The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  Bernier shrugged. “That’s not my department. We got people in the bureau we call Agatha Christies. But you’d be surprised how seldom we peg a motive. Even serial killers—and the worst claim innocence to the end—rarely reveal, you know, the urges, whatever, that took them over the edge. They’ll blame it on the full moon or make up something spectacular. Something to add to their own headlines. A lot of the media fall for that crock. No offense.”

  The briefcase computer issued a faint beep. Bernier shielded the keyboard to enter an access code. “Bad news,” he said. “Georgia’s DMV computer is off-line for system maintenance until midnight.”

  A black Chevy Caprice sedan stopped in the middle of Dredgers Lane. Dark tint blacked out its windows; thick black-wall tires and plain wheelcovers gave it away. Here on the island, it stood out like a snowplow.

  “You called for a ride?” I asked.

  “I pressed an orange button.” Bernier patted the briefcase. “Thank you for your hospitality. Thank you for your assistance.”

  “Yeah. Mucho gracias, sweetie.” Laura Tate tipped back her beer.

  Bernier started out the door. “One last thing, Rutledge.” He leaned toward Monty and me. “That Walther .380? Your bookcase is a bad hiding spot. I liked the movie Legends of the Fall. I noticed your hardcover first edition, autographed, no less. I slid out the book, there it was. B-and-E boys, if they have time, love to riffle through book collections because people hide cash between the pages of classic novels. That gun’d be a goner. The wrong hands for sure.”

  As the Caprice backed out of the lane, Sam popped tops and handed out beers. I pulled my tattered road atlas from the shelf under the coffee table. Sam pointed at it. “You thinkin’ tonight or tomorrow?”

  “You in?”

  “From here on, I don’t hear a thing,” said Monty. “I don’t know anything.”

  Marnie peered over my shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  Sam put his arm around her. “An extension of a chat Alex and I had several nights ago, talking about frustration, the working out of same. Seems to me that Wednesday or Thursday is a long time from now. The man said the FBI needed ‘corroborating evidence at this end’? So, nothing special. We’ll go somewhere, we’ll look for a pickup truck.”

  Monty shook his head but didn’t say a word. Marnie’s face showed concern and a trace of admiration.

  “I’m outa here,” said Laura Tate. “Nap time back at the hacienda.”

  25

  There was no way to get short-notice seats on a Sunday flight to Miami, especially in the evening. Too many three-day tourists heading north to face the new workweek. Sam called a commercial fishing captain named Ellison who owned a Cessna 172. Captain Ellison said he’d take us, but he couldn’t leave until eight. That gave us time to book two seats out of Miami, reserve a rental car in Atlanta, eat Cuban food with Marnie, Carmen, and Maria, pack our ditty bags, and drive to the airport.

  Typical of pilots, Ellison had arrived early. He was doing preflight, testing his control surfaces, topping off his tanks. But he’d become grumpy and claimed to have had second thoughts about flying into Miami International after dark. There also was some question about headwinds he’d encounter on his return.

  Sam pulled me aside. “Not to worry. Ellison isn’t happy unless he’s pissed off.”

  “Oh, I get it. He’s an asshole. Why isn’t he a light-tackle guide?”

  “He’s also a great pilot,” said Sam.

  We were in the air by 8:05. The lights of U.S. 1 pointed us to Miami. The Gulf Stream had its own traffic corridors of freighters, tramp cargo haulers, and tanker ships. In the bay-side mangrove country northwest of the highway, small boats ran the shallows in darkness, headed for port after a day on the salt. The moon lit cloud tops. Its reflection off the water raced along with us. Strobes on distant microwave towers and mainland airport beacons flashed like teasers on a giant pinball machine. To the east, heat lightning zipped cloud lines where warmed air had drifted offshore, over cooling water. None of us spoke until the pilot quietly asked us to double-check his approach frequencies and runway chart. Lights on a dozen airliners blinked around us. Ellison griped about being a mosquito in an aviary, but his final approach was a well-executed speed run with no flaps. He taxied out of the realm of the 737s and L1011s and stopped next to a private charter terminal. Wheeler handed him a short stack of fifties. We went looking for a taxi to the main terminal.

  After we’d checked in and pocketed our tickets, I called West Palm. Annie’s mother, evasive: “She’s gone out for a while. Can I take a message?”

  It would last ten minutes, nuances would be lost, details scrambled, intent edited. “I guess not,” I said.

  At 1:15 A.M. we arrived in Atlanta during a violent rainstorm, worse for wear. I’d grabbed an hour’s sleep. I would have been better off without it. Sam woke when the airliner jerked to a halt at the gate. The courtesy van to the rental lot was on its after-midnight schedule. We waited twenty-five minutes in an empty departure lounge. Our growling stomachs echoed off floor-to-ceiling glass walls. After we’d shuffled paperwork with a graveyard-shift snarler at a rental-car counter, we hit the I-285 loop south of town. Unlike Keys rainstorms, this downpour felt like it would hang around until morning or longer.

  It had been several years since Sam had rented a car. “People wonder why I never go north of Jewfish Creek,” he muttered. “Pay phones, jukeboxes, Coke machines, pinball machines, drop the coin in the slot, facts of life. The pay toilet went away with dime phone calls. Pay TVs in waiting rooms. Don’t those people ever read a book? Now I pay for extra fucking insurance, I carry my own gas so I don’t get gouged, I buy permission for you to drive if I fall asleep at the wheel. Next thing, we’ll be downtown, they’ll charge us to loiter.”

  I patted him on the back. “Okay, Ellison.”

  He headed us east on U.S. 78. He drove as far as a one-story cement-block motel near Monroe. Three A.M., we looked like derelicts in the rain. The owner surprised us by admitting to a vacancy. We asked for a six-thirty wake-up call. By my body clock, the call came ten minutes later.

  Sam turned into Mr. Military, ready for action, the man with the plan. “Shower, yes, shave, no. That phone book, por favor.”

  Ten minutes later we were inbound to Athens. Five minutes after that we pulled into a Mitsubishi dealership.

  “A two-pronged attack,” said Sam. “I’ll take the front office. You’ll describe Kemp better than I will, so go around back, bribe a flunky. He’s got to have brought it in for at least one repair. A warranty freebie or something.”

  “Mechanics aren’t hired for their memories.”

  “What time of the morning does your positive attitude kick in?”

  He was right. It didn’t cost me a penny to have a muffler technician sneak into the service manager’s computer. I described the truck that had hit my hunting dog and fled the scene. I wanted to give the veterinarian’s bill to the slimy bastard that owned the truck. Ezell, the mechanic, understood the principle behind justice for a good hunting dog. I mentioned the salt-and-pepper beard.

  Ezell snapped his tool chest shut and wiped his hands on his coveralls. “I remember that dude. Sort of a yuppie hippie, talkin’ Yankee like you, but he push hisself around like big money. He’d be the dog-hitting type. I think he just bought that truck a few weeks back. Had a damned Dale Earnhardt sticker on the back window. He come in here to have it checked for a long trip.”

  Ezell zipped through the computer, found a service memo, and scribbled an address in Albertson, Georgia. He warned me not to speed in town. “They built a Little League stadium on people doin’ thirty-eight in a thirty-five.” The name above the address was Delray Crane.

  I returned to the car and waved Sam outside. He’d been head-to-head with an officious “customer-privacy butthead” in the front office. But he’d caused enough commotion to keep the service manager away from Ezell’s charity.

  “Pay dirt?” he said.<
br />
  I described my ruse.

  “Yep, Kemp’d be the dog-hitting type,” said Sam.

  Sam drove a mile or so, veered into a convenience store lot, stopped next to a bank of coin telephones. “I’m going to buy some insurance. I’ll leave this name Delray Crane and the address on my answering machine. If the shit hits the fan, at least there’ll be a trail.”

  “We could call Bernier.”

  “He’d order us to back off. You come this far to back off?”

  We took a bypass around Athens, turned north on 441, and drove ten miles before passing the Maple Tree Palace Night Club, then the Albertson city limits sign. We were pleased to learn that the town had produced the State Champion Girls Track Team ten years earlier. As Sam slowed for the Albertson business district, a crow flew over the windshield, a garter snake hanging from its beak.

  “Any ideas on who murdered Mary Alice?”

  Sam flinched at the name, shook his head. “Couple of cars been parked down there the last few months. Some kind of Lexus or Infiniti—I can’t tell you squat about Japanese stuff—and a late-model GM car, an Olds or a Buick. For a long time I thought she was paranoid about her ex-husband. She didn’t want to go out anywhere, wouldn’t go out to eat. Didn’t want to go out anywhere.”

  We needed directions to Rural Route 3. Two old boys in the Shell station knew nothing about postal routes. The Albertson post office wouldn’t be open for another twenty minutes. At town center we found a secondhand clothing store, an outboard-motor repair shop, a restaurant called the Luncheonette. Inside its twin picture windows, bathed in the off-chartreuse cast of vintage overhead lighting, sat a half dozen representatives of the hitch-up overall crowd, a couple of businessmen in short-sleeve shirts and ties, and a lady school-crossing guard wearing a clear plastic rain bonnet. An ideal spot to spend nineteen minutes. We angle-parked next to the building. We had to jog around puddles to the door.

  Stares from the regulars. The booths were claimed. The place smelled of bacon grease and overcooked oatmeal. We settled for a table where someone had left a morning paper. A grandmotherly waitress peered over the top of her spectacles, her face a question, her stance an urge to hurry.

  “Cream,” said Sam.

  “Black,” I said.

  Sam checked the weather map on the back page of the front section. “Like I predicted, the weather in the Keys turned to crap. I ain’t missing a thing.”

  “Was Noe a wife beater?” I said.

  “She never said. I figured out she was still in love with him, so I made some excuse about my work schedule and stopped going by. I couldn’t quit thinking about her. I kept catching myself looking for her in the yard, letting myself get bothered by those cars out front. I guess she fell into that category that you described for Julia Balbuena. I always held out for the impossible reunion.”

  I knew words would fall flat right at the moment.

  “On one hand,” said Sam, “Bruce Noe had no reason to kill his ex-wife. I’m not positive. I don’t think there was alimony going out. He was the one wanted out of the marriage.”

  “That leaves out jealousy, maybe. What’s on the other hand?”

  “He’s tight with Steve Gomez and a couple of the commissioners. He hangs around with cops. He had an above-average opportunity to pick up details on the other murder scenes, if he wanted to put it to use.”

  “He was out of town for the weekend. If he was behind it, he had a helper.”

  Sam agreed. “Someone who didn’t know his knots, who didn’t know that he was supposed to pluck his twanger and leave a calling card.”

  “The detail that never leaked out.”

  Sam looked me in the eye. “She said she knew you.”

  I nodded again.

  “She on the list of ex-girlfriends, Alex?”

  “Technically, yes,” I said, then paused to consider my phrasing. Was Sam going to become angry over an event that happened years before he even met the woman? “In a practical sense, we hardly knew each other. We took drunk a few days before her wedding. What a gentleman would call a half-night’s stand. Her idea.”

  Now Sam was shy of words. I had told it straight. I hoped he would drop the subject. He did. “This rainy day in Georgia is lame and ugly,” he said. “We should have brought walkie-talkies.”

  “Low-tech?”

  “We get separated, one of us gets his ass in a sling, practical. Low-tech is duct-taping somebody’s mouth and nose shut.”

  “How about weapons?” I said.

  “What’d you come here to do?”

  “Deliver the shitbird to justice.”

  “Well, yes. One must presume that he does not wish to come along.”

  We still had ten minutes to wait when a middle-aged man in a postal clerk’s uniform walked into the luncheonette. He brushed raindrops off his shoulders and stamped his feet on a rectangle of carpet near the door. The waitress had prepared a cardboard tray. Four coffees with lids, stir sticks, a mess of sugars, several cream thimbles. Sam approached the man and asked directions.

  “Y’all wouldn’t believe how many questions like that I get,” he said. “The government needs to change the system, get rid of rural route numbers. Go north out of town to a shut-down Gulf Oil, take a left. One mile along, go right where it says ‘Karma Farm, Two Miles.’ That’s County Five, but it’s Postal Route Three.”

  “Karma Farm?” said Sam.

  “Longhairs,” said the postal clerk, knowing that the word explained itself. It would break his heart to learn that ninety percent of the nation’s longhairs are on Country Music Television. On his way out the door he turned to ask what box number we needed.

  “Thirty-five,” I said. “Name of Crane.”

  The clerk scowled. “That boy with the satellite scoop? What’s he havin’, a yard sale? I sent two Mexicans to that place twenty minutes ago, Puerto Ricans, they all the same. Danged wetbacks sneak into the country, drive a shiny-paint Mercedes-Benz, gold hubcaps. I gotta buy the wife a used Toyota…” He chewed his lips and kicked at the doorsill. He’d pronounced it “Tie-ota.” The door closed behind him.

  Sam said, “You look like you just crapped your pants.”

  “Let’s save time and head back to Atlanta. If the Benz had Dade County plates, Kemp’s having a soul talk right now with Julia’s brother and his father’s pet thug. There won’t be anything left for us to do.”

  Sam dropped several dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go get in line. Maybe Kemp needs us to run for Band-Aids.”

  We hurried through the drizzle to the car. Sam pulled into an alley behind the restaurant, found a side street, then accelerated onto the main road. He crooned a soulful “… was a rainy night in Georgia…”

  I suddenly figured how the Balbuenas had found Ray. “Talk about the Cuban network,” I said. “What’d Bernier say last night, that the Kemp file had been checked out?”

  Sam turned at the empty Gulf station, an old oil company approximation of art deco. “Miami is complicated,” he said. “You need money to survive. After that, your human value is based on connections.”

  “It didn’t work for Julia.”

  26

  The Delray Crane address fell among a string of brick ranch-types spaced apart in hilly country not fully recovered from winter. Most properties had a mobile home or two out back. Wedged between two clumps of oaks and set twenty yards off the two-lane, the two-story frame farmhouse looked especially neglected in the rain. It needed more than just paint. The front porch was filled with dead plants and weathered furniture, and the yard had not received its first mowing of the year. The driveway’s twin ruts flowed with red dirt runoff. An empty two-stall carport behind the house looked ready to collapse into the crabgrass. A row of chicken coops ran along what I guessed to be the back boundary of the property. Noticeably out of place was the Direct TV receiver dish between the house and carport. The well-maintained silos on the rise to the north probably belonged to a neighbor.

  There was
no sign of the Mercedes-Benz or the Mitsubishi pickup truck.

  Sam eased into the driveway, then onto the grass to keep from hitting potholes under puddles. We stopped next to a broken wheelbarrow full of magnolia sprouts. The front door of the house was ajar. In spite of the dim light, there were no lights inside. Sam turned the key and stared out the windshield.

  “Not a warm welcome,” I said.

  “Wish I’d worn a jacket,” said Sam. “I also feel naked without a pistol.”

  “Honk the horn a bit. See if anyone comes out.”

  “We’re not even sure this is Ray Kemp’s house.”

  We knocked on the doorframe and yelled hellos. We peered into the gritty windows, seeing nothing in the darkness. We finally invited ourselves in. Sam went down the center hallway. I crept up a creaky stairwell and caught stale smells of mildewed vinyl upholstery and furniture stuffing. A twisted bedsheet lay on the floor outside one bedroom. Another room was full of boxes and junk: an ironing board, baseball equipment, a Seagull outboard motor on a stand. The bedroom had all the personality of the motel in Monroe, Georgia: a thrift-shop dresser with two drawers left open; magazines stacked around the bed; an old Princess-style telephone on the floor, tipped on its side, off the hook. A bright orange athletic jersey had been tossed in a corner.

  Upside down in a cheap frame on top of the dresser was a photograph that looked at least twenty years old. I turned it over: an older couple in aviator-type sunglasses and Bermuda shorts standing next to a ’76 Cadillac convertible.

  An upside-down photo?

  Sam’s voice from downstairs. “Nobody here but us bulldogs.”

  I didn’t want to leave fingerprints. I snagged a sock from the top open drawer, wiped the photo frame and hung up the Princess phone.

  Sam had Ziploc baggies over his hands. He opened kitchen cupboards, one by one. “If we hadn’t dropped in, the house would’ve burned down. That pot was boiled down to the last half-inch of water. My guess is, ol’ Ray left in a hurry.”

  “I wonder how it feels to ride a thousand miles in the trunk of a Mercedes.”