The Friendly Urban Neighborhood Kops? Tell me why they gave away a thousand dollars’ worth of Jamaican-flag-colored balloons. Make friends with black kids? I mean, where’s ‘urban’ in the Keys? And, no shit, they had a Special Homicide Investigative Team. Figure out that one.”
Liska’s story reminded me of Sam Wheeler’s story about a Psy-Ops office in Saigon. Someone had had the idea of handing out red-white-and-blue rubber balls to Vietnamese kids, an effort to build loyalty to the invading forces. The kids didn’t want them. Psychological Operations Headquarters was awash in cardboard boxes full of rubber balls. The desk jockeys invented a game. They painted numbers on wastebaskets, put them around their desks. They took turns throwing the balls into the slow-moving ceiling fans, having them ricochet into the cans. Different cans were worth different points. They worked on timing, and velocity,
and angles. They wagered huge amounts of money. They did it for months on end, then returned to the States wearing combat theater service ribbons.
I looked at five empty plates on the table. Chicken Neck Liska had the metabolism of a high-torque blender.
I said: “You don’t eat at your desk twice a week.”
“You’re right I get to Bobalu’s fairly often.”
“Do I dare ask about the cigarette packs taped together?”
“My New Year’s resolution. I start each day with a fixed number, which, this week, means fifty-one. This is my daily ration, this kit. I reduce the count in the packs by one cigarette per week. By July it’ll be one pack, a year from now I’ll be clean. Next year I can resolve to stop chewing on my steering wheel.”
“Something else is bothering you.”
“You bet,” said Liska. “First we got Caroline Street, like my case from a year ago.”
“Okay.”
“Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “a headless body. Ring a bell?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“Two years ago we found that head behind Searstown. The body turned up in Dade. Ice-cold case, closed-casket funeral. Damn fucking strange, two in one day like two I never solved.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“We’ll know for sure if a body wrapped in plastic shows up at Bahia Honda.”
I shuddered. Nine months earlier the body of a friend of mine, an ex-lover, was dumped in a beachside hammock up the Keys. Fortunately, that case had been solved. Liska knew my connection to the dead woman. I couldn’t believe he’d zap me with the memory.
“Now we’re even for the wife remark,” he said.
I gave him that point. “Ever bust Bug Thorsby?”
“Barracuda shit in the ocean?”
“Do me a favor? Or yourself, depending on how it works out. Run his prints back through AFIS? But don’t include
his vital data. Put them through as unknowns.”
“You used to be undetectable on the radar screen. You lived a damn calm life until when, about a year ago? You’ve been in the barrel since then. Now you’re a blip the size of a fucking Humvee. You’re asking law enforcement favors when you should be minimizing your echo.”
“None of it’s been my doing or my choice.”
He stared at me. “Anything else you need to tell me?”
“Yep. You’ve got a stolen-car ring moving vehicles out of Stock Island.”
“Shipping ’em out of there?”
“Or warehousing, repainting. I don’t know. Whatever they do.”
“Where are they hiding ’em, down in the abandoned coal mines?”
“You asked.”
He tapped a knuckle on the newspaper. “I’ve got skin and bones to worry about. Dead humans. Plastic and metal come later.”
Liska shocked me. He picked up both tabs.
I pedaled into a fifteen-knot north wind, stair-stepped side streets, wove my way through traffic. Working off a late breakfast—shredded beef, yellow rice, black beans, two pints of tea. I’d gained five by eating one pound of food. Disorienting scenery, sharp glare, a tint to the foliage. I tasted grit in the air, smelled exhaust fumes floating down from Fort Myers. I’d hoped that the wind might have ignored the embargo, blown the haze to Cuba.
I thought, The dirty yellow fog may be self-induced.
I’d delivered prints and film to Liska. After I invoiced Monroe County, with an extra whack for working Sunday, the Stock Island decapitate-and-drop job was over for me. Gone, behind me.
Every day in January two events coincided. The glut of today’s visitors arrived by vehicle from Miami. And the first wave of yesterday’s tourists—after shaking hangovers and recoiling at the price of gas—started back up the Overseas Highway. The two flocks crossed paths at Truman and White just after lunch hour. One beer truck turning left could jam traffic back to Bahia Honda. I stayed away. I rode Francis past the cemetery to avoid the noontime traffic jam.
I found Heidi Norquist in front of the house, sleeping in a silver Jaguar XKR convertible. The cloth top was up, the
windows down. Her pink headphones hung from the rearview mirror. A pink pastel knit shirt. Today’s gold chain a fraction wider than yesterday’s. A glistening drool at die side of her mouth informed me that she wasn’t feigning slumber.
I wasn’t going to wake her. She looked peaceful. I didn’t have the energy to deal with the flip side of her charm.
I wanted to shower, then walk to Sunbeam Market to buy the
Key West Citizen
and
Miami Herald.
The
Citizen’s
page-two Crime Report usually was worth the price of the paper. I wanted to see the front page this time, to see how they’d handled the murder on Caroline.
A subdued voice on the message machine: “Hi, this is Heidi Norquist. I’m falling asleep in my car, in case you didn’t recognize me, so this is probably the best way to reach you. First, I’d like to apologize for yesterday, but I can do that to your face, when we talk. Second, would you please wake me up? Pound on the fender, or something. Even if you don’t want to talk to me, I’ve got a two o’clock hair appointment that I don’t want to miss.”
She had a solid one-hour nap ahead of her.
Mornings tend to cool temperatures in winter months. Cold air in the outdoor shower, while invigorating, inspires quickness. It had been weeks since I’d enjoyed midday comfort in the rain locker. It made me wish I’d replaced the exterior stereo speakers that long ago had rotted. I could stand Miles Davis under the mango tree, or something more lively—Buena Vista Social Club, or Mac Rebennack’s New Orleans-style whorehouse piano. The early-afternoon sunlight gave elegant tones to limbs and fronds, shadow angles and reflections I seldom saw. The constant breeze kept it in motion. As minutes passed, the haze faded. Just as I suspected: a personal problem.
This was my second shower since taking pictures on Stock Island—I’d done a major hose-down after dining with Teresa and Marnie, but hadn’t felt as though I’d fully washed the filth. This time did the trick. I was thankful to have the mess twenty hours behind me. I’ve always said
that I couldn’t have been a schoolteacher, a restaurateur, or a police officer. The stress on good days would eat me. No telling how I’d cope with the bad, but this was a fine sample. Years ago I had gravitated to my laid-back tropical lifestyle, my no-boss, no-bureaucrats job with mental survival in mind . . .
I kicked open the stall door so damp air could escape, toweled off, dried my hair, stepped into my flip-flops. I swung open the rear-porch door. Heidi sat there, facing away, perched so close to a chair edge I feared her petite ass would go floorward in an instant. No padding to cushion the drop. She tickled her upper lip with a bottle of Jolt Cola. I wrapped the towel before she swiveled and nodded hello.
Blue jeans, barefoot, the belly-pack. Red-tinted skin from yesterday’s jog. Her first words were to ask to use the bathroom. She trailed a cloud of high-ticket scent as she walked through the living room. She faked having to get her bearings to find the John door, scoped out my furnishings, the wall decorations, the books. She left the bathroom door open. I realized she’d gone in there to brush her teeth.
I went to the bedroom and pulled on shorts. I envisioned Butt Dunwoody and Teresa Barga simultaneously arriving, ringing the bell. Odd fear gripped me; I considered a plausible explanation for Heidi’s presence. Why do I dread social strife more than an attack by teenaged hoods?
Heidi began talking before she was through spitting out toothpaste, half-shouting so her voice would carry: “I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking . . .” She exited the bathroom, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, then tucking her toothbrush into her belly-pack. “. . . the way you looked at me when you came down there to photograph Mr. Engram’s body . . .”
“The way I looked at you?”
“He doesn’t recall his reaction,” she said to the wall. Then, to me, “Yes.”
We faced each other in my living room, ten feet apart, a slowly rotating ceiling fan between us. “Enlighten me.”
“When you were taking pictures, when I skated by and asked you to stop. Didn’t you think I was unpleasant?”
Get her out of here. “Yes, you were unpleasant.”
“Oh, good, he’s normal. Did you wonder why?”
“Assholes are everywhere.”
“You don’t know . . . Oh, fuck it. I can’t control your opinion. Never mind.” She began to pace the floor. “After Butler found Mr. Engram, the detective, the bossy black man, made everyone wait until the photographer arrived. You showed up. I didn’t know you worked for the police. You stared at me as if you knew, or you thought you . . . because I told you to go away from the construction . . . Do you think I knew Mr. Engram was in there dead?”
“Crossed my mind.”
She stopped pacing, threw her arms up. “He thinks I knew.”
I said, “Something else crossed my mind.”
She stared at a framed Tom Szuter drawing on the west wall. “What?”
“That maybe you wondered why I was hanging around. That maybe you asked someone to hurry me away.”
She inhaled deeply. “I may look like a stereotype, Mr. Rutledge. Butler Dunwoody, my partner, doesn’t help my image. He likes people to think that I exist only for his pleasure. No other reason. But here’s the deal. I’m not just a receptacle for his unit. I know murderers don’t hang around victims taking snapshots. Even the weird ones in movies take only one picture, then get the hell out. Come to think of it, Butler’s more my possession than I am his.”
“The word ‘partner’ has two meanings.”
“Think of both.”
I gestured to offer her a chair, then sat in my oversized bamboo rocker. “Where you from, originally?”
“Wisconsin. Farm country, dairies. Boring with a capital
B.
That stands for Beer.” She began to sit but chose to keep pacing.
“On Sunday you were listening to a Bonnie Raitt CD
that was released about the time you were born. How did you—”
“I had six older brothers and sisters. Same mom, four different fathers. Lots of influences around the house. I liked Bonnie’s sense of independence.”
I said, “Fun time, growing up?”
“I stayed busy. I dated older guys in high school. They all owned cars.”
“Reasonable criterion.”
“Even an ugly car is a warmer place for sex than a frozen hayfield.”
“Sounds like paradise,” I said.
“We did the best we could. I was basically trailer trash.”
“And you broke free.”
“Yes. I did it myself. I got straight-A grades, a partial scholarship to the University of Michigan, an off-campus job, a marketing management degree. I left school owing twenty-two thousand in student loans. But everyone told me I’d succeed in the business world. They told me I had savvy and ‘money hair,’ the color of hair you see in the wealthy parts of big cities.”
My motorcycle helmet lay on a chair near the door. She patted it and said, “One of my old boyfriends had a Harley. He’d take me riding. Man, I loved that, but it broke down every time we rode. What kind is yours?”
“Somebody paid off a debt, gave me an old Kawasaki 400.”
She sneered. “Not all that classy.”
“It wasn’t my choice. If someone builds a strip mall in Wisconsin, does anybody complain?”
“People don’t have to drive so far for haircuts and beer and chip dip.”
“You miss it?” I said.
“Did you read the paper yesterday? The wind chill Friday was thirty-eight below. A truck stopped on a bridge and froze in place. They found people in their cars, stiff and blue.”
“Key West covers less than six square miles.”
She pushed her hair behind one ear. It fell loose immediately. “How long have you been here?”
“Since 1975.”
“What month?” she said. “That’s the year my best friend was born.”
Slap me in the head with your youthfulness. “My point is, on an island this small, every change is big.”
The hair thing again. “Didn’t I say I wasn’t fucking stupid?”
The charm.
She said, “The whole island suffered an electrical failure this morning. Isn’t it quiet when the pool pumps quit?”
“Did you meet Butler in college?”
“I met him three years ago. His partner hired me to run their office. A week later the partner sold his half of the company to Butler. They’d just developed an eighteen-home subdivision south of Jacksonville. I figured my job was out the door, too. Turned out, I became Butler’s top salesperson. I learned the game. I kicked ass. I was the best closer in St. John’s County.”
“So you’re expert at getting to the point?”
“I’m there. In the end, on my commissions and a couple investments, and after the development company got tangled up in two lawsuits, I made more money than Butler Dunwoody. That’s why I’m so interested in success in Key West.”
“It was your downstroke?”
“And it’s poorly leveraged. It’s a situation of win okay, lose big. Do you think I killed that man?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know a single fact about it, except the man’s name and what we saw down there. I’ve got no reason to talk about any of it, and tomorrow’s another day.”
“So you’re happy to shut down your brain and have no opinions at all?”
“As far as the pictures I take, I try not to dwell on them. The police have their jobs to do. I did mine. I have my opinion about construction of instant shopping arcades in
Old Town. But my opinion will not stop your project.”