Air Dance Iguana (19 page)

We tried two other offices with the same luck. The day’s heat won the battle with Teresa’s air conditioner. I could do better on the phone. We rode the last leg in silence. I kept my nose in the tabloid and made a mental list of brokers to call in search of Sharon Woods.

Teresa pulled into Manning’s yard but stopped halfway in. I looked up to question why she hadn’t pulled into the parking spot next to my Shelby in the shade under the house.

I thought at first that the Chamber of Commerce had staged an advertisement for doing business in the Keys. Marnie Dunwoody had turned her Jeep’s tailgate into a mobile office: a short plastic chair, her laptop on an Igloo cooler, her cell phone hooked to a charger, which she had plugged into an outside outlet.

We got out of the Grand Am and walked under the house.

Teresa said, “It’s not what you think.”

Marnie kept her face expression-free. “I try not to think, but Alex and I have work to do.”

We heard another car coming down Keelhaul Lane. Bobbi Lewis skidded her county car onto the yard’s pea rock, angled the sedan so she could talk through her lowered window, then jerked to a halt and levered it into park with a grudge uppercut. After the dust squall blew off with the breeze, I saw my brother in her backseat. I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was cuffed.

Teresa, to her credit, did not make a scene.

“I hit the jackpot,” said Lewis. “Two people I need, both in one place.”

“Hi, Bobbi,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Fucking beat, Alex. Save your sweet hellos.”

“What do you want?” said Teresa.

Lewis shifted her glare. “Clarification. You had a breakfast meeting with the mayor and his assistant at six-thirty Monday morning?”

Teresa nodded. I heard heavy breathing through her nostrils. “We met at Pepe’s.”

“A predawn breakfast?”

“The mayor had an eight o’clock flight to Fort Myers. Our meeting dealt with his agenda and two things I had to do later that morning.”

Bobbi’s radio made a squelch noise. She reached to adjust it, then looked up. “What time did you leave your house on Staples, Teresa?”

“I remember checking the kitchen clock before I walked outside,” said Teresa. “It was just before six, maybe 5:57 or 5:58.”

“You checked the clock? And Tim was where?”

Teresa grimaced, almost glanced at me, but looked instead to the backseat. “In my bed, Bobbi.”

Lewis looked bored. “Fully dressed?”

“No, Bobbi,” she said. “Maybe a T-shirt and nothing else. We’d been asleep. Maybe not even the T-shirt.”

“It took you thirty-five minutes to drive two miles to Pepe’s?”

“I stopped at my office to get my digital recorder, and I went to an ATM on Southard to get cash. Then I went to breakfast.”

Lewis lifted an eyebrow. “Is the ATM receipt still in your wallet?”

“It’s in a little file box on a bookcase at home,” said Teresa. “Two hundred dollars, leaving me a balance of seven hundred and change.”

“Make any phone calls from your office?”

“Who would I call at six-fifteen?”

“Right,” said Bobbi. “It’s a little early for city business.”

“No, wait a minute. I called Tim. I couldn’t find my watch before I left, which is why I checked the clock. I thought I’d left it at work, but it wasn’t in my city desk. I wanted him to look for it.”

“At six-fifteen you woke him for that?”

“It’s a Gucci watch.” She twisted her head toward me then looked back at Lewis. “Alex gave it to me last year. I thought I’d lost it. I panicked, so I called and told Tim to look in my makeup kit in the bathroom. It was in the kit.”

“You went without a watch for the rest of the day?”

“I was going to, but he brought it to Pepe’s.”

“How did he get there?” said Bobbi.

“A Five Sixes cab. His car wasn’t at my house. I forget why.”

Bobbi nodded. “Did you introduce him to the mayor?”

“Tim wouldn’t come in. He beckoned me out to the sidewalk and fastened the watch to my wrist.”

“Nice. Did you see anyone you knew while you were on the sidewalk?”

“What?”

“Someone walking toward Harpoon Harry’s?”

“Oh,” said Teresa. “Dink Bruce went by while we stood there.”

“He was up early, too?”

“He said he was leaving for Montana in an hour. He was going to stop and see a tall girl in Nashville. His sense of humor.”

“How did Tim get home?” said Bobbi. “Walk?”

“No, the cab waited for him.”

“Good, Teresa. Your story matches and we can check the details. They’re good details. You just got your boyfriend off a federal kidnap charge.”

“Then let him go.”

“Sorry. This all started with credit-card fraud, and we’ll follow through on it.”

Teresa stared at Lewis, then walked to her car, started it, and drove away.

“Was I the other person you needed to see?” I said.

Bobbi’s gaze went frosty. “I bust my brain to script an interrogation that allows me to clear your brother with a clean conscience. Teresa goes away pissed. You stand there like this is old news.”

“I’m getting hardened by all the drama.”

“You knew about Tim and Teresa, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You had a good idea where to locate his dark teal Chevy Caprice station wagon.”

“Key West is a small island.”

“You had all day Sunday to hire someone to retaliate against Millican.”

“I just ran this same kind of everyone’s-guilty gambit with Billy Bohner. Maybe you ought to arrest everyone and sort out the innocent.”

Bobbi nodded. “Then we could claim some progress.”

“Did you call it progress when you took that rope from the gold star to Tavernier?”

“I called it my job.”

She drove away with Tim in her rear seat. I told myself not to dwell on how at-home he looked as a prisoner.

He refused to look back.

Marnie and I
moved our op center to Al’s kitchen. After I laid out paper towels, a beer, a Coke, and the cold fried chicken that Marnie had brought from Dion’s, she handed me a morning newspaper. “Check the personals,” she said.

The list was typical.
“ATTRACTIVE SENSUOUS WOMAN WANTED,” “TANTRA CLASS ALL DAY,” “THE RUSSIAN BRIDE SERVICE,” “COMPUTER PROBLEM?” AND “BACKCOUNTRY TOURS.”
The last bore the headline
TENDER REUNION.

“You think a Russian bride will solve my problems?”

Marnie smirked. “Did you read that bottom one carefully?”

“No.”

“Read it out loud to me.”

“Tender reunion,” I said. “Attention all
Bushnell
and
Gilmore
shipmates. Big reunion scheduled. October in Key West. All hands on deck. Pass the word.”

“Sound like an opportunity?” she said.

“If we wait until October, we might learn a few things.”

“Is there a number to call?”

“Yes. Two nine four…it’s your home number.”

“It’s my ad,” she said.

“And?”

“Not a blessed peep so far. The odd thing is, there’s a legitimate
Howard W. Gilmore
reunion scheduled eighteen months from now in Seattle. I found the coordinator on the Web. He said I could plant the ad if I sent him contact info for anyone who responds.”

“Did he remember the hanging?” I said.

“He didn’t come aboard until after the ship left Key West, but he’d heard about it. He said the ‘Happy Howie’ was five hundred thirty feet long, which gave plenty of room for bad apples who didn’t fit the ‘military mode,’ as he called it. He also said that when the
Bushnell
went out of service in 1970, a lot of men lived in Key West with their families. Their kids were in school and their wives had local jobs. Several hundred were reassigned to the
Gilmore.
”

“Pretty standard,” I said. “In those days, at least.”

“The man said that the humanitarian transfers resulted in what he called ‘an overstock of tropical talent’ on the
Gilmore
. He said they were skilled in swapping favors and doing shady deals. Maybe you know the word he used.”

“We called it cumshaw when I was on active duty.”

Marnie nodded. “That was it.”

“It’s a barter system,” I said. “It supposedly skirts bureaucracy to benefit the military. All I ever witnessed was a mutant version that benefited humans.”

“But shady deals would have to come ashore to turn into felony arrests, right? Is that why you wanted to know if any Navy personnel had been nabbed by the city or county?”

“That was my thinking,” I said.

“Can we find a better view?”

I carried the chicken to the screened porch. Marnie inspected a rattan chair’s salt-crusted cushion, flipped it over, and settled in. “I went to the library this morning,” she said. “It doesn’t open until ten, but that man in the research room does me favors. He let me in at eight and let me sift through a stack of old newspapers. I started by reading the weeks just before and after the January flagpole hanging. I worked backward, then forward again. In the last four months of ’72 and the first two of ’73, the hanging was the only crime that wasn’t the usual crap. The
Citizen
ran with four major local stories.”

“Dirtbags and hippies leading the list,” I said.

“Nope. The State of Florida declared the island’s sewer system obsolete.”

“Thereby prompting a thirty-year repair job. What else?”

“Gas prices had driven down tourism, and Duval Street was a wasteland. The Treasure Salvors found the first signs of the
Atocha
, the silver coins and ingots. Finally, the Navy cut out all submarine activity, sent the
Howard W. Gilmore
packing in late January, reassigned to Sardinia, and declared fourteen acres of the naval station surplus.”

“Sardinia?”

Marnie nodded. “I noticed two other things during that time period. In October the city manager, acting on a tip, ordered a massive inventory of maintenance equipment. Then, in mid-November, the city was investigating a deficit in its accounts. Three hundred thousand bucks was missing. There was never a follow-up story, no mention of it ever again.”

“Nothing related?” I said.

“Not in the
Citizen.
From mid-September to the first week of February, I had to weed through Watergate horseshit, Paris Peace Accords, and gas-station lines. No missing-money follow-up, no crimes involving Navy personnel, no inventory results.”

“You’re very resourceful, Marnie. You should be a reporter.”

She shook her head. “I might have screwed up last night. I called Liska at home. He’s a very depressed man.”

“What was his side of things?”

“I asked about the hanging,” said Marnie. “It was like driving my Jeep into a mountain of Jell-O.”

“He stonewalled with fluff?” I said. “Sounds just like our sheriff.”

“He talked for five minutes, never said a thing, but the more he jabbered, the more depressed he sounded.”

“Did any details sneak out?”

“He tried to investigate the sailor’s death without calling it a suicide or a murder. His superiors gave him no support—I assumed that included Millican, but I didn’t want to ask outright and tip our hand—and the Navy was no help. A ship’s officer told him the higher-ups were afraid an investigation would delay the
Gilmore
’s deployment. Two city commissioners bought him a few drinks and told him he was working too hard. He even talked to a police counselor about it, and the woman told him to let it go.”

“Let it go?”

“Those were his words.”

“Well, it sure as hell came back to him on Ramrod,” I said. “Right about the time he saw Kansas Jack with a stretched neck.”

“Can I use that for my story lead?”

“There’s no story yet.”

Marnie’s phone rang. She took it to the kitchen, talked softly.

I used the break in our analysis to call Dave Klein’s direct number at the Broward Crime Scene Unit.

“I don’t want to be a pest,” I said, “but things down here are moving fast.”

“I forwarded the results an hour ago,” said Klein. “We pulled an image, but nothing too promising. Nothing we’d pursue at this level.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“I try to do a good job, and like I said, you had a favor coming. Gotta go.”

Marnie came back to the porch. “I have to be in the office by four.”

“I’ll be ten cars behind you,” I said. “I might have to evict my tenant.”

“That was a quick lease.”

“Two months reduced to five days. He moved in on Friday. According to Carmen, the party’s been nonstop since then. The neighbors blame me.”

“As well they should. You’re the slumlord of Dredgers Lane.”

“And don’t say—”

“Too late,” she said. “It’s too good a headline to pass up.”

“This kid Bixby at the city,” I said.

“How did we digress to him?”

“He must have a first name. Any chance you might…”

Marnie nodded, punched in a number, and told the city’s PIO that the
Citizen
planned a profile of the new photographer. She asked for a few preliminary details, hung up, and said, “E. J. Bixby.”

“No name? Just initials?”

“That’s it. He’s a big bundle of style, that boy.”

“Or bullshit,” I said. “Or evil.”

Marnie checked her watch. “What did we accomplish?”

My turn to shrug.

“We’re dead even,” she said. “You’re hung up on the Navy. My nose for news smells a story in the city’s maintenance-gear inventory and the single mention of missing money. If we blend our hunches…What if two or three sailors off the
Gilmore
stole a mess of city property just before the ship left port?”

“But why would people be getting killed thirty years later?” I said. “Three hundred grand…it’s not like they held up a Brink’s truck.”

“If it all ties together, there’s always revenge for some part of it that went haywire.”

“Like a murder made to look like a suicide?”

Marnie gathered her things to go. “It’s your turn to face down Liska.”

“I’ll go see him after I deal with my tenant.”

Marnie walked to the screen, stared at the canal. “Check it out,” she said. “Two girls in a tandem kayak, each wearing a Day-Glo bikini and a lightweight headset. The sweeties are adventuring in the wild Florida Keys.”

“Packing iPods and caffeinated spring water?”

“I used to live like that,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Okay.” She laughed. “I never lived like that. Not even for one week.”

I walked Marnie down to her Jeep. She pointed out a county cruiser cutting a U-turn at the lane’s dead end. The big car rolled back past us, but the deputy kept his eyes on the road. “Think the sheriff’s watching you?” she said.

“I can’t worry about that. I wonder who’s watching the sheriff.”

The bastard chirped as I watched Marnie’s Jeep disappear onto Pirates Road. Area code 973 meant Monty Aghajanian in his FBI office.

“Alex, that forensic man in Broward County got a bingo on your duct tape. He e-mailed us a palm print.”

“No fingerprints?”

“Just a right palm, but it matches a partial print connected to a murder from four years ago. Indirectly, it hooks into two others that same year and one from three months ago.”

“Male or female?”

“Victims?” he said. “All male. The perp, too.”

“Where were the murders?” I said.

“That’s info we can’t let slide.”

“I’m a security risk? I brought you the tape.”

“I can tell you this,” said Monty. “They were all over the map, and not in Florida.”

“A nutcase?”

“A professional popper, and you need to back your ass off big-time. This boy’s on our ‘silent’ Most-Wanted sheet. It’s a list we don’t make public. We don’t want the cruds to know we’re on to their patterns. We also don’t think the public can help us without risk.”

I said, “A three-year gap between the first three and the fourth?”

“Right.”

“Were any hung?”

“Nope,” said Monty. “Numbers one, two, and four were electrocutions. We gave him the nickname ‘Sparky.’ The third was a sicko shot. He used a router on the vic’s kneecaps and hooked power winches to his arms and legs. The victim died when his left arm came off.”

“Electric davits fit the modus.”

“Good deduction, my friend.”

“Any of those four related to the Navy?” I said.

“No, Alex, but look,” he said. “I’ve already told you more than you need to know. Our people are southbound right now. Keep your distance from all of this shit, and don’t buddy up to anyone with sunglasses and a haircut.”

“I’m going to say three names, Monty. You do whatever you want with them. Are you ready to write?”

“Hold on,” he said.

Just then my cell phone’s second line beeped at me. I recognized the number as one assigned to the City of Key West, but I didn’t want to break away from Monty.

“I’m ready to write,” he said.

“Chester Millican, E. J. Bixby, and…you need spellings on these?”

“Not so far,” he said. “That’s only two.”

“The last one is…fuck.”

“What’s the matter, man?”

“The third name is Timothy Rutledge.”

Monty kept silent a few beats, then said, “Sorry you got dragged into this one, my friend.”