Octopus Alibi (5 page)

Dexter Hayes had grown up in Key West, but he had worked for the city for only six months. He had come from Boynton Beach SWAT to fill the detective slot vacated when Fred Liska ran for sheriff. Dexter was the only son of “Big Dex” Hayes, a large-sized, low-level manipulator who, for years, had run victimless rackets in Key West’s black section. Big Dex had made no secret of his work. Even a newcomer like me knew his legend within months of arriving on the island. Folks assumed that white men controlled Big Dex’s puppet strings. In the mid-Nineties, Big Dex made cash demands, acted too big for his britches, and his protection blew away. Deputies knocked on his door one morning before dawn. He spent two years reconsidering his leverage at Union Correctional.

Dexito, as young Dexter was called, had left for college within weeks of his high school graduation. Except for rare visits to his parents’ home, he hadn’t returned until he’d accepted this new job. Many old locals wondered if he hadn’t come back to rectify the bad his father had done in the Sixties and Seventies. A few wondered aloud if his job was a ruse, if he was setting himself up to follow in the big man’s footsteps.

Dexter dumped his coffee dregs into a crown-of-thorns shrub. “You can thank me now or later. Technically, we have a crime scene, a violent death with no witnesses. You, on the other hand, have a skate gig. You don’t have a body, and you don’t have to hurry, except I don’t want you to take all night.”

“He was in that van I saw go?”

“He was in it. Go around back, be a genius. Give me up and down, frontward and backward. You’re here to shoot scenery.”

Had I heard an echo? “You don’t trust me with real evidence?”

“I had to call in our marine recovery team, to collect … you know, brain and hair in the canal. I needed to get the remains out quick, due to gawkers in boats and because of the family. I shot two rolls of Polaroids myself. One boat team guy had a camera. I had him shoot the juicy ones.”

“What kind of camera?” I said.

“A yellow waterproof job.”

Wide-angle hell, I thought.

“Waterborne gawkers,” I said. “No wonder it upset the next of kin.”

Hayes turned away from me, stifled a yawn. “Some family members
were
the gawkers. Like they wanted a jump on the eleven o’clock news. Anyway, go run a couple rolls. Do a nature tour, catch some rays. It’s pretty back there. Gomez put the same care into his garden that he gave to the city.”

“Tell me again. What am I supposed to shoot?”

“It’s your job to be clairvoyant. Think of a few pictures we haven’t taken yet. And do me two favors: Don’t touch the shotgun; it’s in my custody, but I don’t feel like toting it around. After you’re done, draw me a scene diagram, like you learned to do in your correspondence course.”

Dexter had ordered me to boost my forensic skills if I wanted to keep working for the city. I had never signed up for the course.

He let my mind fumble, then said, “Just kidding.”

“Come steer me around,” I said. “Help me document the air.”

“What, I should hold your hand? I’d rather stand in the shade, save my energy so I can authorize your paycheck.”

I exited the walkway. The police marine recovery team—four men the size of Mark McGwire with skin the color of Sammy Sosa’s—had blocked the canal with “Crime Scene” tape. They wore wet suit vests and shorts, rubber shoes, belts cluttered with penlights, clippers, and other tools. They looked bored, sleepwalking through the motions. Two sifted surface water with scoop nets. I thought it unlikely that splatter had stayed afloat, that hungry fish had ignored it. An officer in a stubby gray Avon argued with a boatload of irate residents who wanted to get home for supper.

Winding paths split Gomez’s yard into three sections, two filled with Barbados cherry, sugar apple, and mango trees. In the third section, a sea grape loomed above a teak rack that held potted bromeliad. Gomez had built a brick and stainless steel barbecue at the yard’s west end and disguised a large equipment shed as a grass shack. I had never seen so many orchids.

Had he built himself a paradise, then shot himself to celebrate?

I found his body’s outline painted parallel to the seawall, next to a small bloodstain. Someone had chalked lines and arrows around the outline. Tiny numerals noted distances from the mayor’s hands to the shotgun, from his feet to the seawall’s edge. Nothing about the scene looked right. If the gunshot had gone south, over the canal, why had he fallen sideways? Wouldn’t the force have knocked him backward? How had he depressed the trigger, and why hadn’t the shotgun slid farther away with its recoil?

I decided to stop asking myself questions. I had no expertise, no way to answer them. That was Dexter’s job, anyway, and he wasn’t busting his ass to gather evidence.

I looked over at him. He stared back and I knew that he’d been following my eyes, reading my thoughts. I canted my head to beckon him closer to me, to see things from my angle. Hayes shook his head, started back toward the walkway.

“I guess I’m through,” I said loudly.

He stopped walking, tilted his head, but didn’t turn to face me. “Is that, like, you quit?”

“Why should I be interested? You sure the fuck aren’t.”

Now he turned, began to walk closer, but kept his eyes on his marine recovery team. From fifteen feet away: “Did you kill the mayor, Rutledge?” Then, a twist of his head to check my response.

I read his conjecture on the spot. I pulled a boarding pass stub from my pocket, fluttered it at him. “I was out of town, Dex. I flew to the big city and back. But you force me to ask, do you think
anyone
killed him?”

“No, I damned sure don’t,” he said. “I’d bet you my car that Steve killed himself. But if he didn’t, and I’m out a car, I’ll bet you two more cars that his killer’s out front, part of that political melee we both have no time for. Since your alibi’s airtight, I’d just as soon go where the action is, to do my phony-baloney job. Is that okay with you?”

I nodded.

“I liked the man,” he said. “He dealt square and played fair. I don’t trust a single other member of the city commission. What I’m saying is: My job is going to change, somehow or other, and not for the good. I will miss him. If he didn’t pull that trigger, I will find the man or woman who did.”

He didn’t wait for my answer. He turned and left the patio.

Vegetation blocked line-of-sight for most of my scene-setting photos. I shot one roll eastward from the barbecue, another from the opposite end of the seawall. In several photos I included the home’s Florida room with its old-fashioned jalousie windows.

I focused on the jalousies and a short woman inside, whom I assumed to be Yvonne Gomez, the estranged wife. She wore a black slacks and white blouse combo, which, over the past thirty years, had become the uniform of Conch women working at the city, county, or local utilities. Cootie Ortega stood next to her, patted her shoulder, looked to be speaking calmly, comforting her. He glanced in my direction, then toward the police boat team, and then back to me. I was glad not to be in his shoes.

Do estranged wives become unestranged widows?

Another question I couldn’t answer.

I wanted to limit my detail shots to the area near the painted outline. I placed my compass and short ruler next to a chalk line, took a close-up, and backed off for two that included the seawall. I ran three to show scrapes on the concrete, then noticed similar marks the length of the walkway. Gomez had moved yard furniture, or had loaded a boat for a cruise. I didn’t want to spend all evening documenting gouges. I ran a poor man’s panorama, eight overlapping frames, to show the canal and the hammock on the far bank. Without stepping on the softball-sized bloodstain, I got five wide angles from the point of view of a man about to die.

I repacked my cameras, took a last look. I couldn’t imagine having time to create such a garden, or finding the time to appreciate it. Ten years ago a boatload of Cuban refugees had found its way into this canal. Sunburned, destitute, they had appealed to a resident for help. They had no way to know that their benefactor, the man who had given them Cokes and snacks, chairs on a shady porch on dry land, was Jimmy Buffett. I wondered what they had thought of his home, his hospitality. Or what they would have thought of Gomez’s equipment shed, a structure that could house a family of four.

I listened to a jet goose its engines at the airport, a half mile distant.

We fly on with our lives. Except for Steve Gomez and Naomi Douglas.

“Hey, bubba.” Cootie Ortega waved me to the Florida room. He held the door to allow me inside, into the shade. “How you be, amigo?”

“Be tired of dead people.”

Ortega agreed. “Always, I’m that way, bubba. I hate these dead-people jobs, but this one, you know … I just couldn’t. Lemme ask, you shoot that Olympus brand, right? You wanta buy some used camera stuff?”

The man saw the handwriting on the wall. He knew that his ace had been played, that his city job was in jeopardy.

I played dumb. “You trading up to digital, Cootie?”

“I’m going to that medium format, Rutledge. I like those
como se llamas
, those Hasselblad deals. I want to shoot art photos out by Marvin and the Snipe Keys.”

“Birds and fish, Cootie? Cormorants?”

“No way, bubba. I can’t do nature crap.” He walked to the door. His footsteps echoed off the floor tiles. He waved southward as if the Snipe Keys had mysteriously appeared on the Salt Flats. “Gonna take some tourist girls out there for beauty work. Little tan titties, butt-floss bathing suits. I’m gonna enter me some art shows, win me a bunch of prize money. Once I lay in my reputation, I sell sunset pictures to big corporations to hang in their meeting rooms, you know what I’m saying? Bucks.”

Grief takes odd forms. “That’s a concept, Cootie.”

He said, “So … how about it?”

“I’ve got everything I need. I’m not feeling all that rich.”

“I’ll do you right,” he said.

“See if you have an Olympus eighty-five lens, Cootie. I can always use a backup. Or maybe a forty lens. You could sell me an OM-4 camera body, if the price was right.”

“I’ll have to look,” he said.

“You do that. Bring the gear by the house, but call first, okay?”

Yvonne Gomez came onto the patio, pain-faced, deflated. I didn’t know the woman, but I nodded hello. She stared at me as if I were a wood post. She was having a bad day, but she also looked like a woman who could make any occasion unpleasant. I turned to leave the sunroom and noticed two glass-front cases on the side wall. One held a dozen kelly-green ribbons. The one that read
FIRST PLACE—CARAMBOLA
was from last year’s Florida Keys Tropical Fruit Fiesta, and
FIRST PLACE—LONGAN
was from the year before that. I didn’t read the others, but I was sure that Gomez had competed well, for years, in multiple categories.

The other glass case was designed to hold four shotguns. Two sets of pegs were empty.

I found Detective Hayes alone on the painted driveway. No city officials, no media people in sight. He handed me the keys to Teresa’s motor scooter. “Marnie had to leave,” he said. “Ms. Barga needed to get to her office for a few press releases. She rode with the city commissioners. She said you’re invited to dinner on somebody else’s nickel. An old friend or something.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“She asked if you’d call her personal cell number.”

I said, “Who found the body?”

“Next-door neighbor. The man heard a boom, thought a gas can on his boat had exploded. He came out to the seawall and saw the truth. He was still heaving in the canal when I got here.”

“Two guns in the glass case, back there in the sunroom.”

“I saw,” he said.

“Gun number three was out by the canal.”

“I know your next question,” said Hayes. “Go on home.”

“You need me to drop off your film?” I said.

Hayes handed me two rolls of Kodacolor. “We’ll split the chore. You drop ’em off, I’ll have the prints picked up tomorrow.”

“Did Gomez have a part-time caretaker for this place?”

Hayes looked disgusted. “How the hell should I know crappy details like that? You want me to go in there and ask his grieving wife about plants and trees? I’d like to be home right now, drinking a beer like you’re going to be in fifteen minutes. But I’ve got to document exit procedures. I’ve got to dictate a report, tell how a self-inflicted gunshot snuffed a damned good mayor. You have fun at supper. I’ll grab a midnight snack.”

“Don’t choke on your fat self-pity, Dexter. You might snuff a damned good martyr.”

5

D
UFFY
L
EE
H
ALL WORKED
out of a large two-story house on Olivia, where I stopped to drop off the death-scene film for processing. The warm smells of his neighbors’ suppers filled the street. He came to his broad, shaded porch with two cold Corona Lights and offered me a cushioned Adirondack chair.

I had bolted two cups of coffee, skipped breakfast, barely touched lunch in Lauderdale, and passed on a banana when Marnie borrowed one of mine. Dexter Hayes’s midnight snack remark hadn’t helped, and beer was not what I needed.

Hell, I thought, if it keeps my stomach from imploding …

“You don’t look so hot,” said Hall. “This one get to you?”

“Other things.” I tilted back the beer. “Hunger and heartbreak.”

“You had a thing for the mayor?”

“Remember those eleven-by-fourteen prints?”

“You sold to Naomi Douglas? The start of your fine art career?”

“She died in her sleep,” I said.

“She had taste.”

I agreed. “She had everything.”

Hall promised to guard my negatives, to not release them to anyone else.

Sucking suds on a breezy veranda was an improvement on an ugly day, but I needed quick bulk intake, token nutrition before stomach acid ate its way to daylight. I chugged the Corona, thanked Hall, and drove the motor scooter to Dorothy’s Deli on Simonton. My belly growled while I read the newspaper and waited for a smoked ham and provolone on whole wheat. Three
Solares Hill
articles in a row made me think of Naomi. An art opening, a Paradise Big Band concert, a garden seminar. I felt pissed off that she had died, more pissed that I had nowhere to direct my anger. I told myself to be grateful for the time she had been in my life. Small consolation. I walked out to the soft evening light, my hand in the sack, clutching ham and cheese. I found Teresa waiting next to her parked scooter. She had changed out of her work outfit, wore a black cocktail dress and extra blush to fake a tan. Passersby might have mistaken her grimace for sun squint.