Octopus Alibi (24 page)

“That’s all interesting,” Dexter Hayes said to Lewis. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it. Any chance you might tell the city about the ATM problem, too?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Sorry to offend you. Maybe you can tell us about mail fraud.”

Admonished, Hayes searched his thoughts for a comeback. I didn’t want him to kiss up by linking me to Randolph’s condo. I broke the news to Lewis myself.

“You paid him a visit, and that surprises me?” she said. “We’ve already got you as a KA and a coconspirator.”

“A few things in his condo matched up to his targeting wealthy people for check washing and investment scams,” I said. “He even had Post-it notes in the phone book.”

“But why in the first place did you go there?” said Liska. “Or do you have a badge you haven’t shown us?”

“He set me up for that ATM bullshit. As a cop, you’ve got a legal view. But I’m a civilian. I take it personally. I wanted to discuss it with him. Also, my neighbor saw him creeping the lane while I was at the funeral.”

“Anything else?” said Lewis. Her eyes told me she already knew.

“He put a full court press on my live-in domestic partner, whatever you want to call her. I think the son of a bitch is laying pipe in my backyard.”

No one wished to respond to my admission of being two-timed. Lewis looked ashamed for having brought it up.

“I went for another reason, too,” I said. “The ME told me that Randolph had been asking questions about Gomez’s autopsy. Riley said that a ‘Randy Whitney’ queried him…”

“One of his dead aliases,” said Monty.

“Which I figured out quickly. I wanted to know why he’d used a fake name, maybe get his reaction to a photograph.” For the second time in an hour I took out the envelope. This time I didn’t show the Kodak Max print. Lewis would zing me for absconding with evidence. Or ruining evidence, because my fingerprints had obscured any others on the Max. I pulled out the bloody-shirt image. “After my chat with Randolph, I decided not to show him this.”

Lewis and Hayes stepped closer, looked over my shoulder.

Hayes said, “Messy, and a shit print. I hope you didn’t shoot that one, Mister Pro.”

“It’s a blowup from one of your man’s bad ones, Dexter. Duffy Lee Hall noticed something when he salvaged the overexposure. Look closely, since this is your case for now. You told me yourself that the shotgun blast blew everything away from the body. In your words, ‘He blew brain salad into the mangroves.’ Even Randolph, an hour ago, said, ‘bodies leak like crazy.’ This picture proves that the bloodstains don’t match the gunshot.”

Hayes studied the print, then managed to say, “Oh.”

Lewis said, “It’s my case now, thank you.”

“Agreed,” said Liska. “It’s the power structure at work, Detective Hayes. It’s my county-over-city prerogative. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, our state baby-sitters, can yank it from me just as quickly as I’m lifting it from you. But none of us needs to forget, if we’ve really got two murders, their connection is thinner than a silk thread. Whitney Randolph made a call to Naomi Douglas’s phone, he was in a picture with the mayor, then he got curious about the autopsy. Detective Lewis learned there was a friendship between the two deceased, and Rutledge noticed a common hometown. That’s all we have. The skinny thread runs through the man, but it’s not proof of squat. Our work has just started. Or the FDLE’s work, however it works out.”

“It may have been more than friendship, sheriff,” I said. “According to Mrs. Butler, the woman who cleaned Naomi’s house, Gomez may have been Naomi’s step- or foster son.”

I heard Lewis inhale deeply, an attempt to calm herself. I did not want to look. I wanted to give her private relief.

“That makes the thread fatter,” said Liska.

So would the Kodak Max photo of the Z-3 on Grinnell, but I held back.

“I talked to Naomi’s friend,” I said, “the woman who owns the gift shop in the six hundred block of Greene. She can’t get anyone at the city to return her calls. She said that Naomi told her Gomez thought ‘bad elements’ were behind that old development project out by the boulevard. The Salt Pond Condos, whatever they’re called.”

“Who’s to say bad elements aren’t behind the Mallory Dome?” said Hayes. “Isn’t that group from Seattle? Isn’t that the same area as Randolph’s answering service?”

“Randolph’s bubble is about to pop,” said Monty.

“It needs to pop now,” I said. I opened the door, walked inside. No signs that Teresa had packed her bags. I leaned back out. “Has anybody seen my roommate? She could be in over her head.”

“She could be in it with him, too,” said Lewis.

I locked eyes with her. I didn’t like hearing it, but she was right.

“Lemme make a call.” Hayes unclipped his phone and stepped outside.

Lewis said, “We’ll contact the airport and Highway Patrol. We’ll bluelight every yellow roadster in the Keys.”

“If Randolph thinks the fat’s in the fire,” I said, “that roadster’s parked by now.”

“Okay,” said Lewis. “We’ll call the car rental and air charter firms.”

“If he rented a car, it was days ago,” I said. “He parked it, kept it ready to go.”

Monty agreed. “He’s that good.”

“Shit,” said Lewis. “Does he know we’re getting close? That’s the big question. Maybe he thinks he’s skating free.”

“One last thing,” said Monty. “I’ve got a friend in the bureau’s profiling section, a guy I met in basic. He’s already up to speed on a lot of that stuff, personality studies, motivational analysis, and so on. You describe a crime, its details, its timing. Or better yet, a series of crimes. These guys come back and give you the whole ball of wax. They’ll tell you the perp’s shoe size and year of high school graduation. They’ll know ethnic background and number of siblings. They know if the perp ever saw his parents having sex. My buddy told me something that stuck in my head. He said, ‘It’s rare that grifters kill, and they keep it in the crowd. The vic is almost always another con artist.’”

Hayes came back to the porch. “Teresa didn’t go back to work after the funeral.” He looked at Lewis. “We’ve got city cars looking. I’m out of here.”

She shrugged, gave no response.

Dexter nodded and went for his car.

“Monty,” I said, “can you do me a favor?”

He made a sweeping gesture, talked out the side of his mouth, mocked a nasal New Jersey accent. “What did I just do?”

“I mean unofficial.”

“This new job of mine, I don’t know that word.”

“I need to reach Bramblett. I need to settle Naomi’s estate.”

“Hire a private eye in Fort Worth.”

I looked at Bobbi Lewis. Twenty-four hours earlier, she had suggested that Bramblett might be dead or his sister’s killer. She looked back at me, thinking the same thought.

“Thanks, Monty,” I said. “The estate can pay to find him. It’ll come out of his pocket, not mine.”

The porch went to silence, predeparture shufflings. The meeting was over.

Liska said, “What’s your pal Sam Wheeler doing in Broward?”

“I’ll ask him when I see him.”

“Good. You do that,” said the sheriff. “You gonna know him in a hospital bed, in an orange jumpsuit?”

Shit. The call to Liska’s cell phone. “What did he do, give
your
name?”

“You got it. And I can’t recall fronting him any blue chips. You want to think again about his privacy?”

I explained Sam’s dawn call, our flight to Lauderdale, the failed ID of the found body. I added the Broward deputy, the private eye, Wally Loads in the motel, and the brother of the other dead woman.

“You and I are driving to the mainland,” said Liska. “I’ll need to keep a low profile, so we’ll take my personal car. Pack a ditty bag.”

“Everything I need is at the airport.”

He checked his watch. “Let’s go.”

I had spent four days in passenger seats. Decisions had been made for me, not by me. I had gone from wanting to leave the island to having every reason to stay. I had been in Sam’s Bronco, two Lauderdale taxis, Marnie’s Jeep, another taxi, Bobbi Lewis’s SUV, and Dexter Hayes’s city-issue Caprice. Now I faced a long ride in the Lexus.

Questions loomed. Why would Liska want to put himself into a Broward problem? What was his interest in Sam’s welfare? Did I need to stay to help find Teresa? A big problem, too. The last thing Sam might want around was one more lawman. A big fact carried the moment. I couldn’t learn a thing sitting on my ass in Key West.

With everything I had learned about Randolph, I was glad I lived in an old wood Conch house with fifty places to hide small objects. I was equally happy I hadn’t told Teresa about Sam Wheeler’s ten thousand dollars. I pocketed the money along with the notes I had scribbled when Sam had called from Broward.

Carmen Sosa stood in the lane. She read my face. She was good at that.

“Back tomorrow,” I said. “Keep an eye on the fort, will you?”

She scoped the people around me and gave me a hug. “I’ll do that, Alex. You keep an eye on yourself.”

One more issue faced me as I walked toward Liska’s Lexus.

I hadn’t fixed Marnie’s flat.

21

“T
HIS ISN’T THE WAY
to the airport.”

“We don’t have time.” Liska waited for a bicyclist, then turned left onto North Roosevelt. “You can buy pit wax at a rest stop. What else you need, a comb, a toothbrush? Put ’em on a credit card. Bill it to your buddy chained to the bed in Jackson Memorial.”

“I’m not going to fill your car with luggage, sheriff. I can pull some clean clothes and leave the duffel.”

“Idiots up in Florida already think I go to the office dressed like Jimmy Buffett. One attorney in St. Pete heard that my deputies had Hawaiian shirts like turnpike toll collectors. Every call I get from around the state, Orlando, Tallahassee, other sheriffs, they want to know about fishing. Like I ever get time to launch my boat. I got a twenty-one-foot shed queen gathering lizard shit and dust.” He waggled his hand between us. “You and me, dressed for a funeral, we never looked better in years. We’re not going to a fashion show. Quit your crap.”

“I especially like day-old shirts.”

“We can buy two up the road,” he said.

“My cameras are at the airport, too. They’ll be gone if I leave them too long. Georgette can’t watch my bags twenty-four hours a day.”

Liska relented. He parked in an up-front security zone. I was in and out in two minutes.

“You got time and money for a vacation?”

“A job in the Caymans. I canceled out.”

“Tell me another one. ‘Work’ and ‘island’ don’t compute.”

“You live on one.”

“I don’t care what they used to call it. You don’t drive to real islands. This fucking road makes it a peninsula. We live at the end.”

I was heading up U.S. 1 with an attitude in the driver’s seat and an air conditioner that would shame Alaska. I thanked my stars that he had given up Seventies-era colognes. Also his smoking habit, though the squeaking coffee stirrers drove me nuts.

I made a show of checking the dials on his stereo system.

“I keep my CDs in the glove box and here.” He lifted the lid of the center armrest.

I read eight or nine jewel box spines. “I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve seen a Barry Manilow record, Sheriff. Maybe not since 1945. What happened to your disco fetish, your clothing collection?”

“It’s on hold. I’ve got a new public image to nurture.”

“You’re quite the politician.”

“No, I’m quite the cop. I use politics as camouflage.” Liska whipped his wheel left, went for the center lane to avoid being smacked by a swerving station wagon. A small sticker on the wagon’s bumper advertised Jesus. Do unto others, if they’re in your way.

People in Conch Cruisers, four-door heaps that locals favor, stared at us. In their minds we were outsiders with bankrolls come to turn islanders into subservient fetchers. None of them noticed the Monroe tags, the Hurricane Reentry Permit on the windshield. They didn’t want to know that we were neighbors, part of Cayo Hueso’s Human Family.

“Why aren’t we flying commercial?” I said. “You’re a powerful man these days. Snap your fingers, you could’ve had two seats bumped for us.”

“We got a meeting at the top of the Keys in a restaurant. It doesn’t have its own airport.”

“Do I get clues, or do I have to guess cold?” I said.

“I don’t know any details, but he’s charged with assault on a law officer.”

I hoped Detective Odin Marlow got the worst of it.

“Half this traffic, it’s city cops,” he said. “They drive patrol units home to Sugarloaf because they can’t afford to live in town. They think they got the right to do fifteen over the limit, and my deputies can’t bust them.”

“A badge buys certain freedoms,” I said.

“You get mixed up in a few more of these, you ought to get that badge I talked about. Sign up for courses at the college. You could be quite the cop, too. Put some stability in your life. You’ve got a problem on the romance front, I take it.”

“Teresa Barga moved in a week ago. It’s been downhill since then. We’ve hit a seasonal change in our relationship. Summer into fall.”

“Ah, yes, that psychological trampoline,” said Liska. “My wife and I did the big split, once and for all. When they’re there, you go through a lot more toilet paper and aspirin. When they’re not there, you go through a lot more frozen dinners and alcohol.” He toggled his window switch, brought it down three inches, pitched a flattened straw. “On second thought, be glad you’re not a cop. Why are some women drawn to losers?”

“I have no idea. Fish to bait, moths to flame. Maybe she’s a scam victim, too. A different kind of scam.”

We drove in silence across Boca Chica and Rockland Keys, then Liska said, “Off the rock, up here on U.S. 1, they put cute facades on every funky joint. You lose your bearings. You don’t know your way around anymore. The old roadside dives, these days, sell eighty foreign beers that after two or three you feel like you drank a box of glazed doughnuts. Mixed drinks have names like Key Breeze and Atom Smasher. The other day I heard a girl downtown order a Buck Naked Belly Flop. It took the kid five minutes and two machines to make her drink. What ever happened to Seven and Seven or gin and tonic? Show me the progress.”