Tourist Season (12 page)

“Exactly.”

“You ever read
The Ransom of Red Chief?”

“Sure,” Jenna said. “What are you getting at?”

“Nothing.”

Every so often Keyes’s attention was drawn to the coffin, which dominated Jenna’s otherwise-cozy living room. The coffin was plain and vanilla-colored, made of smooth Dade County pine. A pauper’s coffin. Jenna had done a valiant job of trying to disguise it as normal furniture. She had placed cocktail coasters neatly on each corner of the lid, and in the center she had stationed a blue Ming vase with fresh-cut sunflowers. For more camouflage she had added a thick stack of magazines, with
Town and Country
on top. Despite all this, there was no mistaking the coffin for anything else. Keyes wondered morbidly if he ought to peek inside, just to make sure Wiley wasn’t there.

“There’s been no ransom demand, has there?” he asked Jenna.

“Not yet. Let’s sit on the couch.” Jenna put a James Taylor album on the stereo and went into the bedroom. When she came out, her hair was down and she was barefoot.

“If Skip wasn’t kidnapped,” she said, “then maybe Cab’s right. Maybe he just went crazy and wandered off.” She curled up on the couch. “I wish I had a fireplace.”

“It’s seventy-four degrees outside,” Keyes said.

“What happened to my young romantic?”

Keyes smiled bashfully; God, she never let up. He fought to keep a proper tone to his voice. “Is there a possibility … have you two been getting along?”

“Better than ever,” Jenna said. “We made love the afternoon he left. Twice!”

“Oh.”

“Right there, where you’re sitting.”

“Sorry I asked.”

Keyes kept waiting for Jenna to say:
I know how hard it was for you to take this case.
But she never did, and gave no sign of comprehending his distress.

“You’ve got to find him, Brian. I don’t want to get the police involved, and I
don’t
want a lot of publicity. It could ruin his career.”

Or cinch it, Keyes mused. He asked, “Do you think he’s gone insane?”

“I’m not sure I’d know the difference.” Jenna took off her earrings and laid them on the coffin. Elegantly she poured herself another glass of wine. Keyes sipped cautiously. The Chablis gave a dangerous urgency to his loneliness.

Jenna said, “Lately Skip’s been wilder than usual. He wakes up ranting and goes to bed ranting. You know, the usual stuff: toxic waste, oil spills, the California condor, the Biscayne Aquifer. Armageddon in general. About a week ago a man came to the door selling time-shares in Key Largo, and Skip attacked him with a marlin gaff.”

Keyes asked, “Does he get incoherent?”

Jenna laughed softly. “Never. He’s a very cogent person, even when he’s violent. He always makes perfect sense.”

“Well, if he’s been kidnapped—which I doubt—all we can do is wait for a ransom demand. But if he’s off somewhere in a frenzy, we’ve got to find him before he really hurts someone. Jenna, I need some ideas. Where the hell could he be?”

“The wilderness,” she said wistfully, gazing at her imaginary fireplace. “That’s where to start.”

“You mean the Everglades.”

“Where else? What other wilderness is there? The rest is all gone.”

Jenna was vice-secretary of the local Sierra Club, so Keyes knew it wouldn’t take much to launch her off on a big speech. He had to be careful. “Jenna, the Everglades are three times bigger than Rhode Island,” he said. “I’ll need a few more clues.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. The wine was almost gone. She went to the refrigerator and opened another bottle.

Remembering Jenna drunk, Keyes thought: This could be promising.

“I’ve got an idea,” Jenna said as she filled their glasses. “Here, hold this.” Quickly she cleared the top of the coffin, uprooting the vase, collecting the coasters, sweeping the magazines to the carpet. Then she unfastened the clasps and opened the lid. She’d been telling the truth: the coffin was full of newspaper clippings.

Jenna dropped to her knees, the wineglass poised in her left hand. Methodically she began to explore Skip Wiley’s unusual personal library. “A few months back,” she said, “he did a column about a place near the dike.”

Keyes knelt next to her and joined the search. Concentration was impossible, Jenna looking the way she did, smelling so warm and familiar.

“He used to go fishing at this place,” she was saying, “when he was a boy. Not long ago he discovered that they’d built a huge development right there, next to the old dike on the edge of the Glades. A retirement community, they called it. Stocked with three thousand geezers from Jersey. Skip was livid.”

“I remember the column,” Keyes said. “ ‘Varicose Village.’ “

“Right! That’d be a good place to start. Maybe he’s camping out. Planning something big.”

“Oh boy,” Keyes said.

Somehow Jenna located the column amid the random litter of Wiley’s coffin. She slid over to show it to Keyes and practically nestled in his lap. He was not certain if she was doing this out of pity, or just to tease. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. He also wanted to take her in his arms and make her forget all about Skip Wiley.

“The name of the place,” Jenna said, all wine-woozy, “is Otter Creek Village. Three miles off State Road 84, it says here. Near the old bombing range.”

“I can find it.”

“He grew up not far from there,” Jenna said. “And his family had a cabin out at Sawgrass.”

“Okay, I’ll look around out there tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Brian,” Jenna said. She kissed him lightly on the lips and snuggled against his shoulder. Keyes slipped his right arm around her; it was a brotherly little hug, not a very good one. He wished he weren’t so damn nervous. Still, he was thrilled to be there, alone with Jenna and no
crazy
Wiley, just old JT singing “Fire and Rain” on the stereo. Keyes loved the scent of Jenna’s neck, and the sweet narcotic sound of her breathing. He could have stayed that way for hours, hopelessly consumed by her presence, clutching her like a bedtime doll. With Keyes, nothing had changed; as for Jenna, it was hard to tell.

“Brian?”

“Yes, Jenna.”

“I’m getting sleepy.” She looked up from his chest. “I think I’d better go to bed.”

She uncurled like a cat, stretching the lavender leotard in a dozen breathtaking ways. She closed the coffin, yawned, and said, “Well.”

Keyes waited, clinging to hope.

But then she said: “It’s time for you to go home and get some rest.”

“Good idea,” Keyes said with a brave smile.

He drove off in a pinprickly sweat—euphoric, suicidal, utterly confused. All over again, he thought. God help me.

10

Overnight the weather cooled, and a fresh north wind brought an early whisper of winter.

Brian Keyes awoke at dawn, surprised by the dry chill. He slipped into blue jeans, foraged for a sweater, and went outside to crank up the car. The old MG was a marvelous summertime sportster, but on cold mornings the engine balked. Keyes let it warm for a full ten minutes. He used the time as unwisely as possible, reliving the dinner with Jenna and devising romantic strategy.

From Miami he took the turnpike north to Road 84, a clamorous truck route that runs cross-state from Fort Lauderdale. Despite the gray gauze in the sky and the whipping wind, the highway was clogged with boxy Winnebagos, custom vans, and station wagons dragging metallic-purple bass boats—the usual weekend lemmings.

Over the years civilization doggedly had followed Road 84 toward the lip of the Everglades. Heading west, Keyes could chart the march of the chain saws and bulldozers. What once had been misty pastureland and pine barrens were now golden-age trailer parks; medieval cypress stands had been replaced by 7-Elevens and coin laundries. And spreading like a spore across the mottled landscape was every developer’s wet dream, the condominium cluster.

Later as he walked along the dike, hands in his pockets, Keyes marveled at the contrast: to the western horizon, nothing but sawgrass and hammock and silent swamp; to the east, diesel cranes and cinderblock husks and high-rises. Not a hundred yards stood between the backhoes and the last of South Florida’s wilderness. It had been a while since Keyes had driven this far west, and he was startled by what he saw. No wonder Skip Wiley had been so pissed off.

Keyes was nearly two miles from where he’d parked the car when he came to the Otter Creek condominium. He smiled, remembering Wiley’s snide column. “Talk about false advertising. There’s no creek, and there’s damn sure no otters—no live ones, anyway.”

Otter Creek Village consisted of three cheerless buildings set end-to-end at mild angles. Each warren stood five stories high and was painted white with canary-yellow trim. Every apartment featured a tiny balcony that overlooked a notably unscenic parking lot. From the dike Keyes could see a solid acre of shuffle-board courts, crisp formations of aluminum lounge chairs, and a vast ulcer-shaped swimming pool. In the center of the complex, surrounded by a twenty-foot chain-link fence, was an asphalt tennis court with faded lines and no net. The entire recreation area was outfitted with striped table umbrellas, sprouting like festive mushrooms from the concrete.

But Otter Creek was quiet today. No one floundered in the pool, and the shuffleboard courts lay deserted; the cold weather had driven the retirees inside. Keyes finally spotted one old gentleman, bundled in fluorescent rain gear, walking a hyperactive terrier along the banks of a murky manmade canal. “Great fishing in your own backyard!” is what the Otter Creek brochure promised. Keyes didn’t know much about fishing, but he had grave doubts about any creature that could procreate in such fetid water.

On the other side of the dike, in the Glades, the wind sent ripples through the dense saw-grass. Keyes broke out the binoculars and scanned the marsh. Somewhere out there, not far, stood the Wiley family cabin. Jenna had said you could find it with a good pair of field glasses, so Keyes had brought the Nikons.

Before long he spotted a row of snowy egrets, hunched along a tall fence; except it wasn’t a fence, but a rooftop, an angular anomaly among the bush cattails and the scrub. Keyes trotted down the dike for a better look. The closer he got, the more the cabin showed above the swamp. The walls were made of plywood, the roof of corrugated tin. There was a crooked porch, a faded outhouse, and torn screens fluttering in the windows.

Keyes was most impressed by the fact that Wiley’s cabin had been built on cypress stilts, smack in the middle of wetlands. There was no way to get there by foot.

He hiked along the dike until he drew even with the cabin; from the roof the egrets eyed him warily, flaring their nape feathers. Keyes guessed he was still a hundred yards away, with nothing but dark water and lily pads between him and the shack. He trained the Nikons and searched for signs of habitation.

The place looked empty and disused. A rusted padlock hung on the door, and the rails of the porch were plastered with petrified bird droppings. There was no boat anywhere, no smoke from the flue, no trace of a human being.

Except for the boots.

Brian Keyes knelt on the gravel of the dike and fiddled with the focus dial on the binoculars.

They were boots, all right. Brown cowboy boots, brand-new ones, judging from the shine off the toes. The boots lay on a plank beneath the warped door of the outhouse, and from their pristine condition (absent of bird speckles) it was apparent they hadn’t been there very long.

Keyes knew what he had to do now: he had to find a sensible way to get out to Wiley’s cabin. Swimming was out of the question. He had not quit the newspaper business to go frolic in the muck with water moccasins, not even for five hundred bucks a day. So Brian Keyes went looking for a boat.

“Sit down, Garcia.”

Al Garcia settled in a chair. Harold Keefe, the big redheaded detective, cleared his throat, as if he’d been practicing for this. He picked up a copy of the
Miami Sun
and waved it in front of Garcia’s face. “You wanna explain this!”

“Explain what, Hal?”

“This quotation here from Metro-Dade detective Alberto Garcia.
The case is still under investigation: I can’t comment.
You wanna explain that!”

Garcia said, “No comment is what I’m supposed to say. That’s department policy. It’s right there on the fucking bulletin board.”

Hal rolled up the newspaper and slammed it on the desk, as if killing a cockroach. “Not for
this
case it’s not policy. This case is closed, remember?”

Garcia ground his teeth and tried not to say something he’d regret. “Hal, this guy Bloodworth calls me out of the blue last night, okay? Says he’s talked to these two guys, these Shriners, who tell him about their missing pal, Mr. Bellamy. You ‘member Bellamy, don’t you?”

Hal just scowled and waved his hand.

“Anyway,” Garcia said, “this hump Bloodworth says he heard there’s some connection between Bellamy and Sparky Harper. Extortion letters is what he heard. Says he’s writing a story on Bellamy’s disappearance.”

“Oh, and that he did.” Hal fingered the newspaper. “Ran Mr. Bellamy’s picture, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for any information, et cetera. Nothing wrong with that, Garcia. But you didn’t have to say what you said, especially the way you said it.”