The Naked Detective (18 page)

Or it could until a different sound intruded. The sound was far away, and hard to locate in the wind, but it gradually resolved into the high nattering buzz of small engines—more than one of them, I thought. Early fishermen, probably, drinking coffee from thermoses and staking out their portions of the reef for dawn. I scanned the horizon but saw nothing. The engine sounds got closer, now taking on the rise and drop in pitch that went with little bounces in the chop. And finally, maybe a mile off and faintly mauve in the listless moonlight, I thought I saw a pair of misty rooster tails of the kind that were shot skyward not by boats but Jet Skis. I squinted toward these phantoms, trying to assure myself that they were really there, that they really were connected to the engine sounds.

Then another detail barged in on the night. A cone of light flashed forth on the water underneath me. I couldn't see the source of the light, but it could only have come from our boat. It stayed on for some fraction of a second, switched off, and then switched on again.

When the former dimness had returned, the motor sounds no longer seemed to be getting closer. I squinted toward where I thought I'd seen the rooster tails but saw only a featureless swath of predawn ocean. Gradually, the whine of engines fell away, restoring the flawed quiet of the background hum. The breeze dropped, the surface of the water healed itself; it was as if nothing whatsoever had occurred.

Perplexed, exhausted, doubting my eyes, I tried and failed to make some sense of the dim vague episode. Then my brain shut down and, passive as a plant, I waited for first light.

It came at last as an undramatic paling of the eastern sky, a lazy snuffing out of stars, then exploded in yellow slashes that sliced through lavender slabs of cloud, and seared the retina, and briefly made the ocean red as blood before turning it turquoise.

It was already hot when
The Lucky Duck
groaned against its pilings and was made fast to the dock. I didn't see Veale or Cruz before I disembarked.

———

In principle,
I'm all for decadence. Crazy hours; the edgy desperate drive that peels the skin off life and pushes your face into the tart and pulpy stuff inside—why the hell not?

I just don't seem to have the constitution for it. Up all night, I felt like shit. I'd never quite gotten drunk and I didn't have a hangover. I just felt dull and itchy and disoriented. The morning sunshine embarrassed me; I saw myself as an affront to the day. I craved sleep, but when I'd reclaimed my bicycle from its lockup near the dock, the moving desperate drive that air slapped some semblance of alertness into me and I wasn't sleepy anymore.

Suddenly I wanted pancakes.

Don't ask me why; I don't even like pancakes. But I rode downtown through empty streets and went to a place that opened early and served banana pancakes in an open courtyard full of cats and chickens. Drinking coffee, mopping syrup, glancing around at the other grubby souls who hadn't been to bed yet and whose tortured shirttails had long ago given up on staying in their pants, I wondered, with only minor anxiety, if this was what a nervous breakdown would be like: You still had a self, you still went through the motions of a life, but the life you were living no longer seemed congruent with the person living it. At forty-seven I knew who I was. I was a guy who hit the sack around eleven and woke up to an austere and wholesome bowl of cereal and fruit, a bonanza of vitamins and fiber. So who was this unshaven red-eyed impostor poking sodden pancakes with a slightly trembling fork?

I started getting worried. A little angry too. That bastard Cruz was right—I ought to get a life, or at least preserve the little life I had. Why was I letting it go down the tubes? Well, I wouldn't let it, not without a fight. I would grab a piece of it and hold on, do something wherein I'd recognize myself. I slurped down the last of my coffee and decided, exhausted or otherwise, I would go and play some tennis.

So I rode home, threw cold water on my face, tucked myself into my jock. By the time I made it to the park, it was around eight-thirty and the usual idiots were assembling. Including, of course, Ozzie Kimmel. He was holding forth in the shade of the players' enclosure, and when he saw me he sang out, "Aha! He's here!... You've been dodging me."

I loved this about Ozzie. A more marginal person could hardly be imagined, and yet he kept right on believing that everything referred to him. "Don't be ridiculous," I said.

"Come on," he said. "You stiff me, what, like three, four times already, then you show up on a day I drive. I'm usually not here."

This reminded me that I no longer knew what day it was, still less what days Ozzie Kimmel worked. Vaguely I said, "So where's the cab?"

"Fuck the cab. I didn't wanna. You got a game?"

"No," I said. "I don't."

At that he brightened, but cautiously. He'd been kicked before. But he couldn't quite keep his tail from wagging at the prospect of a ball to fetch. "We gonna play?"

"Come on," I said. "Let's do it."

So we played a set, and, boy, did I stink up the court. Served like hell, volleyed worse, and couldn't find my forehand. This was humbling but salubrious. Reminded me that leisure too was serious, required discipline, even passion. Do it half-ass and it was a thinner, poorer thing by far.

Ozzie picked up the ball after my final errant shot and said, "Another set?"

Slow and hangdog, I walked toward the net. "Oz," I whined, "I haven't slept, I got pancakes churning in my stomach like cement, and I think I'm gonna barf."

"In the seventies. Sure. Everybody did. Marijuana from Jamaica, Mexico, Belize. Came in in bales. Mother ships brought 'em almost to the reef, transferred 'em onto fishing boats. Which is where I worked. Sometimes bales fell overboard. Or guys got paranoid and ditched 'em. People found 'em on the beach. Called 'em square grouper. It was good. Everybody made some money."

Seeking shade, I continued walking off the court. And tried to hide that I was slightly shocked. Was I Key West's last puritan, the last bourgeois? Here I was, supposedly hard-boiled and all that stuff, and everybody but me seemed so cool and so blasé about the various and sundry crimes they had committed.

Ozzie might have read some disapproval in my posture. Or more likely he just felt like talking. "Hey," he went on, "smuggling is the whole story of this town. Rum-running, drugs—I mean, what's the point of living on a dinky island at the edge of nowhere if you're not gonna smuggle shit in?"

Ozzie blew a dismissive, farting sound between his lips. "Aah, it isn't what it was. No demand for reefer. Hard shit's all moved up to Miami. What's left? Haitians? Cuban cigars? I don't really know."

We reached the peeling wood enclosure. Ozzie produced a frayed rag with which he began to dry his hairy chest.

"Well, let me ask you this," I said. "Other than smuggling, can you imagine why a pair of Jet Skis would approach an anchored boat at four
a.m.?"

"You saw this?" he said. "Jet Skis at four in the morning?"

"Let's just keep it hypothetical."

He didn't answer right away. He daintily picked lint from the rim of his navel, then gave in and really reamed the thing. "Jet Skis. That's interesting."

"Why?"

"No real room to stash stuff on a Jet Ski. What they're smuggling would have to be something really small."

The power of suggestion instantly kicked in. I pursed my lips and pictured emeralds. I pictured pearls. I pictured super-fast computer chips. Then I said, "Wait a second. I have no idea if they were really smuggling."

Ozzie snickered as he reached into his bag for one of his appalling tank tops. "Okay," he said, "they weren't smuggling. They just felt like going for a little ride at four
a.m
. What were you, born yesterday?"

The question hung there as Ozzie's head briefly disappeared into his torn and faded shirt. I had a moment blurrily to reflect on all the things that had surprised me lately, all my recent blind-sidings by the unwholesome and illicit moves that people made. "You know," I said, "sometimes I think I was."

Finally I got to go to sleep, and you can bet I made the most of it.

I didn't toss. I didn't dream. I stayed down till 3:00
p.m.,
by which time the full heat of the day had collected and compressed in my upstairs bedroom, and I woke at last, as puffy and moist as a dumpling in a steamer. The pillow was wet beneath my head. The sheet was wet on top of me. This might sound gross but it felt totally wonderful. It was a jungle feeling, generative and raw. It suggested vines and parrots and lovemaking on piles of hot leaves.

I lay there awhile, savoring, then threw off the sheet and rolled over to a dry part of the bed. A new batch of sensations followed, no less delicious than the first. Evaporation cooled me; I tingled at the collarbones and hairline. I felt moisture wicking off my back, the skin shrinking ever so slightly as dampness was coaxed from it. Truth was, I could have been perfectly content for several hours, just lolling there, rolling, folding arms and legs in different combinations, trying out various configurations of sheets and pillows. Why not? Out in the world, things were befuddling and frustrating and complicated. Here, all was simplicity and peace. What's wrong with avoiding aggravation?

But finally, reluctantly, I rose from bed. I headed for the shower, then decided, no, I'd start off with a cool plunge in the pool. I grabbed a towel and went downstairs. Padded through the kitchen and out the sliding door to the sun-baked deck.

But I never made it into the water. I looked down and saw a pair of dead rats floating there, spinning lazily on the current from the pump.

They were palm rats—smaller and less filthy than their urban cousins, but rats nonetheless, and plenty unappetizing. They were just beginning to bloat. Their sparse fur had corkscrewed into tufts between which were lewd bare patches of stretched skin whose color was an ugly pinkish taupe. Their eyes were closed but the lids were an appalling red; their ears seemed to have grown soggy, and futile whiskers floated on the surface. Their tails had been tied together.

With a disgusted fascination, I watched awhile as the rats spun in their morbid circuit, and tried to figure out the meaning of this. Why two rats? Why tied together? Did they symbolize the two murdered men? Lefty and Lydia Ortega? I watched them and pondered. Sometimes their tails stretched out full length, then twanged back, pulling the corpses close together as in a dance routine. Maybe I was reading too much into this. There were two to make it twice as nasty. They were tied together so that I would know a human hand had intervened, that these were not simply unfortunate or klutzy rats that had fallen from a tree. They were supposed to scare me.

They did scare me, but in a delayed-reaction kind of way. I was still too groggy to get frightened all at once. Besides, I had practical matters to deal with. I had to get the rats out of the pool before they decomposed and gummed up the works.

I went over to the shrubbery and started looking for a stick. Call me squeamish—I don't like to touch dead things. If this is a superstition, it's a pretty primal one, I'd bet, based on the notion of death itself as a contagious particle, the mother of all germs. In any case, I found a fallen frond with a good hard spine, then waited for the rats to do a final do-si-do over to my side of the pool. I scooped them by the knot in their tails; they hung down like a pair of sausages; water dribbled from their mouths. I flung them back into the bushes. They spun slowly like the weighted snare that cowboys from the pampas use, then crashed through leaves and twigs and came to rest somewhere out of sight.

I shuddered and tossed away the frond. I looked down at the pool but there was no way I was getting in it so soon after death had visited. It occurred to me to put an extra chlorine tablet in the bobber. Then I sat down in a lounge chair; and finally the fear caught up with me, slow and whispering at first, then clamorous and strangling.

I'd just been put on notice that someone capable of killing was extremely pissed off at me. And all at once it seemed that, in everything I'd done so far, I'd been stupidly cavalier, careless and unserious. My approach had been pure Key West. Which is to say I'd been blundering along through a haze of heat and goofiness as though the standards of the outside world did not apply, as if doing things smilingly half-ass was good enough, because the whole thing was basically one big joke. To an extent that seemed suddenly incredible, I'd overlooked the simple facts that violence was violence, and murder was murder, and death was death, wherever you happened to be.

I sat there for a while. Bugs buzzed; lizards posed on rocks. Then, spinning off my fear; a strange thing happened: Even though I absolutely knew I hadn't touched the rats, I became obsessed with the worry that I had rat on my hands. I splayed my fingers and held them out in front of me so that I wouldn't accidentally touch my mouth or eyes. Then I stood, and used an elbow to slide the screen door open, and moved in a quiet panic to the kitchen sink.