Octopus Alibi (3 page)

“Right. The type who promises what he wants you to hear and delivers what he wants you to believe. Finish your beer.”

We walked outside to find Marlow still there, leaning against his county car, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I’m curious, Mr. Wheeler. How’s fishing in the lower Keys this month?”

Sam shook his head. “Constant east wind, just like here. Messed things up good.”

Marlow agreed, “When the wind blows, fishing sucks.”

“Let me put it this way,” said Sam. “Yesterday and the day before were my first all-day charters since mid-March. The weather kicked up the water. The bay-side shallows look like milky green soup.”

Marlow had a distracted look in his eyes, as if he’d gotten smoke in one of them. “I was thinking of running my Fountain down there this weekend. It’s been months since I ran that Yamaha 225. I need to run it more often.”

“If the sea bottom’s riled, the fish can’t see your bait,” said Sam. “The wind’s an ugly enemy. Like I said before, don’t waste your gas money.”

Marlow nodded, still distracted. “Speaking of not setting your hook, you decide to snoop around up here, this is not a quaint beach town anymore. You’ll get yourself in a world of hurt. Hire yourself a private eye. We got ’em for all budgets and needs. You want to go that way, give me a call.”

*   *   *

Sam didn’t talk in the cab. He stared at sprawl, fast-food joints and tire stores, and reacted to none of it. At the airport, he called Marnie from a pay booth. I heard him say, “False alarm. I’d rather see Lorie dead than looking like that woman must’ve looked when she was alive.”

The flight back to Key West was bouncy. Late-afternoon heat played hell with the air mass above heated land and the cooling sea. A salt mist lay on the Keys, reflecting sunlight, obscuring the horizon. North of us, a single-cell cumulonimbus had drifted off the mainland and vertical arrows of lightning danced inside it. If the pattern held, it would be seven months before the cool, dry breezes of tropical winter returned.

Sam remained quiet, consumed by another man’s jargon and his own frustration. Throughout our fifteen-year acquaintance, the past six or seven in close friendship, Sam and I had come to know each other well. Even in his worst moods, Sam never had failed to express himself.

The engines’ buzzing zoned me out. I fled to a half-hour nap. I dreamed about my father chasing me into the house, in a rage. I don’t remember why we argued—something about a friend’s loud muffler in our driveway—but I recall my mother screaming his name as he caught me in the kitchen and hauled off to slug me. I ducked, and the dent in the freezer door couldn’t be repaired. My mother got a new fridge. My father’s hand was in a cast for two months, but he got off my case for the rest of the school year.

I woke and filed my dream under “the past,” then thought about the next forty hours of my future. I needed to squeeze in five days’ errands before I escaped to an island where I knew no one, where I would welcome solid, income-producing work. The Keys’ incessant wind had chipped away at my sanity. I damn sure would wallow in Grand Cayman’s perfect weather.

Sam stared out the aircraft’s window.

I said, “You ever wish your father was still alive?”

“Yep, twice,” he said, “but only for two reasons. He would unplug my radio whenever he heard ‘What’d I Say?’ or anything by Buddy Holly. I wish he’d been around to see Ray Charles perform at the White House. I’d have loved to stuff that in his racist face. And I wish he could’ve attended that football game in Lubbock, Texas, when forty-nine thousand people made the Guinness Book of Records by singing ‘Peggy Sue’ in unison.”

The pilot made his seat-backs speech. Sam poked me with his elbow. “Before I hung up, I asked Marnie to fetch us at the airport.”

“Your Bronco’s at the airport.”

“Yep, it is. Somehow that fact departed my mind while I was talking. So we won’t tell her it’s there, and we’ll hope maybe she won’t see it. I can’t have her worrying about me. She gets neurotic.”

“What’s happened to your memory?” I said.

“I keep forgetting to take my ginkgo biloba.”

“Can I ask the main distraction?”

“Marlow bothers me. What detective would ask if he could plant a phony squib in the paper? What cop would sit down to talk about immigrants? And how, on his salary, does this guy own a boat big enough for a Yamaha 225? Did he inherit that, too?”

“Why lunch?” I said. “He thinks you know the dead woman? He suspects you of something? Doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s his cop job coming through. He thinks, ‘Arrest them all, let the courts sort it out.’”

I heard a Vietnam echo in the phrase. “Arrest for what?”

His grim expression had frozen as if he would never again laugh or speak in jest. “He’ll find something.”

“What’s that look in your eye?”

“I’ll find something, too. With Detective Odin Marlow attached.”

3

O
UR COMMUTER PLANE ANGLED
above a twenty-story cruise ship standing off from Key West Harbor, drew attention from flocks of pastel-draped sightseers on the redesigned Mallory Pier, then chased its cruciform shadow past a hundred bed-and-breakfasts, the bright tin rooftops of Old Town. It flew high above the ghosts of old turtle butchers, shrimpers, long-liners, career whores, chandlers, cockfighters, spongers, ice chippers, shipwrights, dock jockeys, mechanics, and stevedores.

Sam checked without comment the charter wharf as we descended past Garrison Bight. Air turbulence bounced us above the Salt Ponds, mild wind sheer, an edgy end to our hollow trip. We touched down into what I guessed was a twenty-knot headwind, back on the rock, battle-weary, Sam no better off for his round-trip. After he’d had time to reflect, I’d tell him my theory. There is no such thing as a good phone call between three
A.M.
and sunup.

Marnie Dunwoody had hung back by the Avis lot to save the short-term parking fee. We walked outside, saw her orange Jeep Wrangler, and waited as she pulled from the distant curb and drove toward us.

“What was our cabdriver’s name?” said Sam.

“Goodnight Irene Jones.”

Under a long-brimmed ball cap, Marnie had a wary look, trying to guess Sam’s frame of mind. I clambered into the rear seat as he walked around to the driver’s side to give her a hug. In a blue cotton shirt, khaki slacks, and walking shoes, Marnie was dressed for her ten-hour day, searching stories for the
Key West Citizen
. Her light brown hair was shorter than I’d ever seen it. Even after the hug her wariness remained; without words, she knew Sam’s mood, knew she would have to adjust to it.

The scramble began around us. Taxi drivers threw down their smokes, popped trunk lids, solicited the first ones out the door. Marnie finessed the confusion of vehicles, then rolled between parallel rows of palms toward South Roosevelt. She said one or two things to Sam, raising her voice above the wind noise. He nodded but kept silent. I focused on an enormous anvil-shaped cloud to the south that expanded upward like a slow explosion of cotton. Three minutes later we stopped for the light across from the Grand Way Luncheonette. It hadn’t been open for business since I had lived in Key West. Every few years someone repainted the building and sign but never opened the doors. I didn’t know why, but that was okay. The place offered an aesthetic opposite to endemic tear-downs and remodeling jobs.

“I need to stop by the boat,” said Sam. “Check a couple things.”

“You want me to come back for you? I’ll drop Alex and—”

Sam patted her on the thigh. “I’ll get a ride from Turk, or I’ll walk.”

We followed two kids on motor scooters down First Street. They jacked around, wove back and forth, aimed at each other. They wore no helmets or shirts. If they tumbled they’d be scarred like barber poles—if they lived. We trailed their oily exhaust to North Roosevelt. They ran the light as it went red. Marnie stopped.

Fifty feet away, Captain Turk, who kept a guide skiff next to Sam’s
Fancy Fool
in Garrison Bight, walked out of the Union 76 convenience store.

Sam said, “See you at home. Let’s call for a Thai supper.” He stepped out of the Jeep, slugged my knee—a nonverbal “thank you”—and ducked traffic to cross the street. I moved up front before the light changed. Marnie had a small metallic sticker on her dashboard:
SIT DOWN, BUCKLE UP, HOLD ON, SHUT UP.

As we crossed the boulevard and started up the Bight bridge, I looked back. Turk reached into a sack and handed over a Miller Lite. Sam twisted the cap, tilted back the cold beer.

Marnie stopped for the light at the Naval Station Annex. “Shall I assume that he needs time alone?”

I felt the thirst that I knew Sam was quenching. “Between the MEs, the cops, and a woman cabdriver, he got his head twisted in six directions.”

“Which direction did it send him, going forward?”

“You’d better let Sam explain,” I said. “I saw it from my point of view. His take, I might get wrong.”

“I’ve never seen him so … detached.”

“He used the word ‘distracted,’ but yes.”

“He was too embarrassed to tell me that his Bronco was right there in airport parking.”

“You were good not to mention it. You look like you’ve had a long day yourself.”

“Long for fifteen reasons, Alex.” A minute later she turned onto Fleming. “How’s your new living arrangement?”

“Remains to be seen.”

“The remains of what?” She grinned. “Shouldn’t it be perfect?”

A loaded question. But Marnie and I had been friends since before I had met Teresa Barga. Marnie never had tattled or betrayed a conversation.

“I’ve seen her four times in three days,” I said. “Two of those were in bed while one of us was ninety percent asleep. Our affair has turned into April weather: cloudy, windy, and eighty.”

“As opposed to…?”

“Sunny and hot.”

“I get the picture.” She turned down Dredgers Lane, stopped near my porch, shut off her motor. She turned to face me and look me in the eye. “Look, Alex. I’ve got bad news. I wish I didn’t have to say this. I wish I didn’t have to tell anyone. Besides worrying about Sam, this was a big part of my long day. Naomi Douglas died in her sleep last night.”

I felt as if she had slugged me. I felt as if I’d dropped through a hole in the car floor, through a crack in the crust of the earth, into a dark cavern where nothing goes right or makes sense. I managed to say, “I didn’t know she’d been sick.”

Marnie shook her head. “She plum wore out, is all I can figure. It gets us all, eventually. I know you’ve been her friend the past few years.”

“But … damn. You saw her. She was healthy, perfectly alive.”

“Some people reach old age before others,” she said. “Most of the time you can’t tell by the outside what the inside is doing.”

“How old was she? After all this time, I don’t even know.”

“She was only sixty-eight,” said Marnie.

“She acted half that.”

“Right, she did. But in this town age is relative. Some people come to Key West to get a new life. Some people come here to die. Naomi did both.”

“With flair,” I said, “and a happy attitude. Is this her reward?”

Marnie was quiet a moment, then said, “She probably looked young because she didn’t hang out in bars.”

“Does Teresa know?”

Marnie squinted, looked away. “I have no idea.”

Naomi Douglas had come to Florida in the mid-Eighties from the upper Midwest. Widowed, she had used her late husband’s insurance proceeds to resettle herself far from reminders of old contentment and new heartbreak. She had bought an attractive two-story home on Grinnell, two blocks from my place on Dredgers Lane. I knew that she’d invested in stocks after the market’s mini-crash in ’eighty-seven. The boom of the Nineties had allowed her to remodel her home and yard and become a supporter of numerous Key West causes and charities. She had asked me several times to donate my photo expertise to promote historic restoration projects. Her charming manner had made it impossible to turn her down. She had paid me back by touting my name for several lucrative jobs, and by purchasing two of my photographs and displaying them in her home. She never remarried. I had seen her many times in the company of the island’s older, wealthy men, gay and straight. I’d never had the impression that any of them might be a love interest. More than once I had wondered about my feelings toward her. I had always found her attractive, never worried that she was of my parents’ generation. I had been in other relationships throughout the time I’d known her. Nothing had come of my feelings, or the attraction.

I said, “How old would Sam’s sister be?”

“Lorie’d be close to forty. You think she didn’t make it?”

“I don’t think Sam’s holding much hope.”

Marnie hadn’t moved in two minutes. She finally turned, looked toward the porch. “Your phone’s ringing.”

I don’t know why I hurried, but I did. Perhaps to run from the fact of my friend’s death. The front door was unlocked, wide open. I caught it before the answering service clicked in. Key West Police Detective Dexter Hayes Jr. monotoned, “Oh. You’re
not
dead.”

I took a moment to think through his words, then said, “They won’t have me in the club.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. I assumed the worst.”

“Was I supposed to be calling you? I thought our deal worked the other way around. I hoped it did.”

“Too true,” he said. “There’s only one reason I’m calling.”

“You got told to call me.”

“Not in so many words, Rutledge. Please say you’re too busy…”

“I’m too busy…”

“… to snap photos of a suicide victim.”

“I’ve pledged my late afternoon to a special project.”

“That piece-of-crap Mustang you got?”

“It’s a Shelby.”

“Once again I’m right?”

“No. I’m redoing my Weber grill. They should use me in ads. Like people who drive cars for a half-million miles. This is an early-Eighties model.”

“Lotta value in those relics,” said Hayes.

“I paid to have the grate sandblasted. I bought heat-resistant paint for the outside of it.”

“This guy took himself out with a shotgun on his canal bulkhead.”