Tango Key (2 page)

-STENDAHL

June 7

A
line Scott's Honda sounded like an asthmatic as it wheezed its way up Hurricane Drive.

The car had already overheated once today, when the temperature on Tango Key had peaked at ninety-eight. Although it was dusk now and a few degrees cooler, the Honda was voicing its displeasure. Like Ferdinand the Bull in the old children's story, it just wanted to be put out to pasture to smell the flowers. Unfortunately, the air conditioner in her house apparently had the same idea when it had gone on the fritz this morning. No telling what the heat would kill next—and it was only early June. At this rate, the island would be uninhabitable by August.

In the driveway, the Honda backfired and died. She got out and retrieved her dry cleaning and briefcase from the back seat. There was no breeze. The humidity had clamped down over the island like a dome, and the smell of salt and fish, of jasmine and freshly mown grass, flourished in the utter stillness. The shriek of crickets pulsed against the almost unbearable tightness of the air.

Usually, the sanctity of her house at the end of a day beckoned like a lover. But this wasn't going to be one of those evenings, not without air-conditioning. There was no twenty-four hour repair service on the island, and no one in Key West would make the drive at 8:30 on a Sunday night. So unless Murphy was back from the boat race in Miami and would come over to fix it, she was going to have to sleep out on the porch. Or in the tiny back room with the window air conditioner that rattled like a trunkful of skeletons.

Last summer, Murphy the mechanical wizard had replaced the alternator in her Honda. A couple of months ago he'd fixed the dishwasher, and before that it had been her dryer. In all, in the three years they'd been lovers, he'd rebuilt practically every major appliance in her house.

Her place, like so many homes at the southwest tip of Tango Key, was built on stilts. It rose from the hump of a man-made hill at the dead end of Hurricane Drive, a knotty-pine beach house with vaulted ceilings, a sleeping loft, tile floors, wicker furniture, huge floor-to-ceiling windows. Strictly laid-back.

The house was built shortly after Aline's birth here almost thirty-four years ago. It had been her family's weekend getaway, a refuge from Key West. But when her dad had died in 1978, she'd given up the apartment she'd rented in Key West and had moved in here. It wasn't as large as her old place on Whitehead Street, but it was comfortable—when the air-conditioning worked.

It was an effort to move through the wall of heat in the hall to get to the kitchen. The moment she switched on the light, she heard the sharp click of Wolfe's nails against the pine floors. He appeared in the doorway, a year-old skunk fattened to a tomato plumpness by domestic life. He swished his tail and sniffed at the air, his glossy black fur catching the light, then padded over to Aline and reared up on his hind legs, asking to be picked up. When full-grown, he would be about two feet long, with an eight-inch tail. Right now he was half that. When she'd found him in the jungle of brush and trees behind the house, cowering next to a boulder where his mother had been a predator's entree, he'd been small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.

She had never had him de-scented and wouldn't, as long as he foraged and romped outside. Tango, after all, was home to several panthers, hawks, and other predators. The only time Wolfe had sprayed his malodorous stuff in the house was when Murphy had tripped over him one night en route to the fridge for a midnight snack. Ever since, Murphy had kept a respectful distance—and so had Wolfe.

She nuzzled the top of his head with her chin, then set him down, draped her dry cleaning over the back of a chair, and set her briefcase on the counter. When she opened the fridge, Wolfe lifted his front paws onto the edge of the fruit bin, his little nose busily analyzing the contents. Aline brought out a container of lettuce and some leftover chicken. She shredded the lettuce in his bowl and topped it with bits of chicken. "Skunk-o Delight, guy. Go to it."

She plopped down on one of the stools at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room, and reached for the phone. Her chest tightened with a now familiar anxiety that said she shouldn't be making this call, not when things between her and Murphy were so unilateral. In fact, the calendar tacked to the bulletin board in front of her said it all.

The slashes that sliced diagonally through the little squares marched back to June 1. That was the last time Aline had seen him outside of work—and only because she had called and invited him to dinner. Before that, the slashes dated to May 25, a free Saturday when they'd both worked their other jobs—Murphy at the old boatyard here at the south end of the island, and Aline in her bookstore. He'd come into Whitman's at the end of the day to pick up a couple of books he'd ordered and they'd gone out to dinner and a movie. She traced the slashes back farther still, to May 1, the last time he had gotten in touch with her. The tiny red L in the corner of the square indicated they'd also made love that night. The only other L that appeared in the five-week period from May 1 to June 7 was on May 25. Her initiative. It had been quick and perfunctory. It didn't take a mathematician to figure out the odds on this one, she thought, and pushed the phone away.

Things might've been easier if they didn't work together, if she didn't see him every day. It wasn't as bad during the season, when the staff of the Tango Key police department doubled. But since late April, when the number of tourists had tapered off and their full-time staff had been cut back to twelve, she couldn't step out of her office without running into him.

She climbed the bamboo ladder to her sleeping loft. Both windows were wide open and the ceiling fan was on, but the air felt scorched. Clean laundry, which had probably molded by now from the heat, was heaped on the bed, as were books and magazines she'd weeded out of the straw basket near the window and hadn't tossed out yet. Aline rarely slept in the bed anymore, opting instead for the colorful hammock strung up in front of the window. Her solitude there seemed less noticeable when she awakened in the middle of the night.

She paused in front of the bureau, regarding herself in the mirror, searching for evidence that might explain Murphy's diminishing ardor. In February she would be thirty-four to his thirty-six, so it couldn't be her age he objected to. Her wavy cinnamon-colored hair, which fell past her shoulders and was woven into a single braid tonight, had no gray in it. Her eyes, a vibrant blue fringed in lashes a shade lighter than her hair, weren't deeply lined at the corners. Her nose was merely ordinary, straight and narrow, rather sparse. Her mouth was okay, a shade too large for the rest of her face, but hey, she had great teeth. At five eight in her bare feet, she was slender but not skinny, with adequate curves. She was attractive, she thought dispassionately, but not stunning, not a knockout like Monica, Murphy's wife, had been.

Okay, so maybe it didn't have anything to do with the way she looked. Then what? Did she have bad breath? Laugh at stupid jokes? Should she dress more seductively? Try a new perfume? Had their sex life gotten routine?
What sex life?

Her housekeeping: she turned and looked slowly around the loft, trying to see it through Murphy's eyes. She definitely failed in the domestic department. Her house was cluttered—not unclean, just cluttered—and she wasn't even an adequate cook. But they'd known each other for almost ten years, she and Murphy, so none of this was new to him. Aline had actually met his wife first, at a book fair in Key West shortly after Murphy had started working in Tango's homicide department. After Monica's murder, Aline, the grieving closest friend, and Murphy, the devastated husband, had drawn comfort from each other that eventually had become something else.

So maybe the problem was that she was too familiar to him. Maybe she was a habit he was trying to break.

The phone pealed, that it was Murphy drew her toward it, Murphy announcing that he was back from the race and when could he see her? But it wasn't Murphy. It was Roxie, the dispatcher at the station, her voice soft, breathy.

"Al, there's been a murder up in the Cove. Doug Cooper. Can you take it?"

It's the heat. The heat drives people over the edge.
"Roxie, I just left the station. After ten hours."

"I know, Al. And I'm sorry, really. But Murphy's still out of town, no one answers at Bernie's, and I can't get Jack Dobbs, either. I'll track down Doc Prentiss as soon as we hang up."

"Okay. Sure. Who found him?"

"Who d'you think. His wife," she said in a harsh tone which summed up Roxie's opinion of Eve Cooper. "Let me give you the address."

"I know where they live."

T
he Honda sped through hills that rose in the pale moonlight like camel's humps and were crowned by pines that shot toward the dark bruise of the sky. Hardy Florida pines, sea pines that could flourish in hot, bleached sand or here, higher in the hills, where the earth was fecund, blacker than pitch. The night air rushed through the open windows, and it smelled of brine, gardenias, of childhood.

And of death.

The first murder of the summer, and the dice came up with her name on it. Swell. She needed this.

In the thirty months Aline had been with the police department, there had been sixty murders on Tango Key. The bulk of them occurred between October and late April, the tourist season. But spread out over the year, they averaged about two a month, and were divided among the four detectives in the department. It was the sort of cosmic tidiness that worried her. And why oh why the hell did it have to be Doug Cooper? She didn't want to be callous or anything, but by tomorrow morning she'd be fending off reporters as fast as Cooper had courted them.

Cooper had been one of the most controversial and well-known defense attorneys in the state. His sleek good looks and his gift of gab had made him a favorite with the media, and it hadn't made much difference to Cooper whether that favoritism was good or bad, as long as it existed. When he'd married Eve two years ago, their wedding had rivaled that of a Saudi prince. The press had touted her as an eighties Cinderella, the drug store clerk who'd made good by marrying a man old enough to be her father.

Aline had found the whole affair nauseating.

The Honda faltered as it chugged up a steep hill. She heard a disturbing click in the engine. The car was more than eight years old, an Accord that had seen better days. But it was paid for, had a new paint job, a refurbished engine, and most of the major parts had been replaced. If she'd been in the department for at least five years, she would've been entitled to one of the half-dozen cruisers slated for summer use. But her two-and-a-half-year stint in homicide made her the fledgling of the permanent staff, so it was either the Honda or walk.

Aline followed Ivy Road as it ascended above the Cove Marina. Its lights twinkled in the dark, illuminating the spectral shapes of yachts, fishing vessels, houseboats, sloops, and catamarans. The toys of the rich. The folks in Pirate's Cove sure weren't working two jobs so they could afford to live on Tango. They were probably the only people on the island who weren't. Many of them, like Eve Cooper, didn't work at all. They had married into money.

The lights of the marina vanished as the road twisted and sloped steeply upward, then dead-ended—and there was the Cooper mansion. The windows blazed. Light bled into the front yard and shot across the crescent driveway. Aline counted three cars—a pale blue Mercedes, a Porsche the color of seaweed, a canary yellow VW bug.

Eve stood at the end of the walkway, clutching her arms against her. As Aline parked behind the Porsche and got out with a flashlight in one hand, Eve hurried over. She was thinner than a blade and wore navy blue shorts that were very short, a light blue T-shirt with no bra, and she was barefoot. Her short sable hair exploded in curls around her face, and the heat had plastered several strands against her cheeks. Maybe it was the sharp blue of her eyes or the sensuous shape of her mouth or just that Aline hadn't seen her for months and had forgotten how much she resembled Murphy's dead wife. But tonight she looked enough like Monica to have been her twin. A huge swell of sorrow thickened like phlegm in Aline's chest. She nearly backpedaled out of the drive, nearly lifted her hand and called,
Bye Eve, catch you later.

Then she realized Eve's mouth was moving, and her sorrow broke up and floated away. The beauty of Eve, that precise symmetry of her features that mimicked Monica's, shattered as she spoke. Monica's voice had been lilting, musical, an erudite voice; Eve's voice was merely common, a street voice, quick and hoarse.

"Out back. He's out back. On the beach. Behind the house. I was gonna go swimming and that's when I . . ." Her eyes went dead and blank. She moved her hands up and down her arms, rapidly, as if to warm them, then spun around. "This way. I'll show you."

Aline switched on the flashlight, but it turned out not to be necessary because the path that cut through the foliage was illumined by a dozen or more three-foot-high lampposts. Moths fluttered around them. Insects chirred. Heat coated the air like varnish, but this part of the island had a northeast exposure, and at least there was a breeze. It carried the distant whine of a boat and the bark of a dog.

Eve hurried along in front of Aline, hips swaying slightly, just as Monica's had, a practiced sway, as if she'd rehearsed in front of a mirror. When they reached the end of the path, where the yard was washed only in moonlight, Eve slowed and stepped deliberately through the grass, as if to avoid stickers or bugs, toes pointed like a ballerina's.