The Quick Adios (Times Six) (33 page)

Sam walked inside with a plate of hot squash, peppers and mushrooms. “Kill who, kill what?” he said. “Will it wait until after we eat? I’ll help you kill this afternoon.”

It got weirder after brunch.

After we pitched in to rinse dishes, we returned to their open front porch where Marnie showed off her new pocket-sized Nikon. She returned my camera along with a bottle of contraband Havana Club Añejo Reserva Rum. “A shot of appreciation,” she said. “You saved my ass, I’ll attack your liver.”

“Wish I’d had this in Starbucks last night.”

“Sam told me about your awkward meeting in Fort Myers,” said Marnie. “Now, I have a couple of questions about the shots you emailed to me early in the week.” She handed me a print, and I recognized the scene. “This one’s no big deal, Alex, but why did you take a picture of my car on Josephine Street?”

“That’s where I parked my Triumph. I always fire a random before I begin work. Make sure my camera’s functioning okay. Your Jeep happened to be there.”

“I just wondered,” she said. “That’s not the real question I had.”

I looked closer at the print. The car in front of Marnie’s Jeep was Ocilla Ramirez’s green Honda Element. I handed the photo to Beth, told her what it was.

“Do you still have this on your computer?” I said. “I’d like to see it blown up to full resolution.”

“Sure, let me boot it up.” She started into the house.

“What’s your real question?” I said.

Marnie stepped back outside. “One thing at a time. It’ll be simpler if I point to another picture on the screen.”

A minute later she opened my Josephine Street “random.” Helped by the glow of the laptop’s screen, we saw the outlines of two people inside the Honda Element. The driver sat low in the seat, a match for Ocilla’s stature.

“Oh, shit,” said Beth. “It’s the victim’s business partner.”

“Murderers who’ve returned to the scene of the crime?”said Sam.

“Or never left,” said Beth.

Looking through the glass of the Jeep’s windshield and the rear window of the Honda, I couldn’t tell if the passenger was a man or a woman, but it was someone at least six inches taller.

“Nice hit, Marnie,” I said. “What’s next?”

“After that discovery, this may not be so remarkable.” She selected and opened another image. “When you were taking photos for my story, why did you aim at cars across the street? You documented fifteen or twenty cars and vans in visitors’ parking at the 1800 Atlantic condo. This filthy white van is particularly artistic. Let me zoom in closer…”

It was a fairly new van mottled with dried road dirt, its Ontario rear tag speckled by the salt employed to melt ice on northern roads. It wasn’t unusual to see Canadian plates in the Keys, all year long, but if its owners could afford to stay at 1800 Atlantic, why hadn’t they driven though a car wash south of the Snow Belt to rinse off the corrosive grime? Even rainstorms during the previous week would have washed away some of the salt, so the van must have been new in town.

“Two for two, Ms. Reporter,” I said. “We’re Canada-sensitive this week.”

Marnie grinned with pride. “You think your new best friend Fonteneau has other friends in town?”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “It could be Caldwell’s van.”

I gave Sam and Beth my version of Marnie’s story from Captain Tony’s about the pilot and my new friend and my new friend’s elegant nickname.

Beth wagged her cell phone at the laptop. “I need that tag number.”

I read it aloud while she repeated the numbers to a colleague in the police station who promised to call back when they had identified the vehicle’s owner.

“You asked about airport security last night,” said Sam. “Could Fonteneau and his possible friends have gone onto the airfield and messed with the King Air?”

“Someone got to the plane,” I said. “Rodney Sherwin was adamant about never losing two engines for the same reason. He told me not to think about sabotage, but later he said, ‘If you make it and I don’t, kill Beeson for me.’”

“There’s another possibility,” said Beth. “Didn’t you tell me that this Luke Tharpe from Sarasota is an ace mechanic?”

“Old carburetors are a world away from turbojets,” I said, “but there’s aptitude. Maybe he went to night school.”

“We left through that key-coded gate last night,” said Sam, “but it’s a big, fenced-in airport.”

“How about a Google satellite view?” said Marnie. She was already pressing buttons on her keyboard. “Zooming on Key West International and the Salt Ponds…”

“There’s a north-side road parallel to the runway?” I said. “What’s it leading to, a baseball stadium?”

“Government Road?” said Beth.

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

“It runs south off Flagler like an extension of 7th Street,”said Marnie. “It runs past the Cuban airliner and leads to the Little Hamaca nature trail. A few homeless people hide in the woods. That stadium-looking area is the old Hawk Missile Bravo Battery. These days it’s a paintball field, so the war goes on.”

“A missile battery, a Cuban plane and a paintball field? I feel like a stranger in my own city.”

“A lot of water hazards around that airport,” said Sam. “But someone could get to those planes between the runway and A1A.”

“That’s where the King Air was parked,” I said. “In the middle of that group.”

Sam nodded. “Must be dark and lonesome out there in the wee hours.”

“Before you shut your laptop, Marnie,” I said, “can you see if it snowed in Toronto early this week?”

“Getting off-topic here, Alex?” said Beth.

“Fonteneau said something on the plane Tuesday about having to shovel his way to his car so he could drive to the airport. I wondered at the time why he hadn’t taken a taxi.”

Marnie clapped her hands. “It hasn’t snowed in Toronto since December 30th.”

Beth read my mind, stood and patted my belly. “We’ve had our good eats. We’re sure that Fonteneau’s full of shit. Let’s walk back and take a ride.”

“Please let me set the pace this time,” I said. “I’m starting to feel like I survived a freak airplane crash yesterday.”

Beth and I hiked up United and wove our way through the back streets toward Windsor and Passover Lanes. A car drove by, music flowing from its open windows. For once it was classic Steely Dan instead of a bass-thumping mindless rant. As we crossed Olivia, no more than four hundred feet from Justin Beeson’s elegant cottage, my phone buzzed: it was another call from Beeson.

“Maybe he’s right down the street,” said Beth.

“Or in Paraguay.” I took the call. It was Justin’s daughter, Eileen Beeson.

“I need your address, Mr. Rutledge. I heard that you were in a plane crash and I painted you a get-well card. Can you guess? It’s a tropical tree limb, so don’t guess too many times.”

Beth and I had started past the Key West Cemetery, its discolored crypts and sad, plastic flowers. “Eileen, I’m thinking right now that you’re the one who might need to recover.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “but I’m okay.”

“How is your father getting along?”

“Not so good. He cries. He started going through my baby clothes yesterday like it was me that died.”

“Have either of you talked with Anya?”

“I have, twice on the phone. She’s in Key West. I don’t know about my dad.”

“How about a detective named Steffey? Has he talked with you?”

“Oh, God, yes. He couldn’t, you know… He asked about the men who delivered my mom’s cars from Daddy’s workshop.”

“The mechanics, Luke and Edwin?”

“Yeah, those guys. My mom told me that Luke was okay but Edwin was nervous around us. She could tell because he always rubbed his thumb against that tattoo on his neck.”

“How did you like those men?” I said. “Were you okay with them?”

“Oh, Luke was just another man. I didn’t think about him, even when my mom said she liked him okay.”

“How about Edwin?” I said.

“He creeped me out. One time I tried to draw his face and the drawing looked really scary. I tore it up right away.”

“Why did you draw his face?”

“It’s an exercise I do. I draw faces from memory. I draw my own face at least once a day, but I usually look in the mirror. Everyone else, I try to remember.”

“Does anything else feel scary to you?”

“No, I’m just afraid that someone will hurt my dad.”

Beth drove me to Dredgers Lane so I could change my shirt and grab my camera bag. Her white Audi A5 coupe is a stunning car. I had a ball driving it to Orlando to visit my brother before Christmas. Even Corvette drivers stared at it, and pedestrians would stop to let it pass so they could grab a second look. I wasn’t sure it was the car we needed for a low-key clandestine run.

Stuck at the light at White and Virginia, in front of Sandy’s Café where we started our day, Beth’s phone rang.

“Another brunch,” I said.

She handed her phone to me. The call was from
PRIVATE NUMBER
. I gave my name and explained that Detective Watkins was driving and couldn’t talk just then.

“This is Max Saunders, Rutledge. We’ve got a puzzler on our end. We can’t find the woman, but my squad is on the move. You two will know the minute we see her.”

“Agent Saunders, we’ve pulled together some fragments of information since we saw you. We think a man named Robert Fonteneau is mixed up with Ocilla Ramirez. His nickname in a Canadian prison was Bobby Fuck No.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rutledge. Where would the FBI be without citizens like you?” The call went silent.

Screw you, too, I thought.

I explained Max’s message as we rolled east on Flagler, in style.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Keep going and take a left just past Grace Lutheran.”

“The fundamental premise of this idea?”

“We’ll take Dubbie Tanner’s car instead of yours.”

“I get it,” she said. “My car stands out in certain neighborhoods.”

“We might also need supporting actors.”

We found The Aristocrats doing yard work. I wanted to whip out my camera to gather evidence of their labors, but I knew they were embarrassed to be found with hedge clippers and a push-it-your-damned-self lawnmower. We chose to ignore their chore and they chose to help us out.

“You have made a wise decision,” said Fecko.

Wiley Fecko dug into their wardrobe archive to find us suitable camouflage for cruising. Dubbie Tanner had to remove four cardboard boxes, a few stained towels, many empty soft drink cans, and a bulging black plastic garbage bag from the back seat of his Caprice. He spent most of five minutes in there with a wet/dry Shop-Vac, paper towels and a squirt bottle of Windex.

From that point onward the game got dirty.

W
e rolled west on Flagler for four blocks, turned left onto Government Road, then passed the entrance marker for
KEY WEST SALT PONDS - LITTLE HAMACA CITY PARK
.

“We get complaints from back in here,” said Beth Watkins. “Homeless dudes in drunken fights, and they use sharp objects. Ironically, all the 911 calls come from cell phones.”

“Blood brothers at noon,” said Wiley Fecko. “Broken bottles and mortal enemies by midnight. I lived the booze opera too long.”

“There was one brawl at the paintball field,” said Beth. “A man was tagged during a war scenario, but he refused to vacate the field. The war turned into fists and rocks. One of the brawlers was an Eastern European already on probation for a bar scuffle. He was deported.”

“Does that make me feel safer?” I said.

“Wasn’t my decision, Alex.”

“Sorry about this heat in the car,” said Dubbie Tanner. “I’ve got the A/C on four-thirty.”

Beth turned up her palms. I explained about four windows down and thirty miles-per-hour.

A blue bandanna was wrapped around my head and Beth wore a backward flat-brim ball cap. We hunkered down in the back seat of Tanner’s four-door Caprice, and tried to look as deadbeat as possible. Every time we hit a bump, a cloud of dust mites escaped from under the front seats. The open windows were life-savers. We passed the Cubana passenger plane, an Antonov An-24 that Dubbie said had been hijacked in March, 2003.

Somehow I missed that event. I must have been ass-deep in somebody else’s problems. Or off taking promo photos on a breeze-swept Caribbean island.

Fecko turned to check on us. “I’m going to play Phil Collins for a short time. It sets our roll tone, if you follow my reasoning. If it’s too loud, tell me.”

I was their guest, so I held my tongue.

A quarter-mile along and just beyond a barbed wire-topped fence on our right, we saw ponds and water weeds—enough to make entry to the airport a pain in the ass or worse. Only two hundred yards farther down we could see dry-looking silt clear to the runway, beyond which was the line of parked single- and twin-engine small planes where, thirty hours earlier, Rodney Sherwin and I had boarded the King Air 90.

“Along here, in my humble estimation,” said Wiley, turning down the CD player, “this is your best access point.”

Dubbie, at the wheel, spoke over his shoulder: “My able partner sounds far too desperate to prove that you need us.”

“We need you,” I said.

Airport security also believed that this stretch offered the easiest access. Every fifty yards they had posted signs:
NO PARKING WITHIN FIVE FEET OF FENCE
. The shrubbery in a couple of areas might help with cover, but not much, and it might not matter at night.

“That’s cheesy barbed wire,” said Wiley. “One twin mattress, a step ladder, and it’s up and over. You pull the mattress over behind you so it’s available for escape. Your only risks would be tripping an infrared alarm or being spotted by someone with night vision goggles. If security caught something on their monitors, they could flip on the runway lights, illuminate the entire area. You would turn into a cue ball on black velvet.”

“Were you in Iraq?” I said.

“Kuwait,” said Wiley. “Four-point-six months, civilian tech advisor. Okay, right along here, if you got over the fence, you would run for that windsock because they wouldn’t place sensors near an object that moves around as much as it does. This spot gets eight points on a scale of ten.”