Octopus Alibi (14 page)

“I get it,” I said. “People play futures in the past?”

“You don’t need to make fun, bubba.”

Cootie moped away like an unfed dog. I had forgotten to ask about the Mercedes. He turned, gave me one more dejected look before he pulled out of the lane.

His face looked like Bobbi Lewis’s when she had left Naomi’s house.

12

I
OPENED MY THIRD
beer in an hour, tilted it back, stared off my porch at fluttering shadows in the empty lane. The beer went down cold and easy. I had told Randolph that I wasn’t into daytime drinking, but I’d hedged the truth. I dislike socializing with booze braggarts, and I’d had a plane to catch anyway. If I had told him I like beer best when the sun is up, I might inspire a new slosh pal who would stick around and still be here when I returned.

I rationalized this third cold one. I was in my house, but my brain was in Grand Cayman.

I remembered to reconfirm my reservation for the next day at noon. I waited for the agent, a thousand keystrokes, and wondered if I had a job to fly to. Despite what I had said to Carmen, I needed money more than escape. You can’t rationalize six-packs and mortgage payments. Or build a career by sitting on the beach. Job or not, I had an aisle seat.

The phone rang as I hung up. Marnie said, “Heard from Sam?”

“No, not since this morning. But it’s not time for him to call.”

“He asked me for background on a cop up there. I haven’t had a chance to do it. Who did you tell about the Akron tie-in?”

“Liska,” I said. “He made his token gesture, he sent Bobbi Lewis. I struck out with her, or I should say she waffled. I took her to Naomi’s house, she looked at the walls for ten minutes, then boogied. But we confirmed with a neighbor that Mayor Steve Gomez visited Naomi on a regular basis. They were maybe doing nooners.”

I knew the instant I said it that I’d made a mistake. I listened to silence for a half minute. My brain came back from Grand Cayman. “Those weren’t the neighbor’s exact words.”

“So that was your golden-tongued paraphrase?”

I had learned my lesson with Bobbi Lewis. I kept my mouth shut tight.

Marnie said, “Love affairs can be beautiful, Alex, for the people having them. Especially if you don’t call them nooners. Tomorrow at ten-thirty, First Congregational, William Street. Will you escort me to Steve’s funeral?”

No choice, now. “Okay.”

“What are you going to do about a memorial for Naomi?”

“I’ll let it wait a week,” I said.

“You might piss people off, going that long. I talked to Phil. Louie’s can do it in the morning, at nine on the deck, but you have to let them know by six-thirty tonight. You want me to make some calls?”

“I want to give people a chance to plan. It’ll be hard to say good-bye if we don’t know how she left.”

She said, “Sometimes you word things weirdly. Did Liska want to look into Gomez?”

“It’s a city deal, as far as he’s concerned,” I said. “And we sure as hell can’t go to the cops. They’re rock-solid, jammed up with opinion. Have you talked it around, heard any foul-play talk?”

“No and no,” she said. “If I talk it up, I lose my scoop. I’m doing what I said I would do. I’m researching the mayor. I found a few things we need to talk about.”

“Don’t forget the statistics,” I said. “Florida leads the nation in murder-suicides.”

Another mistake. The big silence.

I said, “Where will you be in an hour?”

“Standing next to you.”

“Meet me at the morgue.” I checked my watch. “Make it forty minutes.”

She said, “I can remember when forensic autopsies were done at funeral homes. Monroe was the last county in the state to get a damn morgue.”

“Wasn’t that last year?”

*   *   *

In February I’d hired a carpenter to build a shed. We sized it to keep my new motorcycle and a gas can out of the weather. The man anchored it to a thick concrete base, and I spent a bundle on treated lumber and siding. We sloped the roof so runoff went to the mango tree, and placed air vents under the overhang. I owed my classic machine that much. More permanence than I offered myself.

I unlocked the shed door and rolled out the Triumph. I wanted to catch Jack Spottswood walking home from work. Every day at four, you could set your watch by it. If you couldn’t get him on the phone, you could stop him on the sidewalk.

I rolled down Eaton. At three fifty-nine, I turned onto Bahama. Bingo.

He said, “Look what rode in on the wind and the tide.”

“What’s the chance of ordering an autopsy of Naomi Douglas?”

My question stopped him short. It actually pushed him backward. “You had that kind of day?”

“I’m serious.” I gave him the condensed version. “Naomi and Steve were from the same hometown in Iowa. They were friends who were never seen together in public. If you ask me, they were dancing the Bone Island mambo. They died on the same day. Am I the only person who thinks that’s strange?”

“Who are you?” he said. “Paul Revere? Running around the island yelling, ‘The bad boys are coming’? Are you on a mission?”

“Just following Naomi’s wishes.”

For once I had said the right thing. The skeptical look left his face. He moved in a half circle to get the sun out of his eyes. “Okay, Alex. I’ll tell you what you need to know. But leave me out of it.”

Jack gave me three names at the county. I knew Larry Riley, the medical examiner, but not the others. He told me how to play each in turn against the other two. If I worked the triangle, didn’t say too much, I might succeed. “Don’t do it tonight,” he added.

“Gomez was on top of things,” I said. “I assume he wrote a will.”

He thought for a sec. “A long time ago, after he married Yvonne.”

“She get it all?”

He shook his head. “Not something I can talk about.”

“After a death? I thought wills became public record.”

Jack bit his lower lip, then said, “She had family money, and the family made Gomez sign a pre-nup. It was the first one I ever saw. When he wrote his will he turned the tables, for what he was worth. Yvonne would get any house they owned plus proceeds from an insurance policy, so she could have fast cash. The rest went into a trust for some nieces and nephews, a college fund.”

“Does that will still stand?”

“He could’ve gone to another attorney, changed it anytime. I’d have no way to know.” Then he said, “Your lifestyle, you don’t have to heed many warnings, do you?”

I used my index finger as a squeegie, wiped sweat from my forehead. “I don’t own vehicles with seat belt chimes.”

Jack cracked a smile. He leaned back, cocked his head as if to regard me with better focus. “Remember, Alex,” he said, “a lot of crusaders have come and gone in this town.”

I heard it faintly in his voice. His emphasis on the word “gone.”

*   *   *

My three beers had trumped Carmen’s fish sandwich. The route to Stock Island, through rush hour, required expert skills, and I felt less capable as minutes ticked by. I wove through chaotic traffic, thought about Teresa, the fact that I hadn’t heard from her all afternoon. The road maniacs were locals. The tourists were in the bars or headed for sunset. These days the in-town workforce has to rent off-island, in the Lower Keys from Big Coppitt to Big Pine. My guess was that every member of that workforce got off at four and hit the road en masse. I didn’t have time to pull over, wait an hour for traffic to settle. Trying to figure out Teresa and the idiots around me, I rationalized again. I joined the club, drove like a maniac to survive. I kept thinking about my tumbling relationship.

Why do we hate boredom and dream of consistency?

Perhaps I’d become a bland dude. Maybe three days in my house had slapped her with the notion that I wasn’t the perfect man. Or else she’d been bothered by a no-name problem that Whit Randolph’s arrival had helped her define. If that was the case, I would take a hard fall. I had wanted this one to work.

But it wasn’t just Whit. Teresa had been pissed for weeks. Her mood had soured during a quiet supper at La Trattoria. We had been celebrating her six-month anniversary with the police department. We had talked about her work politics and the island’s politics. There’d been an edge in her voice. Her words sounded cynical, filled with the resignation of a woman trapped. I had tried to ease her pressures, from active encouragement to keeping my distance, showing concern, and minding my business. Nothing had worked. Now that I thought back, she might have begun then to be bored with both her job and me. She had chosen to bottle her discontent, let it further decay and ferment.

I wanted to be out of range when the cap blew.

I survived the fast food strip and got in line to turn up Route 1. Strange area of the island. Palm trees in the sidewalk have always amazed me, but I had seen them in a photo from 1937. They were there long before the liquor stores, car dealerships, motels, and groceries. I waited while the traffic light sequenced four times. A sticker on the Acura ahead of me read,
MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT
. I sucked in smells of fried chicken, a few cubic yards of exhaust fumes and secondhand tobacco smoke. I absorbed head-banger vibes from multiple fuzzy woofers. All part of the tropical dream. I went left, crossed the bridge, and waited two lights to go north on College Road. I wallowed in more oily exhaust, more woof, and a low-tide beach-rot breeze from Cow Key Channel.

What had happened to my sleepy village at road’s end?

Finally, one thing went right. I saw two Jeeps in the morgue lot. Marnie’s tall Wrangler and Riley’s rattletrap, circa post–Korean War. Perfect that he was there. I hadn’t called ahead. I wanted to pitch my case face to face.

Larry Riley, Monroe County’s medical examiner, had driven the ’57 Jeep as long as I had known him. He checked for rust as habit, had repainted the military olive drab several times. He ran it for function over comfort, drove full-tilt around town, and fashion be damned. The Jeep had more style than fifty stereo-driven Acuras.

I had worked several crime scenes alongside Riley. We had the added link of Carmen Sosa as a mutual friend. Larry and Carmen had been high school lovers, but he had gone off to college and she had married a loser named Johnny Sosa. By the time Riley had finished med school, Carmen had ditched her first and second husbands and was the mother of Maria Rolley, now ten, going on fifteen. They had not renewed their old relationship, but both were single and there was always that chance.

I shut down the Triumph.

Marnie said, “Do I just stand there while you harass Doc Riley?”

“You were worried about losing your scoop.”

“You make my goal sound less than honorable.”

“I want to know what happened to these people,” I said. “I don’t want a double homicide to be ignored like a branch falling in the forest.”

“Are you a cop?”

“No, I take pictures.”

“Okay, and I’m a journalist. We’re both human. If a crime gets close to us, we’ll help solve it. But we can’t forget what we always do.”

“Sometimes I’d like to.”

“Cops want to know ‘who,’ so they can grab somebody,” she said. “They want to know ‘why,’ so they can prosecute. I do it in the same order, but the ‘who’ lets me launch a piece and the ‘why’ lets me dig into it, make it a real story. That’s how I tick.”

“Are you through?”

“Sam has me worried.” She rapped her knuckles against her forehead. “I need to report slippage.”

“Let’s go dig.”

*   *   *

The woman who governed the new morgue’s reception desk acted as if we were the building’s first visitors of the day. Larry Riley agreed to see us.

He met us in a hallway, and looked surprised to see me there. He smiled but didn’t offer to shake hands. Fine with me. Riley was a string bean, maybe five-eleven, no more than 170. I had seen him only once without the ponytail he’d worn for years, but couldn’t get used to the sight, or that he showed tinges of gray. He sipped from an old ceramic mug. He wanted to stay in the hall, perhaps to keep our meeting short. I was thrilled not to be ushered into a chilled meat locker.

“I’m doing a double this afternoon,” he said. “We had a scuba death by the Western Sambos.” He considered his next words, then said, “You’re the third amateur detective I’ve talked to today. One works for the city.”

Marnie flicked a glance my way, lifted an eyebrow. The fact snapped into place. Dexter Hayes had run lax procedures at a murder scene three months earlier, had angered Larry Riley. Marnie had told me that Dexter had better watch his step. She knew that Riley’s parents lived next door to Chief Salesberry, and Riley had the chief’s ear. Dexter’s career probably had faltered back then. If he felt unloved in city hall, it was because he was unloved in city hall.

“If I read you right,” I said, “that city detective sees a shame where I see a crime. But if he came to see you, he might be picking up momentum.”

“Is this your new calling?” said Riley. “Mayor Steve Gomez a friend?”

“Barely knew the man.”

“Don’t you get a lot of shit when you freelance like this?”

“It’s easier to wash off than my conscience. What happened to the open mind of the research scientist?”

He said, “What do you know about that?”

“Squat.”

“Why don’t you take a cram course? I’ve got a brochure on my desk, this place in St. Louis gives a medicolegal class six or seven times a year. Hotels, meals, airfare, tuition, you’re talking maybe twelve hundred bucks. Invest in your own future, my friend.”

Riley wanted to draw me into his profession. He wanted to inspire the bright eyes of a recruit, get me excited about details that stoked his drive. Past years of on-the-job training had taught me that I couldn’t detach myself from the real grit. Some people have that power, but repulsive evidence stuck to my senses like dog shit stuck to a sneaker. My wish to solve crimes that got too close to my world fought a constant battle with my aversion to gore, to decay and the dark realm of human action. I wanted to work on a “need to know” basis. If I took any courses, they would stress the memory-erasure techniques that Goodnight Irene Jones had mastered.