The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Give me another minute to look around.” I figured the house had to hold some kind of clue to the murders, or to Ray Kemp’s motives. A copy of Sports Illustrated sat on the arm of a lounger. On a Formica table in the front room was a manual called “How to Write Effective Short Stories.” I slid a tattered bookmark from between its pages. Dated 10 May 80, it was the boat owner’s copy of the customs and immigration form that Ray had submitted on our return to Key West from Mariel on Barracuda. It bore his name, Julia’s name, my name, and the names of the twelve strangers who had been delivered to freedom on that day. Strange that he would keep a souvenir of the Boatlift. It had not been a banner day for the captain. Any one of the refugees would have appreciated it more.

  “We’ve got the right house,” I said quietly.

  Sam opened the drawers of a battered metal desk. “No utility bills or check stubs. Like he’s already moved out.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t home when they got here. Maybe Charlie Balls flipped on the stove to leave his signature on the place.”

  The kitchen wall phone rang. I wasn’t sure what to do. After the second ring I walked the short hallway, stuck my hand in a Ziploc, and picked up the receiver. I heard a snap and then silence. I hung it up.

  “Check out these old postcards,” said Sam. I walked back toward the front door. Suddenly Sam’s face filled with disbelief. He pointed out a front window. Two vans and six sedans sat in the front yard. I glimpsed the initials on the back of a man’s nylon jacket: FBI.

  A hundred ball-peen hammers slammed into my back. The explosion in the kitchen blew us both out the door and off the porch. Twirling fireworks filled my vision, and I was flat out on the wet grass with my arm twisted under my body and the taste of blood in my mouth. Two of the hammers had struck my ears directly. When I tried to sit up and move my head, splinters of glass sprinkled from my hair to my forehead.

  “We alive?” Sam’s voice sounded far away but I felt an elbow hit my ribs.

  I leaned to one side and shook shards off my eyelids, then opened one eye to see Sam crawling away from the porch.

  A voice quivering with forced calm said, “Get a move on. There could be another bomb. The whole place could go.” Someone grabbed me under one arm.

  My eyes were full of grit. The baggie was still on my right hand. It hurt to move my mouth. We figured later that Sam’s shoulder had caught the front door framing and we’d been spun off the porch in a tangle of wicker strands and parts of a plastic clock that had hung in the hallway. Our heads had banged together—that’s how I wound up with a black eye and a broken front tooth. One of my shoes had landed twenty feet away.

  * * *

  I remember being propped against the trunk of a dark blue Crown Victoria, watching a black-clad SWAT crew exit Ray Kemp’s house. The team looked to be at parade rest; they had discovered what we knew: that the lights were out and nobody was home. My lights had been knocked halfway to Tennessee. I kept thinking how much I wanted a Dustbuster so I could clean the crap out of my hair. At one point I thought I saw Sam walking around the yard, picking up the postcards he’d wanted to show me.

  “Too bad you aren’t carrying a gun,” said a thirtyish frat-type in a cable-knit crew-neck sweater. “We could have you on an even-dozen state and federal charges.” On second glance he looked like the kind of mean-spirited pretty boy who’d beat up his Pi Phi sweetheart for shaking her fanny too much at the sock hop. “Just don’t try to bullshit us,” he warned. “Don’t try to tell us you learned how to make bombs by copying a recipe off the Internet.”

  I did not want to be this boy’s friend. I heard myself moan, then whisper, “I was cleaning it … and it went off.”

  I believe at that moment I faded out again.

  * * *

  The next thing I knew, I was being helped into our rental car. Covered with mud, holding the shredded remains of my shirt, I rolled into the front seat. Sam opened the driver’s door, flopped his butt on the seat hard enough to bounce me, threw a wad of muddy postcards on the floor, and finally got the ignition key in the slot.

  “Don’t say a fucking word until we’re out of here,” he said without moving his lips. “Keep quiet. Just don’t talk.”

  And then we were driving away from the ruined house and the squadron of federal agents. I noticed only one other thing. None of the neighbors on the rural road had come outside to investigate the explosion.

  * * *

  A map in the glove compartment showed the quickest route to Atlanta was up to I-85 and straight west. It hurt to move, but I slowly gathered the old postcards from the floor of the car. Lithographs from the late forties or early fifties. A collection of old linen cards, from tourist traps in the eastern part of the country. Identical to the mysterious cards that Michael Anselmo had been receiving. But why would Kemp have sent threatening notes to the man who had provided him freedom in Witness Protection?

  “Why are we free to go?” I said. “That one schmuck was already reserving us rooms in the Federal Prison System.” Every time I said an s, my broken tooth whistled.

  “You owe Bernier a favor,” Sam said solemnly. “Size large.”

  “What, to fit his hotshit ego?”

  “No, to wrap around his heart. I suggest you call him from the first pay phone we see.”

  “I need a shirt to wear on the airplane.”

  * * *

  Before we got onto I-85, just outside of Commerce, Georgia, Sam swung into a beer-and-candy store attached to a filling station. I got on the phone.

  “Took a chance on you,” Bernier said brusquely. “They were playing with the idea that you rigged your girlfriend’s car with Tovex.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t me?”

  “The lab techs determined that the jury-rig couldn’t have been installed at an earlier date and set to blow later. It was probably hooked up during Ellen Albury’s funeral. You were stumbling around the beach at Bahia Honda about then, and your witness was a Monroe County deputy.”

  “So you checked me out…”

  “You want more? The night the Guthery girl got killed, you were drunk on your ass in Louie’s Back Yard. Kim, the pretty bartender lady, told me you sat at the service bar in the lobby until she closed it down. She had to call a taxi for you. You couldn’t have squashed a cockroach, much less gone to Stock Island and murdered someone. Now tell me what the fuck you and Wheeler are doing in Georgia.”

  I explained the events of the past two hours. “Until the bomb went off, I figured Kemp had been abducted. Now I don’t know what to think. Either the bomb was meant to get him, or else Kemp rigged it to get anyone who might come after him.”

  Bernier hummed while he thought. “Could go either way. If the Cubans grabbed him, the bomb may have been set to blow when the phone rang. That way they could rank out the evidence and confuse the issue. Or else, like you said, Kemp set it to blow as soon as anyone answered an incoming call.”

  I felt my brain wobble from one moment to the next. I had no confidence in my powers of reason. But one more fact lumbered into my consciousness. “Bob, there was a phone upstairs, off the hook. I hung it up two minutes before the downstairs phone rang.”

  “Cute. Hanging up probably triggered a phony incoming call. That’s a new one, but it’s simple as hell. That makes me think the bomb was meant for one of us. We’re having trouble nailing down a serial criminal profile, but let’s run on the idea that Kemp’s still at large. Why don’t you two come back and let the real cowboys do their thing?”

  “Okay. We’ve saved the American taxpayer thousands of dollars. Now we’re not qualified.”

  “That’s not it. Your friend is out of jail on his own recognizance. He’s not supposed to be outside of Monroe County. If you want to get precise, you were trespassing and interfering with an ongoing federal investigation. Truth is, the Georgia State computer is still down. I wouldn’t have had that Kemp address in Albertson until five thi
s afternoon at the earliest. Now get your ass out of there.”

  “How about Raoul Balbuena’s home address?”

  “No way.”

  “I wanted to send a sympathy card.”

  “You didn’t get this from me.”

  I wrote as he dictated, then hung up and tried to reach Annie again.

  “I’m afraid she’s off to meet friends for breakfast.” Her mother’s officious voice especially grating when one is fighting gnats in the middle of nowhere. “May I ask her to call you when she gets back?”

  “Mrs. Minnette, I’m alongside the highway in Food Court, Georgia. I’m searching for the man who blew up Annie’s Volkswagen. He may be responsible for several murders. He’s also threatened another of Annie’s acquaintances, Mr. Michael Anselmo.”

  “I haven’t spoken to my daughter since you last called.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Minnette. I’ll be flying into Miami this evening. I would like Annie to meet me in North Miami, at the house where she stayed last week. If she can’t be there, I’ll call from Key West later tonight.”

  “Wasn’t she about ready to trade in that old convertible?”

  27

  A service station with civic spirit. While Sam used the phone, I pondered the two choices on a wobbly T-shirt rack wedged between the Doritos display and a shelf full of crocheted toilet-paper covers. Extra large only, white lettering on black cotton/polyester fifty-fifty. I picked “The Big Word in Commerce is ME.” The other shirts read, “I’m with Buckhead.”

  Sam headed us toward Atlanta. He’d connected with Marnie Dunwoody at her office. “She tried to call Anselmo to follow up on Monty’s decertification. Anselmo had gone to Miami for some kind of meeting. She requested a callback and she got it.”

  “What did the buckhead have to say for himself?”

  “She’s got Caller ID at her desk.” Sam paused long enough to warn me. “Anselmo dialed in from a West Palm exchange.”

  “Aw, Jesus.” Annie must have invited him up. What had she been doing with her hands on Sunday morning, gauging the thickness of my skin?

  “Anyway,” said Sam, “he had no comment. Claimed he couldn’t remember the case.”

  “Her mother said she was having breakfast with a friend.”

  “How much does Annie know? What’s she saying to him?”

  “Unless he tells her, there’s no way she could know that he put Kemp into Witness Protection. She knows about the threatening postcards, she knows that Kemp is a strong possible in the murders. She can’t connect them, but if she talked about both topics, and Anselmo’s the bad guy, he’d know we were on to him. Depending on his level of panic, that might be dangerous to her. And Kemp could still be out there, too.”

  “This is getting beyond weird.”

  I couldn’t argue. “As long as we’re out in left field on this thing, where was Anselmo when Mary Alice Noe was murdered on Saturday night?”

  Sam shivered with disgust. “This goddamned mess grows a brand-new dimension every twenty minutes.”

  “Over in right field,” I said, “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “This sounds like a confession.”

  “I’ve tried to jam this into the back of my mind, but it keeps popping out. Annie knew the names. Julia, Sally Ann, and Shelly.”

  “She didn’t know Mary Alice?”

  “Nope. No way.”

  Sam had to pay attention to traffic as we neared the six-lane loop around Atlanta. Citizens flipped us off because we were doing only eighty in the fast lane. South of downtown we began to see signs directing us to the airport.

  We had progressed from looking like derelicts to resembling washed-out photographs of corpses. My head had begun to ache. We finally found a ticket agent who would give us two seats on a late-afternoon flight into Miami. Sam reserved a standby slot on a Key West puddle-jumper. He also bought a shirt that looked like a Jamaican party joke. We spent ten minutes in a men’s room scraping dried dirt from our trousers and shoes.

  My seat was seven rows behind Sam on the Miami-bound plane. A perky flight attendant informed me that he’d paid for my first four drinks. She brought the first two rum and sodas immediately and promised to deliver the second two the minute I gave her the signal. I fell in love with her, in spite of her wedding band. I spent the next hour wondering why someone just earning a paycheck could show me such consideration while my alleged lover treated me like a cold slice of week-old pizza. When I attempted to order drink number five, the young woman named Tiffany, after the retail outlet I presumed, brought coffee instead. I gave up on her and buried my face in a magazine article. The best mutual funds to hold for the next ten years. If I hit nothing but “home runs,” I could quadruple my savings and ease into the Luxury Life. I should tell the magazine’s editor that my future financial happiness depended entirely on my having enough to pay property taxes in Key West.

  It had been a week since I’d thought about earning a living. Nothing like six ounces of rum to snap the world into focus. Our plane descended into Miami over the northern edge of the Everglades. The bleached saw grass, the few trees and fewer birds appeared to belong to sagebrush territory, to the rural West. Our final approach above the Tamiami Canal, a man-made slough, helped explain the plight of the River of Grass.

  I called from the terminal and had trouble saying “Thadd” with a broken tooth. My “big black motorbike” was right where I’d left it. They’d had no word from Annie. They offered to come fetch me but I told them not to bother, I’d grab a cab. I realized my mistake when the meter clicked past thirty dollars.

  The perfect host, Thadd ushered me into his home and offered a cocktail “for the ditch.” Then he looked at me more closely and understood that he was too close to the truth. “Your eye looks like a hurricane map.”

  “I bumped into a door.”

  “And your tooth. You’ve been hanging out in the wrong kind of bar. When David comes home like that, we call it heat stroke.”

  David left the kitchen and returned brandishing a pair of my undershorts. “The maid found these in the bedclothes. We presumed they belonged to you and not your lady friend.” The skivvies had been washed and ironed.

  They were humoring me. Did I look that awful?

  I asked to use their phone.

  “Alex, I’m afraid she’s gone out to dinner.” Cleo Minnette, always afraid of something.

  “Did you warn her about the dangers I described?”

  “I couldn’t swear to it, Alex. Things get so confused around here whenever Ann is home.”

  “Please ask her to call me in the morning. If she’s still alive.”

  I presented Atlanta Braves baseball jerseys to Thadd and David to thank them for their extended hospitality. Light rain began to fall as I decamped the Enchanted Forest. My first stop was at a 7-Eleven to buy a city street map.

  Raoul Balbuena lived on the edge of Coral Gables, in a modest concrete block house not five blocks from St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. A four-foot stucco wall surrounded the property. Green-tinted gravel had replaced the grass. Orange lights illuminated the iron bars that covered each window and the front door. An intercom was set into a panel next to the door. When I pressed the call button, a spotlight blasted my face. I was being monitored by a closed-circuit TV camera. I pulled off my helmet and held back the temptation to dance a soft shoe for program variety. Behind me the rain came down harder.

  Raoul’s voice through a speaker: “Good evening, Mr. Rutledge. I’ll be right there.”

  He appeared surprised by my rough appearance but said nothing about it. He ushered me into the house, into a large room full of heavy, dark furniture. The walls were hung with small religious icons. One small photograph showed the old cathedral in central Havana. The furniture looked worn but not trashy. Raoul appeared to be the only person in the house. There was no offer of refreshment. “What brings you up from Key West?” he said.

  “I just flew in from Atlanta. I’ve been touring Georgia.”<
br />
  I got the stutter of silence that I’d hoped for. I sat in a broad leather chair.

  “Have you turned yourself into a policeman, Mr. Rutledge?”

  I knocked my knuckles against the top of the helmet. “I’m the same person you met Saturday. Have you turned yourself into a criminal, Mr. Balbuena?”

  He looked me in the eye. “Your check is in the mail.”

  “Is that like, ‘Don’t let the door hit me in the ass…?’”

  “Last Saturday we exchanged information and we asked for your help. You had a goal, but no ideas. Information can be expensive to obtain. Now you have acted on some of that information.”

  “And you’ve acted on my information, too. You need to know that I was not alone when I saw your Mercedes in Albertson.”

  “Thank you. Now we are back to level ground.”

  I wanted to push him over the edge. “One more thing. A file is missing from the criminal division of the United States Attorney’s Office. If, by any chance, you have access to it, you should arrange for its immediate return.”

  “You’re one point ahead. It’s nice to sit and talk to an old friend of Julia’s. Do you have anything else for us?”

  “Did Julia have any other old friends that I need to know about?”

  “Good guess, Mister Rutledge. Fair is fair, so you may play with this. After she left Key West, almost fifteen years ago, she met and spent almost two years sharing a condominium with Michael Anselmo. Now we’re even again. Do you need any cash for your trip home?”

  “No.” I stood to go.

  He looked me up and down. “I don’t suppose the clothing stores are open this late, anyway.” He showed me to the door. The lock on the iron gate buzzed as I reached to push it open.

  Ray Kemp had either a rival suspect or a cohort. Billy Fernandez had tried to kill me but Michael Anselmo had been intimate with both Ellen and Julia—two murder victims—and with Annie, a near miss with the bomb. Kemp could be tracking Annie through Anselmo, or Anselmo could be setting her up for Kemp. She could be two-timing, lying her ass off, running her own agenda, and sleeping with the enemy. If she desired the man she had described to Carmen as not much of a straight shooter, the man she’d caught boffing her roommate on a kitchen floor, so be it. There is always a tragic element in physical attraction. But she didn’t deserve to be harmed by a lunatic or a lunatic’s accomplice.