The Naked Detective (13 page)

Corallo shot a disgusted look at Cruz. Cruz rubbed his eyes. I yawned. This was not calculated nonchalance, just plain exhaustion. After a moment, Cruz said, "Why the hell didn't you come to us? From the start?"

"Come on," I said. "What kind of private eye does that?"

They looked at me with a grudging respect then. No—I just wanted to imagine that they did. What they looked at me with was boredom and annoyance and fatigue.

Cruz said, "Listen, Amsterdam, no offense, but you're a fuckin' amateur. You want to be a PI in this town, get yourself a long lens and go stake out motel rooms. This is police business. Your client's dead. Your job's finished. Stay the hell out of it and we'll forget about tonight. Okay?"

I stared at the floor and made a point of looking like I was carefully weighing the proposition.

But the weird part is that I was weighing it. I should have been the happiest man alive. Absolved of my first felony, and unequivocally ordered to give up the fumbling crusade that was wrecking my small contentment. It was the perfect out, and yet it didn't set right. I felt like something of value was being wrested from me, even if it was a thing that made me miserable. And I found to my amazement that I wasn't ready to pledge to give it up. As if a promise still mattered in this world, I searched for a way to avoid giving my word. I said, "Will you let me keep the jumpsuit?"

It was way too late for anyone to see the humor. Cruz frowned so that his hairline moved. Corallo puffed up his barrel chest and said, "Take the fuckin' thing off. And go the hell home."

I crashed immediately and slept till ten.

I would have slept still later, except for a loud, insistent hammering on my front door. It went on awhile, stopped, then started in again; it got louder then switched over to a tapping on the window. At length I gave up on going back to sleep, pulled on a robe, and went downstairs.

I opened the front door and saw Ozzie Kimmel. This was not a great start to the day. He was wearing a tank top that had once been red. Now it had faded to a splotched and hideous orangey pink, with armholes so stretched that they hung down nearly to the waist. He was holding a newspaper; slapping it from time to time, and laughing maniacally. "Awright, Pete!" he yelled between cackles. "Popped your cherry, guy! You're a real local now! A regular Bubba. Right in there with the other deadbeat fall-down perverts! Yes!"

Beyond Ozzie, the morning was very bright. I narrowed my eyes, and wished I could have narrowed my ears. "What are you talking about?" I wearily asked.

He brayed in my face and slapped the paper again. "Page two! Police blotter, man! The locals' honor roll! The cavalcade of assholes! You made it! Right up there with the lunatics shooting BB guns at chickens and the crazy lezzies fighting over strap-on dildos. Congratulations, Bubba!"

"Let me see that," I said, and reached out for the paper. Sure enough, there I was. By name, in a bland little six-line item. Local detective arrested at murder site. Held for questioning at county jail.

He was used to that kind of thing and didn't take offense. Through the narrowing aperture, he said, "Come on, let's play some tennis."

Tennis? Did I play tennis? It had only been a few days since my routine had been annihilated, but already the aimless, peaceful life I lived before was starting to seem as distant as a half-remembered dream. So I told myself: Play tennis. Start doing normal things again, and maybe you'll feel normal. I told Ozzie I'd meet him in an hour.

"I'll kick your ass," he said, and turned to go. "Here, I'm done with this." He handed me his paper.

I threw it in the garbage and made myself some breakfast.

———

Sometime between finishing my granola and pulling on my sneakers, I remembered that my bicycle was not locked to its accustomed palm.

It had been left behind, unchained, at Redmond's Boatyard when I got arrested. Which no doubt meant that it was gone by now—bicycle theft being Key West's crime of choice. Call me petty, but this bothered me a lot. It's depressing to lose a bike. It pulls you back to all the little heartaches of childhood, all the things that seemed wildly unjust and made you want to cry. Toys that broke the first time you played with them. Ice cream cones that tumbled to the ground. Things that grown-ups took away from you because they imagined you'd outgrown them. Oh well. I tried to shrug it off. I'd walk to tennis. No big deal.

Except I didn't get to walk to tennis.

With a towel around my neck and my racquets slung jauntily across my shoulder, I came out of my house to find two enormous fellows loitering at the base of the porch steps. They were wearing dark and shiny pants that strained across their meaty thighs, and big loose shirts such as one might wear a holster under. They might have been brothers, or salt-and-pepper shakers; they looked that much alike.

I gave them a friendly smile and tried to walk around them. They didn't let me.

"Lydia Ortega wants to see you," said one of them. He said it with a heavy Conch accent, in which taut New England vowels are stretched like taffy by a Southern languor and made lilting by a hint of Spanish singsong. He sucked his teeth right after he said it. His top lip crawled around on his gums.

"Ah," I said. "And how is Lydia? Tell her I'll stop by later."

"She wants to see you now," said the other goon.

Like his partner, he had a piggy nose and the ungenerous expression of someone whose features were squeezed too close together. I tried to figure if these were faces belonging to the Ortega clan. A degenerate branch, maybe. I also could not help wondering how these two guys would look in snorkels.

To this the large men were insensitive. They stepped in a little closer; their shadows fell across me like a mildewed blanket. I shuffled my feet but didn't move. I was pleased with myself for not being more afraid, but I knew down deep that this wasn't courage, just befuddlement. I'd never been abducted before, and I didn't know how to act. Should I scream for help? Should I fight? Pummel them with slashing backhands?

Frankly, my chances of winning by force just didn't seem that good. I let out a long slow disappointed sigh, and vaguely wondered how I all of a sudden had got so popular, and why every confrontation seemed to end with me throwing up my hands and caving.

"Okay," I said at last. "Let's go talk to Lydia."

Driving crosstown with the finger-breakers, I really wished that I was on my bike.

On a bike you can smell what's blooming, yard by yard. You can feel when a puff of breeze starts up from nowhere, and when it fades away, dropping one by one the fronds it had lifted. I missed my bicycle pretty badly.

We reached the giant condo and took the elevator up.

Lydia met us at her door. If she'd ever been in mourning for her father, she was out of it already. She was wearing tight cream-colored pants and a red blouse that draped in some places and clung in others. I wanted to look more closely at the clingy parts, but sandwiched as I was between her goons, I felt a little shy about it. Lydia herself seemed to feel no such hesitation. She looked me up and down, then down and up, lingering, I thought, on the zone between my sweat socks and my shorts. The examination made me feel a little cheap, but I must admit I kind of liked it. With a nod toward my racquets and my towel, she said, "Ah, it's Mr. Casual."

Frankly, I thought it was a pretty good description and I had no comeback for it.

We went into the living room. The AC was blasting, of course, and my thighs were cold. Lydia motioned for me to sit. I avoided the sectional. I was afraid it might still be damp from last night's vodka, and besides, I wanted some space of my own. I settled gingerly into an armchair. The two goons stood on either side of me like giant bookends in the shape of snarling dogs.

Lydia sat opposite me and crossed her knees with a flourish. "So," she began. "You didn't tell me you're a private eye."

It was something after eleven in the morning. I shook my head. She looked a little disappointed. There went her chance to have one.

She got over it. She even smiled. "Pete," she said, "I'm going to ask you some questions. And today you're going to answer them."

I waited. At the edges of my vision, I could see the knobby asses and thick arms of the men who'd brought me here. Their scarred fingers and hairy knuckles struck me as pretty good reasons to cooperate. Yet from the start the interview did not go well.

"Who's your client?" Lydia began.

"I don't have a client."

This happened to be an honest answer but it clearly didn't satisfy.

"Don't bullshit me," she said. "You working for Mickey Veale?"

"Him again," I said. "Why would I be working for him?"

"And don't start that question-with-aquestion crap. What were you doing on that boat?"

"Looking for something. Next you're going to ask me what, and I'm going to tell you I don't know."

Lydia exhaled; her breath whistled slightly. She looked sideways at her flunkies and they squeezed in closer next to me. They didn't hit me, didn't touch me, and yet I had a certain airless feeling, like when you flatten the last bubble in a Ziploc bag.

With fraying patience, Lefty's daughter said, "Okay, let's start again. Tell me who you're working for."

I tried to clarify; I really did. "I'm working for myself," I said. "I almost had a client but he died. Okay?"

"And who was he?" she pressed.

I thought it should be obvious. "The guy whose boat I got arrested on."

Lydia looked a little bit confused. "The Polish guy?"

"He was Latvian."

Her face revealed a profound lack of interest in fine distinctions among the Baltic nations.

"But that isn't who I mean," I said. "I mean the first guy who owned the boat. The guy who robbed your father's place a couple years ago."

"That bartender? He's dead?"

I leaned very slowly forward in my chair. The goons, who might very well have been the killers, after all, leaned very slowly forward with me, like we were somehow glued together. I could not hold back from saying, "You want me to believe you didn't know?"

Time got very viscous when I said that. Expressions chased one another across Lydia Ortega's face. She looked surprised, or tried to. Then she seemed angry, cornered, and I thought she'd sic the thugs on me. The anger simmered down to what might almost have been hurt; the real or fake offense then girded itself with haughtiness, a brittle resolve to seize control again.

Which she did in an instant, simply by seeming to ignore the question altogether.

"Dead," she said. "Too bad ... So. You know he robbed my father. What else do you know about it?"

I wasn't ready for the way time revved back to normal speed, for the pace of her recovery. I felt a beat behind, and spoke too fast, trying to catch up. "I know your father was pissed off enough to have him killed," I said. "I know that, on his deathbed, he was still obsessed with getting back whatever it was that was stolen."

Smugly, but not without, I thought, a certain nervousness, Lydia said, "But you don't know what that was."

"No," I admitted, "I don't. All I know is that it was in a bank-deposit pouch. As for what's inside ... maybe you could tell me."

She smiled at me sweetly, then sat up straighter and snugged her blouse so that the cloth went translucent against her bra. "You're pressing your luck, Pete Amsterdam."

To that I had nothing to say. A moment passed. Lydia crossed her legs the other way. Her slacks rustled and I watched the creases rise and fall along her thighs. In a tone suddenly executive and brisk, she said, "Well, then I guess you'll work for me."

The question boggled tact. Could I tell her that I didn't care to work for lunatics, or nymphos, or front-running suspects? "I just don't."

Ignoring that, she said, "What's your usual fee?"

In spite of everything, I almost laughed. My usual fee? My usual fee was
bupkis
.

Lydia said, "Two thousand a week okay?"

"It's not about the money."

She laughed. Her red mouth got very wide and strands of sinew rose up in her neck. Even the matched goons smiled. Why did people always find this such an uproarious remark?

While everyone was feeling blithe and cheery, I said lightly, "It was a woman who put the pouch into the safe. Your father said that himself. Can you think of who that woman might've been?"

Lydia's spasm of merriment stopped on a dime. There was something unwholesome in how quickly it ended, how radically it changed. She shot me a look that almost seemed to hiss.