Air Dance Iguana (21 page)

“I guess, Alex. They were ripping off stuff, I forget what all. Then that big Navy ship went away and took almost the whole Navy with it. That one man they took to jail, I don’t know about him.”

“After that?”

Hector looked back at my house. “You buy that house, Carmen still at high school, and Weedy Fields goes to Michigan, and we hear he died.” He shook his head. “Never saw that girl again. Or the boy again, never.”

I sat quietly for a minute or so, juggling facts and half-facts.

Hector spoke first. “You been gone a week, Alex, seems like two years. What you miss about Dredgers Lane beside my face?”

“I miss Carmen’s scolding and going out for my morning coffee.”

“Over to 5 Brothers?”

“Or to Eden House, if I’m in a hurry. Mike lets me slide in and pretend I’m a paying guest.”

“I went crazy, they put that hotel there. I thought, the block was ruined by traffic and racket. Hell, all these years, not problem one. After Hurricane Georges…when was that?”

“In ’98.”

“After that storm, that hotel man, Michael, give us ice and food. Before I die, I win the Lotto, I’ll spend a night in that hotel, maybe two, pay him back.”

We stood to leave. Perhaps made brave by the brandy, Hector gave Watkins a fatherly pat on her shoulder. “Young lady, you take care on that hot-rod motorbike, you hear me? You don’t see it coming, that machine can hurt you bad.”

Beth Watkins and
I found Carmen in her backyard, steadying Maria on a pogo stick.

“Johnny Griffin promises total reform,” I said, “and your father dislodged a few facts from his memory.”

Carmen gave me a forlorn grin. “He pulls details from the past, then forgets to tighten the cap when he hides his brandy.”

“His watered-down brandy?” said Maria.

Carmen raised her hand. “Hush, missy. We do it for Grandpop’s own good.”

“The Fields boy who grew up in my cottage,” I said, “you recall his name?”

“Something simple,” said Carmen, “like Robert. He was the straight-arrow and Pokey was the wild one…Robert, for sure, because he hated the name Bob, and one year—maybe in fifth or sixth grade—we all called him Bob because he was such a goody-boy.”

“Was Pokey older than you?”

“Two years by the clock, but a good five in her social life, even with her skinny little girl’s body. She was a junior when one of my friends saw her back then, smoking dope with longhairs behind Howie’s Lounge. But I guess we all made our mistakes. I made mine so Maria could be perfect.”

Maria flashed us a broad smile and hopped away, showing off.

Carmen pushed her finger into my chest. “You owe me a case of wine, minimum price, twenty a bottle.”

“I had a premonition that your fee would go up.”

“I hope the cost of wine does, too.”

“What ever happened to Pokey?” I said.

“No idea.”

“How about the Navy man she lived with? Did he ship out with the
Gilmore
?”

Carmen dropped her voice. “I’d forgotten all about him. He died.”

“Did he hang himself on the Navy base?”

She nodded. “That’s what people said. A few said that he might’ve had help.”

Late-day traffic clogged White Street. I could tell that Watkins hadn’t expected to ride in a car without air-conditioning. Waiting for the light at Truman Avenue, she dipped three fingers into her cleavage, scooped out droplets of sweat, and flung them out the window.

“Cocktail hour,” I declared. “Time to meditate on all we’ve learned.”

“How about sushi with our drinks?” said Beth. “In a cool restaurant.”

“Ambrosia’s one minute away and Louie’s Backyard is a good five minutes.”

“I’ll buy the fish,” she said.

I parked a half-block from Ambrosia near the fire station on Grinnell and toggled the Shelby’s fuel shutoff switch. With my mind on Pokey’s dead lover, I walked across the street and tripped over a blue plastic recycling bin on the far curb. Beth caught me to stop my fall. She saw me flinch as my ribs took stress.

Instead of checking my scraped shin, I stared at the bin.

“You’ve got revenge in your eye,” said Beth. “It wasn’t the container’s fault.”

“I’m not blaming. I just got an idea.”

A waiter with a tenor-profundo voice met us at the restaurant door, seated us at a small table near the front window, and took our drink order. I was curious about the “situation” that Watkins had mentioned, the one that had pulled her from the all-agency meeting, but I didn’t want to push too hard. After our beers arrived, I asked about her first weeks on the job, her impression of the Key West Police Department.

“The veterans’ universal goal is to fly under the radar,” she said. “The young ones are a mixed bag. Some are too strict and some are slackers. I’d like to toss them all in a blender and pour out a few normals.”

Our server reappeared. “Are we ordering?”

“May I?” Beth wanted to pick for both of us.

I shrugged a slacker-like okay.

She ordered dancing shrimp, flounder sashimi, a spicy California roll, four white-tuna sushi, four yellowtail sushi, and four smoked-salmon sushi.

When the server left, I said, “Do you see yourself as a strict cop or normal?”

“I lean toward the strict side,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned is that successful cops form teams and find allies. I’m having a tough time with that.”

“Maybe after a few more weeks have passed…”

“You think we’d make a good pair of detectives?”

“Why would you want that?” I said. “I’m a loose cannon with no desire to be a cop.”

“You have a reputation for taking cases to their core.”

“I’m about as official as a plaid shirt.”

“But look what you did with that Cuban man,” she said. “You got him talking, he went on a tangent about Cuban hookers, and he spilled out ancient details of a work scam.”

“I wish, over the last few years, I’d tape-recorded the man’s stories.”

“You think his information fits with that photo Lewis found in Kansas Jack’s home?”

“She told you about that?”

“Yes, she did,” said Watkins. “And you’re trying to connect dots.”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“You looked shocked to learn that that Navy man killed himself. Did you know him?”

“No, just the girl, Pokey Fields. I guess I didn’t know her very well.”

“Do the old hanging plus the new ones add up to a situation?” she said.

“They add up to a goddam mud bath, but things are starting to link up.”

“It sounds like you’re doing better than the all-agency group.”

“I’m juggling theories,” I said. “Did they say why the FBI is in an uproar?”

“That summit meeting was like a bridge game. Or maybe not, now that I think about it. They weren’t so much holding their cards close as not wanting to reveal that they hadn’t a single idea why the murders went down. One man—I think a fed—said their goal was to make connections. I took that to mean they wanted to tie the first two to Lucky Haskins.”

Typical Feebs, I thought. They hadn’t mentioned the out-of-state hit man.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Pretty much. Who’s your favorite suspect?”

I held out my hands, palms down, to ask for calm. “It’s a thin case, but my first choice is Bixby. I think he’s trying to forge his career on a road of bones.”

She showed the calm I had hoped for. “Are there second- and third-place picks?”

“Not really. You probably don’t know Deputy Billy Bohner. He and Detective Millican are possibles, but I can’t see a motive unless someone hired them to kill those poor men.”

“Motives don’t always jump out at us,” said Beth.

“Pathetic list of choices, isn’t it? Maybe a solution won’t be found. It’s been almost a week since three men died, and Bixby is the only person with a plausible motive. No one else raised that point?”

“Nope,” she said. “But at least you have the balls to speak your mind. What prompted you to bring up the concept of a hit man?”

I didn’t want to betray Monty’s confidence, especially if she hadn’t heard about the pro in her afternoon meeting. “It’s one of a hundred possibilities.”

“Maybe the victims were in Witness Protection,” she said.

“See?” I said. “Progress. We raised it to a hundred and one. You were going to tell me about your situation in the city this afternoon.”

Our dancing shrimp arrived. Beth promised to tell her story after we’d given the shrimp proper attention. I made a remark about dead crustaceans doing the mambo in limbo.

Beth smiled. “Lewis told me about your iguana analogy. If Kansas Jack was an iguana and Haskins a manatee, what was Navarre?”

“An air dance wino.”

Beth lifted her glass to her lips, smiled over its rim.

We attacked the shrimp with a flurry of soy sauce, ginger slices, and wasabi and didn’t say a word for four or five minutes. When I came up for air, I said, “Tell your tale.”

“Your number-one suspect stepped in a bucket of shit. We may need your services at the city for a few weeks.”

“I’m someone you call when you can’t get another date?”

“Bixby tried to rig a drug buy on Whitehead Street. He overextended himself. He tried to get it on film and he tried to make a citizen’s arrest. The other two players took attitudes, with each other and with him. It was knives, not guns. They all survived.”

“Jesus.”

“The slashees have been sent for repairs. We have a damaged storefront, a parked car with a busted window and dented door, a moped on its side, and a picket fence with splintered slats. And one fewer city employees.”

“Trying to create his own headline,” I said.

“You won’t believe the irony and humor,” said Watkins. “Two days ago I considered hiring you as a consultant to bring Bixby up to speed.”

“What could I tell a kid with a master’s degree?”

“We’re in the tropics. He learned under different lighting conditions. Better than that, you could have given him pointers on dealing with locals, from a pro’s point of view.”

“It might have saved him some blood loss.”

“And camera loss, too,” said Watkins. “While he was being transported to the hospital, an EMT called the switchboard to check on his gear. No one had noticed the camera bag, so the city will mend his wounds and fire his ass, but he’ll have to file the insurance claim.”

“Someone needs to go back and look into those crimes he solved in college.”

She took a moment to show her empty glass to the server and point to my beer. “Did you ever read any books on JFK’s assassination?”

“A few, maybe five or six, half my life ago,” I said. “The Warren Commission report read like bad fiction. The others were okay in parts, far-fetched in others.”

“I lived in California with a guy who collected anything related to the subject. He got me hooked on the books that dealt with conspiracy theory. The most bizarre one of all was
American Tabloid
by a man named Ellroy. His style was jerky, his characters were over-the-top, and the connections he made were off the chart. But in the end, it was so believable. I finished the last page, closed the book, and said to myself, ‘That was exactly how it went down.’ Since then, every time I hear or see bizarre, I sift for truth.”

“So my being over-the-top and off the chart makes me a good teammate?”

She went back to eye contact. “Doesn’t hurt.”

We had finished two thirds of the sushi when Beth held still and looked puzzled.

“Something wrong?” I said.

She laughed to herself. “I suppose not. I always think coincidence is funny.”

“Which coincidence?”

“Your friend Carmen talked about that man who hung himself years ago on the Navy base. A case file came across my desk this morning at the city. I was supposed to review it and file it away. This is what I wanted to tell Bobbi Lewis today when she got short with me. Did you hear about a suicide on Olivia Street maybe three months ago?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I guess we can be grateful it wasn’t a murder, too. There was a suicide note, and his neighbors weren’t surprised he killed himself. He’d always been the mopey sort, down on himself, always negative. The guy dressed up in his old Navy uniform and tied a nylon rope around a ceiling beam, then jumped off his television. He almost screwed up because the nylon stretched. When they found him, his feet were only four inches off the carpet.”

“Tell me again, how long ago?”

“The first week of April. Maybe it will juggle itself into one of your theories. Anyway, I’m full and the bill is on me and I don’t need to ride my motorcycle home tonight. Can you drop me off on your way back to Little Torch?”

On Big Coppitt I coasted from U.S. 1 to Beth’s driveway and shut down the Shelby. Next door, Bobbi Lewis’s personal and work cars sat under her house.

“I can’t exactly ask you to come in for a drink,” said Beth. “You’ve got a relationship going with my cranky neighbor.”

I hesitated out of surprise more than indecision.

Watkins caught my delay. “I could come up to Little Torch and you can bring me home in the morning. She goes to work at six forty-five.”

“Then you and I would be the item and Bobbi would take a hike?”

She looked pouty. “All I offered was another beer.”

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Why did you look up my property at the county records office?”

She looked into my eyes, slowly nodded. “There went that mood.”

“I don’t know why I thought of it, but I guess it needs an answer.”

“I did it to see if you had a mortgage, or if you had paid cash for your home.”

“And if I had paid cash?”

“You probably earned it behind the scenes.”

“You mean illegally?”

“I’m the new cop in town. No one offered to fill me in on details that I consider important. I wanted to know what kind of freelancer the city had employed.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Thank you for dinner.”

She opened the door, eased out slowly, and walked away, leaving the door open. I had to reach to close it before the Shelby filled with mosquitoes.

I found my share of bugs at the outdoor phone a block away, next to the Circle K on U.S. 1. I had promised Marnie I would have a go at Liska. I needed to catch him at home, away from his job, his point of power. I dropped coins, punched numbers, and decided that calling was a bad plan an instant before he answered.

“Mmyello,” said Liska.

“What the fuck is mmyello?”

“Oh, it’s you. That’s how cops in the movies say hi.”

“What’s your house number on Eagle?” I said.

“I’m not receiving visitors.”

“Navy personnel working full-time for the city, early seventies.”

“Unless he has a large pizza in hand.”

“You order it, and I’ll pay when it gets there.”

I hung up fast, before he could respond.