Gumbo Limbo (8 page)
“Shit, no. I stayed at the office, working late, pulling investigative material off the Internet.”
Our food arrived and she didn’t offer any more information. A huge truck turned the corner, shook our table, almost rattled the food onto the floor. Even the quaint Waterfront Market had its own tractor-trailer to transport supplies from Miami. Our talk stopped while we attacked our meals. I finished mine and received permission to attack her unfinished sandwich. Buddy, the owner of B.O.’s, placed another beer next to my empty plate, put his finger to his chest before he walked away. On the house.
“Now that you’ve finished your meal …” Teresa looked me in the eye. A seductive look. “Is there anything else you need?”
I didn’t want to bite too hard, in case it wasn’t meant to be seductive. I sidestepped: “Could I get a ride home?”
The woman’s face showed a trace of affront.
“I didn’t mean that to sound like it did.”
“That’s okay. I mean, I wasn’t offering you a kiss good-bye.”
We walked to the car in bright sunlight. I didn’t have my sunglasses. Even dark things were too bright to look at. Puddles evaporated as we watched. Dust swirled behind vehicles on Caroline. The bumper sticker on the car parked ahead of the Taurus read: MORE SHIT HAPPENS IN KEY WEST. After sitting downwind
from B.O.’s deep-fat fryer, I still smelled like the inside of Spence’s Sunbird.
from B.O.’s deep-fat fryer, I still smelled like the inside of Spence’s Sunbird.
Teresa drove on Fleming Street, turned east, slowed near Dredgers Lane, and pulled to the left curbing. “Liska wants you in his office at three o’clock.”
I answered her with a questioning look. Why this news now?
“Well, you told me you didn’t have plans for the afternoon. I didn’t want to spoil our lunch.”
Just riding the four blocks from B.O.’s, I’d thought of at least six things to do during the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.
“Liska said, ‘Three P.M. exactly.’”
“Will you kiss me good-bye?”
“What’s he going to do, put you on Death Row?”
I laughed. “Let’s leave Liska out of this, for a moment.”
She laughed, too. She leaned across the front seat and quickly kissed my lips. She smelled of faint perspiration and shampoo rinse. She tasted like the sweetness and lemon of her iced tea.
Her eyes caught mine, and they smiled.
“
I
t’s not as bad as it smells.”
I
t’s not as bad as it smells.”
I allowed Duffy Lee Hall his moment of nonsense.
I stood thirty feet from the burned building, but my hair and clothing had already absorbed the stench of charred wood and plastic. The weight of the firefighters’ water had caved in the pharmacy roof. Long pink strands of attic insulation, tangled in electrical wiring, hung against warped drywall. Support beams had settled at odd angles. Ash layered exposed surfaces. No question, the building would be bulldozed.
If Hall had meant to compare the extent of ruin to his personal odor, I’d buy into the idea. The sweat of emotion and exertion had drenched his blue denim work shirt. He’d been packing sooty boxes out of the ashes, wrapping them in garbage bags, hoping they wouldn’t ruin the interior of his vintage Volvo station wagon. He’d wasted his money with the plastic bags. I could swim off South Beach or shower for an hour. The Volvo would never lose the residual stink.
Hall had insisted that he needed no help. “No reason for both of us to ruin our clothes. This is my second carload. It ought to cover it.” He leaned into the Volvo to organize the boxes. His belly, a testament to the nation’s microbreweries, restricted his movement. He gave up and backed away. His round wire-rimmed glasses slid down his nose. “The darkroom used to
be a walk-in refrigerator.” He wagged his arm at the north wall of the gutted pharmacy. “The lunch counter used to be over here. They built new coolers when they moved the serving area to the United Street side. They couldn’t afford to rip down the old walk-in, so I got a perfect space. No light leaks, no temperature shifts. I mean … before this. Anyway, the steel walls and thick insulation saved my equipment.”
be a walk-in refrigerator.” He wagged his arm at the north wall of the gutted pharmacy. “The lunch counter used to be over here. They built new coolers when they moved the serving area to the United Street side. They couldn’t afford to rip down the old walk-in, so I got a perfect space. No light leaks, no temperature shifts. I mean … before this. Anyway, the steel walls and thick insulation saved my equipment.”
“Open for business somewhere else?”
A dejected exhale: “With a full house of jack-jawed customers …”
“ … who will understand the circumstances.”
He slid out of the car, headed back into the rubble for more. “But not their missing film. Be glad you didn’t leave yours last night.”
“You can’t wash the film, try to salvage it?”
“Nothing to wash. It’s gone. Somebody took it all.”
“Took your clients’ film … ?”
“ … and finished prints.”
“And burned it down, too?”
Duffy Lee slid a box of developing trays into the car. He barely nodded.
Theft and vandalism. A crime and an overkill cover-up. The deed and the distraction. It had gone down that way at Jesse Spence’s apartment.
Coincidence bites again. It clicked almost immediately. The phone bug in the Ziploc. Strike two had hit Duffy Lee Hall’s darkroom.
Someone had wanted my film and knew from eavesdropping Spence’s phone line that I’d deliver the film to Hall before six the night before. They didn’t need the film I’d shot at Spence’s. Those pictures were documents, not evidence. They held no clues and, unless Jesse had performed a miracle of cleaning and restoration, that film could be re-shot easily. That left only one possibility. Someone had wanted my Conch Train pictures. And
not the detail shots of Omar “Joe Blow” Boudreau, either, because I could easily reproduce those, inside a different kind of walk-in fridge. They’d wanted my shots of the Front Street crime-scene onlookers.
not the detail shots of Omar “Joe Blow” Boudreau, either, because I could easily reproduce those, inside a different kind of walk-in fridge. They’d wanted my shots of the Front Street crime-scene onlookers.
I didn’t have the balls to admit to Duffy Lee Hall that his livelihood had been destroyed because someone wanted film I’d failed to drop off. I left him to his chore, rode two blocks down Simonton to a pay phone, and called my message machine.
Sam Wheeler: “A break in this horseshit weather. My new client needs a couple hours in the Mud Keys. Come by the dock at three-thirty.”
I hit Chicken Neck’s office at
exactly
three o’clock, Omarscene photos in hand. No sign of Liska. My Cannondale had been shoved against a wall between two windows darkened by stained white miniblinds. I’d arrived on the Kawasaki; the bike could wait another day. The room smelled of a recently puffed cigarette. A sure sign of a short-timer: breaking city rules, inside the police station. Fred Liska burning bridges long before election day.
exactly
three o’clock, Omarscene photos in hand. No sign of Liska. My Cannondale had been shoved against a wall between two windows darkened by stained white miniblinds. I’d arrived on the Kawasaki; the bike could wait another day. The room smelled of a recently puffed cigarette. A sure sign of a short-timer: breaking city rules, inside the police station. Fred Liska burning bridges long before election day.
I sorted through the stack of photos. Omar’s verminlike face—a nose well-engineered for snorting Bolivian power powder—and his fancy shoes. I’d shot the crowd pictures with a 28-mm wide-angle, so onlookers’ faces were too small to recognize on four-by-six prints. But the wide-angle lens also meant that depth of field, the focus front to rear, would be sharp.
I left the photos with a Post-It note and walked a block down Angela to Mangoes. I needed to tell Jesse Spence about the fire, warn him of probable escalation. I needed to pick his brain, too.
Crowded. People waited for tables at the restaurant’s sidewalk entrance. I didn’t see Spence behind the bar. A young black man in a waiter’s polo-style shirt scrambled to make drink orders for other waiters and the two dozen customers on stools. I asked for Spence.
“Yeah, well …” The young man gestured, a broad wave to
show me the packed patio. “He quit.” He finished mixing a Bloody Mary, then turned back to me. “Came in, worked ten minutes, then faded. Asked for his paycheck, too. Told the boss lady he was having psychological problems and needed a month off. Something about cabin fever. She told him, an early check, make an appointment with the accountant.” The fill-in bartender almost fumbled the drink shaker. “Cabin fever’s for Colorado, Idaho, the Montana boondocks. It’s not like we’re snowed in, Key West, in August. You need a job?”
show me the packed patio. “He quit.” He finished mixing a Bloody Mary, then turned back to me. “Came in, worked ten minutes, then faded. Asked for his paycheck, too. Told the boss lady he was having psychological problems and needed a month off. Something about cabin fever. She told him, an early check, make an appointment with the accountant.” The fill-in bartender almost fumbled the drink shaker. “Cabin fever’s for Colorado, Idaho, the Montana boondocks. It’s not like we’re snowed in, Key West, in August. You need a job?”
I shook my head. “A sudden decision.”
“They’re all that way. Every bartender I ever knew, the Al-Anon Syndrome. At least one alcoholic parent. Lots of time both, if they had two. Impulsive, selfish, full of self-importance or riddled with insecurity. Know what I mean?”
“Never thought about it.”
“Think about it. Blame the parents.” He’d poured short on ingredients and had too little to fill two margarita-rocks glasses. He dropped in a few extra ice cubes. “You see Jesse Spence, tell him his job went out the door behind him. Nobody on this shift’ll forget. The door slammed real loud.”
I stared at the table close to Duval Street where Omar had sat staring at the sidewalk. Not much for aesthetics. It fell in with the logic: he’d been there for a reason. He’d been looking for someone. The concept of coincidence had come to gravity.
I went back to the Angela Street police station and fire house. I had a few questions for Dewey Birdsall, the Key West Fire Department’s fire marshal and chief investigator. The joke around town used to be that Dewey spelled his first name D-U-I. He’d come to Key West in the early seventies, a fireman on vacation from Connecticut, and had opted for local employment. He didn’t mind the fire department’s traditional motto: “We’ll save the house next door.” What did people expect on a windy island packed shore-to-shore with century-old wooden
structures? He liked best that, in winter, the water used to extinguish fires did not turn his feet into chunks of ice.
structures? He liked best that, in winter, the water used to extinguish fires did not turn his feet into chunks of ice.
Dewey and I had become friends when we—along with Duffy Lee Hall and a diverse cast of other maniacs—had spent many foggy wee hours in the Full Moon Saloon, when the bar had been located on United. Birdsall had since quit drinking. A court-ordered acquaintance with Alcoholics Anonymous had put him on the right track. He did his job well and with pride.
I found him in the fire station’s main office straightening his desk, piling papers in what looked to be an end-of-day ritual.
“Señor Rutledge,” he said. “I thought Dracula never saw daylight.”
“Don’t we all slow down, Dewey?”
“If we want to stay alive. How can I help you?”
“Duffy Lee did all my film work. Personal stuff and the jobs I shot for the detectives. Stuff for the county, too.”
“Weird fire. No accident, no act of nature.”
“Electrical, or what?”
“More like kids playing with matches, until you look at the evidence. High temperatures. The torch used an accelerator, but not plain gasoline.”
“Any way to analyze it?”
“Triple answer, Alex. Yes there is; residue samples are already at the state fire marshal’s office in Tallahassee; and proof of it being incendiary probably won’t make a case against anyone.”
“How about matching residue to a perp’s clothing, if it spilled?”
“Possible. Difficult. Circumstantial.”
“Shit.”
“I know where you’re at. Hall’s my friend, too. I’m paying extra attention to this case. I’ve requested firebug info from the statewide database on repeat offenders. Couple other angles. I’ll keep you posted. By the way …” Birdsall reached to hand me a business card. “My sister and her husband just moved to town.
He’s selling insurance. You ever need term life, give him a shout.”
He’s selling insurance. You ever need term life, give him a shout.”
I stuck the card in my pocket. Since the Navy, I’d kept current on a small life policy, so no one would have to shell out their own bucks to turn me into ashes. Odd product name. “Term life” sounded like a prison sentence.
I sat on a PVC chair, feet on Sam’s dock locker, sipping a beer wrapped in a paper towel, waiting for
Fancy Fool
to coast in. Most of the Garrison Bight charter boats had remained in port; the morning weather had killed a day’s income. Bilge soap and WD-40 vapors told me that a few crews had taken the opportunity to catch up on maintenance. For a handful, Wheeler included, the sun’s late-morning reemergence had invited a half-day stab in the least-murky backcountry waters.
Fancy Fool
to coast in. Most of the Garrison Bight charter boats had remained in port; the morning weather had killed a day’s income. Bilge soap and WD-40 vapors told me that a few crews had taken the opportunity to catch up on maintenance. For a handful, Wheeler included, the sun’s late-morning reemergence had invited a half-day stab in the least-murky backcountry waters.
Other dock smells rode the wind—diesel and gas fumes, open fish boxes, barnacles left high on pilings by the dropping tide. Once in a while burgers and onions floated from the fast-food box across the boulevard. The humidity enveloped me like an extra layer of clothing. The eight-minute shower I’d taken after lunch had given me perhaps ten minutes of relief. I’d take another after dark. At these latitudes, this time of year, everyone perspired around the clock. The trick was to smell like today, not yesterday. I’d placed my ball cap upside-down in direct sunlight to dry.
My watch said quarter to four. Every ninety seconds a plane passed overhead, adjusting flaps, dropping power on final approach to runway 9. Exhaust heat shimmered behind them, tainting the afternoon sea breeze. Even my dark Serengetis struggled with the brightness. High-rev mopeds and blatting Harleys crossed the Garrison Bight bridge. Pickups with throaty glasspacks climbed the bridge in second; those coming the other direction used their transmissions to brake downhill to North Roosevelt.
Prospects, tomorrow’s clients, crowded the marina’s bordering sidewalks. Forty yards away, three beginners, scarlet-skinned for having misjudged the midday sun’s intensity, posed in Bermuda shorts and polo shirts near the logo-emblazoned stern of a deepwater fishing yacht, laying unified claim to four adolescent nurse sharks. The souvenir photographs would impress the secretaries back in Wheeling. The sportsmen would be facedown in conch fritters before dark, forgetting the name of the cabbie who’d promised he’d take them down to the titty bars for a flat rate, off the meter.
Three or four offshore charter boats filed under the bridge, returning to their slips. The captains faced astern, worked levers behind their backs, playing their twin V-8s, alternating forward and reverse as they backed into slips. Easy as wedging their bottoms into reclining chairs.
Sam sneaked up on me. I didn’t notice the flutter of his 90-horse Yamaha until it shut down. I turned just in time. He’d tossed a dock line at me. Sam stood forward in
Fancy Fool,
his bare sixteen-foot Maverick Mirage, a flat-bottomed skiff designed for chasing the permit, bonefish, and tarpon that feed in grassy shoals and winding flats channels. He braced himself, a foot atop the forward platform. A striking young woman in white shorts and a T-shirt stood calmly at the stern, holding a pair of coiled dock lines.
Fancy Fool,
his bare sixteen-foot Maverick Mirage, a flat-bottomed skiff designed for chasing the permit, bonefish, and tarpon that feed in grassy shoals and winding flats channels. He braced himself, a foot atop the forward platform. A striking young woman in white shorts and a T-shirt stood calmly at the stern, holding a pair of coiled dock lines.
“Say hello to Sammy,” said Wheeler.
I put my beer on the pier and wrapped two turns around a piling. After I’d bent a simple knot—Sam, the nautical perfectionist, would resecure anything I might tie—I stood to help the client onto the walkway. She declined. She’d already looped the far stern line to its post. With confident sea legs she timed her step ashore, then whipped around to take a turn in the other stern line. She handed off the bitter end so Sam could gauge his slack, fix a light-duty chafing sleeve, and snug the hitch he’d used daily for twenty years.
The young lady demonstrated competence and crew courtesy. Her face showed determination and suggested uppermiddle-class genes. As much as sexiness, her lovely shape exuded strength and the health brought by good eating. She had pulled her blond hair into a practical twist. Her extra-large shirt read, VISUAL.IZE WHIRLED PEAS.
“Decent day out there?” I fought to quit staring.
“Depends who you ask,” said Wheeler. “She did better than some regulars who think they’re hot shit.”
“Shit’s the word. And I apologize for that.” Sammy’s magnolia tones, in eight words, carried the history of the Deep South.
“Tomorrow, all hits, no misses.” Sam freed the lock on his dockside box and raised the lid. Sammy lifted out a folding bicycle with small wheels, quick-adjust height clamps for the seat and handlebar, and a mid-frame hinge. She rigged the bike, pulled a set of keys from her pocket, and strung them on the handlebar. A tiny float on the key ring. The yachting crowd and fishing crews knew the huge advantage of not losing keys dropped by mistake in the water. A half-minute later we watched her pedal west on the Roosevelt sidewalk.
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