Octopus Alibi (12 page)

Lewis moved back to our position near the door. She stood still, moving only her eyes. It looked as if she wanted to get a feel for the house in which a woman had died, wanted to find another dimension, a higher level of focus. I didn’t say a word.

I had been in the house twenty hours earlier. This time I looked at each piece of furniture differently. I wondered what I might have touched, what evidence I might have fouled or ignored. I felt a different longing for Naomi. I studied her bookshelves, her tattered paperback copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
and Gene Lyon’s
Search for the Atocha
in hardcover. I’d given her
The Sibley Guide to Birds
. Odors dug deep into my memory. The room held her cologne, the potting soil in her table plants, the Cuban coffee that she and I enjoyed. The room smelled of loss.

“Liska said you’re the executor. Who gets all this?” Lewis didn’t look at me for an answer. She continued her observations.

“Her older brother, Ernest Bramblett,” I said.

“How did he react to her death?”

“I haven’t found him to tell him. That’s my first chore.”

She said, “Is he from Akron, Iowa, too?”

“That’s what Jack Spottswood thought. But Jack’s secretary tried to contact Bramblett. She learned that he’s not there anymore.”

“So he’s dead, too,” she said, “or the killer.”

“Is that how these cases work?”

“We look at the families. How you going to find him?”

“Pick through her correspondence, spend time in her computer.”

Lewis looked around the living room, used her hand to fan her face.

“She got a Mac or a PC?”

“Macintosh.”

“Shit. I can’t find my way around Macs. I’ll let you do that. You can spend the afternoon in Iowa, long distance. And see if she’s got her check ledger in there. You know Quicken and Excel?”

I nodded.

“This place is squeaky clean. See who she’s paying to keep house. Give me a call later.”

“So, this is it?”

“You want me to declare it a crime scene? Bring in forensics, string the yellow tape? You won’t be able to track down her brother, do the business you have to do.”

She had been off to a good start. Something had snuffed her interest.

I said, “How do you test for poisoning?”

“You hope she’s not cremated. At this point, it takes a court order.”

“Can I use your cell phone?”

Lewis stared out a window. “I’ll use it first,” she said. “I’ll tell Liska I’m not convinced there’s been a crime.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that. I’ll have to make another power call to him.”

“To say what?”

“To tell him you’ve got a chunk of driftwood up your ass. And the next time he makes me cancel a flight reservation, he should send over a real investigator.”

Lewis looked away. I half expected her to come around with a right hook, to settle my hash and shut me up. Instead, I saw deep hurt in her eyes. The same rule applied as before. I kept my mouth shut.

“You enjoy your crime-photo cameos?” she said.

Be careful, I thought. “The financial part helps.”

“You also helped us with closing a couple bad ones.”

“That type of result is not my goal. I try to shoot good pictures.”

“I beg to differ, comrade. That one with your buddy the banker, and the Stock Island murder, you got like a dog on a scent. You went balls to the wall. You made those cases your own personal vendettas.”

“That doesn’t mean they fulfilled my ambitions. I need to have a life, too. It’s that part that gets away from me.”

She stared out the window. “Same dog bit me.”

Quiet, Rutledge. Quiet.

She turned to face me. As her head swung, her light brown hair brushed her cheek. “You asked if I knew the mayor?”

“Right.”

“We had a fling two years ago. It lasted eight months. Is that the ‘know’ you meant?”

Shit. I had stepped in it again. Four inches of duct tape would close my mouth. Her admission explained her attitude.

“He wouldn’t leave his wife,” she said. “He was too much in love with her. Who can explain it? I was a dumbass for starting up with a married guy in the first place. After we split up, I found out she was screwing around, too. Multiple partners. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t break his heart that badly. Somebody needed to do it. Coming from me, it would have sounded like sour grapes. Or come off like I was trying to rekindle our deal, which I was not.”

My mouth was shut, lips sealed. I wanted her to stop.

She didn’t. “You’re the first person I’ve told. Don’t feel obligated to pass it along. Especially to your friend Dunwoody from the
Citizen
. She’s always been a Gomez groupie. Most likely she still is, and she does a good job. So it’s our secret. I needed to say it to someone. Now it’s off my chest.”

Goodnight Irene Jones had warned Sam about the grieving process. “It’s hard to lose friends,” I said.

“It makes you relive history, for a few days at least. I didn’t think missing him was in the program. I was wrong.”

“Do you think he was capable of…”

Lewis glanced at me again. “Yes, Rutledge. I think he committed suicide. He talked about it twice while I was seeing him. That kind of talk is a big fat warning. It was part of the reason I went away. Hell, it was the main reason. I knew that our affair wasn’t helping his sanity. Some men, their dicks turn off their brains, but not Steve. Our romance chewed at his conscience. We were together, but he was always somewhere else. For a while I blamed the fact that he was a politician. For another while I blamed my job. Before I was over it, I blamed everything but the Russians.” She walked to the window. “You know the neighbor?”

I looked into the yard next door, saw a woman in her late thirties or early forties. “I’ve seen her at Fausto’s. I can’t put a name to her face.”

Lewis hurried out to the porch, peeled off her booties and gloves. I took off my stuff and caught up as she was saying, “Did Ms. Douglas have a lot of visitors?”

“I seen this man here,” said the woman. “And that lady that runs a fancy gift shop on Greene Street. She’d come by, I don’t know, once a week, late in the day.”

“Do you know the woman’s name?”

She shook her head. “They’d sit on that porch, drink their high-priced wine. They opened it with a corkscrew. Their first sips, they always clicked their glasses. Like every day was a damn celebration.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“That lady who talks to bugs.”

“I see,” said Lewis. “The woman who talks to bugs.”

“Right. She’s an exterminator who, well, I don’t know what she does. It looks like she has a prayer session with herself, telling the bugs to stay away from Mrs. Douglas’s house. I think that’s why I have so many over here. They all leave next door and come to me.”

Lewis said, “Is that your phone ringing?”

The woman laughed. “It’s my bird. It imitates more than words. It does the phone, the microwave beep, garbage truck brakes, you name it. I’ve had that bird for years. It does a great flushing toilet.”

Lewis bit inward on her lips, held back her reaction. “Let me ask you this. Did you see anyone who, say, looked like a domestic?”

“You mean, like a local person?”

“Someone who cleans houses.”

“Oh, that’s right. That black woman. I don’t know that woman’s name. Maybe I’m better off. She was not a friendly person. I’m not saying she was mean. I saw her feed stray cats. She’d wave to that old black man that rides the bike with American flags on it. He would wave back at her, and they’d smile like teenagers. She’d look at me, wouldn’t say hello, wouldn’t say boo. Like I was a damn stop sign.”

“So, no one else?” said Lewis.

“One other man, and this is how I knew that lady was so important. She worked on charities and all. I’d read in the paper that she met all the time with people from the Arts Council. But this one other person came by a lot. That good-looking mayor, bless his soul. I got to admit, I voted for his face.”

Lewis’s eyes caught mine for an instant as she looked to the treetops. A few seconds later she turned and thanked the woman, then led me back to Naomi’s porch. She had something to say, but couldn’t form her words. She went inside, gathered up her phone gear and toolbox, stared again at the walls. She finally said, “Naomi must have had a wallet and jewelry.”

“They’re locked up at my house. I found them yesterday afternoon and took them home.”

“Did she own a car?”

“I never knew of one,” I said.

Lewis nodded, went back to staring. “This is still a city case, you follow?”

“So I get to jump the political fence?”

“You get to bear bad tidings. Other than that, you don’t do anything.”

“So you confirm the shaky commonality, as you called it, then you sit on the sidelines?”

She gave me a “so what” shrug. “I’ll tell Liska I’m spooked. You stop the cremation, if it’s not too late. You track down the cleaning woman. Do what you can to find the brother. Play it out, however you need to. Bear in mind, though, you come back in here, you might foul evidence.”

“That cell number you gave a few months ago. Will it still get to you?”

Lewis shook her head. “My week off starts tomorrow. This is a break I need now more than ever. With what I just told you, you can understand. I need to get out on the water, wash the cobwebs. Put all the drudge work behind me. Get some windburn instead of this pallor. I called your friend Sam Wheeler to book a couple days of fishing. He said he’d be out of town for a few days.”

“Try his pal Captain Turk.”

“That’s what Sam told me to do. Maybe I can find a place up the Keys to veg out and sleep late. Anything on the water with no phone. With any luck, I can stay away until all this is over.”

“You don’t feel compelled to question two deaths?”

She shook her head. “I am a worn-out woman, and I’m part of a large team. No single case has to be tattooed on my shoulders. Anyway, why do you need my help? I’ve seen that look in your eyes, Alex. You’re on another quest. You won’t let up until the big prize is in your bag.”

“This vendetta stuff was your concept, not mine.”

She nodded. “I just have to wonder if, this time around, you’ll get your ass kicked all to hell.”

11

I
HOPED
B
OBBI
L
EWIS
felt great altruistic renewal. She had vacated the Residential Parking spot that had troubled her conscience. Little matter that she had ditched a potential murder investigation, willed it from her caseload, let it fall into the heap of good intentions gone slack.

I sat in Naomi Douglas’s compact, pine-paneled office, again pondered the woman I had known. Naomi had come to Key West to live out her life, had made friends quickly, shown style and energy. She had cultivated the island art scene, the preservation and cultural groups. Her checkbook had helped people find their visions, live their dreams. She had charmed and helped me as well, boosted my self-worth when I needed it. I saw her as a flower in the rock garden, and I owed her my best efforts to ensure that my “speculation of hometown commonality” was mere paranoia.

I called the funeral home. I wasn’t sure whom to ask for, but learned that the man who’d answered was the only person in the building. I told him my name. He introduced himself as Roger Fading. He had a nasal Conch accent.

“You’re calling about Mrs. Douglas? I saw your name on the forms.”

I asked if she’d been cremated yet.

“Sir, we have a backlog this week. Two kidney failures, a scuba-diving accident, and two cancerous livers. And, of course, our dear mayor. I was told there was no service planned, so I changed her priority.”

“You’ve put Naomi to the back of the line?”

His tone went defensive: “Yes, well…”

“That’s fine, Mr. Fading. What are the chances she could stay there for a few more days?”

A shift to formality: “Is there a problem with payment, sir?”

Fading and I got what we wanted. He would get quick cash and he would delay his work. He had no questions. I had one less problem.

I called Jack Spottswood’s office to ask about autopsy. He was not at his desk, and I didn’t want to leave a confusing message. I asked his assistant to send a check to the funeral home.

I hung up, turned on Naomi’s Macintosh, found her Excel program, and went straight to her financial stats. She had built a schedule of upcoming bills versus expected income. She had maintained a stock-portfolio-tracking sheet. Blue chips anchored her holdings. She had played with a few small cap stocks. I figured that she had gambled no more than three grand. I found her check ledger, but it listed no checks written to individuals. They all were to companies: utilities, insurance, a broker, and two funds.

I used the finder function to search for files that had “Ernest,” “family,” “Bramblett,” “Akron,” or “brother” in their names. No hits, except for notes on One Human Family. I spent five minutes dreaming up alternative categories. My brain finally shifted into gear. I found her address book, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, printed them, and shut down the Mac. I could use my phone for the drudge work.

I walked to Naomi’s living room, wishing I had a better feel for her mind, her secrets, and her fears. I also needed to sort my own thoughts, reexamine my motives. Had I let the Akron, Iowa, connection drag my logic too far? Had I turned a hometown into a bogus assumption? Was I crying wolf, whispering murder and hollering bullshit? The next door neighbor’s linking of Naomi and Gomez had boosted my theory, at least to me. It hadn’t affected Bobbi Lewis the same way. Something had turned her off, maybe during her concentration. Lewis was conflicted, but she was sharp and a pro. I couldn’t believe that she would torpedo a case to save herself a few bad memories.

I closed up Naomi’s home. The outside air was moist and smelled of faint mildew in the porch chair cushions, moss under the concrete steps, and beyond the porch, turned dirt and fertilizer. The neighbor was still working in her yard.

I waited until she looked up, then said, “Can I ask you one more thing?”

She rubbed her nose with a knuckle. “They think she was killed, don’t they? I know who you are. My nephew develops your crime pictures. They aren’t letting that woman die in peace.”