Bone Island Mambo: An Alex Rutledge Mystery

by Tom Corcoran

  Did it matter, with them in darkness, me on the porch?

  Then, as if out of fog, Marnie Dunwoody appeared in the faint glow of light from behind me. I felt adrenaline drain from my system. I drooped with relief. I hadn’t even considered that it might be Mamie’s Jeep. Her normal pace in the lane was full-tilt and full-halt Her time, driver’s seat to my screen door, averaged twelve seconds. She’d be knocking on the screen before her car door slammed shut. She was out of character.

  Marnie peered through the screen, She jerked back, startled. We were eye-to-eye. She looked catatonic. Her eyes had no depth. “Sam went to bed.” Her voice was hoarse. “He worked on his porch all day. I can’t sleep.” The strain in her voice threw me. I wondered if Sam had had to endure a long rant. Maybe she’d gone to the end of White Street Pier and yelled at Hawk Channel for a while. Marnie didn’t have the presence of mind to reach for the doorknob. I began to open the door, but it wouldn’t swing until she stepped back. Limp with relief, I finally got her onto the porch, directed into the living room.

  The drama had proved that my promised revenge against Bug and his boys needed to include a defense plan. For some stupid reason, I’d felt content that Teresa and Carmen both owned pistols, probably kept them in their purses. But my best weapon, if I could get to it, was a kitchen knife. The last time I’d kept a gun in the house, a loaner from Sam Wheeler, someone else had shot it to save my life. The man who had fired the gun now was an FBI agent. A pistol was part of his daily attire.

  The scare was proof, too, of the power of focus. With Marnie inside the house, my world decompressed; the noises of the neighborhood—crickets, distant traffic—resumed. An air conditioner or two, though the night had a chill to it. I even smelled Bounce as I came in from the porch. Someone in the lane doing laundry.

  Teresa exited the bedroom without questioning that I’d been upset. She carried her purse, casually dropped it on a table near the door. She greeted Marnie, expressed sympathy, and calmly insisted that she join us for supper. She gave me a strange, puzzled look, almost a pissed-off look. Then she went to the kitchen and resumed dinner preparations. The light in my brain finally glowed. She’d asked Carmen why she’d been ordered into another room, told to have her gun and the phone ready. Carmen had walked outside, identified the vehicle in front of the house, and explained my problem with the thugs. I’d forgotten to mention the thugs to Teresa. Stupid error.

  Now the purse pistol was close at hand. The next vehicle in the lane might not be “friendly.”

  Smart woman.

  Marnie fell into the chair I’d been in. “I’m up shit’s creek for leaving the murder scene. The slick from the Herald showed up. Someone from their staff called to warn me. They’re going to use my name in the piece.”

  I said, “Because he’s your brother?”

  “Because a body was found at a controversial construction site.”

  “That’s your fault?”

  “They will wonder in print if I’ve soft-pedaled in the past two months. They’ll wonder if I’ve omitted facts about the permit process that might have given warning about strife, an advance warning that someone could be murdered.”

  “That’s stretching,” I said. “No one believes the murder happened at the site.”

  With a lost look on her face, Marnie yawned. “Words are powerful. So are attitudes. That prick lieutenant kept looking at me. Like, none of it—the costumed body, the construction site—would be there if I hadn’t brought my brother to town. As if I had control of my brother.”

  “Any way to fight back? You getting heat at the paper?” I said.

  “They’ve been great. They haven’t diverted assignments. But I want to smooth my boss with a story about the Stock Island thing. The media were not invited to that one. I need your help.”

  “I’ve got it memorized,” I said.

  “Can it wait till afterward?” Teresa offered two dinner trays: food, silverware, paper napkins.

  In deference to Mamie’s battle with alcohol during the past year, Teresa had put away the Sauvignon Blanc. She offered decaffeinated iced tea and Perrier water. We thought as we ate that Marnie might fall asleep in her chair. Before we’d finished, I too wanted to call it a night.

  But Teresa’s wonderful food energized Marnie. “I can’t do it,” she said softly. “I can’t bear this cross again. I did it through high school and part of college. I got to this town first. My name’s on my byline every day. I’ve got a reputation for straight reporting. Now Butler’s fucking it up, damn his ass.”

  I offered, “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “People don’t want to talk anymore. Information used to come easy. I’m not getting good stories. That’s not it. I’m getting good stories, but I can’t develop them. My work feels hollow.”

  Teresa said, “Why did your brother come here in the first place?”

  “He came to visit three or four years ago.” Marnie fiddled with the place mat. Rolled its corner, released it. Rolled it again. “His eyes lit up. He saw nothing but opportunity. He saw all these people doing business dressed in Bermuda shorts and T-shirts. He made the mistake every newcomer makes. He figured they were rubes. Didn’t give them credit for brains. Right away he started plotting his massive takeover.”

  “Motivated by . . . ?”

  “My brother sees himself as a great tycoon taking double steps up the marble stair to immortality.” Marnie kept placing her hand on top of her head, perhaps to hold it in place. “He once said he wanted to be so rich, he could have other people go to wine tastings for him.”

  “He’s always had that nickname?” I said.

  “Calling him Butt was against family rules. But in college he joined a fraternity. Their nickname for him was Butt-Woody. One of his old friends still calls him B.W. Just to show you how my brother thinks, he hated the Butt part of the nickname, but loved the Woody part, so he allowed it to stick. He thought it was good for his image. Might help him seduce women. Back then we joked about him. We always said he was a walking billboard, advertising himself. He was full of slogans. He used to boast that he lived on the four Ts: Tequila, Tic-Tacs, Trojans, and Tylenol. He was big on clever lines, like ‘bed, bath and behind.’ He found new girlfriends before he broke up with the old ones. He called it ‘rotating the stock.’ One high school girlfriend called him a male chauvinist piglet She’s the one who tried to get pregnant”

  “So he set his eyes on Key West?”

  “He came the long way around. He flunked out of college, went into the Peace Corps, spent a year in Central America, came back and worked construction in Virginia while he finished college. Then he moved to Jacksonville and became a contractor. He’d bid on jobs like single town houses or strip malls, then hire shitkickers out of bars near the construction sites. Not much of a quality human-resource program. But he banked money. He reinvested. He hired good lawyers and accountants, plus laborers who couldn’t get work anywhere else. Now he’s investing his profits in Key West In my face.”

  I said, “So, he . . .”

  “He made his big arrival. This was before Thanksgiving. He flies down, buys a Sunday Citizen, whips out the real-estate section. He picks ‘The Home of the Week.’ You should see it. It’s a Conch-style job next to a man-made pond at the Golf Club. Three hundred forty-seven grand, and he made a down payment of all but a hundred and fifty thou.”

  “I saw that on the real-estate cable channel,” said Teresa. “The glad handshake with the agent. The pat on the back from the banker. The paper listed his girlfriend as co-owner.”

  “Then, that yacht he’s got out at Oceanside. He traded it for two vacant lots in Annapolis, and he paid three idiots to bring it down here. They ran it aground twice. He renamed it Heidi Ho, like nobody’ll get the joke. And he slapped a bumper sticker on the stern that says, ‘Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For.’”

  “Thank God you don’t share his sense of humor,” said Teresa.

  “Then he goes for public opinio
n,” said Marnie. “He always tries to make a name for himself. The stingy creep hates Christmas. But he rolled around town in that car with the hat on.”

  Teresa and I had seen him, the week before Christmas, in his bright red Ford convertible, with the long crimson Santa Claus stocking cap, its puffy cotton-ball tassel whipping in the wind. Teresa had called him the “Fat Cat in the Hat”

  “Naturally, his Navidad was big on borracho and low on feliz. That’s when Sam and I decided to get out of here. We knew he wanted to make a big deal out of New Year’s Eve. In the old days he’d throw a premature drunk, two days early, and suffer all day the thirtieth with a sympathy-sucking, knuckle-dragging hangover. Then he’d go into a planning panic so New Year’s could be ‘perfect’ Our version of perfect was Jamaica.”

  “You know the odds against get-rich plans on this island,” I said.

  “I know my little brother. He’ll never be as drunk as he appears, or as tired, or as hung over. Sometime during the first few weeks he knows you, he’ll let slip his net worth. It’ll be a slurred aside to an unrelated story. Sooner or later he will embarrass Heidi by assuring everyone present that she is better in bed than all of his other lovers combined.”

  “So there’s no way,” said Teresa, “that you could have insisted he stay away from your town? Or convinced him he could lose it all?”

  Marnie shook her head, then shrugged. “I have this weird feeling he’s going to come out okay.”

  Teresa nodded. “This is Key Weird.”

  I said, “How did you wind up so bogged down by decent manners?”

  “And poor? And boring? Luck of the draw. He got my father’s genes, I got Mother’s. Maybe I’ll come out okay, too. If I don’t crumble like an old crust of Cuban bread.”

  “Your brother ever met Dex Hayes before?”

  Marnie shook her head. “That man was very strange. Mucho pissy.”

  “He got that way with the coroner’s people, too,” said Teresa. “Larry Riley got steamed.”

  Marnie chuckled. “Detective Hayes may not know it, but he picked the wrong man to piss off. Larry Riley’s parents live next door to Chief Salesberry.”

  “Small town,” I said.

  “Small island,” said Teresa. “The main problem being small people.”

  “Like Bug Thorsby,” I said.

  “Oh, shit,” said Marnie. “I forgot. Sam said you got mugged.”

  Teresa said coldly, “Yes. Carmen mentioned something . . .” Her chin receded, her lower lip stuck out A gray cloud came into her eyes.

  I said, “Two against one. I fought dirty, it’s over, I’m okay.”

  I hadn’t placated Teresa.

  Marnie said, “Sam asked me to tell you, he made a call or two. Jemison Thorsby’s working a boat out of Summerland Key. Keeps it docked at that fish house, Big Crab.”

  “Hell, I forgot to check with the hospital.”

  “No. What do you need? Can I get it for you?”

  “Thanks. I’ll just call in the morning.”

  Teresa stared at me.

  “Look,” I said, “It’s over. Compared to everything else today, it was a minor event”

  Marnie saved me: “Speaking of events . . .”

  I turned to her. “On Stock Island, one man, unidentified, found on a discarded couch in a trash heap. Naked, scrawny, decapitated. They couldn’t find die head. Dead fewer than four hours. Sheriff’s officials aren’t revealing identity if, in fact they know it The crime may have occurred elsewhere. There were no witnesses. What else you want?”

  “No dildos or feathers?”

  “No.”

  “No rope or duct tape?”

  “No.”

  “How do you expect us to sell newspapers?”

  We froze for a moment then Teresa laughed first I laughed, too, but only to acknowledge Mamie’s return to form. I had reduced a man’s death to forty words or less. Marnie would embellish it with the lingo and adjectives of her craft

  My short summary had brought back the odd chill that Shrimp Road had inspired earlier.

  Marnie addressed us both. “I’ve thought about this all evening. I can’t tell you two what to do, but I’m not telling law enforcement that I knew Richie Engram. It’s not a necessary detail. It could complicate things, my working for the news media. The Citizen doesn’t appreciate reporters who slip into the realm of ‘possible suspect.’ ”

  Teresa and I both said okay.

  Marnie hugged us both. I’d have offered to drive her home, but she was sober, rejuvenated, more lifelike than she’d been on arriving.

  We waited until the sound of the Jeep faded up Fleming. Teresa said, “Can we name this soap The Mother of Sibling Collisions?”

  “Thank you for sharing dinner. Thank you for cooking in the first place. Thank you for including Marnie.”

  Later, in bed, Teresa said, “Does she drop in like that when I’m not here?”

  “She’s a friend. Do you think I’d tell her not to?”

  Teresa didn’t answer for almost a minute. Then she said, “I wish I had more friends like yours.”

  6

  Teresa had flipped on the air purifier before we went to sleep.

  I’ve never believed that the filter would help me dodge throat-clogging mites and airborne disease. Never counted on its adding a dozen drooling days to the back end of my life. But its hum shielded me from Key West’s ambient racket. It masked two A.M. motorcycles on Fleming. I rarely heard the trash tracks or school buses, or electric saws at the crack of dawn.

  I hadn’t felt Teresa slide out of bed, hadn’t heard her leave the house. I woke to an audible pressure drop, a weird silence. No hum indoors, no noise outside. No electric saws. Frequent power failures were part of the island’s charm.

  I sat up, checked the battery-powered clock. I needed to make a call.

  Key West residents discovered the truth about electrically dependent phones during storms in the late 1990s. Cell phones covered them until their batteries died. Then they were out of luck. I’d kept my vintage, basic-black rotary-style when I’d installed two cordless units years ago. I’d adapted a snap plug to its cord. I hoped Duffy Lee Hall had found the same foresight.

  He answered on the second ring. “Good morning, Alex Rutledge. You call this early for only one reason. How many rolls?”

  “Caller I.D. in a power failure?”

  “I lose power, Alex, I’m out of business. I’ve got a four-outlet Back-UPS in the darkroom. My Yamaha generator kicks in automatically. A special switch separates me from city power, so I don’t pump juice to the outside wires.”

  An arsonist had burned Duffy Lee’s commercial work space six months earlier. An attempt to destroy evidence photos. The negatives had survived. Duffy Lee had been compensated for his loss. He’d used the money to build a darkroom in his home. I depended so much on Hall’s talents, if he ever went out of business, I’d consider doing the same.

  I said, “Can we do four rolls by noon?”

  “I read the paper. I figured you might’ve gotten called. Bring ’em on.” He faked a cough to announce a tongue-in-cheek remark: “I’ll add my usual rush charge, fifty percent.”

  “It’ll bump your county taxes in the long run.”

  “Maybe they’ll rebuild the electrical grid.”

  I hung up and the phone rang.

  Chicken Neck Liska, from a cellular: “What time?”

  “I told him noon. Why is the high sheriff calling, instead of a detective?”

  “Tell him eleven-thirty. I’ll see you at eleven-forty. El Siboney, corner of Margaret and—”

  “I know.”

  “La Lechonera used to—”

  “I know,” I said.

  “. . . with all the pig statues out front.”

  “I didn’t know you ate there.”

  “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

  I made the kind of mistake I’d make only before coffee. I began to make coffee. I’d already poured the first scoop of
Bustelo when I looked at the coffee maker’s plug in the socket. I put away the coffee, went to get dressed. I looked at the living room ceiling fans and wondered why they weren’t turning. Two minutes later I made my third pre-coffee error. I was almost out of the yard on the motorcycle when I thought about the mess on the streets, everyone driving to work. I could make it to Hall’s with no traffic signals, but I wasn’t sure where I’d need to go after that I parked the Kawasaki, stuck my helmet on the porch, and unlocked the bicycle.

  Duffy Lee lived in the 1400 block of Olivia. His wife had kept the beautiful two-story house after her first marriage ended in the eighties. A large house on a deep lot Old trees and foliage, dark green Adirondack chairs on the front-and-side veranda. Plenty of room in a spare back bedroom to build a light-tight enclosure. I rode up from White past fences full of purple and red bougainvillea, a purple passion-flower vine, bright yellow palm fronds. Four or five precious parking spaces were occupied by boats on trailers. Something new in the 1300 block: an old bike wedged in a tree, a prosthetic leg affixed to its left pedal. Found-object art or a political statement?

  Hall met me at the front door. He offered a full mug. “Black?”

  “I always praised your genius,” I said.

  “Just a mind reader.”

  “You’d best stay out of there. You dig into my mind today, you’ll muck your brain for weeks.” I gulped the coffee. It hit my system on the fly.

  “I assume this is one of the homicides in the Citizen.”

  “You’re in there. At your own risk.”

  “Both homicides?”

  “The one on Stock Island. Don’t inspect the prints too closely.”

  “You said noon. I’ll bet you want it earlier.”

  “You’re in there again.”

  Hall looked at me quizzically. He sensed my stress. “You want me to top off that coffee, Alex? You’re welcome to the porch. Listen to the neighbor’s parrots. Chill before you face the world.”