Hawk Channel Chase (21 page)

We peered through the screen door. Cigarette smoke wafted outward. Jason Dudak sat with his back to us, playing a game console on the far side of the main room. He was shirtless, skinny as a rail and had a four-inch rocket ship tattoo on his shoulder. Maria strolled in and went straight to his elbow.

“Cool,” she said.

I went inside and let the door close behind me.

“He’s married to that game,” said a young woman in the doorway to the front room. She wore a low-cut tank top that bore the words W
HO’S
Y
OUR
C
ADDY
? and no bra, which allowed her small breasts free rein when she moved even slightly. She wore black men’s swim trunks low on her hips. Her straight dark hair was parted to one side and hung neatly to her shoulder. She held a cigarette in her teeth, Keith Richards-style.

“Give me twenty-two seconds,” said Jason. “I’ll get it for you.”

Music—some kind of Celtic dirge—played from miniature speakers on the kitchen counter. Above the counter a hand-scrawled sign:
NO PISSING IN THE SINK
.

“Jason’s too rude to introduce anyone,” said the girl. “I’m Brandi.”

“This is Maria,”
 
said Jason. “That’s Alex, her mom’s friend.”

“And that,” said Brandi, pointing to a mattress on the floor in a corner, “is the famous Cally Piper.”

Cally, in a black sports bra and neon green thong underwear, slept atop a pink floral-print sheet, one foot against the other knee, a forearm over her eyes. A few blonde tufts had escaped her thong. Apparently the group’s living arrangement dictated that modesty was a non-issue.

Next to the mattress were the duffels I had seen Jason loading into his car and two of the packed Hefty Bags.

“Famous for what?” I said.

“Surviving a deadbeat mom,” said Jason.

“She’s transitioning,” said Brandi, “from coming in at sun-up to going back out at eleven.”

“Cally likes the island?” I said.

“Oh, God, yes. We’ve been here six weeks and she hasn’t missed a night. This is a peaches-and-cream image of innocence that fools a hundred men a night. The only thing she learned her sophomore year was how to suppress her gag reflex.”

“A fine talent,” I said.

“And, Jesus, I’m glad I don’t have her roster of conquests,” said Brandi. “But I wish I had her boobs. She calls them her opportunity knockers. Her name is a contraction of ‘cat in the alley.’ Or that’s what we decided.”

As if she’d heard Brandi but had no desire to respond, Cally rolled over. A big lipstick kiss was tattooed on her milk-white right-side bun.

Brandi kept talking. “I love this island, too. I can do the shit my mother never let me do. Not wash my hair for five days. I can eat Vienna sausages. I might get a nose ring.”

 
I sensed that I wasn’t free to ask too many questions, but I said, “Where’s the Ukrainian?”

“He’s at work,” said Brandi.

“His second job,” said Jason. “He’s a bar-back at Rick’s. Brandi, why don’t you offer Alex a beer or something?”

“I might,” she said. “I mean I really might do that. I mean, I have thought about that so very many times.”

Maria turned, regarded Brandi with a bored expression. “Jason’s loaning me the Simpsons Tenth Season,” she said.

Brandi’s eyes narrowed on Jason. “So you’re loaning out my fucking DVDs?”

“Hey, whore,” said Jason.

“Yes, girlfriend,” said Brandi.

“It wouldn’t be yours if I hadn’t saved it from your old landlord.”

Maria looked at me with disgust and consternation in her eyes. She pointed at the counter. “I’ve never seen an iPod like that,” she said. “Is it a Nano?”

“It’s some offbrand mp3 player,” said Brandi. “My mother wanted to surprise me with it. I think she bought it at a goddamned yard sale.”

Jason shoved back his chair, marched into the dark front room, and returned with the DVD in hand.

“Christ,” said Brandi. “You’d think I wasn’t paying the rent.”

Maria was out the door, halfway down the steps, studying the back of the DVD box. I held open the door and turned back to Brandi. “You feel a great compulsion to educate the young ones?”

She looked at me and said for Jason’s benefit, “He can’t stand dirty words. Fuck him.”

“I’ve been using worse language since before you were born,” I said. “But you need to remember, if young Maria gets too smart too soon, she’ll be stealing your boyfriends for the rest of your life.”

She kept her eyes on me, but her puffiness deflated. “He’s got a point.”

“Good on ya, Alex,” said Jason with a fake Aussie accent.

We saw no sign of Russell when we retrieved our bikes.

“Gross,” said Maria.

There was a certain element to the whole scene that reminded me that all four of them were almost still kids—midway between Maria’s age and graduate school or parenthood. I rode away feeling like an old fogie, some buttinsky who had tried to discipline other peoples’ children. Like grown-ups did before the media enabled all children to sass back.

Just before we got home, Maria said, “Alex, I knew that all boys my age were disgusting but those two might be just as bad. What do I have to look forward to?”

I gave her my best answer: “The great long search for perfection.”

“How do you know when you find that?” she said. “Is it like deciding whether to rent or buy in Monopoly?”

I pretended I didn’t hear. Maria hurried home to check out her entertainment.

I popped a beer and called the number I had for Beth Watkins. She picked up on the second ring. “I was beginning to think you’d never call.”

“Sounds like you’re in a saloon,” I said.

“A late lunch and an early white wine at the Turtle Kraals,”
 
she said.

“Have you got that envelope full of pictures with you?”

“If I do?”

“I borrow.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Unless I accompany. What’s on your mind?”

“Let me call you back.”

I called Duffy Lee to make sure he was home. We caught up our hellos, and he told me to come by.

I redialed Beth. “Have you got forty minutes?” I said. “Pick me up when you finish eating.”

Eight minutes later Beth Watkins’s city Impala appeared in the lane. I stuffed my compact camera in a pocket of my shorts and locked up. She pushed open the passenger-side door for me.

“You left the restaurant in a hurry,” I said. “Did you grab a toothpick on the way out? Cops chew toothpicks.”

“It’s a trait I’ve escaped so far.” She backed around and eased toward Fleming. “I don’t belch in meetings and I don’t scratch my nuts. I’m not one of the guys.”

“Pardon my attempt at humor. Go up to White, down to Olivia and take a left. I got an inspiration about ten minutes ago. Sitting there on my porch.”

“Mine usually come in the office or the bedroom,” she said.

Did I dare let my imagination dance with hers? I wanted to envision acrobatics, nude yoga on a wide mattress, solo of course. But my mind could picture only a pissed-off Bobbi Lewis striding toward her Ford Explorer.

“You’re not laughing,”
 
said Beth. “Did I cross a line?”

“It’s a matter of timing,” I said.

“Trouble in paradise?”

I held back for a few seconds then said, “Also known as palm-tree purgatory.”

“A friend of mine was in Michaels last night,” she said.

“I wondered if there had been witnesses.” I began to sweat. I blamed the sun’s reflection off the dashboard, the heat baking downward from the car roof.

Beth kept her eyes on White Street’s oncoming traffic. “She showed up late and left early, the word I got. Given her job description and your laid-back approach to life in general, an intelligent person could almost guess the script.”

“Why would an intelligent person want to do that?” I said.

“Living next door, I never got the warm and fuzzies. Not that people are real neighborly on Big Coppitt. I saw her one time in her yard going back and forth. It looked like she was practicing her cop walk. I’ve wondered, hell, ever since I met you, what you saw in each other. To almost answer your question, I don’t steal men from other women, married or not.”

“How does a cop walk?” I said.

She hung a left on Olivia, ran a slalom-gauntlet of curbside trash cans up the narrow street. “Like they just had a hemorrhoid operation and their leg muscles stiffened up in the hospital.”

I ran the mental movie again, Bobbi strutting back to the Explorer, and found the description accurate. “Bobbi said you moved into town.”

“The rent on Aquamarine kept creeping up. I bought a cottage smaller than yours, at the end of that dirt path off Passover Lane. One bedroom and a yard the size of a card table. My ex-roommate in Petaluma bought me out of the condo we owned. That California money put me into my new house like a charm.”

I pointed at a parking space. She nailed it, nudging only two trash bins.

Duffy Lee Hall and his wife own a large two-story house on Olivia. We found him on a cushioned Adirondack chair on his broad front porch. His Volvo station wagon, long in need of a paint job, sat in his short driveway.

“This guy did all my film processing and photo prints for years,” I said. “Once in a while he worked with Liska and a few other detectives. Now he fixes PCs and Macs.”

Duffy Lee stood as we approached. I’ve always assumed he was about five years younger than me and a lot smarter with a patient manner, a fine intellect. He was four inches shorter than me but probably matched my weight. A good man to have alongside in a tough moment.

I made the introductions.

“I haven’t seen Alex lately,” he said to Beth, “but there’s an upside. I haven’t had to look at dead people pictures. I’m afraid you’re here to change that.”

Watkins showed him the manila envelope. “All these fellows but one are alive, as far as we know. Nothing gruesome.”

Duffy Lee took us inside and arranged the photos on his kitchen counter. “I know these guys,” he said. “They’ve all come to me for help and repairs. Why don’t you tell me what you’re after?”

Beth explained Jerry Hammond’s murder and the fact that the photos were in the victim’s possession.

Hall shuffled some of them to one side. “These four had a virus last spring. The same virus, almost like they’d given each other the clap. Once I’d fixed one, the others were a breeze.”

“Did you ever wonder what they might be passing around?” said Beth.

“Maybe they had a genealogy club,” said Duffy Lee. “Key lime pie recipes. In this town I don’t want to know a thing. I don’t look at content. In this new profession, like my old one, privacy is king. It’s far too easy for customers to accuse me of peeking into their business and financial matters, their confidential emails, their Internet searches. I go to extremes to assure my respect for content. I mean, the last thing I want to receive is a summons to an IRS hearing, you follow?”

“So far,” said Beth.

“I install larger hard drives. I purge viruses, do software rehab and save data from crashes. I try to save data from jump drives that went through the laundry. I download updates when people are too busy to do it themselves. I’m learning to write programs. Not many of my clients need that level of work. I stay clear of prospecting and peeping. Truth is, I don’t have time.”

“Gotcha,” said Beth, her tone impatient.

“But there’s one thing,” said Duffy Lee. “I’ve been working my way around to this and I’ll probably be sorry I mentioned it.”

“Will it help solve a murder?” said Beth.

“You knew Billy Blanco, didn’t you, Alex?
 
He worked at Key West State Bank before it became First State, before he retired.”

“Sure,” I said. “He wrote me loans for camera gear.”

“His next-door neighbor owns Reef Pawn in Habana Plaza,” said Duffy Lee. “The old guy’s in ill health and his wife’s in worse shape, so Billy’s been in the shop almost full-time the past couple years. I don’t think he even collects a pay check. I do favors for Billy, except not really favors because he pays me.”

“What kinds of favors?” said Beth.

“He sends me electronics and computer gear to check out and clean before it goes up for sale. The stereo stuff, Billy waits until the owner blows deadline. The computer gear, he wants to make sure it doesn’t have virus infections or bad crap installed. Most of the time the operating system is skunked.” Duffy Lee pointed at Jerry Hammond’s picture. “This dead guy, I went to his house over on Eaton, twice, to get his laptop to synch with his printer.” He pointed to a shelf and tapped his finger on a hefty-looking, black-cased hard drive. “I could swear this Western Digital drive was his. He had the first one in town. The only one I ever dealt with.”

Beth nodded.

“It showed up in the pawnshop yesterday, so Billy sent it over, and I checked it out. It has the oddest damned hidden partition.”