by Tom Corcoran
His one-liner was going south. Along with my bank balance.
At ten after twelve a white cab rolled into the parking lot. The woman at the wheel yelled, “Yo, Rutledge?”
I nodded.
“You’re on the clock, honey. Your buddy watched your cab leave, so he called me. Damn, you’re a tall one. Your buddy got a relative in there?”
“That’s what they told him.”
She shut off the motor, dropped the keys in her shirt pocket, and pulled out a box of Benson & Hedges. She was dressed twenty years younger than her face, fighting time. She had spent a few years on the beach, too, or else smoking had parched her skin.
“Cross your fingers,” she said. She fired a cigarette, and held it high so the smoke wouldn’t blow my way. In her other hand she held the cigarette box and a Bic pinched between her thumb and two fingers. She waved that hand toward the building. “They’ve been wrong in there before.”
“You don’t look as nervous as the man who brought us here.”
“Black man?”
“Yes.”
“They’re immigrants from the voodoo league of nations. They’re afraid their spirits will escape inside the morgue, or their souls will be gang-banged to the sound of a hundred batá drums. Or dead people walking—zombies and fire-hags—will dance a rada in their rearview mirrors. This is the tissues and sympathy hack. I get sent here a lot.”
“You deal with it okay?”
She waved again. “I used to work inside a door that’s inside that door right there.”
“For the county?”
She nodded. “I saw what came through the back, the messes they offloaded. I never got used to it, but it didn’t weird me out. When I was inside, I taught myself not to react, not to have feelings. I don’t know how I did that Looking back, I worry about that part of my personality. I worry about it more than ghosts or bad luck or whatever.”
“So it’s immigrants fighting their imaginations?”
She nodded and inhaled hard. Sucked smoke down to her knees.
I said, “Imagination can be more powerful than reality.”
“They’d be shitless for sure, if they ever saw the real thing.” The smoke leaked from her lungs as she spoke. She patted the taxi’s roof. “The heat of the day, the nutso Gold Coast traffic, this job is heaven. Take my word.”
“Heaven?”
“Well, raw heaven.”
Sam stepped out of the building, flinched, and put on his sunglasses. He walked toward us without expression. His walk carried more resolve than before, as if he had promised himself a course of action.
“You hungry?” he said.
“Was it bad?”
“Yep, bad,” he said. “But it wasn’t her. You hungry?”
I wasn’t, but I shrugged.
Sam asked our driver to take us to Ernie’s Restaurant
“Eighteen-hundred block of South Federal,” she said, then looked me in the eye. She had told me that people behind those doors sometimes got it wrong. She wanted to win her point.
I nodded, silently gave it to her.
Twelve minutes later, the taxi driver pulled into the restaurant lot. She turned to Sam. She had an unlighted cigarette tucked behind her right ear. “Be careful, buddy,” she said. “I used to work back there in that county lab. Six years, and I seen it all. The news you got sounds good, but it’s not like you won the lottery. I’ll tell you why. Unless you’re one in a thousand, you went into the grieving process. Coming out unscathed isn’t automatic.”
Wheeler pulled out his wallet. “I don’t feel this way because I skipped breakfast?”
“Was your sister’s I.D. on the body?”
“Yep.”
“Current I.D., photo of the victim?”
“Nothing current. Her Social Security card, a certified copy of her birth certificate, a few photos and personal papers.”
“No valid driver’s license, no unexpired credit cards?”
He shook his head.
The woman bit her upper lip and nodded. “You look like the kind of guy, you can handle straight talk. Take it from an old hand, for what it’s worth. This ain’t scientific, but it’s up here.” She tapped her forehead. “The doctors call it empirical evidence. Better than fifty-fifty, your grieving might be right on. You follow me?”
Sam looked her in the eye, paid the fare, and opened the door. “You mind if I ask your name?”
She pointed to the license on the passenger-side sun visor. “Irene Jones. Unique handle, eh? The assholes at the morgue used to call me ‘Goodnight Irene.’ I guess that’s not the most sensitive thing to say to you right now.”
Sam waved it off.
“And your name?” she said.
Sam told her.
We walked past a row of eight newspaper, real estate flyer, and coupon pamphlet boxes. Sam said, “Let’s hope the place smells like grease.”
“To boost your appetite?”
“To get the stench out of my nose.”
Just inside the restaurant’s door, a dozen people waited for tables. Sam gave the greeter his name. She ignored the line behind us, led us to a remote booth, asked for our drink order. Sam ordered us two beers apiece.
“Preferential treatment?” I said.
Sam said, “We’ve got a meeting, when the local fuzz gets here. Macho boy, said he’d buy our food, which is unlike a cop. I have no idea what he wants. He said try the conch chowder.”
We watched a server spritz a vacant table with Windex. The mist floated our way, made us grateful our drinks and food hadn’t arrived yet. I let Sam have his quiet, his time to consider what might come next. I decided he also was pondering the “straight talk” from the woman in the taxi.
Detective Odin Marlow showed up four minutes later. I spotted the red polo shirt and muscular build immediately. He was the deputy I’d seen in the morgue parking lot He clutched a box of Benson & Hedges in his hand. The pack and a Bic, just like Irene Jones. Sliding a breath mint around in his mouth, Marlow introduced himself as “B.S.O., C.I.U.,” as if initials meant big stuff to us. He wore a badge, and that said it all. The greeter appeared with an iced tea, made special with two straws and two lemon slices on the rim. She put the glass down, gave the deputy a flirtatious sneer.
Marlow took his tea, then said, “Mister Rutledge, you mind sitting over there? I’m a lefty. I’ll bump your arm fifty times while I’m eating.”
He didn’t give a crap about arm bumping. He wanted to face us, and not worry about his gun being next to my hand. Sam slid over so I could fit on his bench. Marlow placed his cigarettes and lighter on the table as if they were ceremonial objects, and settled into the booth. He smelled like a sniff sample in a fancy magazine. He wore a diamond pinky ring, and an antique Gubelin watch on a leather strap. One more piece of jewelry and his department’s internal team would be on his butt. The men at the top don’t like to see their boys display wealth. Perhaps Marlow had shown his supervisor a receipt for Zirconium. Maybe that’s how they all dress in Lauderdale.
The server took our food order, and Marlow started right in. “We found her out in District Eight, in what we call the I-75 Corridor, the extension of 595. You got your housing developments popping up like palmettos, your wealthy folk from south of the Gulf Stream, most of them from south of the equator. Where they come from, you know, they’re kidnap targets. They can’t shop, can’t spend their money. It’s low profile for survival. This is the comfort life. They got their Expeditions, their cable TV, slate tile floors, the built-in vacuum cleaner systems, the malls, red tile roofs. They also got public schools, no more political strife, and no more family security guards.”
Sam said, “This has to do with a dumped murder victim?”
“The last thing they want in their new neighborhood is a body. I got no proof, but I say no way this was Latino connected . . .”
Neither Sam or I had suggested such a connection.
“. . . and that improves our chances of solving this thi
ng. Bumps it up from one percent to, say, three percent. So we know it’s not your sister. All we got is fingerprints and a dental imprint which, with women, who are less often in jail and rarely in the military, drops our chances back to two percent Take into account, women change their names when they get married, we’re back below the one percent chance.”
“That relates to the victim,” said Sam. “Let’s go sideways. What’re the odds my sister’s alive?”
“I hate to use the word ‘zilch,’ but here’s how it works. Criminals working credit scams swipe names from the living. People who want new identities grab names from the dead.”
“And here we’ve got . . .”
“New identities go to people hiding from the law, or hiding from partners they’ve screwed over, or hiding from abusive spouses.”
“So, if I found old dental records for my sister . . .”
“Don’t even think about it. It’s bad enough looking for a name to match a body. Working backward don’t cut it. Hey, I know where you’re coming from. The M.E.’s investigators called you in, got you all jacked up, put you on a mission. Before you knew it wasn’t her, you were thinking ‘eye for an eye’ to even the score. Am I correct?”
“Was it a robbery?” said Sam.
Marlow shook his head. “You’d find high-end clothing. Tan lines where the watch is missing, rings are gone. This victim, she was a Wal-Mart customer. She was small change. She was a poor target. I’d guess revenge, or she knew too much about bad people. Or, like I said, spousal abuse.”
Sam shrugged, wandered off in his thoughts.
No one spoke as our food arrived. We began to eat. Marlow shifted gears. “Tell me about that island of yours,” he said. “You really like Key West?”
Sam didn’t look up from his food. “Other than your military, very few people live there because they’re forced to.”
“It’s been years since I’ve been south of Florida City. Key West was full of fags and people smoking dope on the beach. That still the deal?”
“It’s strange down there,” said Sam. “And loud. Chain saws, cockatoos, straight pipes, roosters, sirens. You’d probably hate it. Don’t waste your gas money.”
The detective gave Sam a minute of silence, then said, “I’m reading your mind.”
“It’s blank,” said Sam.
“You were thinking of ways, and don’t tell me it ain’t true. You’re riding revenge energy. Nine times out of ten we appreciate that type of reaction. It reduces our job load. Ten times out of ten we bust you for it.”
“I’m not the violent type.”
“You’re the right age to be a Viet Nam vet. You may not be the type, but it’s my guess you were trained for . . . what did they call them, contingencies? So you find out it ain’t her. You shift your mission, you try some freelance snooping. We like that about the same as two-bit vigilante work.”
“Think what you want.”
Marlow pulled a ballpoint and a tiny Spiral pad from his trouser pocket “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Eighty-six.”
The detective stared at Sam. “All these years, could she have found you? How long you lived in the same place?”
“Since eighty-one, the same place. My number’s in the book.”
Marlow stared at his pen, then began to snap it back and forth between the two bottles in front of Sam. The pen was not for writing. It was a prop, and the cop had taken notice of Sam’s desire for two beers. “So if she had gone online, clicked ‘People Search,’ and typed your name, you’d have popped up on her screen?”
Sam nodded, shrugged again.
He said, “You got pictures of her?”
“Nope.”
The pen went to the edge of the table, its use as a prop expended. “We wanted to let you know, ask your cooperation. We’re gonna run a squib in the Sun-Sentinel, announce that the body was ID’d as your sister. It could work for both of us. I’ll maybe learn something about the victim, and you’ll maybe connect with a lost relative. The squib won’t show up in Miami. It won’t show in the Keys. We plan to keep it strictly local.”
Marlow went to a vacant expression, waited for Sam’s reaction. I didn’t look at Sam, but I knew he wasn’t showing emotion, either.
Marlow found another prop, a subtle distraction. He used a french fry to trace designs in his remaining ketchup. “Your own sister,” he said, “and not a single photo? Can I ask why?”
Sam looked him in the eye. “You have your methods. I have my limits.”
“Nifty answer. What’s it mean?”
“You want to blow her out of the weeds. I’d like to coax her out.”
“Look at it this way,” said Marlow. “Her fifteen years to find you goes the other way. You’ve had fifteen years to find her. I take it you haven’t tried.”
Sam shrugged.
“And you’re worried about her picture in the paper?”
Sam nudged me. “What do you think, Alex?”
“There’s more to gain than lose,” I said. “But if she’s alive, could it put her in danger?”
Marlow leaned toward Wheeler. “This guy your roadie?”
Sam said, “No, my witness.”
“You got a business card?”
Sam pulled out his wallet, and handed one to the man.
The detective read the card, stood, snatched his cigarettes. “Do yourself a favor, Captain Wheeler,” he said. “Do like you’ve been doing since Ron and Nancy was in Washington, wait for her to call. Thanks for the club sandwich. You’ll find a taxi out front in five minutes.”
Marlow sucked in air, tensed the muscles in his chest, then walked from the table. Ten feet away he hesitated, then looked back at me. “The watch was my father’s,” he said. “Right to the day he died, he was the police chief in Greenwich, Connecticut.”
Marlow exchanged patter with two waitresses as he left.
I said, “His next smoke was more important than our talk. He neglected to ask if you had other brothers or sisters.”
Sam said, “Right. The type who promises what he wants you to hear and delivers what he wants you to believe. Finish your beer.”
We walked outside to find Marlow still there, leaning against his county car, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I’m curious, Mr. Wheeler. How’s fishing in the lower Keys this month?”
Sam shook his head. “Constanteast wind, just like here. Messed things up good.”
Marlow agreed, “When the wind blows, fishing sucks.”
“Let me put it this way,” said Sam. “Yesterday and the day before were my first all-day charters since the third week of March.”
Marlow got a distracted look in his eyes, as if he’d gotten smoke in one of them. “I was thinking of running my Mako down there this weekend. It’s been eight weeks since I ran that Yamaha 225.”
“You need to run it more often,” said Sam. “Your carb jets’ll get clogged, your water pump’ll go south. Anyway, the fish are hungry, but the wind’s a bad enemy. If the shore trees are bending, you’ll be skunked.”
Marlow nodded, still distracted. “Speaking of not catching fish,” he said, “you decide to snoop around up here, this is not a quaint beach town. You’ll get yourself in a world of hurt. Hire yourself a private eye. We got ’em for all budgets and needs.”
Sam didn’t talk in the cab. He stared at the urban sprawl and reacted to nothing around us. He called Marnie from the airport, caught her before she left her office. I heard him say, “False alarm. I’d rather see Lorie dead than looking like that woman must’ve looked when she was alive.”
The flight back to Key West was bouncy. Late afternoon heat played hell with the air mass above the heated land and cooling sea. A misty haze covered the Keys, obscured the horizon. If the pattern held, it would be seven months before tropical winter’s cool, dry breezes returned. But there was stiU a chance that the northeast wind might stick around.
In forty-eight hours, I wouldn’t care about Florida. I would esca
pe to an island where I knew no one. I’d begin solid, income-producing work, would wallow in Grand Cayman’s perfect weather.
Sam remained quiet during the trip, consumed by another man’s jargon and his own frustration. Throughout our fifteen-year acquaintance, the past six or seven in close friendship, Sam and I had not been constant confidants. But around me, even in his worst moods, Sam never had failed to express himself.
The engines’ buzzing zoned me out. I fled to a half-hour nap. I dreamed about my father chasing me into the house, in a rage. I don’t remember why we argued, but I recall my mother screaming his name as he caught me in the kitchen and hauled off to slug me in the face. I ducked in time. The dent in the refrigerator door could not be repaired, so my mother got a new fridge. My father’s hand was in a cast for at least two months, and he got off my case for the rest of the school year.
After I woke, I thought about squeezing five days’ errands into my next forty-eight hours. And whether every smoker in Fort Lauderdale used the same brand of cigarette.
Sam woke, and stared out the window.
I said, “You ever wish your father was still alive?”
“Yep, twice,” he said, “but only for those two reasons. He would unplug my radio whenever he heard ‘What’d I Say?’ or Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue.’ I wish he’d been around to see Ray Charles perform at the White House. I’d have loved to stuff that in his racist face. And I wish he could’ve been at that football game in Lubbock, Texas, when 49,000 people made The Guinness Book of Records by singing ‘Peggy Sue’ in unison.”
The pilot made his seat-backs-and-tray-tables speech. Sam poked me with his elbow. “Before I hung up, I asked Marnie to fetch us at the airport.”
“Your Bronco’s at the airport.”
“Yep, it is. Somehow that fact departed my mind while I was talking. So we won’t tell her it’s there, and hope maybe she won’t see it. I can’t have her worrying about me. She gets neurotic.”
“What’s happened to your memory?” I said.
“I keep forgetting to take my ginkgo biloba.”
