Octopus Alibi (22 page)

“You familiar with webcams?” he said.

“Constant movies that run on the Internet?”

“Or still pictures that refresh every five or ten seconds. Like with the cameras mounted in various spots around town. On Mallory Square, or at the Environmental Circus, and inside the Hog’s Breath Saloon.”

“And there I was…”

“Knocking back shots, having a big old talk with Mr. Randolph. Matter of fact, you did most of the talking. Any chance you want to tell me what was so important you had to dominate the discussion?”

“Coexistence,” I said.

“Say what?”

“I was explaining how all types of crazies and misfits get along on a three-by-five island. Sort of a modern sermon.”

Dexter said, “What’d he do, bad-mouth a gay waiter?”

“You’re smart about some things and dumb about others,” I said.

“Was that the tone you used with him? Bet you made a lot of mileage on the brotherhood front.”

“Whatever I said blew by him like a jet airliner. He’d rather see two men holding guns than two men holding hands.”

“Men get set in their ways,” said Dexter. “He’s one, needs a profit motive to warm up to tolerance.”

He cut the wheel, went right down Petronia. People sat on chairs in front of the Swingers Club, eight feet from the car. They stared openly, and I felt like a trespasser. We rolled a half block farther, and I watched money change hands on the corner of Emma, saw the dead end at Fort Street, the old Navy building, the green eight-foot chain-link with barbed wire up top. Dexter veered away from two chickens, turned right onto Emma, then right twice more. We had gone in a tight spiral, wound up on Chapman Lane. We drove past a mess of thin, unspooled cassette tape that had snagged in a busted picket fence and fluttered in the wind. One strand had looped around a large yellow hibiscus blossom. We stopped in front of a small house bordered by a stubby concrete wall. The place needed paint, but its yard was neat and its roof looked new. A chunky, elderly black woman sat on a high-backed rocker on the front porch. She stared at us with no expression.

I said, “I guess we’re here, huh?”

Dexter nodded his agreement.

Next door, two middle-aged men sat near the curb in plastic-web lawn chairs. They chewed cigar stubs and drank from paper cups. They refused to acknowledge the city car.

I said, “Why?”

“My father’s sister made up for my half-assed upbringing. When you talk to her, take your time. She’s never been in a hurry in her life, but she knows more about this island than you and me and ten others put together. Don’t be fooled by her walking cane. It’s a weapon, not a crutch.”

“To hell with catching criminals,” I said. “We’ll do family visits today.”

“Her name is Mary Butler. I call her Auntie Bee, and she’ll tell you to call her Miss Mary, so do it. She was Naomi Douglas’s cleaning woman.”

“Thanks for remembering.”

“Get out of the car.”

Mrs. Butler didn’t resemble her brother, Big Dex Hayes, or her nephew, Dexter Jr. Her broad, fleshy face forced her eyes, nose, and mouth to a tiny group at center. She wore a big print dress and a sun-faded New York Yankees nylon jacket.

Dexter introduced us. She repeated my name, perhaps to run it against her mental roster of old Conch names, and reached out to shake my hand. Her grip was firm. She held on for about ten seconds. I had a feeling that she was sizing me up, or downloading vibes, or whatever wise old women do that lets them see into your soul and know all your secrets.

“I heard your name,” she said. “You’re the man Miss Douglas wanted to settle her affairs.”

How would a cleaning woman know the terms of her employer’s will? She held her hands with her fingertips resting against each other as if she was about to start the church-and-steeple child’s rhyme. Her fingernails were trimmed short, uniform in length.

I said, “Yes, ma’am, I’m the executor.”

“You call me Miss Mary, like she did. And tell me what’s so wrong with her affairs you got to come and pester me. And why you got to come with this nephew policeman I got.”

Straight talk only, I told myself, and keep it fluid. Dexter would not have brought me here if he didn’t think I could learn something. The lightbulb came on. Dexter Hayes was a cop. I was supposed to make a connection with the woman that her nephew couldn’t make. I was there to learn something that he couldn’t learn on his own.

“We’re worried about the way she died,” I said.

“She died in private, and asleep. Young man, who could ask better? At my age, my worst fear, I’ll fall down and die on Duval Street, in a crowd of strangers. They all in a hurry to get back on that cruise ship, they step over me like a wino lady picked a bad place to sleep.”

Back away, I thought.

“Did you clean her house this week?”

“I didn’t know they’d took her away. Some days, you know, she goes to Home Depot up in Marathon. She buys her plants, gets her some projects. She kept a good toolbox.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.” When Miss Mary spoke, she cocked her head as if peering around some obstruction between us. The angle said I don’t trust you yet, I’m trying to figure out your angle.

“You went in and cleaned like usual?” I said.

She nodded slowly, and kept nodding. “I go in the house and her bed’s stripped, which is how I always found it on my days.” Her eyes watered up. “I didn’t know they take the bedsheets when they take the dead.”

Change of subject. “How do you travel back and forth, from here to her house?”

She pointed at Hayes. “Free taxi. The same way I go groceries, to Fausto’s or Eckerd’s.”

Dexter rolled his eyes, looked away, focused on something down the street. I couldn’t think of a better form of graft.

Mary Butler said, “Miss Douglas, she use the same taxi man.”

“Was there anything strange about the house?” I said.

“Pretty as ever,” said Miss Mary, again tilting her head. “Not much to do. All the plants were watered.”

“You said there wasn’t much to do. Was that normal?”

“Well … That’s almost right. She kept it neat, but I kept it clean. I guess that was strange, that morning I went in there. It was neat, but clean, too. As if I’d already been there.”

“Did you notice anything changed in her living room?”

Miss Mary’s eyes widened. “Now, there you got one. Those big pictures, those artist pictures of railings and gingerbread? They were not on the wall, which I didn’t worry until I saw them in that trash. I knew she must’ve had a big, big problem with that boy who took those pictures. It would have to be a big problem, throw away those pretty frames. There’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Sometimes a thin line between love and hate, you know that?”

I looked at Dexter Hayes. He stared straight at his aunt, wouldn’t look at me.

Change the subject, I thought. “I like your porch, all the green.”

“Those are her plants covering up the chicken shit. When I heard about Miss Douglas, I went back. I couldn’t leave them to dry and die, like the lady who bought them. The first thing we ever agreed was the secret to plants in Key West: Put ’em in the ground green side up and add water.”

“They look good right where they are,” I said. “I like your house.”

She bobbed her head, agreeing. “It’s all right, but for stray chickens and my troublesome neighbors”—she tilted her head at the men drinking next door—“or some fool down the road turning a paper-thin shack into a quaint home. You make it pretty around here, it draws flies. You see this walking stick? I walk as good as you, young man, but I got to fight off those cherry-vanilla real-estate ladies come down here to tell me I got to stop being happy and contented so I can be rich. You know what I say to them? I say, Ladies, Hewlett-Packard and Intel and Citigroup are all up today, so I can afford my collard greens and a box of fried chicken. Oh, they do not know how to take that. And I got Miss Douglas to thank for that, too.”

I wanted to say, “How so?” It was none of my business. I said nothing.

Miss Mary filled the silence. “We help each other in this world, young man. Miss Douglas needed my help with her house, and she give me help with other things.”

“With investments,” said Dex Hayes. “Auntie sold her mother’s home on Green Turtle Key to a wealthy man years ago. Mrs. Douglas kept Auntie in the stock market through the 1990s, then took her to cash before the market went soft.”

I said, “You went to her house for friendship. That’s what I think.”

She cracked a small smile. “Smart old ladies have more fun than you think, young man. We lost husbands. We waved good-bye to our children, if we were lucky. We got nothing left to lose. It depends on approach, don’t it?”

“You lived your whole life in Key West?”

She shook her head. “Two years in a city called West Palm. That place smell like cars. It was way too agitated. We never had to rattle our chains on Key West, excuse the expression. Some of the children went away and came back with ideas. They wanted to get ahead in life by using people, not hard work. They sang in small choirs, and they didn’t see a twinkling dime from white guilt until the last few years. A few of them got to selling dope, smoking that stuff. A few got the cancer from smoking that dope. They in another choir now, no dope allowed.”

“Do you recall a sisal rug that ran down Naomi’s hallway?”

“Miss Douglas decided that rug drew dirt. She said next time I came, we would put that dirty old rug at the curb.”

“It’s not in her house now.”

“Maybe she got her boy to haul it off.”

“Boy?”

“Her stepson, adopted, whatever he was. Foster child, for all I know. That boy, the mayor.”

I looked at Dexter Hayes. His eyes were wide, intense, but he didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation.

“Naomi Douglas was the mayor’s mother?”

“I don’t believe she was his natural, but she raised the boy, like I did for this one.” She waved the back of her hand at Dexter but didn’t look at him. “Miss Douglas worried about that boy more than anything in her life.”

“What was to worry about?”

“He treated her different than boys treat their mamas. And I don’t mean like better or worse. I believe that was her only bother, and I hated to see that. Worries are better spent on the future than the past.”

Yes, but the past holds secrets. “You never had other cause for concern about Mrs. Douglas?”

“One thing.” She nodded for about fifteen seconds, then said, “That odd ho-listic bug lady. You cannot meditate bugs away. They too smart. You can’t train them. You got to poison those bugs, plain as can be. That’s when they understand you mean business. She pay that lady more than Orkin. What’d she get? Flies in her flour, ants in the cereal, cocka-roaches under the house. Why she had a ho-listic bug lady, I don’t know.”

Dexter jangled his car keys. Miss Mary got the message just as I did. She said, “You go up in town, you find that man that took those broken pictures in the trash can. Ask him what made her angry. Ask that man why she died of stroke or her heart blew out.”

One of the men from next door approached me as I reached for the car door handle. He adjusted the napkin around his paper cup. Old Conchs wrap napkins so evaporation delays warming. Fifty years ago it was inspired by a shortage of ice. People still did it in the Seventies, half out of tradition, but almost no one did it anymore.

The man beckoned me toward him. “Hey, brother.” It sounded like “Oy ba-rudda.”

I looked at Dexter, hoping for telepathic instructions. He stared back, no help at all, almost grinning, waiting to see how it played out.

I said, “How’s it going?”

“You don’t like me ’cause I’m a poor person. You hate my poverty.”

“Nope, that’s not it, mister.”

“But I was right, right? You don’t like me.” His breath smelled like an empty saloon in the morning. “Is it ’cause I’m a colored man?”

“Nope. You want to know why I don’t like you? I’ll tell you. If you came into my life, you’d be a problem, not a joy. I’ve got enough problems with friends to last me years. I don’t need problems from pushy strangers.”

The man looked entranced, stupefied by my words. He shrugged, walked away shaking his head.

Dexter popped open the squeaky door on his side of the car. “Well done,” he said.

“Thank God I was in a bad mood. I might have let white guilt take over.”

“I didn’t mean with that man. I meant with my aunt. Ever since I became a cop, she’s shut me out. The only thing I can figure is some loyalty to her criminal brother.”

I’d never before heard Dexter speak of his father.

We drove over to Whitehead, got stuck creeping behind a Conch Train. A tourist family of four in identical tie-dyed tank tops took up the train’s rear-facing backseat. A thirty-year-old German sedan was parked near the Hemingway House. It reminded me of the car that Ortega had parked at my place.

“Can I ask how Cootie came to be driving a vintage Mercedes-Benz?”

“Part of his collectible thing, his fixation.”

“Cars?”

“In this case, Princess Diana.”

“No.”

“You didn’t know?” said Hayes. “He’s the biggest Di groupie in Florida. People at the city call him Di Guy.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“He’s got two rooms devoted to her. He told me about it once. Pictures on the wall, a book collection, a piece of fabric from her wedding dress in a walnut box with an etched-glass front and fancy seal. He’s got every copy of
People
, a bunch of ski lift passes, a set of earrings, and the veil from a hat she wore to a ceremony in France. He’s got three tea sets, a pair of her sunglasses, and five or six scarves in a framed box. I got no idea where he gets it all. The Internet, probably getting his ass fleeced by somebody. Willingly, of course.”

Then I remembered. He had asked if I had any
Time
or
Newsweek
issues from 1997. The Paris death.

I dreaded the answer. “Where does the Benz come in?”

“He saw some photo years ago in
National Enquirer
. Princess Di got out of an old Mercedes to fool paparazzi at the rear door of her London athletic club. Cootie saw an identical one for sale by the highway up on Big Pine. He paid peanuts for it, then spent thousands to make it run right and not leak when it rains. I think he put a Cuban mechanic’s kids through college just on that car. Somebody down at the city told me he pays three hundred a month to rent a garage for it out on Laird.”