Air Dance Iguana (20 page)

The call I’d
missed from the city switchboard had been Beth Watkins: “If you get a chance,” the message said, “call me back in the next half hour or so.”

I scrolled the call log on my phone. Beth must have called me at least once from her cell, but her mobile wasn’t in my phone’s memory. I called her office line and was shuttled to the KWPD switchboard, a woman with impatience in her voice: “Desk.”

“I just missed a call from Detective Watkins.”

“She’s on an investigation.”

“It wasn’t three minutes ago, and she asked me to call her back,” I said. “Can you patch me through?”

“Hold.” The phone fell to a hard surface. I listened to thirty seconds of chatter, code calls, rogers, negatives, and addresses. “Detective Watkins is on an investigation. She can’t call back.”

“Can you give me her cell-phone number?” I said.

“I can’t give you that.”

“All I want is the detective to call me.”

“You can leave a message, but I can’t guarantee she’ll get it.”

“She doesn’t have a voice mailbox?”

“Of course she does, but she has to call in to retrieve her messages.”

“Is that something she usually does?”

“How should I know?”

“Can you get her on the radio and inform her that I responded?”

“No way, sir. The radio isn’t for personal use.”

“I hope to fuck this is being recorded.”

“It is, and you can go to jail for talking that way.”

“Good. Maybe the detective can find me there.”

The week’s miracle took the form of a Wendell-free exit from Keelhaul Lane, though I still had the feeling that he was peeking through the miniblinds, monitoring my moves, readying himself to pounce into conversation. I supposed that his free divorce had taken a toll in loneliness. Perhaps his love affair with the ocean helped to fill the void.

I hooked up with hellbound traffic on Ramrod and escaped the race by thinking through my meeting with Marnie, trying to dislodge details to illuminate the puzzle. Something we discussed wanted to float free of my subconscious fact trap. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it had lodged late in our chat. She had placed the Navy-reunion ad in the paper, spoken with Liska, studied four months’ worth of old newspapers. What else? Pieces of our conversation faded in and out, but nothing came to me. I only knew that I felt trapped by our dependence on ancient copies of the
Citizen.
We needed a human source.

I needed to test the memory of my Dredgers Lane neighbor, Hector Ayusa.

Crossing Harris Gap Channel my convoy slowed behind an old pickup with a two-story plywood camper teetering on its ass end. A sane person wouldn’t drive it in a fifteen-knot crosswind, much less on a bridge. Perhaps that explained its tortoise speed. My speed run had slowed from full tilt to snail’s pace, and my pitted windshield magnified the sunlight’s glare. Hurry be damned, I would get to town when traffic wanted me there.

My phone rang as I passed Bay Point.

“Alex, it’s Beth Watkins.”

I locked on to the mental picture of a trigger finger shot tipless by a police hero.

“I tried to get back to you,” I said.

“So I heard. Look, this is a difficult call for me. I’m not a soap-opera fan.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“Did you mention to Detective Lewis that I drove up to Little Torch on Saturday?”

“I believe so,” I said.

“I called her with some information an hour ago. She was more interested in being rude than hearing me out.”

“When she gets focused on a job she…well, she gets focused.”

“So maybe you’ll hear me out,” said Watkins. “Tell me if I’m on a wild-goose chase.”

“I’m all ears, Beth.”

“I’d rather have this be face-to-face,” she said. “Any chance you’re coming into town this afternoon?”

“I’ve got to play landlord in the next couple of hours.”

“Great,” she said. “Call me when you get free, and we can meet in my office.”

My memory coughed up an old news item on some cops in Philadelphia who notified by mail dozens of fugitives that they had won Super Bowl tickets. The winners simply had to show photo ID at a storefront office near the stadium to claim their tickets. The police busted each gullible fool who walked through the door and cleared dozens of warrants. With the past week’s talk of my being an accomplice, or tampering with evidence, or illegally renting my home, I didn’t want to fall for a similar scam.

“Could we meet at the Afterdeck?” I said. “Tell me what time to meet you there.”

“I rode my Ducati today. Can you pick me up?”

“I need to run an errand on my way in. I don’t know how long—”

“Call me when you pass Home Depot. I’ll be waiting outside the police station.”

“That sounds okay.”

“I get it,” she said. “You share the universal fear men have in dealing with women police officers. This is not a setup to detain you, Alex.”

“I wasn’t suggesting—”

“Quit while you’re ahead.” She gave me her cell number and hung up.

A few miles later an F-18 landing at Boca Chica flew low enough to scorch my hood paint. The jet’s roar unleashed adrenaline, uncorked my brain, and the point I’d tried to recall from Marnie’s visit came back to me. When I told her that I’d had to evict my tenant, I had flashed on the timing of Johnny Griffin’s Thursday arrival in Key West. If someone wanted to suggest that my brother’s appearance coincided with three murders, why not Griffin’s, too?

Hell, why not consider everyone I’d ever known?

But I decided to take Watkins with me when I went to Dredgers Lane to evict Johnny.

The new police station on North Roosevelt looked like a corporate headquarters. This was my first time inside, and the first person I saw was Marge Sayre, the receptionist who had migrated from the Angela Street station to finish out her last year before retirement.

“Where do I sign up for the guided tour?” I said.

“There’ve been a few of those today,” she said. “All these state and federal people in here, that all-agency meeting they had earlier in the conference room. Meanwhile, you’ve been out in the sun, haven’t you?”

“Scrubbing a boat on Saturday,” I said. “I’m house-sitting on Ramrod.”

“We had a canal house up there years ago, before it got crowded. What street are you on?”

“Keelhaul Lane.”

Marge got a faraway look in her eye. “I remember when Keelhaul had two houses and three more were built one summer. The old-timers thought the place had gone to hell.”

“No vacant lots left now. Is Beth Watkins in?”

“I heard she was looking for you last week,” said Marge. “I think the girl’s husband-hungry, but you don’t need a warning. You’ve dodged that trap.” She called to get Beth’s okay, then gave me a clip-on visitor’s badge and directed me down a sea-foam green hallway. The place was awash in calming pastels, modular work areas, easy-to-clean surfaces.

Beth’s second-floor office with its pale blue walls, three workstations, and a bulletin board fit the uniformity. She was staring at the door, waiting for me to appear. She looked beat and distracted. Mostly beat.

“Marge said there was a big meeting,” I said.

She nodded and scowled. “Turned out I’m too junior for a front-row seat. I got a chair by the wall.”

“Any breakthrough news?” I said.

“Typical all-agency crap. Everybody lays out their hand, then the FBI shuts up and no one complains. I saw it coming five minutes into the sit-down. I didn’t really mind when I got pulled out of the meeting.”

“Pulled out?”

“It was almost over anyway,” she said. “We had a situation here in town. I’ll tell you about it after we have our first drink. Why do you look so antsy?”

I told her about Griffin’s noise problems. I didn’t mention my paranoiac questioning of his arrival time.

“You want to take care of it and come back and get me?”

“Why waste the time to go and come back?” I said. “It shouldn’t take five minutes. I’ll talk to him nicely, maybe ask him to vacate.”

“If I get out of your car, my badge stays behind.”

“It’s hard to picture old Johnny Griffin as the violent type.”

“Half of the bad ones look violent. The rest look like puppy dogs, but they’re just as mean.”

I coasted past a new Ford van in front of my house, a plain-vanilla rental. From outside the place looked quiet and normal. I parked at the end of the lane and led Beth around to Carmen Sosa’s back door. Carmen stood in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, hovering over her daughter’s shoulder.

I introduced Watkins, then said, “What do we know?”

Carmen pointed at a puzzle book. “Maria’s acing a crossword and I don’t know shit.”

“Mom,” said Maria.

Carmen shrugged, groped in her shorts pocket, and dropped a dime in the Bacardi 8 cuss bottle. “He’s been home about ten minutes,” she said. “Thank you for dealing with it.”

Watkins and I walked to my house. I could tell by her breathing that she was readying herself for a confrontation.

Johnny Griffin sat on my porch, a can of beer in one hand, his other hand swathed in cotton bandages. He looked ten years older than five days earlier. His hair and face were grayer and thinner, his eyes fatigued. He pointed to a six-pack with four remaining. “Did your friend see the mess? I assume that’s why you’re here.”

I offered to open a beer for Watkins, but she shook her head. I helped myself, popped its top. “The neighbors are getting uppity about the parties.”

“They’re over.” He lifted his bandaged hand. “I’m officially off hard liquor.”

“Someone attack you?” I said.

“I couldn’t find any scissors in your kitchen drawers. I needed to open one of those new foil packs of tuna fish. I found what I thought was the perfect tool. My new Griffin Kitchen Rule is you don’t open tuna with a box cutter.”

“You were sober at the time?”

Griffin shrugged. “Maybe still drunk from the night before. Now I’ll be off the water for five days, if they can take out my stitches on day four. The one thing I know for sure is my body needs to dry out.”

“No more social functions?”

“None at all,” he said. “I hooked up with a bunch of gigglers the other night. I got my fill of their company.”

“Everything else okay?” I said.

“Peachy. You going to let me stay? Even with the constant heat, I need this vacation.”

I thought about it, then nodded.

“Come by any time next week,” he said. “I’ll slip you another wad of cash.”

As we walked across the street to speak with Hector Ayusa, Watkins said, “Known this Griffin a long time?”

“Since college. We kept in touch, Christmas cards, occasional visits. He and his ex-wife put me up for three or four days when they lived in Knoxville. Why do you ask?”

“How did he make his money?”

“Insurance,” I said.

“That’s a cash business?”

“All these years in the Keys,” I said, “I’ve learned not to question certain things.”

I knocked on Hector’s door and waited. A waft of Spanish brandy preceded Hector to his screen door. He waved his hand at the rocking chairs on his porch, then dropped into his favorite seat like a potato into an Easter basket. “You come to tell me you kick out that noisy boy?”

“I had a talk with him, Hector. He said he was sorry about the racket. It won’t happen again.”

“So why you come by, you miss my face?”

“I need to pick your mind about Weedy Fields.”

Hector peered across the lane, tried to send my house back through the years. “Weedy come here from Michigan, so he talk funny like a Swedish, and he probably say that my Conch tongue is funny, but he was a smart old man. One day in 1957 he flies me to Cuba for lunch. I been married maybe not five years, Alex, and he flies me there, we skim close to fishing boats and land near Havana. We have lunch in some old whorehouse, excuse me, miss, but I got six whores mad at me because I tell them my wife is in Cayo Hueso, I got to go back to her. I think those whores might kill me with a knife. Mr. Weedy Fields, he pay the whores to sing us a song, and they happy again. They earn more American dollars to sing than…you know what. We leave that whorehouse, everyone smiling. How that man know to pay a whore to sing, I don’t know, but he smart as hell.”

“You recall his children?”

Hector pushed himself from his chair, stuck his hand between two square flowerpots, and pulled out a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap, offered it to Beth. She smiled and waved her hand to decline. He handed it to me. “That boy go off to college, that young girl—they call her Pokey—she went to hell when his wife died.”

I tilted it back, took a short swig. “She start hanging out on Duval?”

“Not so much, but she live with that man, he wasn’t from here.” Hector took a more substantial slug, replaced the cap, put the bottle back in its hiding spot. “Maybe they had a wedding, I don’t know, maybe not.”

“You recall his name?”

“Alex. My head don’t work, all these years. I think I only saw him one time. You better off, you ask Carmen.”

“What kind of man was he?” I said.

“He was Navy, I know that. Weedy Fields, he hated that man. One day I watched that one black lieutenant the city had back then, he put the handcuffs on the Navy man in Carlos Market. I believe they caught that man for his work at the city.”

“Hector, you’ve confused me. Pokey’s sailor left the Navy and found a job in town?”

“Never left the Navy, Alex. Now, all your questions, you reminding me. That boy and three or four or five other sailors come out and get jobs.”

“At the city?”

“They forgot to tell anyone downtown they in the Navy,” said Hector. “They forgot to tell the Navy they got all these jobs on the island.”

“What kind of jobs?”

“Work crews, just like me at City Electric. Matter of fact, one Navy man started at City Electric, messed around, I almost lose my job over it. Only time I ever come close to losing my job. They caught him with a box full of new tools, they thought I should have suspected before it happen. A month later, I see him in a city truck. He getting less pay, but he back to having two jobs.”

“So someone finally caught on to these boys?”