Scavenger Reef (24 page)

She leaned against him and he held her. The
only comfort he could offer was the attempt at comfort, and in
giving it he could almost forget that he was terrified as well. But
then another thought occurred to him. He pictured Reuben, odd, shy,
swishy Reuben, streaking across the path of the speeding car, his
own young body perhaps three feet from its fender as it throttled
toward them. "And Reuben? Reuben knew?"

"He knows," said Nina. "I had to tell
him."

Augie slowly shook his heavy head. "Reuben
is amazing."

*

Joe Mulvane was a man who
knew how to fill a doorway. His broad shoulders in their
out-of-place suit jacket nearly brushed against both sides of the
frame, his thick thighs prevented any light from slicing in between
his legs, and his mordant posture made it clear that he did not
appreciate being called with a paranoid tale at 8
a.m.
on a Sunday morning
and asked to pay a mercy visit.

Nina Silver greeted him, looking prim,
composed, not obviously hysterical. She led him in and offered him
coffee, which mollified him somewhat. He leaned against the kitchen
counter as she poured him a mug. He jerked a thumb toward the
living-room walls. "These your husband's paintings?"

Nina nodded, then braced herself. People
always felt obliged to make some comment. It was a nuisance.

"They're big," said Mulvane.

"Yes," said Nina Silver. She handed him his
coffee, led him through the living room and out the French doors to
the pool.

Augie was sitting there, an untouched slice
of melon and a plate of mango muffins set in front of him. His
color was bad, a yellowish gray, and his skin hurt, his body
throbbed like a headache all over. "Darling," said his wife, "this
is Sergeant Joe Mulvane."

The painter didn't rise, just held out a
hand. "Hi,

Joe," he said. "Augie." He said it with the
same sort of utterly disarming informality that had allowed him to
sit on Nina Alonzo's office desk the first time they had met.
People should rest when their feet were tired. They should call
each other by easy names. Why not? Mulvane seemed to understand. He
slipped off his jacket and took a chair without waiting to be
offered one. He drank his coffee.

"Have a muffin, Joe," said Augie, offering
the plate. "I'm not hungry."

Mulvane, a Bostonian, knew from muffins,
although they didn't have mango way up there. He broke off a piece
and appraised its texture.

"Joe, listen," Augie went on. "I'm sure my
wife was right to call you, but I can't help feeling we're wasting
your time. There's so little to go on. I didn't see the driver or
if he was alone. I didn't see a license plate. Neither did
Reuben."

Mulvane swallowed a piece of muffin, looked
quickly for a napkin, then discreetly licked his fingers. "But both
of you—you and Reuben, I mean—are sure it was intentional?"

"The guy sneaked within thirty yards of me
and floored it."

"And it was one of those turquoise ragtops?"
the detective asked.

"Spanking clean," said Augie.

'That's a renter," said Mulvane. He blinked
his sandy eyelashes, looked around the Silvers' yard. The swimming
pool and plantings reminded him how perilously enviable the
well-to-do Key West life could be. "And you're not aware of any
enemies?"

Augie shook his head.

The detective thought back to his first
conversation with Nina. "But you have a lotta friends," he
said.

Augie looked down, his color went a shade
more sallow, his deep blue lighthouse eyes went dim. "Yes," he
said, "I do. And in some crazy way, that's what bothers me more
than anything. That it could be a friend."

Mulvane dove into his coffee. He was a
homicide cop; hurt feelings did not come very near the top of his
list of human tragedies. Yet there was something in Augie's pain
that got to him. An intimate betrayal was itself a kind of murder.
"Well, let's not assume—"

Nina cut him off, following her own
insistent train of thought. "What else could it be? The paintings.
The prices."

The artist recoiled at the words but could
not deny them. Murder, after all, generally came with a motive.

The cop had a piece of muffin in his hand
and realized suddenly that he had lost his appetite. He put it back
on the plate. "Maybe you should call the auction off," he
suggested.

"Impossible," Augie said. He wore a look
Nina was not sure she had ever seen in him before, a look not
exactly of helplessness but of sour despairing. 'There's this huge
machinery already cranked up. Sotheby's. Advertising. Sellers.
Buyers. My agent."

"Agent?" said Mulvane. "What's he do?"

"She," said Augie. "Shows the work.
Publicizes. Coordinates."

"Takes a cut?"

"Of course."

"She's in New York, this agent?"

"Based there," Augie said. "She was here a
couple of days ago."

Seemingly from nowhere Mulvane produced a
small and crumpled notebook and a cheap and capless pen. "What's
her name?"

Augie squirmed in the heightening sun as
though he himself had suddenly come under suspicion. "Joe,
really—"

"Claire Steiger," Nina said. "S-t-e-i-g-e-r.
She was here with her husband, Christopher Cunningham. Goes by Kip.
They were staying at the Flagler House."

"Did they rent a car?" the detective asked,
the butt of his pen against his freckled lower lip.

Nina looked at Augie. Augie shrugged.
Neither had noticed how their visitors arrived.

"When did they leave town?"

Augie shrugged again. 'They might still be
here, for all I know."

Mulvane took a last pull of his lukewarm
coffee, held the ear of the mug with the pen and pad still twined
between his fingers. Then he slid his chair back and got up.

"Sergeant," said Nina, rising with him and
trying to keep her tone free of panic, "are you going to help
us?"

Mulvane made an involuntary sound that was
halfway between a sigh and a growl, the gruff and weary complaint
of one who always seemed to end up caring more than he wanted to
and doing more than he told himself was worth it. "Officially, no,"
he said. "We have two open murders and a suspicious suicide on the
books. I go to the chief, he's gonna tell me no crime has been
committed, leave it alone. I'll do what I can. But quietly."

"Thank you," Nina said.

The beefy detective waved the gratitude away
like a fly. "First thing," he said, reaching for his jacket, "make
a list. Anybody here in town who has paintings—"

"They're friends," said Augie. "The pictures
were gifts. They wouldn't be selling . . ."

Mulvane didn't want to be around while Augie
dragged himself to the bitter end of that line of reasoning. He
kept on talking to Nina. "I don't care how much you think you trust
them—I want the names. Call me later. We'll check car rentals.
After that . . ."

He hunched his shoulders, and the movement
made him realize that his cop-blue shirt was already damp, another
sweaty day in Key West had begun. He squinted toward the sun, it
rudely pawed its way like hot hands between palm fronds and through
the gaps in branches. He glanced at Augie and Augie met his eyes
but didn't say a word. A lousy thing, thought Joe Mulvane, to be
bumped off by a friend; and since he didn't have anything to say to
make it seem less lousy, he walked unescorted through the Silver
house and back into the relentless sunshine on the other side.

The way it worked, the cars were put in
neutral and then hooked one by one to a conveyor chain. The chain
ran under a metal groove that was like a knife gash in the earth.
There was an electric eye that started the water when the cars
pulled even with the washing frame. Then the jets hissed all
around, above the cars and on both sides. The water came out hot
but went lukewarm almost instantly as it vaporized. It vaporized
into little fuzzy globes like dandelions, and sometimes rainbows
cropped up in it; the vapor moved but the rainbows hung in space
where they had started. After that the brushes came down, they
squeezed in softly but insistently like a fat aunt's arms and
didn't let go till they had felt the car all over.

Then the water stopped and the car paused in
the metal shed between the wash frame and the rinse frame. That's
where Jimmy Gibbs stood, in the clanging, steamy place between
cycles. He wore green rubber boots and held a rag. He worked the
vehicles' starboard side, and his job was to rub away the dirt and
stains too stubborn for the brushes: the bird shit that sometimes
needed scraping with a fingernail, the exploded bugs that congealed
to the color and consistency of baked-on egg.

People wanted a clean car when they rented.
Spotless. That fact had been drummed into him from the instant he'd
applied for this idiotic job. Didn't matter if the engine pinged,
didn't matter if the body rattled. The car had to look good,
festive, vacation-like for the off-season deadbeats with their
cheapie vouchers and their plastic nose protectors. Was it part of
what made it feel like vacation, Gibbs wondered, to look as
ridiculous as possible? To wear a nose protector, a flowered shirt,
and to drive around in one of these silly-looking ragtops in their
frippy Florida shades of plum, persimmon, turquoise?

Wave on wave the cars came through the shed,
a dreary parade of dripping doors and fenders emerging from a fog
of mildew and the smarting stench of strong detergent. Gibbs's toes
itched maddeningly inside his rubber boots. He'd wanted to work
barefoot, give his cracked and soggy dogs some air. The boss
wouldn't let him; some insurance bullshit. That was the thing about
working on land—there was always some rule, some regulation, some
suit making it his business how you had dealt with the fungus
between your toes. They blocked you from the light, these land
jobs; they stank up the air worse than fish guts ever could. In
all, going from sea to land seemed a terrible descent, a punishing
demotion.

Jimmy Gibbs had come down in life. He
admitted it, in some crazy way he savored it, it confirmed the way
he'd always figured things would turn out. Except he wasn't
finished yet—that's what no one realized. He had a plan, and this
jerked-off job was part of it. A big part. Gibbs had to laugh.
Could anyone imagine that he was standing melting in this metal
hell of steam for the four-fucking-thirty-five an hour they were
paying him?

Another turquoise convertible rolled dumbly
up to him and waited to be scrubbed. He clutched his fraying rag
and attacked a patch of guano on its windshield. All alike, these
rented cars, alike as fish in a school. That was the worst thing
about them, and the best. Gibbs rubbed some limestone grit off the
vehicle's sleek flank as the conveyor yanked it past him. Hell, he
thought, these cars aren't even from a place; on the bottom of the
license plate, where the home county was stamped, these just said
Lease. Lease County, famous for its cheapskate deadbeats. Cars from
nowhere, going nowhere.

Unlike himself. Jimmy Gibbs was moving up.
He'd sunk low, he'd sink a little lower still, but after that he
knew that he was springing to the top. This job was going to do
more for him than the boss man with his dry hands and his tie clip
could ever have imagined. With a wet hand Gibbs patted the yard
keys in his pocket. Satisfying, the feel of those keys. He raked a
forearm across his streaming hairline and turned back, just
slightly refreshed, to the unending line of ridiculous
convertibles.

At around four o'clock that afternoon, the
telephone rang at the Silver house. It was Joe Mulvane. He'd done
some checking up on the list of names that Nina had called in to
him a few hours before. She switched on the speakerphone in the
living room so that she and Augie could listen together, sitting on
the couch. With the speaker on, Augie thought, it seemed less like
talking on the phone than listening to the radio, passively taking
in a news flash not on one's own life but on some stranger's.

"The agent and her
husband," Mulvane said, "they checked out of the Flagler House
around two
p.m
.
yesterday."

"Ah," said Nina. "So they were gone."

"No," said Mulvane. "They didn't fly out
till nine-thirty. But they didn't rent a car. I checked both
names."

Augie let a long breath out.

"Of course," the detective went on, "there
are other ways to get cars. Theft is popular. Fake I.D.s. But in
the meantime, somebody did rent. Ray Yates. Rented a ragtop,
turquoise, Friday night, and hasn't been seen or heard from
since."

"Maybe he went on vacation," Augie said.

"His employer didn't know about it," said
Mulvane. "I called the station. Yates phoned in yesterday morning,
he didn't say from where, and told them he didn't know when he was
coming back."

"Can you find him?" Nina asked.

The answer was quick and definite. "No. I
checked his boat, I asked some neighbors. I don't have the
resources to do more."

There was a pause. Augie caught himself
staring at the speaker and felt suddenly pathetic, having a
conversation with a plastic box, looking to the box to solve his
life for him.

"Maybe we can find him," Nina said.

Mulvane cleared his throat. It was a
skeptical sound that seemed to go with the lifting of eyebrows, the
rolling of eyes. "We might be dealing with a killer here," he
said.

The words hung in the air; Augie tried to
get his mind around them. Ray Yates a killer? It seemed
preposterous. But then, was it any more unlikely than the notion
that the would-be murderer was his agent, or Clay Phipps his oldest
friend, or any of the other buddies with whom Augie had drunk and
sailed and fished and eaten? No, Yates was neither more nor less
fantastic as a villain than the others. As in a nightmare,
everything was taking on a tinge not only of horror but of a dread
perverted flatness; all things were equally misshapen and equally
possible. The painter, suddenly dizzy, let his head swim backward
onto the settee cushion.