The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  It was that time in mid-afternoon when the sun reflects off rear windows of cars, the chromed bumpers of pickup trucks. Two dogs slept in shade under a bus-stop bench. In the right lane a young woman on a motor scooter waited for the light. Marnie pointed. A tiny poodle rode the scooter’s floorboard.

  “Known Sam long?” she said.

  “Six or eight years.”

  She hesitated, then asked, “What’s he like?”

  I didn’t like the question. “Is this human curiosity or fodder for a story?”

  Marnie turned onto Flagler without slowing and without reacting to my tone. “Interesting guy,” she said. “I met him three days ago. He came into the office with a story that’s turned into a minor scandal. Suddenly he’s dragged in for suspicion of murder.”

  “Phony charge.”

  “Of course it is. He was in bed with me all night. He sure as hell didn’t have time to go hurt somebody. I barely let him go take a leak.”

  That stopped me short. She’d been hiding Sam’s trump card. “To answer your question,” I said, “he’s intelligent and quiet and humorous. He doesn’t get involved in much beyond fishing and having one girlfriend at a time. He won’t let his clients keep the fish they catch. It’s all ‘tag-and-release’ on his boat.”

  She slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I hope that’s not his policy with his women.”

  I understood Sam’s willingness to sacrifice his virtue.

  “Do me a favor?” I said. “Pull into Luani Plaza? I need a pay phone.”

  “I’ll swing around to Winn-Dixie and pick up steaks and charcoal while you make your call.” We found a coin unit on the front wall of the grocery.

  Miami. Raoul Balbuena answered.

  “Just checking in,” I told him. “You know about the latest victim?”

  “I understand a man is in custody.” He sounded preoccupied.

  “Let me guess. Monroe County Sheriff’s Detective Billy Fernandez is standing right there, ready to collect his substantial reward.”

  “Let’s pursue that a little farther.”

  I’d hit the nail on the head. “The man in custody has a rock-solid alibi of the female variety. He was too much of a gentleman to reveal her identity, but it’s a fallback if he needs it. Other facts in this case and the other cases prove his innocence. I just left the Detention Center. The so-called suspect is a half hour from freedom. I will be happy to accept ten percent of the check you do not have to write to Billy Fernandez.”

  “I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Consider it done at this end.”

  “I think Fernandez tried to kill me two days ago, right after he found me scene-snooping at Bahia Honda. My death would’ve looked like a car accident. I still think Kemp murdered Julia. Regarding Kemp’s ability to vanish, his identity, it’s possible that Witness Protection is involved.” I instantly sensed that I’d made a mistake in revealing that last piece of info. Too late.

  “Yes. Thank you.” Curt, but businesslike. The line went quiet.

  Why had he said yes? Could he have already known?

  On the drive to Elizabeth Street in Marnie’s Jeep I found myself wondering if Annie had gone to West Palm Beach. I pictured her tooling around the landscaped suburbs in my noisy Shelby. If she had gone, I did not have to worry about the car’s being exposed to weather or to theft. Her parents would want it out of sight, in the garage.

  Sam Wheeler’s house was surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence and a wall of tropical bushes that had been allowed to ramble. At center front, the tiny roof of a mini-gatehouse protected the mailbox and a locked doorway. Sam kept a gate key dangling from a string behind one slat in the fence. Over the years he had filled the yard with tall cacti and palmetto trees, with crotons and hibiscus along its perimeter. It was a shaded, tropical blend of freshness and decay. Even in daylight hours the fragrance of frangipani filled the air. He had strung colorful fishnet floats across the front of the house. Three sawhorses in the side yard supported the hull of a plastic-wrapped flats skiff. I went looking for a trash bag to hold the ashes from the last time Sam had used his outdoor grill. Marnie and I had not been there three minutes before a car pulled up out front.

  “Yo-ho! Yo-ho!” The gate door flew open and Wheeler barged in. Ten feet behind him a pink taxi spun a wheel in the dirt as it departed. Sam carried two twelve-packs of beer under one arm. Using the open bottle in his other hand as a microphone, he struck a Presley stance and sang, “I fought the law and—hah—the law lost!” His hip thrust was imperfect.

  This was a rare Sam Wheeler, at the loose end of his spectrum. Of all the times not to have a camera …

  Marnie walked across the yard. She gave Sam a kiss and reached into the open box of beers.

  “See?” Sam toasted me. “An alibi of last resort.” He dropped the beer on a yard chair so he could hug the smiling woman. “Oh, the price I paid to cover your professional standing in this two-bit town.”

  She assumed an eye-fluttering coy expression. “Did you have to put your hand in your trousers?”

  Sam scowled. “Talk about stretching a man’s fantasy. Pulling your pud in the Detention Center.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Hair on your palms and you’ll go to hell.”

  “Hell’s never bothered me,” he said. “They told me when I was five that hell was where it was hot. They talked about fires and heat and sweat. Even at that age I knew that heat and sweat are pains in the ass, but cold just plain hurts. If they’d told me that hell was cold, with frozen toes and icicles and blue skin, and everyone aching and shivering, I would have lived a different life.”

  “Except for last night.” Marnie offered a sly grin.

  “Except for last night. Is that my phone? The goddamn newspapers want my life story already.”

  His phone was ringing.

  “Tell them I’m out in my garden singing ‘Born Free’ a cappella. No, better yet, tell them I’ve sold all of my belongings and donated the proceeds to the ACLU.”

  I got to the phone before the answering machine clicked on.

  Bob Bernier, looking for me. “You know a Laura Tate?”

  “She was one of the women I warned yesterday.”

  “Can you come over here to your place?”

  I didn’t want any more bad news. “Is she dead?”

  “Not hardly.”

  24

  We rode across the island in Marnie Dunwoody’s Jeep. I sat in front. Sam had stationed himself next to a coolerful of iced beer in the backseat. We took back streets, dodging Sunday-evening church traffic on Truman and Simonton. Warm late-day sunlight angled through the tall trees, brilliantly illuminating houses on Grinnell and Frances, especially those trimmed in Caribbean pastels.

  “Weather looks like shit,” said Sam.

  I looked upward. “With this warm, gentle breeze in my eyes, I’m having trouble locating those storm clouds.”

  “Color of the sky. The sunset’ll dazzle ’em, morning’ll be crap.”

  It struck me odd that Sam’s spell in lockup could prompt manic behavior until I considered the twenty-four hours during which he’d found a new lady friend, learned that someone had murdered an ex-lover, then been accused of committing the murder. Marnie, to her credit, had given room to Sam’s mood. There was always the chance that her attentiveness had more to do with a scoop and a headline, but she hadn’t projected the aura of shark. I hoped her interest was genuine. Sam deserved a good woman, though he’d made little effort to join the hunt. “I find it hard to believe,” he would say, “that the future Mrs. Wheeler is waiting for me on a barstool in Key West, Florida.” Often he’d add, “I don’t want a red-eyed drooler with smoky-smelling hair.” He would always tack on his rule of the decade: “Never love a woman with more mileage than you.”

  I guided Marnie to a spot in front of Carmen’s cottage. We hiked to my house. Bob Bernier, Monty Aghajanian, and Laura Tate sat mute in my living room. Laura looked steamed but cute in a parrot-patterned Haw
aiian luau shirt and a white miniskirt. Within a minute of our arrival we’d all noted her neon-green panties covered with yellow smiley faces. I wondered if straitlaced Bob Bernier had scoped them out.

  “Laura’s calmed down since she first got here,” said Bernier. “What, about a half hour ago?”

  Laura was not calm. She sat forward on the rocker, pouting, breathing through her nose. “Shit, I don’t know, man. It feels like five hours.” She turned to me. “If I didn’t believe you yesterday, Alex, I sure as hell knew something was up when I come here. I mean, you sit in my house and tell me about Ray Kemp, dead women, I don’t know what to think. So I come here to tell you something that pertains.”

  She wanted an acknowledgment. Credit for making the effort.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m glad you came.”

  “I see your door closed, I know you aren’t here. I sit on your step to write you a note. Ol’ Bob here springs bad outa nowhere, you know, like those SWAT teams on the tube, tumble out a van and surround the place? So I get my own personal cop show in your crabgrass, on my tummy with my hands behind my head, my derriere sticking up like a big ol’ beach ball.” She paused for a swig of beer. “Shit. No wonder those ‘alleged perpetrators’ bitch about gettin’ cuffed. Worse than twenty-five pushups in PE class with some chunky gym teacher screamin’, ‘Keep your butt down! Keep your butt down!’”

  Bernier had learned more about the panties than I’d suspected. Marnie’s mouth hung open. She’d been mesmerized by Laura Tate’s monologue.

  I told Laura I wanted to know what pertained.

  Bernier raised his hand to stop the action. “Miss Dunwoody, it is FBI policy to not discuss cases in progress. Can this meeting remain in the background until we determine its bearing on the whole mess?”

  He’d been watching too many TV shows about Washington reporters.

  “Consider me off the clock.” Marnie looked away from Bernier and tilted back a beer.

  Bernier gestured to Laura Tate, inviting her to continue.

  She sneered at him and turned back to me. “I’m at the Packet Inn for the noon shift because the boss dreamed up this stupid fucking promotion to sell tequila sunrise with breakfast. He called it the hangover-cure concept. Imagine the bluehairs slamming Cuervo to kill their headaches. Anyway”—she nodded to the others—“I got this boyfriend, Tripper Wilbanks, who had to go away but he got out early. You know, all this publicity about felons getting early released for behaving in prison. Like what else are they going to do in there? But Tripper’s not dangerous, so that’s okay, except he’s dangerous to himself I guess.” She turned back to me. “Okay, so he and his brother come in the restaurant. As it happened, they had monster hangovers. And they tell me this totally spooky story, because of what you told me yesterday.

  “So, anyway, the boys are driving down I-95 Friday night on their way home from Union Correctional, which I think used to be called Raiford, right? And they stop in this restaurant near St. Augustine, somewhere up there. And Tripper recognizes some guy from the old days in Key West. He sees Ray Kemp sitting in a booth. Tripper tells me this, I’m like, ‘What is this damn coincidence?’ It was like you described, fat and a beard, but Tripper knew it was him. Except he plays dumb and refuses to recognize Tripper.”

  I said, “Did he claim to be someone else?”

  “He was like, ‘I don’t know you boys,’ and ‘Quit fuckin’ with me’—pardon my Portuguese. He pays his bill at the register and takes off. Tripper’s like, ‘Something’s weird here.’ He doesn’t make it obvious, but he follows Ray to the lot. Ray pulls away in a pickup truck full of boxes and shit. Tripper watches him get on I-95, heading toward Jacksonville.”

  I felt pieces slipping into place. I didn’t know how big they were. “Tripper didn’t happen to get a license number, did he?”

  “He said he don’t know why he read that plate. It was getting dark, but he did. Except he forgot the number. I guess he was already celebrating with the beers. I bugged the piss out of him and give him about five free coffees and he says, ‘Mitsubishi, Georgia plates. Jackson County, Georgia.’”

  A moment of silence let everyone adjust to the news.

  Bernier gestured to Money and to me. “One more little tidbit. The Bureau determined there was no coverage of the Balbuena murder outside of Florida. Even in Washington State, the Twin Peaks connection didn’t warrant curiosity. Ray Kemp didn’t read about Julia in any paper up there.”

  “What have we got?” I said. “A phony name on the Miami rental car, the bullshit about flying in from Washington for the funeral, the Witness Protection Program, nautical knowledge, and a pickup heading north. Add it up. If he walks like a duck…”

  Wheeler sprang out of his beer daze. “The biggest thing is what we don’t have. Say you’re right. And the court of logic is on your side for the moment. Ray Kemp killed Ellen Albury and Julia Balbuena. Ray Kemp put the bomb in the VW convertible. I’ll buy all of that. But it’s a sure bet he didn’t do Mary Alice Noe. He was heading north from St. Augustine at sundown. That’s eight hours away.”

  Monty rubbed his chin. “Time of death before midnight was all they knew for sure.”

  “So,” said Sam, “even if he turned around on I-95 and drove back to Key West, he would’ve been too late. Unless he chartered a plane…”

  I said to Monty, “Where’d you leave Chicken Neck?”

  “Talking to his ex-wife, Mrs. Hatch. Out at the jail he called Avery to talk about the fact that Sam had been released. Hatch had told his wife he was going somewhere to clean out a storage shed. She figured he was in a dark bar getting screwed up. She wanted to talk to Liska face-to-face. He was already hung up on the talk he’d had with her this morning, so he asked me to take a cab on the city’s nickel. Then he closed himself in an office in the Detention Center. I took a cab. I presume he called her back. If I’d known five minutes earlier, I could’ve shared the taxi with Sam.”

  Bernier motioned me over to my telephone. The LED window on my answering machine showed four messages.

  I punched the “play” button. The first three for Annie: Ellen Albury’s mother, about the bike; Benjamin Pinder: “Please call”; Marnie with questions. The fourth for me: Raoul Balbuena. “Now that I have a moment to myself, I would like to thank you for your professionalism and your honesty. Perhaps we can meet again under happier circumstances.”

  Raoul sounded as if the case were settled, the killer found. Bernier raised his eyebrows and looked me in the eye. I thought back to my slip of the tongue regarding Kemp, my mention of Witness Protection. I elected not to share my transgression with Bob.

  No word from Annie.

  Next to the laptop computer in Bernier’s briefcase was a cellular phone with a keypad as complicated as one of those scientific calculators with cosines, logarithms, and exponential keys. After typing a short memo on the computer, he pressed several buttons on the phone. Screen prompts and windows confirmed that the memo had been encrypted, compressed, autodialed, and sent by burst transmission through a secure cell network. “Next thing you know,” he said, “I’ll think about taking a leak, Miami will E-mail permission.”

  “Wait till Washington tells you you’ve already taken it.”

  Bernier cracked a reluctant smile. “I’ll retire to Costa Rica.”

  “What are we communicating to the outside world?”

  “If Laura’s friend Tripper is correct…”

  “Tripper knows his pickup trucks,” said Laura.

  “… and Kemp’s license tag isn’t phony,” continued Bernier, “we should, in a couple hours, get the name and address of every registered Mitsubishi pickup owner in Jackson County, Georgia. I’m going on the chance that Kemp built the explosive device that crunched the Volkswagen, that he transported the device from Georgia…”

  Marnie interrupted. “That makes it a federal violation?”

  Bernier leaned forward. “Enough to justify Bureau jurisdiction. Our people in Georgia will do som
e legwork. When we establish residence, provided we can cough up sufficient corroborating evidence at this end, we’ll get a warrant and make an arrest. By Wednesday or Thursday, Kemp will be explaining himself to us in person, in detail. Which leads me to an important request. We need media quiet for a few days. This joker decides to become a fugitive, we could have more murders. As my boss says when we’re forced back to square one, it’s ‘dog ate dog.’ It’s all in the past tense.”

  Marnie nodded. “The runway behind a jet pilot.”

  Bernier smiled for the second time in two minutes.

  “I’m not a scoop artist,” she said. “I just want an exclusive.”

  “Done,” said Bernier.

  Sam said, “Rutledge, one thing you mentioned didn’t hit right. What are you talking, Witness Protection?”

  I looked at Bernier. He scanned the faces in the room, then said, “Kemp got busted on a federal conspiracy fifteen years ago. Anselmo was the prosecutor. He cut Kemp a testimony deal in exchange for Witness Protection.”

  Marnie Dunwoody’s eyes snapped wide, as if she’d been slapped.

  “We don’t know much else yet.” said Bernier. “Files that old are still being entered into our database. For some reason, the hard-copy folder was checked out of the U.S. Attorney’s library last night. It’s still in their secure area, but we’ve got to pin it down. We should have it in the morning.”

  Grinning, Marnie addressed Monty. “I’ve spent three days scrounging on Anselmo. One funky real estate transaction. My next path was past cases.”

  Monty looked doubting. “I don’t think prosecutors have to go public on their finances.”

  “Public records. He bought a house in ’79 for ninety-six thousand, and sold it in ’84 for three eighty-five. That’s a hell of a lot of improvements for a man making forty-seven grand a year.” Marnie turned to Bernier. “One other thing. I haven’t heard a whisper of motivation for any of these killings. No thefts that we know of. Sam told me about the peripheral connection to Alex, but what’s the motive, down deep?”