The Naked Detective (4 page)

"All legit?"

Ozzie snorted. "Fuck's legit? Pot, no; tequila, yes? Cubans, yes; Haitians, no? I mean, who the fuck decides—"

I jumped in to forestall another tirade. "I heard he owns the cops."

"The cops!" said Ozzie, managing to invest the word with a detestation that had been fermenting half a lifetime. "Now we're talking assholes. Corrupt or just plain dumb? Remember the one got caught suckin' pussy in the squad car?"

"You think Ortega owns them?"

Ozzie looked at me almost with pity. "Man, are you naive? There's six, eight guys control this town. The guys with the real estate, the tour concessions, the gambling boats. They get what they want. The cops are there to help.... Why you so curious all of a sudden?"

I didn't answer. I made a point of getting busy packing up my stuff. It was around eleven-thirty and the courts were emptying. Old doubles players with bent backs and bandaged knees hobbling home for chicken salad in an avocado. I dropped my racquets into my bike basket. "Same time Saturday?" I said, and headed off across the park.

Riding home, I was thinking: Why do people get sucked into things that they know, down deep, won't make them happy?

Things like golf. Or volunteering for committees. Or moving to Los Angeles. What is the strange insidious pressure that, every day, persuades large numbers of people to leap headlong into crap like that? Is it just that people are so easily bamboozled? Maybe it's the awful fear of being bored, the belief that being bored is somehow shameful. Better to do anything, however dumb, however trivial, than just sit there, quietly and still.

Me, I sort of like being bored, though I admit it's an acquired taste, and difficult to justify to people who live north of, say, Mile Marker 10. Being bored is like drinking tea the exact same temperature as your mouth. You're getting something from it, though it's easy not to notice. And at least, when you're bored, you're not pretending something matters when it doesn't. At least you're not being had.

These thoughts, of course, were a way of assuring myself I would get sucked no deeper into the death of Kenny Lukens. Why should I? I'd met the guy exactly once. His life had zilch to do with mine. I owed him nothing. So I rode home, looking forward to, even craving, a boring afternoon. A good long soak in the hot tub. A bowl of pasta and a glass of Sangiovese. Some empty time in which to recover from my shock of the morning and my drubbing on the tennis court.

I climbed off my bike, locked it to the same palm I always lock it to. Went up the porch steps and into the house. Dropped my racquets and stripped, bachelor style, directly into the washing machine. Grabbed a towel and headed out the back.

I skirted the pool and was two steps from the hot tub when I saw them.

I didn't want to see them, but there they were: Kenny's tits, still perched pink and gleaming on the apron of the tub, uncanny, accusing, like the severed body parts of a medieval martyr. I tried not to look at the tits. I thought of flinging them like small humped Frisbees over the fence and into a neighbor's yard. I couldn't do it. I stepped over them and into the hot tub.

I closed my eyes and sought to calm myself by picturing the trajectories of tennis balls—the exquisite parabolas of topspin, the floating rise and steep drop of a slice. Instead I saw Kenny Lukens with his wig flung off, brow furrowed above his made-up lashes. I rested my elbow on the lip of the tub, and at some point my fingers blundered against a vinyl boob. It was hot from the sun, the nipple just melted enough to feel tacky to the touch. I yanked my hand away. And at some point I understood that I'd be going to the hospital that afternoon. Visiting Lefty Ortega. I didn't want to do it. It wouldn't make me happy. I was being had, and I knew that I was being had, getting sucked in deeper to the story of this poor dead dreamer, and acting as if perhaps his story mattered, and wondering at every moment if I believed it really did.

———

I wouldn't go to Key West General with the idea of getting well, but as a place to die it's probably as good as any. Better than most, in fact, because all the rooms have views. One wing, it's true, looks out at the garbage dump, but another faces toward the community college. From the third floor you can gaze across the tops of palms all the way to the green shimmer of the Gulf. Above the trees, pelicans swoop; they seem to be bundling up the world like storks wrap babies, but now they're carrying it away from you, leaving you behind as they glide on silent wings.

Lefty Ortega was in Intensive Care. At least that's what I was told. But when I showed up at the unit, it seemed they'd lost him. I don't mean he died; I mean they couldn't find him. Vintage Key West General.

So I trudged to yet another wing. By then the stench of the place had gone all through me; I'd forgotten what air smelled like without the adornments of blood and disinfectant.

I found Ortega's room and remembered I was supposed to be a private eye. So I strolled discreetly past, observing. It was a big room, full of flowers; the arrangements were showy, garish, the kind of thing people send when they don't really give a shit, just feel they should be represented. There was a woman at the bedside. I couldn't see her face. She was wearing a scarf; rich, thick hair spilled out beneath it and darkly curled against her slightly downy neck. Her posture was youthful and her legs seemed nervous in shadowy stockings. She was stroking Lefty's forehead.

I moved on to the end of the hallway, biding my time, watching the horribly familiar hospital routines. Where my father died, where my mother died—it was always the same. There was always a guy with a mop, and he was always whistling. There was the woman with the cart of magazines and candy. She was always Filipino, always smiling, always kind.
Ah, you're dying?
How about an
Entertainment Weekly
and a Snickers bar?

After maybe twenty minutes the woman emerged from Lefty's room. I tried to figure out if she looked devastated, but was distracted by noticing that, all in all, she looked damn good. White blouse tucked snug enough into a straight black skirt to show the salient features of her torso. High Cuban hips that seemed somehow to wiggle when she was standing still. She paused a moment and looked my way; our eyes met for some fraction of a second. Hers were wide-set with a peculiar upturn at the outside edges. As she turned to go I saw a soft and somewhat sallow cheek around the corner from lips that were full and red and bowed. She pivoted on midheel shoes and clicked away.

I watched a little then breathed deep and took my turn at Lefty's bedside.

For a guy whose only care was palliative, he was hooked up to a lot of gizmos. Sensors on his sunken chest led up to a beeping monitor where the weary race of his pulse was run out on a graph. He had a harness like a feed bag on his nose; it squirted oxygen up his nostrils. A chandelier of IV bottles was clustered above him, feeding saline and painkillers through different tubes to various needles taped into his arms and neck.

His cancerous abdomen was huge, bizarrely pregnant-looking; it made a steep egg-shaped hump in the sheet. Like a spider sucking out the innards of a fly, the tumor had drained all the rest of him to feed itself. His cheekbones showed and his collarbones stuck out. The once fearsome shoulders were stringy and pathetic, the arms knobby at the wrists and elbows. The suspicious eyes still darted, just as Kenny Lukens had described, though the whites were yellow now, and it was hard to know what they were seeing. Morphine. My parents had both been on morphine near the ends of their separate lives. My mother had seen square men pouring from the television and dancing down the walls. My father always fastidious, became deeply troubled by the geometry of the ceiling tiles, and had made me wheel his bed around and around the room until he felt properly aligned.

He slept about ten seconds, long enough to snore just once, then blinked himself awake. He raised a finger a few inches off the sheet. Wagging it at me, his voice a slurring rasp, he said, "You fuck my daughter I cut your balls off."

"You find it yet, Bubba?"

I didn't answer right away. I told myself be cagey. "Not yet," I said. "Still looking."

He fell asleep for another snore or two, then woke and gestured weakly toward a corner of the room. "Fuckin' palmetto bugs. Cocksuckers sing to me, ya know. Stand up on their hind legs, put their arms around each other, sing. Antennas waving, won't shut up."

I looked toward the vacant corner. "What do they sing, Lefty?"

He closed his eyes and murmured tunelessly through deeply fissured lips: "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore ..."

"Would kill anybody."

"No shit, Bubba." He laughed, I think. There was some wheezing and his enormous liver shook like half-set Jell-O. Then, to my horror; he reached out and touched my arm. His fingers felt waxy, already dead. He said, "I can't rest, you don't find it. Promise me you'll find it."

Stalling for time, I glanced up at the monitor. Bunch of numbers. When they zeroed out, that was that. I told myself be smart. "I'm working on it, Lefty."

There was a silence. The sick man seemed to settle into it, practicing for the quiet to come.

After a bit I nonchalantly said, "What is it again I'm looking for?"

Lefty's mouth opened. I saw stumps of teeth and a scaly tongue before it closed again. His forehead crawled, his jaundiced eyes narrowed with a fresh confusion that now took on a tinge of panic. "You ain't Bubba. Fuck are you?"

"Sure, I'm Bubba," I said, though even as I said it I felt some echo of the uselessness that Kenny Lukens had felt in lying to this guy.

"Fuck are you?" he said again. "That fuck Mickey send you?"

"What fuck Mickey?"

He didn't answer. His eyes slid off me and strained upward toward a nurse call button on the wall behind him. His arm slowly lifted, dragging tubes and needles. I blocked it with my body and leaned down low. Rumor has it that cancer isn't catching; still, it was creepy bringing my face close to the foul breath of this dying stranger. "Okay. I'm a friend of Kenny Lukens, Lefty. Remember Kenny Lukens?"

Ortega's hand dangled in midair. Pulse showed through the thin skin of his temples. "Cocksucker," he whispered.

"He's dead, Lefty. Went to dig up what he stole from you, got killed."

The dying owe no homage to the dead, and Ortega wasted no sympathy on Kenny's passing. He just gurgled and scrambled till he was almost sitting up. IV bottles swung like bells and clunked together. "The pouch? You have it? I pay you."

"Whoever killed him has the fucking pouch."

Ortega just panted through the harness on his nose, his eyes as wild as the eyes of a cornered horse.

I suddenly realized I was not only frightened and appalled, but angry; I still don't know exactly why. Maybe because any death drags you back to thoughts of every other, all the helplessness and lack of resignation. I grabbed him by the arms. "What the fuck is so important with that pouch that Kenny Lukens died for it?"

His mouth twitched, his cracked lips quivered and split deeper. Disgusted to find his bony shoulders in my hands, I let them go. He fell back against his pillows. Oxygen was squeaking in his nose; or maybe it was my own breath, coming hard. The graph of his heartbeat was tracing out a jagged range of hills.

His eyes stayed on my face as he reached slowly once again toward the call button. I did nothing to stop him. I was paralyzed. I watched him watching me, and I digested the horror of having touched him. Wheezing, straining, he used up the slack of the tubes in his arms. The button was farther than the tubes would stretch. He kept reaching for it anyway. The tape that held the needles in his veins started pulling back from his purplish-yellow skin; it made a sound like ripping silk and left behind a residue of gummy dots. The needles appeared to be bending in his flesh like spoons in unripe melon. A syringe pulled free with a muffled pop and a small spout of brownish blood gushed out of Lefty's forearm.

Dizzy, nauseous, I wheeled out of the room.

The monitor started beeping, screaming at my back. I'd just made it to the elevator when a clot of doctors and nurses went hurrying by in the opposite direction, scrubs and lab coats rustling behind.

Back home
,
I went not for the Sancerre, not for the Vouvray, but straight, and with an unsteady hand, for a jumbo hit of grappa.

Great, I thought—one hour of playing detective and already I'm reaching for the hard stuff in the middle of the afternoon. How much longer before I sank to swilling the crappy bourbon out of paper cups?