Skinny Dip (40 page)

“Minnesota? But what about Joey?”

“The case is more or less over,” Rolvaag said.

“Is that the same as closed?” Rose asked skeptically.

“Not exactly. Just over.”

He told her about Chaz Perrone’s Humvee turning up at Loxahatchee, and about the suicide note. He related only what he knew as facts, and not his strong suspicions.

Rose leaned against the soda machine and said, “Oh God. There’s something I’ve got to confess.”

The detective felt a stab of heartburn. “Please don’t tell me you killed him. I already rented the U-Haul.”

“For God’s sake, no, I didn’t kill him,” she said. “But I did invite him to my place after the memorial … and then I doped his drink.” She smiled sheepishly. “I was trying to get him to admit he pushed Joey overboard.”

“Did he fess up?”

“No comment,” said Rose. “Do I need a lawyer?”

“Not unless Mr. Perrone files charges, and I would say that’s a long shot.”

She handed Rolvaag the half-empty soda pop, which he tossed in the garbage.

“My mom lives in Minnetonka,” she said.

“No kidding? The job I’m taking is in Edina.”

“Nice town.” Rose clucked approvingly. “I saw you at Joey’s service, sitting way in the back of the church, but I didn’t know whether it was cool to say hi or not.”

“You gave a good eulogy,” Rolvaag said. “I’m sure Mrs. Perrone would have liked it.”

“I haven’t given up on that girl, you know. Weirder things have happened.”

“I haven’t given up, either,” said Rolvaag. He wanted to tell her more, but he couldn’t.

She said, “I try to go up and see Mom once or twice a year.”

“It’s nice in the spring,” Rolvaag heard himself say.

“Maybe I’ll call you next time I’m there,” Rose said. “There’s not a whole lot happening in Edina, crime-wise. I’ll bet you could spare a whole hour for lunch.”

“Oh, at least,” said the detective.

As she walked out of the office Rose Jewell never once glanced back, which spared Rolvaag the embarrassment of being caught staring. It was one of the most splendid exits he had ever witnessed. After a moment’s recovery he returned to his desk and resumed boxing the files. He checked his voice mail but did not find the message he was expecting. It was possible that he was dead wrong about what had happened; possible, he thought, but not likely.

Rolvaag made sure that the rest of the day passed slowly, to give his telephone time to ring. It didn’t. Then, shortly before five, he was approached by a well-set middle-aged man with a deep-water tan. The man introduced himself and presented a faded ID from the Dade State Attorney’s Office, where many years ago he had worked as an investigator.

“How can I help you, Mr. Stranahan?” Rolvaag asked.

“Let’s go eat.”

“As you can see, I’m pretty busy. It’s my last week on the job.”

Stranahan said, “This concerns a man named Charles Perrone.”

Rolvaag reached for his coat. “There’s a new place on Las Olas. The burgers aren’t bad.”

“Mind if I bring a friend?”

The detective found one last notebook in the bottom drawer of his desk. “Fine with me,” he said.

The green Suburban was parked three blocks away, in the public lot. At the sight of it, Rolvaag suppressed a grin. He got in the backseat and rolled down the window to feel the sun on his face. They ended up ordering takeout and carrying it to a picnic table on the beach.

Mrs. Perrone was even lovelier than in her photographs. Mick Stranahan let her do most of the talking. When she was finished, Rolvaag said, “Tell me again the last thing you remember.”

“Falling,” she said. “No, diving.”

“And before that?”

“My husband throwing me over the rail.”

“And afterward?”

“I woke up at Mick’s and it was all a blank,” Joey Perrone said. “Until yesterday.”

“Then it came back to you all at once? Or in bits and pieces?”

Stranahan spoke up. “Pieces. For a while she didn’t even know her name.”

Rolvaag put down his notebook and went to work on his french fries.

“They found a floating bale of marijuana that had the tips of your fingernails stuck in it,” he said to Mrs. Perrone. “I was wondering how long you’d hung on.”

Pensively she glanced at her hands and flexed her fingers, as if trying to muscle up the memory.

“She hung on all night,” Mick Stranahan said. “That’s how I found her.”

Although Joey Perrone appeared vigorous and fit, Rolvaag was nonetheless impressed. Few grown men he knew would have survived such a fall, followed by eight hours in the cold chop of the ocean.

“Where’s this island exactly?” he asked.

Stranahan told him.

“But you’ve got a boat, right? Why didn’t you take Mrs. Perrone to a hospital after you found her?” the detective said.

“Because she was in no condition to be moved. It’s a small skiff, and a nasty ride when it’s rough.”

“You don’t have a phone or a VHP radio on your island?”

“Just a cellular, and the battery was dead.”

“No charger?”

“Broken,” said Stranahan. “Same with the VHE”

“So, for the last two weeks—”

“Mick’s been taking care of me,” Joey Perrone said.

With a straw, Rolvaag swirled the ice in his jumbo Sprite. He said, “You’ve had quite a go of it.” That much of their story he believed.

Mrs. Perrone picked distractedly at a Greek salad. “I know it’s just my word against his, but I want to prosecute Chaz for attempted murder. I want to take him to trial.”

“That may not be possible,” Rolvaag said. “Your husband is missing in the Everglades. There was a suicide note in his vehicle.”

Joey Perrone seemed more shocked than Mick Stranahan, who asked if the note looked authentic.

“I think there’s a strong possibility that Mr. Perrone is gone for good,” the detective replied.

Mrs. Perrone put down her fork and turned away, looking toward the ocean. Stranahan moved closer and laid a hand on her back.

“Damn,” she said softly.

“You all right?” Rolvaag asked.

She nodded and stood up. “I want to take a walk.”

When they were alone, Stranahan asked the detective where he was moving.

“Home to Minnesota,” Rolvaag said. “I figure it’s best to get out of here now, while I still remember what ‘normal’ is.”

“Good luck,” said Stranahan.

“Just yesterday was one of those only-in-Florida moments. They called me out to see some dead guy by the side of the road. You know these white crosses people put up at fatal accident scenes? He had one sticking in the middle of his gut.”

Stranahan took a bite of cheeseburger. “Was he a tourist? Because that’s when you hear from the governor, when tourists start getting whacked.”

“Nope, he owned a big farming outfit up near Lake Okeechobee. Coincidentally, he was an associate of Mrs. Perrone’s husband,” the detective said. “Samuel Hammernut was his name.”

Stranahan displayed no curiosity whatsoever. When a seagull landed on the corner of the table, he tossed a french fry at its feet.

Rolvaag said, “They held a memorial service for Mrs. Perrone last Thursday and, I swear, there was a guy at the church who looked a lot like you.”

“No kidding?” Stranahan offered a soggy slice of pickle to the gull, which mangled it greedily. “The island is lousy with these things,” he remarked. “Rats with wings.”

“All those years working for the state,” Rolvaag said, “did you ever get a case that wrapped itself up in a nice neat package, and all you could do was sit back and watch? Where all the bad guys just canceled each other out and saved everybody the hassle of a trial?”

“A rare treat,” Stranahan said.

“Well, this is my first.” Rolvaag picked up his notebook and sailed it into a litter basket, spooking the bird. “I figure it’s a good note to leave Florida on. What do you think, Mr. Stranahan?”

“I think timing is everything, Karl.”

The two men stopped talking when they spotted Joey returning along the beach. She had put on her sunglasses and taken off her shoes and pulled the tie from her ponytail. A big striped ball rolled into her path and, without breaking stride, she gently kicked it back to a small blond boy, who skipped away laughing. Every now and then she would stop to watch the waves froth around her legs, or to pick up a seashell.

The burly unkempt stranger who came shouldering out of the saw grass carried no weapon. Chaz Perrone heaved the rock, which splashed in front of the stranger, and screamed, “Stay the fuck away from me, old man!”

The intruder’s grin was alarming in its perfection. From his deportment, Chaz initially had pegged him as a homeless wino, but winos typically did not make a priority of dental hygiene.

“Don’t get any closer,” Chaz warned. He snatched another rock off the ground and cocked his arm.

The grizzled intruder kept coming. When he was ten yards away, Chaz let loose. The man caught the rock bare-handed and threw it back with surprising velocity, over Chaz’s head.

“I played some college ball myself,” the man said, “about a jillion years ago.”

Chaz shielded his shriveling, bug-bitten privates as he backed against the bay tree. He told himself that the situation could be worse; it could be Red and Tool, with the twelve-gauge.

The man said, “I heard the shots last night, but I was a long ways off.”

“What do you want?” Chaz asked shakily.

“Thought it might be a deer poacher. Five rounds from a shotgun means somebody’s trying to kill something.”

“Yeah, me.” Chaz turned to reveal the pellet marks in his backside.

“Close call,” the man said, with no abundance of concern.

If he was a game warden, Chaz thought, he must have been lost in the boonies for decades. He wore a tattered Stones T-shirt, filthy dungarees and moldy boots that had long ago come unstitched at the toes.

A plastic shower cap was stretched over his hair, and one misaligned eyeball stared emptily at the sky. His silver beard, intricately braided, was accented by a necklace made of teeth.

Human teeth, Chaz observed with consternation. He could see the amalgam fillings.

The stranger noticed Chaz gawking and said, “They’re real, if that’s what you’re wondering. I took ‘em off a guy who killed a momma otter for no good reason. Where are your clothes, sir?”

“They got torn off in the saw grass.”

Chaz was thirsty, famished and nearly unhinged from lack of sleep, having spent the night ribaldry serenaded by alligators.

“And where’s the fellow who tried to shoot you?” inquired the man in the shower cap.

Chaz motioned haplessly at the outlying marsh. “Who knows. There was two of ‘em, back on the levee.”

The stranger nodded. “Before I decide what to do with you, I need some answers. You mind?”

Chaz answered emphatically. “Anything you want. Just get. me out of this goddamn hellhole.”

“Understand that I’m not a well person. I’m muddling through a rough spell at the moment,” the man said. “For instance, I’ve got a hunch you don’t even marginally resemble H. R. Haldeman. Bob, they used to call him at the White House.”

Chaz said he didn’t know who that was.

“An arrogant, perjuring, justice-obstructing shitweasel who worked for the thirty-seventh president of the United States of America, an amoral maggot in his own right,” the stranger related somewhat testily. “Anyway, that’s who I’m hallucinating when I look at you—Bob Haldeman. So keep that in mind. Plus, I’ve got a hideous duet running like a freight train through my skull—’Hey Jude,’ as performed by Bobbie Gentry and Placido Domingo. It’s a fucking miracle I haven’t disemboweled myself.”

“What’s your name?” Chaz was trying to stay calm, trying to sound amiable and harmless.

“You just call me Captain. But I’m asking the questions here, you understand?”

Chaz signaled cooperatively.

The man said, “Good. Let’s start with basic identification.”

“All right. My name is Charles Perrone and I have a Ph.D. in wetlands ecology. I’m employed as a field biologist for the South Florida Water Management District.”

“Doing what, Mr. Perrone?”

“It’s Dr. Perrone.” Chaz hoped that the substance of his title would counterpoise his forlorn appearance. “I work mostly out here in the Everglades, testing the water for phosphates,” he said. “It’s part of the big government restoration project.”

The stranger did not seem as impressed, or deferential, as Chaz had hoped. He removed his artificial eye and, with a scrofulous pocket-knife, scraped a dried clot of algae off the polished glass.

Then he twisted the orb back into its socket and said, “What’s your name again?”

“Perrone.” Chaz spelled it.

“No, ace, your first name.”

“Charles. But everybody calls me Chaz.”

The stranger cocked his head. “Chad?”

“No, Chaz. With a z.”

That brought an inexplicable laugh. “Small world,” said the man in the shower cap.

“How so?” Chaz asked, though he was already dreading the answer.

“I met a lady friend of yours out here the other night,” the man told him.

Chaz’s stomach pitched and his tongue turned to sandpaper.

“Ricca was her name,” the stranger went on. “She had quite a story to tell.”

Chaz smiled weakly. “Well, she’s got quite an imagination.”

“Yeah? You think she imagined that thirty-eight-caliber hole in her leg?” The man fished into his dungarees, first one pocket and then another. He cackled when he located the bullet slug, which he held up for Chaz to inspect in the pink early-morning light.

The man said, “I dug it out with a bent fishhook and a pair of needle-nose. Hurt like hell, but she’s a champ, that girl.” He nicked the damaged bullet into the water.

Chaz Perrone stood slack and helpless in defeat. What were the stratospheric odds, he wondered, that this half-senile, cockeyed hippie was the same person who’d rescued Ricca?

The stranger said, “Let me address a couple of points, Mr. Perrone. First, I’m not that old a fellow that I can’t snap your neck bones with my bare hands. Second, this isn’t a hellhole, this is my home and I happen to think it’s heaven. Third, if you’re a real scientist, then I’m Goldie Hawn.”