by Tom Corcoran
“You want to show me a badge?” I said. “Something official… a note from the teacher?”
He blew off my humor. “Just a few questions about yourself,” he said. “A little background. It’s in your own best interest to cooperate.”
I wasn’t sure how long I had slept before Marv’s arrival, but I came wide awake. “What the fuck do you know about my best interests?”
“On the scale of national security priorities,” he said, “they rank for shit. I think you discovered that at dawn this morning. Did you enjoy meeting those defenders of our coastline?”
“They had a nice yacht,” I said.
He crossed his arms, widened his stance by an inch or two. “That yacht is the nautical equivalent of a Stealth bomber. It’s so loaded with tech gear that we know the location of every one of those in the world. They have satellite tracking tied into their ignition and steering controls.”
“You’re spreading them around?”
He shook his head. “We’re selling them to friendly nations for coastal duty, for right-now response and agile security. But we’ve got one off the reservation. It was stolen from a dock in Belize.”
“Why do I need to know this?” I said.
“The Keys have seen a series of odd events in recent days, all related to boat thieves. We aren’t sure who they are and we damn sure don’t know what they want with that boat. But they knew enough about electronics to leave the GPS transmitter on the dock and still be able to start and steer the craft. We hate the thought of having our front-line weapons used against us.”
I had no response for that, so I waited for him to continue.
“You’ve been going around asking questions,” said Fixler. “Just the asking could jeopardize our recovery mission. How did you happen to photograph my car while I was running surveillance?”
“Happenstance,” I said. “It was just another car.”
“You made a five-by-seven of it. Why?”
“If Bobbi told you every last detail about me,” I said, “you know the answer already.”
“How often do you meet Robert Catherman in the Summerland post office? Or were you following him, too?”
I pointed at the screen door. “My invitation to leave. I insist.”
“There’s a saying among upper echelon snoops, Alex. They say, ‘Born to Black.’ It means some people, one out of ten million, are cut out for sneaky shit and the others are general fuckups. You’ve made it far too obvious that you’re tracking the evidence of… Call it an unknown crime. Am I getting through, here?”
“You talk tough but I hear generalities. Have the facts eluded you, too?”
“You have a nice face.”
“Odd adjective.”
“A little faggy-sounding, I admit,” said Marv, “but pertinent. I expect you’d like to keep it that way.”
“This isn’t going well, Marv. You walked in saying you didn’t want to punch me in the nose.”
“Fuck me, I lied.”
“What do we do now, whip out our weenies and a ruler?”
“Wouldn’t be fair,” he said. “You’ve been stepping on yours for three days. I hate to start with a disadvantage.”
“You’re coming from a position of horsepower, near as I can tell. Traction and torque and all those manly metaphors.”
“Glad you understand that,” he said.
“Why talk to me in the first place? Why can’t you take me out with a trumped-up arrest or a spinal cord injury, a simple hit-and-run?”
He smirked and went for the door. “I’ll get back to you on that. Might have to fix you up with a blind date.”
“Is this the way you treat your girlfriend?”
“Rutledge, your friend Sam Wheeler is a killer who’s in it for the money. It’s general fucking knowledge that he’s been out of sight for four days. Why do you think he’s hiding? Take a guess.”
“I don’t guess,” I said. “I don’t ask why.”
“Ask your buddy why he doesn’t want to get rich, why he’s kissing off an early retirement. He knows the program. No strings, no risk. Hell, once and for all he could pay off that place in Alabama.”
Marv was either ten steps ahead of me or tonsil-deep in horseshit. I couldn’t believe his indictment of Sam Wheeler, but he had confirmed the cover-up of at least two murders.
“You should let the cops do their job, Rutledge. What do you do for fun, ride your motorcycle? Take the rest of the day for a ride.”
“Maybe I will.”
“If you don’t back off, we don’t do forgiveness.”
I was going to say, “Give my best to Bobbi,” but I didn’t want to spoil my opportunity to see him leave.
His engine started as he approached the car. I guessed it was a remote switch on his key ring until he opened the passenger-side door, got in and slammed it. The car was already pointed out of the lane. It was gone in ten seconds.
19
Marv Fixler left behind a fog of gym-locker cologne and a new assortment of puzzles in my mind. It wasn’t so much a straightforward list, but layers with edits, corrections, and arrows in the margins. A smoke screen with sharp edges. Fill in the blanks or else.
Buzzed numb by fatigue, I gazed from my porch, studied the short shadows of midday sunlight and cobwebs in the crotons, and tried again to sift facts from bullshit. Ugly assumptions came to me moments before I heard the motorcycle downshift on Fleming.
Beth Watkins’s tomato red Ducati sounded like a dozen lions growling through a ballpark sound system. She gave it a quick, precise throttle burp and shut it down on my walkway. She wore a sly grin and gunmetal-tone leathers, her silhouette an exact match to the immodest one I had seen, and Turk had enjoyed, six hours earlier.
“Killing the noon hour boredom?” I said.
“We talked yesterday about riding up the Keys,” she said. “I’m taking an all-afternoon lunch.”
I wanted to retrieve my cash from Frank Polan. Awkward with a witness. I also needed to connect with Alyssa at Colding’s Grocery, but having Beth along could make it complicated, if not kill the whole interview.
“I thought you had a murder case to investigate,” I said.
“I’ve got two people on it, and they’re waiting to budge a judge. I want to scope out that non-crime scene on Bay Point, if we can figure out where it was.”
“Your bike looks different. You grew an extra headlight.”
“I love a man who notices small details,” she said. “My SS-800 was an ’03 with forty thousand miles. This 848 is a benefit of the constant paycheck.”
“And you kept the color to match your hat?”
She glanced down at her helmet. “Paint code rosso seven-four-nine-five. There were two choices and white didn’t light my fire.”
“New leathers, too. You’re worried about road rash?”
“Oh, I have scars,” she said. “Remind me to show you my ass when the lights are on.”
A vision filled my mind, for the second time in a minute.
I could think of no graceful way to dodge a two-bike excursion. Checking out Bay Point made sense. “It’ll take me a minute to liberate my ride,” I said. “Let me make a phone call first.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not saying that I showed my ass the other day, with Julio in tow, when I first asked you about Hammond. I was Ms. Mega-Cop for a few minutes. I don’t need reminding of that, at least from outside my conscience.”
Another moment custom-built for silence.
I went inside to brush my teeth, change my shirt, put a fresh battery in my pocket-sized camera and smear goo to mask my own gymnasium effect. I grabbed the house phone to call Duffy Lee Hall and found a message from Carmen: “Have you heard from that real estate dude who’s making us all wealthy?”
I dialed Duffy Lee and reached his voice mail. I said my first name and hung up.
Beth was around back sizing up my motorcycle’s mini-garage. I felt disl
oyal suspecting a possible ulterior motive. Was she also checking out my view of Hammond’s yard and home? If so, she covered herself well.
“My new yard on Poorhouse Lane has a perfect spot,” she said. “The paint on my old Ducati was iffy before I got to the Keys. Then the tropical sun played hell. I like the tin roof. Who built it?”
“Man named Tim Dunne. He lives on Stock Island. His nickname used to be ‘Un’ Dunne and he lived up to it, but lately it’s ‘Gitter’ Dunne and I trust it’s just coffee. He looks like an axe murderer but he’s a puppy dog and reasonable and an absolute artist.”
Beth looked around, walked toward the outdoor shower, opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Heaven on Earth. A bench, twin massage-style shower heads. The more I learn about you…”
“I just installed new all-weather stereo speakers,” I said. “Maybe they’ll last longer than the last pair.”
She pushed me up against the shower door and kissed me, held it, pressed her fingers into my shoulders, her hips against mine. “That’s just music, those speakers,” she said. “Let’s make sure your new girlfriend lasts longer than your old one.”
“Fine by me.”
My 1970 Triumph and Beth’s sparkling Ducati were like a ’65 MG-B and a new Ferrari running the streets out to Stock Island. She suggested that we take Flagler up the center of the island instead of North Roosevelt. “I’m a spine rider,” she said. “Two wheels are two too few on the boulevard.”
Crossing Big Coppitt Key, trailing the Ducati’s snarling tailpipe, I wanted to hear Tom Rush’s song “On the Road Again” or “Blues’ Theme” the fuzz-guitar instrumental from The Wild Angels, the Fonda biker movie that pre-dated Easy Rider.
Once we hit the 55-mph zone past Shark Key it became more a matter of daring than equipment. Beth had a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card in her pocket. She would get a courtesy warning while I might receive an expensive high-speed driving certificate. She remained ahead but didn’t leave me eating her dust. On U.S. 1 you travel at the speed of the slowest common denominator. Most of the time slow-moving cars and double-yellows kept us in check.
A briny tang hung in the air through the Saddlebunch Keys. The view to the northeast was misty, almost gray, ominous for a sunny day, with pale aqua in the shallows. To the south was the sprawling green-gold mangrove forest, vegetation held by roots instead of land, plants capable of forming their own islands and always more fascinating up close. This uninhabited section, minus the roadway, is what the Keys had looked like for centuries before Flagler’s railroad jerked the island string into the early 20th. The islands farther north, Sugarloaf, Cudjoe, Summerland, Ramrod and Little Torch, were irregular splotches of land split by the main highway with a few short roads reaching like tentacles to the north and south. They were scattered with businesses and homesites, from trailers on blocks to elegant estates, though most were canalside two- or three-bedroom houses on stilts.
I thought back to Jason and Russell loading their car in Carmen’s driveway, extolling their first impressions on arriving in the Keys on Sunday. Russ had called the briny smell a combo of fish damp, salt and seaweed. Jason Dudak had enjoyed the magnificent view from a bridge peak. The olfactory certainly came into play during my first drive down the Overseas Highway yet, as with Jason, the visual captured my soul. Two palm trees with nothing behind them but endless green and blue water. That was the clincher. Up to that moment I’d been an Ohio boy. After that I had sand in my shoes, a camera in my hand.
My sunsets-and-coconuts vision of paradise, stained so often in recent years, had taken a hit that morning as I faced government gun barrels aimed at my head and body. It also stood to suffer when I arrived in Bay Point where a probable double-murder was discovered and hushed. What was happening to my Keys, the Keys of Carmen, Hector and Cecilia? For that matter, the adamant, born-on-the-island Julio Alonzo’s Keys? I’ve never envisioned myself leaving and I dislike clichés, but too often I’ve caught myself wondering whether bad island days really are better than great days elsewhere. I hoped to hell it held true.
I was so lost in thought I almost jammed into Beth’s Ducati. She had signaled and slowed. She knew where to turn. West Circle took us to Bay Drive, a stretch of high-ticket homes with well-maintained yards so lush and perfect they could be murals in the La Concha Hotel lobby.
A quarter-mile down, Beth stopped to speak to a man cutting his lawn. The guy wore a “banana hammock” bathing suit and Doc Martens boots. Even from a distance I saw sweat flowing from his forehead and bare chest. His house, if it was his, was elegant, but I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a push-it-your-damned-self mower. I sure didn’t expect to see one in that neighborhood. Nor did I expect a man with his flabby buns hanging out.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the man pointed across the road. I looked where he pointed and recognized, as I had that morning on the boat, the former residence of the late Lucky and recently widowed Tinkerbell Haskins. The large, elevated home, seemingly vacant, sat on raised ground on a double lot. It had become the local slum. I rolled past the conversation, parked in its driveway, removed my helmet.
The yard had gone to seed, untrimmed and weedy, especially compared to the homes on either side. I recalled its white five-foot fence, healthy palms and new shrubs. All gone. The mailbox with hand-painted tropical fish had become a mildew farm. One smiling, toothless grouper with faded lavender lips oversaw the single remaining stick-on house number. A realtor had stuck a sign on a post in dirt near the road.
Beth ended her chat and rode over to join me. She had already pulled off her helmet. Damp ringlets of blonde hair hung over her forehead and ears. The sweet smell of feminine perspiration added to her beauty. She unzipped the top of her riding suit, wore a sweat-damp KWPD T-shirt underneath.
“How romantic,” she said. “This is where we first met.”
More of it came back to me. I was on my motorcycle that time, too. A Carolina Skiff had rested on a trailer under the house. Bobbi Lewis was the officer in charge of the crime scene, and she had allowed Watkins, then a rookie Key West detective, to observe the county’s crime scene procedures. Beth had admired my Triumph and had asked, already knowing, if it was a 1970 T-120R model.
Beth said, “Bobbi Lewis introduced us.”
I winced. “Can we celebrate our first date instead of this crime scene?”
“You’re good,” she said. “If you had come up with anything but those words, you were in the deep.”
“Want to leave?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “After I look around.”
Closer to the water, the place didn’t look like most of the unoccupied homes in the Keys. The feds, or whoever they were, had cleaned up. The patch of grass had been raked, the patio swept. One section of concrete near the seawall was bleached to pure white. The place was as neat as a rich man’s desk.
“What do you think happened?” she said.
I reminded myself that Beth had dated Cliff Brock. “Processed, documented and vacuumed,” I said. “No one would do this for a robbery or a stolen boat.”
“Empty house,” she said. “Nothing to steal.”
I couldn’t look at her face. “That’s all we’re going to learn.”
“I agree,” she said, “but I can’t believe they clamped down a murder scene. It’s way too much like a spy novel.”
“Where did you go boating with Cliff Brock?”
“Actually, we only went once, on a weekend. We went to some remote island called Marvin.”
“What kind of boat did he own?”
“Brand name?” she said. “I don’t know motorboats. It was like the smaller guide boats in the Bight. Flat on top, big motor.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“On a trailer he towed with a black Ford pickup. He launched it off a ramp by the Sugarloaf Lodge.”
Shit, I thought. The sunken skiff really had existed. It had been Cliff Brock’s boat with Sam Wheeler’s registration numbers
stuck to its hull. It was no stretch to guess that Cliff and Sally had been killed on the skiff, then their bodies moved to Bay Point.
“Want to leave?” I said.
She zipped up her leather top. “Oh, yes, now I do.”
Why had it been so important for the two bodies to be found? Had someone wanted to learn how law enforcement might react, put the security machine into action? Lay the groundwork for the next step, whatever that might be? Why did it have to begin with Cliff and Sally?
What if they succeeded? What if they now knew what they were out to learn? And how, from false hull numbers to forced hiding, did the whole mess come snaking back around to Sam?
The man across the road was still cutting his lawn. I placed my helmet on the Triumph and walked over to speak with him. It took me a second to recognize the drunk from Louie’s. The man who had pestered Sheriff Liska at Louie’s Backyard about the roadblock and cops with pizzas and Pepsis on the hoods of their squad cars.
“Hard labor,” I said.
“A few people here in ritzy Monroe still work in their own yard.” He used his forearm to wipe sweat from his brow. He left behind a smear of tan dirt and grass confetti. “Also, I’m sweating out a three-day bender.” He pointed back to where Beth stood with her Ducati. “Same house where some poor rich bastard hung himself two years ago.”
“Were there any helicopters?” I said.
“What do you mean, this week?” He shook his head. “I got it all second-hand, but there was no talk of that.”
“An ambulance?”
“Not that either.”
“Can I ask who told you about it?” I said.
He jacked his thumb toward the house just north of us. “Dude next door. Boy hid behind his mini-blinds and watched the damnedest parade. He left yesterday for Wyoming to go hunting for a week, and don’t ask your next question. He don’t have one. If I answer my cell phone while I’m talking to him, he gets offended like I cut the cheese and he walks away.”
“Where to next?” said Beth.
I told her about Sally’s job at Colding’s, along with Mikey Bokamp, Honey Weiss and Alyssa. I explained why we had to be careful about socializing with the women if the boss was around.
