Skinny Dip (9 page)

“But I found something really weird in the sink.”

“What?” Stranahan was thinking maybe Jell-O or whipped cream.

“Pubic hair,” Joey reported indignantly. “Kelly-green pubic hair. That nasty woman shaved herself all over my vanity.”

Mick Stranahan reached over and squeezed her hand. “Nobody said this was going to be easy.”

The man called Tool lived in a trailer outside of LaBelle, not far from Lake Okeechobee. The trailer had come with a half-acre parcel upon which the previous owner had cultivated tomatoes, a crop despised by Tool since his days as a crew boss. The day he moved in, he hitched an old Pontiac engine block to his truck and dragged it back and forth across the tomato patch until all that remained was churned dirt.

In place of vegetables Tool began planting highway-fatality markers that he collected on his travels throughout southwest Florida. The small homemade crosses often displayed colorful floral arrangements, which Tool found pleasing to the eye. Whenever he spied one of the markers along a road, he would yank it from the ground and place it in the back of his truck. Often this act was witnessed by other motorists, though nobody ever attempted to interfere.

Tool stood six three and weighed 280 pounds and owned a head like a cinder block. His upper body was matted so heavily with hair that he perspired copiously, even in cold weather, and found it uncomfortable to wear a shirt. Nearly a year had passed since Tool had been shot in broad daylight by a poacher who had mistaken him for a bear. No entry wound had been visible, as the slug had uncannily tunneled into the seam of Tool’s formidable buttocks. Because bleeding was minimal, he elected to forgo medical treatment—a decision that would come back to haunt him.

Soon the pain became so unbearable that he gave up his job as a crew boss, no longer physically able to harass and abuse migrant farmworkers for twelve hours at a stretch. Such was his misery that a concerned dope-addict friend recommended fentanyl, a high-octane painkiller used during surgery but also available in a convenient skin patch.

Tool had no prescription for the medicine, but he did have a lock-pick. Once a week he’d drive to Fort Myers, break into a nursing home and meticulously peel the fentanyl patches from torsos of sedated cancer patients. In no time Tool was hopelessly hooked, his dosage escalating to levels that would have euthanized a more highly evolved organism. The only serious obstacle to his drug habit was his excess of body hair, so dense and oily as to defy conventional adhesives. Daily cropping was required, often in checkerboard patterns to accommodate multiple stolen patches.

That was how Red Hammernut found him, buck naked in a rusty washtub behind the house trailer, scraping brutally at his shoulder blades with a disposable razor.

“Hey,” Tool said. “Long time no see.”

“I been to Africa after them tarpon.” With a groggy sigh Red Hammernut lowered himself into a tattered lawn chair. “Just got back to Tampa this morning and I’m jet-lagged outta my skull. May I ask what in the name of Jesus P. Christ you’re doin’?”

“You got a job for me?”

That was one thing Red Hammernut admired about Tool—the sumbitch got right to the point.

“Go on and finish your bath. We’ll talk after,” Red said. “Meantime, where’s my ole friend Mr. Daniel?”

“They’s a bottle in the bedroom somewheres.”

Tool’s bedroom was the last place that Red Hammernut yearned to explore, so he took a beer from the refrigerator instead. When he came back outside, Tool was hosing himself off.

Red pointed at the field of white fatality markers behind the trailer. “How many you got now?”

“Sixty odd. Mebbe seventy.” Tool shook himself like a drenched buffalo. “Say, Red, throw me that damn towel.”

It was a wadded scrap stained with what appeared to be transmission fluid. Red Hammernut tossed it to Tool, who fashioned a do-rag crookedly around his head.

“I still can’t understand why you save those damn things. It’s pretty fuckin’ depressing, you ask me,” Red said.

Tool turned to contemplate the orderly rows of crosses. He didn’t give a shit about the car-crash victims, but he liked the visual symmetry of his design. “It’s sorta like that famous soldier graveyard up in Washington—what’s it called?”

“Arlington?”

“Yeah. Sorta like a mini Arlington!”

“Christ, I’m sure.”

“Well, it’s better’n goddamn tomatoes.”

“You’re right about that.” Red Hammernut laughed.

The two men had met four years earlier when Red Hammernut’s company purchased the vegetable farm where Tool was running crews of pickers and packers. After observing Tool’s specialized management techniques, Red had recruited him for side jobs that required muscle and a lack of conscience. Red had found him to be reliable and focused in the way of a natural predator, though not as ruthlessly gung ho as his precedessor, Crow Beacham. It was Crow who had eagerly volunteered to dispose of that foolish young Mexican, the one griping about the curdled toilets and brown-running water at the migrant camps. Barely nineteen, the boy had marched his complaint to the faggot Communist lawyers at Rural Legal Services, who were preparing to share it with a federal judge, when their star witness vanished. It was almost two years before they’d found the Mexican kid’s skeleton, in a phosphate pit a hundred miles away, but by then Crow Beacham was dead from syphilis and tapeworms. Tool took better care of himself, Red Hammernut noted, though not much.

“What’s the work,” Tool asked, “and how much does it pay?”

“Five hundred a day.”

Tool looked amazed, and doubtful. “Do I gotta kill somebody or somethin’?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t be jerkin’ me around, Red, I ain’t in the mood. Not with a bullet in the crack of my ass.” He lumbered indoors and banged about for a few minutes. He emerged wearing black denim overalls and carrying a pizza that was frozen solid. When he took a bite, it sounded like the crack of a .22.

Red Hammernut decided not to ask about the three flesh-colored patches that Tool had attached to the shaven areas on his back. The less known about the man’s personal habits, the better.

“Let’s have it,” Tool said.

“Okay, here’s the deal. I got a boy does some work for me, he lost his wife a few days back. He’s a little shaky right now and I need you to keep a eye on him.”

“How’d she die?” Blood was trickling out of Tool’s mouth from where the pizza crust had lacerated his gums.

“She fell off one a them cruise liners out in the ocean.”

“No shit? Was she some kinda retard or somethin’?”

“Not hardly.” From experience Red Hammernut knew it was best not to clutter Tool’s brain with a surplus of information.

“Anyway, the boy’s nerves are ‘bout fried on account of her bein’ lost at sea and the cops askin’ questions and so forth. This mornin’ I get a message on my machine. Now he thinks somebody’s sneakin’ into his house and movin’ shit around and generally tryin’ to freak his ass out. Personally, I got a feelin’ it’s all in his head. Either way, he needs a guardian angel, and that would be you.”

Tool nodded, chewing savagely. “You say he works on the farm?”

Red Hammernut raised his arm in time to deflect an errant chunk of pepperoni. “Nope. He lives over in Boca Raton.”

“Oh fuck, Red.”

“I know, it’s hor’ble. That’s how come the five hundred a day.”

Tool spat again, this time intentionally, and stomped back into the trailer. He came out with a bag of beef jerky sticks.

“Gimme one a them bad boys,” Red Hammernut said, helping himself.

“Boca! I swear to God, Red.”

“I’m really sorry, man.”

“What kinda work he do for you, this guy?”

“Nuthin’ I want advertised, unnerstand? You notice any funny bidness, I spect you to call me.”

“Sure thing,” said Tool.

“And don’t hurt nobody,” Red Hammernut said, “less I say so.”

Once, when the feds were investigating potentially damaging (though well-founded) accusations that Red was holding farm laborers as indentured slaves, he sent Tool to discourage the aggrieved workers from cooperating with the authorities. While nobody disappeared or died, the few workers who dared to testify unanimously portrayed “Mr.

Hammernut” as a saintly, paternal figure who’d plucked them from a life of aimless destitution and given them a bright future in modern agriculture.

Based on what he’d seen in the labor camps of Immokalee and Belle Glade, Red felt confident that Tool would have no trouble handling a weak, pampered white boy like Chaz Perrone.

With a grunt Red stretched his arms and announced he was going home to sleep for about four days. Tool followed him out to the paved road, where the gray Cadillac waited. As usual, Red’s driver had kept the engine running and the thermostat set at sixty-eight degrees.

“She a pretty girl?” Tool asked.

“Who—the wife? Yeah, she was.”

Tool scratched at his neck. “Maybe he kilt her.”

“I don’t care,” said Red Hammernut, “and neither do you.”

Nine

One spring evening in 1896, a prominent Pennsylvanian named Hamilton Disston blew his brains out in a bathtub. He had become gravely depressed after depleting his inheritance on a grandiose campaign to drain 4 million acres of Florida swamp known as the Everglades.

Although Disston died believing himself a failure, he was later proven a pioneer and an inspiration. In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators—land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.

Those wetlands that could not be dried, paved or planted were eventually trenched out and diked into vast reservoirs by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Billions of gallons of freshwater that for eons had flowed freely as a broad marshy river toward Florida Bay was now held captive for siphoning by agriculture, industry and burgeoning municipalities. First one cross-state highway and then another transected the southern thumb of the peninsula, fatally interrupting the remaining southbound trickle from Lake Okeechobee. What precious water made it to the heart of the marsh often arrived tainted by pesticides, fertilizers and mercury.

To protect farms and subdivisions from frequent flooding—the unsurprising consequence of having occupied a bog—hundreds of miles of canals were dug to carry the overflow out to sea during the rainy summer months. Engineers employed a string of pumping stations to manipulate the water levels according to whim and weather, heedless of the historic natural cycles. Inevitably the Everglades and all its resplendent wildlife began to die, but nobody with the power to prevent it considered trying.

It was, after all, just a huge damn swamp.

Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, a series of severe droughts shattered the cocksure assumption that there would always be plenty of water to steal. Those whose fortunes depended on luring home buyers and tourists to South Florida now contemplated the dreadful possibility that the infernal granola-head environmentalists had been correct all along. If the Everglades dried up or succumbed to pollution, so might the vast underground aquifer that supplied drinking water from Palm Beach to the Keys. Growth would come to a gagging halt, and the dirty fortunes that accompanied it would evaporate faster than jizz on a griddle.

This apocalyptic scenario was laid out before Florida’s politicians, and in time even the most slatternly among them were extolling the Everglades as a national treasure that must be preserved at all costs. Officeholders who had for decades abetted its destruction now delivered quavering oratory lamenting its demise. During election campaigns, they shamelessly contrived to be photographed kayaking around the East Cape or hiking Shark Valley, drowsy alligators and snowy egrets prominent in the background. Saving the Everglades became an apple-pie cause embraced by both political parties, and voters responded avidly.

Sadly, there wasn’t much left to save. Ninety percent of the original ‘glades already had been developed, converted to agriculture or otherwise debauched. The only untrampled remnant was a national park, the waters of which were of dubious purity. Nonetheless, in the late 19905 the United States Congress and the Florida Legislature allotted a boggling $8 billion to restore a natural and unpolluted flow to the fabled river of grass. Many decent and well-meaning people believed this to be a moral imperative.

Then there were those such as Samuel Johnson Hammernut, whose sole interest in sustaining the Everglades was to make sure that his thirteen thousand acres of lettuce, cabbage, sweet corn, tomatoes, radishes, escarole and parsley would have cheap and unlimited irrigation forever. Red Hammernut cared only slightly less about the imperiled wildlife than he did about the wretched souls who toiled for dirt wages in his crop fields, held captive to his employment with imaginary debts imposed by violent crew bosses.

As for the pollution issue, Red Hammernut intended to continue using the vast marshlands as a latrine, and to hell with the law. A pragmatic fellow, he’d watched closely as the bureaucracy of the Everglades restoration project evolved, and he had taken measures to safeguard his stake. Eight billion dollars was an unholy shitload of dough, and Red Hammernut calculated that no less than a third of it would be ripped off by lobbyists, lawyers, consultants and bid-riggers favored by well-placed politicians. The remaining windfall would be spent more or less earnestly, if not efficiently, by a phalanx of municipal, state and federal agencies that would seldom communicate with one another.

Prominent among these was the South Florida Water Management District, which was recruiting field biologists to test for harmful substances in farm runoff. It was a specialized mission, one that held some potential to complicate Red Hammernut’s life.

Conveniently, the members of the water board had been appointed by the governor, to whose re-election campaign Red Hammernut had donated large sums of money and the use of a Cessna Citation. Therefore it was no surprise to Red Hammernut that his phone call to the water board was so genially received, or that his recommendation of a bright young job applicant was so promptly acted upon.

After that, it was easy arranging for the newly hired biologist to be assigned to the same water-testing district in which certain large vegetable farms were located.

On paper, Dr. Charles R. Perrone looked like the real deal.

Red Hammernut had his mole in place.

“It’s good you’re staying busy,” Karl Rolvaag said.

Chaz Perrone nodded stoically.

“Your supervisor said she told you to take the whole week off, even longer if you needed.”

Chaz frowned. “You spoke to Marta? What for?”

“Just routine,” said the detective. “Anyway, she said you insisted on coming back to work, and I told her it could actually be a healthy thing.”

“Well, what else am I supposed to do—hang around the house all day and get morbidly depressed? No thank you.”

They were standing in the kitchen, Chaz with a Budweiser in his hand and Rolvaag sipping a Sprite. The detective had shown up at the front door not five minutes after Chaz had returned from work.

“I’m really beat,” Chaz said for the third time.

“Yeah, it was a scorcher out there today.” Rolvaag had seen on the news that an early spring snowstorm had hit the Twin Cities; he sitting in air conditioning in Florida. It was fairly astounding.

He said, “Marta explained what you do on your job, and it sounds real interesting. I bet you run into plenty of snakes out there.”

“Well, I run over plenty of ‘em with my truck.” Chaz, unable to resist the smartass quip. “Look, I’m not trying to be rude, but, man, I am seriously whipped.”

“Of course. I understand.” The detective finished off the soda and raised the empty bottle. “Do you recycle?”

Chaz made a dunking motion toward the trash can. “Let God sort ‘em out,” he said.

Rolvaag placed the bottle on the counter. “There was just one point I needed you to clarify about that night on the Sun Duchess.”

“You know who you remind me of? That TV cop, Columbo. He never quit with the questions,” Chaz said. “I bet that was your favorite show, am I right?”

“To be honest, I never watched it.”

“But I’m sure other people must’ve told you the same thing—that you remind them of Columbo. Not the way you look, but how you never let up. In a nice way, though.”

Rolvaag said, “What night is the show on? I’d like to see it.”

Chaz shook his head. What a hopeless dweeb. “It was canceled, like, a hundred years ago. Anyway, what did you want to ask me about?”

The detective seemed relieved to get back to business. “Just one thing, really. Are you certain about what time Mrs. Perrone left the stateroom?”

Chaz experienced a disconcerting twitch in his colon. “Three-thirty in the morning, like I told you before. I remember looking at my watch.”

“And there’s no chance your watch was wrong?” Rolvaag’s tone was unbearably neutral. “The reason I ask, we’ve found some evidence raising the possibility that your wife went into the water a few hours earlier than you told us.”

The detective was leaning against the countertop, his hands shoved casually in his pockets.

Chaz said, “That’s impossible.”

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“What kind of evidence did you find?”

Rolvaag winced apologetically. “Afraid I can’t discuss it.”

Locked in his desk at the office was the test confirming that the fingernail tips removed from the marijuana bale belonged to Joey Perrone.

Chaz said, “This is my wife we’re talking about—and you’re saying you can’t tell me?” He felt his cheeks redden, but that was actually a good thing; he was supposed to look angry. “Did you find her body or not? Goddammit, I’ve got a right to know!”

Rolvaag said, “No, sir, we didn’t recover a body. That I can tell you for a fact. Or even a body part.”

“Then what the hell was it?”

Chaz was racking his brain. Joey hadn’t been carrying her purse, so it had to be a piece of clothing that had washed ashore somewhere at odds with the computer model of where her body should have floated, factoring in that night’s currents and wind.

“Is this why you wanted a DNA sample?” Chaz demanded.

“It’s an active investigation. Certain aspects must remain confidential for the time being,” Rolvaag said. “I’m sorry, Chaz.”

It was the first time the detective had used Charles Perrone’s nickname, and the sudden informality only heightened Chaz’s anxiety. He’d seen enough TV homicide shows to know you were in deep trouble when cops started acting like they were your asshole buddies.

“I’ve lost my wife and you’re playing head games,” Chaz said, acting hurt and disappointed. “Just come out and say so if you think I’m lying.”

“I think people make mistakes.”

“Not this time.”

“But you’d been hitting the wine pretty hard that night is what you told me. That’s not always good for the memory,” Rolvaag said.

Chaz twisted the cap off another beer and drank slowly, stalling to let his emotions settle. It occurred to him that the detective had unwittingly provided a way out. The Coast Guard had ended its search for Joey, so what was the point in arguing about when she’d gone overboard? If there was anything left of her, which was unlikely after four days at sea, it wouldn’t really matter how far south she was found. One could always blame a shark or some other deep-water scavenger for carrying her remains out of the search grid.

Chaz hung his head. “I was pretty hammered, that’s true. Maybe I did get confused about the time Joey left. Or maybe I misread my watch.” For effect he tapped the crystal of his inexpensive Timex, which he wore only on sampling days in the Everglades.

As usual, Rolvaag’s expression was unreadable.

“Those are two possibilities,” the detective said. “Something to think about anyway. Thanks for the pop.”

Chaz laughed. “The what?”

“The cold drink,” Rolvaag said. “By the way, somebody’s staking out your house—some big hairy guy in a minivan, parked down by the corner. The tag comes back to a rental agency.”

“Oh?” Chaz thinking: Wait until I tell Red.

“Any ideas?”

Chaz poked his head out the doorway and looked down the street. “I’ve got no earthly clue who that man is,” he lied. “How do you know that it’s me he’s watching?”

“Wild guess.” Rolvaag smiled. “You’ve got my card. Call if you need anything.”

“Right,” said Chaz. When goats learn ballet.

He stood at the bay window and watched the prying detective drive away. When the phone began to ring, he almost yanked it out of the living room wall.

What the hell’s happening? he wondered dismally. Wasn’t I supposed to be home free by now?

Off the hook.

Cruising.

Instead, that goddamn cop is still snooping around, some sadistic perv is sneaking into my house and messing with Joey’s stuff—and now I’ve got to deal with some knuckle-dragger of a bodyguard that Red’s dredged out of a sinkhole somewhere.

When Chaz answered the phone, the man named Tool was on the other end.

“That guy that just left?”

“What about him?” Chaz said.

“Want me to go after him?”

“And do what?”

Tool grunted. “I dunno. Bust his spleen.”

Chaz sighed. “He’s a cop.”

“Yeah, so?”

Unbelievable, Chaz thought. “Leave him be, please.”

“It’s your party,” said Tool. “Hey, I gotta go take a dump. You gone be all right?”

“I think I can manage.”

Chaz stripped off his clothes and propped himself under a hot shower for twenty minutes. Try as he might, he still couldn’t see where he’d made a single mistake in the plan, not one wrong move.

The crime was perfect. It was the rest of the world that was fucking up.

“I lied,” Joey Perrone said.

This was after a day of doing largely nothing; swimming, sunning, losing herself in a John D. MacDonald paperback that she’d found in Mick Stranahan’s tackle box.

“I lied to you,” she said again.

Stranahan didn’t look up. He was cracking stone crab claws by whomping them with the flat side of a spoon. It was all in the wrist, he’d explained. Fragments of shell were flying around like shrapnel.

“Lied about what?” he asked.

“About not touching anything in the house when I went back inside to take a pee. There was a stash of pictures in the hall closet.”

“Wedding pictures, that sort of thing?”

“Wedding, honeymoon, vacations. All shots of Chaz and me,” Joey reported, “in happier times.”

“Why were they in a closet?”

“Because my shitheel husband pulled ‘em off the wall,” she said, “probably within five minutes after he got home from the cruise. I guess he couldn’t even stand to look at my face.”

Stranahan brushed an orange fleck of crab claw from her cheek. “Tell me what you did.”

Joey spun away. “Another glass of wine, sir. Please.”

“What did you do with the photos?”

“Not all of them. Just one,” she said. “All I did was take it out of the frame and slip it under his pillow.”