Air Dance Iguana (7 page)

“You did me a backup favor,” he said.

No escaping now. “What was that?”

“You dropped me off on the street behind our house so I could sneak through the Goldsteins’ yard and go in the back door and not get caught drunk by Daddy.”

“Sounds right,” I said.

Tim pretended to read the label on the beer bottle. “Did you also forget that you went back to the drive-in that night? You taunted that GTO dude yourself and got him to chase you again. Maybe you wanted to show him you were good instead of lucky.”

“You know it didn’t go down like that, brother.”

“You’re not still sticking with your old story, are you? Maybe today, all these years later, you can tell me the truth.”

“Which truth would that be?” I said.

“You got him to chase you through the same route, but faster. You took a right and a quick left and crossed the river bridge and that GTO fishtailed and disappeared from your mirror. It ran off the road at something like seventy, but you didn’t go back to look. You took your date home and put the Riviera in her father’s garage and made sure your stories matched—except you two couldn’t have known that the passenger died in the wreck and the driver would go to prison for DUI manslaughter. Then the hero probably hit a home run—or at least got to third base with her so ready—before you walked home. That about right?”

“No.” I felt sweat sticking my shirt to the chair’s plastic webbing.

“What was it, Alex—they were waiting on Susan’s street when you drove her home?”

I nodded. “I turned into her driveway, they jumped out with baseball bats and started coming for us.”

“Now I hear that echo from the past.”

“I was about to take your beating, Tim, not to mention they’d hurt Susan and ruin her father’s car. Those boys called the tune and I bolted. My point of view is that I outran them twice.”

“Okay,” said Tim. “Your side of the tale hasn’t slipped over the years. How was it they knew…oh yes, the driver knew her brother Jeff because he used to swipe his dad’s car and hang out with the big boys at the drive-in. He even sold the GTO driver some pot.”

“I knew about his hanging out,” I said. “I never knew about peddling weed.”

“We were never on the same grapevine, Alex. Did Susan ever have an opinion about that guy who died? Or the guy going to jail for seven years?”

“I guess she agreed with my side of things.”

“How’d you keep her quiet?” he said.

“I didn’t do anything. After that night we stopped seeing each other. I think that was August, and a month later we were off to different colleges.”

“Didn’t you expect some legal repercussion?”

“I don’t know if I expected anything,” I said. “I sure feared it. I suppose the police knew the chasers were hoods. I heard they found the bats inside the wrecked car. Brass knuckles, too.”

“So it was good riddance?”

“Maybe so. They could’ve found witnesses to your fight and traced the Riviera, but they never did and nobody came forward. I waited for that other shoe to drop for months after that. Hell, I waited all through my freshman and sophomore years.”

“But you skated, just like always?”

“It’s deep in the past.”

“You took part in two illegal car chases,” he said. “Speeding, reckless driving, stop-sign violations. How’s your conscience on that?”

“Like I said, they made their move and I reacted. My conscience never came into play.”

“Gotcha.”

It was time to clam up. Once again Tim had shaped history to his favor, to put down someone else. In his smug slam of my conscience, he couldn’t grasp that my actions that night, right or wrong, stemmed from his grief at the drive-in. If I hadn’t had to rescue him, the two chases wouldn’t have happened.

But Tim kept hammering. “The guy who wanted to punch out my lights has been deep in the ground ever since.”

“His buddy bought the blame. Can we change the subject?”

“But, Alex, you knew they’d smashed that GTO.”

“I knew they’d left the road,” I said.

“You didn’t go back to see if anyone was hurt.”

“I could’ve learned the hard way that they were fine and ready for action.”

“Didn’t that give you a weird sense of power?” said Tim.

“Not wanting to be injured?”

“Leaving them there to maybe die. You could’ve made a difference.”

“What’s your fascination with all these details, Tim?”

“Hell if I know. Why is it something you want to sweep under the rug?”

“I had one thought in my mind,” I said. “I wanted my girlfriend, her father’s car, and my ass as far away from those fools as I could get. Now it’s history.”

He was quiet for a minute before he said, “Ever wonder what ever happened to Susan?”

“Mom told me a few years ago that she was divorced twice and finally landed a rich boyfriend. They live on an island near Spain.”

He finally went quiet. I went back to work on the skiff, spritzing cleaner, scuffing my knuckles as I jammed the scrub brush into corners, finding pockets of mildew that Al had ignored all year.

“After that summer,” said Tim, “with Raymond and you gone, I got to be the orphan.”

“You mean ‘only child,’ right? I can’t imagine you stuck around the house much.”

“Why bother?” he said. “The old man didn’t get it. Even when I was in junior high, he didn’t understand I wasn’t that bad. I was a fuckup, I won’t argue, but I wanted to be good. He didn’t believe I was smart, maybe smarter than he was. So I did what any red-blooded American boy in my shoes would do. I tried to prove to his nasty ass that I was dumb and evil, and I did it to piss him off and disappoint and embarrass him. Except it pissed me off, for some fucking reason, that you could ignore him. You didn’t let his bullshit get in your way. You went off to be good and smart on your own. I had to stay back and fight my little fight.”

“So here we are today,” I said.

“Yep, in your Keys.”

“Having arrived by different routes of travel.”

“More different than you can imagine,” said Tim.

“What will you do here?”

“Are you asking do I still want to be a decent human being,” said Tim, “or did I waste all those wishes living a shitbird’s existence?”

“As pilots say, that’s the runway behind you.”

He nodded. “And life is a long series of drag races and siestas. I know you’ve got this ledger in your mind where you owe guilt debt to the world or Mom or your friends on the island. But your debt just grows as you get older, gets heavier and never goes away. All I want is a balance sheet that zeroes out to a guilt-free ride. Anything wrong with that?”

Out of Tim’s mouth, that assessment amounted to towering optimism. Maybe my kid brother was starting to grow up.

“A zero balance sheet.” I laughed. “The old man died owing me money.”

“He died owing me more than that.”

“Like there’s a written guarantee?” I said. “I won’t argue that he started the wound. Maybe you need to get over it before you dig yourself a deeper hole.”

Tim drained the beer. “I suppose we all exist for a reason, pieces in the cosmic puzzle. I’m through digging my own holes, Alex. On top of that, I’m convinced it’s easier to be a decent human being instead of the alternative. I like easy.”

“And it’s nice not to always be looking over your shoulder,” I said.

“You bet. But, as great men have said before me, fuck it all. How fast will that boat go?”

“That hull, that motor, I expect forty-five, maybe fifty with the wind on your butt.”

“You need some kind of license to take people for rides?” he said. “Maybe that’d be the job for me.”

“They call it a six-pack license. You take a course, take a test, get the Coast Guard’s approval. I’ve heard a few captains bitch that their income’s dependent on the weather.”

Tim shook his head. “I smell insurance and permits and sales tax, too. They don’t make a damned thing easy these days. It’s all stacked against little guys like me.”

The Caprice rolled in with a honk and a shut-down blat from its hollow mufflers. Tim didn’t move from where we sat. “Five-point-seven liters, 260 horsepower, and twenty-three miles per gallon. I paid two large and I should’ve paid less.”

“Still sounds like a bargain.”

“I never make good deals,” he said. “I might get lucky every few years, but one way or the other, even the good ones nail me in the ass. That station wagon’ll break down one day and leave me stranded when I need it least, you can count on it.”

He pitched his empty behind him. It rose in a perfect arc but missed the trash barrel by a foot and landed in the grass. He stood, looked away, and made no effort to pick up the bottle.

“All that anger inside you,” I said.

“I think some of it’s drained out.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not violent.”

He grinned but it turned into a sneer. He picked up the bottle and flung it downward. It shattered in the trash. Brown glass flew and sprinkled his forearm. He brushed it off, unconcerned about imbedding shards in his skin, then stared into the trash can as if searching for truth. “I’m not violent? Who ever told you that, brother?”

Tanker Branigan presented
me with two of the four dozen antique Cuban postcards he had bought at the Big Pine flea market. One was a hundred-year-old lithograph card with a picture of Key West’s Havana American Cigar Factory. The other had no photograph but read, “The Cosmopolitan Bakery, Obispo Street 101, Splendid Restaurant and Bar, We Employ English Speaking Waiters.”

“Some boy in hitch-up overalls thought he bent me over for these,” said Tanker. “I was the better actor, and I knew what they were worth. Join me in my mercenary happiness.”

“You could frame them,” I said. “Sell them as art.”

“He’d need a thousand damned frames,” said Francie. “His walls would look better, but his party budget would go straight to hell.”

Before she drove—insisted on driving—her two bad boys back to town, Francie pulled me aside, but not too far. “If you forced me to ride that boat, Alex Rutledge, I might loosen you up a bit.”

“I could stand a few hours of ocean time,” I said. “No offense, but I was hoping to be alone.”

Francie scratched her breastbone. She understood the power of jiggle. “It’s quicker and better on the buddy system.”

I checked Tanker’s reaction to her banter. His little cough-laugh told me he’d heard it all before.

Before they pulled away Tim offered me a beer from his dwindling twelve-pack. In a brotherly gesture of solidarity, I accepted it. As his Caprice started down the street, he stuck out his arm and flashed me Winston Churchill’s
V
sign. I wondered what kind of victory he had in mind. Victory over self-pity?

Or had it been a peace sign?

I put up the cleanser and brush, coiled the hose, and chucked all the empty bottles into Manning’s recycle bin. Then I stood under the house to sip Tim’s beer and stare again at the canal. Our exchange had been similar to re-hashes of the past, but Tim had shown a shift in thinking. He finally recognized the evil and foul luck that had grown from his bullheaded nature. He hadn’t indicted our father as much as admitted to his own demons, his desire to reshape his own destiny.

Perhaps the years had caught hold of him, and he really wanted to change. All this was one or two levels up from the days when not giving a shit was his mastered art. He’d closed it out with a vehement “Fuck it all,” but I suspected that was a remnant of his old stage routine. Perhaps my inclination to back off, to ease judgment and forgiveness, wasn’t the sucker bet it had been most of my life. Maybe it was time to let Tim start with a clean slate, no demerits, no probation. It sure would make my life more pleasant to call him a brother instead of a liability.

I heard a motorcycle zip Pirates Road and thanked myself for not being one of those testosterone-charged boys who thought that high-revving café racers possessed magical powers to fend off injury and death. Like GTOs were supposed to do a generation ago. A half-minute passed before the ketchup-red Ducati SS-800, growling like a miniature Ferrari, rolled down Keelhaul into Al Manning’s yard and stopped behind my Triumph. The rider wore tight Levi’s, Adidas sneaks, and a long-sleeved light blue shirt with a front zipper. I figured someone had the wrong address until the new Key West detective, Beth Watkins, peeled off her matching red helmet.

She pointed at the Triumph. “Alex Rutledge, you up for a ride?”

I envisioned her blasting the West Coast freeways on her European road rocket. “Your hot machine would outrun my old beast,” I said. “It’d be like a Porsche Targa playing with an Austin Healey, but I give great Lower Keys tours.”

“Let’s go.”

“I appreciate your coming by to say hello, but I’ve had a weird morning. I’m not up for much riding.”

She checked out the beer in my hand and notched down her excitement level. “I met your ex–lady friend, Teresa. She spoke highly of you.”

“I haven’t seen her in a couple of months,” I said.

“I gathered as much. She said she was dating your brother these days.”

“Quick work on both their parts,” I said. “He’s been in town all of fifty hours.”

“She also told me some more details about that day you and Detective Lewis secured the ‘officer down’ situation with gunfire involved. Again, I commend you for that.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I guess my days with the city are done, what with your new full-time photographer.”

“We’ll see,” said Watkins. “He’s just finished his photo training. I was among those who approved his résumé.”

“He’s bound to be better than the last full-timer. Was the training forensic?”

“It covered everything, including on-the-job success. He documented and helped solve two murder cases while he was in graduate school.”

“Where was that?”

“University of Missouri,” she said. “You don’t seem too upset about all this.”

“I wasn’t looking for more crime work, Beth, especially after Thursday with the county,” I said. “I’m sorry for being rude. Can I offer you anything? Water, or a Coke, or beer?”

“No alcohol on this machine, thanks, and I’ve got a water bottle. Did you work one of those murders?”

“I shot photos at both scenes,” I said.

“Lewis told me they’re being treated as separate crimes. Does that make sense?”

I shook my head. “It makes even less that I’m the only person in the county who saw both scenes firsthand. All three scenes, if you count Haskins.”

“Florida gets some strange ones,” she said.

“Where did you live in California?”

She placed her helmet on the Ducati’s seat. “Marin County, last, but I grew up in Santa Cruz. I went to college in San Jose.”

“How did you make it to the southernmost end of the road?”

“Six weeks ago I found a job ad on a law-enforcement Web site. It felt like a good time for me to leave California. I applied by e-mail. They hired me after two phone calls.”

“Your opinion, now that you’re here?”

“Tahiti’s the true Promised Land. But I signed up in good faith, and I can give this island a couple of years.”

“You’ve been to Tahiti?”

She nodded but did not elaborate.

“You’ll find the city unique.”

“We’re talking the same lingo, right?” she said. “When you say ‘the city,’ you mean the local bureaucracy?”

I nodded. “The attitudes and crazy crap. Our elected officials aren’t all wizards. Some are good, maybe better than we deserve. But the others, I wouldn’t count on their common sense.”

“What’s their motivation, overall?”

“Their view of the island economy is that any time you make something more complicated, someone makes more money. It almost doesn’t matter who benefits. They think that, in the end, even if the island’s in knots, we all get richer. A wise economist might argue the concept, but his voice would be a whisper in a wind tunnel.”

She smiled, mouth only, then blanked her expression. “Did you hear about Matilda?”

“The blow-up doll?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You played with her, too?”

“I read about her last month in
The Citizen.
” To slow traffic, the police had parked a squad car on Flagler and put a uniformed vinyl doll in the driver’s seat.

“I didn’t realize she was so well known.”

“What do you mean, play with her?” I said. “You sound peeved at her existence.”

“Some of my colleagues don’t know they’re boorish and sexist. A few chauvinist jokers bought her a peekaboo bra and thong panties. Like a bunch of horny teenagers, they had a dress-up party two days ago in the first-floor weight-lifting room. I walked in to see one officer stuffing Kleenex wads in the bra to make her look more stacked.”

“How would I have heard about that?”

“That’s not the news,” she said. “The duty desk forgot to bring her into the station last night. There was no sign of forced entry, so someone forgot to lock the cruiser. Matilda was stolen between sundown and sunup.”

I almost asked Watkins what time she had made the heist. “Maybe they need to replace her with a male mannequin.”

She dropped her eyelids a fraction and chilled her gaze. “How would that fix sexism?”

“You’re right. It wouldn’t.” Instinct told me to shift the subject. I walked around her Ducati, admired its hardware and fairings. “Did you have this shipped with your furniture?”

“I gave my furniture to my ex-roommate. I drove here three weeks ago with four suitcases and a box of DVDs in my car. A friend rode the Ducati cross-country last week.”

“A trip of large temptation,” I said. “He get many speeding tickets?”

“She got three. It took her forty hours, counting six to sleep. She also has windburn and blisters on her hands and butt. She slept twenty straight hours when she arrived here.”

“Is she on the island to stay?”

“She works with her husband in San Mateo, and he wanted her back right away.”

“One thing you might need to know,” I said. “Last month a multi-agency safety check near Garrison Bight pulled every third passing vehicle into a parking lot. The officers claimed they wanted to make sure everyone had brake lights, taillight lamps, and horns. They brought the Bill of Rights into heavy question, but they busted a few DUIs and gave seat-belt tickets.”

A puzzled look wrinkled her face. “How does that affect me?”

“They also ticketed three people who worked in Key West but still held their out-of-state registrations.”

She turned to look at her license tag.

“Just a tip,” I said.

“Thanks.” She lifted her helmet and tugged it on. “Let’s ride soon.”

An odd visit. I could’ve taken it as a put-down, a come-on, a challenge, or an attempt at insider alliance. I decided to stick with face value, a future date for a tandem tour.

She took it slowly on Keelhaul Lane and quicker on Pirates Road. Her upshifts were timed for torque peak rather than sound effects.

Someone had taught her well.

Later that afternoon I heard tires crunch Manning’s pea-rock driveway. I walked to the far end of the second-deck screened porch in time to glimpse a fender, the tinted side glass of a plain white Crown Vic. Was this Bobbi Lewis’s weekend visit with smiles, boat rides included? Odd that she hadn’t called ahead. I was halfway down the stairs when a second vehicle rolled into the yard. The Ford had green-and-white county markings,
KEY LARGO
on its front fender, and it carried two men. The driver stopped with his side of the car facing me. It was not Billy Bohner.

A throat-graveled bark: “Rutledge?”

Sheriff’s Detective Chet Millican stood with his rear end pressed against my car, his thumbs hooked in his belt. “Got a sec?” he said. “Couple questions for you.”

I looked at the cruiser. Both occupants sat watching, not moving. “You drove all this way with two questions and you had to bring backup?”

“The man on the far side of the vehicle’s a witness,” said Millican. “Also happens to be my son-in-law.”

“What’s he going to witness, harassment?”

“Not yet. What we need, though, he’s already seen.”

Millican’s head was a rectangle, wider than tall.

“Is this about Navarre’s murder?” I said.

“Now that you mention it, how did my crime scene look in broad daylight, Rutledge?”

“Like a slum.”

Millican nodded. “Where were you Thursday morning before sunrise? Humor me with a timeline.”

I couldn’t imagine humor making its way to his brain. “I was asleep until wakened by a call from Detective Lewis.”

“Which phone?” he said. “Your home or your cell?”

I could see where this was leading. “Surely you don’t believe I hung a man. How did you work your way around to that?”

“Are you refusing to cooperate? We can do this in Marathon.”

“A town I admire,” I said. “Your questions won’t get answered until my lawyer drives up from Key West.”

He hesitated, checked out my motorcycle as if memorizing its parts, then pointed his finger at the cruiser. “Turn around. Hands on your head.”

The uniformed deputy was out within a half-second, crouched, with a pistol aimed.

I turned around, touched the hair above my ears. “What’s my infraction, expired tag?”

“Living in a world of shit,” he said. “A mouth that’s full of it, too. Pull down one hand at a time to your waist.”

Millican strung a plastic cuff to my wrists, yanked it tight, then turned me around and backed me up to the house pillar. He smelled of cheap cologne and failing deodorant. The day’s humidity had set in and the wind had died. My first fear of being handcuffed was not being able to swat mosquitoes.

“Sure looks like our boy to me.” The Key Largo deputy looked thirteen years old but had the arms of a home-run hitter.

Millican crooked his finger to summon the second man from the green-and-white. A moment later the son-in-law, a Brad Pitt lookalike with a high-pitched voice said, “That’s the crook right there.” He strode back to the cruiser and reclaimed his seat.

Millican put his face six inches from mine. “You showed up all smart-ass in Marathon on Thursday, I knew I knew you. I saw you on videotape earlier that morning, sliding your bogus credit card up in Rock Harbor. We must’ve watched that gas-station security video five times. I saw you at the murder scene, and blame it on context, your face didn’t register right off. But I slept late this morning and caught your ass in a dream. How does it feel to be busted in another man’s dream?”

No better, I thought, than for another man’s crime. “I’d drive a hundred-fifty-mile round trip to scam gasoline?” I said. “You might want to go back and check that video.”

“My eyes got me this job, bubba, and a thirty-year career before it. You accusing me of bad eyes? You don’t accuse me of shit.”

“You want me to take him in my vehicle?” said the Key Largo deputy.

“I’ll do it,” said Millican. “While you’re driving Mitchell back to Rock Harbor, I can sit this goofball at the substation, maybe clear some other hot cards.” He gave me a tough look. He had spent years at his mirror, perfecting the Clint Eastwood jaw set and cold eye.

“That your billfold in the front pocket?” he said.

I nodded.

He asked the uniformed deputy to pull and inventory my wallet so they could verify each other’s version of events. “We might get lucky and find the card that financed his cruise up and down the Keys.”