Octopus Alibi (32 page)

Something in the parking area for northbound vehicles caught my eye. Sam stood behind a freight truck, then went under the trailer. I looked away so no one around me would notice my stare. When I came back out, Sam was shirtless, leaning against the Lexus. Two welts stood out on his chest.

I said, “Am I allowed to ask…”

He shrugged. “One dumb cop. The price of an education.”

“Not the welts,” I said. “The semi across the way.”

“Those super cops were too proud of their satellite tracking devices. They couldn’t let us go scot-free.”

He had found a transmitter on the Lexus, and sent it in a different direction.

“Where will they be looking for us?”

“The license tag was Virginia.” He pointed at the candy. “Why did you buy all that shit?”

“Self-esteem,” I said. “The joy of making my own decisions.”

Sam pulled on his new shirt, then went in to phone Marnie. A rented Mustang convertible pulled up next to the Lexus. Two couples, sunburned, partying their way to Margaritaville. They did a piss-poor job of hiding their open beers. I waved a five and offered to relieve them of two unopened.

Sam opened his the instant he got back in the car. “Wonderful,” he said. “The sheriff’s own ride, we can go to the edge. Follow our FDLE session with an open container charge. I quiver in fear.” He chugged it.

We started down the Eighteen-Mile Stretch. Sam spun me what Marnie had told him. “Whit Randolph’s attorney is no slouch. This is the guy who got famous by a television news exposé of the Travelers, the scam artists who work out of the Carolinas. He’s their attorney du jour, always rushing to small towns where they’ve been snagged in fraud. He chartered a jet out of New Orleans and got to the Monroe County jail before the deputies finished the booking process. He brought along a goofball lawyer from Whitehead Street and a bail bondsman. When he got Randolph set to hit the street, he called a news conference. Our naive local stringers took the bait.”

“Did he offer any legal brilliance?”

“He claimed that he can prove that his client had not committed a single crime. He also said that, within forty-eight hours, he and his client would deliver the mayor’s murderer to justice. His real words were something like, ‘My client will let these rube cops know who really did it.’”

“The scam bust was a delay tactic so the police could build up murder evidence. Why would the lawyer want to go there?”

“Fire with fire?” said Sam. “Maybe to let the fuzz know that he was wise to their tactic?”

“Make you glad you’re a fisherman?”

“I’ve never doubted my choice. But everybody wants to be like me. This guy is busted, then bonded out in five hours. The cops have their own catch-and-release policy.”

“We should hope they left the hook in his mouth.”

Our timing down U.S. 1 was perfect. The sun dropped below the horizon as we rounded the bend into Key Largo. I said, “Two hours earlier, we’d have had it in our eyes for a hundred miles.”

“Still a bunch of shit,” said Sam. “Friday night, the Upper Keys, you get drunken pull-outs from bar lots. Those end-of-the-week brews make people forget to turn on their headlights.”

“You think Marlow’s down here?”

“If it were me, I’d have gone thirty or forty miles north and put into a marina where no one knew me. Marlow’s smart enough not to go to Bimini. He knows the easiest place to hide. He’s got an ‘FL’ hull registration number, so his boat will blend in anywhere in the state. His first goal is to hit money machines close to home, because he knows they’ll track him. After that, if he’s got a cash stash, he can take his time, go anywhere.”

I said, “He was in the fake-identity business.”

“Bingo,” said Sam. “He can be anybody and go anywhere. For that matter, his boat could be registered to a fake identity, which makes him a free man indefinitely. What the hell. He could have a car, a home, and a new job, but I doubt it. Marlow was a cocky bastard. He wouldn’t have looked ahead to possible failure.”

“Can you think back twenty-five years?” I said.

“No.”

“Who sold us those shares in that development project?”

“Some dock jockey at the yacht club.”

“Where were our brains?”

“We must’ve thought we were flush,” said Sam. “I remember those men on the fuel dock, Norman Wood, his friend Foster, the can-opener tycoon, and the dockmaster, Jabe. They looked at us like we were nuts. Of course, we thought Norman was crazy for investing in Treasure Salvors. What the hell did we know?”

“What’d we give them, two grand apiece?”

“You did, but I doubled-up. I never told you that.”

“I remember thinking for about a year and a half, I was going to make a killing. I was going to pay off my mortgage twenty-seven years ahead of time. I finally, mentally, wrote off my riches. I hadn’t thought of it in fifteen years.”

“I don’t even know if that company still exists.”

“I was getting to that.” I told him about the issue coming before the city commission. I explained Marnie’s heads-up regarding our names appearing on the list of owners, the circled BBDC mention in Marlow’s newspaper.

“I don’t remember Marlow the bad cop.”

“Me either,” I said. “If he was on the take—what cop wasn’t back then?—he had money to burn. If the stock was sold before he got fired, maybe he invested cash he needed to hide.”

“You or Marnie would’ve seen his name on that list.”

“He could’ve used a corporate name. You recall any more about the guy who sold us those shares? Wasn’t he a townie?”

“A blip in the back of my head says he was a Cuban Conch who left town for a while, then came back. He knew a lot of locals, but he was connected to Miami money.”

“Miami money came in funny flavors back then,” I said. “Maybe some of the investors would rather forget their involvement.”

“You better believe just as many are hoping for that big payoff in the sky. Once again, I’m glad I fish.”

“You could write a book about your past five days.”

“I’d have to think about things I would rather forget,” said Sam. “I tried to write a book in the early Seventies. On active duty.”

“How did you find time?”

“I did my last two years at a desk in Fort Knox. I was supposed to train recruits, but some lieutenant colonel thought I was too extreme, too over-the-top. They put me in charge of filing psychological profiles. I supervised a civilian, a widow with three young kids. She did all the work. She was great. I didn’t have to do squat, but I turned into a slug. I reached a point where my eyelids were tired, my legs were tired, and my brain was in overdrive. It was making me loopy, so I wrote to save my sanity.”

“A book about what?”

“My best friend in Vietnam. Boy who didn’t get out.”

“Did you write a whole book?” I said.

“I didn’t finish. I made it fiction, because I didn’t want to tell stories and name names. I can’t remember, but I think Crumley’s
One to Count Cadence
was the only fiction out there. This was before
Going After Cacciato
and
Dog Soldiers
and
Fields of Fire
. Anyway, I got my discharge papers when it was half done.”

“You never thought about going back to it?”

“I came to Key West, and one of my first charters was two men from Elyria, Ohio. After the first day’s fishing they invited me to join them for a beer at Cow Key Marina. One of them began to shoot pool, and I got into telling the other guy about my book. I think he brought up the subject. Anyway, I gave him background, a few combat details. The man says, ‘You’re talking about the Foster boy, aren’t you?’ He pointed to the pool shooter. ‘You’re talking about his son.’ I didn’t see that one coming. The man playing pool was my friend’s father.”

“Small world we live in.”

“I thought for a few days that meeting his father would inspire me to get back into it. It worked the opposite. The father was an asshole. He got drunk and begged me to find him a hooker. I decided my friend died to escape his old man. I took my manuscript to the far end of the Northwest Channel and gave it the float test.”

“And?”

“It failed. Sank like sledge. Come to think of it, I taped it to a sledge.”

“Your friend in Nam was a hero?” I said.

“No more than fifty-eight thousand others. He was just another story.”

“What’s a hero’s secret?”

“You take abject fear, fight it back with a death wish, and people think you’re courageous.”

“In other words…”

Sam said, “In other words, you fight crazy people with crazy logic, you force the other guy to share the fear. It’s all they respect, and if you’re lucky it takes them by surprise.” He changed the subject. “Christ, look at the price of gas.”

“Every ten miles it goes up a nickel a gallon.”

“And the closer you get to Key West,” said Sam, “the more people live for today and to hell with tomorrow.”

Full circle. He was back to memories and revenge.

*   *   *

I called Liska’s office from Murray’s Food Mart on Summerland Key.

“Gone for the day,” said the dispatcher. “He left you a message, bubba. ‘Keep the car. See you
A.M.
’ I also got another for you, ten minutes ago.”

“What’s that?”

“From Agent Simmons, Miami FDLE. He said, ‘Very funny.’ I assume you know what that means. He wasn’t laughing.”

I went into the market, bought a six-pack. It was gone before we reached Searstown. Key West was oddly quiet for a Friday night. Elizabeth Street smelled like a valley of frangipani.

Sam’s house was dark. “Marnie’s cashed it in for the night,” he said. “Teresa going to be waiting?”

“You’ve been in Lauderdale, you missed the soap opera. I should have bought a T-shirt that said,
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW
.”

“Didn’t she just move in?”

“Remember, ‘If you love somebody, set them free’? It’s a crock of shit.”

“Ask her to wear a zapper collar. You can install an Invisible Fence.”

“Too late. The best I can do is call Animal Control.”

“Looks like it’s back to Annie Minnette,” said Sam.

“Jesus. I forgot about her.”

“Ah, subconscious smarts. By the way, your meddling saved my ass. Thanks.”

“Blew their sting to shit, though.”

“Flatter yourself, bubba. We don’t have that kind of power. No matter what they say, they blew it themselves. Can you imagine trying to catch a fish from inside my house? They thought having an Ops Box would cause bad people to wave white flags. That’s what smart people call caca.”

“I almost forgot to ask you,” I said. “What went down between you and Liska when he came to the hospital this morning?”

“Never saw him. They yanked me out of the hospital at dawn. When you got to the Ops Box, I’d been sitting there eight hours.”

*   *   *

My house was dark, too. I went in, locked the door behind me. Teresa’s packed bags were next to the door, her squash racquet and snorkeling gear stacked on top. She had taken two prints from the bedroom wall, cheap prints unworthy of their frames. Also the Isabelle Gros painting, which I would miss. Two boxes of books were there, too, mysteries she had kept to reread. Right on top was one named
Love for Sale
.

Honey, you could write the sequel.

I blew off my messages and opened the only beer in the fridge. I would learn in the morning that I drank maybe two sips before I passed out fully clothed.

29

W
OODPECKERS AND A BAR
fight. Roofers’ hammers, brass gongs, a hardball through a window. Twenty people shuffled on my porch. The cast of
River Dance
had decided I wasn’t supposed to sleep late. Why couldn’t I live on a peaceful dead-end lane on a tropical island where everyone slept late? I had wasted my money on an alarm clock.

Empty space on the dressing table. Her knickknacks were gone, her eaux de toilette, ceramic alligators packed in boxes, ready to roll. They had been there only a few days, but they had added a secure touch to the room. Safe to assume that Teresa would move back to her old condo and Whit Randolph would gain a roommate. Or vice versa, depending on their arrangement. She preferred to be on top. I didn’t know if that position applied to her business deals.

Good morning and look at the bright side, I thought.

You are not manacled to floorboards.

Someone peered through a pane in the French door. I hit the bathroom. My hair looked like an explosion in a wire factory. I would have to wear a ball cap to greet visitors. My face looked like a topological chart of northern Montana. They would have to suffer that. I brushed my teeth—for myself, so my jaw wouldn’t stick shut. Baking soda toothpastes make your mouth feel like you’ve chewed a handful of sand, though there are times when that can be an improvement.

I walked outside. No one spoke.

Marnie, Monty, and Liska had made themselves at home. Coffee for the men, a Sprite for Marnie, nothing for me. The porch air smelled wet and warm. Birds sang, late-season gray catbirds, tree swallows. Fat April foliage blocked traffic noise on Fleming. Monty’s ketchup-red rental convertible was snugged behind the Lexus. Marnie’s Jeep was parked behind the ragtop.

Chicken Neck resembled a tourist in a yellow mesh T-shirt and tan shorts with fifteen pockets. He chewed his coffee stirrer, appeared taciturn, almost smug. Had he forgotten that he’d set me up for an FDLE beating? And why would he be with Monty on a Saturday morning?

Monty looked grim. He had succeeded in getting a deep tan, had slicked his hair back to expose a balding pattern I never had noticed. The style did him no favor. He looked like a junior Soviet diplomat in a Cold War newsreel.

Marnie stared at Liska as if he was a crazy man who could go berserk without warning. She wasn’t too placid, herself. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

I wanted to stare at my magenta bougainvillea, ignore them all. I felt like a fat mango, ripe to pick. I hoped that Marnie didn’t want to discuss the Borroto Brinas Development Corporation in front of the sheriff. I didn’t want to explain my part ownership that early in the morning.