Bone Island Mambo: An Alex Rutledge Mystery

by Tom Corcoran

  “You’ve known my girls for years, haven’t you?” said Holloway. “Alex Rutledge, dear.”

  She wouldn’t face me. “I know who he is.”

  “How are you today?” I said.

  “Not so fucking good,” spat Suzanne.

  “You’ll be pleased to know,” said Holloway, “that Suzanne’s sister Julie recommended your skill with the camera.”

  Suzanne was already out the door she’d entered.

  Holloway said, “Much as we are not permitted to pick our families, we’re not allowed to choose their moods.”

  I had an opinion, but no need to share it.

  “Anyone asks, while you’re working, your response will be, ‘Insurance documentation,’ and that is it. Those two words, only. We okay with that?”

  I nodded an “okay.”

  “Let me add one more thing. This relates to our discussion of changes in Key West. We have plans that will benefit this island in the future. It won’t be gentrification, and it won’t ignore history. My personal view is that it’ll be so good, even the tree-huggers and zero-growth nuts and letters-to-the-editor windbags will bow down and thank us. Your photography will add to our effort. I beg you to take me at my word. Ease your mind about my view of things.”

  My mind was not eased. One way or another, Holloway had given me plenty of reasons to bag the job, to express gratitude at his having asked, to turn down his offer. Dealing with bad clients, while infrequent, was part of freelance photography: ad-agency account execs, publishers’ art directors, record company reps, even models’ agents. With Key West being home turf, my misgivings focused on personal aspects. Still, the money would come in handy. I was on the fence.

  My mind kept going back to when I’d called from White Street, when Donovan Cosgrove had put me on hold. Anyone who still owned an old Junkanoos album couldn’t be all bad. And someone who perpetuated the music by installing it in his phone system . . .

  I said, “We’ll do this one of two ways, Mr. Holloway. You set up an account at Conch Photo so I can stock up as I go. Or I’ll buy the supplies I need and add a fifteen percent surcharge for extending credit.”

  “As luck has it, I own Conch Photo. Do what’s easiest for you. Why don’t you check that list tonight? We’ll start scheduling first thing in the morning.”

  Holloway made no move to show me to the door. I saw no one in the hall and foyer, no sign of Donovan in his office. The red van was gone from the parking space out front. I unlocked the bike, rolled off the sidewalk, glanced up Holloway’s driveway. A silver Infiniti sedan with tinted windows. The one that had driven down Caroline Street twenty-two hours earlier, when I’d been chatting with Julie Kaiser. Just before Bug Thorsby’s social call.

  I found Duffy Lee Hall stroked out in the chair I’d occupied on his porch. Eyes closed, legs stretched, a contented expression. I had just come from an orderly, expensive palm tree exhibit. The Halls’ neighborhood foliage existed because it had sprouted there and no one had hacked it down. I’d have loved to spend the afternoon back on the porch, even with the hourly Conch Train. I had eight minutes to meet Liska.

  Hall heard me park my bicycle.

  “You’re set to go,” he said. “I was in the darkroom, I kept thinking of you out here. I came out to take a break. I just watched the garbage men for the first time in years.”

  “A cultural experience.”

  “Maybe not. When did the trash trucks lose their sense of humor?”

  I hesitated a moment, then understood. For years the garbage trucks in Key West bore the signs WE CATER WEDDINGS and FREE SNOW REMOVAL.

  “You’re right. No extra services.”

  “The town has changed,” said Hall. He handed me two bags—one held the negatives, which I always kept in my files—and an invoice. “Thanks for warning me not to look at the photos.”

  “Awful?”

  “Not so bad. No blank face looking back at you.” He looked away. “It’s always dead eyes that see too far into my soul.”

  8

  Pure Key West: parked near El Siboney Restaurant, a red Volvo with a red-and-black Harley-Davidson decal on its rear window. Was a Harley the other vehicle, or the owner’s alma mater? Pedaling up Catherine, a gray-haired man with wood crutches hung on hooks at the bike’s front sprocket and at its handlebars. A huge parrot was perched atop one crutch’s armpit cushion. The bike rider sang in perfect falsetto, “Those oldies but goodies reminds me of you . . .”

  Sheriff Fred Liska had angled his maroon Lexus into a slot out front. The air smelled of fried plantains and garlic used to season yuca. I chained my bike to a USA Today vending box. Inside the front door, more concentrated scents: steam from cooking olive oil, roasted chicken. Also a space problem. I waited for three people to pay their checks. A Cuban woman finally noticed me as a fresh face.

  I said, “El Jefe?”

  She smirked, and hiked her thumb toward the dining room on my left.

  Liska sat alone at a four-top with a café con leche, a Presidente beer, and iced tea in a thick tumbler so big a child couldn’t lift it. The Key West Citizen, read and refolded, was set aside. Also two packs of Marlboro Lights, held back-to-back by clear packaging tape. He wore a blue flannel shirt over a red T-shirt. Chicken Neck suddenly was issuing a left-handed punk statement, expensive clothes worn sloppily. I’d noticed it five weeks earlier. I hadn’t thought he’d change when he took over as sheriff. After all, he was an island icon, accepted as eccentric, acknowledged as one of the best investigators in police department history. He’d long ago been forgiven his vast collection of seventies disco-era clothing. Evidence proved that his new job had inspired a jump in fashion.

  I placed the packet of proof sheets and five-by-sevens on the table. A waitress, without speaking, dropped a set of silverware in a tiny white paper envelope, then vanished. I took the seat opposite Liska. He tapped his index finger on the packet, looked me in the eye.

  I said, “What?”

  “I’ve been down this channel before. Put the negatives in there, too.”

  “I no longer own my own work?”

  “I hate lawyers,” he said.

  “They exist.” I helped myself to a chunk of buttered Cuban bread.

  “I know, I know. The negs are your property unless you’ve signed a prior, written, work-for-hire contract. I just want to hold ’em.”

  “They’ll show up in the newspaper,” I said. “I’ll never see a cent . . .”

  “When did they ever?”

  “Never,” I said. “But why risk our lovely relationship with the potential for disagreement?”

  “A case out West, the prosecutor had photos and no negs. The defense alleged that the prints had been digitally manipulated, which sounds dirty but fun. The judge pitched the case out of court. So, you suffer a fire at your cottage, I squander how many murder investigations?”

  “Trust me, Sheriff. I’ve got fireproof storage. Goddamn, it’s weird to call you ‘Sheriff.’ ”

  “Your praise takes odd forms. Look, some idiot spills coffee in my file cabinet, ruins these prints the day you drive your Japanese motorcycle into a tree. What do I do, petition your estate for my evidence negatives? How come you’re driving a Kawasaki, anyway? That rice burner doesn’t match your ail-American Shelby Mustang image.”

  “Some writer gave it to me to pay off a debt. I’d have never collected the cash, so I took it. Where in Detroit did they make your Lexus?”

  He tapped his finger on the bag again.

  I’d have been within my rights to keep the negs. But I’d never made—or lost—a penny by doing so. “They’re my property, right?”

  He nodded. “They’ll be bagged and tagged. With a signout slip.”

  I extracted Duffy Lee’s second bag from my shirt pocket. “I just kept them to screw with you, anyway.”

  Liska didn’t laugh.

  I knew the waitress drill at El Siboney. Middle-aged women, all sisters or cousins or friends since childhood. One wa
lks to your table while carrying on a mile-a-minute Cuban conversation with all the others. For an instant there is a lull in the talk. She will look you in the eye. You must give her your whole order. Take too long, the chatter in Spanish resumes. You wait until the next lull to order. If a tourist has questions about the food, the waitress develops an urgent need to be elsewhere. She motions, Wait a sec, be back in a minute. A long, long minute. So you learn by watching, or learn the hard way. Once you know, you order quickly. You say your main dish and side dish in Spanish, order your drink in English. She will say, “Thank you, honey,” and beeline for the swinging door to the kitchen.

  Liska ordered arroz con polio. I ordered ropa vieja. Old clothes.

  I said, “Where do you eat on Tuesdays and Thursdays?”

  “My desk. A lady in the office goes to Publix, brings back tossed salads, Caesars, the usual rabbit food. Man’s gotta watch his wasteland—I mean waistline—this day and age.”

  “Why me, yesterday?” I said.

  “We found a headless body and thought of you.”

  “Your praise . . . Well, now we’re even.” I stupidly upped the ante: “Did you ever reconcile with your ex-wife?”

  The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

  Liska kept rolling. “In a minute or two I’m going to ask a favor. So for now I’ll forget you said that. We got the Marathon doofus to drive down. The ants on the body spooked old Lester. Kept looking behind himself, like the head might appear. He ducked into the mangroves to barf, right into some bum’s campsite. Lester was too afraid to barf. That’s when I called you, got a busy signal. A minute later you had the good fortune to answer. We put Lester Forsythe in his car and sent him back up the road.”

  Liska paused while the waitress put my iced tea on the table, then said, “You made an appearance at Caroline Street.”

  “Abbreviated.”

  “I heard that, too. What, exactly, went down?”

  “This the favor?”

  He nodded. “That’s why I said ‘exactly.’ ”

  I told the chronology, the list of those in attendance, a description of the body, Hayes’s flakiness.

  “It’s identical to one I had a year ago,” he said. “Damn near identical.”

  Holloway hadn’t been the only person in town to notice the similarity. It made sense that Chicken Neck’d see it.

  I said, “That wasn’t one that I photographed.”

  “Right. The FDLE swooped in. Their boys did the scene-scoping. Right down to fingerprints off the toilet-flush handle. Then they handed it back to me. Or most of it. I never closed the case. The little I’ve heard, I’m told it’s been passed along to young Dexter.”

  The waitress placed Liska’s meal before him: chicken and yellow rice, chunks of chorizo sausage, green olives, pork, a side dish of plantains. She replaced the empty red plastic basket with another—a stack of buttered Cuban bread. My plate came second.

  I said, “Why here, three days a week?”

  “Look around.”

  Cuban housewives, aging hippies, a few business owners. In a corner, his face half-hidden in the Herald sports section, Captain Turk, who kept the Flats Broke, a light-tackle charter skiff, next to Sam Wheeler’s Fancy Fool at the Bight.

  “Don’t ask me why, ‘cause I don’t know,” said Liska. “Cops don’t eat here. Men or women, nobody city, nobody county. Even on their days off. It’s a secret sanctuary, with eats. A midday mental oasis.”

  “Pressure so soon? You’ve been in office how many weeks?”

  “My first pledge, when I took the office, was to check out county units named with an acronym. In my experience, acronyms are money sponges. Politicians love to fund acronyms. They never react when you tell them all that cash went to FAST or CATCH or STOMP or FUNK. They say, ‘What’s FAST?’ and you say Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team. End of question. Ka-ching with the money, lots of zeros. Now I’m boss. I know. Automatic funding means automatic loafing. It so happens, the Fugitive Apprehension Strike Team is a good operation, underfunded. But FUNK?

  The Friendly Urban Neighborhood Kops? Tell me why they gave away a thousand dollars’ worth of Jamaican-flag-colored balloons. Make friends with black kids? I mean, where’s ‘urban’ in the Keys? And, no shit, they had a Special Homicide Investigative Team. Figure out that one.”

  Liska’s story reminded me of Sam Wheeler’s story about a Psy-Ops office in Saigon. Someone had had the idea of handing out red-white-and-blue rubber balls to Vietnamese kids, an effort to build loyalty to the invading forces. The kids didn’t want them. Psychological Operations Headquarters was awash in cardboard boxes full of rubber balls. The desk jockeys invented a game. They painted numbers on wastebaskets, put them around their desks. They took turns throwing the balls into the slow-moving ceiling fans, having them ricochet into the cans. Different cans were worth different points. They worked on timing, and velocity, and angles. They wagered huge amounts of money. They did it for months on end, then returned to the States wearing combat theater service ribbons.

  I looked at five empty plates on the table. Chicken Neck Liska had the metabolism of a high-torque blender.

  I said: “You don’t eat at your desk twice a week.”

  “You’re right I get to Bobalu’s fairly often.”

  “Do I dare ask about the cigarette packs taped together?”

  “My New Year’s resolution. I start each day with a fixed number, which, this week, means fifty-one. This is my daily ration, this kit. I reduce the count in the packs by one cigarette per week. By July it’ll be one pack, a year from now I’ll be clean. Next year I can resolve to stop chewing on my steering wheel.”

  “Something else is bothering you.”

  “You bet,” said Liska. “First we got Caroline Street, like my case from a year ago.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “a headless body. Ring a bell?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “Two years ago we found that head behind Searstown. The body turned up in Dade. Ice-cold case, closed-casket funeral. Damn fucking strange, two in one day like two I never solved.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “We’ll know for sure if a body wrapped in plastic shows up at Bahia Honda.”

  I shuddered. Nine months earlier the body of a friend of mine, an ex-lover, was dumped in a beachside hammock up the Keys. Fortunately, that case had been solved. Liska knew my connection to the dead woman. I couldn’t believe he’d zap me with the memory.

  “Now we’re even for the wife remark,” he said.

  I gave him that point. “Ever bust Bug Thorsby?”

  “Barracuda shit in the ocean?”

  “Do me a favor? Or yourself, depending on how it works out. Run his prints back through AFIS? But don’t include his vital data. Put them through as unknowns.”

  “You used to be undetectable on the radar screen. You lived a damn calm life until when, about a year ago? You’ve been in the barrel since then. Now you’re a blip the size of a fucking Humvee. You’re asking law enforcement favors when you should be minimizing your echo.”

  “None of it’s been my doing or my choice.”

  He stared at me. “Anything else you need to tell me?”

  “Yep. You’ve got a stolen-car ring moving vehicles out of Stock Island.”

  “Shipping ’em out of there?”

  “Or warehousing, repainting. I don’t know. Whatever they do.”

  “Where are they hiding ’em, down in the abandoned coal mines?”

  “You asked.”

  He tapped a knuckle on the newspaper. “I’ve got skin and bones to worry about. Dead humans. Plastic and metal come later.”

  Liska shocked me. He picked up both tabs.

  9

  I pedaled into a fifteen-knot north wind, stair-stepped side streets, wove my way through traffic. Working off a late breakfast—shredded beef, yellow rice, black beans, two pints of tea. I’d gained five
by eating one pound of food. Disorienting scenery, sharp glare, a tint to the foliage. I tasted grit in the air, smelled exhaust fumes floating down from Fort Myers. I’d hoped that the wind might have ignored the embargo, blown the haze to Cuba.

  I thought, The dirty yellow fog may be self-induced.

  I’d delivered prints and film to Liska. After I invoiced Monroe County, with an extra whack for working Sunday, the Stock Island decapitate-and-drop job was over for me. Gone, behind me.

  Every day in January two events coincided. The glut of today’s visitors arrived by vehicle from Miami. And the first wave of yesterday’s tourists—after shaking hangovers and recoiling at the price of gas—started back up the Overseas Highway. The two flocks crossed paths at Truman and White just after lunch hour. One beer truck turning left could jam traffic back to Bahia Honda. I stayed away. I rode Francis past the cemetery to avoid the noontime traffic jam.

  I found Heidi Norquist in front of the house, sleeping in a silver Jaguar XKR convertible. The cloth top was up, the windows down. Her pink headphones hung from the rearview mirror. A pink pastel knit shirt. Today’s gold chain a fraction wider than yesterday’s. A glistening drool at die side of her mouth informed me that she wasn’t feigning slumber.

  I wasn’t going to wake her. She looked peaceful. I didn’t have the energy to deal with the flip side of her charm.

  I wanted to shower, then walk to Sunbeam Market to buy the Key West Citizen and Miami Herald. The Citizen’s page-two Crime Report usually was worth the price of the paper. I wanted to see the front page this time, to see how they’d handled the murder on Caroline.

  A subdued voice on the message machine: “Hi, this is Heidi Norquist. I’m falling asleep in my car, in case you didn’t recognize me, so this is probably the best way to reach you. First, I’d like to apologize for yesterday, but I can do that to your face, when we talk. Second, would you please wake me up? Pound on the fender, or something. Even if you don’t want to talk to me, I’ve got a two o’clock hair appointment that I don’t want to miss.”