Octopus Alibi (40 page)

“Liska rewrote my vacation request,” she said. “He predated it to last Wednesday, and gave me a four-day bonus. I just arrived down here and it’s beautiful, so on a whim I tried to make you a reservation. They said you were already booked for tomorrow noon. It’ll be great to see you, away from all the mess. This place is really alive.”

Keep reading for an excerpt from Tom Corcoran’s next mystery

Air Dance Iguana

COMING SOON IN HARDCOVER FROM ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR

A cockatoo’s screech ripped the dead man’s quiet.

I scanned the screened porch across the canal, then the morning sky. A huge, high-floating turkey vulture had pushed the caged cockatoo to panic. An upwind yachtsman began to dock-test his unmuffled outboards. Seconds later oily smoke shrouded the hanging corpse and fused stink into my sweat-drenched shirt. The din expanded when the shingle team next door, bored by watching the dead man’s slow twist, cranked up a CD blaster and added their nail guns to the noise pollution choir.

I felt that the man deserved peace, that Ramrod Key might go silent, if only until the medical examiner lowered his body from the power boatlift davit. Perhaps, on a deeper level, I hoped that people would treat my death with dignity if they learned that I had died. But the food chain of commerce runs beyond a single loss. I was part of the mass disrespect, not entirely by choice. My business mode had plowed me to a new low. I was part of the mass indifference.

At least I wasn’t strung to a twelve-foot mechanical crane, hung by my neck until blue. I was alive to dread the moment.

I switched lenses and went back to photographing the murder victim. In contrast to the sunny, balmy day, he looked trapped in mid-winter, his blue hands frostbitten.

“You’ll be done what time?” shouted Detective Bobbi Lewis.

“See that shadow across the noose?”

She sipped from a lidded Styrofoam cup. “No, I don’t.”

“I have to wait for the sun to move.”

“Why did they invent fill-flash?”

“I’m an impractical man,” I said. “Please fire me.”

“Quit in person. Liska ought to be here any minute. This yard smells like shit.”

“Blame the dead man.” I pointed to his stained trousers. “Make him feel guilty, as only you can.”

She began to walk, then turned. “I know I can’t beat you in a word game. But you may want to consider the forensic detail that wants to kick your ass for dawdling.”

“We all have our jobs to do.”

“They want to do theirs today.”

Tie game.

My phone had rung at 6:40 that morning. No friend would call that early. Even in half-sleep I knew that either Key West or Monroe County needed my help. I let the thing ring through to the answering service. After fifteen years of freelance magazine and ad agency work, I had come to dread the sight of my own camera. Crime scene jobs had poisoned my love of photography. It was my own fault; I had started accepting gigs from both city and county detectives for the extra cash. The money helped pull me through some dry spells, put food in my mouth when the mortgage had drained my checkbook. But I kept stepping into involvement that I couldn’t scrape off my shoes. I never wanted to be a cop, yet every time I saw a victim up close, I wanted justice.

That’s not exactly true. My job was not justice. I wanted revenge in the name of decency, contradictory or not. I had invented a few versions of it, and barely survived. Revenge almost always claims two victims.

So my phone rang. Dawn calls never were a good sign. I let a battered survival instinct take blame for my failure to answer.

One minute after the ringing stopped, my cell phone buzzed. I reached for the nightstand, almost knocked over the beer I hadn’t finished before falling asleep at one. The little window identified Bobbi Lewis. She had split us up, made a point of not calling for several weeks for any reason. Her odd silence had inspired many post-midnight beers. Now she had broken a prime rule and dialed my private number to hire me. I feared it was the last nail in the lid that sealed our love affair.

In spite of a long list of fine reasons to ignore it, I answered the call. I let some other instinct take blame for that one. It summoned me to a hanging.

Lewis moved to shade under the elevated house, pitched the cup into a weathered trash can. She wore crisp khaki slacks, clean sneaks, a star logo-emblazoned white polo shirt and, clipped to her belt, her Monroe County badge. At five-eight or so, she looked capable but not powerful. I wished I had a dollar for every man—criminal or not, including other deputies—who had made the mistake of thinking he could bully her. She studied the dead man, glanced over, and caught me staring. “You know what I see?” she said.

“One less voter?”

“Sweet, Alex. Go larger than instant image.”

I looked at the stanchion and swing arm, tried to guess which detail she expected me to notice. For want of an answer I said, “Another event to justify your job?”

Silence. I felt eye-daggers.

“Okay,” I said. “That was lame and I give up. What do you see?”

She aimed her index finger, drew a picture as she spoke. “A prehistoric praying mantis that spit out a one-string marionette.”

“Very creative.”

“Can you top that?” she said.

On what scale of measurement? It pissed me off that she was taking time to play a game. I had expected her to divulge a crime-solving clue. She was into fantasies. I stabbed at her big picture with my own poetic summary: “An iguana with a hemp necklace doing an air dance for breakfast.”

“Good start,” she said. “Go farther.”

I felt fresh out of poetry. I considered the davit’s on-off switch, well out of the victim’s reach. I tallied the noose, the hook, the restraints and, as if part of the man’s punishment, the spectacle. “To me,” I said, “it’s a professional hit. Drawn-out and foolproof.”

Lewis narrowed her eyes, gave me a quick nod. “Or someone not a pro planned it for a long time. What’s on his forehead?”

“I assume that a mourning dove perched on top of the davit.”

She shooed a mosquito from her shirt collar. “Bird crap?”

“You hang around on a cable long enough…”

“I gotcha. So, no problem, your waiting for the sun to move. It’s going faster than usual today.”

I wanted to remark on the velocity of her mouth.

The neighbor down the canal revved and shut down his twin outboards. A last cloud of thick oil fumes drifted down on us.

Lewis lowered her voice. “You didn’t know this man, did you, Rutledge? His name was Jack Mason. People called him Kansas Jack. With your escape from downtown, you’re almost his neighbor.”

“I don’t escape for two more days, detective. I’ll be on the next island up, a mile from here. It’ll take me time to meet locals. I’m shy that way.”

Lewis bit her upper lip, released it. “I wish.” She turned to go.

“Are we at a murder scene?”

She stopped, but didn’t look back. “Oh, shitfire. We have dueling faults. You’re impractical and I’m unprofessional.”

The phone on her belt buzzed. She unclipped it and strode away.

The cockatoo screeched again. My spine went corkscrew. We ought not reveal this weapon to the Third World.

Morning sunlight sparkled off the canal’s rippled surface. Sea grape limbs tossed long shadows in the background. Warm yellows enveloped Kansas Jack’s dangling body. His eyes had locked in a permanent squint. His eyelids bulged—hence my iguana impulse. My lens picked out a web of sun-induced wrinkles gone waxy next to his left eye. I scoped threads where buttons had popped or been ripped off his luau shirt. He wore shorts, normal in the Keys after April Fool’s Day, and black socks. His shoes were Goodwill specials, the black oxfords I had sworn off on leaving the military. His lean face and thin muscular arms suggested an undernourished man who may have shoveled coal in his youth, or snow, or manure. He carried the belly bulk of a boozer. I suspected he had done no labor of late beyond lifting beers.

The breeze finally offered me a favor, turned the suspended corpse so that my camera caught reflection in the duct tape over his mouth. I tapped the shutter button six times, at differing angles, then focused for a close look at the rope around his neck. In my childhood I had seen a diagram of the correct way to structure the knot. A person today would be investigated, hounded out of town for showing a youth how to tie a proper noose. As if the skill might lead one to a hellish career. My knowledge hadn’t inspired me to hang anyone.

In two days I would start nine weeks of house-sitting on Little Torch Key. After almost thirty years in Key West, I would learn about life twenty-seven miles from the big island, among fish and birds and people who had elected to live near open water. Kansas Jack Mason had existed at the bottom end of Lower Keys style. In contrast to nearby homes with their proper trees, shaped shrubs, clean pea-rock, and slick watercraft, his place was a dump. Jack had arranged empty buckets under a homemade lean-to with a weedy thatched roof. Each five-gallon plastic bucket had its own category: plumber’s trash, wood scraps, parched aloe clusters, boat motor parts. A row of pineapples along his home’s east wall had sprouted and wilted, been wasted. A veteran center-console Mako named
Swizzle Rod
rested sun-bleached and engine-free on a boat trailer with two flat tires. Its blue Bimini top had frayed to pale pennants. Its name had faded to a pink swirl on the transom.

If Jack Mason’s demise hadn’t been so evil, his hands hadn’t been bound by monofilament fishing line, I could have suspected murder-suicide. He had killed his environment, then took himself out. But this scene spoke only of murder, at the ugly end of a sad spectrum.

I heard a distant helicopter, then a go-fast boat out in Newfound Harbor Channel. With the exhaust fumes dissipated, sour plankton captured my nose. I framed a shot of the yard, the expanse between the davit and house.

“Take your time, Rutledge. Gaze about and soak up paradise. We got all fucking week.”

Sheriff Fred “Chicken Neck” Liska also wore khaki slacks and a polo shirt embroidered with his Monroe County badge. I had known him for years. My mental picture of him was that of a man who ate everything but never gained weight. For the past year or so, I’d been surprised each time I noticed his filled-out cheeks and baggy trousers. I knew only two tactics to counter his constant sarcastic banter. Stay silent or speak in homilies.

“Everyone’s in a hurry,” I said. “We came to the Keys to slow our lives, but we speed up after we’re here a while.”

“We got a rain issue,” he said, sticking his thumb to the northwest. “The fingerprint people want a shot at that davit. Plus, we got a situation up the road. I need you there for an hour or so.”

“I should have my booking agent review my contract?”

Liska ignored me. His mouth formed an ironic smile as he peered at the corpse. I could almost hear his brain shift from its management hemisphere to its true detective side. “That tan on his forearms?” he said. “That’s his lifestyle in a glance. The man never wore a watch.”

“I thought about that. He was barely scraping by. But he might have been one of the last old-time Keys dwellers not pushed out by incoming wealth.”

“Think he got to see himself die?”

“It was dark, no moon,” I said. “Or do we know that?”

“He was found at first light.”

“So, somebody hooked him up and turned on the davit winch,” I said. “He got to hear pulleys, motor whine, and the twang of cable adjusting itself on the take-up reel. He got to feel himself die. Probably smell himself, too. Who found him?”

“Woman down the canal, going out for smokes at daybreak. She idled by and spotted him swinging.”

“She runs for cigarettes in her boat?”

“Florida snatched her license after four DUIs. She commutes to the store in her Boston Whaler. Happens a lot in the Lower Keys. She even drives it to church. What’s
that
fucking noise?”

I pointed to the cockatoo. “Bird.”

“If it wakes the dead, maybe our jobs will be easier.”

“I just saw two more shots I want.”

“I got a crime scene crew waiting on your ass. You got ninety seconds.”

“Where’s your regular photo ace?”

“I fired him.”

*   *   *

Detective Lewis watched me snap my lens covers into place, stuff gear into my canvas shoulder bag. “Did you shoot any digital?”

“Nobody mentioned it to me. What’s wrong with film?”

“Nothing. It’s what we need for court cases, but digital’s the wave of the future. I just thought, if you had two or three, you could e-mail them to me. Might help me write my scene report.”

“What were you saying a few minutes ago, you wished I was shy?”

“Did I say that? My words come back to haunt me. Forget it.”

“There’s another photo I want to take when you cut this guy down. The sticky side of the duct tape that’s on his mouth.”

“We’ve tried that before, so forget it,” she said. “Fingerprints on top of duct tape threads are impossible to read.”

“Give me a shot at it.”

“Like you’re better than our print experts?”

“I heard about a process that might work,” I said. “Let’s at least preserve the evidence.”

“Whatever. I’ll try to arrange something.” She pointed. “The sheriff is in his car.”

I gave it a last effort: “Did we not have a relationship last month?”

She returned to her gloomy expression. “Call me a chicken shallow bitch. Or a moth too close to the torch. Just don’t call me, okay?”

“You called me, remember?”

On my way out front I snapped shots of Jack Mason’s character truck. The van was hand-painted a poster tone of royal blue. Faded bumper stickers covered its sides and rear end. “S
AVE
T
IBET
,” “S
TOP
G
LOBAL
W
HINING
,” “S
AVE
O
LD
S
TILTSVILLE
,” and “F
UCK
FEMA. B
LOW THE
B
RIDGE
.” He had used red Magic Marker to write
Swizzle Rod
on his gray vinyl spare tire cover. A new star-shaped FOP donation decal sparkled from his rear bumper.