Bad Monkey (3 page)

“What the hell’s wrong with Sonny, anyway? This is no big deal.”

Burton said the sheriff freaked when Channel 7 called. “Anyway, he already gave a press statement saying the case had been turned over to Miami-Dade.”

“I warned him, Rog.”

“Just ditch the fucking arm and come home.”

“Let me think about this.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Yancy boiled the blue crabs and served them on hearts of palm, sprinkled with lemon pepper and Tabasco. Bonnie brought a bottle of Bordeaux. The fine vintage was wasted on Yancy but the gesture seemed rich with promise. Still she said: “I shouldn’t have come.”

They ate dinner on the back deck, where a world-class sunset was being ruined by the vulgar structure arising next door, spears of light slanting harshly through a checkerboard of window spaces and door frames.

“Where’s the good doctor?” Yancy asked.

“Lauderdale. He’s got a meeting tomorrow with our bankers.”

“It must be nice to have bankers. As a couple, I mean. ‘Here’s our Christmas tree. Here’s our minivan. And, oh, last but not least, here are our bankers.’ ”

“Shut up, Andrew,” Bonnie said. Her frosted hair was in pigtails, and a touch of pink gloss had been applied to her lips.

“He’s sixty, you’re forty. I remain at a loss.” Yancy threw up his hands.

“Don’t try to flatter me. I’m forty-two and you know it.”

She kicked off her flip-flops and crossed her smooth tanned legs, which stirred in Yancy’s chest a longing that almost incapacitated him. He and Bonnie hadn’t slept together since the night before the vacuum-cleaner incident.

Yancy said, “The sheriff would lift my suspension if you and Cliff agreed to drop the charges.”

“So that’s why you invited me tonight.”

“I ask you over three or four times a week, but you always say no.”

“Cliff won’t budge,” Bonnie said. “He wants to see you punished.”

Yancy pointed out that a trial would be humiliating for all parties. “Especially the alleged victim.”

“Alleged? There were three hundred witnesses, including yours truly.”

The assault had occurred at high noon at Mallory Square, which was packed with cruise-ship passengers. Fourteen amateur video clips of admissible clarity were in the hands of the prosecutor.

“Nobody calls you a whore and gets away with it,” Yancy said.

“Well, I
was
cheating on him, as you’ll recall. And I believe he used the term ‘tramp,’ not ‘whore.’ ” Bonnie balanced a plate of crabs on her lap. With a silver fork she probed for morsels amid the ceramic debris. “These are pretty darn tasty,” she said.

“Talk to him, darling. Please. I need my badge back.”

“Why didn’t you just punch him like a normal person? Why’d you have to go and sodomize him with a Hoover?”

Yancy shrugged. “You always said he had a bee up his ass. I was only trying to help.”

“Are you seeing anybody?” Bonnie had no talent for changing the subject. “I don’t think you’re ready yet. I think you’re still recovering.”

“It’s true, I’m a portrait of frailty. Tell me again why Cliffy isn’t divorcing you.”

“He adores me, Andrew.”

“Even after catching us together.”

“Yes,” said Bonnie impatiently.

“On his own boat.”

“We’ve been over this a hundred times.”

“In the tuna tower, for Christ’s sake! His own wife and another
man, lewdly entwined.” Yancy inserted a crab claw in his mouth and bit down violently. “We must’ve looked like the fucking Wallendas up there.”

The boat was a seventy-two-foot Merritt with all the bells and whistles. Dr. Clifford Witt had recently retired from the practice of medicine, having invested in a chain of lucrative storefront pain clinics that dispensed Percocets and Vicodins by the bucket to a new wave of American redneck junkies.

Bonnie said, “I wouldn’t be here tonight if I didn’t care.”

“Yet still you intend to testify against me.”

“I’ll take no joy from it, Andrew.” She looked down, tugging at a loose thread on her cutoffs. “Of course, you could cut a deal. Spare us all from the messiness of court.”

Yancy frowned. “And lose my job? That’s automatic after a felony conviction.”

“Suppose I got Cliff to go along with dropping the charge to a misdemeanor? Between you and me, Dickinson’s office would be thrilled.”

Billy Dickinson was the local state attorney, and he had no appetite for ventilating scandals.

“Sonny could still fire me,” Yancy said, “or bust me down to deputy.” Still, a misdemeanor wasn’t insurmountable, career-wise.

“What do you think of the wine?”

“Yeasty,” said Yancy, “yet playful.”

Their affair had started on a Saturday afternoon in the produce section at Fausto’s, the two of them reaching simultaneously for the last ripe avocado. From there they beelined to Bonnie’s car and sped up the highway all the way to Bahia Honda, where they spent the night, hiding from the park rangers and humping madly on the beach, carving their own private dunes. For breakfast they split the avocado.

Yancy had been aware of Bonnie’s marital status; Cliff Witt was his dermatologist at the time, always ready with a frigid zap of liquid nitrogen whenever Yancy burst into the office to present a new, ominous-looking freckle. Yancy appreciated Cliff Witt’s accessibility but knew of his reputation as a horndog perv and pill peddler.

Still, guilt fissured Yancy’s conscience when he began undressing the man’s wife. It was his first encounter with a Brazilian wax job, and
rapture soon blinded him to the manifest hurdles in his path. Usually he avoided married women.

“I suppose I should go,” Bonnie said, rising. She had pale blue eyes and reddish lashes that looked gold-tipped in the light.

Yancy suggested a detour to the bedroom, and she said no. “But I’m a little drunk. Maybe a shower would wake me up.”

“There’s an idea.”

It was just like old times, Bonnie’s bare bottom slapping against the wet tile while Yancy’s heels squeaked in joyous syncopation on the rubber bath mat. Somehow they broke the soap dish off the wall and also spilled a bottle of Prell, which played havoc with Yancy’s traction. Afterward they toweled each other dry and fell into bed, and there Bonnie made a peculiar revelation.

“I am wanted in Oklahoma,” she said.

“You’re wanted here even more.”

“I’m serious. That’s why I married Cliff. I was a fugitive.
Am
a fugitive.”

Yancy wasn’t always a good post-coital listener, but Bonnie had gotten his attention. She said, “My real name is Plover Chase.”

“Ah.”

“
The
Plover Chase?”

“Okay,” Yancy said.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember the case! Stay right here.”

Naked she bounded from the sheets, returning with a French handbag that Yancy judged to be worth more than his car. From a jeweled change purse she removed a newspaper clipping that had been folded to the size of a credit card. As Yancy skimmed the article, he recalled the crime and also the steamy tabloid uproar.

Plover Chase was a schoolteacher in Tulsa who’d been convicted of extorting sex from one of her students in exchange for giving him an A on his report card. The boy was fifteen at the time; she was twenty-seven. On the day of her sentencing she’d disappeared.

“The judge was a shriveled old prick. I was looking at ten years,” Bonnie recapped. “So instead I hopped a plane to Lauderdale. Cliff’s medical office was advertising for a receptionist, and the rest is history.”

“Does he know the truth?” Yancy asked.

“Of course.” Which explained why Bonnie had stayed with him.

Yancy eyed the headline on the article:
WARRANT ISSUED FOR TEACHER CONVICTED IN SEX-FOR-GRADES SCHEME
. He wasn’t sure whether he should act shocked or jealous. Certainly he had nothing as sensational in his own past.

He said, “May I offer a couple of observations? One, you’re even more beautiful today than you were then.”

“That’s a mug shot, Andrew. And, FYI, a dyke named Smitty had just given me a full-on cavity search, which is why my eyeballs are bulging in that photo.”

Yancy plowed on. “Number two, ‘Bonnie’ is so much sexier than ‘Plover.’ I don’t think I could ever be intimate with a Plover—it’s just not a name that can be seriously howled in the heat of passion.”

“Cody had no trouble,” Bonnie said.

Yancy raised an eyebrow. “The teenage victim of your seduction?”

“Yeah, some victim. He knew more positions than I did.”

“Actually, Cody’s a good sturdy name. He would be, what, about thirty now?”

Bonnie said the young man had sat in the front row of her AP English class. “I have no defense for what happened. He flirted with me, fine, but so did lots of the boys. Our … whatever … only lasted a couple of weeks, and of course he blabbed to everybody. His mother was the one who went to the cops.”

“Even after you gave him an A?”

“There was no trade! Cody was an outstanding student.”

“I assume he took the stand.”

“His parents threatened to sell his Jet Ski if he didn’t testify. Apparently he’d kept a journal of everything we did and how many times we did it. His writing was quite jaunty and explicit—I should never have turned him on to Philip Roth.”

“So what was the final tally? How many trysts?”

“The jury was a horrid bunch, Andrew, leering like gargoyles.”

Yancy said, “I can only imagine.”

“Anyway, I wanted you to know the full truth, now that we’re closing the book on each other’s lives.”

Like a buzzard coasting through clouds, the thought crossed Yancy’s mind that his lawyer might be interested to learn that the wife
of the man Yancy was accused of assaulting—and a key witness against him—was herself a fugitive from a sordid felony rap. He let the notion glide away.

“Whatever happened to Cody?” he asked.

“How the hell would I know? He was a dumb mistake, that’s all.”

“We all make ’em.”

“I’ll talk to Cliff again tomorrow. Promise.”

Yancy said, “Thank you, Bonnie. I like being a detective.”

“In the meantime you’re still getting a paycheck, right? So go fishing or something.” She returned the newspaper article to her purse. Then she stood up and stepped into her denim cutoffs. “I need some ice in my wine. How about you?”

“I’m good.”

Yancy lay back on a pillow and watched Bonnie button her blouse. She always did it without looking down, her gaze clouded and faraway and dull. After she left the room, he shut his eyes and tried not to think about the supernatural frequency of erections enjoyed by fifteen-year-old schoolboys.

“Andrew!”

He lifted his head and through the doorway he saw Bonnie rigid in the glow of the open freezer. Her fists were pressed to the sides of her head.

“My God!” she said.

Yancy sat upright, thinking:
Oh fuck
.

“Andrew, what have you done?” she cried. “What on earth have you done?”

Three

After that night, Bonnie refused to come back to Yancy’s house. From her line of questioning it became depressingly clear that she thought him capable of murdering somebody and hacking the corpse into pieces. Yancy took this as a sign that he’d failed, over their time as lovers, to showcase his best qualities.

He told Bonnie that the severed limb was evidence in an unsolved missing-person case and that he was storing it at home as a personal favor to Sheriff Sonny Summers, which was nearly true. Sonny didn’t know Yancy still had the arm because Yancy hadn’t told him, not wishing to upset the man who would soon be deciding Yancy’s future in law enforcement.

Some nights, when it seemed as if Bonnie would never again be available to him, Yancy found himself wishing he’d followed Burton’s advice and dumped the dead arm in the mangroves. That remained an option, of course, and perhaps one of these days he’d do it.

After a telephone plea featuring abject begging, Bonnie finally agreed to meet him for breakfast at a diner on Sugarloaf. Afterward they made love in the back of her 4Runner, sharing the cramped space with her husband’s smelly golf shoes. From Yancy’s vantage it was impossible not to notice that Bonnie was no longer waxing.

“We’re moving to Sarasota,” she explained. “Cliff’s burned out on the Keys.”

“But what about the trial?”

“There won’t be any trial.”

In jubilation Yancy rubbed his chin back and forth across her pale stubble. “You’re an angel!” he chortled.

“Whoa, cowboy. It doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.”

“No? Then what?”

“I tried my best, Andrew.”

Yancy sat up quickly, bumping his head on the roof. “But they
are
offering me a deal, correct?”

“Yes, and you’ll take it,” Bonnie said, “because Cliff doesn’t want to go to court and you don’t want to go to jail. Hand me that bra, please.”

“What about my suspension?”

“Look, I’m not even supposed to be talking about this. I honestly
did
try my best.” She finished dressing and nimbly vaulted back to the driver’s seat. “Out,” she commanded Yancy. “I’m late for a facial.”

He exited by the rear hatch and hurried around to her window. “I’m going to miss you,” he said. When he leaned in for a kiss, she offered only a damp cheek.

“Good-bye, Andrew.”

“Good-bye, Plover.”

Yancy went back to his car and called Montenegro, his attorney at the public defender’s office. “How soon can you be here?” Montenegro asked.

“Give me something to chew on. What the hell’s going on?”

“Dude, you know how things work in this town.”

Yancy sagged and said, “Damn.”

“It’s a good news, bad news scenario. I’m around till noon.”

There was a bad wreck at Mile Marker 13, a head-on between a gravel truck and a southbound rental car that crossed the center line—somebody’s Key West vacation done before it started. The fire department was still hosing the gasoline and blood off the pavement when Yancy inched past the scene in his Crown Vic. He lost a half hour in the traffic jam, but Montenegro was still waiting when he got to the office.

“What’s their offer?” Yancy said.