The Naked Detective Page 10

  "Let me see that," I said, and reached out for the paper. Sure enough, there I was. By name, in a bland little six-line item. Local detective arrested at murder site. Held for questioning at county jail.

  Ozzie said, "You don't look happy."

  I gave him his paper back. I didn't answer.

  "Great publicity," he said. "You can't buy publicity like that."

  "I need some coffee."

  Ozzie seemed to think that meant I was inviting him in for some. But he was wrong. I started closing the door on him.

  He was used to that kind of thing and didn't take offense. Through the narrowing aperture, he said, "Come on, let's play some tennis."

  Tennis? Did I play tennis? It had only been a few days since my routine had been annihilated, but already the aimless, peaceful life I lived before was starting to seem as distant as a half-remembered dream. So I told myself: Play tennis. Start doing normal things again, and maybe you'll feel normal. I told Ozzie I'd meet him in an hour.

  "I'll kick your ass," he said, and turned to go. "Here, I'm done with this." He handed me his paper.

  I threw it in the garbage and made myself some breakfast.

  ———

  Sometime between finishing my granola and pulling on my sneakers, I remembered that my bicycle was not locked to its accustomed palm.

  It had been left behind, unchained, at Redmond's Boatyard when I got arrested. Which no doubt meant that it was gone by now—bicycle theft being Key West's crime of choice. Call me petty, but this bothered me a lot. It's depressing to lose a bike. It pulls you back to all the little heartaches of childhood, all the things that seemed wildly unjust and made you want to cry. Toys that broke the first time you played with them. Ice cream cones that tumbled to the ground. Things that grown-ups took away from you because they imagined you'd outgrown them. Oh well. I tried to shrug it off. I'd walk to tennis. No big deal.

  Except I didn't get to walk to tennis.

  With a towel around my neck and my racquets slung jauntily across my shoulder, I came out of my house to find two enormous fellows loitering at the base of the porch steps. They were wearing dark and shiny pants that strained across their meaty thighs, and big loose shirts such as one might wear a holster under. They might have been brothers, or salt-and-pepper shakers; they looked that much alike.

  I gave them a friendly smile and tried to walk around them. They didn't let me.

  "Lydia Ortega wants to see you," said one of them. He said it with a heavy Conch accent, in which taut New England vowels are stretched like taffy by a Southern languor and made lilting by a hint of Spanish singsong. He sucked his teeth right after he said it. His top lip crawled around on his gums.

  "Ah," I said. "And how is Lydia? Tell her I'll stop by later."

  "She wants to see you now," said the other goon.

  Like his partner, he had a piggy nose and the ungenerous expression of someone whose features were squeezed too close together. I tried to figure if these were faces belonging to the Ortega clan. A degenerate branch, maybe. I also could not help wondering how these two guys would look in snorkels.

  Showing them my racquets, I said, "I'm sorry, but I have a tennis game right now."

  The first goon said, "Welluh, I think you're gonna miss it."

  "I can't miss it. It's against a guy who takes defaults."

  To this the large men were insensitive. They stepped in a little closer; their shadows fell across me like a mildewed blanket. I shuffled my feet but didn't move. I was pleased with myself for not being more afraid, but I knew down deep that this wasn't courage, just befuddlement. I'd never been abducted before, and I didn't know how to act. Should I scream for help? Should I fight? Pummel them with slashing backhands?

  Frankly, my chances of winning by force just didn't seem that good. I let out a long slow disappointed sigh, and vaguely wondered how I all of a sudden had got so popular, and why every confrontation seemed to end with me throwing up my hands and caving.

  "Okay," I said at last. "Let's go talk to Lydia."

  17

  Driving crosstown with the finger-breakers, I really wished that I was on my bike.

  On a bike you can smell what's blooming, yard by yard. You can feel when a puff of breeze starts up from nowhere, and when it fades away, dropping one by one the fronds it had lifted. I missed my bicycle pretty badly.

  We reached the giant condo and took the elevator up.

  Lydia met us at her door. If she'd ever been in mourning for her father, she was out of it already. She was wearing tight cream-colored pants and a red blouse that draped in some places and clung in others. I wanted to look more closely at the clingy parts, but sandwiched as I was between her goons, I felt a little shy about it. Lydia herself seemed to feel no such hesitation. She looked me up and down, then down and up, lingering, I thought, on the zone between my sweat socks and my shorts. The examination made me feel a little cheap, but I must admit I kind of liked it. With a nod toward my racquets and my towel, she said, "Ah, it's Mr. Casual."

  Frankly, I thought it was a pretty good description and I had no comeback for it.

  We went into the living room. The AC was blasting, of course, and my thighs were cold. Lydia motioned for me to sit. I avoided the sectional. I was afraid it might still be damp from last night's vodka, and besides, I wanted some space of my own. I settled gingerly into an armchair. The two goons stood on either side of me like giant bookends in the shape of snarling dogs.

  Lydia sat opposite me and crossed her knees with a flourish. "So," she began. "You didn't tell me you're a private eye."

  Reasonably, I said, "Wouldn't be very private if I told everyone."

  "But now it's in the paper;" she pointed out.

  "Yes," I said. "Ironic, isn't it?"

  She frowned and looked down at her lap. "Drink?"

  It was something after eleven in the morning. I shook my head. She looked a little disappointed. There went her chance to have one.

  She got over it. She even smiled. "Pete," she said, "I'm going to ask you some questions. And today you're going to answer them."

  I waited. At the edges of my vision, I could see the knobby asses and thick arms of the men who'd brought me here. Their scarred fingers and hairy knuckles struck me as pretty good reasons to cooperate. Yet from the start the interview did not go well.

  "Who's your client?" Lydia began.

  "I don't have a client."

  This happened to be an honest answer but it clearly didn't satisfy.

  "Don't bullshit me," she said. "You working for Mickey Veale?"

  "Him again," I said. "Why would I be working for him?"

  "And don't start that question-with-a-question crap. What were you doing on that boat?"

  "Looking for something. Next you're going to ask me what, and I'm going to tell you I don't know."

  Lydia exhaled; her breath whistled slightly. She looked sideways at her flunkies and they squeezed in closer next to me. They didn't hit me, didn't touch me, and yet I had a certain airless feeling, like when you flatten the last bubble in a Ziploc bag.

  With fraying patience, Lefty's daughter said, "Okay, let's start again. Tell me who you're working for."

  I tried to clarify; I really did. "I'm working for myself," I said. "I almost had a client but he died. Okay?"

  "And who was he?" she pressed.

  I thought it should be obvious. "The guy whose boat I got arrested on."

  Lydia looked a little bit confused. "The Polish guy?"

  "He was Latvian."

  Her face revealed a profound lack of interest in fine distinctions among the Baltic nations.

  "But that isn't who I mean," I said. "I mean the first guy who owned the boat. The guy who robbed your father's place a couple years ago."

  "That bartender? He's dead?"

  I leaned very slowly forward in my chair. The goons, who might very well have been the killers, after all, leaned very slowly forward with me, like we were somehow glued together. I
could not hold back from saying, "You want me to believe you didn't know?"

  Time got very viscous when I said that. Expressions chased one another across Lydia Ortega's face. She looked surprised, or tried to. Then she seemed angry, cornered, and I thought she'd sic the thugs on me. The anger simmered down to what might almost have been hurt; the real or fake offense then girded itself with haughtiness, a brittle resolve to seize control again.

  Which she did in an instant, simply by seeming to ignore the question altogether.

  "Dead," she said. "Too bad ... So. You know he robbed my father. What else do you know about it?"

  I wasn't ready for the way time revved back to normal speed, for the pace of her recovery. I felt a beat behind, and spoke too fast, trying to catch up. "I know your father was pissed off enough to have him killed," I said. "I know that, on his deathbed, he was still obsessed with getting back whatever it was that was stolen."

  Smugly, but not without, I thought, a certain nervousness, Lydia said, "But you don't know what that was."

  "No," I admitted, "I don't. All I know is that it was in a bank-deposit pouch. As for what's inside ... maybe you could tell me."

  She smiled at me sweetly, then sat up straighter and snugged her blouse so that the cloth went translucent against her bra. "You're pressing your luck, Pete Amsterdam."

  To that I had nothing to say. A moment passed. Lydia crossed her legs the other way. Her slacks rustled and I watched the creases rise and fall along her thighs. In a tone suddenly executive and brisk, she said, "Well, then I guess you'll work for me."

  "Excuse me?"

  "You have no client. You understand the importance of the pouch—"

  "I don't want to work for you."

  She balled her fists, pressed them down into her restless hips, and looked insulted. "And why not?"

  The question boggled tact. Could I tell her that I didn't care to work for lunatics, or nymphos, or front-running suspects? "I just don't."

  Ignoring that, she said, "What's your usual fee?"

  In spite of everything, I almost laughed. My usual fee? My usual fee was bupkis.

  Lydia said, "Two thousand a week okay?"

  "It's not about the money."

  She laughed. Her red mouth got very wide and strands of sinew rose up in her neck. Even the matched goons smiled. Why did people always find this such an uproarious remark?

  While everyone was feeling blithe and cheery, I said lightly, "It was a woman who put the pouch into the safe. Your father said that himself. Can you think of who that woman might've been?"

  Lydia's spasm of merriment stopped on a dime. There was something unwholesome in how quickly it ended, how radically it changed. She shot me a look that almost seemed to hiss.

  The look was scary, but suddenly I knew what a real detective would say right at this moment, and I did my best to say it with firmness and certainty. "Come on now, Lydia, if you want us to work together, you have to be straight with me."

  With utter finality, she said, "No, I don't."

  So much for that.

  "That's why I'm paying you," she went on. "So I can make the rules."

  "And that's why I'm declining."

  Your basic standoff. We allowed it a moment to sink in. Then Lydia settled back into flirty mode and gave her hair a winsome shake. She leaned far forward and did some slick maneuver that made her boobs swell. At the same moment, her goons put their huge hairy hands on the arms of my chair. A pretty graphic carrot and stick. "Pete," she purred, "it's so much better we stay friends."

  Friends? She had me abducted when she felt like chatting and wiggled her backside when she wanted information. This was not my idea of friendship. Then again, with the rank warmth of the thugs pulsing on both sides of me, I had to acknowledge it was better than some other arrangements I could think of. "Friends," I echoed. "Believe me, I agree. So don't hire me. Please. Let's just keep it..." Keep it what? Weird? Insane? Finally I had the word for how we'd keep it. I gestured down at my tennis outfit and my chilly legs. "Let's just keep it casual."

  She looked at my crotch, I swear she did. "Casual. Okay. But let me give you one piece of advice. Check out Mickey Veale. Paradise Watersports."

  "Why?"

  "Because he's a scumbag and a liar and a sneak."

  "Your father was in business with him," I pointed out.

  "So am I," she said. "What of it?"

  18

  I'm not the kind of person who believes in miracles.

  Miracles, angels, affirmations, apparitions— all that muzzy-headed New Age shit. I mean, come on.

  But let me confess that, when Lydia's goons finally drove me home and I climbed from their car with my racquets and towel, I beheld something that partook of the miraculous: My bicycle was there, chained to the palm I always chain it to.

  As if doubting its reality, I went over and touched it. The fenders were dented, and rust lived in the dents. The handlebars were rough with tiny bubbles of corrosion and not quite aligned with the tires. It was mine, all right. The only thing foreign was the lock. But I knew where that had come from; it could only have been Maggie.

  I imagined her roused from sleep as the cops clambered aboard Dream Chaser. Drowsily coming up her companionway, perhaps, in time to see me carted off. And caring enough to climb down into the night to rescue my abandoned bike, to keep it safe. I pictured her rolling it over the gravel toward her trawler, locking it, with a mute nuzzling intimacy, to her own; and my throat closed down with gratitude. It was a small thing, maybe—but what was devotion if not the habit and the piling up of small considerations?

  I went into the house. As I stepped across the threshold I saw a key and a brief note that had been slid under the door. The note said, Hope you're okay. Teaching at noon. Home after that. Please come see me when you can. M.

  A flattering invitation, if less emphatic than sending bruisers to kidnap me. I stepped into the kitchen to check the clock. Just after twelve- thirty. This meant that if I stalled, say, another ten or fifteen minutes, I could show up just in time to miss the more humbling exertions—the contorting and the coiling, the straining up and the clamping down—and to join in as the class was moving into its deep-relaxation phase. Dessert without the bother of the meal. Why not? I walked around in circles for a little while, then traded in my tennis towel for one big enough to lie down on, and headed out again.

  It was great being reunited with my bike. I rode slowly, savoring. A few houses down from mine, jasmine was in bloom. Half a block beyond, the sweeter, pinker smell of frangipani overwhelmed it. A midday heaviness was in the air. Cats didn't wander; bugs didn't fly. Lizards stood on top of rocks, and blinked, and puffed their throats out. The asphalt had softened enough so that I could feel the slightest sexy yielding underneath my tires.

  I locked up outside the Leaf Shed, took my sneakers off on the porch, and tiptoed toward the studio. Inside, ten or twelve people with assorted bandannas and tattoos and eyebrow studs and nose rings were standing on their heads; it was one of those moments when you can't help wondering: What if a Martian spaceship landed right outside and this was the first thing that the little green men saw? The more advanced practitioners shot their legs straight up in open air; a couple of beginners in red leotards used the mirrored wall to support their inverted asses. The mirror doubled the already ample volumes, and the reflected image suggested something grossly floral—Georgia O'Keeffe on a very bad day. At the front of the room, Maggie was as graceful upside down as right-side up. Her back was long and it seemed to cost her nothing to hold her hips aloft. Her gray tights traced out the muscles in her thighs; her taut calves reminded me of full-to-bursting wineskins.

  I spread my towel on the floor and lay down on it. Suddenly I was sort of sleepy. No way was I going to launch myself into a shoulder stand. I rested.

  I rested on a freelance basis until the class came down off its shoulders, and then I rested as part of the group, as Maggie eased into deep relaxation. Padding silent
ly amid the prone bodies, her voice a mesmerizing purr; she urged us to let our weight settle into the earth, our eyeballs to float lightly in their sockets, our tongues to be soft in our mouths. Above all, our minds should be still.

  If thoughts came, they should not be held but allowed to pass like breeze through a wide-open room, neither possessing nor possessed.

  This was the part that gave me trouble.

  I could soften my feet and let my ankles flop as well as the next guy, but, lying there, eyes closed amid the hot smells of ancient tobacco and baking limestone, I couldn't stem the restless flow of thoughts. Thoughts came, and when they came, they stuck, attached by burrs of suspicion.

  Around the time I should have been relaxing my liver and my pancreas, I became preoccupied with recollections of last night's interview with the homicide detectives. While it was happening, it had seemed rigorous and long, but now suddenly I wondered if maybe they'd let me off too easily and too abruptly. They'd been nasty and intimidating—and then they gave me the merest wrist slap and sent me on my way. Why? Was there some deal implicit in their clemency? Were they as nervous as I was about what else might come out if the meeting continued . . . ?

  By the time I'd let these thoughts pass through, I'd lost the opportunity to ease my diaphragm and the little muscles between my ribs.

  I groped for serenity, and was finally settling down to releasing the sinews of my collarbone and throat, when once again my mind was shanghaied. This time it was Lydia. Her off-the-wall idea of hiring me. Her overly generous offer of pay. Was it a fee or a bribe? And then there was this near obsession with Mickey Veale. Was this a festering vendetta between the two of them, or just a way for Lydia to divert attention from herself? Then again, Veale was more than a convenient beard. He was also, apparently, a principal in Paradise Watersports, which trafficked in Jet Skis and snorkels. . . .

  "Let go of any tension in the jaw," Maggie was cooing.