Duma Key (34 page)

I got a beer out of the fridge and turned on the TV, thinking I might find a movie worth watching on HBO before turning in. The shells beneath the house had taken on a pleasant, lulling sound, their conversation tonight civilized and low-pitched.

They were drowned out by the voice of a man standing in a thicket of microphones. It was Channel 6, and the current star was Candy Brown's court-appointed lawyer. He must have held this videotaped press conference at approximately the same time Wireman was getting his head examined. The lawyer looked about fifty, and his hair was pulled back into a Barrister Ponytail, but there was nothing going-through-the-motions about him. He looked and sounded
invested
. He was telling the reporters that his client would plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

He said that Mr. Brown was a drug addict, a porn-addicted sex addict, and a schizophrenic. Nothing
about being powerless over ice cream and
Now That's What I Call Music
compilations, but of course the jury hadn't been empanelled yet. In addition to Channel 6's mike, I saw NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN logos. Tina Garibaldi couldn't have gotten coverage like this winning a spelling bee or a science fair, not even for saving the family dog from a raging river, but get raped and murdered and you're nationwide, Swee'pea. Everyone knows your killer had your underpants in his bureau drawer.

“He comes by his addictions honestly,” the lawyer said. “His mother and both his stepfathers were drug addicts. His childhood was a horror during which he was systematically beaten and sexually abused. He has spent time in institutions for mental illness. His wife is a good-hearted woman, but mentally challenged herself. He never should have been on the streets to begin with.”

He faced the cameras.

“This is Sarasota's crime, not George Brown's. My heart goes out to the Garibaldis, I weep for the Garibaldis”—he lifted his tearless face to the cameras, as if to somehow prove this—“but taking George Brown's life up in Starke won't bring Tina Garibaldi back, and it won't fix the broken system that put this broken human being on the streets, unsupervised. That's my statement, thank you for listening, and now, if you'll excuse me—”

He started away, ignoring the shouted questions, and things might still have been all right—different, at least—if I'd turned off the TV or changed the channel right then. But I didn't. I watched the Channel 6 talking head back in the studio say, “Royal Bonnier, a legal crusader who has won half a dozen supposedly
unwinnable
pro bono
cases, said he would make every effort to exclude the following video, shot by a security camera behind Bealls Department Store, from the trial.”

And that damned thing started again. The kid crosses from right to left with the pack on her back. Brown emerges from the rampway and takes her by the wrist. She looks up at him and appears to ask him a question. And that was when the itch descended on my missing arm like a swarm of bees.

I cried out—in surprise as well as agony—and fell on the floor, knocking both the remote and my sandwich-plate onto the rug, scratching at what wasn't there. Or what I couldn't get at. I heard myself yelling at it to stop,
please
stop. But of course there was only one way to stop it. I got on my knees and crawled for the stairs, registering the crunch as one knee came down on the remote and broke it, but first changing the station. To CMT: Country Music Television. Alan Jackson was singing about murder on Music Row. Twice going up the stairs I clawed for the banister, that's how
there
my right hand was. I could actually feel the sweaty palm squeak on the wood before it passed through like smoke.

Somehow I got to the top and stumbled to my feet. I flicked all the light-switches up with my forearm and staggered to my easel at a half-assed run. There was a partly finished
Girl and Ship
on it. I heaved it aside without a look and slammed a fresh blank canvas in its place. I was breathing in hot little moans. Sweat was trickling out of my hair. I grabbed a wipe-off cloth and flapped it over my shoulder the way I'd flapped burp-rags over my shoulder when the girls were small. I stuck a brush in my teeth, put a
second one behind my ear, started to grab a third, then picked up a pencil instead. The minute I started sketching, the monstrous itch in my arm began to abate. By midnight the picture was done and the itch was gone. Only it wasn't just a picture, not this one; this one was
The
Picture, and it was good, if I do say so myself. And I do. I really was a talented sonofabitch. It showed Candy Brown with his hand locked around Tina Garibaldi's wrist. It showed Tina looking up at him with those dark eyes, terrible in their innocency. I'd caught her look so perfectly that her parents would have taken one glance at the finished product and wanted to commit suicide. But her parents were never going to see this.

No, not this one.

My painting was an almost exact copy of the photograph that had been in every Florida newspaper at least once since February fifteenth, and probably in most papers across the United States. There was only one major difference. I'm sure Dario Nannuzzi would have seen it as a trademark touch—Edgar Freemantle the American Primitive fighting gamely past the cliché, struggling to reinvent Candy and Tina, that match made in hell—but Nannuzzi was never going to see this one, either.

I dropped my brushes back into their mayo jars. I was paint up to my elbow (and all down the left side of my face), but cleaning up was the last thing on my mind.

I was too hungry.

There was hamburger, but it wasn't thawed. Ditto the pork roast Jack had picked up at Morton's the previous week. And the rest of my current bologna stash had been supper. There was, however, an
unopened box of Special K with Fruit & Yogurt. I started to pour some into a cereal bowl, but in my current state of ravenousness, a cereal bowl looked roughly the size of a thimble. I shoved it aside so hard it bounced off the breadbox, got one of the mixing bowls from the cupboard over the stove instead, and dumped the whole box of cereal into it. I floated it with half a quart of milk, added seven or eight heaping tablespoons of sugar, then dug in, pausing only once to add more milk. I ate all of it, then sloshed off to bed, stopping at the TV to silence the current urban cowboy. I collapsed crosswise on the counterpane, and found myself eye-to-eye with Reba as the shells beneath Big Pink murmured.

What did you do?
Reba asked.
What did you do this time, you nasty man?

I tried to say
Nothing,
but I was asleep before the word could come out. And besides—I knew better.

xii

The phone woke me. I managed to push the right button on the second try and said something that vaguely resembled hello.

“
Muchacho,
wake up and come to breakfast!” Wireman cried. “Steak and eggs! It's a celebration!” He paused. “At least I'm celebrating. Miss Eastlake's fogged out again.”

“What are we cele—” It hit me then, the only thing it possibly
could
be, and I snapped upright, tumbling Reba onto the floor. “Did your vision come back?”

“It's not that good, I'm afraid, but it's still good.
This is something all of Sarasota can celebrate. Candy Brown,
amigo
. The guards who do the morning count found him dead in his cell.”

For a moment that itch flashed down my right arm, and it was red.

“What are they saying?” I heard myself asking. “Suicide?”

“Don't know, but either way—suicide or natural causes—he saved the state of Florida a lot of money and the parents the grief of a trial. Come on over and blow a noisemaker with me, what do you say?”

“Just let me get dressed,” I said. “And wash.” I looked at my left arm. It was splattered with many colors. “I was up late.”

“Painting?”

“No, banging Pamela Anderson.”

“Your fantasy life is sadly deprived, Edgar. I banged the Venus de Milo last night, and she had
arms
. Don't be too long. How do you like your
huevos
?”

“Oh. Scrambled. I'll be half an hour.”

“That's fine. I must say you don't sound very thrilled with my news bulletin.”

“I'm still trying to wake up. On the whole, I'd have to say I'm very glad he's dead.”

“Take a number and get in line,” he said, and hung up.

xiii

Because the remote was broken, I had to tune the TV manually, an antique skill but one I found I still possessed. On 6, All Tina, All the Time had been replaced by a new show: All Candy, All the Time.
I turned the volume up to an earsplitting level and listened while I scrubbed the paint off.

George “Candy” Brown appeared to have died in his sleep. A guard who was interviewed said, “The guy was the loudest snorer we ever had—we used to joke that the inmates would have killed him just for that, if he'd been in gen-pop.” A doctor said that sounded like sleep apnea and opined that Brown might have died from a resulting complication. He said such deaths in adults were uncommon but far from unheard-of.

Sleep apnea sounded like a good call to me, but I thought I had been the complication. With most of the paint washed off, I climbed the stairs to Little Pink for a look at my version of The Picture in the long light of morning. I didn't think it would be as good as I'd believed when I staggered downstairs to eat an entire box of cereal—it couldn't be, considering how fast I'd worked.

Only it was. There was Tina, dressed in jeans and a clean pink tee-shirt, with her pack on her back. There was Candy Brown, also dressed in jeans, with his hand upon her wrist. Her eyes were turned up to his and her mouth was slightly open, as if to ask a question—
What do you want, mister?
being the most likely. His eyes were looking down at her, and they were full of dark intent, but the rest of his face showed nothing at all, because the rest of his face wasn't there. I hadn't painted his mouth and nose.

Below the eyes, my version of Candy Brown was a perfect blank.

i

I got on the plane that brought me to Florida wearing a heavy duffle coat, and I wore it that morning when I limped down the beach from Big Pink to
El Palacio de Asesinos
. It was cold, with a stiff wind blowing in from the Gulf, where the water looked like broken steel under an empty sky. If I had known that was to be the last cold day I'd ever experience on Duma Key, I might have relished it . . . but probably not. I had lost my knack for suffering the cold gladly.

In any case, I hardly knew where I was. I had my canvas collection pouch slung over my shoulder, because carrying it when I was on the beach was now second nature, but I never put a single shell or bit of flotsam in it. I just plodded along, swinging my bad leg without really feeling it, listening to the wind whistle past my ears without really hearing it, and watching the peeps scurry in and out of the surf without really seeing them.

I thought:
I killed him just as surely as I killed Monica Goldstein's dog. I know that sounds like bullshit, but
—

Only it
didn't
sound like bullshit. It
wasn't
bullshit.

I had stopped his breath.

ii

There was a glassed-in sunporch on the south side of
El Palacio
. It looked toward the tangles of tropical overgrowth in one direction and out at the metallic blue of the Gulf in the other. Elizabeth was seated there in her wheelchair, with a breakfast tray attached to the arms. For the first time since I'd met her, she was strapped in. The tray, littered with curds of scrambled egg and pieces of toast, looked like the aftermath of a toddler's meal. Wireman had even been feeding her juice from a sippy cup. The small table-model television in the corner was tuned to Channel 6. It was still All Candy, All of the Time. He was dead and Channel 6 was beating off on the body. He undoubtedly deserved no better, but it was still gruesome.

“I think she's finished,” Wireman said, “but maybe you'd sit with her while I scramble you a couple and burn the toast.”

“Happy to, but you don't have to go to any trouble on my part. I worked late and had a bite afterward.” A bite. Sure. I'd spied the empty mixing bowl in the kitchen sink on my way out.

“It's no trouble. How's your leg this morning?”

“Not bad.” It was the truth. “
Et tu, Brute?
”

“I'm all right, thanks.” But he looked tired; his left eye was still red and drippy. “This won't take five minutes.”

Elizabeth was almost completely AWOL. When I offered her the sippy cup, she took a little and then turned her head away. Her face looked ancient and bewildered in the unforgiving winterlight. I thought that we made quite a trio: the senile woman, the exlawyer
with the slug in his brain, and the amputee ex-contractor. All with battle-scars on the right side of our heads. On TV, Candy Brown's lawyer—now ex-lawyer, I guess—was calling for a full investigation. Elizabeth perhaps spoke for all of Sarasota County on this issue by closing her eyes, slumping down against the restraining strap so that her considerable breastworks pushed up, and going to sleep.

Wireman came back in with eggs enough for both of us, and I ate with surprising gusto. Elizabeth began to snore. One thing was certain; if she had sleep apnea, she wouldn't die young.

“Missed a spot on your ear,
muchacho,
” Wireman said, and tapped the lobe of his own with his fork.

“Huh?”

“Paint. On your buggerlug.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'll be scrubbing it off everywhere for a couple of days. I splashed it around pretty good.”

“What were you painting in the middle of the night?”

“I don't want to talk about it right now.”