The Naked Detective (6 page)

On my way to Bayview Park, I'd stopped, as usual, before the rank of newspaper machines in front of Fausto's market. And there, above the fold in the
Sentinel
, was word that Lefty Ortega was no more.

I should not have been surprised—though of course I'd wanted to believe that the docs would get the tough old bastard stabilized, that he'd resume his wigged-out drifting toward the end, and that the crisis precipitated by my visit somehow wouldn't count. So I forced myself to act like I was shocked, riffled quickly through a weak repertoire of amazement—the caught breath, the tsking of the tongue. Then I dug two quarters from the bottom of my tennis bag, and, in what was quickly turning into an unhappy and life-draining habit, I bought the goddamn paper and read it standing on the sidewalk.

The article did not specify the time of Lefty's death, but said that it was afternoon. This sent me delving into morbid subtleties. If he was dead by the time the running medics reached his bedside, did that mean I killed him? How about if he jerked and gurgled another twenty minutes? How about an hour? Did some kind of buzzer go off when the period of guilt expired? But come on, the guy was dying anyway. Then again, everybody murdered is dying anyway. Maybe the miserable bully had one kind and charitable thought left in him, one instant of joy, one spoonful of redemption. When could you say with certainty that somebody was finished?

This philosophical muddle soon gave way to practical considerations, in the midst of which I vaguely realized I was thinking like a criminal. Who'd seen me at the hospital? I'd asked for Lefty at Intensive and at Critical. There was a duty nurse in Hospice who'd probably noticed me hanging around; there was the smiling woman with the cart of magazines. And there was Lefty's daughter—at least I assumed that's who she was. We'd exchanged a glance when she came out of the room, and it had seemed to me that her eyes were dry enough to see through. All these people were witnesses, potential enemies. I wasn't used to having enemies. I wasn't used to feeling furtive. And, now that I thought of it, I'd never regarded myself as an unhealthy person to be around. Why was everyone I met suddenly dying?

Distractedly scanning the rest of the front page, I noticed a small follow-up item about the killing on Sunset Key. The cops had still not managed to identify the victim. Big surprise. They were asking anyone with information to come forward. Fat chance. No chance now. Let them figure out on their own who Kenny Lukens was, and that these two deaths were, in some murky way, connected.

I threw the paper in the garbage, as if by trashing that one copy I could erase the day's events. A homeless guy came along and plucked it out ten seconds later. I continued on my way to tennis, and of course I played like shit. Who wouldn't have?

But the strangest thing about that tennis game was that I didn't go home afterward. I always go straight home from tennis. Get out of my sweaty clothes, have a soak or a swim, analyze, regroup. This, I realize, may seem like just some aimless, trivial routine. To me it's much more serious than that. It's ritual, one of those carefully evolved, scrupulously repeated patterns that define a life, that make it recognizable to the person living it. Violate those rituals, disrupt those private ceremonies, and who knows what else will go ker-blooey?

Still, when I'd packed up my gear and dropped it in the basket of my bike, I just couldn't get the thing to steer toward home. It pointed stubbornly downtown and toward the harbor. Gradually I understood that it was pointing toward Redmond's Boatyard. I felt I had no choice but to follow it, even though I couldn't tell if it was Kenny Lukens or Maggie the yoga teacher I needed to get closer to.

Redmond's is at the north end of the Bight, at a nick in the shore that not long ago was known as Toxic Triangle. The old electric plant looms over Toxic; the gigantic coast guard pier hems in one side of it. The water part of the Triangle used to be a seedily carefree place where nobody paid rent and hardly anyone had all their teeth. Derelict boats tied lines to tilted pilings or settled gently into dockside muck; their denizens nailed lawn furniture onto splintery decks and lived on six-packs and pork rinds. People slept in hammocks slung from masts, and scruffy dogs ran around with fish heads in their jaws.

Local wisdom had it that Toxic was too funky and too outlaw ever to be gentrified. Ha. It's called North Haven Marina now—another of those places whose former moniker has been officially expunged. Costs two bucks a foot to park your boat there for a night, and dock girls trained to call everybody Captain come running up to pump your gas.

A small irony is that Redmond's dry dock used to be the upscale part of Greater Toxic. People actually paid for space there. There were showers, electricity—it was practically suburban. Now, next to the gleaming new marina, Redmond's seemed a blot and an embarrassment. The yard was dusty and unpaved; the vessels anything but yachty. How long till the city found a way to worm out of the lease?

I pedaled through the rusty street-side gate, clattered over potholes and lumps of coral rock. Boats loomed all around me in untidy rows, propped in cradles, suspended from canvas straps, resting precariously on spindly jacks. Maybe it was just my mood, but I found an awful pathos in those landlocked boats. They seemed defeated, punished with exile for their failures. Paint curled on their desiccated bottoms. Their waterline stripes looked futile in the unbuoyant air. Rudders waved at nothing; keels spiked downward to no effect.

I rode and looked around, and after a couple minutes I found Kenny Lukens' sailboat.

I was sure it was his, though I could not have recognized a Morgan forty-one. It was the name on the transom that made me certain—though Kenny had never mentioned the name. It was stamped in gold block letters framed in navy blue, and the honest truth is that it broke my heart. It was called
Dream Chaser
.

There was a fellow standing by the boat, working on it, fairing the hull with a small hand sander. He was spare and lean and his skin had tanned to a rosewood color; his hair was so blond it was white; it stood straight up. He wore flip-flops and a tiny orange bathing suit flecked with paint. I pedaled up to him and said hello.

"Your boat?" I asked.

"Oh yawh," he said happily. His eyes changed to slits when he smiled. His sun-bleached eyelashes all but disappeared.

"She's beautiful."

He beamed. "Oh yawh."

"Had 'er long?"

"Fife months. Buy her almost soon as I arrife." There was pride in his voice, wonder on his flat frank face.

"Where ya from?"

"Riga," he said. "Latvia. Latvian I am. My name is Andrus."

"I'm Pete. You're a long way from home."

"Denks God. Latvia, your ass it freezes off."

"The boat—you bought it here?"

"Right vere she is sitting," he said. "Good deal too. Only unpaid bills is vat I'm paying."

I smiled for the Latvian's good luck though this made me very sad. Why did it always seem that one guy's bargain was another guy's tragedy? I was suddenly troubled by how little was left of Kenny Lukens, how little anybody knew of him, how little it seemed to matter that he'd passed this way. "Know who owned it before?" I asked.

"I tink a local couple."

"Why you think that?"

"Clothes they leave behind," he told me. "Men's clothes, vimmen's clothes."

"Ah. Can I ask you something else? A couple days ago, were you out here working on the boat?"

Cheerfully, he said, "Every day I'm vorking on the boat."

"Did you happen to see a couple of guys hanging around in snorkels?"

"Shnorkels? On the land?"

"Right. Here around the yard."

"Vy shnorkels in the yard?"

"Like, you know, a disguise."

"Ah. Like Halloveen. Pumpkins. Vitches."

"Something like that."

Andrus rubbed the dusty white stubble on his cheek. "No," he murmured. "Shnorkels, no." Then he added, "Vait! Two, three days ago, a couple fellows come racing up on yetskies."

I wondered if he'd noticed that he'd lapsed into his native tongue. "Yetskies?"

"Yawh. You know." He made a motion like revving up a motorcycle.

"Oh. Jet Skis."

"Exectly. This is vat I'm saying. On yetskies they come racing up and shnorkels they are vearing. And I remember I am thinking, Vait, either you are going shnorkel or you are going vit the yetski. Vy both?"

"These guys—you remember what they looked like?"

The Latvian bit his lip, shook his head, lovingly patted the Morgan's hull. "I vas vorking," he said. "Making smooth. Really, I don't pay attention."

"You remember what they did?"

"Did? Nothing. Hang around. Look at boats. Then go. Vy you ask?"

I thought of saying that the former owner of
Dream Chaser
was a friend of mine. But that would lead to way too many questions. So I moved on to other business. "You know a woman, Maggie? Teaches yoga?"

The happy fellow smiled yet again. "Nice lady. Friendly. Nice. Over there she lives."

He pointed across the yard to a beamy trawler sitting on the ground, its only supports a series of chocks to hold it level. It looked less like a boat than like a children's-book rendition of a boat. Its bottom was painted pink. Its flanks were glossy burgundy. Blue window boxes had been rigged up on its gunwales; begonias and geraniums bloomed in unlikely splendor on its decks. I had to smile too. And I had to acknowledge a certain schoolboy thrill in learning where Maggie lived; there was a faint promise of intimacy in seeing her place as she'd seen mine.

The joyful Latvian had gone back to his sanding. Small knots of muscle stood out in his shoulders as he worked. "Well," I yelled above the scratching, "nice talking with you. Good luck with the boat."

"And good luck to you, my friend."

I lifted my butt onto the hot seat of my bike and began to pedal off. But when I saw the Morgan's transom once again, I felt another pang, another primal wish that Kenny Lukens' vanishing might not be quite so total. Pointing, I shouted to the new owner; "You'll keep the name, I hope?"

He looked at me with kind indulgence for my ignorance of nautical traditions. "Oh yes, of course. Must always. Is werry bad luck to change the name."

"Now, on the inhalation
,
tighten down the anal sphincter.... That's right, clamp it down and hold it with the breath…Picture it as a flower closing tightly for the night. . . . This is called the Root Lock pose. If there's any weakness in those muscles, if they start to loosen, just focus your attention on the third-eye center and clamp them down again. . . . Feels strange, I know, but it'll save you problems when you're older.... Inhale, squeeze... Exhale, release ... Inhale, squeeeeeeze ..."

Was I really doing this? Sitting painfully cross-legged on a folded towel, eyes closed and hands resting on my knees, trying to locate some mysterious symbolic place between my brows while slamming my asshole shut among a bunch of strangers clamping theirs?

Yes, I really was. Five o'clock yoga at the Leaf Shed, the one-time cigar factory whose pine walls, a century later; were still faintly redolent of the hemplike musk of raw tobacco. A class taught, in a soft and breathy voice, by Maggie, with whom I seemed, quite suddenly, to be a little bit obsessed. But wait—did this fascination really have to do with her, or was it just an aspect of the nagging itch I felt about the unresolved affair of Kenny Lukens? Besides, could you be a little bit obsessed? Wasn't that against the whole concept of obsession? With obsession it was all or nothing, wasn't it?

And weren't these exactly the kinds of nattering, willful things you shouldn't be thinking about in yoga class?

You should be clamping down the butt hole but freeing up the mind. Letting thoughts go. Declining to hold on. Allowing the breath to carry off the poisons of desire and self-consciousness. Not to mention guilt and bafflement and wondering if the police or other friends of Lefty Ortega would soon be coming after me.

So I tried; I really tried. I stretched and grunted to touch my shins while others palmed the floor. I cramped my toes and strained the brittle sinews of my insteps in an earnest effort to do a kneeling back bend. And, at moments, I did, I think, pay a visit to a different realm, transported there by a heady blend of joint pain and humiliation. Not that yoga is competitive. Absolutely not. Still, I could not help noticing when everybody else's forehead was squarely on the ground, while my face jerked and wiggled like that of a blind chicken pecking after unseen feed.

At least, between my travesties of poses, I got to look at Maggie, who, in a simple blue leotard, was grace itself. Her back was amazingly long and straight, as if her torso were exempt from gravity. When she breathed deep, her rib cage swelled and lifted above a plain of lean, lithe middle. Her arms were the slim but sculpted arms of a dancer, and when she raised them in undulating, all-embracing arcs, the untamed hair beneath them glistened slightly in the dusty light. When her arms were at her sides, reddish wisps poked through the dimpled creases between her shoulders and her chest, and looked just like—well, we all know what it looked like. It looked like something you shouldn't be thinking about in yoga class.

Somehow I made it through the ninety minutes.

At the end I rolled my towel, retrieved my sneakers, and bided my time. When most of the others had drifted off, I went up to the front of the mirrored studio and suavely said, "Yo, Teach."

Maggie was sitting on the floor, pulling on a pair of baggy drawstring pants, seeming to levitate when she needed to get them past her hips. "So," she said, "you came to class."

She seemed a little bit uncomfortable with that. She scanned the emptying studio, and, too late, I thought that maybe it was dumb, unfair to ask her here. Her workplace, after all. "Look," she said, "if the only reason you took class—"