Bad Monkey (14 page)

“How much have you had to drink?”

“Have mercy, woman. I ran out of Advil.”

“Well, I don’t sleep with drunken guys. Period.”

Yancy sighed. “So many rules.”

She took notice of the shotgun propped in a corner, and Yancy told her restaurant inspections could be dangerous. She informed him that for dinner she was doing blackened grouper with mashed sweet potatoes and a grilled Caesar, and that he was going to finish every bite or never see her again.

“I also stopped in Key Largo and got some homemade carrot cake,” she said.

“From where?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Rosa, you don’t understand. I see all the health reports. I know the dirt on every kitchen.”

She ordered him to be quiet while she sewed up his gnawed butt
cheek. To take his mind off the intimate unpleasantries, Yancy told the story of how he was conceived during side one of
Abbey Road
.

“You mean side two,” Rosa said. “The medley.”

“No, side one. According to my mom, the big moment happened during ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.’ ”

“It’s all starting to make sense,” said Rosa.

After trimming the last suture, she made Yancy stand up and drink an entire pitcher of cold water. When his head began to clear, he told her about the seaplane parked behind Eve Stripling’s house.

“I ran the tail numbers on a flight-tracking website. It’s a Cessna Caravan that’s leased from a company in Boca Raton. Flew in from Congo Town the day before and cleared Customs at Opa-locka, all legal and proper.”

“Where on earth is Congo Town?” Rosa asked.

“Bahamas.” Yancy jerked a thumb toward the east. “Andros Island.”

“Andrew, you’d make a darn good cop.”

“That dog bite still stings like hell. You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“My other patients never complain. They are, however, deceased.”

That’s when she kissed him. It was a good one, bordering on unforgettable.

“Only because you’re injured,” she said, and kissed him again.

He pulled her close. “How’s this going to work with all these stitches? Do I have to keep standing?”

“Well,” whispered Rosa, “I suppose you could kneel.”

Yancy lifted her sundress. “You’re the doctor.”

The Dragon Queen asked, “How much you take fuh dot pink boy?”

Neville said he wasn’t for sale.

“Too bod.”

“And dot’s a monkey, madam, not a boy.”

“He got a name?”

“Driggs.” Neville opened the brown bag. He handed her the fresh bottle of rum and a box of cheroots. “Dot woo-doo dint woyk on Chrissofer,” he said. “He supposa be gone but he ain’t.”

“Wot!”

“Mon tore down my house!”

“Maybe den he drop dead.”

“No, madam, he come in again dis morning. Got offa plane wit his woman and drove ’way.” Neville had received the upsetting information from a cousin who worked at the airport.

The Dragon Queen struck a match on her bare heel and lighted one of the cigars. She assured Neville that she’d put a hideous, unshakable curse on the white devil. “Juss you wait. He be gone from Andros in due time.”

“I cont wait fuh due time,” said Neville. “Soon dot fella gon start puddin’ up his damn hotel.”

Neville had been hiding in the pines while Christopher’s workers had replaced the fuel filter on the backhoe into which Neville had pissed. He asked the Dragon Queen what type of voodoo she’d used on the white American.

“Dot piece a shoyt you brought tuh me. Any minute now, his skin be fallin’ off his body. Maybe his balls, too.”

She twisted open the rum and took a husky slug, careful not to dribble. Then she sprang up from her wicker throne and began to dance, clapping her hands and swirling her long red-and-yellow dress. Neville glanced anxiously at the door, which he’d left ajar in anticipation of a speedy exit. Driggs bared his yellow teeth and bounded onto Neville’s shoulder. It was the middle of the afternoon, broiling hot and not a murmur of breeze. The windows of the woman’s shack were open and the doctor flies buzzed throughout, targeting the bald patches on the monkey’s hide.

Neville was disappointed that the Dragon Queen’s spell had failed, and increasingly skeptical of her claims. He’d returned to try once more only because of her considerable reputation for dark magic. He told her that stronger voodoo was needed to neutralize the man called Christopher. The Dragon Queen replied that she had needs of her own, and flapped the flowing dress up over her head. Neville was mortified to be flashed in such a crude manner. Driggs began to shriek and twitch and claw at his diaper.

“Madam, please,” Neville protested.

“Wot’s wrong wit dot ugly boy of yours? Am I de first grown woman he ever seen naked as God made us?”

Neville lied and said he was late to meet a boat mechanic in Rocky Town. He dug into a pocket and came up with twenty-one Bahamian dollars, which he counted out and placed on the table next to the rum. The Dragon Queen sighed, tucking the bills into her damp bony cleavage.

She said, “I will need some udder poysonal tings belonging to dis mon. Dot shoyt is all boined up.”

Neville told her he’d come back with something better. That evening he would snoop in the trash cans outside the big oceanfront house that Christopher was renting. That’s where he’d found the piece of shirt.

“Now, put dot sweet pink boy on my knee,” she said, jabbing a dirty fingernail toward Driggs. “Lemme have a squeeze.”

“No, madam, he bites.”

“Wot!” She craned forward like a buzzard, studying the face of the trembling animal. “I tink someone pudda bod coyse on dis youngstah long time ago. But, see here, I kin make ’im good as new. Juss leave ’im wit me.”

The monkey hissed and vaulted out of her reach. Neville followed him out the door.

Dinner was superb. Yancy cleaned his plate for the first time in weeks. Afterward he took Rosa out on his skiff. She asked why he hadn’t remarried after Celia left him. He told her he’d come close twice. Rosa’s own marriage had lasted three years and fizzled with nobody to blame, or so she said.

The truth was more depressing, laid bare by Google Earth. It happened on a rare slow day at the Miami-Dade morgue, when she had only one autopsy scheduled—an elderly female tourist who had straightforwardly drowned at Key Biscayne, a tragedy witnessed by fourteen blood relatives, none of whom could swim a lick. Why a family devoid of water skills chose to vacation at a seaside resort was beyond Rosa’s scope of inquiry. The postmortem was completed by lunchtime and she had the afternoon to kill.

That’s when a blood tech named Gaylord showed her the Google Earth app, which he downloaded to Rosa’s office desktop. Soon she was enjoying aerial views of the Hoover Dam, the Malecón in old Havana, and even—more impressively—her parents’ home in Union City. From thousands of feet in the sky she could still make out the old sycamores lining each side of the driveway, the rectangular outline of her mother’s flower garden and a blurred image of her backyard swing set, which her father sentimentally refused to dismantle.

Next Gaylord loaded Google Maps with a street view, which sent Rosa eagerly cruising the roadways of her youth. There was the Ferraro house—Bobby Jr. had asked her to the junior prom; the shutters were now periwinkle blue, not white like before. The two-story where Angie Fernandez and her sisters had lived looked deserted, a sign planted in the dead lawn saying the place was up for sale by some bank. Also gone were the Sotos, who’d come from Cuba with Rosa’s parents; the new owners had erected a tall wooden fence and nailed up a Beware of Dog sign embellished with the silhouette of a snarling pit bull.

It was only natural for Rosa to check out her present Miami neighborhood and the dwelling she shared with Daniel, her then spouse, who worked as a teak carpenter on yachts. The driver of the Google camera truck had chosen a sunny morning to map the streets of Morningside, and Rosa thought their small home looked tropical and welcoming—the red barrel-tile roof, the green ivy nibbling at the bright stucco walls; in the front yard, ponytail palms, crimson bougainvilleas and a birdbath carved from limestone.

The only thing out of place that day, when the Google crew with their roof-mounted cameras rolled by, was a car Rosa didn’t recognize in the driveway. The car was parked next to Daniel’s Ram pickup, and it appeared to be a late-model Camry or an Accord; who could tell the difference? Dark blue was the color, though, definitely. The car had a Florida license plate that was partially fuzzed in the video—Gaylord surmised that Google did that on purpose because of privacy concerns—although upon enlargement Rosa was able to identify the prefix, which was LRW.

She would never forget those three letters because, as events unfolded, they came to stand in her mind for Low Rent Whore. Having
nothing better to do on that slow afternoon, Dr. Rosa Campesino fed the tag information to a cop friend, who ran a statewide computer check and found one and only one blue Honda Accord registered with a tag beginning with LRW. It came back to a Sandra Jane Finn, white female, age twenty-nine, who was known to Rosa as a freelance hotel lifeguard and stand-up paddleboard instructor. For Daniel’s birthday Rosa had purchased for him a ten-foot Dragonfly and three private lessons, which had evidently evolved to include floating blow jobs on the Intracoastal Waterway.

That night Daniel broke down and admitted to the affair, lamenting his wretched luck that the Google vehicle had rolled past the marital homestead on one of the rare occasions when Sandy happened to be there. Usually they met at her place, he added ineptly. Rosa evicted him at scalpel-point, and over time she’d successfully swept him into a tiny moldy corner of her memory.

“You still talk to your ex?” Yancy asked.

“He’s deceased,” Rosa said, “but even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t call.”

A pod of dolphins rolled in the channel and Yancy patted softly on the water to draw them near. Rosa said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have children because her job presented such a depressing outlook for the human species. Yancy understood how she felt. Bonnie Witt had once tearfully begged him to impregnate her; the fact that he’d briefly considered the request was proof that he’d been crippled by romantic self-delusions. Their offspring would have been eternally fucked up, prime fodder for Dr. Phil.

The dolphins moved on, swimming leisurely with the tide. Yancy poled the skiff up on a grassy flat and staked off from the stern. He felt all right as long as he didn’t sit down. A colossal thunderhead bloomed to the west, smothering the sun but spreading a lavender veil of light.

“Tell me about the other patient you saw today,” he said to Rosa. “The one who didn’t whine and squirm.”

“You mean the suicide? It was a doctor, believe it or not.”

Yancy briefly thought of Clifford, but he remembered that the Witts were in Sarasota.
Unless there was a medical convention in Miami …

“Please tell me he didn’t strangle himself with his pecker in his fist.”

“No!” Rosa said. “And, by the way, that wouldn’t be a suicide. That
would be an autoerotic miscalculation. This fellow did the job with a handgun.”

“Messy, but less embarrassing.”

“He was also drunk out of his gourd, and probably loaded on oxycodone. They found prescription bottles all over his condo. We’ll know for sure when the lab finishes the toxicology.”

Yancy had stopped admiring the sky. “He wasn’t an orthopedist, was he?”

Rosa turned in the bow and looked up at him. “How’d you know?”

“His name was Gomez O’Peele?”

“Yes, Andrew, but how on earth—”

“I went to see him yesterday, after you and I had lunch. He used to work for Nick Stripling.”

“Jesus, maybe the guy freaked out after you braced him.”

“That’s not the reaction I got. He wanted cash money for being an informant. Did they find a note?”

Rosa shook her head.

“Then how,” Yancy said, “can you be sure he killed himself?”

“Point-blank wound, right temple. His prints on the weapon. No sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. His brother said he’d lost his job at a clinic and had financial problems, booze issues, drug issues.” Rosa raised her hands. “It’s textbook, Andrew.”

“Except maybe it’s not.”

“Did you see a gun when you were there?”

“No. What did he use?”

“A .357 Smith.”

“Let me take a guess on the ammo,” Yancy said. “Hollow points, 158-grain.”

“Okay, stop.”

“Just like the ones that killed Charles Phinney.” Yancy unstuck the pole and started pushing the skiff off the shallows. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“One of the doctor’s neighbors heard a bang around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. She knocked on the door, got no answer. Didn’t call the police because she had company—not her husband.” Rosa was frowning. “This morning a rabbi who lives in the building found blood spots
in his parking space. They’d dripped from O’Peele’s balcony, where the body was found.”

Yancy was disturbed to think his visit had in some way precipitated the doctor’s death. Had somebody been surveilling the condo? Or maybe the shooter had followed him there. He thought of Eve and her boyfriend, their hushed and agitated conversation in the backyard on Di Lido Island. Had they been talking about O’Peele? Had they already shot him?

But why bother killing the guy, since Nick Stripling was dead and unreachable by prosecutors? A murder only made sense if Eve herself feared being indicted as a conspirator in the scooter-chair scam, and if she feared O’Peele would testify against her.

“I’ll hold off signing the death certificate,” Rosa said. “It should be easy to compare the bullets that killed O’Peele and Phinney. Meanwhile you should tell the homicide cops in North Miami Beach what you know. Tell them you were at the doctor’s condo a few hours before the shooting and he seemed okay.”

“I’m not telling anybody I was there.”

“Andrew, this is serious shit.”

“So is saving my career.”

On the ride back to the boat ramp, Yancy mentally replayed his brief time inside O’Peele’s place. He was fairly certain he hadn’t left a trace of himself, besides fingerprints on a ginger ale can that the cops were not likely to dust since he’d tossed it in a Dumpster in the parking lot. Fortunately, he hadn’t given the doctor one of his expired detective cards or even a phone number.