Under Cover of Daylight (10 page)

“Sugar?”

Sugarman said, “Radabob Island. Coast Guard found the
Heart Pounder
run aground. Sunrise this morning. Brought her to Pennekamp Park. Sally Spencer’s got the body at the funeral home.”

Thorn said nothing.

“She’s dead, Thorn.” Sugarman’s eyes were cloudy. Professional mask gone. Just old Sugar. It lasted another few seconds. “Shot.”

Thorn looked over at Captain Ernie tying up at the dock, slow, arthritic. Kate’s age.

“They’re keeping the boat at Pennekamp. Body’ll stay at the funeral home for the autopsy.”

Sugarman looking off at the treetops, the coconut palms fanning the light. Thorn felt groggy, something seeping out of him, a kind of amnesia.

Rosy-fingered dawn. Maybe the fingers were shafts of light through perforations in the clouds. Or clouds in the shapes of fingers dyed red by the sunrise. It was such a simple thing. He’d ask Sarah about it. She’d know something like that.

T
HORN FISHTAILED INTO
the parking lot at Spencer’s Funeral Home, missed by a foot the white Cadillac hearse parked out along U.S. 1. Sugarman following with his blue light on.

The Fleetwood’s brakes shrieked, gravel dust flooding into the car. Thorn sat for a moment, staring at the front of the pink building, gripping the steering wheel. The motor was off but still dieseling.

Sugarman at his door said, “You don’t have to make ID. Spare yourself, man.”

Thorn got his wind back. He climbed out, pushed past Sugarman, and went inside. His first time there since Dr. Bill. The room as cold and dim as a mile-deep cave. The same loud air conditioners, the same dark rug, same smell of something coppery.

Sally Spencer was standing in the middle of the dark foyer. Tall, blond, a narrow, sunken face. In cutoffs and a white T-shirt. Standing in his way. Thorn fought off the anger, the panic.

“Where is she, Sally?”

“I’m sorry, Thorn, I truly am,” she said. She seemed to be edging him to her office up front. The walls in there covered with plaques. Thorn shrugged past her, started back into the dark hallway.

A tarpon was mounted on the wall back there. Sally’s first husband had been a taxidermist. The narrow, shadowy hallway back to the operating room was decorated with his work. Trout, dolphin. A sailfish.

Halfway down the hall Sugarman had his hand on Thorn’s shoulder, tugging him to a halt. Thorn swung around. Sent Sugarman backward with an open-handed shove to his chest.

The door to the operating room had no outside handle, so Thorn had to pry it open with his fingertips. Then he was in there. In the brightness. One of Sally’s twin girls, about five years old, playing on the terrazzo floor. Red and blue blocks, building a skyscraper underneath one of the operating tables.

Sally’s helper, a young guy with swept-back blond hair, wearing shorts and a polo shirt, was standing beside one of the surgical tables, watching Thorn. A fat, bald corpse lay naked on the table, tubes running into the dead man’s jugular and out again, connected to a clear cylinder on the wall. Blood gurgling into the cylinder, rising fast. And the cylinder beside it was pumping an orange fluid back into the fat man. A black bumper sticker fixed to the wall beside the pump said,
MORTICIANS DO IT LAST
.

Thorn steadied himself against the table.

The blond kid scowled and told Thorn he wasn’t allowed back here.

From the doorway Sally said, “She’s in here. This way.”

Sally and Sugarman stood aside as Thorn stepped into the small refrigerated room. Kate was laid out on a chrome rack, still in her fishing clothes. A dark tear through the breast pocket of her khaki shirt. Another hole in the shoulder. Dark stains there surrounding the ragged holes. Her face painted white. Her belt undone, pants ripped at the button.

Thorn stared at her through the steam of his breath. Her expression. Consternation. A serious concern, but not angry. He’d seen this look all his life. Already the forgiveness blurring her frown. A blessing, not a curse, forming on her lips. Kate’s house was all windows, louvered shutters on all of them, but still bright. Furniture from nameless periods, everything comfortable, cotton, pastels. Wood floors, wood walls, beams exposed, a paddle fan stirring the warmth. There were no chairs, only couches in her living room. Four of them, simple squarish things, you could sit five without touching. Covering most of the living room wood floor was a heavy straw rug.

A philodendron vine was growing from a wine jug by one of the front windows, and the vine had made a complete circuit of the room and was starting to lap itself, running along the doorframes and above the window, rising up to twine around the ceiling beams in a couple of places and drooping over the hearth. As though it had spent its years searching for a way out to the sun.

Thorn stood in the middle of the room, Sugarman waiting behind him. It had been Sugarman’s suggestion to come over here after the funeral home, to start the investigation. Thorn had come, but it seemed wrong to him now, to be standing there where her scent, maybe even her breath, still lingered.

There were framed photographs on one wall of the living room. Fishing trips mostly. Prizes, everybody dressed in khaki, all with long-billed hats, usually the men unshaven, the women beaming. Dockside weigh-ins, or out on the water, nine-pound sea trout held up by the mouth at fishing camps, a few from Alaska taken before Thorn, before Ricki. A primitive table where the Eskimo guides were cleaning walleyed pike while Dr. Bill and Kate and some friends laughed, drank, and smoked.

Some of Thorn, blond flattop, rawboned thin, holding up grouper he could still remember boating, and then later as a young man, his first season as a guide, looking serious, standing on the rear platform of his skiff with his pole in hand, all in khaki, long-billed hat.

Thorn watched as Sugarman made a quick inspection of the gallery. Thorn sat on the couch where he’d done his homework as a boy, the one that looked out across the seawall toward Carysfort light.

That was how his nights had been once, read a little Thoreau, do some algebra, and look up, shifting his body so he could see through the louvers the fragile pulse of that marker light, and let his mind roam, first out the twelve miles to the reef and then pushing farther, out past the shipping lanes into a world he pictured as gaudy and loud, chaotic. Bright colors and horns honking, exotic vegetables and market stalls, and water, clear and deep and shadowy, an ocean of fish, larger and more powerful than those he had hauled to light. Beyond the reef.

From that same couch Thorn had told Kate and Dr. Bill that he was getting the hell off that rock. Twenty, a year of guiding behind him. Ready for the gaudy world.

His time away had lasted three months, one semester at Johns Hopkins. It was the only school Thorn had heard of, where Dr. Bill had done his medical degree. One semester of listening to bearded grad students talk about Vietnam instead of whatever courses they were being paid to teach.

Three months of seeing Dallas James every time he shut his eyes, the blood spilling out of him, Thorn wondering if the burn in his gut was guilt or satisfaction. Three months of drinking at wharfside bars and listening to fishermen talk, a language whose words sounded familiar but whose rhythms were all different. Finally hitching home before exams.

Thorn had been sick of hearing about a war he hadn’t even known existed. Worn out from staring all night at anatomy texts and coming to class in the morning to find the instructor had gone down to Washington to a protest march. Sick of the brittle weather, the smell of not enough air in the air, even disappointed with the waterfront, not the same Atlantic as he knew. This one dark and chilly, opaque as oil.

Sugarman asked him if he was ready to discuss this.

“Not really,” Thorn said. “Not really.”

Sugarman nodded, sat down on the couch opposite him. “I called Ricki from the funeral home,” he said. “I told her. I hope you don’t mind. I was doing it according to the book, next of kin.”

Thorn swallowed, trying hard to come around. “So, how’d she sound?”

“You know, like Ricki.”

“I know,” Thorn said, “smartass.” He brought his head up, straightened his back against the couch.

“Yeah,” said Sugarman. “I got the impression she wasn’t going to spend the afternoon crying.”

“You remember how Ricki was. She’s still that way.”

“I remember her friends,” Sugarman said. “I was in love with one of them. I can’t even remember her name. Short girl. Had a tattoo on her forearm, a heart with a dagger sticking into it. I used to look at that.”

“Brenda. Brenda something. I remember her. That’s how Ricki was. Still got friends like that. Only worse.”

“I used to stare at her, Brenda. What were they, punks?”

“I don’t know. Late beats, maybe. Early hippies. Something. That stuff gets all twisted around by the time it gets to the Keys. Who knows? I think Ricki just considered herself butch, big mama for all the outcasts. Did it to drive Kate crazy, I think.”

“Pretty girl like Ricki, with hoods like that.” Sugarman wiped the sweat gleaming on his forehead. “You want to sit out on the porch? Might be cooler.”

“In here’s OK.”

Sugarman glanced over at the wall of photographs again.

“Those were some days,” Sugarman said. “You know back then a cop’s life looked good to me. People didn’t bother the cops about little stuff. A little bar brawl. Some broken furniture. Hell, don’t worry old Morty. He’s probably listening to a ball game or the gospel hour at the station and wouldn’t come out till it’s over anyway. Not like today, hell. With nine-one-one, every time a baby’s howling with diaper rash, the neighbors call in a child abuse. Dog barking? Punch nine-one-one. You know I blame it on these push-button phones. It’s too easy. Used to be to dial a nine or a zero took a commitment. Now you punch it, it’s like any other number.”

“I guess I’m ready, Sugar, get going with this.”

Sugarman put his coffee down, looked pained at Thorn. Slipped his wedding ring off and slid it back on. “I’m sorry, buddy. I feel like I been run over. I’m not thinking real clear. Talking about Brenda, all that.”

“It’s OK, Sugar. I understand.”

“Well,” Sugarman said, starting over now, watching Thorn close. “Ricki said, she wanted to know was there going to be a funeral.”

Thorn said, “She’s already thinking about that?”

“I said probably, far as I knew.”

“Kate never said what she wanted. Dr. Bill was cremated. Dumped at sea. I guess that’s the thing. What else is there? That or dynamite a hole in the limestone behind the goddamn house.”

A flock of ibis was grazing on the lawn, poking at palmetto bugs, silk spiders. Thorn stared at his hands. He could still feel the jolt from shoving Sugarman. Second time in twenty years he’d used his hands that way. Sugarman and the nail whacker, all in one week.

He felt it rising in him. A hot surge. He wanted to wait, push it back down until a better time. This was still business. Questions. Answers.

Sugarman rose from the couch, sniffed. Put his sunglasses on. He cleared his throat and said, “I need to see that logbook. Wherever she might’ve kept records on her charters. Then I got to go take a look at the boat: There’s a couple of things there got us puzzled.”

“Like what?”

“It’s just something. Nothing, really. Let’s look around for that logbook.”

Thorn said, “Don’t keep hovering, Sugar, looking at me like that. I’m doing OK. It’s OK.”

There was a leather-bound logbook on her desk, but the last entry was two years earlier. Thorn browsed through the desk drawers, not stopping for the photos or matchbooks, the old report cards, diplomas, certificates for this and that. Later. He’d manage that next week.

Sugarman wandered through the kitchen, opening drawers, looking around the telephone for addresses, notes. He brought the Sierra Club calendar out to the living room.

“Your friend Sarah. What’s her last name?”

“Ryan.”

“Yeah,” Sugarman said. He put the calendar on the desk in front of Thorn. July. “She spent a lot of time with Kate. Twice a month, says here.”

“Hmmm.”

“What? That surprise you?”

“Some,” said Thorn. “I knew she was here once a month, but more than that, no.”

Sugarman massaged his forehead. “Says here she was out with Kate last Sunday.”

“Yeah, I saw her last weekend. And Thursday, she was down again for that wood rat meeting.”

“Then there’s this on Friday. ‘YT.’ Know what that is? Somebody’s name?”

Thorn thought about it.

“Yellowtail,” he said.

“I didn’t know Kate chartered out for yellowtail.”

“She and I, we yellowtailed some. But not charters. Not as far as I know.”

“Does, uh, Sarah strike you as maybe a little left of center? Maybe outside the law a little?”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t know, Thorn. I’m not real good at this, to tell the truth. Bullshitting, wheedling things out of people. I can’t get used to it.”

“What’s the story, Sugar? Go on, tell me.”

Sugarman sat down on the couch across from Thorn, squared off to face him. “There’s dope, marijuana, all over the
Heart Pounder.
Stems, leaves. Seeds. A half a pound scattered all over the deck. We’re sitting on that so the DEA guys don’t swarm all over this, but I don’t think we can do that much longer.”

Thorn was quiet.

“So, I see this calendar. Sarah down here twice a month, and I think maybe they’re doing a little contraband. Going out to some mother ship. Like a hobby.”

“Sugar, what in the hell are you talking about? Kate! Kate? And Sarah? She’s a public defender, for godsakes.”

“I’m just telling you what there is. How it appears at this moment. Sheriff’d have my ass if he knew I was even letting you in on this. He’s only letting me have a piece of this ’cause I’m close to you.”

“You can’t believe this. Kate? Dope?”

“There’s the remains of a bale. Plastic garbage bag, strapping tape holding it together.”

“Come on.”

“There’s other things it could be,” said Sugarman. “She could’ve been out there. Seen a bale floating by, picked it up, and the owner might’ve wanted it back. Or she’s out there with somebody fishing, here comes a bale. Her charter hauls it out; she tells him no; they argue. Bang. It doesn’t have to be she’s running dope. But the fact is, Thorn, there’s some high-quality pot scattered all over that boat.”