Bone Island Mambo: An Alex Rutledge Mystery

by Tom Corcoran

  “And here I am, treated like a damn carpetbagger. My architect tried to mimic some old island designs. The building codes wouldn’t let him. That’s typical of the crap I see every day. The only person saving my sanity is Mercer Holloway. You know the man?”

  “Everybody in town knows Holloway.” Dunwoody would find out sooner or later: “That’s who hired me for die next two or three weeks.”

  He stared at me, nodded as his thoughts went inward.

  I heard a shrill beep. Butler Dunwoody reached behind his back, pulled out a cell phone the size of an audiocassette. He said, “Right” Then, “Put him on.” He listened a while longer, then asked, “What time was that?” He closed the phone without saying good-bye.

  “You had a visitor yesterday,” he said. “Lady in a Jag ragtop?”

  Oh, boy. I hesitated, then nodded.

  “Fuck, man. You’re standing right here, telling me to watch my back with the bureaucrats. And you’re stabbing me in the gut”

  “You don’t have to worry about Heidi.”

  “I know that. I may not be her best memory, but I’m the best deal she’ll ever have. You, on the other hand . . . Jesus.” Butt Dunwoody spun away. He punched numbers into his phone as he hurried to the beach restaurant.

  I leaned against the cement-block wall next to the Chart Room, listened to the hypnotizing fountain, stared at the pool area. I wondered how men like Dunwoody and Philip Kaiser made it day to day, coexisted with their inner fears and jealousies. On the other hand, Dunwoody, with his history speech, had not come off as a robber baron, or the sexist sauce abuser Sam and Marnie had described. He’d come off a planner and thinker. A good builder. Or a top-notch criminal.

  Suddenly, Donovan Cosgrove, Holloway’s son-in-law, emerged from the west entrance to the pool-bordering walkway. He approached Dunwoody, shook hands, continued with him to the restaurant. An odd pairing. But Julie Kaiser had told me that Cosgrove was acting as her father’s on-site liaison. Maybe helping to calm the bankers.

  Someone already had swiped my newspaper from the Pier House lobby. I used the courtesy phone. No answer at Sam’s house. No answer at Teresa’s office. No messages on my machine. I dialed Carmen Sosa’s number. In the background, when she picked up, salsa music full blast. The primary sign of her morning-afters, not hung over, but waking after a romantic encounter.

  I said, “You’re not at work?”

  “I couldn’t wake up. I called in sick.”

  “Lovesick?”

  “Bet your ass. I’m a brand-new woman.”

  “Any two-toned four-doors in the lane this morning?”

  “Two at once, until ten minutes ago. One city and one county. They were out there, kickin’ dirt, gabbin’, playing their police radios on high volume. One’s still out there. The county guy. He’s got a kid on Maria’s Little League team. You rob a bank, my sweet man?”

  The city? Liska had asked for help? “Worse. I ticked off our new sheriff.”

  “Was that his girlfriend’s sleek roadster by your house yesterday?”

  I said, “Did you come home with your cabana boy?”

  “I came somewhere. Heaven, I think. Once at noon, twice last night. You wanna make something of it?”

  “He ratted me out to his boss.”

  “Don’t tell me. Not with that bimbo you bitched about . . .”

  “No, Carmen,” I said. “Not what you think.”

  “What I think doesn’t matter, my love.”

  “You be home a while longer?”

  “You know my rule—after the Bone Island Mambo, I wake up and dance the tango. I’ve barely begun. The bottoms of my slippers aren’t even warm yet. Please stay out of trouble.”

  It took me four minutes to reach Cobo Pharmacy—less than a half block from the lane. I called from the coin phone on the store’s front wall, donated thirty-five cents to Phoenix Telecom LLC, wherever they are. You can bet they’re not in Key West. Out of breath, Carmen said, “All clear.”

  It took less than two minutes to lock the Cannondale, change my shirt, chug a quart of OJ, grab my camera bag, extra film, my helmet, and Mercer Holloway’s list of prospective photo sites. I heard the momentary whoop of a police siren on Fleming. It alarmed me until I ran three rational thoughts in a row. Probably urging some motorist to move from the Eden House loading zone, to quit blocking traffic. No new messages on the machine.

  Time to haul ass on the Kawasaki.

  Near the door I saw the envelope I’d probably stepped on coming in. Tommy Tucker’s TNT Security letterhead on cheap bond. He’d slid it under the left-side French door that I never opened. A check from Mercer Holloway. Twenty-five hundred dollars. No note.

  I rode south on White Street I had no idea what to do or where to go. I obeyed the speed limit I recalled a man saying that the only people who drive the speed limit in Broward and Dade are on parole. A traffic slip will send a violator back to the cement for another year. I couldn’t unload my road rage. An empty yellow antifreeze jug blew out of a pickup truck’s bed, made a hollow slap against my helmet. I smelled Cuban coffee, bacon on a grill. I wanted some but didn’t want to stop moving.

  My mind drifted to Teresa’s words at Mangrove Mama’s. I’d worried that by working for Holloway, attaching myself to what he represented, I’d be part of the island’s growth problem, and not part of its solution. She’d suggested that my photography was not going to make a difference. In pattern with the previous hundred and seventy years, the island would change anyway.

  She was right. Change is inevitable.

  But the flavor of change is within our control.

  There’d been a time when motor vehicles could meander to the end of White Street Pier. A driver could park, walk to the south wall, be the closest American to Cuba. It always has been a fine place for solitude. Folks there, fishermen and sightseers, would leave you alone to think. To ponder the crap that trespasses paradise. The county remodeled the pier a few years ago, created a pedestrian bridge to the old center pier section. The county commissioners claimed it would better appeal to tourists. But no one could ignore the fact that a prominent politician lived in the condo just east of die pier, and that Mother Nature insisted on depositing noxious seaweed on the condo’s beach. The remodeling included a spillway so the tides could reduce the buildup of stinky flotsam. Lucky break for the politician.

  These days you must come on foot or bicycle. I parked the Kawasaki in a slot near the West Martello Garden Center. I carried my helmet past the AIDS memorial, crossed the new bridge, and hiked to pier’s end. The farther from land, the less lee effect. At the broad pierhead apron, the wind, which had clocked slightly west, cut through Sam’s jacket. I’ve never known why fifty-five in Key West feels colder than twenty-five in Ohio. I felt new hunger and wished I’d stopped at Pepe’s or Harpoon Harry’s.

  I looked at the south edge of the island. From a hundred yards off the coast, the place looked almost the same as it had when I’d arrived during the Carter administration. Builders had completed the four-unit condo, much to the disappointment of growth opponents. The “indigenous park” at White and Atlantic—once a large open area where weekly flea markets thrived—had been paved, turned into a parking lot decorated with a token cluster of native shrubs. A little green to please the protesters of asphalt. On a tree-shaded grassy field opposite that corner, an elderly man and his wife had operated a miniature train on weekends, sold rides to children for the coins in their pockets. That acreage had been annexed and fenced by Higgs Beach County Park. Another new condo, the Beach Club, squatted up east. To the west was the storm-ruined Higgs Beach Pier and Henry Flagler’s Casa Marina Hotel, shuttered in the 1950s, restored in the seventies by Marriott. Then the building called Southernmost House, though it wasn’t. From my angle, given the passing of time, not much had gone away.

  Such vantage points were harder to find each year.

  I pulled out Mercer Holloway’s Group One property list, put my back to the breeze so the pages
wouldn’t rip. A strange assortment of buildings: retail shops, an apartment complex, a bank on the boulevard. No definition beyond, I assumed, Mercer Holloway’s name on the deeds. He’d said that he disagreed with his tax assessments. But he’d claimed that “tree-huggers and zero-growth nuts will thank us.” He’d said that the island would reap “future benefits.”

  A career politician had begged me to take him at his word.

  I suffered my second stroke of paranoia for the morning: a siren carried down White Street with the wind. It sounded like the siren was heading right for me. Then a fire engine appeared, turned up Flagler.

  I gazed to sea for several minutes. A shrimp boat had anchored to the southeast, its gear laid out port and starboard to stabilize the craft for better daytime snoozing. A handsome, wooden-sparred ketch ran with the wind and against the Hawk Channel current Full main, working jib, a single reef in the mizzen. She trailed an inflatable runabout The sight took me back to a sail transit I’d made with Sam Wheeler in the mid-eighties, a delivery to Bimini, a favor for a fishing client Another case of going blind into a situation without preview of events that would spin out of control. A crisis where a trustworthy companion had saved the day.

  Holloway’s concept whatever it was, might be wonderful for all involved. It also might be the boondoggle of the millennium, the scam to beat all. One thing came to mind. He’d said of his daughters, “I don’t want to deprive them of the joys of making their own fortunes.” The line suggested a limit to each daughter’s inheritance.

  Whatever happened, my name would be attached. I wanted the income. I wanted to know more.

  The Sunrise Rotary Club’s elegant compass rose told me I was located at 24° 32.724’ north by 81° 47.009’ west. I didn’t know where I stood with my conscience, my reputation, my bank balance, or the law. I wanted a nap on the sun-warmed concrete. I walked the bridge off the apron, passed two men straddling their stopped bicycles, reading victims’ names embossed on the AIDS memorial. Tears streamed down their faces.

  Like the man who’d stonewalled Dunwoody, I was in no hurry to make decisions. No hurry to do anything except remove myself from craziness, from the past two days’ gruesome events. I hadn’t been to Epcot in years. I needed a quiet few days in Cedar Key, or a couple of nights slumming the bars on St Pete Beach. My psyche required a therapeutic maxing of credit cards.

  For some stupid reason I drove the Kawasaki back into Key West

  14

  I slowed at Peary Court, where Palm Avenue’s utility-pole forest intersects Eisenhower. I wanted to search the far end of Charterboat Row for Fancy Fool, Wheeler’s bare-bones flats boat. I needed to connect with Sam for advice. I rode the turf Mercer Holloway had claimed was his North Beach childhood playground. The little I’d read about North Beach had described cork and sea-grape trees, patch mangrove, sea oats, pristine sandy beach. Holloway had reminisced about the days before it was “lost in development.” By my calculations, he would have to be ninety to have played there. I could not imagine how the man could honor the past—Junkanoo music, antique lithographs, fond memories, the house he maintained—and at the same time ambush the future.

  I started up Garrison Bight’s bridge. Most of the charter boats bobbed in their slips. Captains reclined in canvas sling chairs, in groups, gazing around the parking strip, bullshitting, spitting downwind. Mates aboard the bigger yachts pretended to spruce topside while scoping the sidewalks for possible customers. Even with the chill January air, the day marked an odd lull for the charter fleet. I guessed that Wheeler would be out with a client, some permit chaser or bonefisherman who’d booked the same week every year for years. Given the shallow currents favored by those fish and the difficulty in finding fish in roiled water, a northwest wind would make it a short day.

  At bridge peak I looked south. Bingo. Wheeler, alone, in his sixteen-foot Maverick Mirage, coasted toward me, leaving the Bight’s dockage basin. I hit the cycle’s squawky horn as Sam glided under the west end. I didn’t catch his ear. Then I stopped in a hurry. Traffic had backed up from the Roosevelt signal—a tourist-season normality in recent years. I saw no activity at the dockmaster’s office, one or two people at the cube-shaped public rest room. No need to double-check for police cruisers. My mental radar already was tuned to that frequency. I waited for a break in traffic, crossed the double-yellow, and jumped the curb into the municipal dock parking area. Sam nudged his throttle between marker 29 and the red 30 triangle, then saw me walking Dolphin Pier, angled over, beckoned me aboard.

  I pointed to my illegally parked Kawasaki. Sam pointed northward. Our mutual friend, Carl Wirthwein, owned a home on the spit next to the yacht club. Problem solved, and an invitation to the backcountry. I returned to the bridge, waited in line for the light, hurried up Roosevelt, swung left onto Hilton Haven. The narrow peninsula had been created during the island’s first major facelift, the heralded arrival of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. By dredging and filling, engineers had built a peninsula for the railway straight to Key West Harbor. The hurricane of September 1935 had shut down the rails, and these days the fill to either side of the bay-access cut offered perfect weather protection for the Bight.

  I left the motorcycle alongside a jasmine trellis in Wirthwein’s carport. Fancy Fool bobbed a few yards off his short dock. Sam’s flat-bottomed skiff was pure utility, with little freeboard, designed for shoal water where schooling fish offer their challenge to light-tackle enthusiasts. Anglers invest plenty in equipment and guides. With rare exceptions, they release fish after battle. The pastime was reputed to be more addictive than sex or drugs. I’d always been a better spectator.

  Sam nudged the dock with his port bow so I could step aboard.

  I noticed no fishing gear. “How’s it going, Captain?”

  He looked over the top of his sunglasses. “Da boat she float. You?”

  “I keep getting bottle caps that say, ‘Sorry, try again.’ Key West used to be a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.”

  “Been a long, strange year. All two weeks of it.”

  “Getting weirder,” I said.

  “You missed a great breakfast in my kitchen this morning. Staff Sergeant Pissoff and Corporal Malcontent. They were being extra polite about sharing the bagel cutter and butter knife.”

  “Too many lightning bolts in the front yard?”

  “Sunday the crap was in your lap,” he said. “Yesterday it reached everyone else.”

  “I’ve been wasting time, dodging the threat.”

  “Instead of?”

  “Instead of trying to figure what’s behind it all.”

  Sam idled out of the Bight, then kicked the ninety-horse Yamaha up to 3,500 revs. Fancy Fool came instantly to a plane, put astern the Sigsbee Park backyards of Navy Officer Housing. Sam dropped the engine speed. We slapped along wavetops, into the wind, north into Florida Bay. Aiming for mangrove islands in the Lower Harbor Keys, we wove between backcountry markers, old wood stakes topped with Day-Glo-painted triangles. We passed an old purloined stop sign, now faded, covered with guano. We skirted hammocks, ran past Cayo Agua. Startled birds flushed. Cormorants like jet fighters went for max speed at shallow altitude, then lifted for safety and perspective. Frigate birds patrolled, stood guard aloft. White seabirds played in the fresh breeze. More glare than detail reflected off the choppy water, kept us from a clear view of the bay bottom.

  The view took me back to a picnic in the Mud Keys four months earlier. Teresa and I had been dating only two or three weeks, dancing around our relationship, fascinated by the strength of our fast attraction. While wary of instant romance, we didn’t want to threaten the momentum. We’d accepted an invitation to explore the Mud Keys aboard The Conch, the boxy pontoon boat owned by my amigo Dink Bruce. A day-cruising masterpiece, The Conch resembles a four-poster bed with a forty-horse outboard, two lawn chairs, and a ladder to the sundeck on the canopy. Years ago Charles Kuralt cruised aboard her, wrote about it in a best-selling book. Y
ou decline a Dink Bruce offer at your own peril. A local woman once turned down an afternoon in the lakes with the excuse that it was her only day for laundry. He never asked her again. More than social rebuke, a need for solitude had motivated our acceptance.

  Four of us—Dink and his companion, and Teresa and I—rode The Conch. Marnie and Sam joined us in Fancy Fool. They brought along a CD blaster with an assortment of jazz albums—Branford Marsalis, Paul Desmond, and an old favorite of mine, Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly. We beat the humidity by taking frequent dips in the water. The bugs never found us. Teresa and I checked each other for sunburn, kept the humor rolling, put on flippers and snorkled, explored meandering channels. Her eyes widened at the sight of a ray, only five feet below us, its wings almost touching the mangrove roots. Small fish checked us out. We swam behind a thick hammock, still could hear the peaceful music. Someone loudly accused us of spawning.

  Later, at my house, we’d made love before showering, then again after washing away salt and sun lotion. The day had secured the link between us.

  Just beyond the small hammock called Fish Hawk Key, Sam slowed, cut the ignition, and let Fancy Fool drift. In no hurry, he went forward, pulled a small stockless anchor from a compact well, and chucked it into four feet of water.

  I looked around, then saw Sam’s reason for stopping. A mile to the northeast, a guide poled his skiff into the wind as an angler on the bow cast in our direction. Wheeler’s sense of nautical courtesy was as strident as any of his waterborne traits—knot bending, neatness, storage, maintenance. His home was just as meticulous. His only failing was his refusal to clean or sell his ancient Ford Bronco. Friends allowed him the eccentricity.

  Sam flipped opened a live-bait well. He pulled out two ice-cold beers. ‘Top off that coffee?”

  I accepted, but my stomach reminded me that I’d skipped food. I tilted the bottle toward the other skiff.

  Sam said, “Captain Turk’s Flats Broke. Fishing a local man. Holloway’s son-in-law. The real estate guy.”