The Naked Detective (9 page)

"Well, I should go," said Maggie, after another pause that I guess was longer than I realized.

She stood up smoothly. I stood up too and walked her through the house and out again onto the porch. Standing there, concern and even affection welled up again, pressed against my faint distrust like a bone chip on a nerve, and I said, "The boatyard—you'll be okay down there?"

She nodded that she would and started down the stairs. Her shoulders stayed level and her neck stayed straight the whole time she was descending, and even as she climbed onto her brightly painted bike.

Back inside, I paced and fretted my way into the music room. I did my riffling-and-deciding thing, then surprised myself by putting on some Monk. Ordinarily, Monk is not someone I would listen to while the sun was in the sky, but this whole day had gotten twisted upside down, and in some cockeyed way I thought that maybe his extraordinary bitterness would cheer me up. I mean, how did you make a melody sarcastic?

———

Some time later
, I remembered the matchbook that was still perched on the arm of what had been Maggie's chair by the pool.

I went out and retrieved it. I carried it around awhile, stalling. I knew I had to call the number scrawled inside, and I knew that calling it would be one more sucker on the octopus, one more tentacle to wrap itself around my life.

I sat down in the living room. Picked up the phone, put it down again, got a drink of water. Finally dialed.

The line was picked up, and before I heard a voice I heard what sounded like an amusement park. Laughing, splashing, brainless little squeals and screams. Finally a rushed but cheery voice said, "Paradise Watersports."

Sunset on a Jet Ski? Slamming my kidneys and wrenching my spine, when the same time and money could be spent on a Puligny-Montrachet? I didn't think so. "Another day," I told the dock guy, and hung up.

And sat there wondering why Kenny Lukens, having fled to the Bahamas and apparently escaped his very messy past, would keep a number for a Key West Jet Ski outfit in his yellow nylon duffel.

If a bike is mainly how you get around, you find yourself passing through the Key West cemetery nearly every day.

The cemetery, maybe five blocks square, is about the only open space in Old Town, the only respite from the grid, the closest thing we have to Central Park. It's a shortcut, a picnic ground, a lovers' lane. And, of course, a tourist attraction. Tourists find dead locals quaint. They love the color photos that the Cubans plaster into headstones; the plastic flowers left behind in plastic vases; the wry epitaphs that flip the bird at Death. Uncluttered palms grow taller in the graveyard; cypresses like candle flames flicker in its breezes.

The only problem with the Key West cemetery is that you can't actually bury anyone there. Beneath a thin layer of dubious topsoil, the ground is solid coral. You need a jackhammer to break it up, and if you do, an ooze of milky, salty water almost instantly seeps through the fissures.

So corpses are either cemented into toe-stubbing bunkers right at ground level or stacked in family mausoleums resembling vast card catalogs. In my thousands of aimless circuits through the graveyard, I'd casually observed a number of funerals, but I'd never really thought about the logistics of these aboveground rites until the day they "buried" Lefty Ortega.

This was not a funeral I should have gone to. I'd been in some degree a party to the old bully's death. If I hadn't actually shoved him into the abyss, I'd certainly poked and prodded him toward the brink. Why show up now and take a chance on being recognized as the last visitor to his hospice room?

Closure, I guess would be the fashionable answer. But I have a deep distrust of fashionable words like that. They blur specifics, flatten the wiggy details of real life. Frankly, I don't know why I went. After my ... my
what?
Not an argument, not a tiff, not even a misunderstanding. After my moment of doubt with Maggie, I'd had a troubled evening and a bad night's sleep, and found myself in that frame of mind where one loses confidence in the hard clear edges of notions like free will and conscious choice. It soothes our pride to imagine that we
decide
. But sometimes it just doesn't work that way. I showered and found myself dressing for a funeral.

The real Conchs, having their roots in New England solemnity and Spanish decorum, are on special occasions a surprisingly formal people, even stuffy in a subtropical kind of way. Not wanting to stand out, I pulled on long pants and a clean white shirt. Real shoes, with socks. Shoes feel very hard when you haven't worn them for a while. Biking in long pants feels funny too, the way they flap against your calves. I rode down to the cemetery, locked my bicycle a decent distance off, and walked toward the assembled crowd before the Ortega mausoleum—a five-story concrete condo, maybe sixty units in all, with one crypt winking open on the penthouse floor.

There were a hundred or a hundred-twenty mourners—a big turnout for Key West, where people pride themselves on seldom showing up. The older men wore suits; the women all wore stockings. It was blisteringly hot. Killer sun is a constant feature of Key West funerals, as drizzle can be counted on up north. You stand there and your neck burns and you sweat. In cases of real grief, emotion opens pores and you sweat even more. The priest sweats in his robes; the workers sweat in their canvas shirts. There is a grim, unspoken worry over putrefaction that tends to keep the ceremonies brief.

I edged closer and heard part of a speech. The guy giving it looked vaguely familiar; I think he was on the city council. He praised Lefty as a pillar of the community—businessman, family man—the standard kind of speech. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Men in snorkels? Guys with blood on their suits? What I saw was a family—variations on a somber Spanish face. The men tended toward the craggy, with bent noses overhanging twitchy lips. The women had very deep-set eyes and the yellowish skin that was a class thing back in Cuba; it seemed to be the chin that determined who would cross the line into a sullen kind of beauty, and who would merely look severe. At the front of the throng I was pretty sure I saw the daughter. Her hair was pulled up, though little wisps had broken free and by now were plastered against her damp and reddening neck.

The politician finished and the priest took over. I looked around some more, concentrating now on the faces that didn't fit the family mold. A few big fellows who kept plucking at their jackets— cops, maybe, uncomfortable out of uniform. Some men I took to be business associates, who comprised a pretty good sampling of South Florida hustler types—dudes with ponytails and earrings, pseudo-yacht club guys in blazers, a fat man sweating grease like a goose and daintily fanning himself like a Japanese lady. The associates seemed not sorrowful but bothered that they had to be here, just like they'd been bothered that they'd had to send showy and expensive flowers to the hospital. If lack of eye contact was any indication, a lot of these people didn't know one another; Lefty Ortega, trusting no one, had apparently kept the various aspects of his business as neatly separate as the mausoleum slots.

The sun beat down. Wet places bloomed on people's clothes. The priest went from talking to chanting then suddenly stopped. Two morticians approached the coffin, which was resting on a platform that resembled a small painter's scaffolding. They fitted cranks to the base, then, with a medieval literalness, started jacking Lefty up to heaven. Soon he was above the level of the mourners' heads; next he pulled even with the lower fronds of the Christmas palms. The mahogany coffin glinted richly in the sunlight; the cranks made a lugubrious and rhythmic squeaking as the struts unfurled and stretched into big X's. Like the last passenger on a balky elevator; the dead man finally reached his floor. One of the morticians fitted his crank into a different socket, and the bed of the platform slid slowly into the open crypt. Lefty was deposited with a chilling thud; the withdrawn platform made a soft ringing scrape, like that of a pizza peel.

A single whimper broke through the steamy motionless air. I guess Lefty had a wife. I guess she was too short to be seen at the front of the group.

The heat-sapped party broke up quickly after that—too quickly for me to slip away ahead of it. The crowd opened so that close family had easy access to the limos waiting in the lane. To my horror; I found myself standing—exposed, conspicuous—squarely on the fault line where the group had split. I tried to shrink back among the other sweaty bodies; short of throwing elbows, there was no way I could retreat. I sidled as far as I could go, and braced for the moment when the dead man's daughter would walk right past. I imagined her meeting my eye, remembering, then pointing, accusing, maybe even screaming. The big men unaccustomed to their suits would lumber through the crowd and grab me. Would they regard me as police business or as an enemy better dealt with privately?

I stood there. Half a dozen very old Ortegas moved past at a pace that was maddeningly sedate. Finally, the daughter; her arm around a tiny woman who must have been her mother, turned to follow. I held my breath. I thought to look away, but realized that such inappropriateness would only be a magnet for attention. I composed my face and fixed my gaze.

And just as I'd feared, Lefty's daughter's eyes clamped on to mine nearly at once. She was wearing a tiny black hat with a veil. I hadn't known that women wore veils anymore, and I'm sure I'd never before been caught in a stare through one. I found it Gothic and riveting. Webby shadows stretched across her brow; her eyes were dark inside of dark, as sexily elusive as nakedness through gauze. Stripped of context, swelling into sunlight, the full red lips were almost lewd. Feeling weird and doomed and dizzy, I thought: If I have to be undone, let it be by such an archaically erotic graveyard stare as this.

But Lefty's daughter didn't flinch, didn't accuse, didn't signal to her father's friends. Instead, she quickly, deftly reached down with the arm that was not around her mother and pressed a scrap of paper into my hot hand.

I swallowed hard and squeezed it tight, and didn't dare even to uncurl my fingers until the crowd had wandered off, and I was safely on my bicycle once more.

———

I went straight home,
peeled off my sodden clothes, and immediately jumped into the pool. I swam a few laps of three or four strokes each, then curled into a ball and let myself sink slowly to the bottom. I liked it down there. There were no sounds, except for a soft hum that you felt more than you heard. Light congealed into a cool thin greenish batter. There was no one there to bother you. I wished I could have stayed there longer.

Surfacing, I did the next best thing—waded to a shady corner and stood there chest-deep in the water. I thought about the note that Lefty's daughter had pressed into my hand. It was a very short note, consisting of nothing more than an address and a time. What intrigued me, though, was the question of when she'd found the opportunity to write it. She could not have noticed me before she was already front row center at her father's funeral. Did she rummage through her purse for pen and paper while the priest was chanting, while the body was ascending?

Another possibility occurred to me—one I didn't like at all. Maybe the note had been written beforehand. Maybe it was part of a stratagem, a trap. The daughter, together with her father's thuggish friends, perhaps, had guessed correctly that the unknown man who'd visited the hospital might also show up at the funeral. But Conch decorum would disallow a violent scene at such a solemn event. Better, then, to lure the poor doomed sucker into an ambush.

One gruesome notion leads to another, and for the first time in the couple of years since I'd stashed it there, I caught myself thinking about the never-fired nine-millimeter in the wall safe.

The mere fact that I was thinking about it made me shiver in the tepid water. Guns really, really scare me; I wished I hadn't let myself be talked into getting one. I'm of the school that basically believes that soft middle-class people like myself should never own a firearm. The first time you whip it out, someone tougher, meaner, and with less to lose takes it away from you and shoots you with it, and you end up with your own bullet stuck in your liver like a garlic clove.

But wait a second. It was the middle of a sunny day and I was standing naked in my bright blue swimming pool. What the hell was I doing, worrying about ambushes and guns, getting myself all jumpy? How had I let things go so far that images of wounds and mortal struggles were poisoning my mind?

Well, however far they'd gone, I could stop them here and now. I knew how. I'd learned the one sure, simple way of avoiding ambushes of all descriptions: Mind your own business and stay the hell at home. That's all it took, and that's what I would do. I just wouldn't go to the address on Lefty's daughter's note. Not at the time she specified, not ever. Done.

As if to lock in my fresh resolve, I took a big deep breath and drifted once again toward the peaceful void at the bottom of the pool. I felt the soft hum of the water, and watched the glinting light, and told myself I wouldn't go, I wouldn't go.

12

I went.

Of course I went. At 7:00 p.m., exactly as instructed. And with my gun still locked up in the wall safe.

I left my house around twenty of. The sun had just set, and layers of pink cloud were stacked up amid slabs of lavender. Heat throbbed off parked cars as the air began slowly to cool. I climbed onto my bike and turned it toward the ocean.