Scavenger Reef (17 page)

"Sergeant," she said, "I'm telling you—that
tart was poisoned."

"If we had it we could test it," said
Mulvane. "Or if we had the bird."

"I know, I know," said Nina. "But I told
you. I didn't think. I threw it away. The housekeeper took the
trash out—I checked with him. The garbagemen came. The tart. The
bird. They're gone."

Mulvane drummed lightly on his desk with the
fingers of one hand. Of all the kinds of people who settle in Key
West, not the least numerous are those for whom Key West would seem
the most unlikely place on earth, a purgatory almost, and Joe
Mulvane was one of these. He had a pale freckled complexion that
could not stand the sun. He was thickly built with larded muscle;
you could picture him shoveling snow in a T-shirt, and the heat was
for him as much a torment as it is to a long-haired dog. He was not
a bigot, but nor did he exactly revel in human diversity. He
belonged, it seemed, in a blue-collar suburb south of Boston, a
place where people had basement workshops and basketball hoops in
the driveway; yet he was restless, perverse, and spirited enough to
flee where he belonged.

"Look, Mrs. Silver," he said, "I understand
you've been under a lot of strain—"

"Don't condescend to me, Sergeant," the
former widow cut him off. "I'm not a child. I'm not a hysteric. The
fact is there are a lot of people who would profit from my
husband's death."

Mulvane pursed his lips and lifted his red
eyebrows. When paranoiacs started ascribing motives, it could
sometimes get interesting. "Like who?"

"Like anyone who owns one of his paintings.
Anyone who wants to see the price go up."

"Ah," said Mulvane. "Someone who's
selling."

Nina nodded.

"Okay," said the cop. "So who's
selling?"

"I don't know," said Nina. "I don't know if
anybody is."

The detective frowned. For a moment it had
almost seemed he had a thread. "Let's back up a step. How many
people have pictures?"

Nina shrugged and could not quite rein in a
quick sigh of frustration. She admired her husband's profligate
generosity—and it had often driven her batty. Forget the money;
money, they'd always had enough. But here he had a significant body
of work, maybe a great body of work, and he was so casual about it,
so careless. Almost as if it didn't matter. And that of course was
the crux of it. To Augie, it didn't matter, life mattered. The work
was incidental, a by-product, a residue.

"In Key West?" she answered at last. "Maybe
a dozen. Maybe twenty. Altogether, probably a hundred. Maybe
more."

"That's a lot of killers," said Mulvane.
"Your husband suspect anyone in particular?"

"He doesn't know," said Nina.

"Doesn't know what?"

"That someone tried to kill him. Look, he's
very weak, he's had a heart attack. He can't find out."

Mulvane scratched an ear, let out a bigger
breath than it seemed the tiny office could hold. "All right," he
said, "all right. Let's start at the beginning. This tart. You
don't know who brought it."

Nina said, "That's right."

"You just found it by the door."

"No. I didn't find it. It was brought in to
me."

"Ah. Who brought it in?"

"The housekeeper. Reuben. But Sergeant,
really—"

"Reuben," said Mulvane. "Cuban?"

There was something a little rancid in the
way he said it. "You don't like Cubans?" Nina asked.

"Mrs. Silver, I'm a homicide cop. I don't
like anybody."

"All right, then. He's a spick. He's a
queer. What else would you like to know, Sergeant?"

Mulvane looked at her. She was artsy but she
was prim. The short neat hair. The quiet classy jewelry. She was no
longer short of breath and now that she had settled down she was
precise and logical as a watch. He leaned forward over her, and in
the tiny office the effect was of a mountainous cresting wave about
to break. "What else I'd like to know," he said, "is if there is
even one small possibly relevant fact besides the fact that it was
this queer Cuban who handed you the supposedly poisoned goody."

Nina bit her lip, then shook her head in a
defeated no.

Mulvane shrugged, then reached into a damp
shirt pocket and produced a slightly soggy business card. "Call me
when there is."

"But Sergeant—"

"Mrs. Silver, listen. I'm not unsympathetic,
I'm really not. But we don't do preventive medicine here. Real
murders, people murders, we take care of those first. Dead
parrots—call the ASPCA."

Nina's hands were crossed in her lap. She
took a deep breath, then pressed her palms down on her knees and
got up from the chair. Grudgingly she took the business card. It
was a paltry thing but it was all she had. She said, "Thank you,
Sergeant," and she turned to go.

When she was halfway through the open
doorway Mulvane spoke again. "That houseboy, Mrs. Silver. He have
any paintings?"

The razor glinted in the dappled shade
beneath the poinciana tree.

Reuben the Cuban held it by the yellowed
bone handle and for a moment kept the blade poised a couple inches
above Augie Silver's upturned throat. Through the thin skin of the
painter's neck, the blue and lightly coursing jugular could be
quite clearly seen. The funnel of the windpipe stood out fibrous as
the gizzard of a chicken. Augie's breathing was shallow but even,
his eyes were trustingly closed. Here and there doves were cooing,
a hummingbird blurred against the hibiscus. Reuben held his breath
and brought the cool and well-stropped blade a centimeter closer.
The artist seemed oblivious to the approaching steel, he gave a
slight twitch as though in sleep and a sinew fluttered beneath his
ear.

"You sure you want to do this, Augie?"

"Go ahead," the painter said without opening
his eyes. "Get it over with."

"But the beard looks good. Makes you look
like Papa Hemingway."

"I used to be plenty macho, Reuben. I've
caught enough fish and drunk enough alcohol. I don't need to look
like Papa Hemingway."

The younger man shrugged and bent over
Augie. With his free hand he pulled the skin along the jawbone, and
he began to shave his neck. The dry white hair was light as
cornsilk, it drifted onto the old sheet in which Augie was
shrouded, and some of it continued falling to the ground. Now and
then Reuben rinsed the razor in a basin of hot soapy water. He
worked in silence for a minute or two, but there seemed to be
something on his mind. "Is this what macho is, Augie?" he asked at
last. "To catch fish and drink a lot of alcohol?"

Augie smiled and Reuben felt the skin move.
"Part of it," the painter said. "Also you have to know how to fix
things, cars and such. And you have to fuck a lot of women till it
hurts and now and then punch someone in the nose."

Reuben stood poised with the razor and
considered. "I am not macho," he confessed.

"Me neither anymore," said Augie. "It's a
phase."

The young Cuban went back to his barbering.
"You used to punch people in the nose?" he asked.

"No," said Augie. "But not because I didn't
want to. Only because I was afraid they'd hit me back."

"To be afraid," said Reuben. "This is not
macho."

"No," said Augie. "But everybody is."

Reuben rinsed the razor. The sun was near
its zenith, it made a steely mirror of the swimming pool. The tree
the Cubans call Mother-in-law made a rattling complaining noise
although there did not seem to be a breeze. Reuben looked at
Augie's chin. It was odd to be shaving someone else, to be paying
such unflinching pore-by-pore attention to another's face, and
there was something deeply naked about Augie's skin, pale under the
beard, splotched pink from the tug of the blade as the hair was
scraped away.

"You have fear?" Reuben didn't exactly mean
to ask the question, he just heard himself asking it.

"Damn straight," Augie said. He was going to
leave it at that, but there are certain questions that are like
siphons, they suction off truth and once the flow starts it
continues of itself. After a moment Augie went on. "I used to have
a terrible fear of falling short somehow, disappointing myself in
some final way, some way that could never be fixed. I'm not afraid
of that anymore. No, that's a lie. I still am. But much less. What
the hell. But I was terrified of dying down in Cuba, I'll tell you
that. Among strangers. Without even saying goodbye to anyone. . . .
And you?"

Reuben hesitated. It was his own fears that
had led him to ask about Augie's, yet he was unprepared to have the
question turned around. He rinsed the razor, looked away a moment.
His eyes burned. "I fear to be alone," he said.

English words, Spanish syntax. Augie didn't
quite know how to take it. Feared to be alone in a room? Or feared
to live his life alone? Augie decided to address the longer-lasting
terror.

"You'll find someone," he softly said.
"You're a caring, loving man, Reuben. You'll find somebody worthy
of you."

Reuben didn't answer. For himself he didn't
mind crying, but he was there to help, not to ask for help, and he
didn't want to impose his crying on Augie. He pressed his jaws
together, then tried to smile. Gently, he pulled the skin along
Augie's jaw and went back to shaving him.

But his hand was trembling just a little,
the razor veered from its proper angle and sliced through the skin
of the painter's chin. With a nauseating vividness Reuben felt the
blade pop through the flesh. For a second the cut place was paler
than the skin around it, then it filled with a line of blood that
formed a fat red drop at its lower verge. Reuben pulled the razor
back and looked with shame and horror at what he had done. He had
let his own pain conquer him so that he had hurt his friend.
Frantically he began apologizing while his free hand reached for a
cloth to dab the wound.

Augie turned his head away. "It's only a
nick," he said. "I used to cut myself all the time."

But Reuben was not to be comforted. He was
sorry in English, he was sorry in Spanish. The tears that he'd
choked back now broke loose, the drops were thick as Augie's blood.
He fretted with the cloth over the painter's cut chin, got it
splotched with blood in half a dozen places. The red blots made him
feel queasy, and without a word he dashed into the house to fetch a
fresh clean towel.

He had just passed through the open French
doors when Nina entered from the front. She saw him with the
ferocious midday light glaring at his back. She saw that his face
was tormented with some terrible guilt. She saw the razor in his
hand, the bloodstained cloth. She lurched forward as though she
might perhaps attack him, and she screamed. Or thought she
screamed. But before the sound had left her throat she had passed
out cold and crumpled to the cool bare wooden floor.

Reuben stood there, tears drying on his
cheeks, the razor dangling from his fingers.

The sight of Nina fainting had baffled him
but also brought back his composure the way a dreadful piece of
news can make a drunk man sober. Suddenly it seemed he had a lot to
do, and he wasn't sure of the order he should do it in. He had
Augie outside, half shaved and bleeding. He had Nina here,
blanched, unconscious, her legs folded under her in a way it seemed
they should not go. He put the razor and the bloody cloth on the
kitchen counter. He approached Nina and tried to lift her to the
sofa. She was limp and unhelpful as a sack of rice, and he dragged
her more than carried her. He slipped her shoes off, then grabbed
the razor and a new towel and went back out to Augie.

Augie didn't seem to have missed him. He was
relaxing under his sheet, contentedly baking in the stressless
all-over warmth of hot shade. The blood on his chin had thickened
to the consistency of jam, solid enough to stem the tide of further
bleeding. Reuben resumed his apologizing and Augie told him gently
but firmly to shut up.

"For Christ's sake, Reuben, you make it
sound as if you'd slit my throat."

After that the young man worked in silence.
Water glinted in the swimming pool, lizards did push-ups on the
pitted coral rocks. Dry white hairs fluttered down from Augie's
face, they were almost light enough to float away like motes of
dust.

Inside, Nina was coming back from the small
death of a fainting spell.

Her brain turned on like an old television,
the kind that started with a single point of quivering light then
popped into a grainy gray in which void images moved like ghosts.
One fact filled the screen: Reuben, this peculiar young man she'd
trusted and even loved, had killed her husband and it was her fault
absolutely for throwing them together. Her own life was finished,
that much was clear. She'd forfeited it by this amazing blunder,
this astonishing misjudgment. Her eyes opened of themselves, she
looked out at the world she'd disowned. She saw the French doors,
the flat indifferent light above the pool. The cloth with Augie's
blood on it still lay crumpled on the counter. There was nothing
left to do but go outside and find the body.

She sat up. Her veins had lost their will
and the blood emptied down through them as if through rain spouts;
she again grew lightheaded. After a moment she stood on legs that
no longer seemed her own and moved slowly toward the open doors.
She did not allow herself an imagined vision of Augie dead, yet she
was assaulted by a lunatic memory of drawing class: a tilted oval
standing for a human face, balanced on a stem of neck at an angle
that could only be true in death.

She stood in the open doorway now and saw
Augie, clean-shaven, shrouded in a sheet but very much alive.

Reuben had his back to her as he finished
Augie's sideburns, and it was her husband who saw her first.
"Darling," he said. He reached up and rubbed his own smooth cheeks.
"I wanted to surprise you."