Bone Island Mambo (31 page)

Mercer paused, leaned toward me. “I know what you think of me. You think we’ve got a finger in every pie, we’ve fixed everything with our fabulous riches. But you must remember that as a family, we’ve always been like this island. We’ve been under economic attack from every newcomer with a half-baked dream. The island hit its real low point in the thirties. The federal government came to run this town. Since then, the people who’ve stuck it out have sworn that no one would ever again take away that power. That’s why you hear about strange alliances fighting outside money growth. We’re not connivers. We’re survivalists. We’re guarding the fort We’re not padding our wallets. Our proprietary approach is not greed. It’s cover-your-ass, for the benefit of children and grandchildren. The endangered species on this island are old-time residents. Half of them have fled to Ocala, run off by noise and dirt and taxes. The rest are wealthy and powerful, or else destitute and getting worse. I made a decision, years back, to be ruthless, to do anything it took. But my goal is not evil.”

I said, “Where does Butler Dunwoody fall on the scale of carpetbaggers to fort defenders?”

“Dunwoody’s new in town. He’s trying to buck generations of players. Those players are always successful unless intramural squabbles escalate.”

“Do these successes always require the other guy to fail?”

“You bet,” he said. “It’s a small island.”

“Do they require murder?”

“Never. And he’s a special breed. He’s the kind we need. Do you know what was going to happen to that parking lot he’s building on?”

“Under your rule of inevitability,” I said, “I’d be a fool to imagine it might remain ‘as is.’ ”

“Some idiot had an idea he could buy up that trailer court behind the property, extend a building all the way to the Bight boardwalk, put in a giant combination brewery, de-sal plant, and aquarian museum. Supposedly had big Texas money to back him, some movie star to be a five percent owner for the sake of name power. Why these people think they can crap on the pavement like a stray dog, I do not know. Excuse my language, Ms. Barga.”

Teresa leaned forward. “Crap is a tame word for what you’re describing, Mr. Holloway.”

I said, “So what’U happen to the buildings I’m supposed to photograph?”

“Those buildings will not be gentrified. They won’t be part of a palm-tree Epcot. Nobody’s going to have to pay admission to soak up the past in my Key West. Some people in this town are peddling history they got for free, selling it with Florida-resident discounts and package deals.”

I thought: It takes a worried man to sing a worried song. Whatever my guilt in acceptance of growth, tempered by my not having been born here, wrapped in nostalgia for the seventies, Mercer was right. Everyone’s first day in Key West is a visit to paradise. Every morning I wake up here, I thank fortune and my priorities for not having to wake up to snow chains and dead batteries, slush, bare trees, urban sprawl, and the foul moods of those who must endure it all.

I said, “All that you’ve just said, and you’re helping Dunwoody?”

Mercer refilled his empty wineglass. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he said. “The profit motive made America great But competition must be based on ‘Do unto others . . .’ The profit motive warped by greed has inspired some of the most awful human tragedies of our time. I decided a year ago that Dunwoody’s motive wasn’t warped by greed.”

“Monday morning you said something like, ‘We aren’t permitted to pick our families, and we’re not allowed to
choose their moods.’ Do Suzanne and Julie view progress with your sense of history?”

“I love my daughters, faults and all. You can’t help but love your children, unless they’re mass murderers or Una-bombers or whatever. But even then, I might love them anyway. Thank goodness, I’ll never have to know. But my big mistake, long ago, was my choice of wife. I was in love with two women at the same time. I had to make a choice. One was the daughter of drunken parents. Her upbringing was a shamble of strife and what we’d call high-class poverty. The other young woman had a traditional family, salt of the earth, hardworking father, homemaker mother. I saw my future in the mothers. My parents were boozers. I’d had enough of drunks. I didn’t want to live with a drunk. I picked the girl who promised me pleasant calm. Unfortunately, she became a drunk, and she tore my political scene to shreds. I divorced her. The woman I cast aside is married to a future Senatorial candidate.

“I also paid the rich man’s tithe, straight out of a Greek tragedy. It’s happened to other men. Mel Fisher paid the price, twenty-five, almost thirty years ago, searching for gold and silver and emeralds. Bill Cosby, too. I lost my son four years ago next month. That event stole any happiness I might have found at the end of my life. The old people are supposed to die first. No amount of success or wealth can make up for that kind of loss.”

Once again, point well made.

“I can’t say much more about these property trusts, Rutledge,” he said. “But I know you’re worried about a taint of your professional reputation. I’ll tell you this. The town will reap benefits. Think what you want, but it won’t be a black mark.”

Teresa said, “I’m going to have to excuse myself.”

She looked beat. Her hair looked beat. Even her clothes looked beat.

Holloway attempted a pleasant smile. It almost turned into a yawn. “I wish I were younger and could stay out all night. It’s time for me to walk home, too.”

We did our thank-yous. Holloway sent us on our way. We walked down Angela, hugged the pavement’s edge where there was no sidewalk. A tipsy bicyclist wobbled toward us, veered just before colliding.

I came away from Mangoes believing in Mercer Holloway’s brilliance. His genius was directed. He was expert at molding history to match his personal goals. I was no closer to knowing if his pompous wizardry propelled altruism or murder.

History is full of tyrants who deeply believed their goals were good.

“He’s an odd man,” Teresa said suddenly. ‘If one person is behind all these murders and attacks, it’s Mercer Holloway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve never heard so much bullshit in my life. He’s guilty of something.”

“Aren’t we all?” I said.

“People like Holloway have ways to make things happen, and they’re never directly involved. We could argue that he’s not the bad person, but this sure is revolving around him.”

“So power’s the pivot point for trouble?”

“Money, power, volatile family scene. He matches all the stats I’ve ever read.”

“You might be right,” I said. “That bit at the table was like a salesman’s presentation. Too perfect.”

My gut told me that Donovan Cosgrove’s stock had risen.

When we reached Teresa’s condo she said, “You’re going to hate me. I don’t think I could sleep a wink in here. Can we go to your house?”

We spent a half hour in the condo while she retrieved messages—about eight condolence calls; the word had spread about her car—and gathered clothes she could wear in the morning. Then we risked a traffic citation, rode double on her blue motor scooter to Dredgers Lane. She wore the helmet to fool the fuzz if they saw us from behind. I
shut it off on Fleming under the three modem crime lights between Grinnell and Francis, and I rolled it from there. All I could hear were the tires in the gravel and Teresa’s footsteps ahead of me. The odd stillness in the lane reminded me of a power drop. Not quite as silent, but the same effect. Everything closer to your skin, thoughts booming inside your head.

At six
A.M.
the phone rang. Teresa moaned. She had it right. Couldn’t be anything good.

Dexter Hayes said: “I need your help, man. I can’t even start to tell you. I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon. Bring your stuff down to Mercer’s. The poor man’s dead. He hung himself in the back patio.”

I spread the blinds, looked outside. Barely sunup. “Five minutes,” I said.

He tactfully added, “If you can get a message to Ms. Barga quicker than I can, I’d appreciate that, too.”

I arrived at Holloway’s home ten minutes after Dexter Hayes’s call. Three minutes later the bus unloaded: two county commissioners, Mayor Steve Gomez and two other city commissioners, and a minister wanting to claim Mercer Holloway as a devoted, generous church member. A photographer from the
Citizen
and two reporters from the
Miami Herald
showed. Then, more quietly, Sheriff Fred “Chicken Neck” Liska, Detective Bobbi Lewis, and Lewis’s video assistant, in the same grunge clothes he’d worn the previous afternoon.

No family members in sight.

Ex-Sheriff Tucker, ace security expert, had discovered Mercer Holloway’s body. Tucker had slept in the house, on the second floor, and had wakened at daybreak. I’d seen Tommy Tucker when I arrived, sitting alone in a police van with the passenger-side door open, in wrinkled pants and a tank-top undershirt, sipping a Mountain Dew, staring at nothing. Tucker looked guilty as hell. Guilty of letting the worst happen on his watch.

Dexter told me not to approach the body. He wanted only general shots: the patio, the rear fence, the ladder on its side. The same ladder I’d used to scale the rear hedge fifteen hours earlier. Mercer was dressed in the clothing he’d worn at Mangoes, the trousers now soiled, his feet
bare. Stains on the flagstone and the narrow, symbolic path of antique ballast stone. A vehicle tow-strap hung from a twelve-foot-high branch of gumbo limbo. The force of his drop, his dead weight, had stretched Mercer’s neck two or three inches. I looked close enough to see the half-shut eyes, his weird grimace, his tongue, his expression of massive regret.

I’d shot maybe eight pictures before Dexter hand-motioned me to put the camera away. I dropped it in my satchel, stood aside, my back to the foliage, as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigative team blew into the yard. Four in dark pants, black sneaks,
CRIME SCENE
pullovers, radio mikes snapped to their shoulders. Varsity wrestling in ninja jammies. Two of them, not eight feet from each other, conversed by walkie-talkie. Their commanding officer declared the patio “secured,” demanded that anyone not “authorized” vacate the premises. The modern military gives us these wizards. On our way out, we passed four more incoming: Medical Examiner Larry Riley, his chief investigator, and two assistants.

Outside, I watched Liska’s Lexus turn the corner of Elizabeth, roll northward. My best guess: breakfast at Harpoon Harry’s.

Dexter and I both knew the zinger, the one small detail. And Liska would know, too. Holloway had kicked the stepladder out from under himself to commit suicide. No one had stolen the ladder.

Hayes told me he’d reached Teresa’s cell phone, told her that he didn’t need her on scene, apologized for waking her early. He asked me to hang a minute, then huddled on the front lawn with Bobbi Lewis. I could tell they were pissed at the FDLE, but policies of all three agencies dictated seniority. In some city cases, the county sheriff will elect to command a scene. In a few murder cases the FDLE will do so. It was the manner of pick and choose—especially when headlines were at stake—that brought interagency conflict. The death of ex-Congressman Holloway guaranteed high-profile headlines.

When their discussion ended, Detective Lewis hurried away while Hayes strode toward me. “The man changed my life completely,” he said. “Now I’m politicked out of investigating his death.”

“Teresa and I ran into him last night,” I said. “We had a drink at Mangoes.”

“Tell me he was normal,” said the detective. “Please tell me that.”

“That was my impression. Defiant, pompous, talked our ears off.”

“Elderly white men in Florida commit suicide more often than teenagers. They feel that ‘vague loss of joy,’ and they go the hemlock route.”

“I’ve read about that,” I said. “It’s when they lose control, usually over their health.”

“What’d you talk about?”

“Changes on the island,” I said. “Power struggles.”

“Was he drunk?”

“No, just drinking.”

“His appearance?”

I said, “Kind of sloppy.”

“Did he mention his son?”

I nodded.

“Then he was depressed.”

“He didn’t bring up the subject. He mentioned him only because I asked about his relationships with family members.”

“Why a question like that?”

“I asked a bunch of questions. I wanted to mentally eliminate him as the source of this week’s nastiness.”

Dexter’s jaw tightened. “Did you succeed?”

Play this easy, I thought Go gently. “I couldn’t decide. But the hanging, there’s the similarity to the Toth case.”

“And the people in there are trampling the scene,” said Hayes. “I tried to explain the copycat theory. One guy laughed out loud.”

“I learned yesterday how he’d helped you with college.”

Hayes tried not to act surprised.

I said, “It’s rough to lose friends.” I realized as I said them that they were the exact words Teresa had expressed to Marnie on Sunday night. It’s hard to be original before the day begins.

Dexter looked down the street, toward Simonton, mentally took himself farther away. “I bit myself in the ass,” he said, “when I told you to buzz off with your clue.”

Bobbi Lewis had told him about the feather.

“It wasn’t as slick as I thought,” I said. “Doesn’t much prove anything.”

“They’re going to talk to Donovan Cosgrove in the next hour or so. You got any other ideas?”

“Detective Lewis tell you about Wiley Fecko?” I said.

“The weed sleeper? Yeah. I got to him before we cut him loose, ran some mug shots past him. He identified Bug Thorsby but not Robbie Carpona. Bug had a helper we don’t know about, when he dropped Freddy Tropici’s body on that sofa. Maybe one of his daddy’s wharf rats from up on Summerland.”

I said, ‘Tell me about Gram Holloway.”

Dexter shook his head. “The boy’s dead. I’m not going to walk on that grave.”

Liska, on Sunday, had mentioned “walking on graves.” Must have become a standard cop expression. We both were talking in echoes.

“How about I walk on it?” I said. “You just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”