Mangrove Squeeze (15 page)

There was a silence. Suki turned toward him once more. His flush was gradually subsiding but his hands were white as they squeezed the metal counter.

He went on, "It goes no farther, right? The department is a goddam mess. Politics. Butt covering. PR. They want it murmured there's a Mafia in town? Something they couldn't possibly handle? I'm homicide, Suki, not administration. I don't decide what things get called. Motive: burglary. Officially, that's the story."

Suki's stare grabbed out for his eyes. "And unofficially?"

He looked down at his feet. "There is no unofficially. So what'll you do from here?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid to go home."

"I'll bring you home," Stubbs offered.

"And what then? What happens when they find out Lazslo botched his job and the woman he spilled his guts to is still alive and talking? What then, Lieutenant?"

Stubbs didn't answer.

Suki settled back against the rusty dinette chair, gestured toward the pronged rotisserie, the little propane fridge. "With the protection of the Key West cops I guess I'll stay right here."

Stubbs looked around at the torn screen door, the leaning sack of garbage with some un-nameable fluid dampening its bottom. "Look," he said, "you can't stay—"

Suki said, "And if you can't do anything to help me, at least keep it to yourself that I'm alive."

The lieutenant sucked his teeth, pocketed his notebook, pushed his bulky body up from the sauerkraut steamer. He stepped over Pineapple's bedroll and headed for the door. "This job really sucks sometimes," he said. "You never heard me say this but I'll see what I can do."

By early afternoon, Gennady Petrovich Markov had polished off a quart of vodka, and though his stomach burned and his living room swayed under him and his eyes pulsed in and out of focus, his mind evinced a stubborn and perverse refusal to be drunk.

With ruthless clarity he saw his nephew stretched out on the gurney, bloodless and just faintly blue, his sundered neck appalling, his face as waxy and pearlescent as a squid. He smelled the stink that tried to cover death, the antiseptics and preservatives. He heard the voices of the cops and coroner, gruff and clumsy in their sympathies in spite of all their practice. He kept drinking. His ears rang and his vision blurred but the things he didn't want to think about just got more cruelly vivid.

Around two o'clock Ivan Fyodorovich Cherkassky came by to offer his condolences. Silently, he slipped into the living room; silently, he sat at the end of the sofa, his slight stiff body barely denting the cushion. The two men stared blankly at one another, and after a moment Cherkassky said, "A terrible thing. I am sorry."

Markov was hunkered in an enormous leather armchair, sunk so deep that it was hard to tell where the chair ended and its occupant began. He tried to fix his gaze on his old comrade, but nothing would hold its proper shape. Cherkassky's waferish body rippled as in reflecting water. His scooped-out face shrank inward like a drying apple. Markov said to him, "You are not sorry. You hated him."

Cherkassky took no umbrage, just strove to be precise. "I did not hate him. He worried me. He was too careless, too American."

"And so you had him killed."

"You think I did this thing?" Cherkassky said, his voice rising by just the slightest increment. "In this wiolent country of drugs and guns and shooting while you change a tire on your car, you think I did this thing?"

Markov seemed to bloat up in his chair, his fingertips clawed the arc of brass tacks that pinned down the upholstery. "You made him kill the girl. That was punishment enough."

"Yes, it was," Cherkassky said. "For him."

"For him? What is it you are saying, Ivan?"

Cherkassky turned away a moment, looked through the window and across the garden to the Gulf, to mangrove islands hovering on pillows of distant glare. "I am saying nothing. Only I agree. To kill the girl, that was punishment enough."

With difficulty, Gennady Markov reached across his heaving chest, retrieved the glass of vodka from the table next to him. He drank. He said, "Ivan, if you have done this thing, to punish me, no matter why, I will never forgive you. Never. You will be my enemy till one of us is dead."

Cherkassky listened. His scooped-out face wobbled in Markov's vision but its expression didn't change. After a moment, he said, "Gennady, you are sad, you are drunk. I understand and I take no offense at what you say, these accusations. Tomorrow you will apologize and of course, as we are old friends, I will accept."

Markov tried to turn away. The ripples of his shirt twisted up across his belly and his bottom squeaked against the leather seat, but he couldn't really move. He stayed silent and looked down at the floor.

"And I will tell you one more thing," Cherkassky softly said. "You will not hear it now but when you are ready you will hear it. This terrible thing that has happened, it is a grief that will end, and that will spare you far more heartache than it caused. Believe me, I know. Life will become much easier for you, Gennady. You will have one less thing to care about."

Aaron Katz was unaccustomed to wandering the streets.

He worked day and night. He was organized and disciplined. He went to places when he had a reason to go to them, and unlike many in Key West, he usually went to them directly.

But now it was the middle of a working day and he was wandering. He wandered past Hemingway House, tour buses lined up along its slapdash brick wall; past Southernmost Point with its Indians selling conch shells; up to the gay end of Duval Street, past the elegant and well-run and fully booked guest houses such as his would never be.

He wandered, and he tried to figure out just why he was doing it. Was he being chivalrous or pigheaded? Maybe, at the end of this sleeplessness and disruption, it would turn out, pure and simple, that Suki had stood him up. Changed her mind. Got a better offer. Happened to some poor lonely bastard every day.

But he kept going. Past sunglass shops and ice cream stores, places that sold pornography and bathing suits. Tourists spun postcard racks in front of him, or sat on patios in silly hats, sipping cappuccino.

Then he saw something that didn't quite register until after he'd strolled past it: a shop that wasn't open.

It was a busy day in the midst of tourist season, pale visitors were milling and buying, and this one store was closed up tight and dark. Aaron backed up to look at it more closely. In its dim window were racks and racks of T-shirts. Some had spangles, some had pictures, some had slogans. Some racks said
special today
and some said
decals free
. On the big glass pane of the front door of the store, a hand-scrawled cardboard sign had been crookedly taped up. It said:
close due to deth
.

The message was only four words long, but Aaron read it several times, as if it held a nagging and laconic riddle. Suki was involved with Lazslo, and Lazslo ran the T-shirt shops. The T-shirt shop was closed and Suki had not been heard from and somebody had died. He walked on, turning the riddle this way and that, looking for the strand of logic that would make it all come clear. He walked past smoothie stands and bars, galleries and restaurants. Yellow sun bounced off metal roofs and a line of shadow ran down the middle of the street.

On the next block there was another T-shirt store. It too was closed and dim. It too had a cardboard sign in the window of the recessed front door. This one said:
death in femily—not today.

But as Aaron was walking past, the door swung open and a young man stepped out, turning around to lock the place behind him. Aaron studied him a moment He wasn't especially tall, but his arms were huge and his back muscles quaked with even the smallest movements. He wore no shirt just thick suspenders crisscrossed on his massive shoulders. His hair was long and tangled; at the nape of his neck it merged indistinctly with the soft fur that grew in patches down to his waist.

His back looked unfriendly, show-offish, menacing. Aaron struggled against a reluctance born partly of shyness and partly of an idiotic jealousy, and approached him as the second lock was clicking shut.

He said, "Excuse me. By any chance, is your name Lazslo?"

The fellow spun toward him. His eyes were hard and narrow. For an instant they flashed suspicious or maybe spooked. He said a simple no and began to walk away.

Aaron followed, gesturing backward toward the sign. "Who died?"

The muscular man was breaking into the heavy flow of walking traffic on Duval. Grudgingly, a little off the beat, with a slightly guttural
h
and langorous vowels, he said, "Soon everyone will hear."

They were moving down the busy sidewalk now, Aaron dodging tourists and racks of souvenirs as he tried to keep pace with the other man's bounding steps. "Hear what?" he said. "This is what I'm asking."

The man with the suspenders kept rolling. Couples parted to let him pass between them. Without looking at Aaron, he said, "Is not your business. Leaf me alone."

"But—"

"I tell you go away."

Aaron didn't go away. He wanted to know and he made a mistake. He put his hand on the young man's shoulder, said, "Look, all I'm asking—"

The other man was tired of the questions and it made him angry that this annoying stranger had touched him. With the coiled economy of the practiced fighter, he pivoted quickly, almost nonchalantly, and grabbed two handfuls of Aaron's shirt.

Aaron just barely had time to be befuddled. He hadn't been in a fight since junior high school; he'd had neither strength nor conviction for it even then; fighting, he felt, was for kids whose fathers hadn't taught them reason. But now, by reflex, he defensively reached out and held the other man's arms. The arms were thick as fence posts and fibrous as snakes and they could not be held.

The man looked at Aaron with a calm, impersonal malice, gave a quick sharp pull and then a shove.

Aaron's head whipped forward as his torso rocked back, and he stumbled for a step or two until a parking meter caught him square between the shoulder blades. The impact knocked some air out of his lungs, sent arrows of hot pain up to his brain stem and down to his kidneys.

Nauseating starbursts appeared at the edges of his vision, and by the time his eyes had cleared, a sparse ring of passersby had gathered. They were staring at him. Not in sympathy but with embarrassed fascination for the loser. He'd become a part of their vacations, something they'd remember; a victim of the kind of brief and pointless sidewalk brawl that Duval Street was famous for.

As for the young man with the suspenders and the giant arms, he was half a block away, walking neither faster nor slower than he'd walked before. Aaron did not go after him.

He went back home instead, and the first thing he saw as he walked into the office of the Mangrove Arms was a crippled blind chihuahua curled up on the front desk, its scaly black nose resting against the cool metal of the service bell. The dog just barely lifted up its hoary head as Aaron entered. Its white eyes panned futilely as its twitching nostrils tested the air to find the new arrival.

Sam Katz was sitting in a chair behind the desk. His new friend Bert was sitting next to him, wearing a shirt of emerald green with a navy chalk stripe and a collar whose wings came halfway down his chest. The two old men were in the middle of a game of gin. Each had a stack of quarters at his elbow, and a ragged pile of cards was spilling over between them. Sam said, "Ah, here he is."

Bert stood up, gnarly hand extended. He said, "I come to visit the old man."

Aaron reached across the counter to shake his hand; the motion stretched the lingering pain down from the valley between his shoulder blades. Distractedly, he said, "Great. That's great."

Sam said, "You went out, I didn't know you went."

It was not an accusation, not exactly, but Aaron, good son, felt guilty nonetheless. "Had a couple things to do," he said. Absently, he petted the chihuahua. With every stroke, hairs the length of eyelashes fluttered from its scalp.

His father looked at him. Sam Katz forgot a lot of things, and a lot of other things passed him by entirely. But he knew his son. He said, "Aaron, something wrong?"

Aaron, a pathetic liar, said, "No, Pop. No."

There was a pause. The dog had exhausted itself, it wheezed and lay down flat again. Then Bert said, "There was a call for you. A guy Evans, Edwards, something like that."

"We wrote it down," said Sam. "Better we should write it down. Where'd I put the paper?"

He patted pockets till he found it, handed it to Aaron. Aaron looked at it then headed for the door behind the desk.

The old men went back to their game of gin.

Sam fiddled with his hearing aid, said, "Wait a second. Been too long, now I can't remember what's been played."

His friend said, "Tough titty, we're playin' cards heah."

"But I'll throw what you picked up already," Sam complained.