Air Dance Iguana (4 page)

A raindrop hit my arm as I opened the door. More drops darkened the sidewalk. I knew the drill. My walk home would be humid but not drenching. Summertime blue-sky showers rarely lasted more than ten minutes.

The store’s bins were filled with potatoes, plaintains, and onions. Three narrow aisles split four steel-framed racks, which displayed
rojo criollo
and Edmundo soft drinks, picnic supplies, Cuban condiments, and canned food. The top shelves held expensive-looking skillets and pots, though I’d never seen anyone buy them.

I worked my way to the rear deli section, into the usual scramble at the old-fashioned cash register, the bilingual orders for coffee, pastries, and breakfast sandwiches. A flash of eye contact with the person behind the counter was an invitation to place an order. A delay, even for an instant, was the equivalent of being sent to the back of the line. I asked for café con leche and a guava cake. By the time I had paid and shuffled to the front door, the rain had let up.

I crossed through rush-hour traffic on Southard, bicycles and cars, early birds going to work. Halfway to Fleming a male voice behind me said, “Mr. Rutledge?”

If someone in Florida calls you Mister, they’ve already screwed you or they want to get in line. This voice was just twirpy enough not to be a cop. I turned to find a movie version of the hot-shit metropolitan newshound, Jimmy Olsen eagerness all over his face. Two Nikons, a standard and a digital, hung from his neck. His khaki vest had fifty zippers for forty pockets.

“I’m Bixby, from the K dub PD.”

Oh boy. The new full-timer would dig his own ruin. He had made up a nickname for the Key West Police Department. I wished I could be a fly on the wall when the sergeants heard it. The day’s first flight of tourists roared eight hundred feet above us. I said, “Blow it out your ass,” but the jet ate my words.

“I’d love to get a few minutes with you, if you don’t mind. I left my home number with your service. I know your schedule must be tight, so if you ever need help, I’ll carry lights, hold cameras, anything to watch a real pro work, to get my career in motion.”

“What’s this, at this hour? Are you stalking me?”

“No, no,” he said. “I went to the graveyard for dawn shots. No one told me they keep the gates locked until seven. I was in the grocery. A man saw my camera equipment, he pointed you out.” Finally he studied my face. “I’m disturbing you. If this is a bad time—”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s call it a bad time. Why don’t you call my secretary and make an appointment?”

“Yes, sir.” He slid a reporter’s notepad from a vest pocket.

“His name is Liska.” I gave him the sheriff’s direct office number.

“You’re the best,” he said.

My cheap practical joke reminded me that Liska was looking for a fax. His words had been “Tell me what those dead men said to you.”

An old Raleigh ten-speed with ape-hanger handlebars was parked at my screen door. Duffy Lee Hall sat on my porch.

“I would’ve brought you a coffee,” I said.

“Had mine an hour ago. One more would rocket me to the Tortugas.”

“What’s up, home delivery?”

He slapped a large manila envelope. “I got your packets, and I printed some extras.” He spread four eight-by-tens across my table. “Were you like me and a million other ninth-graders? Did you learn to tie a noose? How to loop coils around the rope, and feed the rope back through them?”

“Sure. Fascinated the hell out of me.”

“Maybe it was a rite of passage, a ritual for all boys. Like throwing jackknives into the dirt, to see how close we could come to the other guy’s foot. Or doing forty downhill on Schwinns, defying death every way we could think of, positive we never would die.”

“All of the above,” I said. “My specialty was to fake being wounded by an enemy sniper. I would spin and fall off the garage roof, shooting the sniper on my way down.”

“Check these shots. The group Liska gave me, the coils go one way; the roll you gave me, the coils go the other way. I don’t know about you, but it was hard enough to learn the knot, much less bending it backward.”

I studied the pictures. “Two bad guys, you think?”

“More likely two than an ambidextrous hangman.” He stood to go. “That should be enough to keep you out of this one, Alex.”

“Duffy Lee, I have no desire to get into this mess.”

“But I’m just saying, you don’t want to be sandwich meat, chasing one murderer and outrunning another at the same time.”

Carmen Sosa had
agreed to cover the domestic side of my house rental. Once a week she would wash sheets and towels at her place—three houses down the lane—and make sure that garbage cans reached the curb on proper days. Everything else, including kitchen tidiness and soap in the outdoor shower, went to my tenant. Carmen would charge me a “major wine” for each visit. I was to vary the vineyards and surprise her. “No bottle before its time,” she said. “And no trash under twenty bucks.”

I wanted to bury myself in the bed to recapture lost sleep, but I stripped and remade it and rolled a Burgess Cabernet into the laundry bag. Walking the lane to deliver Carmen’s first task to her back door, I smelled baked bread and frangipani. Carmen’s sago palm had gone berserk, grown two feet since I last noticed it. The sensory ambush launched new misgivings about my desertion of Dredgers Lane, but I fought back with images of solitude on Little Torch, my coming days in the kayak. It also helped to picture myself fanning 160 pictures of Benjamin Franklin, looking much like Jack Benny.

Back at the house, I wanted to write Liska’s fax in longhand, get it done before Johnny Griffin showed up. I began with the scene address, my time of arrival, and the presence of Bohner and Millican. My first narrative sentence read, “No footprints available at Marathon scene due to F.O.P. meeting on site.” Then I heard the screen door open, and Liska’s voice.

“Wake up, Jerky Boy,” he said. “You sleep sitting up, you’ll pitch off your chair and hit your head.” He wore a shirt and trousers similar to those of the day before, perhaps the same ones.

I looked outside. Bobbi Lewis had parked her unmarked county cruiser next to Liska’s Lexus in front of the house. She stepped onto the porch behind him, smiled at me, skipped hello, and closed the door. Not that I’d expected a kiss in front of her boss. From five feet away I could smell her shampoo. Liska eased himself onto the chaise longue and pursed his lips for an extended exhale.

“You don’t believe in fax machines?” I said. “I was just working on my summary.”

“This is beyond faxing your report,” said Liska. “A couple things came up.”

“About these hangings?”

“And what else?”

I glanced at Bobbi. She peered into my eyes, perhaps noting a bloodshot effect. “Let’s get it done and behind us,” I said. “I’ve got some things happening in the next hour or so.”

Liska raised his open hand to give Lewis the floor.

“It fell to me to snoop Kansas Jack’s belongings,” she said. “We wanted to notify next of kin, and we needed clues to who dragged him outside in the middle of the night.”

Liska said, “After giving him time to dress and put on his shoes.”

“Kansas Jack may have met his killer elsewhere,” said Lewis. “He may have been followed home, or else he brought the murderer home. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening inside his house.”

“More pleasant than outside?” I said.

She sneered. “He didn’t have central air.”

“Find anything you could use?”

“Depends how you look at it. His life was a short story. Kansas Jack Mason didn’t exist prior to forty months ago.”

“So he rented instead of owned?”

“He owned the house,” she said, “but just barely. He arrived in the Keys and paid cash. The broker on Big Pine remembered him. She suspected back then that he’d spent his last penny to close the deal.”

“Where was he before he came to the Keys?”

“He didn’t exist,” she said. “No record of his paying telephone or utility bills in the United States, no Social number, no credit history, no relatives. It’ll take us a day or two to hear back on his fingerprints.”

“His income since then?”

“The neighbors say he did odd jobs that he found word of mouth.”

“Did he mix and mingle, or stay in his cave?”

“He was a happy-hour drinker, as opposed to a late-nighter, but he didn’t hang in one bar all the time. They knew him at the Tiki Bar, of course, the No Name Pub, and the bar at Mangrove Mama’s. No one at Boondocks knew his name, and none of those other places had seen him this week.”

“I don’t suppose his neighbors heard or saw anything odd,” I said.

She shook her head.

“So you’ll send his prints to Kansas?”

Finally she looked away from me. “The nickname’s a problem. I always thought they came from other people, but these days, in the Keys, a lot of nicknames are self-imposed. People want to puff up their self-image, be Bonefish Bruce, or Pedro the Pirate, or Bad Bob. State handles are bargain models. You get them when people can’t recall shit about you except where you lived in a prior life. Women take only the state names, like Carolina or Texas. Men get the state plus their first name. Hence, Kansas Jack.”

“What the problem?” I said. “You think he made up the part about his home state?”

“Kansas doesn’t fit his style. No argument, he was a lowlife. But you look around his yard, inside his house, he was tuned to the Keys like he’d been here for fifty years. He was a walking survival manual.”

Liska snorted. “Except he didn’t survive.”

“You remember who sold you this house, Alex?” said Bobbi.

“Sure. A retired man, Horace Fields, nicknamed Weedy, originally from Michigan. We made our deal on a handshake.”

“What do you remember about him?”

“I haven’t thought about him for years. Can I make you coffee?”

“Already had it,” she said. “Back to Weedy, okay?”

“He was a pilot in the 1930s, a real pioneer, and he trained pilots for the Army during World War II. He settled here after the war and flew charter hops to Havana in the forties and fifties. After Castro, he worked for Curry’s Chandlery until it burned. He admitted that he sold me the cottage for fifteen grand more than he ever thought he’d get for it.”

“He have family?” she said.

“He sold because his wife died,” I said. “He had two kids, or at least that’s all I knew about. A boy in college on a baseball scholarship and a girl a couple years out of high school. Weedy wanted to go back to Michigan to live out his years.”

“Gotcha,” said Lewis.

“With all this other crap going down, why do you want to know about Weedy Fields?”

“I found two things in Kansas Jack’s house that might give us clues to his past.” Bobbi unzipped her belly pack, removed a small photo, and handed it to me. “Why would Kansas Jack Mason have a picture of a young woman standing in front of your house?”

Right away, the sparse vegetation around my cottage told me the print was made before I arrived in Key West. The girl was in her early teens and wore a tough expression and a light-colored dress that came to midthigh. I recognized her immediately, even with her hair shorter than I’d ever seen it. I felt alarm and disappointment knowing that her photo was among a murdered man’s possessions. “It’s Horace Fields’s daughter,” I said. “They called her Pokey.”

“Weedy and Pokey?” said Liska.

“It’s a town full of nicknames,” I said. “You of all people—”

“Let’s get back to the picture,” said Bobbi. “You get to know her when you were buying the house?”

I shook my head. “We met after Fields and I signed the papers at closing.”

“The daughter came to the closing?” said Liska.

“No, she didn’t live at home. The neighbors told me she moved out when she was still in high school. She’d taken up with a boy in the Navy, and Horace pushed her out of his life, never spoke of her.”

“Then how did you meet her?” said Lewis.

“We closed our deal and left the lawyer’s office, and Weedy took me to the Boat Bar for a beer. He told me that he’d shipped some things to Michigan, sold his furniture, and left five boxes in the utility room, stuff that his late wife wanted to give their daughter. He gave me the girl’s phone number and tried to give me fifty bucks to store the boxes for a month or so. If she didn’t show any interest, I could put the stuff with the trash. I told him I didn’t want the fifty, so he bought a round of drinks for the old boys in the bar.”

“Did you call her?” said Lewis.

“Sure,” I said. “She came by a week or so later to see if it was worth her bother. She looked happy to have it, but she was in a small car, an old Camaro, and couldn’t carry much of it home. She came back a day or two later in a borrowed pickup truck and took it all in one trip.”

“Her nickname was Pokey?” said Lewis. “You recall her given name?”

I shook my head. “You could check old records at the high school.”

“And how old was she when you met her?”

“I think nineteen, almost twenty,” I said, “so this picture’s well before my time.”

“You never saw her again?”

“She came by again, maybe six weeks after she got the boxes.”

“My, my,” said Bobbi. “Please tell us about it.”

I glanced at Liska. He dodged my eyes, gazed at the porch screening.

“She showed at the door,” I said. “She wanted to come in and walk around. Wanted to remember better times or something like that. She told me about her mother, went out in the backyard and cried, then got in that old Camaro and drove away.”

“I see,” said Bobbi. “And that was all that happened?”

“Sorry to bore you, but that was it,” I said. “You found two things that caught your eye?”

Lewis looked at Chicken Neck, as did I. He nodded, gave her an okay.

She reached again into her belly pack, extracted a silver Zippo lighter, and handed it to me. One side of the lighter was engraved in two columns. At the upper left was “1-12-73.” Just under the date was the word
Nevada
, under that “R.I.,” which I took to be Rhode Island, then a space, then “M.J.W.” Three more sets of initials were stacked in a similar column to the right: “E.J.B.,” “J.P.McW.,” and “H.P.E.”

“How do you see it?” said Lewis.

I said, “Four men from Rhode Island went to Vegas or Reno a long time ago.”

“Assume it’s four dudes in Vegas,” said Liska. “What’s with Rhode Island?”

“Maybe all four of them grew up there,” I said. “They met by chance at a blackjack table and decided to commemorate the occasion.”

Liska shook his head. “Too nice a souvenir, especially if they bought one apiece.” He dropped it face up on the porcelain table. “A home state can’t be that goddamn important.”

“I was on a ship in the military,” I said. “Three hundred men aboard, but I knew which ones were from Ohio. You stood the midwatch, you bullshitted to kill time, and home states were important. Don’t ask me why. Maybe a base point for pointless conversation.”

“Okay, the military,” he said. “Vegas isn’t exactly a liberty port.”

“So they were Air Force. Maybe they worked at that secret air base in the desert out there, Area 351, or whatever it’s called. Maybe they were test pilots or UFO controllers.”

Lewis shook her head. “Your brain is running away from you.”

“You were in the service,” said Liska. “You ever take a vacation with two other guys?”

“No,” I said. “Except for a half-day train ride in Europe. Maybe it was the other way around. Four men from Nevada were assigned to a Navy ship out of Newport, Rhode Island.”

Liska turned to Lewis. “Detective, was the medical examiner going to perform back-to-back autopsies?”

Lewis checked her watch. “Forty minutes from now. I should go.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” I said.

Bobbi turned her head and stared at me. “You look awful, Alex. I suggest you go back to bed.”

It was not a good time to tell either of them about Tim. I stared back.

“Okay,” she said, “make a suggestion.”

“Ask Larry Riley to consider two perpetrators while he works. I know it’s not the examiner’s job, but…”

She looked for Liska’s reaction, as did I. Liska didn’t move.

“I’ll ask him,” she said.

Liska watched her walk to the county vehicle. I saw his eyes drift below her belt line, then to her face when she turned to get into her car.

Backing out of the lane, Lewis had to swerve her cruiser to allow another vehicle to pass. Johnny Griffin—my new tenant—in his rented van. He was head-to-toe khaki with wraparound sunglasses on a string and zinc oxide on his nose. Ready to fish all day. He looked up the lane, watched Lewis’s unmarked Crown Vic turn onto Fleming. When he opened the porch door, I introduced him to Sheriff Liska.

“Are we all friends,” said Johnny, “or do we have an issue here?”

Liska looked bored. “We need to discuss your misdemeanor lease of this residence. Four local ordinances will be trampled the instant you carry your suitcase into the house.”

Griffin blanched. “I’m out of here.”

I fought back quickly. “Hold on,” I said. “The sheriff used to be my deal killer, but I fired him yesterday. His job is out in the county. Right here, he’s just another slug on the porch.”

Griffin still looked confused. “So I stay or don’t stay?”

“I’ll help you carry in your gear,” I said.

I stepped outside to follow Griffin to his van. Just loud enough for me to hear, Liska said, “I’m a fucking slug.” He remained in a funk while Johnny and I unloaded duffels, two briefcases, bags of groceries, and boxes of business files. Liska’s sulk didn’t reassure Griffin, and I feared I might have to make a monetary concession to ease Johnny’s mind about Liska’s petty prank. But I kept my mouth closed. Before Johnny left I swapped him a set of keys for a narrow bank envelope full of hundreds.

“Thanks for welcoming my friend to the tropics,” I said.

Liska was back to staring through the screen, studying my yard. “Did he hook his sense of humor on light tackle?”

“I think he borrowed it from Detective Lewis.”

“She’s my best detective,” said Liska. “Intense and eccentric, but good.”

“She was trying to accuse me of having an affair a long time ago.”

Liska turned, tried to read my eyes. “That she was, so let me talk straight, two things, package deal.”

His deals tended to go lopsided in his direction. “My curiosity awaits.”

“I see officers come and go,” he said. “I’m a crusty cop and set in my ways, but I’m not so stupid I could slap aside a man who…what the fuck word do I want, contributes? Stands up? You saved my ass three times in recent years. Cases got solved, you were the unsung hero, and I got the official recognition. Whatever you’ve got, most never will. So, thanks a bunch, and that ends my ‘attaboy’ session. Part 2, and I might get into your space here, but I know you pretty well, so I apologize in advance. Lewis was burned pretty badly about three years ago. He was a hot-dog lawyer from Dallas with one of those seven-figure houses on Truman Annex. She took the initiative, fell in love, and had a mad fling. Fifteen weeks into it, not only was he killed in a private-jet crash, but his wife showed up in Key West to close out his affairs. The dude never mentioned a wife. Since then she’s dated two or three gents, but her cold feet ruined the deals. If she invents jealousies and starts arguments, it doesn’t mean you’re not doing the right things. It’s her issue, and you have to stay steady.”