Bone Island Mambo: An Alex Rutledge Mystery

by Tom Corcoran

  “Appreciate it.”

  The officer shoved aside a sawhorse barricade. A huge remote-TV truck, its dish to the heavens, ready to snag overhead power lines, tried to follow me around. The cop went apeshit I didn’t stay for the power squabble.

  Two squad cars blocked the intersection at Caroline. One faced Greene, the other Simonton. Roof lights strobed in the afternoon sunlight. I spotted Jerry Bovim, Key West’s new head detective, in Bermudas and a Hawaiian-print shirt, departing on his vintage Harley. Delegation of duty is not just good management in Key West, it’s an art form, a tradition. I saw no sign of technicians from the county medical examiner’s office.

  I parked the Kawasaki thirty yards up Caroline, next to Teresa Barga’s blue motor scooter. So much for her personal-time paperwork. I walked around a silver Mercedes ML-55, another high-ticket sports utility vehicle that would never leave the pavement Its Florida “Save the Dolphins” license tag read POKEM UP, which I associated with the Pokémon craze of 1999. I’d seen Butler Dunwoody driving an imperfectly restored ketchup-red ‘61 Ford Galaxie convertible. It too had carried a “Save the Dolphins” vanity plate. Obviously, his Benz. Then I recalled that “poke ’em up,” in Florida, referred to the construction industry’s goal of erecting buildings wherever it found undefiled land.

  I crossed the street, didn’t recognize the uniformed cop on duty. I pulled out my KWPD identification card. He showed me through the chain link, not eight feet from the DANGER sign where Heidi had stood when she’d told me to mind my own business. Two more uniforms stood inside, next to a row of four portable toilet stalls. The cops looked semiofficial, barely alert I assumed they’d been called at home, scrambled for special duty. The stinky portables no doubt a boost to their spirits. They aimed me toward the northeast corner of the framed-out three-story building. Away from the potties, the place smelled of pine sawdust A walkway of pallets and two-by-sixes lay over clumps of dry dirt, loose rock, fist-sized asphalt chunks from the lot’s previous life. The makeshift walkway ended at a fresh concrete slab.

  Marnie Dunwoody hurried toward me, a frantic look on her tanned face. She moved closer as if to hug, but instead clutched my upper arm. Almost whispering, she said, ‘Too awful. I knew the man, real well.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been four years since I dated him. But I can’t do this for the paper. It’s got to be somebody else’s piece. Call us when you’re done, okay?”

  I nodded. She went away. I walked around a pallet stack and an upended Dumpster. For a moment, time froze. In the shade of a high scaffold I saw, in one take: Teresa—her dark hair pulled to a twist, her face grim and pissed off; Mamie’s brother, Butler Dunwoody; Heidi Norquist; Detective Dexter Hayes, Jr.; a uniformed lieutenant; and the city’s prince of nepotism, Cootie Ortega. Cootie Ortega was the department’s full-time photographer, lab tech, and all-around screw-up. He held an old Nikon and a Polaroid camera.

  All but Teresa stared as if I’d kept them waiting for days.

  Except for a scowl of distaste, Hayes’s face revealed nothing. He said, “Glad you could make it.” No other greeting after years of not having seen each other, no offer to shake hands.

  “Thanks for thinking of me.”

  “Your name came up. I just need a few shots here.” He handed me a pair of rubber gloves.

  “I need shoe socks, not gloves. I’m not going to touch anything but my camera.”

  He pocketed the gloves.

  I remembered Hayes as about five-eight, but he’d grown a couple more inches. He was slender, in khaki pants, a button-down blue oxford-cloth shirt, plain vanilla Reeboks, white socks, sunglasses hung on a cloth lanyard. He reminded me of the actor Gregory Hines. Years ago, Hines had filmed a movie segment in Key West. I’d watched him roller-skate acrobatically down Front Street.

  I looked around. Teresa—slightly taller than Dex Hayes—wore pressed blue jeans and a wrinkled cotton blouse, hurry-up professional attire. More clothing than the last time I’d seen her. Dunwoody wore a gray sweatshirt, baggy, bright yellow swim trunks, opaque sunglasses, Blues Brothers-style, a backward ball cap atop disheveled hair. Heidi looked windblown, her hair darker out of the sunlight, her face hardened in shock and fear, though the result suggested fragility. The million-dollar tan not as healthy as before. Her arms were folded across her chest, as if to ward off harm. The self-indulgent power act on hold.

  The victim was belly-down on temporary plywood flooring. Not what I expected. No obvious damage, no blood. He wore black ankle-high work boots and a frilly cream-colored nightie—thin straps over his shoulders, most of the garment bunched around his waist Makeup, rouge, and powder covered his face. Heavy liner around die eye I could see, duct tape across his lips, a panty liner that looked like a clown smile stuck over the tape. A tan webbed belt was snug around his neck. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Whip marks covered his buttocks and upper thighs. A large dark feather stuck out of his ass. A strap-on pecker was next to him on the floor. The kind women wear with women, with Velcro-adjustable nylon belts, chromed D rings, a rainbow-hued dong sized to make men cringe with inadequacy. Crack vials, whole and crunched, on the temporary floor, and small plastic vial stoppers.

  “Go ahead,” said Dexter Hayes. “Do your thing.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  I said, “Any background notes, might help my approach?”

  Hayes shrugged, looked down at a tiny spiral notepad. “Richard Engram. Project manager. No one had seen him since the Friday shift. They don’t work weekends. Mr. Dunwoody gave two bankers a tour yesterday. Engram wasn’t here. Thirty minutes ago Mr. Dunwoody and Ms. Norquist came in, spent five minutes walking the layout with a prospective tenant, found the body. Called it in twenty-five minutes ago. Other than that, shoot the scene neutral, like you don’t know jackshit and need to find clues.”

  “Which is where you’re at?”

  “It’s the way I work every case. Why taint a scene with suppositions?” He used a forefinger knuckle to scratch his upper lip.

  “Like what killed him?”

  “This was not a hunting accident. It’s not ‘Failure to Thrive.’”

  Chuckles from Ortega and the lieutenant, at my expense. If it weren’t for their smiles, I’d have thought the mood hostile. I didn’t want to look at Teresa, to put her on the spot.

  I pulled the camera from my shoulder case, fitted the electronic flash, checked my settings. Shit, I thought. I hadn’t removed my morning film from the camera. I’d exposed only five frames, but I’d shot them twenty yards from where I stood, smack in front of the site. Screw it, I said to myself. If I swapped rolls right then, I would look unprepared, like an unsure fumbler. Easy enough to have Duffy Lee Hall, my darkroom tech, pull the first neg strip from the packet he’d prepare for the city.

  I disliked my audience. I couldn’t understand why Detective Hayes had permitted so many people to remain, or why he’d asked me to work before an access alley had been cleared by scene investigators, especially with so many objects on the floor. Even shoe-print lifts were good evidence. Scene contamination could kill a case or make details inadmissible. Even if someone finding the body had rolled the man over, tried resuscitation, the officer in charge needed to preserve remaining crime scene integrity.

  I began slightly wide-angle, for scene establishment. After a half dozen shots, I moved closer. Confirmed: No mental preparation cushions the photographer who must capture gruesome details. Alternatively, looking a dead man in the eye is not facing up to death. I walked around him, for different angles. A Rolling Stones gaping-mouth-and-dangling-tongue logo was tattooed low on the far butt cheek. On second perusal, I realized that the tattoo masked a poorly repaired concave scar from a bullet hole.

  After maybe two minutes, Dexter Hayes pointed to the plastic stoppers. “Those red tops? That’s redneck-quality dope.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “How good is a project manager with a habit like that?”

  “W
hen he left work Friday, he was headed for Kelly’s. He had a reputation for chasing pretty girls. He told somebody he’d had his eye on a particular waitress. Maybe he thought crack would impress her. Who knows where he went after happy hour.”

  I tried to figure his line of reasoning. Gossip could offer leads, but he was speculating in left field.

  I said, “Did he think cross-dressing would impress her, too?”

  “Some guys will do anything to get laid.”

  “You’re getting too scientific for me, Detective.”

  “Sorry. I hate Sunday murders. Thank goodness the Super Bowl is next week, and not today. Look, pack it up, Rutledge. We got it from here.”

  I hadn’t shot a third of what I knew they needed.

  Hayes continued: “Ortega can wrap it up for you. Give him those rolls you just shot. You can head on out”

  I’d observed Ortega’s screw-ups for years. As if on cue, Cootie went right to work. I could tell by the sound of his camera that his flash wasn’t synchronizing with his shutter. His photos would be worthless. For some reason, Dexter Hayes was running this investigation into the toilet. I couldn’t bear to look at Teresa, who must realize the folly in play, or at Butler Dunwoody and Heidi, who probably didn’t. I extracted the Kodacolor, handed it to Cootie, slowly packed my camera and flash into their satchel pockets.

  Having to give film for developing to Ortega, after Marnie’s distress and the detective’s atrocious handling of the scene, amounted to strike three. I immediately wrote off future work for the Key West Police. I picked up my motorcycle helmet and started for the lumber walkway.

  Hayes said, “Better bone up on your skills, Rutledge.”

  “How so, Detective?”

  “Procedures. We’ll talk about it some other time.”

  “No hurry? Maybe after the Super Bowl?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  3

  I escaped the construction site’s chain-link enclosure. Six onlookers watched from Caroline’s south curb—three couples in flowery shirts, woven-frond hats, beads and name tags on necklace strings, tall drink cups in hand. Puzzled party hounds confronted by violence in paradise. I felt the same gravity. I’d avoided ugliness for most of my time in Key West It had intersected my life too often in the past year. Too often in the past two hours.

  I wasn’t sure what Dexter Hayes and his forensic team would learn from the scene. I’d found new evidence that crime photography was not my dream vocation. I’d begun moonlighting with it several years back. A few side jobs, helpful income, few hassles. This gig had proved to be a sick game for an unprofessional investigator.

  Violence wasn’t new to Key West Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers called the atoll Cayo Hueso—Bone Island. They’d found human skeletons strewn about evidence of native strife. The first permanent settlement had formed in the 1820s. Since then the island’s condition had rolled from tough to impoverished to romantic to lunatic to wealthy. Strife had remained.

  A ten-knot north wind had picked up. I rode the Kawasaki toward Sam Wheeler’s house at the south end of Elizabedi. Ten days into January, air in the shade cool, but the direct sun hot as April or October. Traffic a zoo, wandering, in slow motion. The main blast of the winter tourist season. Hotels charging more per night than my monthly mortgage payment

  Ironic, I thought, that Dexter Hayes, Jr., had become a detective. His upbringing probably gave him the best possible preparation, but no one would have guessed this outcome. The story I’d heard was that his father had been a juvenile thug in the 1950s, when Bahama Village still was called Jungletown. A stint in a central Florida reform school had cooled Big Dex’s jets. He’d returned to Monroe County trained in off-street life skills. He was ready to represent larger brokers as a purveyor of victimless crime. To ensure his position, he also became a one-man neighborhood watch. He launched a career in basic urban fiddles: hookers, numbers, light-duty dope, and two dimly lighted after-hours joints. Equally important was delivering votes and suppressing tourist and sailor muggings. His career’s ups and downs had tied into political and economic changes on the island. When his bosses were slick, Big Dex was golden. When the big boys were short, arrest and harassment became occupational hazards.

  I hadn’t seen Big Dex since a night at the Hukilau in the mid-1990s. The place wasn’t crowded—it must’ve been a weeknight Coffee Butler had seven Conch housewives at his piano bar, a birthday party whooping it up to “Who Put the Pepper in the Vaseline?” Big Dex had just been released from prison. He was hosting a triple-table of local barflies and players. His two or three years upstate had aged him. I couldn’t recall the problem that had brought him down. Probably bolita, the Cuban numbers racket Anything else would’ve been a stiffer sentence. At one point a local madam—retired, still young—had entered. She’d beelined for Big Dex. Gushes and hugs. Before she moved away from the table, she’d smooched all the others, too. Former clients.

  I recalled Dexter Jr. from the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. Those had been the years when the island had made its transition from a sleepy tourist outpost worried about hippies to a smugglers’ haven full of boozy spring break college kids and summer people in motor homes. Little Dex ran with a group of local kids, the sons of men in power among whom skin color mattered little. They were the last Conch boys to scoot around the harbor in open outboards, small sponging skiffs powered by fifteen-horse motors. It may have been the last generation to appreciate Keys traditions and lore and customs. Some of the boys grew into men like their fathers: car dealers, construction bosses, bankers, restaurant owners. Some had turned to drugs—pot and cocaine and Quaaludes. A few had slid to importation and serious criminal activity. Fewer had become cops.

  I’d heard a while back that Dexter Hayes, Jr., had begun college in Tallahassee, and I recalled having seen a bubble of intelligence in the kid’s face. I’d read it as hope for something bigger than his father’s tainted footsteps. Then I’d heard, after a couple of years, that he’d flunked out of law school. I’d lost track of him, hadn’t seen him, hadn’t thought of him except that night in 1995, in the Hukilau, when his father had been kissing a whore.

  I last saw Sam Wheeler on Christmas Day. The next morning he and Marnie had driven to Miami, no warnings, no farewells. They’d flown down to Jamaica. Sam had canceled three charter bookings with serious anglers, January first-week regulars since the eighties. Marnie had put her Key West Citizen job in peril by giving short notice and taking vacation without prior approval. But her newspaper colleagues knew she needed slack. She and Sam had desperately needed a break from Mamie’s brother and Heidi, the woman Sam called “Butt’s moody lollipop”—in reference to her shape.

  I found Sam remodeling the broad porch that bordered three sides of his one-and-a-half-story Conch cottage. Tools and tape measures laid out. Dust everywhere. The nervous, pre-holiday Sam Wheeler had returned to normal calm, his industry the by-product of a refreshed outlook.

  “You survived your time away,” I said.

  He didn’t look up from mitering an eight-foot one-by-two. ‘I’m a brand-new man.”

  Sam was out of uniform. Unshaved, a bandanna around his head, shirtless in drawstring cotton shorts and high-top sneaks. A light-tackle guide, he usually wore khaki trousers, long-sleeved denim shirts, deck shoes, a long-billed cap. His tan, in another locale, would be a trucker’s tan, though after Jamaica he was dark in places he protected while flats fishing. Enough blond remained to camouflage the gray so typical, these days, of a Vietnam vet Sam’s upper bulk had for years threatened to become paunch, but hadn’t succeeded. He wore the horn-rim eyeglasses he rarely showed in public.

  I said, “How’s Marnie?”

  “She called from the office, shell-shocked. Told me about it She wanted to stay and work. We’ve been dealing with a better mood since Jamaica, until an hour ago.”

  I didn’t know whether Marnie had told Sam about her relationship with the dead man. I did not want to be a news bearer
.

  I said, “The yard smells like boiled snapper.”

  “You’ll get your chowder after you earn it” Wheeler gave his chore precise attention. He made a cut raised the hand saw, carefully set the wood aside. He chose an identical piece from a short stack. I let him concentrate.

  Sam’s porch had lost its permanent screening during recent hurricanes. He’d planned to install sliders, tracks and bolt holes for interchangeable screens and storm shutters. After two years of trying to find time, he finally was into it He’d taped a sheet of paper to a table near the front door. He’d sketched elevated storage racks for under the porch, noted the nautical hardware that would hold numbered sections in place. He’d also designed shelving for Mamie’s plants, bougainvillea trellises for the porch’s corners. Lower Keys’ residents should have learned many lessons during the big late-nineties storms. Sam probably was one in a hundred preparing for future bad weather.

  He finally quit his concentration. He began to sort the trimmed wood into two stacks.

  I said, “You rent a house down there?”

  “A bungalow at a big resort. Pay in advance, leave your brain at the door. You buy everything with beads. It’s hammocks and umbrella drinks and fresh fruit. Windsurfing, sunset cocktail parties, private hot tubs, birdsongs. A lot of chunked pineapple. Housekeepers beg to clean up, servers wait to fill your plates. For two weeks the employees do everything but change diapers. Better-quality Christmas music, and less of it. How you been?”

  “Not bad. Got mugged an hour ago. Next to your future brother-in-law’s beautification project.”

  He sneered at my having named Butler Dunwoody as a possible relative, knew I was joking, let it slide. “Connected to the body inside?”

  “Could be, but I doubt it. The murder looked planned and orchestrated. I got jumped by three droolers in a low-roller pickup. The driver was Jemison Thorsby’s kid.”