The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  “Alex, you’re a civilian. But you’re under a probable threat to your safety, so you’ll be kept informed, warned if we see anything coming your way. To a certain extent, we’ll compare notes with the city and county. If Monty wants to share anything, that’s up to him. Can I keep your photographs a few days?”

  I couldn’t think of a reason not to let him have them.

  “Let me ask you one more thing, Alex.” He stared at a bare-breasted young woman who’d sat up on the beach in order to refasten her bikini top. “Where are you from, where’d you grow up?”

  “Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

  “The Midwest. And you’ve been here how long?”

  “Oh, twenty-plus years.”

  “Okay, tell me. What’s all this ‘bubba’ stuff? Everybody calls everybody else ‘bubba.’ It’s about to drive me bananas. Is this a figment of the Waylon and Willie legacy, or does it come from the Nashville Network?”

  “Near as I can tell, it was here before Patsy Cline.”

  “So it’s a local thing.”

  “I agree, it doesn’t make much sense. The roots of this town go back to the Bahamas and to Cuba, not to Hattiesburg, Mississippi.”

  “I hear it in federal court. Defense attorneys talking to prosecutors and vice versa. They butter each other up by calling each other ‘bubba.’ It’s almost a prerequisite to getting down to business. It drives me bats.”

  “When they start using it on you, you’ll know you’ve been accepted.”

  “They didn’t tell me this in graduate school.”

  * * *

  A base-level fatigue began to creep into my muscles and my mood. It would have been easy to blame the rum, but common sense told me I had not been good to myself for almost a month. Stress, travel, and lack of sleep never used to bother me much. I’d always banked on a personal theory of relativity: the quicker your speed, the slower time passes. In other words, the faster you live, the longer you live. It was proving to be a bogus notion.

  Exercise is supposed to help. But I’d labeled the bike ride to the Hyatt and to Laura’s as my workout for the day. If I hadn’t ridden the Kawasaki to Louie’s, I might have blown off my next whistle-stop. One more ride past the Bight to try to catch Sam at the dock. My traffic-avoidance program took me out Washington to 1st Street, and left to Charterboat Row. I found the deadpan captain hosing down his skiff next to the houseboat restaurant in the corner near Roosevelt Boulevard.

  “Get a chance to relax?” Sam looked at me more closely and knew the answer.

  “Things are flying by a mile a minute,” I said. “You’re going to just love a couple of these tasty details. Before I tell you about Julia’s father offering a fat reward for Ray Kemp on a platter, I will give you the juice on Michael Anselmo receiving threatening postcards in the mail.”

  “After the doofus I had in the boat this afternoon, I need some fun.”

  For the second time in ninety minutes I explained what I knew. Then I tagged Carmen’s post-office recollection with the fact that Marnie Dunwoody had called about the dead roommate and the car bomb.

  “Isn’t it wonderful to find someone in this town doing her job?” Sam coiled the water hose and stowed it in his dock locker. We caught a whiff of bilge soap from down the dock. Sam pointed out a hefty woman with her hand in the back pocket of her thin cotton pants, scratching her ass like crazy. “You ready for a cold one?”

  “I’m ready for twelve hours with my head under the pillow.”

  “Go do it.”

  “Wish I could. My penis brain won’t let me. Miami calls.”

  “What happened to our pledge to solve the mystery?”

  “I’m thinking about it every waking minute. And I’ll be back on the clock Monday morning.”

  “People get murdered on Sunday, too.”

  “We can’t be psychics. He wants to hit, we can’t stop that. I think the kind of work we need to do requires places of business and civic offices that aren’t open until Monday.”

  “Did Annie ever explain anything?”

  “I’m not sure I caught the gist of it. Something about being pissed off that she loved me.”

  “That makes you the one at fault. You asked me to warn you if you flew too close to forgiveness.”

  “I got snared in the web the other night.”

  Sam got pensive, and looked back again at the woman in the white pants. “Maybe I need a night or two in some kind of web. It’s been a few weeks.”

  19

  I rolled into Dredgers Lane in second gear. The copper Cutlass Ciera was angle-parked up near the house, its nose tucked into an overgrown croton bush. I let the Kawasaki coast to a stop. Through the screening I could see Detective Billy Fernandez staring at me from the lounge chair on my porch.

  “How do I put a stop to all these surprise visits?” I said. “Cut the fucking porch off the house and tow it out the Northwest Channel?”

  Billy clutched a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Dandruff flecks covered the shoulders of his black muscle T-shirt. He didn’t answer and his arrogant, mustached TV-cop expression didn’t change. By a count of empties, he was four beers into a six-pack of Heineken. That late in the day I was sure there’d been a previous six-pack, maybe two. A mix of fashion cologne and rank perspiration escaped the porch and tainted the yard air.

  I kicked down into first, eased the cycle around back, and peeled off my helmet. The spaniel’s glum eyes peered through the fencing. I wondered if I wasn’t looking into a mirror. Afternoon shadows and fingers of orange sunlight shimmered in the crabgrass. An electric guitar somewhere in the neighborhood delivered respectable Stevie Ray Vaughan riffs.

  The walk to my door was getting longer by the day.

  Fernandez tilted back for another swig of beer. I figured the ICE logo on his ball cap for a rap group until I recalled that Island City Electric sponsored a baseball team in the youth leagues.

  “We need to compare notes, bubba.” He slurred his words. “You don’t know what kind of slicks and badasses you’re dealing with.”

  Why this? “I’m getting to know you too well, Billy.”

  “Coño, I’m not who I mean.” Billy squinted and tapped the neck of his beer bottle against the table edge. “This ain’t no goddamn Mickey Mouse scenario, bubba. You follow?”

  I stared back.

  He shifted his sitting position and brought up a modest burp. “I tell you ’bout chitchats they start in Spanish, they stay in Spanish,” he said. “That’s a Miami code they use to make it Latin against Anglo. They get Hispanic Metro cops to go bad that way like, you know, bending the law falls under a category of political action, you follow me? The caca ever hits the fan, they hang the kids out to dry. I got this acquaintance on the Metro-Dade force, ex-vice, ex-homicide, he’s done two years Internal Affairs. Knows the fuckin’ scene inside out. Even talks Yiddish, a few words. I call him last night and out of his head he pulls nicknames. You wanna know this?”

  Did I have a choice? I took a beer and Fernandez offered the opener on his key ring. “You got me rolling,” I said. “Let’s see where it goes.”

  Billy perked up and tried to focus. “Carlos Balbuena, the kid?”

  “Right.”

  “Right. Also known as, get this, Charlie Balls, the man to see in the Grove and the Gables and South Beach for quantity crystal meth. He’s sewage. Almost for sure the man behind three homicides. And he’s a puncher. Big into personally stomping street addicts who don’t pay his runners. Hangs with a bunch of rich Cuban boys, drive top-of-the-line Japanese cars with gold-plated trim. Their girlfriends all look like WASP girls from the university or the country club. Except for their women, these boys hate anyone not Cuban. They hate Colombian, they hate Puerto Rican. And they pay to train this bunch of jerks who want to abduct Castro, teach ’em how to crawl in mud and throw grenades in the Everglades. So these para-militaries are the rich boys’ muscle, and they don’t give a rat’s ass who they mess up. Now you want to find out about Emi
lio Palguta.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like I say, no Mickey Mouse, right? ‘Ogunito,’ the name from santería. You know, Cuban voodoo. The god of the forge and warfare.”

  I tried to imagine a Cuban swordfighter. “Blades,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ A, bubba. Ogunito likes the sharp edge. He likes to spring bad for the simple fun of it. He’s in Broward now because Dade kicked him out. Back then he did little shit. Melted stolen coin collections, made gold and silver coke spoons to sell to the head shops. He put vans in vacant lots near the canals to offload Cigarette boats after mother-ship trips. Did time upstate. Last ten years he lives the good life, a made guy in Dania. He and the old man Raoul, they go back to the jungle, blood-brother rebels in Camagüey, eating leeches, wiping their ass with ferns, fighting for Fidel’s little dream.”

  “They’re looking for someone who killed the man’s daughter. She was a friend of mine. We’re working the same side.”

  Without a breeze the porch had become stifling. Sweat streamed from Billy’s forehead. He pointed the bottom of the beer bottle in my direction. “How much they offer you, bubba?”

  “How much they offer you, Billy?” I said. “Are we working against each other? Is that why you’re here?”

  Fernandez pondered his answer. He scratched his stupid mustache, and I wondered which way the dead caterpillar faced, if Billy was picking its nose or its ass. “Three bills to leak a few things. Five to drop a dime when we make an arrest. Ten grand to let him escape.” He paused again. “They pumped me a grand for scene details on the Guthery and Albury cases. Little pocket change.”

  It wasn’t the beer talking. He was bragging, thrilled to have learned his dollar value in the bribery market. The potential income was clouding his vision. He’d been a cop too long to ignore the obvious. He was setting himself up for a lifetime of blackmail.

  “You got family, Billy? Wife, kids?”

  “Ex-wife, two boys. Over on George Street.” His voice dropped as his brain shifted into a different gear. He lifted his ball cap, then showed me the ICE logo. One of the boys played in the youth league.

  “You’re looking for a way to collect their cash, Billy.”

  He shut up for a moment. Mopeds and motorcycles made a racket over on Fleming. “You should remember one thing, bubba, this one thing. You can’t get me in trouble, but I can get you out of it.”

  Somehow I knew he’d used that line a hundred times before. “You saying that I’m headed there, or I’m already there?” I said. “Or do you think I’d turn you in for helping the Balbuenas?”

  “Like you say, bubba. The same team.”

  “They offered me five to snoop around Key West.”

  Billy snapped out of his stupor. He grabbed the cardboard container for another beer. “A bird-dog fee? Five hundred or thousand?”

  “What’s the difference? I turned it down.”

  “You notice, these girls, nobody’s saying official cause of death.”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  Now he looked smug. He popped the bottle cap with his opener. He almost whispered, “You know Avery wants to come down on you?”

  “Avery’s been diddling around, not making a whole lot of sense.”

  “He makes more sense than you think, bubba. Sometimes you know he scares me, he makes so much sense, you follow?” Fernandez began to jingle his key ring. “So he talked about picking you up for questioning. My partner can be a fuckhead sometimes. You could hear the knock on the door. This is not a good time to be holding concealed.”

  “I look like the type to carry a gun?”

  “Maybe you should.” After a long swig his glassy eyes met mine. “Just don’t get caught.”

  “How long have you known Hatch?”

  “I jumped city to county in ’80. He came to the county in ’81.”

  There was no way to be sure if Fernandez had known Ray or Julia. I didn’t want to ask. The time frame suggested he might have. “Find anything at Bahia Honda?” I said.

  “Only you.” He pushed himself out of the lounge chair and leaned against the doorframe. “You should back off. Back away, bubba. Don’t forget these talks we have.”

  The talk had consisted of slurred advice from a man who complained about tactics used to turn good cops to crime, then, like reading a menu, explained his options for making illegal pocket change. Fernandez lumbered out the door with his half-finished beer looking no different than a thousand drunks he’d arrested for staggering out of the Boca Chica Bar. He left his empties and his magazine behind.

  The last thing I said was not to spin his tires in the yard. In Key West real grass is harder to grow than the Jamaican variety.

  * * *

  Raoul Balbuena had dictated a message to my machine. He’d spoken with his ex-wife about Ray Kemp, and she had told a strange story she’d heard long ago from Julia. Raoul thought I might find it interesting. Before Julia left Key West, Ray had become angry at a neighbor’s dog. The dog’s owner worked a night shift, and the dog barked all night every night and kept Ray awake. One midnight Ray had gone next door and duct-taped the dog’s mouth shut. The dog had died.

  Raoul had drawn a parallel, but did not explain his knowledge of Albury crime-scene details.

  I packed a waterproof duffel and listened to the phone ring as I headed for the door. Again, against good judgment, I answered.

  “You sound out of breath,” said Bob Bernier.

  “I’m blowing town for the sake of my optimism.”

  “Far?”

  “Near. Going to Miami for a couple days. See what I can make of this half-assed romance of mine.”

  “I need to ask one more question. Was Kemp ever in the service?”

  “I told you all I know.”

  “You said he sold his charter boat to an old friend from the military…”

  “… an old friend of Wheeler’s,” I said. “But now that you mention it, Ray and another captain in Mariel got into war stories, recognition games about places in ’Nam. You couldn’t tell by the way he acted on that trip, but I got the impression he might have been in the Marines.”

  “Well, he doesn’t fit our type profile for serial crime. That gives him some distance. But not much.”

  “So where’d the bomb come from?”

  “The big leagues. It was a mix of commercial mining explosives. Tovex and Drivex. They look like greasy white sausages, crimped at both ends with metal staples, nasty to handle. They’re hard to get, except in West Virginia, in any hardware store. At least that was the case a couple years ago. The law may have changed by now.”

  “How was it set to blow?”

  “Two different ways. An electric blasting cap and an M-100 firecracker, both wired to filaments in bulbs like they use in taillights. The bulbs were wired to the brake-light circuit. Broken glass, intact filament. Once the driver hits the brakes and holds his or her foot down, the bulb would last about forty seconds in the open air. It’d glow white-hot and light the M-100 fuse. Plus, when the bulb burned out, it’d trigger the electric cap. Crude, rude, and fail-safe. Either way the explosive gets a boost.”

  “Why wasn’t the thief blown to hamburger?”

  “German engineering, the way the factory pieces together sections of VW convertibles. That and luck.”

  “Why West Virginia?”

  “Who knows? It’s solid rock, and people need holes for their outhouses and graves and coal mines.”

  “I’ve got to go, Bob.”

  “Can I ask a favor?”

  I told him he could ask.

  “You’re a focal point. I’d like to put a man in your house until you get back. We’ll bring in groceries and bed linen.”

  And search my house for evidence of my involvement in pot smuggling, you chickenshit bureaucrat. On the other hand, I felt reassured having someone looking out for the homestead. Plus, I had nothing to hide.

  “I’ll leave a key under the Christmas cactus,” I said. “Be prepar
ed. The neighbors are going to ask who you are. Tell my houseguests there’s no cream for coffee. It’s been a few days since I’ve been to the grocery.”

  * * *

  I did not have the energy to push it. I found a speed just above the limit and put my brain on cruise control. In the Key deer slowdown zone on Big Pine, I zeroed in on one question. If the ex-girlfriend link was real, what had I done to provoke all this ugliness and violence? Nothing came to mind. And knowing nothing about the killer or his motives, there was nothing I could do to change it. All I could do was try to stop it. I quit thinking again.

  Except for the beam of the cycle’s headlight, my ride through the desolate areas of the Keys and across the longer bridges was like being aboard a sailboat at night, up close to the flavor and moods of the sea. Ships’ lights glowed in the distance and gave the only clues to the horizon. At the south end of Marathon a wobbly pickup truck pulled in front of me as it departed a bar. A double downshift and a swerve cleared me from danger. Two close calls in two days, though this had been the lesser of the two. It would have done no good to confront the loadie in the GMC. Sooner or later a semi would T-bone his pickup, shatter his legs, bounce his skull against the roof, and the Herald would have another five inches to fill.

  An hour later, behind a line of traffic north of Jewfish Creek, I laughed at the brake lights, the slowing, the movement to the right in the four-lane passing zone. The tourists’ radar detectors had picked up Southern Bell’s microwave tower on Card Sound Road. For once, the locals could speed up and go to the head of the line. I hit the Turnpike in Florida City, turned east on 836 behind the airport, and connected with with I-95 near the center of Miami. A friend once told me that cycle riders in Miami are classified as targets of opportunity. Traffic was light and my last few miles were easy. I found the Enchanted Forest address about twenty after eleven.

  Carmen’s cousin lived in an elaborately lighted home in an area bordered by canals. The motorcycle engine had buzzed me into one large nerve ending. I felt shaky on solid ground, like a sailor who steps onto the dock after a long voyage and becomes seasick from lack of rolling motion. A jovial man answered the door. My height, probably in his mid-thirties, he wore silk pajamas and a short inch-thick terry-cloth robe. He looked like a blond stand-in for the Marlboro Man. If this guy is gay, I thought, I’m Nancy Reagan.