Party time. Any time, any afternoon, everybody parties in Key West.
I rolled my Cannondale around back, snapped its Kryptonite lock to the stainless-cable I’d strung around my mango tree. I tossed the weather tarp over it. The neighbor’s springer spaniel whimpered through the fence, stuck its nose out for a forefinger scratch, five seconds of friendship. Its eyes more alive, more intelligent than the Goth girl’s. More alive than many downtown. The poor dog worried about the pot fog.
I stepped onto my porch, slung my helmet onto the porcelain-top table. “Problem, Butler?”
“I’m everybody’s bum. You’re everybody’s hero.” He tilted back the malt-liquor bottle. A half dozen drops leaked out the side of his mouth, dribbled down his shirt.
“Self-pity’s an ugly ride, Dunwoody. You look better in a red convertible.”
“My main backer is pulling out. The convertible’s on the block, along with my project, my home, my other vehicle, my ass, and my future. It’s all toast.”
“Why’s it so special, every damned day, to be on top of the world?”
“The rest of the world sucks,” he said. “Better to be above it all.”
“The bank give a reason?”
“She thinks I can’t do it without Mercer Holloway’s blessing, or without Donovan Cosgrove running interference with the locals. She thinks I’m useless without somebody else’s horsepower.”
I knew who he meant, but didn’t want to let on. “She . . . ?”
“Tits on Sticks, the eighth wonder of her own little world.”
Butler had failed the sensitivity-training course.
“Reason?” I said.
Another hit of the sauce. “She said I was ordering her up like a Happy Meal. She wants to cut her losses.”
“With you or the project?”
“She begged me to write her into this thing. I could’ve done it without her. Halfway into final structuring, I said no to two banks in Jacksonville. They got offended. They won’t come back on. I let my dick sign a contract. Now it’s about to get chopped off.”
“Why’s it so easy for her to pull out? Doesn’t she lose big?”
“She writes a check every week. She stops writing checks and somehow the job gets completed, she gets everything back, a pro-rated chunk of future profits.”
“Pro-rated on her contribution until she quits writing checks?”
“Right,” said Butler. “Smart deal, eh?”
“If it folds up, everything stops forever, what happens?”
“She loses everything.”
“So she’s banking on the idea that you’ll bring in another investor?”
“Like I said, cutting her losses. Who can blame her?” Butler slugged one more mouthful of malt liquor. “She’s playing it safe.”
“I heard in a movie one time, ‘Playing it safe’s the most dangerous thing a girl can do.’ Something’s screwy.”
“Righto,” said Dunwoody. “My brain when I agreed to the crap.”
“When she came over here that day—if you’ll allow me to bring up the subject . . .”
“No problem. I have fond memories of the event . . .”
“. . . I got the impression she’d go to the edge for you. She loved you, the money be damned.”
“She worships money,” he said.
“I don’t think so. I think she just wants to kick you in the ass.”
“At this stage I’m supposed to find another investor?”
“Do the damned thing,” I said. “The way it’s set up now, it might be an unenforceable contract. If you brought in another investor, Heidi could recoup. But you could stipulate that she be shut out of future profits.”
“Not bad for starters. Now all we need is a deep pocket.”
“Mercer’s daughter.”
“My boy Donovan’s in a serious tight. She’ll be spending all her money on lawyers.”
“The other one,” I said.
“Married to dipshit? No, thanks.”
“A lot of investors are married to unpleasant people. Why should it make a difference?”
“It just does. That fucker gives me the willies.”
On one hand, with Mercer’s horsepower gone, Heidi’s departure from the deal made sense. On the other hand it was weird timing, taking into account the fact that Donovan drove down Caroline Street last Sunday, past Heidi on her Rollerblades, and me about to be jumped by thugs.
Had I just implicated Heidi in a convoluted plot?
The phone rang. I left Dunwoody to his last six ounces of malt liquor. It was Teresa: “Can you meet me at Blue Heaven? I found a guy from Boynton Beach you might want to talk to.”
The cop, Dexter Hayes’s ex-partner. The owner of the hot Maxima, Bug Thorsby’s last ride.
“I want to talk,” I said. “But I don’t want to go to Heaven for a few days.”
She covered the phone mouthpiece. A silent moment.
She came back on. “How about P.T.’s?”
I said: “Five minutes.”
I returned to the porch. Butler Dunwoody had left his empty bottle and a half-inch roach. A few years back I would’ve recycled both objects. I cleaned up, checked my two messages. Tommy Tucker said he’d call back. Sam said: “Pick you up at nine-thirty. Pack a bag. Wear darks. If you want the skeeters to leave you alone, don’t take a shower today or yesterday or the day before. If you want the bad guys to leave you alone, bring your knife collection.”
Dexter Hayes’s ex-partner owned the stolen Maxima.
Hayes, with his shifting moods, had told me to take a hike, to quit playing cop. Then his ex-partner, the car owner, had agreed to sit with me, to answer questions. Why the mixed messages?
One other thing. The Maxima had chased us with a body in its trunk. Then it showed up on a hot sheet. How many vehicles are reported stolen after their use in a crime gone sour? For every time I’d heard the story, the police had heard it a hundred more. The ex-partner knew that. He either thought we were rubes, or he was playing it straight. No middle ground.
I wasn’t ready to buy his tale, but I wanted to hear the man talk.
I locked the house, unlocked the bike, rode against traffic to Grinnell and turned north. A light breeze, heavy traffic—tourists en route drive-through culture—and heavy dust. How many times will they dig up the east end of Eaton? Some genius, decades ago, plait-braided the water and sewer systems and laid their rust-prone pipes into salt-permeated coral rock. Job security for future backhoe drivers. Key West is like every other city in the nation in only one way. More supervisors than laborers.
P.T.’s is near the old shrimp docks, the 600 block of
Caroline. It occupies the building where, for years, the Big Fleet saloon had hosted Navy chiefs in working khakis, straight from the Naval Air Station or the submarine tender, petty officers in dark denim trousers and light denim shirts, Caroline Street sweethearts and deployment widows. The place would be packed from nine
A.M.
until closing time. There was a long-standing truce between the aviation and seagoing ratings. Strangers in civvies might enter but would sense the chill, leave before finishing the first draft beer. Today’s bar was more welcoming. The last time I’d been in P.T.’s was for emergency food after a long night of carousing with a writer friend and a New York book publisher. The publisher had looked too screwed up to win at the pool table. He’d played perfectly until daybreak. He’d enjoyed his food and drink at my expense.
I chained the Cannondale to a news-vending box. I checked the chalkboard in P.T.’s walkway. Black bean soup, barbecued chicken breasts or pork chops with rice and veggies, ribs and black beans, blackened grouper with pineapple salsa. Blue-plate specials from lunch hour straight through to five or six
A.M.
, depending on customer attitudes. Home for people who’d rather be in a bar than at home. The Thursday Special was roast turkey. If we had time for food, I was good for the grouper.
Leaving brightness, entering the cavern, all I could make out was the huge aquarium—three noise-resistant butterfly fish—and four TV screens. Baseball on one, hockey replays on the others. “Hearts and Bones” by Paul Simon on the sound system—at a level that allowed conversation without vocal strain. Near the door a dozen old photographs of neighboring streets. Shots from forty and fifty years ago. Most noticeable were vacant lots, true relics of days past. Two basketball jerseys had been framed and mounted on the pine-paneled west wall—Celtics 33, Bulls 23—along with a medium-sized sailfish and a huge bull dolphin.
I arrived first. I bought a bottle of beer.
The bartender, a stocky woman in her mid-thirties with a twinkle in her eye, whipped a chrome bottle opener from
her rear pocket, popped my beer. She put my change on the bar, then went back to checking ashtrays, facing-out bottle labels, restocking glassware. “You want a show?” She pointed at a television.
“You pick,” I said.
She pointed at the clock. “Usually, somebody walks in, three minutes to the hour, it’s for a certain game. Anything you don’t want to watch?”
“Best of the Great Racing Accidents.”
“I’m with you there.”
I claimed the northwest corner table. The booth floor elevated, foot-tall mirrors at shoulder level. A middle-aged couple leaned on the pool table in the adjoining room, mashed faces like teenyboppers to “Slip Slidin’ Away.” I shifted to the opposite bench, faced the kitchen. It worked out fine. Teresa arrived ten minutes later and introduced Jim Farmer. Jim wanted to face the wall. It took me a moment to figure out why. The mirrors offered a surround-view of one room, and he could face the other room. Security for the career law officer.
Farmer had developed style to counter the rural suggestion of his name. He was about five-ten, solid, with perfect posture. His T-shirt read
FINS TO THE LEFT, FINS TO THE RIGHT
—Key West had put Farmer in a relaxed mode—but his military bearing declared his belief in the daily workout, the weekly haircut. Some cops are like men I knew in the Navy, so caught up in spiffy uniforms, they lose all taste in street duds. It’s hard for jocks or military trainees in great physical shape to look laid-back. Farmer’s face was blotched from too much first-day sun.
He said, “Who’s gonna win?”
I didn’t get it. He pointed at the tube. A Super Bowl Preview Show.
“I forget who’s going to play.”
“Been that bad a week, eh?”
I nodded.
“Ms. Barga, here, tells me we’re all car-theft victims,
except for your near-miss. You almost lost your car to the bums that got mine.”
“They were more than car thieves. And I got a flaming motorcycle.”
“I got the whole rundown.”
“Where’d they take your Maxima?” I said.
“Shopping center on Congress Avenue in Boynton. Broad daylight. Right under the nose of a security weasel. The idiots wear American flags on their shoulders, patrol in little pickups with wimpy-ass roof lights. They couldn’t catch a buggy thief. Type of guys who go for news coverage when they collar a purse snatcher. Most of them failed the cop qualifiers.”
A longer answer than I needed. And he knew it
“What day was that?”
“Week ago today. Thursday.”
“You driving the car?”
“Yep. Usually drive the Xterra, but I took the wife’s car.”
“Go to the mall straight from home? Or did you come from work?”
He gazed at the table, pulled a long inhale. “Why you asking?”
Into the quicksand already. Think fast “Whoever stole your car tried to kill us,” I said. “He carried a body in the trunk. I’m trying to get inside his mind, trying to understand. Figure out if he followed you, targeted your car special, or picked it at random.”
“Dexter said you were a wannabe detective.”
“Not true. Certain things I take personally. Others I let go.”
“Great I’ll take your word for it.”
I needed to change the subject but keep pushing. “You trust Hayes’s judgment every time?”
“Every damn time,” he said.
“How about his decision to come to Key West?”
“That’s his business.”
Almost
every damn time.
“They must’ve totaled the car. Don’t they just send you a check?”
“This is really enjoyable. Can I buy you folks another round?”
Teresa became peacemaker. “Alex didn’t sleep well last night, Mr. Farmer. But he’s buying this afternoon, and I could use another wine, Alex. I’d rather not wait for a server.”
My cue to make a bar run. When I returned, Teresa and “Jim” were best pals. They were dishing the dirt about Hayes and his funny mannerisms, his oddball sense of humor. Farmer launched into an anecdote about the time Hayes was imitating Madonna in the squad room, mocking a dance from her then-current video. Dexter tripped over an extension cord, fell against a desk, sprained his wrist. He missed four days of work and claimed the injury on workman’s comp. The day he returned to work he was called to a meeting in the squad room. Every officer present wore a pointy brassiere.
The ice had broken. The bartender delivered a plate of munchies that I’d ordered at the bar. Farmer loosened up, bought the round he’d facetiously suggested a few minutes earlier. He grinned slyly, pointed out the athletic bag that held his Rollerblades. “You might’ve thought I was carrying a semiautomatic weapon . . .”
Cops joke about weapons. I laughed to humor him.
Farmer admitted that his trip to the Keys was a schmooze deal. He’d come down with his insurance broker, a free vacation to “identify” the waterlogged Maxima. He’d inventory the car for personal belongings and agree to the totaling of it. That way, the broker claimed, the company could save the expense of transporting junk back up the Keys.
“Service with a smile and a tan,” I said.
“I stop vehicles for traffic infractions, they’ve got out-of-date insurance cards. I turn some biz his way. I don’t jeopardize my job. I don’t invite kickbacks. The motorists appreciate my leniency. But, hell, they’re not criminals.
Most of them forgot to clip the card, put it in their glove box. A few failed to renew. So I come here. Helps keep insurance costs low. Yours included.”
Teresa kicked my ankle. She’d probably spent all morning on the phone with her insurance company. I didn’t offer an opinion of Farmer’s freebie trip. I wanted to get back to my questions. I was in dead-end territory, with Dexter refusing me access and Farmer defensive about my queries. I tried an end run, phrased as a joke: “All the headlines down here lately,” I said, “you might be better off with a weapon than Rollerblades.”