Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (10 page)

I didn’t say anything.

“That sounds awful, I know, but he stuck me with a lot when he left, Zack. I spent the first five years paying off debts that were in both of our names, the next five getting out from under things he hadn’t even told me about. Man had more secrets than the CIA. Can’t imagine what kind of shape those other two wives of his are in, not if he did them like he did me.”

“You know how I’d get in touch with them?”

“Yeah, I’ve got their numbers laying around here somewhere. Might take me a while to put my fingers on them. They both used to call me every now and again, asking if I’d seen
him after he’d run out on them. We should have formed a club or something.”

“Monk have any kids that you know of?”

“Think he had a couple by the last one. Annie, her name is. Lives somewhere around Tampa. The two of them were still married, I think. She called here a few months ago, wondered if I might have heard from Monk. Poor thing was broke. I wound up sending her a little something just so she could make her bills.”

“Anyone else I need to get in touch with?”

“Not that I can think of,” Rina said. “I mean, besides his old teammates, but you know most of them. Then there were some of his old Army buddies. Monk was still pretty tight with one of them back when we were married. Connigan. Scotty Connigan. That was his name. But I wouldn’t know how to find him.”

“Well, you come across any numbers, keep ’em handy. I’ll get back in touch with you so I can notify folks about it,” I said.

“Look, Zack, don’t you worry about that. I’ll make the calls,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve got enough on your hands.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. And I’ll see about a memorial service or something. Guess it should be in Florida, with his wife and kids,” Rina said, her voice breaking. “Hold on, let me get some goddam Kleenex.”

When she came back on, she said: “Never thought I could shed tears again over that son of a bitch. But no one deserves to go like that, Zack. No one. Not even Monk DeVane.”

We said our good-byes and I told her I would call in the next day or two, as soon as I knew anything more.

It was late and I knew I should sleep, but I was wound tighter than the knob on a cheap alarm clock. I thought a shower might do some good, relax me a little bit.

I got undressed and stepped in the tub and turned on the spigot full blast. When things got steamy I yanked on the shower valve and let the needles of water beat against my neck and shoulders. Not as good as a deep-tissue massage, but not bad.

I stretched and got out the kinks and did some yoga neck rolls that Barbara had shown me. Said they were good for relieving stress. They worked. Sorta. But if Barbara had been in the shower with me then we could have engaged ourselves in a stress-reliever that would have worked a whole lot better.

I dried off, stepped into the living room, and tried all of Barbara’s numbers again. Nothing doing.

I went back to the bedroom. There was an AC unit in one of the windows, but I didn’t turn it on. It was warm out but not unbearable, with a breeze off the ocean coming through the front screen door, moving through the cottage, feeling almost cool against my just-out-of-the-shower skin.

The lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling was confounding a couple of moths. I turned it off and the moths flitted away.

I lay on the bed in the dark, face up, arms at my side. I closed my eyes. I thought tranquil thoughts. I visualized Redfish Lagoon, behind my house in LaDonna, its surface smooth and unruffled.

So calm. So peaceful.

Such a load of horseshit.

I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around me, and stepped next door, to check out Monk’s place.

The layout on the other side was just like on mine—same generic furniture, same color curtains and paint on the walls—but it bore Monk’s presence. A pair of worn running shoes just inside the door, a T-shirt and gym shorts draped on the doorknob, as if Monk had gone for a run and was letting things air out for the next time. A quart bottle of drinking water sat on the coffee table, uncapped, a few swallows left in it.

Monk had just stepped away. And then he was gone for good. Poor bastard.

There wasn’t much to see. No books or magazines scattered about. Monk had never been much of a reader. In the kitchen, dishes were washed and stacked neatly in the drying rack. A towel was folded over the faucet.

I looked inside the refrigerator. Empty, except for more bottles of water, a carton of eggs, a withered mango, and a plateful of something covered with aluminum foil. I decided it didn’t bear investigating.

I stepped into Monk’s bedroom and turned on the light. The bed was made, its corners tucked tight. The room was tidy as could be.

I opened the closet door. There were shirts and pants on hangers, including two pink Libido polos, like the one Monk
was wearing the last time I saw him. I found a couple of white polos that looked as if they’d fit me, along with one of his old scrimmage jerseys from the Saints, and took them off the hangers. I tried on a pair of khaki pants. A bit loose around the waist but they’d do. I took one of Monk’s leather belts, too. A blue Kelty backpack hung on the clothes rack. It was empty. I stuck everything in it.

I rummaged around in a wooden dresser that sat at one end of the closet and found a pair of khaki shorts and some bathing trunks. I added them to my borrowed wardrobe. I let Monk’s underwear stay where it was. It didn’t really creep me out to wear the shirts and pants of a dead man, but I drew the line at underwear whether the guy was dead or alive. I’d free-ball it until I could get to a store and buy some of my own.

The bottom drawer of the dresser doubled as Monk’s filing cabinet. It was filled with manila folders and crammed with papers. I saw old bank notices and car-payment booklets. I’d go through it later. Maybe I’d come across something that would be helpful in settling Monk’s affairs, a life-insurance policy or a secret savings account that might help out that ex-wife of his in Tampa. I really wasn’t counting on finding anything like that. Still, it couldn’t hurt to sort through things.

I peeked in the bathroom. Monk’s Dopp kit sat open on the formica bureau. I recalled reading somewhere that the Dopp in Dopp kit came from the name of a German immigrant to Chicago in the early 1900s, Charles Doppelt, whose nephew was in the leather-goods business and named that particular style of small zippered bag after his beloved uncle. Then again, maybe the nephew didn’t really think too much of the old guy. Why else would he attach his moniker to something made to carry everything from jock-itch salve to hemorrhoid cream.

I wondered what Charles Doppelt might think of someone who went snooping in someone else’s Dopp kit. He’d probably turn up his German immigrant nose at it. Screw him. I fingered my way through Monk’s private stuff: dental floss, tweezers, toenail clipper, travel-size containers of talcum powder and aftershave, aspirin, Maalox. The usual.

I stepped into the bedroom and stopped at a small desk by
the door. I hadn’t noticed it on my way in, but sitting square in the middle of the desk was a black, faux-leather organizer, one of those day-by-day calendar/journal things. Gold letters, embossed on the front cover, read “Ideal Executive Daybook.”

I picked it up and flipped through it. A newspaper clipping fell out. It was a month old, from the
Jamaica Gleaner,
a page of legal ads. Someone, Monk I presumed, had circled one of the announcements in black ink. Under the heading “Notice of Ownership,” it read: “Regarding Township 14, Range 7 West, Section 24, Trelawney Parish, 254 hectares, as bounded by Old Dutch Road and Fishkill Morass; notice is hereby given that said parcel is fully and lawfully owned by Libido Resorts, LLC, in accordance with all covenants of the Commonwealth. All other claims hereupon are rendered null and void, and all unlawful occupants therein are hereby instructed to vacate said parcel.”

Sounded like fancy language for an eviction notice. I stuck the clipping in the back of the daybook and finished flipping through it. The pages were stiff, as if the organizer had been seldom used. There were only a dozen or so entries, dating back to early May, which would have been shortly after Monk first arrived at Libido. They were written in a neat, deliberate hand, in the same black ink that had circled the legal ad in the
Gleaner
. Phone numbers, to-do lists, that sort of thing.

Two entries caught my eye, if for no other reason than Monk had marked them in big letters and set them off with asterisks. One was for just a couple of days earlier:

****K.O.****

MARTHA BRAE
1019 CHRIST CHURCH LANE

K.O. The only thing I knew that that stood for was knockout. And who was Martha Brae?

The last entry was for today, September 6. It listed my flight number and arrival time. Beneath that was written:

****EQUINOX INVESTMENTS****
314 DOVER RD MB

I’d never heard of Equinox Investments, but I was guessing MB stood for Montego Bay. Brilliant deduction, Zacklock. I stuck the daybook in the blue Kelty backpack along with the clothes I had taken from Monk’s closet.

Maybe the entries meant something, maybe they didn’t. They were strings, the only strings I had. Might as well tug on them and see if they unraveled something.

I slept better than I had any right to and woke up feeling like a new man. A new man who was famished.

Darcy Whitehall had mentioned something about breakfast. Wonder when he liked to eat it. I glanced at the clock. A little after six. A tad early for civilized dining. How to kill time until mealtime? Life’s most pertinent question.

I put on Monk’s bathing trunks and the old Saints scrimmage jersey, slipped into his running shoes, and set out on a slow jog across the Libido grounds. Ten minutes later, after following a dirt path that wound down a hill, I reached a secluded stretch of sand along a pocket-sized cove. It was separated from the rest of the resort by VW Bug–sized boulders that jutted out from the shore. The sun was still low, the water dark and opaque, not yet flaunting its tropical striations.

A stately arc of coconut palms rimmed the beach just beyond the high-tide line. Contrary to Boggy’s assessment of my taxonomical knowledge, I was slowly learning which kinds of palm trees were which. I couldn’t spout off genus and species, but I could look at the trees along the beach and know that they were not just any coconut palms. They were Jamaica Tall Palms.

Used to be Jamaica Talls flourished throughout Florida, but
lethal yellowing disease has pretty much done them in. Nowadays when you see a coconut palm in Florida it is most likely the shorter, stubbier Malayan Greens or Malayan Golds, perfectly decent palm trees, but lacking the oh-wow factor enjoyed by the statuesque eighty-foot-tall beauties along this beach.

As I stood there admiring the scene, a voice from behind startled me: “Welcome to my beach.”

I turned to see Ali Whitehall smiling at me from the porch of a stilt house nestled in a thicket of pepper trees just a few yards away. I had walked right past it, but hadn’t even seen the place, so much was it a part of the landscape.

“Your beach?” I said.

“Yes, Ali’s Beach. That’s what Father named it when he bought the property.” She pointed to a bluff at the far side of the beach. “Way over there, past the promontory, where you can’t see it, that’s Alan’s Beach. He’s on one side, I’m on the other. The prodigal son, the black-sheep daughter. Fitting, I suppose.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.

“Out for your morning constitutional?”

“Something like that,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet your father for breakfast. What time does he usually get started?”

“Oh, he’s not much of a morning person. Sleeps in ’til at least nine, then works out for an hour. Never breakfasts before eleven,” she said. “But I’ve got a pot of tea going. If you’d like some.”

“I’ll take my caffeine any way I can get it,” I said.

I stepped onto the porch and followed Ali inside the house. It was a small place, a great room/kitchen downstairs with a loft bedroom above it. She walked back to the stove and I looked around. Bolts of fabric were stacked everywhere, bright colors and wild prints, with swatches of this and that flung over chair-backs. An easel displayed sketches of women’s gowns and dresses. More sketches were scattered on the hardwood floor. A trio of mannequins stood by a window, two of them draped in exotic, floor-length ensembles, the other in something brief and frilly.

Ali returned with two big mugs of tea. We sat at opposite ends of a rattan couch.

“Interesting stuff,” I said, nodding to the mannequins. “You have your own line of clothing?”

“I wish,” said Ali. “So far it’s a private collection. Just for me. I’ve been after Father to let me open a boutique here on-property, but he hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for the idea.” She made a face, sighed. “Figures.”

“Well, I know of at least one customer you could count on. Barbara couldn’t stop talking about that outfit you were wearing the other day in Gainesville. Had the circumstances been a little different, I think she would have bought it off your back.”

Ali’s face lit up.

“Oh, really? How sweet of her,” she said. “Barbara’s your wife, right?”

“No, just friends,” I said. “Well, more than friends, but . . .”

“No need to explain,” said Ali. She smiled. She looked at my shoes, my shorts, my shirt. “You’re wearing Monk’s clothes.”

“Yeah. Lost my luggage. Had to borrow something of his.”

“I saw you coming down the hill, and at first I thought you were him.” She closed her eyes. Then she opened them and squared around on the couch to face me. “Monk and I, we were together you know.”

“Together?”

She gave me a look. It finally sunk in.

“Oh,” I said.

“I thought maybe he’d mentioned it.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

A flicker across her face. Disappointment? Whatever, she recovered quickly.

“We’d been seeing each other for several weeks. No one knew about it. Monk was adamant that no one find out. Especially not Father.”