The Naked Detective (10 page)

The address on the note was 2000 Atlantic Boulevard. This was Key West's biggest condo, a low waterfront fortress that well-off Conchs just loved. Typical, I guess. Relative newcomers like me were seduced by the charm of the old Conch houses—the grainy, pitted wood; the sloping floors; the bowed, eccentric door frames. Whereas the Conchs themselves couldn't wait to get out of those mildewed, termite-eaten wrecks. If they made a little dough, they blissfully moved to the cinder-block boxes of New Town, or into generic condos that might have been in Fort Myers or Fort Lauderdale. They'd had enough authenticity to last a lifetime. Now they wanted drywall, Formica, enough amps to run the microwave. Above all, central air-conditioning. They set the thermostat at fifty-five, moved the recliner over by a vent, and sat there basking in the glow of getting over.

It was just before the hour when I reached the complex, and the truth is, I was pretty nervous. Felt it behind my knees. I took a quick detour to look at the water. It was dead flat, as it usually gets at dusk. It still looked milky green but it was near the moment when it turned to purple for the night. This happens with nothing in between, and it happens in a second. If you blink, you miss it.

The water failed to calm me and I didn't see that I could stall much longer. I pedaled back toward the condo. I didn't go directly to the entrance but approached in a series of concentric, leaning arcs while I sort of scoped it out. What did I expect to see? Men in Ray-Bans hiding in the oleander bushes? No, if they were going to jump me, they'd wait until I got inside. I locked my bike and walked up to the board of names and doorbells. Ortega, L. was in 4E. I raised my thumb to ring. I hesitated. Odd-looking thing, a thumb. I thought about withdrawing it and fleeing, no harm done. The thumb jabbed forward and rang the bell.

In a few seconds the buzzer buzzed. I pushed through the door and walked under an ugly chandelier throwing bad light on a cheesy mosaic. I went to the elevator and rode to the top floor. Ascending, I pictured Lefty being cranked up toward his crypt. The image wasn't comforting.

The doors slid open on an endless hallway. Silent. Lit by Deco sconces throwing yellow scallops that folded onto the ceiling. I did the alphabet until I found 4E. I stalled for just a second more, then realized I should look jaunty and assertive, in case I was being examined through the little peephole. So I knocked before I was really ready. I was still clearing my throat and shuffling my feet when the door swung open and Lefty's daughter stood before me.

I sure wasn't ready for the way she looked. She was wearing black silk slacks and a white satin blouse that was open a long way down. There was lace at the edges of her breasts, and a small, embroidered pale blue flower in between them on her bra. Her hair was pinned up, though more loosely than it had been before. Wisps of it escaped at her temples and thinned out into barely visible strands along her jawline. Her eyes were made up, deep-set, and they still seemed somehow veiled. In a musky voice with an edge that might have been ironic, she said, "I wondered if you'd come."

I couldn't immediately get my mouth to work or my eyeballs to stay still. They wanted to look down her shirt but also wanted to check behind the door for people waiting to hurt me. Finally I managed to say, "Why wouldn't I?"

To that she only shrugged. The lace and the little blue flower moved as she did so. She stepped to one side and motioned me into the apartment. My shoulders hunched as I leaned through the doorway. I was ready to be hit or grabbed. Nothing hit me except her perfume. It was too sweet and floral for my taste, but I liked that it was there.

The carpet got thicker as I stepped into the foyer; the living room furniture, in turn, crystallized for me something that I hadn't quite been able to place about her clothes: Both seemed outside of their own time. Not retro-hip, not campy, just intriguingly misplaced. The high life, circa 1961. Pointy bra and sectional sofa. Bad sculptures that were lamps, and black stockings under black silk pants. There was even a wet bar in a tiled and mirrored alcove. It had its own small fridge and a see-through cabinet full of highball glasses and pony glasses and martini glasses. She went to it and offered me a drink.

I felt like pinot noir but doubted I could get it. I asked for scotch and water. She poured me a quadruple and handed it over. Then she retrieved her own glass, which had ice and clear stuff in it. We clinked. We stared briefly at each other as we did so, then she dropped her eyes and I had the distinct impression she was checking out my legs. Have I mentioned I was wearing shorts? I'd put long pants on once that day—that was plenty. Of course, I'd forgotten to figure on the air-conditioning. The apartment was freezing and my leg hairs stood straight up in their follicles. I thought she smiled secretly as she waved me toward the sofa.

She sat down on the edge and used her palms to smooth a space around her. "So, Mr.—"

"Amsterdam. Pete Amsterdam. Pete." I'd staked out my own section of the sectional, from where I could look at her across a corner of the coffee table.

"I'm Lydia." She sipped her drink and crossed her legs. The silk of her pants made a nice slidey sound and the momentum turned her hips and torso toward me slightly. "What sort of business did you have with my father Pete?"

"Excuse me?"

She lifted one eyebrow and shot me a gamy, can't-kid-a-kidder sort of look. "Come on," she said. "You went to see him at the hospital. You came to the funeral."

Stalling for time, I thought I'd play it coy. "And this means we had something going on?"

"Pete," she said, "my father kept me in the background, but I know quite a lot about his businesses. I know the men he's in business with." She paused, gave her hair a toss that didn't quite work with the hairpins in. She leaned forward with her chest. "Some of them I know quite well."

Her tone left little doubt as to the sense in which she knew them, and I found it necessary to sip some scotch. I thought back to my deathbed chat with Lefty. Maybe he'd been raving, but he was pretty emphatic about a couple things. One was that his daughter had a problem. The other was that I shouldn't fuck her. I looked at her past the rim of my glass. Her lips were very red and moist. There seemed to be a hint of dampness in her cleavage too, even in the cold apartment. Her thighs wriggled so that fabric squeaked; her tongue didn't seem to rest quite easy in her mouth. Could this be her problem, I wondered—that she was a nymphomaniac? I'd never been quite clear as to whether, in reality, there was such a thing, or if the nympho was a male invention, a figment to whom he could ascribe his own glandular excesses and itchy drawers. And if nymphos really did exist, why hadn't I met one twenty-five years ago, when we could have squared off as more equal contestants and really wrecked a room?

"And now I'll be in charge," Lydia continued. "So there are certain situations I need to . . . get on top of."

With that she drained her glass and got up to refill it. Vodka. Before she turned away from the wet bar, she took a couple hairpins out. "How's your drink?" she asked me.

"Vast."

She came back to the couch and sat this time on my section of the sectional. Perfume wafted. There was a moment of somewhat awkward silence, then she gave a quick giggle and pointed to my naked knee. "You always wear shorts to visit a lady in mourning?" That Conch decorum thing, I guess.

"I guess I didn't think of it as a condolence call," I said.

"No?" she said, and she put her arm up on the back of the couch. It was that symbolic enfolding gesture, the first sly move toward an embrace that men are usually the ones to try. "How did you think of it?"

That stumped me for a second. I sucked at my drink. Then I said, "You invited me, remember?"

"That's right. To ask you one simple question that so far you refuse to answer: What was your business with my father?"

I tried to look like I was holding some marvelous and valuable secret. Her reasonable but wrong surmise had given me a handy smoke screen, after all. Only problem was, I had no idea what use to put it to. Finally I said, "You know, it's funny. You assume I had business with your father and your father assumed I was sent by somebody named Mickey."

"Mickey Veale?" She said it like she'd bit into something rotten.

For the moment I was on a roll. I worked it. "I don't know. Is that his name?"

Instead of answering, she brought her glass up to her lips. She didn't drink from it, though, just slithered her tongue along the rim a couple seconds. Finally she said, "Pete. I ask you a question and all you do is ask a question back. Are you always such a tease?"

Candidly I said, "I don't get to be a tease that often so I try to make the most of it."

She pulled her glass in close to her and touched its frosty base to her chest. "This back and forth, this sparring—you find it sexy?"

My throat slammed shut and I drank some scotch to scour it open. I glanced at my hostess's chest. I thought dirty then tried to think practical. I remembered Kenny Lukens' matchbook and took a guess. "Okay. Let's say the business was water sports."

Bad guess. Or rather, a good guess but a bad answer. Lydia didn't like it at all. Her shoulders tightened, her lips flicked back from her teeth, and she said, "So you are with Mickey Veale!"

Confused now, I moved to deny it. I didn't deny it fast enough, and Lydia Ortega threw her drink at me.

She didn't throw it at my face. She threw it at my crotch. Iced vodka stung my thighs; I couldn't tell if it was the cold or the alcohol that gave rise to a vivid but not pleasant tingling in my privates. Squirming, slapping ice cubes off my lap, I finally managed to say quite clearly that I didn't even know who Mickey Veale was.

This gave rise to an uneasy silence. Then Lydia laughed. It was not a pretty laugh and I wouldn't swear that it was sane. It was the hard laugh of a mean child, half proud of, half embarrassed by her bad behavior. She cackled for a moment, then bit it off quite suddenly. "My mistake," she said, without remorse. "So tell me, Pete: Just who the hell are you, and what the hell is going on?"

With a lapful of booze it wasn't easy to maintain either the bantering tone or my composure, but some vague and maybe perverse instinct told me not to tip my hand just yet. "Ah," I said, "I've made you curious."

"Yes," she admitted. "But now you're starting to piss me off, and that isn't a good thing to do."

This did not sound coy. There was conviction in it. However tardily, it dawned on me that there was no percentage in playing cute with someone dangerous. Since I didn't know what else to say, I said, "Then I guess I'd better go." I took a last swig of my giant whiskey, then put my glass on the coffee table and started standing up.

I didn't get very far. She shouldered me across the thighs and knocked me backward, then threw herself on top of me and gave me one hard, assaultive kiss, for which I wasn't ready. My lips were locked against my teeth, pinned down as helplessly as a losing wrestler's shoulders, and I could neither kiss back nor escape. Her breasts squeezed down against my shirt; her loins briefly wriggled in my soaking lap. Then she pushed up with a wicked shove against my arms, and suddenly was standing over me.

Her blouse was twisted, her chest heaved, and there was fury in her eyes. In a voice that whistled slightly through bared teeth, she said, "You don't toy with Lydia. Lydia toys with you." Her hand shot forth in an imperious gesture that pointed toward the door. "Now go."

People being animals, I was no longer so sure, after that bizarre and violent kiss, that I wanted to. But the decision had been made. I was being banished. For the best, no doubt, but something nagged at me, something that I couldn't figure out. Through the whole interview with Lefty's daughter; I thought I'd handled myself pretty well. Kept my wits about me, got some information. So was it only my wet, cold shorts that made me feel sheepish and defeated at the end?

Like a woozy fighter; I got up slowly from the couch. I didn't say good night and my hostess didn't move to walk me to the door.

But as I was crossing from the living room to the foyer, she called my name. I stopped and turned to face her. Her hands were on her high Cuban hips. In an age-old combination that everybody knows spells doom and that guys always fall for anyway, her eyes had softened, wide and dreamy, but her lips were curled into a snarling dare. "Come back some time," she said. "When you're feeling less like a tease and more like a man."

We've all had evenings when it's 8:30 but feels like 1:00
a.m.

This has to do not with fatigue but with bewilderment, sometimes helped along by a titanic cocktail in place of dinner. At such junctures, it seems that time has hiccuped, that the world is a formerly familiar room in which the furniture's been moved; as with a jazz record started in the middle, you're tantalized but can't quite find the tune. This is how I felt as I dragged my damp ass out the front door of 2000 Atlantic.

What the hell had gone on in there? Lydia had probed me, aroused me, jumped my bones, and ended the performance with a credible attempt to crush my masculinity. Along the way, I'd learned— what? That she was a nympho, maybe, but a tough cookie for sure, and the heir to Lefty's little empire. And that there was a guy named Mickey Veale, presumably involved in water sports, who she didn't like at all.

Fine, but where did it get me? It got me back onto my bicycle, in underpants by Stoli. Underpants that would not dry quickly in the humid air. At least the evening was warmer than the refrigerated condo.

I rode. Gingerly, I addressed the question of where I was riding to. The sane course, as always, was retreat. Home to a bathrobe and some music, some simple food and bed. I knew that but I didn't go there. Feeling utterly peculiar, smudged beyond my own outlines, I found myself pedaling toward Redmond's Boatyard. I needed to see Maggie.