The Naked Detective (2 page)

I tried to talk but nothing happened. My balls were half-floating like eggs in a poacher, and it's difficult to lie when naked. I wanted to tell her no, I wasn't a detective, the whole thing was a joke. Then I had an awful thought. Maybe she was from the IRS. Sent to entrap me. They do things like that, let's face it. Feeling ludicrous, I said, "I take on cases now and then."

"But you're new," she said. "Am I right?"

Absurdly, this made me feel defensive. What did I look like, an amateur?

She must have seen the hurt pride in my face. "That's good," she assured me. "This is a tiny town. I need someone who isn't known."

I didn't ask why. I just sat there in the steamy water. There was a silence, and I remember thinking: Now's when she reaches into her purse for a crumbling yellow newspaper clipping. I may not know diddle about being a detective, but I have a certain rudimentary grasp of the detective story. Doesn't everybody? We all grow up with it. It's like the thirty-two-bar jazz tune. We get it without analysis because it's heritage.

And sure enough she reached into her bag. But the clipping she came up with wasn't yellowed, it was mildewed. That's what happens to newsprint in Key West. It sprouts small black fuzzy dots that ripen from the inside out like certain kinds of cheese. Eventually the mold digests the paper and eats the ink and your memories are reduced to wet black dust. She dangled the clipping in front of me. "Are you familiar with this story, Mr. Amsterdam?"

My hands were soaking wet. I shook them off and took the paper.

The headline read apparent suicide in key west harbor, and it so happened it was a story I remembered fairly well. A man had disappeared.

His pants and shirt and wallet and sandals had been found at the water's edge down by the Fort Taylor jetty. He'd left no note. The disappearance had occurred late on a full-moon night, with a strong outgoing tide; the body had never been found. The man's name was Kenny Lukens. He hadn't been in town for long, and little was known about him. He'd lived on his sailboat, which had a broken mast and a torn-up deck and was resting in a cradle on the dry land of Redmond's Boatyard in the Bight. He'd worked as a late-shift bartender at Lefty's, on Duval Street. Seems he'd made no particular impression on his colleagues. Not friendly, not unfriendly. No crazier than most and not obviously despairing. No one knew of drug problems or romantic disappointments. Kenny Lukens just checked out.

This had happened very soon after I'd moved full-time to Florida—which is why I remembered it at all. I'd been feeling both smug and terrified about disappearing to Key West: Was I retiring at a lucky age to paradise, or making the first, half-conscious movement toward oblivion? Kenny Lukens' story had made me wonder what else would have to happen in a person's life so that he'd need to disappear from Key West and toward that ultimate retreat.

The blonde's voice pulled me out of my thoughts. "Some people thought the suicide was faked," she said. She said it with a hint of malice, though I couldn't figure who or what the nastiness was aimed at.

"Faked why?"

She looked down at her fingernails, which were the same pink-orange as her lips. Something unpleasantly playful, goading, had come into her manner. "Isn't that the kind of thing detectives figure out, Mr. Amsterdam?"

"Ambitious detectives maybe."

She pouted. She looked let down. I hate letting people down, which is why I don't have that much to do with people. There was a standoff. Finally I caved. "So you think Kenny Lukens is alive?"

She kept on pouting. She was very good at it. Just gazing wistfully between lashes that were lumpy with mascara. The gaze, the sorrow, the needling hope—they all reminded me how much I didn't want to be a private eye.

I dangled the soggy clipping in her direction. "Look, I'm sorry, but it's not the kind of thing I do."

I thought I'd sounded pretty final saying that, but the blonde just stood there over me. This wasn't how it was supposed to play. She was supposed to take the article back, put it in her purse, bite her lip, and maybe start to cry. Except she didn't. A long moment passed. The sun moved behind a poinciana branch and threw me into shade. I made the stupid, fundamental error of getting curious. "Who are you anyway?" I asked. "Ex-wife? Girlfriend? Sister?"

She stared at me. Something vaguely flirtatious happened at the corners of her mouth. She smoothed her skirt across her hips and waved with the muscles of her stomach. Then she reached up toward her hair. Her polished fingernails slid along her temples, made her shadowed eyes bend upward at the edges. She pried, apparently, beneath her scalp, then lifted off the wig, beneath which was some prickly fuzz not much longer than a crew cut. Tossing the ersatz coif onto a chaise, she reached into her blouse, probed past the lace top of her bra, and plucked out two perfect vinyl tits—which she placed on the damp edge of the hot tub.

Her voice dropped three-quarters of an octave. "How rude of me," she said. "I haven't introduced myself."

"
So let me tell you why I had to disappear."

Like a traffic cop I raised a hand. "It's really better if you don't," I said, and tried to figure if I felt more ridiculous sitting naked in the hot tub with a woman I'd never met before standing over me, or a drag queen half undressed.

Kenny Lukens told me anyway, of course. "Someone was threatening to kill me."

I turned away, took a deep breath tart with chlorine. I knew it would come to this. I knew it! My asshole accountant. Why hadn't I just paid the fucking tax? Would I have ever missed the measly few grand?

"Kenny, look," I said. "I know jack shit about detective work. I'm not the guy to help you."

He went on like he hadn't heard. "Threatening to kill me, and there was nothing I could do, no one I could tell."

"Ever heard of the police?"

He looked down at my swimming pool, and for an instant I thought maybe he was flirting with suicide again. He would have had a tough time. My pool is four feet deep and not much wider. Without looking up, he said, "This guy owns the police. Besides, I was stealing from him."

Great, I thought. Just great. I'm sitting here braising and this admitted crook has just come swishing through my unlocked house, probably sweeping all my quarters straight into his purse. I have no problem with guys wearing dresses but I guess I'm judgmental about thieves. The disapproval must have shown in my face.

Seeing it, Lukens said, "Mr. Amsterdam, did you ever have a dream?"

A heartbreaking question, asked in a cheap, heartbreaking, Judy Garland tone. Did I ever have a dream? Shit, I've had 'em all. Grow up to be a fireman. Win Wimbledon. Do something grand while my parents were alive, while there was someone to make proud. The usual dreams, the usual unfulfillments. Clichés, in fact. Why did they still have the power to wring a person's guts?

"I had a dream," said Kenny Lukens. He raised his face, and the reflection off the water made him look almost angelic for a moment. "I was going to sail around the world."

I admit this surprised me more than anything so far. Call me conventional—I did not think of drag queens as being avid transoceanic yachtsmen. Those tight skirts and stiletto heels seem so impractical for scuttling across a rolling deck. "Around the world?" I echoed.

"That goal has been my life," he said. "The only thing I've ever worked for. Work awhile, buy a boat, sail New England. Work some more, buy a bigger boat, sail the Caribbean. Luck into a berth, crew across the Atlantic, sail the Med. Everything was leading toward the big one, the circuit."

Lukens fell silent for a moment, his green eyes far away. He was seeing the vast indigo Pacific, I imagine, while I was lounging safe and coddled in my eighty-gallon hot tub. It was humbling, I admit it. Shut me right up.

"Finally I thought I was ready," he went on. "Found a nice ketch in Lauderdale, a Morgan forty-one. Bit of a wreck, of course, or I couldn't have afforded it. So I went back to the old pattern—tending bar to feed the boat. Buying one winch, one shackle at a time. Filling, sanding, painting ... Spent two years that way. Fiberglass all over me. Band-Aids on every finger. At last the boat was sound. I spent my last paycheck on provisions, did a shakedown cruise to Bimini, then headed out for real. Hit Hawk Channel . . . and made it as far as fucking Sugarloaf—Sugarloaf Key!—before I got dismasted. White squall, freak wind shift. Ripped the shrouds, shredded the main.

"Devastating. One gust and I'm right back where I started. I limped into Key West and got another bar job, raising money for repairs. But the money came too slow. I needed fourteen, sixteen thousand dollars. How many more nights pouring shooters for drunk kids? That's when I started stealing."

He looked at me without a shred of remorse, and I felt a grudging sympathy. The fellowship of disappointment, the brotherhood of frustration. The rare dream that is accomplished sets a person apart; the usual, thwarted dream makes a bond, brings home to us our baleful kinship.

"Bar business," he went on, "everybody steals. Forty, fifty bucks a shift. Pays the rent but it doesn't get you launched around the world. So I got impatient. One night I faked a robbery."

I sloshed in the tub. "Don't tell me," I said. "Please. I don't want to hear it."

"I had the thing thought out," he rambled. "It was a weeknight. After midnight I was on alone. Only got the hard-core regulars then—mostly tough and mumbly guys who talked like they all had different deals going with the owner."

I heard myself say, "Different deals?"

My visitor shrugged. "Who knows? Treasure salvage, gambling—the guy seemed to be involved with lots of stuff. Anyway, the closing routine was simple: Get the assholes out, lock the front door; balance the register, put the cash in one of those bank-deposit pouches; put the pouch in the safe, and leave through the back. So I bagged the money and opened the safe. There was a second pouch in it. That was unusual, but I figured it was the take from the shift before. So much the better. I took both sacks, slipped down the alley to the harbor, got in my dinghy, and sailed across to Tank Island. Buried the two bags, sailed back. Took all of twenty minutes. It was after four
a.m.
and I don't think anybody saw me.

"I let myself in the back entrance, trashed the office, tore my shirt, called the cops, and made up some bullshit about two strung-out black kids with a gun. As far as I could tell, they bought it."

"They didn't suspect?"

Kenny Lukens sucked his orange lips into a dismissive smirk. "Who knows what they suspected? Who cares? They weren't the problem. The owner was the problem. Lefty Ortega. They phoned him. He came down and right away I knew I'd fucked up big-time. This was not someone you messed with."

"You didn't know that before?" I asked.

"I got hired by a manager. I'd never met the man. I don't think he'd actually worked the bar in years. But now he came in and I was scared from the very first second. His eyes were never still. They flicked around, they jabbed. He had a thick neck with a flat pink scar on it. Hulking shoulders, hairy hands. The cops sucked up to him. He treated them like personal servants. There was some chitchat, then he sent them away, dismissed them.

"Now it was just the two of us," Kenny Lukens continued. "Lefty paced around the office, looked thoughtfully at the empty safe. Very casually he said, 'So, you blamed it on the niggers. Not very original,' he said. 'And not very smart. The niggers don't steal from me. Know how I know that? Three years ago I had a holdup. Couple fucked-up crack-heads. Took me a while but I tracked them down. Had their fingers cut off and delivered to people of influence in Bahama Village. Word got out. Don't fuck with Lefty. So I know it wasn't niggers and I know you're full of shit.'

"He kept pacing, but slowly. He wasn't any bigger than me but I knew he could destroy me. He had that kind of violence that just makes you freeze. I said, 'Lefty, I'm telling you the truth!'

"It sounded feeble even to me. He ignored it altogether. He said, 'If it was just that one pouch, we wouldn't have a problem. I'd fire you. A day or two later you'd get beat up. People would hear. That would be enough. But that second pouch, she never should have left it—' "

"She?"

"Hm?"

"You said
she
. Did
he
say
she
?"

Kenny shrugged, let his hands slap down against his thighs. "I said she? Jesus, who remembers? What I remember is that then he lunged at me. Grabbed me by my torn-up shirt. My shirt and the skin of my chest. He pulled me close and yelled, 'You piece of shit! Did you look inside that pouch?'

"His breath stank of onions and he was spitting in my face. I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make me sound guiltier. He stared at me then pushed me backward. A desk caught me behind the legs and I sort of half sat down on it.

" 'Listen, scumbag,' he went on. 'Noon tomorrow, you meet me here with that pouch. You don't, you're dead. The bag's been opened, you're dead. You understand? Now get the fuck out of my place.' "

Kenny Lukens paused, and I knew it was my chance to bolt. Spring up naked from the hot tub, dash into my house, find a door with a lock on it, and hide. I'd successfully run away from my own dreams and at least most of my own problems. What sense did it make to become a hostage to some other jerk's? But I didn't bolt. I sat there and kept poaching.

"So I left the office," my visitor resumed, "in a total panic. Tried to think straight. Couldn't. I kept seeing Ortega's eyes, and I just kept thinking, pouch or no pouch, this lunatic is going to have me killed. He can and he will.

"By now it's five
a.m.
I had an hour of darkness left, and an hour of a good hard tide. Suddenly my mind was made up: Get out, period. I faked the robbery, might as well fake suicide. I loaded some food and water in the dinghy. Sailed around to the Fort Zack jetty and left some things on the beach. Got back in and sailed to the Bahamas."

"In a dinghy?"

"I'm a good sailor; Mr. Amsterdam. And it isn't very hard. People do it all the time in fishing skiffs, inflatables even. Catch the Gulf Stream and away you go. Find an out-island with a quiet harbor, keep a low profile, get another bar gig off the books ..."