“Message received. I’ll call Mr. Holloway’s secretary in the morning, if I can make it.”
Tucker thought about it a few seconds. “Suit yourself. You might call in the next ten minutes. Mr. Holloway loves the hell out of quick answers.”
“His secretary works Sunday?”
I had asked, by implication, if ex-Sheriff Tucker ran Mercer Holloway’s errands on Sunday.
He gummed the cigar. “Mr. Holloway pays well.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
He shifted his weight, hitched his belt He pulled the cigar from his mouth. “Wasn’t too many months ago, I signed checks to you. Allowed my detectives to hire your cameras. Now I’m a lowlife?”
He’d been a lowlife for years. I said, “I don’t recall voicing a judgment”
“What I told everybody is this,” he said. “Wait till your boy goes ass-up bad. Then try to make sensible decisions.”
“I’m sure the confusion can wear you down.”
His brain took it as a compliment He said, “Nice to see you again.”
I waited. The hand moved upward. The armpit. The scratching.
Tucker waddled back to his shiny truck, hauled himself in. He held his door ajar so he could twist around, stick his head out put his weight on the poor armrest watch himself back down the lane to Fleming. I went onto my porch, dropped my cycle helmet on the porcelain-top table, and carried my camera to its hidden cabinet I needed a pee, a beer, and a nap, in that order.
My brass doorbell rang lightly. I closed up the equipment stash.
No vehicle had replaced Tucker’s. It could be only one person. She liked to flick the bell with her fingernail.
“Come in, light of my life.”
She’d already opened the screen door. She strolled into the living room wearing what she called her “Sunday sweatpants.” Her T-shirt proclaimed,
LIFE IS A CABERNET
. “My mama’s scanner said there was a body on Caroline Street Did you have to . . .”
She read my eyes.
Carmen Sosa and I have been friends for almost nine years. It has been an evolving relationship; tennis fans know the meaning of “deuce.” Carmen’s parents, Cecilia and Hector Ayusa, have lived on Dredgers Lane for almost forty years. Carmen grew up in Key West—true Conch, bilingual, bicultural—and twice has been married. Her life’s focus is her young daughter, Maria Rolley. Six years ago, not long after Carmen had bought her own place two doors down the lane, she and I had attempted romance. We’d learned that other aspects of friendship outweighed our sexual attraction. We look to each other for common sense and sympathy, mischief and rejuvenation. We swap the personal harassment only close friends enjoy.
She found a glass in the kitchen, opened the fridge to pour water from the filtered pitcher. “You want to talk about something else?” She waggled a beer at me.
I took the bottle, twisted the cap, spun it into the trash. “I worry about what’s happening to you, woman. You lose any more weight, Just My Size’ll go out of business.”
She couldn’t hide her pleasure in my having noticed. “I’ve been walking after work every day. Maria comes to my mama’s after school. This other girl from the post office, she and I drive out to Smathers and walk from the parasailing to houseboat row and back. First half against the wind, second half with the wind at our backs.”
“This shaping-up have anything to do with lunchtime traffic in the lane?”
“Traffic?”
“I sense denial in your response.” I went into the bathroom, half-closed the door. “You’ve been seen midday lately, with a male friend.”
“You’re accusing me of nooners?”
“And he looks about twenty-five. Muscular arms, the all-weather look. You’re too young for a midlife crisis, my sweetness. You making up for all those times you turned me down?”
“I’m a good girl. I saved it for my first husband. He called me the Extra Virgin. I know, I’ve told you that before.”
I took my beer back to the living room.
Carmen fiddled with the leaves of a fat peace lily. “You’d be proud of me. I met this tourist from central Florida. The guy couldn’t have been nicer. He made two mistakes, or I’d have dated him more than once. After our first date he kissed me and said, ‘It’s been a ton of fun,’ which is the wrong thing to say to a weight-sensitive woman. When he walked away I looked at his ass. I noticed the circular-shaped lump in his back pocket”
“Condoms are the sign of a considerate man. Maybe a bit presumptuous, but you should’ve been relieved.”
“It was a Skoal can. End of story.”
“So who is this alleged nooner?”
“His name’s Nick. He used to work at the post office. Now he works construction. And don’t ask. He showers before we—”
“Where does he work?”
“For Mamie’s brother. At that atrocious mini-mall he’s building. I keep telling him he’s contributing to the downfall—”
The phone rang. I raised one finger, told Carmen to hold that thought, and picked it up. “Grand Central Station.”
“Liska here. Your cameras nearby?” I could tell he was using a county-issue cell phone.
“Just so happens—”
“Car’ll pick you up in . . . seven minutes. Gotta go.”
He went I didn’t even hear a click. So much for the nap.
I’d wanted to ask specifics. I comforted myself with the odds against two murders in one day. Not that it hadn’t
happened before. Monroe County had seen more than its share in recent years.
Seven minutes was like two minutes. Barely time to pull my camera back out of its compartment. Carmen had wandered outside. She called from the yard, “There’s a deputy on Fleming. Probably trying to find Dredgers Lane.”
I jumped from the porch, then realized I’d forgotten to check with the emergency room. The county green-and-white made a production of backing down the lane. Positioning is everything. A minute squandered to effect a dramatic getaway. I took ten seconds to tell Carmen about my altercation with the boys on Caroline. I asked her to use my phone, to search for a thug with fewer teeth than toes, and to leave me a note. She promised to lock the place when she left.
The deputy swung a land-yacht left onto Fleming, scared the Coronas out of two moped
touristas.
He ran the blind corner at White. Probably thought his blue and red strobes would shield us from being T-boned. I scrunched low in my seat, snugged the belt another half inch. The climate control was cranked down to wind-chill level, the fan set high. Deputy Fennerty’s cloying cologne recirculated at maximum velocity.
Fennerty looked like his own idea of Hollywood’s idea of a cop. He lifted his Ray-Bans to check his computer. I glanced again. A precision hair-by-hair crew cut. His face said handsome, the eyes said dullard. He wasn’t going to be chatty.
“How far up the Keys?’ I said.
He pointed at the windshield. “Stock Island.”
“Oceanside Marina?”
“Squid Row.”
Right
there
on the windshield.
We hustled out North Roosevelt. The flashing roof bar scared dozens of speeders. The deputy favored the fast lane, managed to clip most of the lane-dividing road turtles with his left tires. Staccato bips, each adding another degree of
migraine to the pain bubble growing at the back of my neck.
A call came over the police band. The deputy understood the gargling. He keyed his mike. “Passing . . . Morrison’s GM dealership. Just passed it”
The voice, clearer now: “Animal Control’s almost outa here. Light a fire.”
Fennerty mashed the gas. Just as quickly he hit his brakes. Traffic at the Cow Key Channel Bridge was backed up in both turn lanes. Whooping his siren, the deputy swung to the far-right lane, forced his way back left into the line of vehicles going up U.S. 1. He stuffed it over the bridge, bullied his way through the College Road light He did it again at the next signal, almost swerved into the Chevron Quick Lube, veered onto McDonald, braked, hung a right on Fifth Street, and floored it. Like two-thirds of America’s recently licensed drivers, Deputy Fennerty had learned by watching Sunday NASCAR races. Play it fast and tight walk away from high-speed crashes. If I had eaten a larger lunch, it’d be decorating the dashboard. Liska had better hope the weekly papers didn’t investigate his upkeep budget.
Fifth Street was a maze of potholes, ruts, dips, solid litter, and slipshod asphalt patches. Concrete-block sheds bore peeling paint and burglar bars. Mobile homes with mildewed, off-kilter doors and windows squatted behind weed-blown Cyclone fences. Gray laundry hung from drooping cords. The deputy manhandled the shift lever, squealed two more cabin-cruiser turns. He finally found Bernstein Park, the million-dollar sports facility that no one used. He goosed the pedal again, missed his turn-off. He spun a one-eighty in the Rusty Anchor parking lot threw gravel on four men lurking around a pole-mounted pay phone. He whipped south toward a long line of bulldozed twenty-foot mounds of rubble. After all these years in Key West my first visit to Shrimp Road.
We skidded, halted in gravel. A crescent of idling vehicles bore audience to a particular pile of trash. Sheriff
Liska’s civilian car, his maroon Lexus sedan, was parked to one side. I swung the cruiser’s door and bolted. I felt like a sailor back on the wharf after a long, brutal storm, thankful for solid land. The breeze tossed the mangrove branches west of the road. Stifling air reigned low. It would help me defrost.
Liska walked toward me. He twirled keys on his index finger. No cigarette in his hand. His annual New Year’s resolution to cut back gradually usually held until mid-February. He wore blue jeans with white sneakers and a white belt His white satin shirt looked like a piece Elvis might have thrown from the stage late in his career. Through the years I’d known him, Chicken Neck had affected an extensive seventies wardrobe. He’d toned it down since being elected sheriff, had gravitated to a
Northern Exposure
look. The Lower Keys hosted many eccentricities. Goofy attire was a minor aberration.
I gave him a “what’s-up” look.
“Some shrimper lost his head—”
“Sounds right” I said.
“Not as funny as it sounds. That roscoe over there, the arm bandages? Says his legal name is Nameless Aimless. He’s our poster boy for twenty-first-century rickets. Aimless found himself sleeping next to a body without a head when he woke up an hour ago. A wild dog woke him, chewing on his wrist Three dogs, total. They’d worked on the corpse, too. I guess the one dog thought Nameless was tastier, rum-flavored and all. We had to call SPCA to remove the animals.”
A lovely Sunday had become a twofer. “Nameless a suspect?”
“Claims the last thing he recalls, he took drunk at sunrise on the fantail of
Midnight Creeper,
a steel-hulled trawler out of Beaufort South Carolina. Captain Smith Jones, or else Jones Smith—we can’t understand his Geechee accent—verified the drunkenness. The captain figured Aimless’d hurt himself and sue the boat owner. He kicked him off around ten
A.M
. But even piss-drunk shrimpers don’t
intentionally bunk down with headless dead men.”
“So a murderer dropped a body next to a passed-out drunk?”
“Probably. Not much blood on the sofa, no weapon to be found, no head. Even broad daylight, around here, no risk of witnesses. Our victim was stabbed—or speared, the standard deal around the fleet. My guess, he died before decapitation.” Liska waved at the huge mounds of trash. “The head could be anywhere in a hundred-yard radius; it’d take us a week to find it. It could be in Miami. It could be in the ocean.”
I wanted Liska to keep jabbering, to postpone my photo gig. As he spoke I gazed at a mound that paralleled the pavement a quarter mile to the south. Someone had built a rubbish barrier to block access to the docks. Beneath tall clusters of yellow chalice-vine flowers lay rotted pallets and cable reels, flattened outboard motors, twisted Dumpsters. I saw two collapsed school buses, an upside-down tractor trailer. A rusted Toyota tailgate with
TO
and
TA
painted out,
YO
outlined by chipped reflector tape. Fuchsia bougainvillea grew from the shell of a Winnebago. Evidence of misery and poverty, of quick departures by workboat or sudden arrest Evidence, too, of vicious storms that had struck the Keys in the late nineties. Mud, marl, tangled fishnets. Lengths of yellow rope dangled from crumbled Styrofoam floats.
A weird, dull silence hung between the mangroves and the mounds. Only rustling shrub tops and the distant rumble of engines at the shrimp docks. The pervasive odors of dog shit, brine, and diesel intruded. In the middle of it all, the rotten velour sofa. On die sofa, the body of a naked, headless man.
“Somebody with a twisted mind,” I said.
“The sick shits beheaded the poor fuck. You expect decency after that?”
About the best anyone could expect, judging by die surroundings, was not to be hit by a sniper’s rifle, or attacked by more wild dogs.
“Go over there and work fast.” Liska motioned to the
sofa. “This spooky-ass place, I feel like I’m walking on unmarked graves. Shrimp Road’s the only place in the Keys where I get creeps standing in open sunlight, seventy-five degrees, a Sunday afternoon in January.”
I walked toward the sofa. A half dozen deputies and investigators stood by, including Sheriff’s Detective Bobbi Lewis. Their expressions, their subdued talk warned me that I faced a gruesome task.
Afternoon light was fading. Mangrove shadows grew long. I paid close attention to my gear. I rigged for fill-flash on manual setting, synched to use ambient light, but less flash on close-up shots. How unlike a dead person, I thought at the time. More object than human, the body with no face excused speculation on the victim’s personality, or life. Or postponed speculation. Later I would blame that concept on my shock at viewing such a grotesque spectacle. The mental defense mechanism allowed me to remove myself from the ugliness, the horror, the dogs.
After a roll of “establishing” shots, panoramic, perspective angles to the east, south, west, and north, I loaded another thirty-six exposures and looked around. Beyond the imposing trash barrier, another world, the white superstructures, masts, cranes, the green nets of shrimp boats. Behind me, silent law officers and onlookers who’d strolled over from the shrimp docks, or from the beer bars up the street. Beyond them, thirty feet into a dense hammock, an ocean refugee, a “knight of the road,” in a bough-enshrouded single-man tramp camp. A thatch-roofed lean-to, with a rusty bike and a tiny chest of drawers, salvage from the mounds. The sun-browned, dirt-blacked man must exist on charity, on handouts from former trawler-fleet brethren. A sense of foreboding penetrated to my bones. The opposite of trouble looking for a place to happen, this strip of blacktop and mangroves felt primed for intrigue, tuned to violence. I wondered if some spirit had long ago cursed the peninsula, so the land wished now to avenge itself by hosting evil in any form.