by Tom Corcoran
I left the women in the foyer—to give me a break from the cop—and went to the end of the hall. Dexter, in his frenzy, had missed two items of evidence. I found a hole in the narrow space between the right-side wall and the woodwork around the patio door. Right where I’d guessed it’d be. I found another hole in the exact opposite spot, adjacent to the left wall. It took a half minute to rig my 50-mm lens, my small flash with its homemade bubble-wrap diffuser, a fresh roll of film. I shot eight photographs, packed my gear, returned to the foyer. I directed the lieutenant to what I’d found. I hoped he’d follow up, find the projectiles in identifiable shape, deduce that the shooter had taken time to fire at least three, maybe more shots at slightly different angles. A smart investigator might even believe that there’d been a moving target, a shadow behind the fancy glass door.
A smart investigator might guess that Tommy Tucker had failed to reveal important information.
I asked Marnie to have Sam call me when he had a moment to spare. I suggested to Teresa that, since we’d missed lunch, we might have an early supper at Camille’s. She smiled, shrugged, and smiled again.
Detective Lewis was waiting for me on Margaret She’s about five-eight, carries herself with authority. Too many citizens think that female officers lack the will to be forceful, especially attractive women who’ve managed to retain femininity on the job. I would hate to be a man who made that mistake with Bobbi Lewis. She wore dark slacks and a pale gray polo shirt with an imprinted badge. A pager and cell phone on her belt, a spiral pad and pen stuck in her belly-pack. She’d brought a muscular young assistant with faded jeans, a loose cotton sport shirt, a backward ball cap, and a video camera. He’d begun taping as I rounded the corner at Fleming. I wondered who’d review the lead-in, wondered if my body language spoke of confidence or flakiness.
Right down to business: “How did you come into possession of the car?” said Lewis.
I explained Mercer’s request, his handing me the keys.
She held out a slip of paper, a memo form embossed with a green badge. “We’ve got the owner as Mr. Donovan Cosgrove,” she said. “Was he present when his father-in-law, Mr. Mercer Holloway, asked you to drive the car?”
I nodded.
She waved her hand at the video rig. “Do me a favor. Answer me verbally so Robin can get his audio. Was Mr. Cosgrove present?”
“Yes.”
“Did he see Mercer Holloway hand you the keys to this Infiniti?”
“I don’t know. He was there, but he could’ve been distracted. He could have been looking away, talking with someone.”
“Was there any doubt in your mind that Mr. Holloway had the authority to lend you Mr. Cosgrove’s car?”
I said, “No doubt at all.”
“Please open the trunk,” she said. “Show me what you found in there.”
We continued the charade so that Lewis could establish her right to be snooping, create an evidence trail, generate an admissible video file. She did not touch the feather, but instructed the young man to zoom for a close-up, then pull back to reestablish location. She went to her unmarked sedan, got what looked like a black plastic body bag, had me assist her in removing the entire carpet from the trunk, rolling it, sliding it into the bag. She placed the bag in her vehicle’s trunk and directed the assistant to cease taping.
“Fingerprints from inside?” I said.
“Too late. You’ve driven the car, and—what, three days?—who knows how many other people have been inside, driving or as passengers. We’ll test the trunk mat for blood and hair and all that. Even with a series of matches, it’ll prove only that the car was used in a murder, but not who used it. Some asshole lawyer wants to step to the edge, he could claim only the trunk mat was associated with the murder, and there’s no proof that it was in this car at the time of the crime.”
My big clue was small potatoes.
Bobbi Lewis turned so the video kid couldn’t hear her speak. “Why was your motorcycle burned next to Wiley Fecko’s camp?”
“I wanted to ask if he’d seen anyone drop off the headless wonder.”
“You found him sober?” she said. “I tried three times.”
“He didn’t tell me you’d been there.”
“Please believe that we’re everywhere on Stock Island. From the classy side to the suicide, night and day. Necessity. We’ve got the whole place wired for sound, so to speak.”
“The day you found the body, that deputy, Fennerty, told me that Stock Island was enough to make anyone not be a cop.”
Lewis laughed. “If it wasn’t for Stock Island, Deputy Fennerty wouldn’t have a life. Where’s Fecko now?”
“He identified Bug Thorsby’s truck. I took him downtown, gave him to a gentleman of the street for safekeeping. I was afraid Fecko would tell the wrong people what he’d seen.”
“Where’s he stashed?”
“His first stop was Mallory Square.”
“Get him drunk, get him the Deluxe Wash? Windshield bugs, spray wax, ashtrays, and vacuum?”
I nodded.
“You called from Holloway’s. Did the city find anything?”
“They’re lucky they found the house,” I said. “Dex Hayes wanted to do it right, but he brought his attitude.”
“Dexter’s made mistakes lately,” said Lewis. “The kid’s trying to be an old-fashioned Conch detective. He’s forgotten how many old-fashioned Conch detectives retired early or went to prison. He may work out okay. But it’ll take time.” She stepped between two cars to let a U-Haul truck roll by.
“What do you think?” she said. “Are all the snuffs connected?”
“Only via me, the Caroline Street geography of the body, and the attack. And a link between Dunwoody and Holloway in the Caroline site progress. Is that enough?”
“Enough for you or me, but not for a judge. Assume this whole mess is one big mess. What was your first big clue?”
“Bug Thorsby . . .”
“Who’s now dead. What was your second big clue?”
“Linking Bug to the headless wonder.”
“A young man also gone to history,” she said. “Your third?”
“The feather.”
“So maybe somebody wants this guy Dunwoody to fail.”
She’d done her homework. “Okay,” I said.
“If he fails, who gets hurt the most?”
“His girlfriend, Heidi Norquist, confided to me she’s a heavy investor.”
“So we take a macro view, assume everything’s a big package. All these crimes are being committed to hurt Ms. Norquist?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There may have been a multipurpose script. The copycat nature of the cases is making Liska look bad. Dexter, too, but not as bad as Liska. Somebody wanted to mess with me and Marnie Dunwoody. Somebody thought the boy-thugs were expendable.”
“Maybe they weren’t thugs,” she said with a straight face. “Maybe they were New York photo critics.”
Not only did she have a sense of humor, but a sense of history. She’d paraphrased Tennessee Williams’s sardonic quote from his 1979 mugging in Key West. He’d blamed drama critics.
I said, “Heidi’s fancy Jaguar disappeared from her driveway last night.”
Lewis shook her head. “Where’s she live?”
“Town house at the Golf Course. Any talk about a car-theft ring, maybe working out of Stock Island?”
“There’s been talk. I have to ask myself, How the hell does a theft ring work with one road off the Keys? I’m not saying I’m not interested, because we’ve lost more cars than a normal quarter. But right now I’ve got more important concerns.” Detective Lewis thought for about ten seconds, then shook her head. She pulled a business card and a ball-point pen from her belly-pack. She wrote a five-digit number on the card. “For you, only.”
She’d given me the last five numbers of her home phone. In the seventies you could drop the two and nine when you dialed locally. Longtime Key West residents still never used the
first two numbers in conversation.
“Where to with the car?” she said. “Return it to Mr. Cosgrove?”
I explained that I’d trampled the truth.
“Go ahead,” she said. ‘Take it down to Simonton Street. Make up another story. Don’t tell him we’ll see him tomorrow. Thanks for your help.”
“How do I explain the lost trunk carpet?”
Bobbi Lewis said, “It ran away with the spoon?”
An old Keys law-enforcement joke about missing cocaine.
I drove to the city lot. I met Cosgrove as he was walking from the upper deck, peering among the used-up cars in the city’s maintenance fleet. I did a song and dance about reaching the car first, having to hurry film to the processor. I apologized for making him wait.
He wasn’t buying. There wasn’t much he could do about it.
Except snuff me.
I shut my mouth and got the hell out of there. I walked to Blue Heaven, drank a beer, gabbed with the bartender as he prepped for the pre-supper rush. The staff still was talking about the noon-hour food fight. I decided against more beers at restaurant prices, retrieved my bicycle, rode down to Southard, then east. By the time I reached Jeana’s, the market opposite the Green Parrot, the sweet beer taste in my mouth had me wishing for more. My stumbling memory told me there was no beer in my fridge.
I locked the bike, went inside, took a six-pack from the glass-front cooler. A barrel-chested man, maybe thirty, arms big around as my legs, ponytail, stood at the deli counter waiting while a harried server crafted a Cuban Mix sandwich. The tattoos on his arms had faded, shifted in time. They looked like blue-black seaweed, dedicated to “Betsy” on one forearm and “Liz” on the other. The back of his shirt read PAUL’S PORTABLE POTTIES. I decided to order a snack for myself.
“How’s business?” I said.
“Don’t ask if I had a shitty day.” The name embroidered on his shirt was NORBY. “I didn’t, but the jokes get old.”
“No joke, I’m curious about your leasing and servicing schedules.”
“What you want to know?”
I guessed at the proper terminology, to prove I was serious. “How do you figure the unit count for a site? How often do you swap them out for upkeep and sanitizing?”
Norby checked progress on his sandwich, put an analytical look on his face. “Can count goes straight ratio with head count, expected traffic. The variables are alcohol and female users. More booze, more ladies, more units, as you called them. We call them shitters. Exchanges for drainage and steam-cleaning, we go by an average daily temperature chart on the computer. Summertime, we obviously got more to do.”
“So this time of year,” I said, “say, a construction site with eighteen men on the job . . .”
“We could go once a week. We got six of those right now. I pull one every day, Monday through Saturday. Today I did that motel renovation on United. Tomorrow, I’m not sure. On Saturday I get the new gift-shop arcade there on Caroline.”
“I saw that place. Rode my bike past there the other morning. How’d you get those portables through the chain-link fence?”
“They’ve got an access gate around back. Through the trailer court, so they can receive building materials and all.”
“So you go down Elizabeth, into the trailer court, then . . . ?”
“You got it, buddy.”
I nodded, mimicked the man’s analytical expression. His food arrived. He’d already paid for it. He left without another word.
I’d lost my appetite. I slid to the front counter and bought the beer.
I biked down Whitehead to Fleming and turned toward home. The thirst hit me as I passed the lemonade vendor at Duval. I went another forty yards, swung left on Bahama, stopped at the trash bin behind the Key West Island Book Store. It wasn’t a full-tilt chug, but the beer vanished in about twenty seconds. I dropped the empty in the bin, almost fell asleep at the wheel as I rode home. One question kept me awake. Why had my motorcycle died while I’d been allowed to live?
“Why can’t I find a normal man who just wants to date for a while? Every goddamned one of them wants to get serious right away.” Carmen followed me in my front door, stood in the living room while I hid my camera bag in its special spot. She’d been on her mother’s porch, home from work fewer than five minutes.
I said, “Should’ve stuck with me when you had the chance.”
“Oh, right. My father would have marched you to the altar at the point of his pistol. But, hell, these men either want to mooch off me, or tell me how to discipline Maria—which usually means find ways to keep her seen but not heard, or get a house together. Or change their life to suit me, or get jealous if I have friends. Or they turn into utter slobs after about the second time we sleep together, laughing at burps, forgetting to bathe. Or they want me to do their laundry. They want me to get my tubes tied, or they want me to have a baby. Whatever happened to dinner and the movies?”
“You’re saying this construction guy hasn’t worked out.”
“He’s in stage four.”
Carmen’s men go through seven stages. One: This guy’s pretty cool. Two: He knows all the right things to do. Three: He might be all right. Four: I don’t know what the deal is with him. Five: What’s-his-name came by last night. Six: I’ve about had it with this dude. And seven: Guess what time Butthole called me? Over the past few years the standard elapsed time, levels one through seven, has been fifteen weeks. The times between men have been much longer.
“From now on,” she said, “the only men in my life are going to be Chuck, Bill, John, Mark, and Bob.”
“Do I know . . .”
“I’m going to chuck my junk mail, pay my bills, go to the john, mark my calendar, and bob for fucking apples.”
I laughed, then offered her a beer from the six-pack. “What year did you graduate from high school?”
She twisted off the botde cap. “Did we stop talking about my love life?”
“Were you in the same class as the Holloway girls?”
“Is that where you took pictures? I saw the street blocked. My mother said someone got shot. She heard it on her scanner. She’s either sweeping the lane or glued to her scanner.”
I told Carmen the basics. “Back to my question.”
“I think Suzanne was a year or two older than me. Julie was in my class.”
“Talk.”
“Oooh-wee. Talk about a defensive little witch. Talk about a girl who was lucky her family had money. That little honey was drawn to trouble.”
“Which little honey?” I said.
“Suzanne Holloway. Suzanne Cosgrove, now. Oh, Alex, stories we could tell.”
“Test me for shockability.”
“Oh, let’s see . . . Should we start with the married man? Her senior-year married man?”
“Start there.”
“You know how, every year, there’s somebody or some couple who’s the new kid in town? Everybody suddenly adores them, invites them over, meets them for drinks. This guy and his wife, supposedly wealthy up-north types, come on vacation a few times, wind up buying a house on Washington Street west of White, massive bucks. She rents a shop on Duval, starts selling knickknacks nobody needs. Called the shop Lollipops and Pralines, which is clue enough. Might as well call it Nobody Needs This Junk. So the husband, he’s traipsing around town, ‘looking for a place to invest.’ Both of them are hanging in the bars, leaving their kid with not one but two Haitian nannies, so the nannies can watch the kid around the clock if they have to. A regular training camp for dysfunctional futures.”
“How does this guy meet a high school girl?”
“Bop Brown’s Jazzy Joint, on Petronia.”
“What’s Suzanne . . . what’s either of them doing in there?”
Carmen shook her head, rolled her eyes. “Anyway, they get hooked up, so to speak, but one Sunday afternoon the guy—I think his last name was Griffiths—supposedly takes his kid to Astro City to play on the slide. A cop busts him with
Suzanne performing—isn’t that a great word for it, like it’s a routine with curtain calls?—doing oral sex in the parking lot behind the grocery where Discount Auto Parts is now. Romantic as hell, by the Dumpsters. The kid’s asleep in the backseat. Suzanne’s performing, a cop knocks on the window. Oops. Needless to say, Mercer Holloway put a lid on it. But lids have a way of popping off on this island.”
“Was she underage?”
“I doubt it. Probably too young for the Jazzy Joint, but not to screw. So, needless to say, the blowee and his wife blew town. Left the nannies behind like abandoned house pets. I heard they wound up heading and grading shrimp in one of Willy Franklin’s plants.”
“How about Julie?”
“How about that jerk cop who stood in your yard the other night and arrested you?”
“Dexter Hayes, Jr.?”
“Oh, that’s the jerk I mean. The very one.”
“He and Julie?”
“The whole bit. Hugs in study hall. Public displays of horny. Pregnancy scares—at least two. Melodrama to beat the Cubanitas. He was a senior and she was a junior. He was a lucky boy. Just to make sure he left town, Mercer Holloway had his company give young Dexter a four-year scholarship to the University of Florida. Gotta keep that community service going strong. Even got him a summer job in Broward County, I think.”
Detective Hayes had been frantic to find clues at Holloway’s home, but lackadaisical at the body-drop scene inside Butler Dunwoody’s construction site.
“He was one of two lucky boys,” continued Carmen.
“Who else?”
“Philip Kaiser. His family had money when he was a kid, but they lost it when he was in high school. Once he married Julie, cash was no problem.”
I twisted the cap off another beer, put the last three in the fridge. I looked out at the high palms swaying, branches tossing in the light breeze. I thought about fortunes that had come and gone on the island. I suddenly felt lucky to have known a constant state of “barely enough” for as long as I’d lived there. In a sense, I was just like Norby. He was transporting and setting up crappers, dumping and steam-cleaning, fending off bad jokes. I ran around, job site to job site, worrying about employment security, praying for checks to come in the mail. I needed to get myself a uniform shirt with my name on a patch, like Norby the potty supervisor. Like Jemison Thorsby. Like the guy driving the forklift on Stock Island last Sunday.
