Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (5 page)

Yep, they were sleeping together.

I said, “All I know is that he’s the only reason the nursery is what it is today. Back when I was playing ball, I couldn’t really take care of the place. After I left the Dolphins and started my charter business, Boggy and I were both too busy to give the nursery the attention it deserved. Then I lucked out and got thrown in prison.”

“Boggy told me about that. He said you were eventually cleared of everything, even got a special commendation from the governor.”

“Yeah, but it cost me two years, and I almost lost this place,” I said. “The only good thing about it, Boggy spent that time getting the nursery back in shape. Worked his butt off—pruned, planted, put in new irrigation, went out and found people who would pay top dollar for exotic palm trees. Made Chasteen Palm Nursery profitable again.”

I poured the hot milk in a mug, mixed the coffee with it, and poured in way more sugar than is good for me.

I looked at Karly Altman and said, “You’re pretty good, you know that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was the one started out asking the questions, but you turned it around on me. Now back to you and Boggy,” I said. “I remember that he went down to Miami a few weeks ago. I didn’t know he had gone by Fairchild Gardens.”

Karly found a strainer in one of the drawers. She poured the bush tea through it, filling two mugs. The stuff left behind in the strainer looked like soggy lawn trimmings.

“Yeah, Boggy just showed up unannounced one day. He was asking the tour guides so many questions that they finally directed him to me. He told me about you and the nursery, and it sounded so intriguing that I had to come have a look for myself. Plus,” she said, “I found him quite intriguing as well. I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”

“That’s because there is no one quite like him,” I said. “Last of his kind and all that.”

She picked up the mugs and stepped for the screen door that opened onto the backyard and, beyond it, the nursery. She stopped and looked at me.

“Do you really believe that?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “What’s not to believe?”

“I don’t know, it’s just that after I met Boggy and he told me, you know, about his background, I started checking into it. Even called a professor friend at the University of Miami, head of the Caribbean Studies department. She said there is no way that he’s a full-blooded Taino. She said there are no more Taino. They died out years ago, way back in the sixteenth century.”

I held the screen door open for her. She stepped outside.

“Better not let Boggy hear you say that,” I said. “He tends to get bent out of shape when people tell him he’s extinct.”

She smiled.

“OK,
Guamikeni,
” she said.

She turned and walked away, the smell of Boggy’s infernal bush tea lingering in her wake.

I went down to the boathouse with my coffee and got out the cast net and took it to the end of the dock. The sun was up now, and I could see fish working in the shallow waters of the lagoon.

After a couple of really lame throws, in which the net collapsed and caught nothing but oyster shells, I finally hauled in a half dozen mullet. I took them to the boathouse and filleted them in the sink of the kitchen I had built just the week before.

While the kitchen in the mainhouse was a perfectly fine kitchen, it had one major drawback—it was stuck on the back of the house and I couldn’t look out on the water while I cooked. And since looking out on the water is just about as pleasurable a thing as I can imagine, along with cooking and eating and drinking and, well, that other thing, I had moved around some storage lockers and thrown out some clutter and created a kitchen in the boathouse.

Nothing fancy, but I was proud of it. A rehabilitated Viking stove that ran off propane tanks. A secondhand refrigerator with a quirky icemaker. For a counter, I had lain two-by-eights across a couple of sawhorses. The cabinets came from Target—a dozen plastic crates nailed to the wall. I was feeling somewhat
slighted that
Architectural Digest
hadn’t called to schedule the photo shoot.

By the time Barbara got out of bed, I was putting the final touches on LaDonna Benedict—poached eggs on fried green tomatoes topped off with homemade Hollandaise. I rolled strips of mullet in cornmeal, fried them in peanut oil, and artfully arranged them around the tomatoes and eggs. I don’t like space to go to waste on a plate so I gave us each a healthy mound of grits. Not just any grits, but Rockland Plantation stone-ground white grits that I have to order all the way from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, because the best grits that grocery stores in Florida can come up with are lesser grits, from Dixie Lily or Quaker Oats. Rockland Plantation grits are grits with gumption. You cook them in milk for almost an hour, and they make other grits taste like pablum.

We sat in the big Adirondack chairs at the end of the dock, eating off wicker trays. I pulled a bottle of champagne from the ice bucket and fiddled with the wire basket around the cork.

“Are we celebrating something?” asked Barbara.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “The fact that we are sitting here. Just the two of us. Enjoying each other’s splendid company.”

“Works for me. Especially since it might be my last free-and-easy gasp for the foreseeable future.”

I stopped fiddling with the cork.

“Look, if this is about me going down to Jamaica . . .”

“It’s not.”

“It’s not?”

“No. Believe it or not, Zack darling, there are things aside from you that do occasionally torment me, and one of them is called Aaron Hockelmann. He is flying in tomorrow.”

Aaron Hockelmann was owner and cofounder of Hockelmann-Glass, or H + G as it is known in the magazine business. His publishing empire, which started in Germany with a stable of racy newsweeklies and gobbled its way through Europe, had recently been amping up its U.S. presence, buying titles left and right, and launching several more. Hockelmann—the trades called him “Aaron the Baron”—had been courting Barbara for
the past year with offers to buy Orb Communications and install her as vice president of a new travel division at H + G. He had privately suggested to her that he was thinking about launching a new travel magazine, one that would go head to head with the likes of
Condé Nast Traveler
and
Travel & Leisure.

It was a tantalizing scenario and one that had caused Barbara no small amount of conflict. While
Tropics
had won all sorts of awards for design and editorial content, it remained smallish in terms of circulation, hovering around 150,000. It lacked the necessary oomph to pull in the most desirable big-money advertisers, the “non-endemics,” as Barbara called them, clients like brand-name vodkas or big clothing-store chains, who would sign on to buy a year’s worth of back covers or multiple full pages at the front of the book.

Instead, Barbara and her sales staff were forever on the road, flogging the product, trying to cobble together co-op ads from small hoteliers or kissing up to Caribbean tourism ministers in hopes they might loosen their islands’ advertising purse strings. For all Barbara’s resiliency, it occasionally wore her down.

And now here came Aaron the Baron, dangling a bucket of money and the allure of an international stage. While Hockelmann promised Barbara that he would leave
Tropics
and the rest of Orb Communications intact, that hadn’t been his style in previous acquisitions. Grabbing the gold ring meant Barbara would lose control of something she had created and built and truly loved.

I popped the cork and reached for Barbara’s glass.

“Just a wee dribble for me,” Barbara said.

“I don’t believe in wee dribbles,” I said, filling her glass and mine.

I took a healthy sip. I didn’t roll it around on my tongue or let it rest at the back of my mouth so I could savor a hint of pear or lemongrass. I just sucked it down. It went well with the fish and the eggs.

It was fake champagne, actually, something from Spain that had cost me twelve dollars. It was the perfect fake champagne
for swilling on a dock on a hot day in September while you are admiring the love of your life.

Barbara was twisting a strand of hair around her right index finger the way she always does when she is thinking hard about something. Maybe twisting the hair massages a point in her scalp that connects with a nerve ending that leads to her prefrontal cortex and helps her think. Whatever, it is one of about a zillion things she does that endears her to me, and sitting there watching her and drinking good, cheap, fake champagne, I was a happy man.

“Do you know what I am thinking?” Barbara said.

I put my fingers on my temples, closed my eyes, and pretended to concentrate.

“Yes,” I said. “You are thinking that as a reward for this most excellent breakfast you would like to take me by the hand, gratefully lead me to the house, and jump my bones.”

“You’re a lousy mind reader.”

“I wasn’t trying to read your mind, I was trying to plant a suggestion.”

“Lousy gardener, too,” she said. “Actually, I was sitting here thinking that I really must be an awful, heartless, self-centered mercenary who cares only about her own well-being and bottom line.”

“Little harsh on yourself, aren’t you?”

She shrugged.

“In the wake of all that happened yesterday the only thing that really concerns me today, aside from your leaving, of course, is that I did not get a chance to actually meet Darcy Whitehall.”

“Which undoubtedly would have led to you charming him and him signing a long-term contract to advertise in
Tropics
and the world would be a happier place.”

“Undoubtedly, because if Darcy Whitehall came on board then other big players would surely follow and I wouldn’t be so tempted by the likes of Aaron Hockelmann,” she said. “And here I am, with so many larger things swirling all about, and all I can think about is my own puny circumstances. Am I awful or what?”

“No, not at all.”

“Oh good,” she said. “I didn’t really think so.”

She took a tiny sip of champagne. I finished off my glass and poured some more.

“Don’t worry, Toots, I can grease the skids for you with Darcy Whitehall. After all, I am now one of his bodyguards.”

“Toots?”

“Bodyguard talk. I’m getting into character.”

Barbara chewed her lip, studying me.

“That’s something I don’t understand, Zack. Bodyguards are big and thick and dumb and like to play with guns. Since when are you bodyguard material?”

“It’s nothing I’ve ever aspired to, believe me, but Monk needed help in a hurry.”

“So what will you do actually? Shadow Whitehall wherever he goes and keep the bad guys at bay?”

“Something like that, I guess. It’s not like I’ve ever done this before. And Monk didn’t give me a lot of details. He was anxious to get out of there.”

“There was no one else he could get?”

“Guess not. He says it might take a couple of weeks to find the right person who can do it full time. I told him I’d fill in until then.”

“But why you? Why not some rent-a-cop or something? There must be tons of them out there looking for work.”

“Monk trusts me. We go way back.”

Barbara looked out at the lagoon. Then she looked at me.

“You keep saying that. ‘We go way back.’ But you haven’t seen the guy in what, seven or eight years . . .”

“About that long, yeah.”

“And he suddenly shows up out of nowhere and asks you for a favor, a really huge favor, and you drop everything to run off and . . .”

“You’re still not right with this, are you?”

“I’m trying, Zack, I’m trying. But you have to see it from my standpoint.”

“Which is?”

“Some stranger waltzes in and you waltz off.”

I sipped some champagne. It had gotten a tad too warm and lost some of its fizz. I put it down.

“Let me tell you about Monk,” I said. “He was like a big brother to me. He grew up poor, in the Panhandle. His parents pretty much abandoned him and he got into all kinds of trouble. Went straight into the army out of high school and when he got out he played junior-college ball somewhere out in the Midwest. He was good, good enough to land a full ride at Florida.

“He was six or seven years older than the rest of us. At first, I wasn’t so hot about him being my roommate. I mean, he was this old guy. It was like living with a semi-adult. But I learned a lot from him, a whole lot.”

“Look, Zack, you don’t have to explain. Really, I . . .”

“I want to explain. I want you to understand. Because Monk and I
do
go way back. There
is
a bond between teammates. Doesn’t matter that we haven’t seen each other for years.”

I picked up my glass of champagne and dumped what was left in the water.

“I went to his first wedding. It was the year before he stopped playing ball. Married a New Orleans Saints cheerleader named Rina. I was one of the groomsmen. Hell of a wedding, that was. Then they split up after a few years, and I kind of lost track of him after that.

“Word was he’d fallen on some pretty hard times. When that kind of thing happens, a guy sometimes just burrows down, doesn’t want his old friends to come knocking. Now he seems to be pulling everything back together. If he needs help I’ll give it to him.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then Barbara said, “I’m sorry. I never meant to question your friendship. I know you are loyal to the core.”

She leaned across the table and kissed me. The sun was beating down hard now. The lagoon was flat. Not even the hint of a breeze.

“There’s another reason Monk asked me to go down there,” I said. “It’s probably because he knows I don’t have any . . .”

I stopped.

Barbara said, “You don’t have any what?”

“What I started to say was, I don’t have any attachments.”

“Well, it’s true,” Barbara said. “You don’t.”

“It’s not true,” I said. “There’s you.”

Barbara smiled. She reached out and took my hand.

“Yes, there
is
me,” she said. “But I don’t ever want you to feel as if I am tying you down.”