The Naked Detective (22 page)

Her tone, its certainty, made me careful to do as I was told. The anchor settled slowly, as though falling through Jell-O. Maggie cut the motor.

The skiff stopped vibrating and the night went magnificently quiet. Quieter than silence. Wavelets licked at the hull. Now and then a faint laugh or a cough or the ring of coins came across the water from
The Lucky Duck
. But somehow these ghostly sounds did not disturb the quiet; rather, they pointed up the vastness and the texture of it. It was a velvet quiet, an embracing quiet. It muffled everything except the present moment in the present place. Things finally felt sexy after all.

Maggie scuttled forward and sat down next to me. The boat rocked with every lean and gesture; we realized that we couldn't move much. But our bodies touched at the hip and at the outsides of our thighs. I put my arm around her back. She rested her head against my shoulder. Her hair had taken on the salt tang of the ocean.

For a long while we just sat there, sharing warmth along our flanks, not speaking. We vaguely watched the gambling boat. Through our fatigued eyes and with the limitless expanse behind it, it seemed at moments insubstantial, painted on a backdrop. I felt time passing, and was reminded that time isn't just an empty bowl in which events are mixed. It's a thing unto itself, has a flavor and a weight, and as it passes it drags a breeze as soft and melancholy as the memory of everything you've ever lost.

Maggie nestled closer up against me, whispered, "Wonderful out here."

I squeezed her waist and nodded.

The late moon climbed and whitened. A jackpot on
The Lucky Duck
was announced by a flat and trivial tinkling.

A while later Maggie turned her face up toward me, kissed me underneath my jaw. "Why do I like you, Pete?" she said. "I don't know anything about you."

I ran my fingers up and down her amazing spine. "Maybe that's exactly why," I said. Then I added, "But hey, you know some things. You know I'm the worst detective in the world. You know I hate to get mixed up in other people's problems."

"That's what you say, but here you are. I can't figure it out."

"I can't either."

Stars wheeled. A big fish or a manta ray trailed green-gold streamers just beneath the surface.

Time breathed in and out. Maggie gently touched the dry cuts on my hands. I found this wildly intimate and maybe just a little bit perverse.

"Tell me about your life before," she said.

"Before?"

"Before Key West."

I sighed. I stalled. I didn't want to talk about it. Not that I was being strong and silent. Just the opposite. I was afraid that if I started talking I wouldn't stop, that I'd be sucked into a whirlpool of whining and regretting, launched upon a litany of rancid old frustrations and ill-digested disappointments. "What's to tell?" I dodged. "It was a pretty standard life."

"Always lived alone?" she prompted.

I felt the rasping birth of a laugh I knew would come out bitter. It would have been rudely out of place in the empty and accepting night, and I tried my best to choke it back. "Basically," I said. "Especially for the six years I was married."

"That bad?"

"Not all of it, no," I said. "For a while it was pretty nice, in fact. But it got kind of uncomfortable once my wife made up her mind I was a failure."

Maggie straightened up a bit. I felt sympathy and indignation in her posture. "Why'd she think that?"

"Because I was."

"I don't believe you."

I looked down at the water. I wiped mist off the gunwale. Then I said, "You know what? I didn't believe it either. I thought I was a success that hadn't happened yet. I really believed that. Slow learner. Late bloomer. But I'd get there. I knew I would. I believed it for years. I really thought I'd do it."

Maggie's eyes were wide, her face a pattern of gleam and shadow in the moonlight. She said, "Do what?"

Right. I hadn't explained, had I? But Maggie's simple question made me shy. A nervous laugh escaped me. To my great surprise, the laugh did not sound bitter. Baleful and nostalgic, maybe, but almost peaceful, almost resigned. Was it possible that old poisons were dissipating, old defeats losing their sting? How did that happen? Was it the velvet quiet of the ocean, or the sweeping breeze that time trailed like a gown? Or was it Maggie? Was it possible that this woman was not just lithe and supple but could be really good for me? "You know," I said, "it's so typical, such a cliché, I feel silly telling you."

"Nothing wrong with feeling silly."

For an instant I thought this was just a quip, then I realized it was far more than that. It was a credo, a statement of a kind of wiggy and unjudging faith.
Nothing wrong with feeling silly.
A giddy sense of freedom made my hairline crawl. Relief flowed in the form of a flushed heat that came streaming past my collar. I belched out a pure ecstatic childish laugh and decided, what the hell, I'd go on with my silly tale.

Except I didn't get to.

By the time I was ready to speak again, a new sound had started scratching at the quiet. It was a high nattering buzz, faint and distant but becoming less so.

Maggie and I stiffened like hunting dogs. Scanning the ocean, we saw nothing but wreaths of vapor doing a weird slow boil on the surface, rising up to meet faint damp curtains that weren't quite clouds. But small craft were approaching; there was no doubt of it. We felt more than heard them as they thumped and whined, tugging at and wrinkling the carpet of the sea.

A minute passed, two minutes, then finally we saw the rooster tails, tinselly silver in the moonlight, cresting and dissolving like the spray from city fountains. There was a pair of them, as I thought there'd been the night before. They were approaching from the east—from the direction of Key Largo, Miami, the Bahamas, a million other places. Maggie reached down and grabbed the binoculars she'd borrowed.

I watched
The Lucky Duck
to see if there would be some signal, a flash of warning or of welcome. But tonight there was no beacon, and the Jet Skis kept approaching. Two hundred yards or so from the mother ship, they slowed to idle speed. The rooster tails subsided; the craft rocked with the last of their momentum. The drivers, as far as I could tell, were wearing short-sleeved and short-legged wet suits; the big plastic zippers glinted in the moonlight. Their goggles did too, and made them look unearthly.

The Jet Skis edged around the stern of the gambling boat and floundered there a moment, motors softly burping. I realized I was squeezing the gunwale of the skiff, sharp aluminum biting deep into my fingers. They were about to pass off the smuggled goods. I was about to witness it.

Maggie handed me the binoculars; I pressed them to my exhausted eyes. The glasses brought me closer but also exaggerated motion—every wavelet, every lean. The image blurred and bounced; I struggled to hold steady, expecting to see ... what? I guess I expected pouches. Pouches like the one that Kenny Lukens died for; produced from mysterious compartments in the innards of the Jet Skis.

But in fact there were no pouches. In fact there was no handoff. What actually happened was something altogether different and totally befuddling.

The Jet Skis idled until a hinged panel was lowered from the transom of
The Lucky Duck
. The panel became a platform hovering barely above the surface of the water. One at a time the Jet Skis bumped up against the platform and were yanked aboard by a thick silhouette, a figure shorter and more muscular than that of Mickey Veale. The Jet Skis, their drivers—everything vanished into the belly of the gambling ship. All that was left was a faintly roiled piece of ocean with some dying eddies in it.

Baffled, disbelieving, I kept on watching. After a moment some boards creaked faintly; a winch groaned as chain links grated. The platform lifted once again, the transom of the boat sealed off, and it was as if nothing whatsoever had transpired.

I lowered the binoculars, let out the breath I'd been holding.

I looked at Maggie. Maggie looked at me. The letdown and bewilderment were all there in the glance we shared. We didn't even need to shrug.

We sat there awhile longer unwilling to accept that nothing more would happen, that there'd be no bigger payoff for our numb butts and our cramped legs and our sleeplessness. But time breathed by, and nothing happened, and there was no bigger payoff.

Eventually Maggie said, "Head in?" But it wasn't really a question and she was already moving back to start the engine when she said it.

The skiff rocked as she yanked the starter cord. The flywheel clattered, gas exploded in the cylinder; but the motor didn't catch. She pulled again, and then again. The groaning of the piston and the splutter of exhaust grew louder with each try, and I started getting paranoid that we were making too much noise. I could not afford to be seen out here; I could not afford to get caught annoying Mickey Veale again. True, our dinghy was a mere speck on the water; with a low profile and no lights whatsoever. But we'd found the Jet Skis in the moon glow; anybody with binoculars could easily find us if he had a reason to look in our direction. I felt my stomach tightening with each abortive grind and pop; I kept expecting to be raked with a searchlight from the gambling boat.

But the light didn't come, and at last the old engine turned over. With my back stiff and arms weak from fatigue and inactivity, I raised the anchor, and we veered away from
The Lucky Duck
and slowly headed back toward land.

Maggie couldn't specify, and I think we both knew we were grasping, pretending to some insight that would make this errand seem to have been worthwhile. But in truth the errand was a washout. We were supposed to learn what Mickey Veale was smuggling. We were supposed to figure out if it could somehow be connected to a blackmail scheme aimed at the Ortegas. But we'd sat there all night and figured out zilch. How could we learn what Veale was smuggling on the Jet Skis if he swallowed up the whole damn Jet Ski?

Sulking, we continued in. The first hint of day appeared in the east. It was extremely undramatic. The black sky turned purple and pushed up from the horizon like a fat man struggling to lift himself from bed. Stars flickered and went out. Off in the distance, Key West slept under the powdery orange blanket of its streetlights.

As the purple was taking on its first tinge of dark red, Maggie said above the clatter of the motor, "But you never finished your story."

"Hm?"

"Your life before," she said. "What you were almost a success at."

I puckered up my face and shook my head. I didn't see the point of resuming that conversation. I half regretted having started it, though I couldn't say exactly why.

"Oh come on," coaxed Maggie, "don't get all tight and cool again."

Tight and cool? I'd never thought of myself as tight and cool. I was just plain tired. Tired and gloomy and afraid. Besides, there are things you can whisper into a velvet quiet that you wouldn't shout above the ugly whining of an outboard engine.

Was that enough excuses?

"Pete," she said, "it isn't fair. You can't just break off in the middle."

I had to laugh at that. She puts her clothes back on after sitting naked by my pool and showing me her breasts, and I can't break off in the middle? Plus there was another reason that the comment struck me bleakly funny. I said, "I always broke off in the middle. Why do you think I failed?"

"Stop saying you failed." Then she added, "Failed at what?"

I squeezed my knees. I blinked toward the sky. Mauve seams showed now between steely slabs of cloud; even their wan light was enough to hurt my eyes. I was worn down, nerves abraded, slaphappy. Finally I said, "Okay, okay, what I failed at, what I was trying to do ... I was trying to be a writer."

"What?"

Had I choked on the humiliating word, or was Maggie forcing me, for some therapeutic or sadistic reason, to repeat the galling and preposterous admission? I said it again. It sounded brassy and mocking in the vacant twilight.

Maggie said, "I knew it!"

"Then why'd you have to ask?"

She didn't answer that. She said, "Were you already rich by then?"

"I'm not rich," I said. "And that's a really gauche question."

"It's not gauche. It's direct."

"Well, the direct answer is that I was basically broke. The money I made, that happened later."

"So you were living off your wife?"

"Christ, Maggie—"

"No value judgment," she said. "I'm just trying to understand. She supported you?"

I blew air past my gums and vaguely wondered how I'd fallen into this ambush of a chat. Resigned, I said, "She was a lawyer. Made good money, liked the idea of having an artsy type in the family. Made her feel unconventional, I guess. But the novelty wore off."

"So she left?"

I nodded. I hadn't blamed her then and I didn't blame her now. True, her leaving stung me, shook me, but that had more to do with pride than love.

Maggie paused but wouldn't quit. She said, "So what kind of writer are you?"

"
Was
I." I scratched behind my ear. "I guess I'd have to say I was the kind of writer who never quite finished anything. Clever beginnings, interesting middles, then nothing."

"Couldn't figure out the ending?"

"Nah, it wasn't that. Maybe some days I told myself it was—but it wasn't. Any idiot can figure out an ending. Finishing is something else."

"What else?"

"Finishing takes . . . what does it take? Conviction. Confidence. Takes believing that you've earned it."

"And you didn't think you'd earned it?"

I just shrugged to that.

"How come?"