The Naked Detective (20 page)

So I pedaled off that way.

Harbor Watch was the fanciest of the developments crammed in recent years onto former navy property, and if it was true, as Ozzie Kimmel argued, that Key West had been divvied into fiefdoms, then it made perfect sense that Mickey Veale would live there. Cede the oceanfront to the Ortegas, keep the harbor side for himself. Fitting too was the reputation of Harbor Watch as the haunt of parvenus and millionaire snowbirds who didn't quite belong. Not more than six blocks from Duval Street, the place just didn't feel like part of the town; somehow the old grim military boundaries lived on in the imagination, made the area feel more like a base than a neighborhood.

In any case, the Harbor Watch condos commanded drop-dead sunset views and, not surprisingly, as I learned from the rank of doorbells, Mickey Veale had one of the primo top-floor units. I rang and waited to be buzzed in.

Instead of a buzz I got the housekeeper; a woman's voice with a heavy Spanish accent, asking who it was.

I announced myself.

"Who?" The tone made it clear I was nobody to her.

I gave her my name again and said it was important.

"You wait one second please."

I waited. A schooner went by. Its sails turned orange as they swiveled toward the sun.

"Meester Veale say he talk to you already."

"He's absolutely right. On that we agree. But I need to talk with him again."

"Please, you wait."

Finally the buzzer buzzed. It sounded grudging and resentful. I went upstairs and found the condo door already open. The housekeeper was standing in the doorway. She was wearing tight pink shorts and had the tails of a lime-green shirt tied against her midriff. Her high shoes gave a pert tilt to her butt but didn't look ideal for vacuuming. She didn't say hello. She said, "Only a few minutes, yes?"

I nodded and stepped past her. I hoped she had other strengths than housekeeping, because the place was basically a mess. Pictures, mostly nudes, hung crooked on the walls. Surfaces were littered with random stacks of paper. There was the oily smell of a stove that needed cleaning.

After a moment Mickey Veale emerged from a hallway. He was a bit of a mess himself. He was wearing enormous, tent-like khaki shorts and a black tank top that was not equal to the task of containing him. Flesh and tufts of hair overflowed the armholes; the crater of his navel could be discerned through the stretched cloth across his belly. He was barefoot; he left pale footprints on the blond wood floor, and the footprints were surrounded by misty auras like breath on glass. He said, "What is it, Amsterdam?"

He looked at me a moment and sucked his teeth. He was different today, but I couldn't pinpoint just how. Without the casino audience, he seemed less alert, less energized, less bent on performing. His legs were very pale, and this made him seem faintly pathetic. He seemed weary and burdened—but burdened by what? Guilt? Remorse? Or just the banal pressures of trying to run businesses in a town where hardly anybody cared? Resigned, he gestured for me to follow him.

We padded down a corridor his damp feet sucking at the floor. He turned into a den that was chaotic but had a stunning view. He sat down heavily in a rolling chair behind a desk strewn with brochures and invoices and poker chips.

I got distracted by the sunset through the window. The sky was pulsing yellow and the water of the harbor was a copper color; boats trailed chevrons that foamed up white and then turned a patina green. Beyond the harbor and before the Gulf was Sunset Key. Its awnings gleamed and its yellow sand twinkled, and the truth was it didn't look like a Florida Key at all. Florida Keys are shallow domes of muck; the former Tank Island had been sculpted into a Caribbean fantasy of dunes and berms and bulkheads. It was fake but you couldn't say it wasn't pretty in the thick red light. I gestured toward the panorama. "Helluva spot, Mickey."

Dryly he said, "I thought we weren't wasting time."

The comment cut short my rhapsodizing, and I sat on the edge of a straight wooden chair. Wasting time or no, I took a moment to study my host. He had broken capillaries in his eyelids and a tense bulge at the hinge of his jaw. A man with an awful, gnawing secret. Unless it was only my impatience and my fear that made me think so. I said, "Okay, Mickey, then I'll get right to the point. Why were you blackmailing Lefty Ortega?"

He didn't answer immediately. First his neck seemed to thicken with a surge of rising blood, then his face darkened with a flush that was not red but bluish. It dawned on me that here was a guy who would die of stroke. At last he said, "What!"

"Like, for instance, why Lefty, on his deathbed, was paranoid that I'd been sent by somebody named Mickey. Like, why Lydia hates your guts and is always siccing me on you, but is too afraid of you to ever make it clear just why."

Veale had folded his hands and was listening carefully, as if he were his own jury. "It's my fault Lydia's a scattered cokehead?"

Cokehead? She hadn't been hopped up when I was there—or had she? That's not the kind of thing I'm very good at noticing. I just marked it down as one more case of Veale and the Ortegas saying nasty things about each other at every opportunity.

"It's not your fault that Lydia's a nut," I said. "But maybe it is your fault two guys are dead."

He squeezed his hands together then. I saw the fingertips whiten. He said, "Be careful, Amsterdam. You're saying crazy things."

There was a pause. The sun must have hit the horizon or a last low cloud because the light dropped quickly in the room. It lost its ruddy color and turned grainy. I realized now how reckless I was being. The feeling scared me but suddenly I liked it. I said, "Okay, then let's talk about something else."

"Jet Skis at four in the morning," I said, and I told him what I'd witnessed from the deck of
The Lucky Duck
—the rooster tails, the warning flashes.

Veale was unimpressed. "Two lunatics out for a joyride," he said dismissively, "while a guy happens to be fumbling with the light switch in the head."

"Or," I countered, "two couriers bringing something small enough to carry on a Jet Ski. Which would probably make it small enough to fit into a bank-deposit pouch which, in turn, would fit in Lefty's safe."

Veale slowly shook his enormous, flubbery face. "You're reaching, Amsterdam. There's nothing there."

I glanced down at my lap, tried to juice up my momentum. "Last night I asked you what other businesses you had to give Lefty a piece of. You wouldn't tell me. You wouldn't tell me because it was this smuggling deal."

"Wrong, Amsterdam. Totally wrong."

Weary as he sounded, he also sounded cocky now, combative in a passive way, untouchable.

This made me mad, and I longed to punch at least a small hole in his serenity. I said, "Listen, Mickey, you feel pretty pleased that the local cops are in your pocket. That's obvious. But smuggling—that's federal. You think these clowns can protect you from the feds?"

There was a heartbeat's silence; then, to my surprise, Mickey Veale laughed. It was a bitten snorting, percussive laugh without the smallest trace of amusement in it. He said, "You think the cops are in my pocket? Let me tell you something, Amsterdam. You don't know shit. You know worse than shit. You're the kind of half-smart guy who understands things just enough to get everything exactly wrong. So listen up. I'm not a blackmailer. I've never murdered anyone or had them murdered. So far. But you're getting to be more than an annoyance. So stay the fuck out of my face. Do we understand each other?"

It killed me to give him the last word, but a death threat is not an easy thing to answer, and the truth is, I couldn't speak just then. I forced myself to stare at him a moment. I wanted my eyes to tell him that, okay, I was through for right now but I wasn't backing down; I'm not sure how persuasively they conveyed the message. I drummed my fingers lightly on his desk, then stood up silently and turned to go.

I left his dimming office and walked down the corridor. Along the way I wondered why it was that in all these interviews—with Veale, with Lydia, even with the cops—I felt from moment to moment that I was doing fine, that I was winning, yet by the end it could not be clearer that I'd been outflanked, I'd lost.

I moved across the living room toward the door. The housekeeper with the bare midriff was leaning sultrily across a counter, her elbows spread around a magazine. There was a feather duster next to her, but as far as I could tell she hadn't dusted squat.

"He's lying," said Maggie. "Of course he's lying."

We were sitting on the deck of her trawler speaking softly in the thickening dusk. I'd gone to Redmond's after leaving Mickey Veale's, and following a spasm of indecision in which I literally rode around in circles for a while, doing doughnuts around the grand horseshoe entrance to Harbor Watch. My mind was cluttered. I was afraid. But the vector of my fear had changed. For a while it had pointed, so to speak, at my chest, pushing me back and down into my chair; counseling retreat. Now it poked me from behind, goading me forward on feet that tingled. Make no mistake—it was still naked, selfish fear and I still felt like a coward. But it had somehow gotten through to me that it didn't matter how I felt, it mattered what I did.

I needed to talk with someone, air things out. The time just after sunset is a lonely hour anyway, and suddenly I felt very alone. Who could I talk to but Maggie? Even though, face it, I knew her only slightly. Such was the life I'd been living.

Still, I felt lighter with a destination, and pedaled almost jauntily to the boatyard. Straddling my bike, I called up to her, and she emerged from the companionway and out into the cockpit. It seemed she hadn't been home for very long. She was wearing the baggy pants she always pulled on after yoga class. Her leotard still seemed slightly damp with sweat; there was a faint zag of moisture like a lightning bolt between her breasts.

She unfurled the rope ladder for me. I climbed it and faced her. She looked at me and her eyes pulled down at the outside corners. "Pete," she said, "are you okay? You look terrible."

I tried to make a joke of it. I said, "You know, you're the second person who's told me that today."

Maggie didn't laugh, and I realized that it wasn't funny. Something let go around my solar plexus, and I felt that I could easily just sit down and cry. I did sit down, on a makeshift bench there in the cockpit, but instead of bawling I launched into a manic and probably none-too- clear account of all that had happened in the last day or so—in the time since Maggie had put her clothes back on and taken her much-desired self out of my backyard. I told her about my Jet Ski ride and the night aboard
The Lucky Duck
. About the rats in my pool and my most recent chat with Lydia. About my second sit-down with Mickey Veale.

At the end, Maggie blew out a long slow exhalation—what, in class, she called a cleansing breath. And that's when she said of course Veale was a liar. She said it with a matter-of-fact firmness that amazed me. The woman was a yoga teacher—spiritual, ethereal. And yet in that moment she seemed far tougher and more realistic than me. She'd embraced the simple, ugly truth that people lie, that lying was part of how the world proceeded. She said, "What's he going to do—say, Yeah, I'm a blackmailer? Yeah, I'm a smuggler? Yeah, I had those people killed?"

I blinked at her. She was backlit by the floodlights that were just coming on around the boatyard. Her short hair seemed downy in silhouette, but the outline of her shoulders and arms was very crisp and definite.

She said, "He's the one who had the rats thrown in your pool. Don't you think?"

"I don't know what I think."

She bit her upper lip, the nub of it I'd felt the time we kissed. Then she said, "We have to find out what he's smuggling."

It took a moment for this to register. Then I said, "We?"

"The Jet Skis—you said it was around four when they came around?"

"Maggie, listen—"

"I could borrow a skiff—"

"Forget about it, Maggie. I'm not getting you involved."

"I got
you
involved, remember?"

Weakly, I said, "Kenny Lukens got me involved. Besides, that's different."

"Why's it different, Pete? What's different about it?"

"Because it's my job to get involved," I said. I said it without taking time to think; I was shocked to hear the words come from my mouth. They hung a moment in the muggy air.

Maggie started in again. I'll borrow a skiff and a good pair of binoculars. We'll anchor near the gambling boat—"

"
You
borrow a skiff," I said. "I'll take it out and watch."

"I'm going too."

"No, you're not."

There was a standoff. In the midst of it we heard electricity buzzing in the nearby pylons, hulls chafing and squeaking against the wharves of Toxic Triangle. Stars got bolder as the gleam in the western sky finally gave up the ghost.

At last Maggie said, "I want to kiss you, Pete. Can I kiss you?"

Before I could answer, her lips were against mine, soft and parted and just slightly salty. I reached up and held her face. My palms cradled her cheeks, my fingers traced her jawline and the tender hollows beneath her ears. We ventured deeper into each other's mouths and at some point we were standing, pressed together at the thighs and the loins and the waist and the ribs. I felt the breath she pulled down deep into her belly. I felt the weight of her breasts as they squeezed against me, the moist and splendid channel between them. The kiss became a kind of trance, a small and perfect vacation, and in the midst of it I knew we would be lovers then and there, that we would waft down into Maggie's dollhouse of a cabin and find a cozy place to roll and join, to surge and sweat against each other as though on piles of hot leaves, to make the world stop if only for an hour.