Air Dance Iguana (10 page)

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“You agree?” she said.

The bartender raised his eyebrows, walked to the distant end of the bar.

“I agree with all of the above,” I said. “You’re fine, you’re tipsy, and you’re a widow. How long were you married?”

“Four long years. The last one, I didn’t get a minute’s peace for all the acid reflux and snoring. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful of the dead, but you be the judge.”

“Not my place to say,” I said.

“Anyway, he woke me up twenty times a night. Like to drove me crazy. I could’ve bunked out on U.S. 1 instead of the next room and got more rest.”

“Was your husband the man in the paper yesterday?”

She nodded slowly and sipped her tall drink. “They hung him right outside our bedroom.”

“How far is the davit from your house?”

“Why would I know that? You think I went out there with a measuring tape?”

“Could you guess?”

“I can do anything I want.”

“Give it a shot,” I said.

“Thirty, maybe forty feet. You want to know how many friggin’ seconds it took to walk to the boat?”

“You didn’t hear them out there?”

She began to pout. Tears filled her eyes. “I wasn’t in my room.”

I let that ride a moment. “Were you home at the time?”

“I was in his bed, goddammit.” Her tears began to flow. “I went in there to give him a little, which I did, and I fell asleep after. He, for one time in our marriage, was a gentleman. He let me sleep, and went to snore in my bed.”

“And someone took him from your room?”

“Not without setting off that fucking alarm.” She swayed, grasped my upper arm for support. She had crossed a bridge, said it aloud. She had slipped the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle, and given herself the answer she was drinking to avoid. Her voice softened. “He always slept after we made love, even during the day. I don’t know why he went outside.”

Tinkerbell fell against me sobbing. I lifted her drink from her hand, set it aside. The crying jag lasted a solid five minutes. She used up an inch-high stack of cocktail napkins to mop eyeliner and eroded makeup. A minute into her recovery, she almost launched into an encore.

I was patting her back when a man of about thirty walked into the bar and approached us. He wore a bright white T-shirt and khaki slacks, was almost chocolate-colored from too much sun. Tinkerbell looked up when he placed his hand on her shoulder, then began to gather her belongings. She slipped a fifty from her purse to cover her tab, told the bartender to put the change in his jar.

“Sorry to meet you under these circumstances,” I said. “Good night, Mrs. Haskins.”

Shock filled her face. “How do you know my name?”

“The bartender used it.”

“He did not. When did he use it?”

“When he told me about your husband. He said, ‘Mr. Haskins was killed two days ago.’”

“I don’t think so…” Drinks and paranoia combined in Tinkerbell’s mind. She tried to slide from her stool, almost fell, and was saved by the tan man. He sneered at me, and they walked out, a matched set, the same height and shape.

I tried to gauge the bartender’s thoughts. “That fellow a family friend?”

“Perfect way to put it,” he said. “Sad situation, for sure.”

“You think he’s a landscaper or a housepainter?”

“I asked him once what he did. He said he was a sportsman. Buy you one?”

“Can you make it a double roadie and sell me a bottle of wine?”

“You can put it on your room,” he said.

“Open a Mondavi Cabernet, tip yourself, and mark it all down as food.”

“I can make that happen, sir.”

I wandered to
my room, finished the rum roadie in two minutes flat. I wanted to sit by the canal with my wine, gaze at the night sky, watch the wind toss palms lighted by street lamps near the highway. After what I had been through, I’d be content to stare across the canal at the marina’s beer signs. The mosquitoes vetoed my notion. Drinking alone in a motel room had a seedy aspect to it, but the bugs gave me no choice. Also, the clump of trees on the south side of U.S. 1 reminded me of that chase in high school, the GTO that had gone broadside into a stand of old beech and maple, my deliberate choice to keep on going. Tim’s questioning of my decision had pulled old guilt to the foreground. I hadn’t felt bad about not returning to assist the injured; the sound of the crash would have summoned help from nearby homes. But I had known that the GTO was a straight-line hot rod. Given a few bends in the road, I could outrun the thugs and lead them into a trap. I used my driving skill as a weapon. In my sole defense, I didn’t have a ball bat or brass knucks to defend my date and myself.

Inside the motel room, with a breeze through the screens, I shifted my thoughts to Tinkerbell Haskins. Why would a widow’s grief match the silliness of a college girl on a beer drunk? She had been gruff at first, but sentimental, too. How did that fit her widow’s pose? A more germane question, if by slim chance he hadn’t been murdered: Why might a man like Lucky take the exit road?

I did the math. A four-year marriage, a crumbling relationship. If he’d split the house, cars, and yacht down the middle, he’d shatter his life and sink his boat. Lucky would be bunking in a trailer on Big Pine, fishing off road bridges instead of his flying bridge. Many would consider that a dream come true, but Lucky might have balked. Maybe there were health problems, or he wanted to test the rope’s tensile strength. Perhaps the weight of his name finally dragged him down.

Now I was being silly.

My life, far from lucky of late, was rising from the ditch. Walking to the room, I hadn’t been bothered by pain. The wine was superb. I poured a second glass, told myself that I deserved it, and wondered how I would feel in the morning if I drank the whole thing.

My elevated spirits inspired me to call Bobbi Lewis’s home phone.

“It’s a tad late, Alex,” she said. “Have you had a drug-induced insight to help me solve two murders by noon tomorrow?”

“Nope, nope,” I said. “I still think you have three, the third not connected.”

“That’s a new touch,” she said. “You sound like you found that rum you wanted. Has your mind been working overtime?”

“I just had a drink in the lounge with Tinkerbell. She offered confusing details about alarm systems and swapped bedrooms. She left with a young fellow ten years her junior and not a relative.”

“Damn,” she said. “But thank you. It’s just that I wanted sleep.”

Eleven minutes later I heard a car stop in the parking lot, a door slam, a tap at the door.

“Alex?”

I peeked through the louvers. Bobbi waved her index finger at my eye.

I let her in, coached her through a painless but extended hug, and offered to share my wine. “I got only one glass from the bartender.”

“You use the glass, I’ll drink from the bottle.”

“This is good stuff,” I said. “It deserves style.”

“What am I, some street chick? I’ll show you style.”

I handed her the bottle. She upended it, took a small swig, no gurgle.

“Pure class,” I said.

“Maybe not.” In her first attempt at humor in weeks, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand, shook it off to the side. She stacked my pillows to make a backrest, then plopped on the bed. “What exactly drew you to that bar?”

I took the chair. “Plain old American thirst.”

“Did you hear or see anything—beyond her escort—to make you think she played a part in her husband’s death?”

“Except for a hunch, no,” I said. “I think now that he’s dead, her feelings have come home to roost. She loves Lucky even more since he got un—”

“Don’t say it! You’ve been waiting two days to use that line.”

“I will rephrase.”

“Forget it, expert,” she said. “What do you think happened?”

“A close friend or a family member.”

“Killed him?” she said.

“Your tone of voice makes it sound like I’m to blame for his death.”

“I’m pissed because you’ve been right before. I drove past her house on my way here. There was a small Mercedes two-seater in the driveway. If we double back and follow your hunch, it makes my job harder.”

I reached out my glass. “You’re sure that he killed himself.”

She poured. “Lucky committed suicide. Tinkerbell, at first, couldn’t stand the thought of it, the shame of having her husband go that way. By the time I got there on Friday, she had come to grips with it. She told me she had hidden the telescoping boat hook he used to flip the davit’s power switch. It was on the concrete when she found him, and she hid it in their laundry room. By the way, I need to thank you for a suggestion. Aside from time of day, we found only one aspect of these deaths that matched all three.”

“Longer throats?”

“Identical rope,” said Bobbi. “You told me that they were similar, and we traced it to Ace Hardware on Summerland. They sell it off a reel, any length, cut to order. No one there could remember a single person who bought rope, even in the past five days.”

“Credit-card records show anything?” I said.

“They looked back two weeks, and no one paid for rope with a card. We asked them to go back another six weeks when they had time, but I don’t hold much hope.”

“What about Lucky’s daily routine? Was he an early riser or did he hang late in the sack?”

She paused and studied my face. “And that will tell us…”

“If he woke up every day at dawn and took a walk, maybe he ran into a friend, invited him back to the house for coffee. That sort of thing.”

Bobbi squinted at me, daring me to have my own thoughts. “Not only was he murdered, but it was by someone he knew?”

“Worth a try,” I said. “Check the probability tables. Friends and family and all that.”

“What is it you want out of this?”

“It’s not like I’m one of your so-called colleagues, trying to rob you of a collar.”

“Change the subject,” she said. “Why do you think Liska sent you to Marathon?”

“I think he feels trapped in his role of being sheriff. He has to delegate work to his employees, but he feels left out of the action loop. He wants me to be the detective version of himself, do the investigative work, keep him informed. Something inside him needs that.”

“For once I feel sympathy. I hope he feels some for me, because I’m tapped for clues.”

“Tell me how Kansas Jack lived each day.”

She took another taste of wine. “Dirt aside, it was like the man lived in a rental condo.”

“Everything new?” I said.

“It was funky but new in the last few years. He had no keepsakes, except for that photo and the Zippo lighter. Nothing looked old except for two things. Some tools and a carton of flashlights. The house looked like he had left somewhere with nothing but the clothes on his back, then did a splurge at Kmart.”

“So, he was a neat freak. He chucked the used-up and replaced the old.”

“But we always have junk. A cracked coffee mug full of ballpoints that haven’t worked in years. Or hot pads, or an iron skillet, or dish towels from the 1970s. You’ve lived in the same house for how long? Maybe you don’t grasp what I’m saying. I got divorced fourteen years ago, high and dry, with no possessions but a Dodge Omni and an old Scrabble game. You wash up like that, you have to find new mementos and touchstones to make you feel less temporary, the smallest bit permanent.”

“So these new keepsakes,” I said. “Are they to remind you of current events, or past events, or of the old keepsakes you lost?”

“I never thought about it. I guess old keepsakes. There’s a shitload of the past I don’t want to recall without serious editing.”

“What made you think the flashlights were old?”

She looked down, let her mind go back. “The box looked beat-up, water-stained.”

“How many of them?”

“It was a small box. It probably held twelve. Eight or nine were left. They were gray and had numbers on them. And one other thing I noticed. His shaving kit was an old leather job with lots of mileage.”

“How about his toolbox? New, old, medium?”

“The box was new. It was Home Depot orange. Most of his tools were new, too, like the screwdrivers. But there were five or six old-looking pipe wrenches and pliers.”

“How about this,” I said. “Kansas Jack was in the military. Probably the Navy. Every ship had hundreds of gray flashlights, and everything in the Navy had a number printed on it. If he lived on ships half his life, he wouldn’t have keepsakes we associate with homes. He was the ultimate transient. He would have a shaving kit and one set of civvies. At some point, at the end of his service, he probably swiped expensive small tools and a box of flashlights.”

Bobbi smiled, sipped more wine. “Retirement pay?”

“Stands to reason.”

“But he had no bank accounts. He lived his life on a cash basis.”

“Maybe the retirement money’s going to an ex-wife,” I said. “Can you trace that info through the military?”

“Where will I get a Social Security number?”

We quit that line of thought, stayed quiet a minute.

“I don’t claim this is startling news,” said Bobbi. “Larry Riley told me that when they stripped Kansas Jack’s clothing, his shins were beat to hell with old injuries. He said they were the types of injuries you see in amateur hockey players and bar drunks.”

“We have a shortage of hockey rinks here in the Keys.”

“In my experience, when drunks get murdered, it’s usually by another drunk. Speaking of which…” Bobbi rolled off the bed and poured more wine in my glass. The bottle went dry after filling only a third of the glass. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I took more than I thought. You want me to drive to Kickin’ Back for another?”

“It wouldn’t be this good. Are you okay to drive?”

“Always.” She stubbed her toe on a bed leg and saved herself from the floor by falling onto the bed. “Almost always. Let me see if I can make it to the bathroom.”

I heard her using my toothbrush. She came out wearing panties, carrying her shoes, bra, top, and shorts. Her other arm shielded her nipples from my view.

She went to the bed and pulled down the cover on one side. “I’m tired and too looped to drive. But, like I said an hour ago, I need sleep. Can we do this without doing
that
?”

“It’s your call. This is the playground where girls make the rules.”

She pretended to grimace. “We’re known for changing our minds.”

“Not tonight, honey. I have a backache.”

“You have a sick sense of humor. Do you have an extra T-shirt?”

“No, but you can wear this one.”

“Pass, thanks. Quit staring like they’re going to blow away. Can you keep your hands off the merchandise?”

“You know my habits.”

“You’re going to hold one all night long?”

“At least until I fall asleep.”

After I had crawled in and doused the light, we lay side by side for a few minutes. I heard her sniff and fidget, sounds that told me she couldn’t fall asleep.

“You okay?” I said.

“I never thought Chicken Neck was the old-boys-club type. He keeps his in-box of job apps and résumés on top of his file cabinet. The detectives have decided that it’s supposed to motivate us by reminding us that other, highly qualified people are waiting in the wings.”

“Where’s this going?”

“I can’t figure out why, with all that talent scratching at his door, he hired Millican.”

“Maybe he knows something about the man’s talents that no one’s seen yet,” I said.

“I don’t know. His main strength is blowing holes in the concept of teamwork. I see anything that makes it tougher to solve cases as a weakening of job security. If I lost my job, I’d have to leave the Keys.”

“If that happened, I’d have to apply for a job.”

“What do you mean?” said Bobbi.

“Your professional traveling companion.”

“You’d follow me somewhere?” she said.

“Anywhere. Except Siberia. I’ve grown attached to warm weather.”

Her hand went to my belly. “Maybe I can coach you on filling out your application.”

“The painkillers…I might need some lead in my pencil.”

“That was never your problem.”

“What
was
my problem?” I said.

She lifted her hips, pushed down her panties. “I can’t remember.”

“Be gentle with me, dear, I’m injured.”

“Hah.”

Bobbi woke me before daybreak. The only light in the room came from the bathroom. She was clothed, ready to attack her new day. She went to her car and brought in a candy box with a piece of clean plywood on its bottom.

“I’m still not sure I want you hovering around my case,” she said. “I brought you a bribe to keep your distance. I hope it distracts you.”

I opened the small box. A five-inch strip of duct tape, sticky side up, was held away from the lid by thumbtacks stuck through to the plywood.

“From Kansas Jack’s mouth?” I turned on the bedside lamp.

“The forensics people knew going in that they couldn’t get a thing off it. Any imprints are fouled by the cross-hatching of the threads that give duct tape its strength. Then there’s other crap to deal with, foreign objects like dust and sawdust and bug shit and sand. Anyway, the experts need four or five identifying lines in prints to call a match, to testify in court, and they can’t pull nada with the web of threads. It’s rejected evidence. I caught it before it hit the trash, and kept it cool.”

“Chilled, like champagne?” I said.

“We don’t want the adhesive to melt, do we? Might obscure the rejected evidence. This way, you have a project.”

The phone rang. We looked at it. It rang twice more.

“Could only be Marnie,” I said.

“Or Sheriff Liska,” said Bobbi. “I’m out of here.”

“I was afraid of that.” I picked up.