Bone Island Mambo (17 page)

I pulled out Mercer Holloway’s Group One property list, put my back to the breeze so the pages wouldn’t rip. A strange assortment of buildings: retail shops, an apartment complex, a bank on the boulevard. No definition beyond, I assumed, Mercer Holloway’s name on the deeds. He’d said that he disagreed with his tax assessments. But he’d claimed that “tree-huggers and zero-growth nuts will thank us.” He’d said that the island would reap “future benefits.”

A career politician had begged me to take him at his word.

I suffered my second stroke of paranoia for the morning: a siren carried down White Street with the wind. It sounded like the siren was heading right for me. Then a fire engine appeared, turned up Flagler.

I gazed to sea for several minutes. A shrimp boat had anchored to the southeast, its gear laid out port and starboard to stabilize the craft for better daytime snoozing. A handsome, wooden-sparred ketch ran with the wind and against the Hawk Channel current Full main, working jib, a single reef in the mizzen. She trailed an inflatable runabout The sight took me back to a sail transit I’d made with Sam Wheeler in the mid-eighties, a delivery to Bimini, a favor for a fishing client Another case of going blind into a situation without preview of events that would spin out of control. A crisis where a trustworthy companion had saved the day.

Holloway’s concept whatever it was, might be wonderful for all involved. It also might be the boondoggle of the millennium, the scam to beat all. One thing came to mind. He’d said of his daughters, “I don’t want to deprive them of the joys of making their own fortunes.” The line suggested a limit to each daughter’s inheritance.

Whatever happened, my name would be attached. I wanted the income. I wanted to know more.

The Sunrise Rotary Club’s elegant compass rose told me I was located at 24° 32.724’ north by 81° 47.009’ west. I didn’t know where I stood with my conscience, my reputation, my bank balance, or the law. I wanted a nap on the sun-warmed concrete. I walked the bridge off the apron, passed two men straddling their stopped bicycles, reading victims’ names embossed on the AIDS memorial. Tears streamed down their faces.

Like the man who’d stonewalled Dunwoody, I was in no hurry to make decisions. No hurry to do anything except remove myself from craziness, from the past two days’ gruesome events. I hadn’t been to Epcot in years. I needed a quiet few days in Cedar Key, or a couple of nights slumming the bars on St Pete Beach. My psyche required a therapeutic maxing of credit cards.

For some stupid reason I drove the Kawasaki back into Key West

I slowed at Peary Court, where Palm Avenue’s utility-pole forest intersects Eisenhower. I wanted to search the far end of Charterboat Row for
Fancy Fool,
Wheeler’s bare-bones flats boat. I needed to connect with Sam for advice. I rode the turf Mercer Holloway had claimed was his North Beach childhood playground. The little I’d read about North Beach had described cork and sea-grape trees, patch mangrove, sea oats, pristine sandy beach. Holloway had reminisced about the days before it was “lost in development.” By my calculations, he would have to be ninety to have played there. I could not imagine how the man could honor the past—Junkanoo music, antique lithographs, fond memories, the house he maintained—and at the same time ambush the future.

I started up Garrison Bight’s bridge. Most of the charter boats bobbed in their slips. Captains reclined in canvas sling chairs, in groups, gazing around the parking strip, bullshitting, spitting downwind. Mates aboard the bigger yachts pretended to spruce topside while scoping the sidewalks for possible customers. Even with the chill January air, the day marked an odd lull for the charter fleet. I guessed that Wheeler would be out with a client, some permit chaser or bonefisherman who’d booked the same week every year for years. Given the shallow currents favored by
those fish and the difficulty in finding fish in roiled water, a northwest wind would make it a short day.

At bridge peak I looked south. Bingo. Wheeler, alone, in his sixteen-foot Maverick Mirage, coasted toward me, leaving the Bight’s dockage basin. I hit the cycle’s squawky horn as Sam glided under the west end. I didn’t catch his ear. Then I stopped in a hurry. Traffic had backed up from the Roosevelt signal—a tourist-season normality in recent years. I saw no activity at the dockmaster’s office, one or two people at the cube-shaped public rest room. No need to double-check for police cruisers. My mental radar already was tuned to that frequency. I waited for a break in traffic, crossed the double-yellow, and jumped the curb into the municipal dock parking area. Sam nudged his throttle between marker 29 and the red 30 triangle, then saw me walking Dolphin Pier, angled over, beckoned me aboard.

I pointed to my illegally parked Kawasaki. Sam pointed northward. Our mutual friend, Carl Wirthwein, owned a home on the spit next to the yacht club. Problem solved, and an invitation to the backcountry. I returned to the bridge, waited in line for the light, hurried up Roosevelt, swung left onto Hilton Haven. The narrow peninsula had been created during the island’s first major facelift, the heralded arrival of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway. By dredging and filling, engineers had built a peninsula for the railway straight to Key West Harbor. The hurricane of September 1935 had shut down the rails, and these days the fill to either side of the bay-access cut offered perfect weather protection for the Bight.

I left the motorcycle alongside a jasmine trellis in Wirthwein’s carport.
Fancy Fool
bobbed a few yards off his short dock. Sam’s flat-bottomed skiff was pure utility, with little freeboard, designed for shoal water where schooling fish offer their challenge to light-tackle enthusiasts. Anglers invest plenty in equipment and guides. With rare exceptions, they release fish after battle. The pastime was reputed to be more addictive than sex or drugs. I’d always been a better spectator.

Sam nudged the dock with his port bow so I could step aboard.

I noticed no fishing gear. “How’s it going, Captain?”

He looked over the top of his sunglasses. “Da boat she float. You?”

“I keep getting bottle caps that say, ‘Sorry, try again.’ Key West used to be a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.”

“Been a long, strange year. All two weeks of it.”

“Getting weirder,” I said.

“You missed a great breakfast in my kitchen this morning. Staff Sergeant Pissoff and Corporal Malcontent. They were being extra polite about sharing the bagel cutter and butter knife.”

“Too many lightning bolts in the front yard?”

“Sunday the crap was in your lap,” he said. “Yesterday it reached everyone else.”

“I’ve been wasting time, dodging the threat.”

“Instead of?”

“Instead of trying to figure what’s behind it all.”

Sam idled out of the Bight, then kicked the ninety-horse Yamaha up to 3,500 revs.
Fancy Fool
came instantly to a plane, put astern the Sigsbee Park backyards of Navy Officer Housing. Sam dropped the engine speed. We slapped along wavetops, into the wind, north into Florida Bay. Aiming for mangrove islands in the Lower Harbor Keys, we wove between backcountry markers, old wood stakes topped with Day-Glo-painted triangles. We passed an old purloined stop sign, now faded, covered with guano. We skirted hammocks, ran past Cayo Agua. Startled birds flushed. Cormorants like jet fighters went for max speed at shallow altitude, then lifted for safety and perspective. Frigate birds patrolled, stood guard aloft. White seabirds played in the fresh breeze. More glare than detail reflected off the choppy water, kept us from a clear view of the bay bottom.

The view took me back to a picnic in the Mud Keys four months earlier. Teresa and I had been dating only two or three weeks, dancing around our relationship, fascinated
by the strength of our fast attraction. While wary of instant romance, we didn’t want to threaten the momentum. We’d accepted an invitation to explore the Mud Keys aboard
The Conch,
the boxy pontoon boat owned by my amigo Dink Bruce. A day-cruising masterpiece,
The Conch
resembles a four-poster bed with a forty-horse outboard, two lawn chairs, and a ladder to the sundeck on the canopy. Years ago Charles Kuralt cruised aboard her, wrote about it in a best-selling book. You decline a Dink Bruce offer at your own peril. A local woman once turned down an afternoon in the lakes with the excuse that it was her only day for laundry. He never asked her again. More than social rebuke, a need for solitude had motivated our acceptance.

Four of us—Dink and his companion, and Teresa and I—rode
The Conch.
Marnie and Sam joined us in
Fancy Fool.
They brought along a CD blaster with an assortment of jazz albums—Branford Marsalis, Paul Desmond, and an old favorite of mine, Donald Fagen’s
The Nightfly.
We beat the humidity by taking frequent dips in the water. The bugs never found us. Teresa and I checked each other for sunburn, kept the humor rolling, put on flippers and snorkled, explored meandering channels. Her eyes widened at the sight of a ray, only five feet below us, its wings almost touching the mangrove roots. Small fish checked us out. We swam behind a thick hammock, still could hear the peaceful music. Someone loudly accused us of spawning.

Later, at my house, we’d made love before showering, then again after washing away salt and sun lotion. The day had secured the link between us.

Just beyond the small hammock called Fish Hawk Key, Sam slowed, cut the ignition, and let
Fancy Fool
drift. In no hurry, he went forward, pulled a small stockless anchor from a compact well, and chucked it into four feet of water.

I looked around, then saw Sam’s reason for stopping. A mile to the northeast, a guide poled his skiff into the wind as an angler on the bow cast in our direction. Wheeler’s sense of nautical courtesy was as strident as any of his waterborne traits—knot bending, neatness, storage, maintenance.
His home was just as meticulous. His only failing was his refusal to clean or sell his ancient Ford Bronco. Friends allowed him the eccentricity.

Sam flipped opened a live-bait well. He pulled out two ice-cold beers. ‘Top off that coffee?”

I accepted, but my stomach reminded me that I’d skipped food. I tilted the bottle toward the other skiff.

Sam said, “Captain Turk’s
Flats Broke.
Fishing a local man. Holloway’s son-in-law. The real estate guy.”

It must be Philip Kaiser. “You’d think somebody local would pick better weather.”

Sam lifted his beer in toast. “We didn’t, and you needed this. You looked more windblown on the dock than you do now.”

“I needed to get out of town. I’m a wanted man.”

“Not by your girlfriend. She thinks you’re holding out some great clue.”

“I am.”

We sat back and watched the fishermen. I described the car chase and the relation of the slayings to previous murders. I unloaded my secret, the photo-proved connection between the deaths on Caroline Street and Stock Island.

“I knew the copycat part,” he said. “It’ll make the paper tomorrow morning. They got an anonymous tip. Marnie got the assignment to follow up. She learned that someone else in the office was prepping a piece on the city’s unsolved murder cases. She wondered if the tipster was the person who dropped the stinky, blue-faced head in her car.”

I parked that detail. Holloway or Liska or Hayes could’ve tipped.

“The FDLE took her Jeep,” Sam added. “Told her to pray hard that they didn’t find evidence. One man let slip a remark about ‘weeks of pain-in-the-butt storage.’ They wanted sample fingerprints from anyone who’s been in the vehicle the past six weeks. Hell, Marnie loaned it to a girl in the office when we went south.”

“Teresa said she was doing okay with it all.”

“The head, no problem. Why they picked her Jeep, that’s a biggie.”

“Butt and I interacted this morning. The boy’s got two flip sides. He’s an entrepreneur with an eye for detail, and he’s an island-history buff. Also, he doesn’t trust his lady friend.”

“He’s a sloppy drunk and a fool with his money,” said Sam. “He’s heavy into nostalgia, and he knows good carpentry. You give him a reason not to trust her?”

I shook my head, waved off the idea of monkey business. “Did you know he’s tied into Mercer Holloway?”

“Politicians are wonderful people. Retired politicians, every last one of them, are mysteriously successful. He could do worse.”

I brought up Holloway’s offer, and my misgivings. “There’s a catch to it all,” I added. “I’m taking this moral stance, imposing standards on people. The developers are no different from Henry Flagler. He tore up the place, dredging and filling, brought in his money, he was given a hero’s welcome. The place is more crowded these days. That’s the difference.”

“That’s why the standards are different”

“But I’m not a native defending the homeland. In an ecological sense, I’m a newcomer, too. My roots don’t go deep in the coral rock.”

“Tell me about roots. I come from a long history of dead ends.”

“Your father? You never said much . . .”

“Born loser,” said Sam. “Broken spoke in the wheel of progress. The anti-Renaissance man. Up north, Muncie, my folks got married, he was a milkman. They phased out milkmen. He got a job selling Packards and, sure as hell, Packard went out of business. Went over to the Edsel dealership, slick as you please. Came to Florida to try something new. Packed everything worth keeping into a Chevy panel truck, along with a bag of hard-boiled eggs and thermos of coffee, and made the long drive. Moved me and my mother to the swamp. He told everyone he knew that he
was going to be a surgeon. Then he’d laugh and say, ‘Tree surgeon, get it?’ A real maverick.”

I’d never heard Sam talk about his family this way. The topic always had been off-limits, like discussion of heroics that had earned his military battle decorations. “You’ve got sisters, right?”

Sam peered over the gunwale at propeller ruts in the bay bottom. “I grew up with three little sisters. My father thought he was cute. They were born after we came south. He made my mother call them Florence, Lorie, and Ida. Put together, the names spelled Florida. Good thing they all were girls. Two are married, live back up north. Lorie disappeared. Back in the eighties.”