Air Dance Iguana (5 page)

I felt mild relief and surprise. In his abrasive way, Liska had boosted my spirits. “Thanks for the background,” I said. “Are you feeling okay?”

“It’s my back,” said Liska. “I tried to carry a heavy box while I was on my cell phone.”

“You were shoulder-holding with your chin, right?”

“I turned my spine into a question mark.”

“And your next ten days, too.”

“Today I see the chiropractor and go for massage therapy. Tomorrow, the acupuncturist and the reflexologist. The day after that, the healer. If worse comes to worst, I can go to a real doctor.”

“You ought to hit the evidence locker for a muscle relaxer. Save you a lot of driving around. Or is that what you already did?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have noted your disdainful approach to crime busting.”

“I may not be perfect, but there’s not a soul in this county that can do better at what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Except you. Listen to the word
supposed.
”

“Maybe I’ve been experiencing a failure of passion.”

“Little trouble in the bedroom?”

“My dick does fine, when I can get it employment. This is on-the-job.”

“You don’t give a shit?”

He jerked his head aside and wouldn’t look at me.

“Twenty-four hours ago you wanted me to be the great cop of the future,” I said. “Two minutes ago you said I had the right stuff. This long-faced follow-up tells me that police work is not a dream occupation. Is this depression your loneliness at the top or facing the daily grind?”

His eyelids drooped as he stared at the floor. “Maybe both, maybe something else. But you’ve got the wrong impression of your side of the table.”

“What do I become, your secret stand-in?”

“Something like that,” he said. “My eyes and ears. I might even be able to put you on the payroll, something administrative.”

“Which of us campaigns for reelection?”

“I’m not thinking past next week. If I’m not careful, I’ll screw up today or tomorrow. If I confessed all this to an employee, I’d crunch my propeller.”

“I can’t stand behind your office chair whispering cues,” I said.

“I think you’re scared of real work.”

“Not true, Sheriff. If I ever, in my life, take a true job, I want my phone to ring at least half the time with good news. If I took this job, every fucking call would be another dead person in the county.”

“You’re exaggerating, and you’re underestimating your talent. I know how you are. You go on a mission, you never let up.”

I laughed. “That’s how Bohner described Millican yesterday. He sinks in his teeth and never lets go.”

“Millican’s a subject I don’t have the energy to discuss. But I will say this. From this moment onward, if you happen to follow your nose, I don’t want to learn any new developments in the
Citizen.
I will be your first ear, and that’s an order, not a recommendation. If I were a mental and physical basket case, I’d still have the muscle to put you in a world of hurt.”

Liska threatening? This was too far around the corner. “If I learn anything,” I said, “it’ll be because it fell in my lap.”

Liska bit his lip, shook his head, and looked down at the page of paper he’d been holding the whole time. “I’m sorry now that I sent you up there with Billy Bohner. This written report you didn’t finish? You didn’t get the simple shit right. It wasn’t Tenth Street South.”

“My evidence is empirical. I read the sign. That’s where we turned.”

He pushed himself out of the lounge chair. “Your eyes are failing you.”

“I’m a photographer. My life’s in the details. Bohner made a fast approach to Tenth, jammed his brakes, and cut a Mario Andretti turn like he knew where he was going.”

“I do details, too, and I was in the dispatching room when the call came in as Thirteenth Street. The officer on the horn is the superstitious type. He wouldn’t say the number. He wrote it down and said, ‘Corpse, Unlucky Road.’”

“I stand by my version.”

“Why argue?” Liska pulled out his cell phone, punched a number. After a short wait and a ten-second conversation, he snapped the phone shut. “The call came in wrong, so I told him Thirteenth Street. How did Bohner know where to go?”

“Maybe it showed on his computer.”

“Good, but not true,” he said. “With two deaths so much alike, I didn’t want a media feeding frenzy. I ordered Web and radio silence on the location. It was word of mouth or landline phone only.”

“What time was the call?”

“Six-fifteen.”

“You were in your office that early?”

“I was at the Freeman Substation on Cudjoe. I had a breakfast meeting with the Border Patrol, which meant I brought coffee and doughnuts. That’s where we got the call. Why did you tell Lewis to think about two killers?”

“Did you get your prints from Hall this morning?”

“Yep,” he said. “I passed them to her. Something you saw?”

“The noose knots are identical, except they’re reversed as if one was tied by someone right-handed and the other by a lefty. But they both learned at the same school.”

“Do we know how to find you?”

“Al Manning’s place on Little Torch. Call here, it’ll jump to my cell. I’ll fax an invoice with my temporary address. Lewis has the other number.”

“That’s too much info, Rutledge. We’ll chase you down if we need to follow up on this chat. Other than that, I’ll take you at your word. If your phone doesn’t ring, it’s us.”

He swung open the screen door, stepped out, and let it slam shut behind him. I couldn’t tell if he was faking or hobbling with pain. Just before he got to his car, he reached for his cell phone. He looked back at the porch as he spoke, locked eyes with me, and appeared to make a mental decision. I saw him say no to his caller, and could tell by the way he moved his head that he was issuing orders.

I had understood his wanting to be secretive over the years, to hold his cards close during his city time and his short tenure as sheriff. But this was the first time I’d seen him so far out of character, the first time I had seen him act suspiciously. His voice had given him away more than his actions and words. I hadn’t heard the sluggish tone of an injured or depressed man. I had heard quivers of anxiety.

At least his job offer was off the table, relegated to history. And I was commencing, as the Navy called it, my “holiday routine.”

I stuffed my shaving kit and cell phone into my camera satchel, watered a ficus, and stopped for a minute before I locked up to picture young Pokey Fields, not three years out of high school, standing in my main room. I looked around the house—gathering memories just as she had—and thanked my lucky stars that I’d hedged the truth with Bobbi Lewis in describing my relationship with the girl.

My next week would be neither routine nor holiday.

I rode the
Triumph away from Key West into damp air under broken midlevel stratus. Whenever I rode in humid weather, my shirt doubled in weight and salt caked my skin. It felt like a fine way to begin a vacation. A swollen cumulus line above the reef resembled far mountains and reminded me that I’d forgotten to call the ad agency in Naples.

Nearing Boca Chica, I watched a succession of jets drop for touch-and-gos, then launch eastward to altitude. Their percussion split the sky, their grace inspired a traveler’s freedom. The highway that skirted the naval air station became my course to calmer waters, its odd dips and rises mimicking the lazy chop of open ocean. All I needed was a steering vane and a guiding dolphin at my bow. I didn’t need a roadblock. Or complications.

The northbound traffic off Big Coppitt picked up speed as it passed Boca Chica Road. Riding the incline past the entrance to Shark Key, I looked south to sailboats anchored in Similar Sound. A sole angler poled a pale blue skiff west of Pelican Key. I turned my head forward just in time to see a brake light, and throttled down before I pancaked myself on the ass end of a Honda Odyssey. Traffic slowed to a walking pace. A minute later, from the Channel #4 Bridge rise, I saw vehicles crawling to Bay Point and red and blue flashing lights declaring an emergency up the road.

Probably the phone call Liska received as he left my house.

I had no wish to wait for a wreck mop-up. I began to turn back for a crab-cake lunch at BobaLu’s but decided that any move away from an afternoon’s quiet on Little Torch was the opposite of progress. I opted for patience and tried not to fry my clutch. Twenty minutes later I reached the flashing lights. A squad of deputies had blocked Bay Point’s entrance roads. Deputy Bohner motioned me toward him, no doubt assuming that I had been called to the scene. He was in civvies, grabbing a few overtime hours.

I stopped between two cruisers and loosened my helmet strap.

“Ever get suspended?” he said.

I thought about high school, my brother Tim’s constant after-school detention. I had pulled the same juvenile crap, but I was never caught. Then I matched Bohner’s words to his odd sense of humor. “Do we have another davit job?”

“You could specialize, Rutledge,” he said. “Your own gallows portfolio. No matter what, we got our wind chimes.”

Glaring truth from Billy Bohner, of all people. With “gallows portfolio” he had defined in two words my collective work in law enforcement.

“How’s Liska dealing with it?” I said.

“From a remote location,” said Bohner. “No sign of him yet.”

“How far down is it?”

He directed me onto West Circle Drive.

I passed the tennis courts and ran the stop sign. As I slowed to turn right and cross the bridge to the trailer subdivision down Beach Road, a deputy waved me farther down Bay Drive, toward the more exclusive neighborhood. “What I heard, they don’t need you down there,” he said. “It’s on the left.”

If a link existed, the killer had changed his pattern, found a victim with a fatter wallet. The large, elevated home sat on raised ground on a double lot. Beyond its white five-foot fence, healthy palms, and new shrubs sat a dark green BMW convertible and a black Ford Expedition. Two edgy but quiet Yellow Labs paced around stakes in the side yard. A Carolina Skiff with a Yamaha engine rested on a trailer under the house. The oversized mailbox was awash in surreal, hand-painted tropical fish. I parked across the street, shut off the motorcycle but remained seated. Gawkers hovered two houses away.

Bobbi Lewis had set up a mobile office on the hood of her Crown Victoria. She was surrounded by uniforms. She looked up, perplexed, and said, “You’ve surprised me, Alex. Liska said he wasn’t sending you. He asked me not to call you.”

“Are you the only one here who knows that?”

“I assume so.”

“Why would the sheriff make that decision?” I said. “I’d have been the only person to view all three crime scenes.”

She bought time, looked around, scratched her neck. My words forced her to confront a fact that already bothered her. “You can hang,” she said, “but please stay over there.” She pointed to the next house to the north, a ground-level bungalow built before insurance companies, via the feds, mandated elevated living spaces. “Leave your camera bag in my trunk so nobody will mess with it.”

“Including me?” I said.

“Orders are orders.” She reached through her car-door window and pressed the remote trunk-release button.

I set the kickstand and put the bag in her car. She told the uniforms I didn’t require an escort.

The first thing I learned was why they didn’t need me.

Bixby, the new city photographer, paced the concrete apron behind the high house. In cargo shorts, zippered vest, and hiking boots, he was a 170-pound peacock in high strut. He screwed a lens onto his camera body, changed his mind, chose a shorter lens. He half-crouched, fired off eight or ten clicks on his autowinder. His moves and mock decisions may have looked professional, but his positioning sucked. He was wasting film. Wasting a crime scene.

The victim looked well fed; his neck had stretched perhaps twice as much as Kansas Jack’s or Milton Navarre’s, and his eyes bulged as if he had tried to stare down death as it approached. He wore bathing trunks and what looked like a pajama top, though, with Keys styles, it could have been a formal supper shirt. I took him to be in his late forties. No duct tape, smashed teeth, or ripped buttons. The rope was the same color as that used on Ramrod and in Marathon, but it wasn’t knotted to a true noose. If there had been two fewer loops, the victim could have fallen from his death collar, fractured his ankles, and crawled away alive. I wondered if his weight had caused the rope to twist him around and around until he quit saying to himself that he hadn’t guessed that twirling would be part of it.

Beyond the fact that a dead man hung from a boat davit and flies had come to play, nothing here resembled the two prior deaths. Nothing but the sadness of another early exit.

Bixby disguised his indecision as concentration. He paced off distance, then cowered when a forensic tech barked at him for encroaching on the circle of evidence. He bracketed exposures, twisted dials to change shutter speed and aperture. Duped by his camera’s meter, he shot into the bright horizon without fill, then toward the street with a flash. His pictures would flop.

I didn’t think it mattered.

“What do you see, Alex?” said Lewis. “Another air dance iguana?”

I hadn’t heard her approach. “More like a strangled manatee.”

“I just chatted with Liska. He was surprised to hear that you’d showed up.”

“I am here by mistake and coincidence,” I said. “Isn’t that how some people die?”

“Not the ones I investigate. Planning and malice lead to all of them, even the suicides.”

“Was the victim married?” I said.

“His name was Lucky Haskins, his first name given, not a nickname. The wife is Tinky, short for Tinkerbell. Shaped like her old man. A family friend got her out of here, took her to a home on Sugarloaf Boulevard.”

I pointed to the woman in dark slacks, a buttoned blue top, and aviator sunglasses who stood under the house writing in a spiral notebook. “Is she related to the victim?”

“She’s the new detective with the city police,” said Bobbi. “Her name’s Beth Watkins. She came from California two weeks ago and by coincidence rented the house next to me on Aquamarine.”

“She works for the city and she’s out here on Bay Point?” I said.

“She wanted to observe county crime-scene procedures in case she needed to coordinate in the future.”

The Watkins woman glanced up and saw us looking. Her hair was short, straw-blond. She looked thirty, give or take, comfortable with herself, with a pleasant calm about her. Lewis waved her over.

Beth Watkins recognized my name when Lewis introduced us. She reached to shake hands. “Your name came up at the city this week,” she said. “You’re the photographer who saved a detective’s life.”

“And you were hired to fill that detective’s slot?” I said.

“Yes and no,” she said. “A man recovering from a gunshot wound, no police department would tell him to pack it in. I believe, officially, he’s on indefinite medical leave and I’m covering his workload. Whatever he does in the future, my job sticks. Meanwhile, I’d better get back to taking notes.”

“Nice meeting you,” I said.

She flickered a smile. “I saw you arrive on that Bonneville. It’s an 800, right?”

“It’s a 650,” I said.

“What, like a ’70 model?”

“Exactly. It’s a T-120R.”

“Sharp.” Watkins turned and walked toward the under-house shade.

Bobbi started back to the street. I had seen all I wanted to see, so I followed. “What’s Liska’s opinion of this spree?” I said.

“He thinks we’ll lose the whole cluster to the state cops.”

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement had a reputation for claim-jumping high-profile cases. They also had a rep for clearing tough ones. “Maybe they’re headline-needy this year,” I said. “Speaking of which, this morning’s headline could be the reason for this.”

“I agree,” she said. “Plain and simple suicide.”

“The rope is similar to the other two, but if he killed himself with that knot, he lived up to his name. My guess is a family dispute with a copycat factor. Whatever it is, you ought to get ready for an insurance nightmare. The FDLE might do you a favor.”

“I’d rather keep the investigations,” she said. “I think the first two are linked, but this one’s self-induced.”

I couldn’t imagine someone taking himself out the slowest way possible. “I’ll bet you a naked boat ride.”

“Are you betting that it’s linked to the other two?”

“No, just that it’s a murder,” I said.

Bobbi reached inside her car and popped the trunk release. “You don’t want to know?”

“Why you won’t take my bet?”

She shook her head. “Why that schmuck is working for me.”

“Orders are orders, right?”

“I guess so.”

I started the Triumph and felt the wet tap of summer, a raindrop on my wrist. I didn’t want to ride through weather with my camera gear, but it was better than hanging out where I was a lump on a log. I rolled to the Overseas Highway. The useless traffic jam was worse than before. Bohner and the deputy at East Circle continued to block all access to Bay Point. Confused residents were U-turning, pulling to the shoulder, jamming the Baby’s Coffee parking lot. A group of college-aged kids tossed a Frisbee on the north shoulder.

I checked the sky. Blue sky and blue water on the bay side. The squall was just south of me, moving westward.

Bixby would conclude his photo debut in a downpour. Welcome to the tropics.

Al Manning’s across-the-street neighbor got to me before I could get inside. He was hanging a wet suit under his stilt home when I turned onto Keelhaul Lane. I parked my Triumph and began to loosen bungee cords. His ambush was perfect. I had no escape.

He strolled over, full of cheer, stuck out his hand. “Wendell Glavin,” he said. “Native Floridian.”

I told him my name, then said, “Calusa, Tequesta, or Seminole?”

His smile faded. “None of them tribes, but that was funny. I was born in Green Cove Springs. You watching the place for Al?”

“For the next two months,” I said.

Wendell was in his mid-fifties, pear-shaped, with a graying beard, the chatter of an old salt. He was a perfect blend of retired blue-collar worker and Hemingway look-alike. “I hate to say this, Rutledge,” he said, “because we don’t lock up much around here. We had us a murder over to Ramrod yesterday.”

“I read about it, Wendell.”

“Devilish way to go. You best keep your gun near your bed, my friend. You ever been married?”

“No, sir, I dodged it a few times.”

“You’re better off. I’m a two-time loser, but the second one stuck around till just last year. She got to be a monster to live with, but she paid for the divorce. The neighbors is all right. Couple old hippies like me at the south end. ’Bout the worst you can say of any folks up and down this street is they got carpenter ants or termites, and that’s like saying they got noses. The woman at the end on your side, she’s never out of her muumuu and bedroom slippers.”

“Al didn’t tell me that detail,” I said.

“He probably burned your ears talking bait and tackle. All these years, he paints and fishes, then fishes and paints. Me, I’m into diving. I just plain live for Looe Key.”

“You knew him before he moved up from Key West?”

“No, but I sure am happy to have him for a neighbor. Al’s the kind of friend you don’t often find. He’s helped me every time I needed it.”

I had brought nine boxes and two duffel bags to Manning’s. I needed to unpack, find my essentials, place them within easy grasp. Al had left typed notes for me in every room. The first was in his kitchen.

I opened a beer and carried my duffels to the bedroom.

Manning wanted me to live his life.

His home was monk-simple, with sisal floor coverings and pine furniture. He explained his décor the first time I visited. Hurricane Georges, in 1998, had blown in two sliding glass doors and ruined furniture that had belonged to his grandparents. “Insurance didn’t cover my broken heart,” he said. “If the storm had been worse, I might not have seen the wreckage. I replaced the heirlooms with this stuff, a step above motel, a step below time-share. My curtains, cushions, and end tables from Target. My CD player, TV, DVD, microwave, speakers, and amps totaled eight hundred bucks at Best Buy. The juice and wine glasses all came from Publix. Place settings, Kmart. My one stab at style was the blue-and-white restaurant dishes. Goodwill, seventy-five cents each. The extra insurance-settlement cash goes toward my high life.”