The Naked Detective (7 page)

She pulled a rumpled turquoise sweater down over her head. The collar flattened the fringe of hair at the nape of her neck. She reached back and popped it free again. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Anything but grappa."

It was early dusk when we stepped outside the Leaf Shed. The sky was yellow in the west; the last vague purple shadows were stretching toward oblivion on the sidewalk. Palms were softly rustling, and the air seemed strangely mottled, as if light and dark were different-colored marbles being stirred.

"Raul's?" I suggested.

"My favorite," Maggie said, and we climbed onto our bikes.

Suffering back in Jersey all those grim and dreary years, this exact scenario had been a fantasy of mine: heading out for cocktails on a fat-tire, one-speed bicycle. The velvety light, the caressing air; the engaging and exotic woman who was not like everybody else—all this was amazingly close to what I'd daydreamed. In the fantasy, though, my mood was never quite so tangled, my simple, aimless habits never so assaulted by sudden complications. Life, sometimes, is too rich for its own damn good.

Anyway, Raul's was one of those Key West places where you go through the door and, almost instantly, you're back outside again—in this case, on a trellised patio hung with bougainvillea and presided over by an ancient mahogany tree with scarred and mottled bark. We found a table in a corner and I ordered a bottle of Viognier. Good aperitif, Viognier. Not sweet but it tastes like peaches.

We clinked glasses and I told Maggie that I'd been to Redmond's Boatyard earlier that day. She seemed surprised.

"I thought you weren't getting any more involved," she said.

"That's what I thought too." I drummed fingers on the table. I knew what I had to say next but I didn't want to say it. "Ortega died right after I talked to him."

Maggie almost met my eyes, not quite. "I saw it in the paper."

"I got him real worked up. Agitated. Panting. The monitor—"

Maggie touched my arm then. Her hand was very cool. "You're not saying it's your fault? Look, he was a bad man and he had a terrible disease."

I appreciated that and I liked having her touch me. There was a sulky silence and I sort of drew it out. But finally I said, "Ortega dead—that means we'll probably never know a goddamn thing about what happened to Kenny. Nothing. That bother you?"

She took her hand off my arm. I still felt where her fingers had been. "Doesn't change anything," she said. "But—"

"But it stinks. It's incomplete. I guess that's why I had to go to the boatyard."

The waiter came and poured more wine. I was extremely grateful.

"I saw his boat," I said.

"Dream Chaser,"
Maggie said wistfully. Could those two wrenching words be said in any other way?

"Spoke to the new owner. Andrus."

"Nice guy, huh? Happy. Gentle."

"He'd seen the guys in snorkels too," I said. "Saw them pulling up on Jet Skis. Remembered zilch except the snorkels."

We drank some wine and briefly looked around the place. At the bar there were a couple of big-haired tourist women getting plastered. A local guy with a parrot was trying to pick them up. He didn't seem to notice that the bird was crapping down his shoulder.

"But here's what I can't figure out," I said. "How did they know Kenny was back? I mean, how long was he in town?"

To my great surprise, Maggie shrugged. "I'm not really sure. Not more than a day or two, I think."

"You
think
?"

Her face got a little bit confused. "Yeah, I think. What's the problem?"

"But he was staying with you, right?" This was not intended as an accusation, though in my own ears it sounded sort of harsh.

"He didn't stay with me. He stayed at a guest house downtown."

Now
my
face got confused. "But wait a second. I thought you and Kenny ... I mean, I thought the two of you were ..."

"I told you Kenny wasn't gay," said Maggie. "I never said he was my lover. We were buddies. We went for walks. We shopped for clothes. Friends. Is that so hard to grasp?"

I should have been embarrassed. I was embarrassed. But since we're being honest here, let me admit I was also happy and relieved. Relieved not to have a rival, even one who was a dead transvestite. I know, I know—this was churlish and irrational. But come on—does anyone really believe that people are reasonable? Jealousy, desire— things like that are hardwired into parts of the brain way too ancient to explain or justify.

"Okay," I said. "I'm sorry for assuming. So let's back up a step. Kenny stayed at a guest house. You know which one he stayed at?"

The lissome yoga teacher didn't answer the question. To my surprise and titillation, she was now the one who kept the conversation mired in sex. "Me and Kenny lovers?" She exhaled quickly with just a hint of rueful laugh. "I mean, I liked him a great deal, but he was a little too strange to be my lover."

This put me in a dilemma that I guess real detectives must deal with all the time. Should I press on with details of the murder; or should I quiz her as to just what kind of lover she was looking for? Someone, perhaps, with proficiency at tennis and a passion for good music? What if he had to be able to touch his toes?

But Maggie changed direction and went on. "The place he stayed—I think it's called Hibiscus. On a side street in Bahama Village."

I drank some wine and heard myself say that I'd go down there tomorrow.

"You will?" said Maggie. There was simple gratitude in her voice, and when I met her eyes, I saw that they were opened very wide. She looked beautiful. Her brow was high and smooth, the full lips soft and slightly parted. Her expression was concerned and yet serene, and I could only wonder at a face capable of conveying both those things at once.

We looked at each other a little longer than was polite or safe, and in the stare I figured something out, or imagined that I did. I thought I knew now the kind of lover Maggie was looking for. She was looking for someone who would get involved, someone who would see things through. Which is to say, exactly the kind of man I wasn't, and didn't care to be; no—exactly the kind of man I'd given up on being. But in that moment, looking at Maggie's open face, I felt just the faintest quivering of long-dead fantasies of rescue and crusade, chivalry and sacrifice. Those quiverings scared the hell out of me and made me tingle.

I dropped my eyes and reached out for the Viognier. The bottle was empty. Now how the hell had that happened? How the hell was any of this happening?

News of the next calamity came not by way of the morning paper—it had occurred too late for deadline—but from the hyperactive mouth of Ozzie Kimmel, when I showed up at the Bayview courts for our customary Saturday game.

"D'ya hear?" he said, as he stepped out of the shadow of the players' shed and yanked off his stretched and faded tank top.

"Hear what?"

He scratched his hairy stomach, tightened the drawstring of his puke-green bathing suit. "Another fuckin' murder."

Instantly I felt a cold spot in my gut, a tightness in my throat. Police-blotter items never used to affect me like that. A murder was too bad for the person murdered. Why should it mean anything to me? "Who?" I said.

"Heard it on the fuckin' radio," said Ozzie. "Ya know what I don't get? The richer and more tarted up this town gets, the safer, cleaner they try to make it look, the more people that get offed."

"Ozzie—who was killed?"

He dived into his ratty bag, came out with a linty headband. "When I first came here, everyone was broke, everyone was stoned, the town looked like some Caribbean Third World piss-hole, everybody lived on cans of beans and bananas off of trees and farted all day long, and nobody got fuckin' murdered. Now and then, okay, someone took bad acid, tried to fly or fell off a boat and drowned. But murdered? No way."

"Ozzie, tell me who was murdered."

He hefted his racquet, took some practice swings, did some torso twists. "What? I can't remember."

"You just heard it on the radio."

"Yeah, but it was some kind of a funny name. Some Polish guy, I think."

"Polish?" I tasted something steely at the back of my throat. "Any chance he was Latvian?"

"Polish, Latvian, who gives a shit? Some poor bastard who just got over here and was fixing up a boat."

"At Redmond's?"

"I think they said Redmond's, yeah. So you heard about it?"

I wiped my forehead and put my racquets back into my bag. "I gotta go."

This flabbergasted Ozzie, cracked a central pillar of his world. "Whaddya mean, you gotta go? It's Saturday. We play on Saturday."

I climbed onto my bike.

Ozzie's amazement turned to indignation. "You can't just go! We're here. We're playing."

I started pedaling away.

To my back, he yelled, "I can't believe this! Wimping out! I'm taking a default!"

A default? The lunatic kept records?

I headed toward the harbor. Key West is a sleep-in town, and at 9:00
a.m
. the streets were so quiet that I could hear the suck of my tires on the pavement. Cats slunk silently around garbage cans. Dogs snuggled against the bottom steps of porches. Tin roofs reflected sunlight and threw a silver glow on the undersides of palms.

The quiet was shattered as I neared the boatyard, though it was hard to say by what, exactly. There were no shouts, no sirens or machinery. It was more the nervous buzz of a threatened hive, the indistinctly roiled atmosphere of a place where something violent has happened.

The cops had placed a barricade across the entrance, just some splintery sawhorses whose legs stood uneven in the coral rock. Passersby gawked then moved along. I edged closer. At last, among the chastened hulks in their high, dry cradles, I saw
Dream Chaser
, cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.

Old salts will tell you that certain boats are just plain cursed. A virus of disaster inhabits their very decks and fittings, bringing ill winds voyage after voyage, misfortunes season after season, persisting even in the face of changing ports and changing owners. Superstitious nonsense, of course. But looking at
Dream Chaser
—its wrecked rigging still unrepaired, its sanded but as yet unpainted bottom splotched with putty, its last two owners untimely dead—it was hard to feel immune from superstition.

"Look, can I go in? I have a friend inside." I gestured in the direction of Maggie's trawler with its begonias and geraniums.

"Far's I know," he said, and then we had a little standoff. The cop didn't come right out and tell me to get lost, but his sour, pinched expression behind the Ray-Bans let me know that I was bugging him. He stared at me in the petty, bullying way of certain small-town cops who want to let you know they are memorizing your face, and that some time it will cost you. I stared back for an instant, and wondered if this guy had been a friend of Lefty Ortega's, one of the flunkies whose mission it was to make sure that the guys who ran the town were free to do their business.

But what I was mainly thinking in that moment was what a sorry excuse for a detective I was turning out to be. Real PI's knew how to talk to cops, manly man to man, how to wheedle information. A real PI would have gotten past the barricade, past the crime-scene tape, would have managed to get aboard that cursed boat. A real detective would have smelled the blood and noticed some small but crucial thing that everyone else had overlooked. Instead, I just sat there on my bike, knowing that I seemed to the cop like one more weenie with white shorts and a tennis racquet. Still outside the perimeter of real involvement, I flinched from his belittling stare and pedaled off.

But in no particular direction. I was edgy and nervous and didn't feel like going home. I felt an itch I couldn't place at first. Gradually I recognized it as something that long ago, up north, I used to feel quite often: the itch of purpose, the itch to get something accomplished. But what?

With nothing much in mind, I leaned and swooped through random streets. Not till I'd crossed the ugly clutter of Duval did I realize I was heading to Bahama Village to check out the Hibiscus guest house.

Bahama Village is about the last part of Key West that could really be called a neighborhood. It still features curbside games of dominoes, and corner groceries that compete on the charm of their owners and the coldness of their beer. Generations of families still live together here. Houses are passed on, patched and propped up with cinder blocks and railroad ties; they lean but they endure. Not that the Village is immune from change. Homesteading whites who can't afford the other parts of town are picking up some bargains—you see earnest young white women in torn jeans and bandannas, scraping paint, raking improbable gardens. Gay pride flags hang from porches here and there. But the pace of change is slow for now, as languorous as the streets themselves, and has a human face. It won't stay that way; and as I rode past the rib joints and the fried-fish stands, I vaguely wondered if the hovering developers would let Bahama Village keep its own true name, or if they'd decide that the suggestion of blackness might keep the millionaires away.