer.

  Raoul continued. “You were kind enough to sign the small book inside the church. And your name was on the police report because you identified Julia. But this man did not sign the book. Do you know his name?”

  “Ray Kemp. He and Julia—”

  “Yes,” he interrupted. “Another name from Julia’s past that we recognize. The captain of the boat you took to Mariel. But we never have met this man.” He took the photo from me, and stared at it. “We want to talk to him. Did you know that Ray Kemp was in trouble with the police?”

  “I know that he was involved in smuggling marijuana. My impression has been that he was never caught.”

  Raoul’s expression turned grim. He motioned for Carlos to continue.

  The next photograph showed a rear view of the maroon rental car as Ray drove away from the church. The next was the Pontiac’s license tag, enlarged from the same negative as the previous shot. Good darkroom work. The print was as clear as a close-up: HV2-74G.

  “It’s a renter, from East Coast,” mumbled Carlos. His first words, with more of an accent than his father. It had been Carlos who’d called me “Rootleg.”

  I was still amazed that Ray had used a fake identity to come to Julia’s funeral.

  “You know where to find Mr. Kemp?” said Raoul.

  “Kemp rented the car using a false identity.”

  “Yes. Johnson, of Saginaw, Michigan.”

  “I called directory information last night. No such name in Saginaw.”

  Raoul nodded. “No Stockton Street either.”

  They had been as successful as I with East Coast. “Ray told me he’s been living in Port Angeles, Washington, for years.”

  Carlos began to write in a small notebook.

  I continued. “He didn’t say much else except that he’s been a commercial fisherman and a repo man specializing in motor homes. This was the first time I’ve seen him since … I don’t know…’81, ’82.”

  Raoul shifted his chair and leaned closer to me. “I want to find the man or the people who killed my daughter. The police believe that it was one of my political enemies. We have been talking to a detective with the Sheriff’s Department, and I will quote what he said: ‘Murders are murders. They happen all the time.’ In my life, Mr. Rutledge, I have learned not to trust the police to do a good job. In Cuba they did not work for the people, the citizens. They worked for the people in power. In the United States the police are overworked. They are not paid enough money. No one can do a good job with those conditions.”

  I agreed.

  “I am involved in political talks which anger many of my shortsighted former countrymen. I am aware of threats made against me. But that is not what happened to my daughter. No one wanting to hurt me would dress up the dead body of my daughter like a television murder victim and deposit her remains a hundred miles away from Miami. My political enemies are too powerful to bother with theatrics. They would begin by ruining me at the bank. They would have me arrested for any one of a dozen false reasons. They are too busy to drive down the Keys. Even the most evil of them would only have beaten her and left her in a Calle Ocho sandwich shop, propped at a table, playing dominoes with the broken, drooling, stubborn old men who despise the past and cannot understand the future.”

  Carlos shook his head. “They would not have killed her. We are Cubans. Not Colombians, not Peruvian animals.”

  Raoul aimed a glare at his son, then relented and nodded.

  There was one more photograph. Ray stood at the Pontiac’s open trunk. He held his undersized sport coat over an open piece of luggage, what we used to call an AWOL bag. The trunk appeared full of large duffels and boxes.

  I studied the print. “A lot of luggage for a quick trip to Florida.”

  Emilio reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and another envelope appeared on the table.

  “We want to find the person who killed my daughter.”

  I ignored the envelope. “As do I.”

  “We want to locate Ray Kemp, to clear his name in this regard.”

  Punch his ticket, too, I thought.

  “We would like your help, here in Key West.”

  “I’m not on a jam-packed schedule.”

  “We would not ask for your time without compensation.”

  “Forget it.”

  Raoul took the notepad from Carlos and flipped a page. “Please excuse our snooping. You have a six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar mortgage payment due the sixth of every month. You have been late in mailing three payments in the past twelve months. Your telephone bill averages over seventy-five dollars per month. Your utility bills exceed two hundred dollars per month. You have been overdue twice since January on payment to the city of Key West.”

  “Bad planning,” I said. “I’m okay with money. Sometimes I forget to mail checks. Look, I’ll help you find Ray Kemp. I’ll do anything to help find Julia’s murderer.”

  Raoul took a new tack. “We will offer a five-thousand-dollar reward for the person who finds the brutal monster responsible for this death.”

  Why fight? “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Is there anything you know right now that might help us?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But let me ask two things. You said you saw the police report on Julia’s death. Which police officer signed the report?”

  Raoul cleared his throat to stall, then said, “Detective Billy Fernandez was the officer of record.”

  “Did you show these photographs to Fernandez?”

  “No.” He pushed himself out of his chair and extended his hand. “We will give you three telephone numbers to call and a credit-card number to use.”

  I stood and shook his hand. “Fine.”

  “We’ll keep you informed of our progress as well.”

  It did not look all that fine to Emilio Palguta. I reached down for the bottle of beer and took my first sip. “Sounds great. Why does this man look like he wants to shoot me?”

  Raoul glanced at Palguta. “I don’t pay this man for charm. He sees the reflection from one tooth, he bites the neck below it.”

  “I promise not to smile at him.”

  I took the Amstel with me.

  16

  Eleven A.M. by the clock atop old City Hall. I had been awake four hours and it felt like twelve and I wished I’d taken the Balbuenas’ offer of food from the menu. The beer helped fill the void where my stomach used to be.

  I needed to reach Laura Tate, wispy blonde, ex-lover. No privacy at the Hyatt breezeway phone, but I used it to call home to my message machine:

  “This is Marnie Dunwoody at the Key West Citizen. It’s nine-forty on Saturday. I would like to talk to Ann Minnette about the death of her former roommate and the theft of her car. Please call me at 291-1241.”

  As Sam had predicted, someone had done her homework. A pleasant voice. The same woman who was checking out Monty Aghajanian’s certification flap with the state of Florida.

  “Robert Osborn, Sunstate Insurance. I need to meet with Miss Minnette regarding the accident involving her 1975 Volkswagen. My number in Marathon is 744-7400. The best time to call back is Monday morning before ten. Thanks.”

  “Ann, Marnie Dunwoody again, calling from the Key West Citizen. If it’s possible, I’d like to talk to you this afternoon, before four o’clock. Please call me at 291-1241. Thanks again.”

  Can’t happen. Should I call?

  “If you would like to place a call, please hang up and dial again.”

  Phantom messages. All the time.

  “Alex, this is Bob Bernier, a friend of Monty Aghajanian. If you could give me a call sometime this weekend, I’d appreciate it. 291-5501. Thanks.” Monty’
s buddy in the FBI.

  I chugged the Amstel, tossed the bottle in a trash can, unlocked my bicycle from the Hyatt employees’ rack. Over at the Pier House the phone booth in the hall, just inside the south parking lot entrance, would give me privacy. On Front Street clouds of dust tumbled behind turtle-paced minivans and convertible rentals. The midday heat put a clammy sheen on my skin, trapping airborne dirt in a thin paste that only five showers would remove. Or an hour’s swim in the salt waters of the back country.

  No such privacy. I’d never noticed that the booth had been removed from the Pier House hallway. Another chunk of history gone. From that small cubicle people had cut deals, lied to bosses and mates, confirmed assignations. I walked past it one night in the eighties and found a middle-aged couple, nude below the waist, making love in the booth. The man was talking into the phone, the woman sobbing as she bobbed up and down …

  Outside the Chart Room I found a new pay phone where the garbage cans used to be kept. No eavesdroppers around. What the hell.

  “Laura, Alex Rutledge.”

  “Oh, God, Alex, it’s been … God, it’s been years. Wait a minute. Is this the call every woman in Key West dreads?”

  “What is it?” I said. “Old boyfriends are the gong show of life? I’m not calling about a disease, I’m calling about a threat. Can we continue?”

  “Have you gotten weird on us, Alex?”

  I realized this would be easier face-to-face. “No, but the world around us is getting weirder by the minute.”

  “I know. I gave some Lithuanian tourist a sympathy fuck until five-thirty this morning. I’m tired and sore. I smell like Third World BO. Where are you?”

  “Down by the Chart Room.”

  “I need a Bloody Mary. Would you bring me one? What’s it like at the Pier House?”

  “The place is full of tourists, lathered up and broiling. The place smells like a big vat of piña colada and baby oil.”

  “Let’s do something we haven’t done in years.”

  “I thought you were sore.”

  “You haven’t changed. Let’s meet for a Bloody Mary at Sloppy Joe’s.”

  “Any day but today. Look, I have to explain something to you.”

  “Will it wait until you bring me the drink? Stoli with extra Tabasco, two limes, no celery. I still live on Amelia.”

  “You really need it?”

  “It’s the only thing that will put me to sleep. I have to get up at sundown to go to work. I’m back to hostessing.”

  “One of the new restaurants?”

  “The Packet Inn. It’s an all-you-can-eat. I’ve got an application at Kyushu.”

  The Chart Room Bar had become a local hangout in the seventies, when David Wolkowsky, the original Pier House owner, converted a motel room into a miniature saloon. Six barstools, three tables, a first-class view of the Gulf of Mexico. The tiny lounge had provided a safe haven for a crazed assortment of yachtsmen, drug dealers, treasure divers, and politicians. There had been nights when an unknown songwriter had strummed his guitar and sung for drinks. After finding success he had included the bar’s name in a well-known lyric. But things change. A certain soul, a camaraderie, had evaporated over the years.

  I drank another beer while I waited for Laura’s Bloody Mary, and chided myself for moping about the “old days” of only twenty years ago. Fifty years ago what was now the Pier House waterfront had seen huge ships come and go. The SS Cuba and SS Florida had provisioned and taken on passengers bound for Havana’s exotic adventures. Seventy-five years ago, Aeromarine Airways had occupied the property. The company had flown passengers and mail to Cuba in leftover World War I seaplanes. Fifty years before that, the United States government had run a ship coaling station. Key West had been a marketplace, a hub of commerce for a century and a half. I suddenly felt small, devoid of perspective, bemoaning the shifting moods of a fifteen-by-twenty-five-foot gin mill.

  I had just left a murdered woman’s father—a man with a tough history of changing politics, a treacherous looking henchman, a punk for a son, and an envelope full of money. The father wanted to buy a solution to a crime. I knew South Florida. He stood a good chance to succeed. Money had bought change in Key West. It also bought all kinds of justice.

  Dangling Laura’s drink in a paper bag, working the bicycle’s gear lever with my thumb, I pedaled across the island. A bike ride on Simonton is the real-life equivalent of a fast-moving video game: you dodge ruts, bricks, Rollerbladers, broken pavement, stray coconuts, mopeds, and fallen fronds. At the Eaton Street light I squeezed between parked cars and traffic to pass the Conch Train, an Isuzu pickup towing a boat trailer, and two convertibles. A Mercedes-Benz 400SEL sedan at the head of the line waited to turn left and head out of town. The old man was in the backseat, Palguta driving. Carlos Balbuena sat low in front, punching numbers into a cellular phone.

  Laura Tate had lived in the same place for years. Amelia above Simonton, near William, is lightly traveled, even by Key West residents. Her cottage sits behind another home, protected from island noise by a small rain forest, a snarl of vegetation she used to call Lizardland. One evening, years ago, we spent hours sitting in beach chairs under the canopy of trees drinking sangria that she had chilled in a thermos bottle, and listening to homemade cassette compilation tapes borrowed from a disc jockey friend. When the wine was gone we’d tried to make love down in the dirt and back to nature, until a frog jumped onto her forehead and scared the wits out of her. We managed to shower off the filth and finish the sex without falling in the bathroom, and we fell asleep on the living room floor. After sunrise a flash downpour had struck. I still can picture her racing out the door, running naked in the yard, laughing and scrambling to save the tapes and the ghetto blaster from the rain.

  She answered the door wearing a flimsy tank top, men’s boxer shorts, and a backward ball cap. Cute as ever. Pink skin, a weariness in her eyes. She held a large black penis-shaped dildo in her hand.

  “Do you know how to fix these?”

  I eyeballed the upright phallus and offered the response of a concerned physician. “Hmm. What seems to be malfunctioning, young lady?”

  “It’s supposed to be a three-speed model. All I get is full tilt, like a damn Joy Buzzer. Doesn’t do a thing for me, high speed.”

  “Have you tried using older, worn-out batteries?” I handed her the bag with the Bloody Mary.

  “I think old batteries were the problem in the first place. I didn’t use this thing for a long time while I was dating Tripper Wilbanks, ’cause I didn’t need to. Then the dummy got caught with a briefcase full of blow, and he had to go to camp. Meanwhile the batteries leaked, you know, that orange goo stuff, so I put in new alkalines. Six bucks at the pharmacy, you believe that? Six bucks. Ever since, full speed. Kind of reminds me of that Lithuanian boy last night. Open throttle, all the way.”

  Laura fetched me a nail file so I could clean the internal switch and battery contacts. I settled onto a sofa and dismantled the plastic dick while I explained about the murders, the attempted abduction, and the shredded VW. I blabbed on with all the details while I scratched away corrosion. Laura was flopped back into an old beanbag chair, sipping from the Bloody Mary and poking around in her mouth with the straw. Her threadbare tank top permitted the occasional review of near handful-sized breasts. Her nipples pointed outward like pushpins and the boxer shorts were askew just enough to flash wispy hints of pale pubic hair. I must have needed someone’s ear. Or else I did not want to abandon the view. I even threw in the parts about Raoul at the Hyatt and Ray Kemp at the funeral in Coral Gables. I mentioned that rape may have been a partial motive. Finally I stopped talking because there was nothing left to tell.

  The coal-colored dork was operational. I needed to get out of the cottage before I succumbed to the scenery. Laura looked at me, stone-faced, making sure I had finished. She began to giggle and apologize at the same time. Something in my story, something in the tale of murder, had struck her as amusing.

/>   “Let me in on it real fast,” I said.

  “I’m trying to say I’m sorry. Oh, Jesus…”

  She leaped from the chair, dropped her cup on the table, pushed down her boxers and went running for the open door of the bathroom. An exquisite moon, those perfect buns that I had loved to palm as I fell asleep the nights I had spent in the next room. I heard her hit the toilet seat, and listened to the splash as she urinated. Out of breath and wheezing, she patted her bare feet on the tile floor.

  She walked back into the living room. “Nothing you haven’t seen before … But don’t look, okay?”

  I looked. The flat tummy, the little blond welcome mat. She turned her back, stepped back into the shorts, and bent to pull them up.

  This time I should have looked away. Things began to get crowded in my shorts.

  She composed herself and sat back down. “This town. This crazy town.”

  “No argument there.”

  “I get on laughing jags, I wet my pants. Ever since high school.”

  “It never happened when I was around before.”

  “It comes and goes. Like an allergy. Some years I’m allergic to cats, some years I’m allergic to pollen. Some years I pee.”

  “What was so funny?”

  “I didn’t know about you and Julia. Up until the day Ray met her, he was sleeping in my bed. Back when I lived on Seidenberg, in that second-floor apartment I rented from Maggie What’s-her-name. The Maggie that moved to New Orleans.”

  “I never saw that apartment.”

  “So she dumped you and Ray dumped me the same day. We didn’t know each other until five years later. Almost like we got our revenge, but it was too late by then … And now you think Ray’s killing your ex-girlfriends?”

  “I know, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Would he kill me, too? I mean, he doesn’t know about us. And I’m his ex-girlfriend. Would he kill me, too?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know for certain that it’s Ray doing it. I’ve got a good idea, but he was in Miami when Annie’s car blew up, so he couldn’t have done that. All I wanted to tell you was, please be careful. Something’s going on. I can’t tell you to leave town, to lock yourself in the house, or anything else. All I can do is what I just did. Warn you.”