“And nobody ever figured out any of this?”
“Some people know, but Hemingway used to be a reporter. Maybe some of the brotherhood wanted to give him a break and let the dog sleep.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Maybe Yorkie faked his death.”
Collister gave me a blank look. “Why the hell would he do that?”
“He was famous, like Hemingway.”
Collister laughed. “Yorkie would’ve loved being famous, but he never was. Hemingway hated the spotlight most of the time. Yorkie got drunk and fell off his boat two years ago. He was never found, but bodies in shark waters seldom are. Do you want help or not?”
“Sorry. The Hemingway thing threw me.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Which was exactly my point about the snowfly. “I just want to know where Gentry’s books are.” I also had an urge rising to put my fist through the door screen and Collister must’ve sensed it because he held up his hands and smiled.
“Easy there, Crash. Yorkie loved fishing. Truth is, I don’t know that the little peckerwood could read a word, but he had this big-ass library in a building next to his house. Now it’s a half-ass museum. What books he didn’t have, he compiled in a list. You know, everything ever written about fishing. Thing is, it’s private. You gotta have a connection to get in.”
“Where is it?”
“Key West,” Collister said.
“Can you get us in?”
“Why the hell would I want to look at a bunch of old books?”
“Not you and me,” I said. I invited him outside and pointed to Ingrid. “Her and me.”
“I’ll call ahead for you,” he said, riveting his eyes on Ingrid. I couldn’t blame him for staring.
“How about calling now?”
“Maybe we should take her a glass of juice or something,” Collister said.
“Please, Carl. Make the call.” Hemingway, for Chrissakes. I decided not to tell Ingrid about that part. She’d think I needed a shrink. And maybe she would be right. This snowfly thing had moved my bubble way off center.
“No problem, Crash,” Collister said.
•••
York Gentry’s place was close to water, not far from Harry Truman’s vacation White House in Key West. There was a large, plain metal building behind the small pink cottage that had been his house.
“There sure is a lot of running around on this vacation,” Ingrid said as we parked.
“This is the last stop,” I said, hoping I was right. There was a blue 1956 DeSoto parked in the small gravel lot beside the building. Ingrid made a pass by it and peeked in as we headed up to the larger building.
We were greeted by a youngish man wearing a faded Green Bay Packers hat. He seemed nervous, his arms darting here and there.
“I’m Rhodes,” I said. “This is Ingrid Cashdollar. Carl Collister called about our visit.”
“I’m Adams.”
“Nick?” I said, intending a joke.
He gave us a stupefied grin. “How’d you know?”
This was getting weirder by the minute. “I’m trying to trace an unpublished manuscript, The Legend of the Snowfly, by M. J. Key.”
Adams said stiffly, “We’ll have to go to our whatchmacallit—card catalog. Mister Gentry’s collection is big, but he didn’t own everything.”
“Did you know him?” Ingrid asked.
“No, ma’am. I’m just doing a favor for somebody.”
There were books everywhere in the building, more on floors than on shelves. The place looked in disarray.
Ingrid whispered, “Some museum. I’ve seen dumps organized better than this.”
Adams went to a wall of metal cabinets and pointed. “File cards. If a book isn’t listed in there, it doesn’t exist.” He stepped aside, making it clear whom he expected to do the work.
“What do you mean, if it’s not here it doesn’t exist?”
“Mister Gentry didn’t want to own everything as much as he wanted to know where everything was. Most of the cards refer to books that aren’t here.”
I started thumbing through cards. Whoever filed them had not done a very good job. They were not quite in alphabetical order.
Ingrid wandered around while I searched and I heard her ask Nick Adams, “Are you a fisherman?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered.
I found no entries for Key’s published books or for the manuscript. Strange. The same thing had happened at Michigan Tech.
Ingrid was suddenly beside me, her hand on the small of my back. “Do any good?”
“Nope.”
She whispered, “I doubt our genial host will be much help.”
“What?” I looked over at her.
“He just split,” she said with a nod toward the front door.
“Maybe it’s lunchtime.”
“It’s four o’clock, Bowie.”
“This is Florida.”
She rolled her eyes and clutched my arm. “There’s a sign on the door we came in that says they close at five. So why is he leaving at four?”
I was trying to think about Key. “You’re the cop. You tell me.”
She smiled, but there was no mirth in it. “He said he’s not a fisherman.”
“Lots of people aren’t.”
“Then how come the backseat of the DeSoto is loaded with fishing tackle?”
“Maybe he borrowed it from somebody.”
“If it quacks like a duck,” she said, her smile gone. “I’m going to look around. I’ve got a feeling.”
Not a good one, I surmised. The answer was in a room upstairs. An old man was curled up on a ratty couch. Ingrid poked him and got no response.
“Deep sleeper?” I asked.
“Call for an ambulance,” she said, kneeling beside the man.
I thought she was kidding.
“Now!” she barked in her cop voice.
•••
A local cop named Fowler came. He was humongous with long greasy blond hair, a rumpled uniform, and semper fi tattooed on his left forearm. He wore shorts and sweated like he had just run ten miles.
The old man on the couch was the real curator and his name was Adams, Harold, not Nick. The identity of the young man with the DeSoto was anybody’s guess. Harold Adams had been drugged, which left his memory patchy as he was driven off to the hospital in an ambulance. Ingrid and I recounted our story several times for Officer Fowler, who had a tendency to address Ingrid’s breasts when he was talking to either of us. Curator Adams was not going to be much help until morning and we were politely instructed to remain in town. Fowler thoughtfully arranged a room for us at the Flamingo View Court, which was pale blue in color, had no view, no flamingos, and no court.
We ate spicy conch fritters and shrimp salads for dinner and went to bed early.
I awoke with Ingrid in the crook of my arm, her mouth open, her breathing deep and even. I was getting accustomed to having her close and I loved the natural perfume of her skin.
She awoke later with fluttering eyes and stared upward and said, “Great. Giant cockroaches on the ceiling.”
“Palmetto bugs,” I said. They were everywhere.
“What’s the difference?”
“A rose by any other name. That cop really looked you over yesterday.”
“I’m a one-man woman,” she said, nibbling my ear. “Serially speaking.”
“I’m moved,” I said.
“You will be soon,” she said, sliding her hand down my belly.
Later that morning we met with a detective with a Van Gogh beard at the library. Harold Adams was there too. He still looked shaky.
“What a mess,” Adams declared, looking around.
“Sleeping pills,” the detective said.
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Harold Adams added, “The jerkwad was here when your friend Collister called. He said the heat had gotten to him and he just wanted air conditioning. I could appreciate that.”
Ingrid looked at the detective. “What about the DeSoto? There can’t be two bright blue ones like that in the world, much less in the Keys.”
“We’ve got a BOL on it,” the detective said. “We’ll find it. Eventually.”
His response reminded me of Ingrid’s when my car was stolen in Dog River.
We told our story again and the detective left.
“He was after something,” Ingrid announced.
Adams looked at her. “The detective?”
“No, the other Adams.”
“Could take me a while to figure out if anything’s gone,” the older Adams said.
“Couple of days?”
“More like three,” Adams said.
“Good,” she said, looping her hands through my arm and looking up at me. “That means we are on vacation for the next three days, right?”
“Right,” I said.
We found another motel with a semiprivate beach and Ingrid was out on the sand and crushed shell dust almost before we were checked in.
“You’ll burn.”
She glanced up at me. “What’s a vacation without some self-inflicted pain?”
“You’ll be sorry.”
“Vinegar salves all,” she said with her usual style.
I couldn’t sit in the sun the way she could so it was my job to shuttle back and forth from the beach to Sunny’s Clam Bar, fetching drinks. We drank Ron Rico dark mixed with orange juice, Ingrid’s idea: We called them Ingrid Libres. Each glass came with a tiny turquoise-and-coral paper parasol. Ingrid planted them in rows in the sand, a graveyard for “small dead soldiers.” After our fourth drink, she shucked her top.
Curator Harold Adams eventually came to see us. Mostly he stared at Ingrid. I had been over to the library several times over the three days, but he had shooed me away.
“There’s no card for the manuscript in the index, and none of Key’s published books on the shelves. Was, but not now.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
I noticed his eyes move in sync to a rivulet of perspiration running off the slope of Ingrid’s left breast.
“Uh, well,” he said. “I know we had Key at one time.”
“ ‘Had’?”
“Not now. The index card for his manuscript is gone. I know, because I remember that snowfly silliness. Only one manuscript is known to exist, but its whereabouts has never been verified and even if Yorkie had known where it was, he didn’t have the kind of money you need to buy really rare stuff.”
He was wrong about the number of manuscripts and I knew where both were or had been, sort of. “The cards and books have been misplaced?”
“Gone,” he said. “As in purloined.”
“But you remember a card for Key’s manuscript.”
“Sure do. Yorkie used to talk about the snowfly all the time.”
I stared at Ingrid, who gave me an overly sweet smile. “You knew Gentry?”
Adams nodded. “Sure did, and he was fixated on that bug. Papa too.”
“Papa, as in Hemingway?”
“Yep, the two of ’em, but they both died before they could chase after the god-blamed thing, which is just as well.”
I suddenly felt weary and sank to the sand beside Ingrid. Collister had told me Gentry and Hemingway were close and I had doubted him. Now I was hearing they were both interested in the snowfly. Collister swore the snowfly was bullshit, but insisted Hemingway had faked his suicide. Would I ever untwist all of this?
“Do you think the ‘other’ Adams took the card?” I asked the curator.
“If I was a betting man, which I ain’t.”
When he walked away, Ingrid lifted her sunglasses. “Does this mean our vacation’s over?”
I had a powerful urge to move on, to hunt and chase. But what and where? Velocity without direction was not progress. “How do you feel about staying through the weekend?”
She said, “Why don’t we discuss this in our room?”
It was a long, leisurely discussion with few words and a great deal of laughter.
•••
The following Tuesday morning we were at Ingrid’s house west of Dog River. She was putting on her uniform. She carried a Colt .357 magnum in a black holster and I couldn’t stop staring at it. It was so huge and she was so small. Guns had always unnerved me, especially in Vietnam, where they had been ubiquitous. My father had been a hunter and I had grown up in a community of hunters, but I had never been comfortable around firearms. The old man and Queen Anna both insisted I learn to shoot, and I had. The old man said I was a natural, but each can and bottle I shattered turned into a living creature in my mind. For me, the psychic weight of bullets in a gun quadrupled its weight. I had no ethical hangups over hunting and hunters. It just wasn’t for me. You couldn’t release the dead.
“You ever have to use that thing?” I asked her.
She looked at me quizzically. “Never even unholstered it. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Girlfriend cop as personal problem?”
“No, nothing like that.” I told her about my folks, my learning to shoot, Vietnam.
“A gun is just a tool, Bowie,” she said, sitting down beside me. “No more, no less. A cop’s real weapon is talk, not lead.”
I wasn’t reassured. “Would you use it?”
“You mean, could I use it. I don’t honestly know, but I have to think I could, if it came down to that. If I couldn’t, I should find another line of work. You can write about bad guys from a distance. I have to smell their sweat. Why are we talking about this?”
“Are you a good shot?”
“I’m not Annie Oakley,” she said with a forced smile. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
I wanted to tell her to take off her uniform and gun and get back into bed. I wanted to fold my arms around her and keep the world away from her. But I couldn’t say what I felt.
“It was a great vacation,” I said.
She kissed me tenderly and whispered, “Worrywart.” Then she was up and all business. “See you tonight.”
“I have to go to New York,” I said. This was the first time I’d mentioned it.
She took it in stride. “When will you be back?”
“You mean, will I?”
She smiled. “You’ll be back, big boy.”
“I don’t quite know when. I’ll call you.”
“This time I know you will,” she said.
I walked her out to her cop car and we kissed good-bye. I had never told a woman I loved her, but I was about to. Ingrid put her hand over my mouth and smiled. “Not now, not yet, not like this.” My mind reader.
20
Grady Yetter had once told me you could tell the world’s current geopolitical losers by the language predominating in New York cabs. On my hop from La Guardia into Manhattan, my driver was South Vietnamese.
I had a reservation at the Visigoth, a small residential hotel on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I called Yetter from a pay phone.
“Jesus,” he said when he heard my voice. “You’re alive?”
Did I detect less humor in his voice than usual? “No thanks to you.”
“Always the carping. It looked like a good setup.” He added, “If you’re looking for work, it’s still bleak here.”
Such directness was not like him. “Just dinner,” I said.
There was a pregnant hesitation in his voice. “You’re here?”
“Hey, I’m your find, remember?”
He reluctantly agreed to meet me and I smelled trouble.
We met at one of his Irish watering holes
on Second Avenue. We shook hands. He piled his overcoat in the corner of the booth. I already had a glass of Guinness on the table for him. He took a long pull that left froth on his upper lip.
“So,” I said. “You look good.”
Yetter stared at his beer. “What do you want, kid?” His eyes stayed down.
“I have to want something? Old pals can’t have dinner, swap war stories?”
“I couldn’t hire you back if I wanted to. I don’t know what you did over there, kid, but you obviously broke some big ballskis.”
“You want the story?”
Finally, he looked up. “No, kid. I don’t ever want to know. Our suits and lawyers have been visited by spooks. They didn’t specifically order you kept off the payroll, but they said you should never leave the country again for UPI if we don’t want the FCC and IRS and who the hell knows who else shoving their microscopes up our keisters. You pissed off the Russians and Washington, kid. That’s quite an accomplishment. I’ve been in this business forty years. I think my reporters should make snakes rattle, but this . . . this went way beyond that. I don’t know what you did, but son, you’ve sure got the federal snakes buzzing. Take my advice, get your ass back to middle America and stay put.”
“Or?”
“Just do it, Bowie.”
•••
I didn’t follow Yetter’s advice. Instead, I went to the New York City Public Library when it opened the next morning and asked to see the head research librarian.
His name was Robert Peterson and he wore a gold loop earring in his right ear. It caught the light when he moved his head. I told him I was a journalist looking for information on M. J. Key, published works and unpublished works, and that I had been led to believe the library could help.
He was gone for about an hour and sent a woman to tell me to come back later that afternoon.
“Nothing,” he said, when we met again.
“What about other institutions? You’re connected to other places, right?”
“I’ve checked. There’s nothing. There’s no M. J. Key on our shelves. No M. J. Key in our catalogs. No record of any M. J. Key publications, published or not, in the index of the Library of Congress. Nothing in our sources on out-of-print works. You must have the name wrong. Or something.”
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