The Naked Detective (5 page)

I paced awhile, drinking, trying to forget the hospital, trying not to picture the mayhem of the docs convening over Lefty's bedside, stabbing to replace the pulled-out needles, poking to sedate his ravings, hammering his chest to get his insides back on beat. Awful and familiar images of care as violence, violence as procedure.

Desperate for distraction, I went to the music room. I scanned the wall of disks, pondered, hummed, and could find nothing that I felt like listening to, not one symphony or song I believed would succeed in carrying me away.

This happened once or twice a year, and engendered in me a subtle, simmering dread. If alcohol and music lost their power to soothe me, what the hell was left, short of really going down the tubes? What comforts would persuade me that it was worth even the small trouble I took to maintain my grip? Here's something that busy people in busy places tend to spare themselves the discomfort of noticing: It would be so easy, so ridiculously easy to let go.

This was not a wholesome line of thought, so I took my drink and fled to the porch. I love my porch. It's a haven of passivity, of presence without involvement; a place where worries seem smaller, diluted by the open air. I have a rocking chair angled behind a dense, anarchic jasmine bush. I can look out through the foliage but it's hard for others to look in. I watch the lime-green weevils chomping leaves, the lizards puffing out their ruby throats. I watch the shoeless locals going by, their cracked heels gray and hard against the pedals of their clunker bikes.

After some porch-sitting and half a glass of booze, I finally started calming down. Perspective grew generous; I began to feel, frankly, like I'd been pretty brave. I'd done the right thing. Confronted Lefty, asked the questions Kenny Lukens would have wanted me to ask. Thank God I'd gotten no answers. I had no idea who Lefty thought I was or what was so important in the goddamn pouch. Which meant there was no more I could do. Now I was really finished. Finito. Case closed. That being so, I may as well refresh the chill on my warming drink.

I was working up the initiative to fetch the grappa from the freezer, when a woman stopped her bicycle in front of my house.

She was on an old Conch cruiser that had a lot of style: hand-painted fenders, pink and green, a color scheme that continued on the chain guard, which featured a yin-and-yang motif. Wire baskets, front and back. When she stepped down from the seat, I saw that it was covered with what appeared to be a remnant of a blue shag rug.

She headed for my porch stairs and I hunkered lower behind the jasmine, shrinking from some fresh irritation, some new demand. I took a moment to pray she had a wrong address or was selling raffles. Not noticing me in the shadow of the foliage, she moved to the door and peered, a little nosily, I thought, through the screen. I waited for her to raise her hand to knock, then said, "Can I help you?"

Nothing clicked at first, and I looked at her harder. She was not your usual-looking woman, but I was pretty sure that she was female. Her hair was reddish—the kind of red that hides inside of brown then flashes forth in certain types of light. Except for feathered sideburns and a fringe at the nape of her neck, it was fitted closely to her scalp, and reminded me a little of the helmet Snoopy wears when playing pilot. Her dress was basically a long black sleeveless T-shirt, and beneath it her unfettered breasts jiggled slightly in a manner that vinyl could not emulate. Her calves were lean and smooth but she had stood firm against the bourgeois impulse to shave her armpits.

"He wasn't gay," she said. "He cross-dressed now and then. Two very different things. He was a complicated person. A dear person. Can we talk?"

I looked down at a lime-green weevil chomping on a leaf. I didn't feel like talking, not about Kenny Lukens at least, but I was raised to be polite and I didn't see how I could kick this person off my porch. "Listen," I said, "I really don't want—"

"Please," she said, her voice dropping to a companionable whisper. "You and me—you realize we might be the only two who know that it was Kenny out there?" She gestured in the general direction of Tank Island—excuse me, Sunset Key.

"What we have to talk about? What it would accomplish? It won't accomplish anything. Kenny's gone. It's finished. That's why I feel like talking. Understand?"

I didn't understand. But already I was getting to like this woman's voice. There was something in it that reminded you that it was made of breath. "What's your name?" I asked her.

"Maggie."

"Nice name." I paused and sipped my drink and looked at her some more. She had steady gray eyes, innocent of makeup, and her top lip was prominent, Egyptian almost; the center of it dipped down into a sensuous nub. She had a depth of tan that only locals get, a tan that, like the polish on good marble, seemed to reach a ways beneath the surface; yet her skin looked very supple, faintly moist with herbal things. "Can I tell you something, Maggie? I just got home from Lefty Ortega's bedside, and I'm feeling pretty lousy."

All she did was close her eyes and deeply sniff the still and humid space between us. Looking back, I guess that was the moment I began to fall a little bit in love with her. No, wait—that's glib and quick and overly dramatic, exactly the kind of thing a detective story makes a person say. Let's just leave it that I was impressed as hell that she could divine the presence of grappa vapors in the air; and intrigued by the guiltless pleasure in her face as her eyes fell closed.

"Come on inside," I said. "I'll pour you some."

We went into the living room. She claimed a corner of the sofa, sitting diagonal and crossed-legged so that her long dress stretched across her knees and made a basket of her lap. I fetched grappa. We clinked glasses and then I retreated to a chair. She gestured toward the walls, which have some pictures on them. Not museum grade but not crap either and some care had been taken with the framing.

"Nice place," she said. "You have a trust fund?"

It was such a marvelously gauche question that I snorted. Clearing liquor from my sinuses, I said, "Excuse me?"

"Come on," she said. "No one makes money in this town. You live like this, either you're retired or you have a trust fund."

It so happens that my father was a furniture salesman who died broke. I didn't have a trust fund. "Let's leave it at retired."

"What from?"

"Nothing important," I said. The under-statement of the year. I sipped my drink and changed the subject instantly. "Where do you live?"

For some reason she seemed surprised I didn't know. "That's how I met Kenny. I live in the boatyard."

Brilliantly I asked, "On a boat?"

"Broken-down old trawler," she said. "Cheap and roomy. Propped in a cradle. All the romance of living aboard without the nuisance of actually being in the water."

"Ah," I said.

That seemed to wrap up the discussion of affordable housing, and there was a lapse in the conversation. Lapses are dangerous.

"Pete," Maggie said—it was the first time, except for introductions, that she'd used my name, and she helped herself to it just like she'd claimed the corner of the couch, with an utter lack of formality or self-consciousness—"did Kenny tell you he was being followed?"

I felt my fingers clench around my sweating glass. "Now wait. I thought you said—"

"That it's over. That there's nothing to accomplish." She gave a pained little smile that was not quite an apology. "I know, I know. But it haunts me. . . . Did he say anything to you about it?"

I blew some air between my lips and tried to remember. The effort made me realize that I'd had a lot to drink. "He might have mentioned something," I vaguely said, and drank some more. "I don't think he gave details."

"Well, I'll give you a detail. These people who he thought were following him—I think they were the same people who came snooping around the boatyard right after he disappeared."

"Two years ago?" I said.

She nodded. "The boatyard's like a little village. Everyone knows everyone. People look out for each other. Someone's there who doesn't belong, it's noticed. Right after Kenny took off, two guys started hanging around. Someone caught them boarding Kenny's boat, called the cops. The cops never showed."

"There was something very strange about them," she said, and sipped some grappa. "Strange two years ago. Strange a couple days ago. Too strange to be coincidence."

I leaned forward in my chair and waited for her to tell me what this strange thing was. She shifted her hips. She smoothed her skirt. By now I was leaning so far forward that my shirt pulled away from my chest.

Finally she said, "They were wearing snorkels."

"Snorkels?"

"Snorkels."

I took a moment to process this. Hit men wore trench coats. Bank robbers mashed their faces in stockings. Snorkels I did not know what to make of. "And flippers?" I asked.

"No flippers. Just snorkels and masks. You know, boatyard and all, I guess they figured they'd blend. Lot of people wear snorkels when they're scraping barnacles, brushing off algae."

I rubbed my chin sagaciously. "But isn't that if the boats are in the water?"

"Exactly."

"Exactly what?"

"These guys weren't in the water. That's why they looked strange."

I scratched my ear. "More grappa?"

"I shouldn't. I have a class. Well, maybe just a little."

I got up to fetch the bottle.

As I was tipping it into her glass, she said, "You think about it, it was a pretty good disguise. I mean, everybody looks the same in a snorkel. Have you noticed?"

I refreshed my own drink and conjured images of guys in snorkels. Lips puffed out like clowns' around the chunky mouthpieces. Bundles of salty hair plastered inside foggy masks. Pastel plastic breathing tubes that always went askew while glaciers of snot came oozing from tormented noses. "I've noticed that everyone looks like a horse's ass," I offered. "These guys can't be too bright."

I'd made it to the freezer and was stashing what was left of the bottle when Maggie said, "So it shouldn't be too hard to find them."

I took a step back toward the living room. "Don't even think about it."

I reclaimed my chair and glass. I took a swig and looked hard at my guest, almost daring her to push me on this one. She didn't, which I found disarming. She just stared gently back. Her unadorned mouth was calm and still, and at the edge of my vision, though I tried to shut it out, I saw a tuft of tinselly red hair protruding through the cleft between her arm and chest, and I tried not to admit I found it awfully sexy.

Maggie looked past me to the changing light through the window. It's how she told time, I guess. "I have to get to class," she said, and without hitch or hurry she was on her feet.

She just pressed her lips together and moved smoothly down the porch steps. I watched her climb onto her bike with the yin-yang on the chain guard and pedal off.

Next morning I got beat again at tennis, this time by an old slicer-and-dicer whose forehand is a tic and whose backhand is a weaselly, contorted little push—a guy I really shouldn't lose to. Not to make excuses, but I had a couple of pretty good ones. For one thing, I was hung over from the grappa. For another it was sort of on my mind that maybe I was wanted for murder.