The Mango Opera

by Tom Corcoran

  Puzzle pieces dropped into place. The Anselmo/Julia link confirmed. Two busts. The threatening postcards.

  Liska leaned closer to me, holding a handkerchief to his forehead. “This is flying at me too fast. You saved Kemp’s life?”

  “Mariel.” I sat in the chair next to Liska. “I saved my own life, along with some people who didn’t deserve to die. Kemp just happened to be aboard at the time. The boat he bought from Avery. He didn’t seem grateful at the time.”

  I figured out the Buick. Sam had noticed a late-model GM car parked near Mary Alice Noe’s house.

  “So, Avery,” said Liska. “You’re talking Kemp didn’t kill Sally Ann.”

  “We know the shrimper who did her, but we ain’t caught him. Previous manslaughter in Port Arthur, Texas. Asshole left prints on empty beer bottles in Sally Ann’s trash.”

  Liska sat back in the chair. “Now I’m confused, Avery. You’re saying Ray Kemp didn’t kill Sally Ann Guthery, and all he wanted was sex with Annie Minnette?”

  “That’s it. No murders.”

  I caught another waft. Concentrated locker room.

  “How did he know who Annie was?”

  Hatch rolled his eyes and wheezed his lungs empty of air. “He had me over a barrel. He wanted to know did Anselmo have a lady friend. I went and found out he was seeing the Minnette woman. I described her. I described her car. I told him where she worked, where she lived.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “He threatened to blow me out of the department. Also I owed him for saving my ass. Those Colombians were going to cut me up. He pulled me out of that one, way back then. But he didn’t say he’d kill her. He was just going to … He didn’t say he’d attack the wrong woman.”

  Liska’s voice became sympathetic. “Why were the Colombians mad at you, Avery?”

  “That load I took near Cay Sal Banks? I got scared. I pushed the pot over the side.”

  “Was Ray Kemp on the boat with you?” Liska acted as if this kind of news came his way all the time.

  “He was on the dock with Billy. They set it up. I heard the Coast Guard on the radio. I got scared, I dumped the load. It was my fault.”

  “Billy Fernandez?”

  Hatch nodded yes. I thought: Confirmed. Billy Fernandez knew Julia.

  “When was this, Avery?”

  “In ’79. Nineteen seventy-nine. I got scared.”

  “What did the Colombians want?”

  Hatch weaved and fiddled with his short, fat fingers. “Half the value of the load. Kemp bought my boat so I could pay them. He saved my ass. But, damn it, I didn’t know he was going to kill any girls. I just didn’t know.”

  Liska sat back and looked at me. He tilted his head toward Hatch, offering me the chance to throw him some questions.

  “Ellen Albury was killed by mistake,” I said.

  Hatch nodded yes.

  “So Ray tried to blow up Annie Minnette’s car?”

  Hatch’s eyes began to water. “Yeah … before I could tell him she was really your lady and not Anselmo’s. Look, he threatened to rat me out. He’s … Aw, shit…” Tears fell down his face.

  I gave him a moment. “Where did Ray keep his gear from Barracuda?”

  “Wagner’s Sheds on Summerland. All this time I paid the rent. He kept everything he owned in there. The other day I went in there just to check it out for rats and leaks … It was cleaned out. Except for some scraps of plastic, like the stuff he wrapped around the Balbuena girl.”

  Was Avery blaming Kemp to cover for Billy Fernandez? Maybe Billy hadn’t tried to kill me after all. “Do you know why Kemp killed Julia?” I said.

  Hatch shrugged. “He didn’t tell me he wanted to murder anybody. I think she had something to do with his second arrest. He went up for fifteen years. He learned a lot in jail. Now he’s out, he kills people.”

  “How does Kemp figure into Mary Alice Noe?” I said.

  Hatch winced, shook his head and shivered. “It was Billy. He couldn’t take it when Mary Alice fell in love with Anselmo. She sent Billy away. But then, you know, Anselmo found your lawyer lady, so he dropped Mary Alice. Billy heard about it, he wanted back in. I knew he’d killed her the minute we walked in that bedroom. I couldn’t say shit.” More tears rolled down Hatch’s cheeks. “I’m in so fucking deep. I can’t do anything. Fucking Ray Kemp kills Ellen Albury because he thought she was Anselmo’s girlfriend. He copies the Stock Island knots and rope. I know he killed Julia. That same rope was in the shed. Then the bomb goes off before I can tell him to back off the Minnette girl. Fernandez copies the knots and rope when he goes bonkers with the Noe girl. I can’t arrest either one because they both know about the pot runs. I can’t do my job without losing my job. Picture me in jail. I’d last two days. I’d be queen of the cornholes. I’d have razor marks on me like a road map. I can’t do nothin’, I can’t think straight…”

  The late-model GM car had been Billy’s Olds Cutlass. The pieces fit.

  Hatch began to struggle against the garden hose. Liska gave me a wave, indicating that I should back off. He gave Hatch a moment or two to realize he couldn’t get loose, then his voice returned to soothing tones. “Avery, why did you go to Rut-ledge’s house to ask about Julia?”

  “I had to find out who knew about the old days. My God, the shit was stacking up and I was sinking. I didn’t know he’d kill them. I sure didn’t want to take his fall. I wanted to lead people to him, so someone else could make the bust and I wouldn’t take the blame for that, either. If I busted him, he’d still blow the whistle…”

  “Did you know that Ray Kemp would hurt anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Billy is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to die?”

  Avery Hatch closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, opened them, and looked me in the eye. He looked at Liska. He shook his head.

  “When’s the last time you ate a decent meal?”

  “Days.”

  “When’s the last time you had decent sleep?”

  Hatch shrugged and shook his head.

  “You want to know what I think?”

  Hatch stared at him, a flicker of fear in his eyes.

  “I think you’re one of the best detectives in the state of Florida. I wish you’d stay the hell out of our city business, but out in the county you’re great.”

  Hatch’s eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

  Liska activated his cellular phone and punched in a number. “You start delivering yet?” He paused. “One-eight-zero-three Laird. H-A-T-C-H. A large pepperoni-and-green-pepper with double cheese. Two six-packs of Cokes … I don’t give a fuck if they’re Pepsis. How long?”

  Liska clicked off the phone, reached for his wallet, extracted a twenty. “Here’s the deal, Avery. I’ll buy if you’ll eat pizza until you can’t eat no more. Then you go to bed until you can’t sleep no more. You want this fucking rubber hose off you?”

  Hatch looked at me oddly and said, “What the fuck happened to your tooth?”

  I couldn’t help thinking: If Avery Hatch had pointed Kemp to Ellen Albury, mistaken identity or not, he was an accessory to murder. He should have been arrested.

  For the moment, I deferred to Liska’s judgment.

  29

  We’d advised Gayle Hatch to remain with her neighbor, Mrs. Sweeting, and we’d locked Hatch’s shotgun in the trunk of the Taurus. As Liska drove over the Garrison Bight Bridge, he said, “For now, that was between us and Avery. You gotta understand, when crazy shit happens, people go crazy.”

  “What’ll we do about Billy Fernandez?” I said.

  “The key word is ‘we.’ From here on out, everything in this case is between the city and the feds. No deputies allowed. ’Course, I ain’t sure where you fit in, Mr. Freelance.”

  The Taurus’s air-conditioning needed to be dropped off the bridge, fed to the fish. We passed Grinnell Street, the turnoff to my house.

  Liska said, “
Need to be home for anything?”

  “Brush my teeth.”

  “You smell great. You smell better than my husband-in-law. Ten years of cigar residue come out his armpits. You damn sure smell good enough for the courthouse.”

  A social call on Anselmo? “You want me along?”

  “Not who you think. He’s in court anyway until eleven forty-five. I need to visit that two-shoes from the Bureau, to get more ammo so I can bring Michael Anselmo down hard, for keeps.”

  Traffic was slow on Eaton. Simonton’s traffic had backed up from the light at Caroline. A Conch Train full of tourists was caught between two low-rider pickups with stereos thudding Richter-scale bass tones. The train’s PA system fought rap at one end, reggae at the other. Liska cut over the curbing and took a slot reserved for a federal judge.

  The Federal Courthouse guard acknowledged the badge flash and waved Chicken Neck around the metal detector. One look and he pointed me through the arch. We found Bernier in a cubbyhole second-floor office filled with law books and journals. He wore a pin-striped short-sleeve shirt with dark slacks. His tie was embroidered with pink conch shells. Newspaper clips detailing arrests filled a bulletin board near the door. Bernier remarked on my appearance, then got down to business. “It’s a good thing you and Sam didn’t root around much more up in Georgia.”

  “Ka-boom?” said Liska.

  Bernier nodded. “Homemade Claymores full of nuts and bolts and roofing nails. Much worse than the one you tripped. They found eight snuff movies in an ammo box. A hundred and seven thousand dollars in thermos bottles buried in the chicken coops. We still haven’t found the pickup truck. We’re assuming he’s in it. We’re also assuming he’s come back to South Florida.”

  “No sign of the Mercedes?” I said.

  “By the time we got on it, once it hit Palm Beach County, there are so many cars like that. Turns out the Witness Protection file had been checked out by mistake. Some bank-fraud investigator had it. A Cuban guy. Thirty-year man. Honest mistake.”

  About as honest as an Uzi at an ATM. Raoul Balbuena blackmailing thirty-year bank fraud investigators in addition to other activities.

  “They also found a box of manuscripts. A friend from my early days in the Kansas City office was on the crisis team up there in Georgia. He called me about them. Short stories, by the same person on the same typewriter, with six or seven pseudonyms. They’re about men who’ve been degraded, belittled by authority figures, who get revenge mainly through murder. Ray Kemp has quite the creative mind.”

  Liska exhaled a long breath and sat down in a wooden armchair. The air system in the courthouse wasn’t much better than the squad car’s.

  Bernier checked a notepad. “One story had a kid badgered by alcoholic parents. It wasn’t physical abuse, but the mental stuff was perverted, competitive, mean—you name it. His father made fun of him when he had a hard time learning to swim. His mother called him a jerk in front of his junior high playmates. Another was about a high school football player who was browbeaten by an aggressive coach. After an error in an important game, the coach berated him on the team bus in front of the team and the cheerleaders.”

  “The grief a million kids go through every year,” I said.

  Bernier nodded. “Except this part is different. Ray Kemp’s parents were killed during a home robbery in 1975. Beaten up and slashed with broken beer bottles. His high school football coach in North Tonawanda, New York, was found murdered in 1976, trussed up with Ace bandages, strangled to death with a jockstrap. We’ve begun to track Kemp’s movements over the years through the author pseudonyms. See if he’s evened the score on any more family members or friends. Looks like he flew under the radar in respect to our criminal profiles.”

  “So Anselmo put a psychopath into Witness Protection?” I said.

  Bernier nodded. “On Thursday Anselmo will visit Internal Revenue Hell. The agents claim they aren’t pushing lifestyle investigations, but this case will lift the lid off anything he’s been covering up. Marnie Dunwoody’s digging into that old real estate transaction helped. It sure didn’t correlate to his claimed income. If he was peddling Witness Protection, it’ll get real obvious real fast.”

  “Put him into the DBA Club,” said Liska.

  Bernier gave him a puzzled look.

  “Dis-Barred Attorneys. There are dozens in Florida—arrested, convicted, and done their time. Now they’re the highest-paid paralegals in America.”

  I wanted to know if Hatch’s story matched up. “Does the Bureau agree that Kemp couldn’t have killed Mary Alice Noe?”

  Bernier settled back in his chair. “I wasn’t around then, but I recently heard a story.” He turned to Chicken Neck. “You remember a local situation called the Jacuzzi Murders?”

  Liska lit up. “City case. I worked it behind Eddie Brown. Nasty case, years ago. I’d been a detective three days when it started.”

  I remembered reading about it. I couldn’t recall details. Something about women being found drowned in hot tubs, screwed up on bourbon and cocaine.

  “You remember an Ivy League dropout confessed?” said Bernier. “Some upper-middle-class guy in his twenties from Connecticut?”

  “He confessed to the first two murders,” said Liska. “He stood fast on denying the third. We couldn’t package the deal, so it’s still open. Shit, we were lucky to catch him and solve the first two. Found the kid drunk in his car at Mallory Square.”

  Bernier sat back. “Larry Riley knew the young man couldn’t have done the third one. Some kind of scientific mismatch.”

  “Right,” said Chicken Neck. “The prosecutor waffled. We couldn’t close the case.”

  “Riley also had a suspect. But Riley was new on the job, like you.”

  Liska flinched. “Did he suspect a cop? Is that where this is going?”

  “What made you think that?”

  Liska considered his answer. “Local gossip.”

  “Concerning a law-enforcement officer?” said Bernier.

  Now I knew why Riley had played his cards close to his chest. He didn’t trust anyone in Key West except the feds.

  Liska rubbed his cheeks as if checking his morning shave. “I am told by unimpeachable sources in the housewives’ telegraph that Mary Alice Noe once had a relationship with Billy Fernandez. At the Noe crime scene, Billy was not his usual lazy-slob self. He was inspection-perfect at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. He ran around like he’d already had fifteen cafés cubanos. He showed no emotion. He never mentioned an affair.”

  Bernier stood and leaned against his desk. “I gotta say, you folks live in an offbeat little city.”

  “I think Billy got himself in a little jam on Sunday,” I said.

  Both men looked as if they might not tolerate a know-nothing civilian.

  “Right after Sam was arrested for the Noe murder,” I said, “Billy tried to screw Raoul Balbuena out of a five-thousand-dollar reward. Raoul offered it to both of us on Saturday in exchange for information. I told him I didn’t want his money, but I called yesterday to tell him that Wheeler’s arrest was bogus. I got the impression that Fernandez was there with him. ’Course, if Billy’s innocent I may have to pay for that one down the road.”

  We spent a minute or so studying the inlaid marble flooring. Offices down the hall provided background music. Two or three metal file cabinet drawers slammed shut, a beeping telephone went unanswered, a dot matrix printer scratched and growled, someone coughed loudly.

  “Speaking for the American taxpayer,” said Bernier, “I hope that Billy Fernandez and Ray Kemp are enjoying the tender, loving care of the Balbuenas. Cut our expenses on prison and courtroom time. Speaking as an enforcement professional, we should assume that Ray Kemp is loose and has more nastiness on his agenda. Finding him is the toughie. Fernandez’ll be easy. He probably still thinks he’s got us all fooled.”

  “And I get to take the heat.” Liska stood to leave. “It won’t go down as popular, me going out to the county and dragging
in a sheriff’s detective for questioning.”

  “We’ll look into nailing him on a civil-rights complaint,” said Bernier.

  I thought of one more thing. “Bob, did you check the phone company records on that call into Kemp’s house?”

  Bernier frowned. “Pay phone in Athens.”

  Had Kemp laid the trap for Carlos and Emilio, or was it the other way around?

  Liska and I walked to the courthouse parking lot. A tearful young woman sat on the Simonton Street curb nursing a skinned knee. A blue moped lay in the gutter, its handlebars cocked at a sharp angle. Liska turned away when he saw a police car approach.

  “Liska!”

  Bernier stood on the courthouse steps, a white-shirt beacon in the sunlight, ignoring the police activity around the injured woman at the curb. He waved us into the shade of the portico.

  “Problem?” said Chicken Neck.

  “That five-thousand-dollar reward? Fernandez collected.” Bernier’s voice dropped a level. “You know how certain faiths of Caribbean persuasion believe that animal sacrifices invoke the gods of judicial leniency? The carcass-retrieval team found Billy’s body two hours ago in Miami. Dumped on a loading platform behind the Federal Court House. Tossed in there with the dead black chickens and slaughtered goats.”

  Liska winced. “Jesus Christ.”

  Bernier continued, “His heart had been removed. The operation was clean, like a surgeon did the job. They stuffed five grand in twenty-dollar bills into the cavity.”

  Fernandez had warned me about “Ogunito.” I described Billy’s rundown of bad-boy Carlos and Emilio, worshiper of sharp edges. “Are we the first people on the island to hear this?” I added.

  Bernier looked offended. “I was the first. You two are the second.”

  Liska dropped me off on Fleming at the head of the lane. I found six wilted doughnuts, two unfinished coffees, and eight messages. I wanted a shower but things were happening quickly. I needed to reach Annie or Carmen. I found a legal pad, a felt-tip pen, and pulled up a chair.