The Naked Detective Page 13

  After a moment, he shot a nervous look across his shoulder at the sluggish action on his gambling floor and said, "Look, I'm running a business here. Let's not have any trouble."

  I put my glass down on the bar and suavely dried my hand on my shorts. "Then maybe there's someplace quiet we could talk."

  23

  Veale led me down the narrow flight of stairs. Even before the door to his office was fully opened, I received a very unpleasant surprise.

  Sitting at a desk, playing solitaire in a pool of greenish light, was one of the last people in the world I hoped to see: Officer Cruz. One of the homicide cops who'd interrogated me the other night. Who'd ordered me to drop this thing. Who'd threatened me with evidence tampering and warned me of the erotic horrors that would befall me in the pen. He looked up at me and the skin tightened at his improbable hairline. "Fuck you doing here?" he said.

  At that, Mickey Veale brightened somewhat, seemed to get his balance back. He even managed to get a little playfulness into his tone. "Ah," he said, "you gentlemen know each other."

  "We've met," said Cruz, and he continued turning cards. "Amsterdam likes to poke around crime scenes."

  His dismissive tone annoyed me. I paid taxes. I had rights. I said, "Somebody has to. I mean, if the cops are playing solitaire on gambling boats —"

  Cruz bristled but Veale seemed to enjoy the repartee. Smiling once again, he said, "Officer Cruz does security for me. So does his partner, Officer Corallo. On their own time. Perfectly legit. Have a seat."

  Sitting, I thought, Security, right. A do-nothing job for very good pay; a vaguely lawful kind of bribery. Ozzie Kimmel had nailed it—the cops were in the pocket of the handful of players who ran the town. Why was I surprised?

  I must have been brooding on this, because Mickey Veale, seated opposite me by now, said, "So, Pete, you wanted to talk?"

  I cleared my throat, said, "Right." Then I remembered a familiar dream, probably one of those that everybody has: You're in a play. Maybe you're the lead. And as the curtain lifts you suddenly realize that you've never seen a script.... I started anyway. "Lefty Ortega—I believe you knew him?"

  "We had some business together," said Veale.

  "What kind of business?"

  "Water sports. A concession over by the Hyatt."

  "Paradise," I said.

  "That's right."

  "So now you're in business with Lydia?"

  "Seems that way," said Veale. "I mean, Christ, Lefty's barely cold."

  "Lydia thinks I shouldn't trust you. Why would that be, Mickey?"

  Veale shrugged affably, indifferently. "Lydia's a whore."

  "You like whores," I reminded him.

  "Some," he admitted, and left it at that.

  I drummed fingers on the desk. Thinking aloud, I said, "She hates you. You hate her. Why would people who hate each other's guts be partners in a business?"

  "You think that's unusual?" said Veale.

  He had me there.

  He paused a moment, then continued rather condescendingly, rubbing my face in my naivete. "Pete," he said, "have you ever done business in a foreign country? That's what it's like down here. You need a local partner to get you in. You don't have to like them. You have to give them a piece of something, in exchange for which they grease the wheels for you."

  At this I could not help glancing at the moonlighting homicide detective, sulking over his now suspended game of cards. "Like what wheels do they grease?" I asked.

  Casually, Mickey Veale said, "Licenses, permits, variances. Boring municipal crap."

  I expected it got more exciting than permits but I let it slide. "Okay," I said. "So you gave the Ortegas a piece of the watersports business. What else?"

  The big man slowly folded his pudgy hands. "Sorry, that isn't public information."

  In semiconscious mimicry, I folded my hands too. Leaning forward I said, "That's okay. I'm not a public eye."

  I thought that was rather clever. No one else did. There was an awkward moment that turned out to serve a useful purpose. A failed joke creates embarrassment, and embarrassment breeds hostility, and I'd badly needed something to get my juices flowing. More aggressive now, I said, "Look, two people have been killed—"

  I got loudly interrupted at that point. Officer Cruz had been sitting there as taut as a chained-up dog. Now he jumped in so fast that it was clear he'd just been waiting for me to cross a certain line, hoping I'd cross a certain line. "I told you to stay away from—"

  I surprised myself by pointing a finger and shouting him down in turn. "Are you off duty? Then back off and let me talk."

  Cruz was halfway out of his chair by now. I was about one-tenth out of mine, when it dawned on me, to my horror and amazement, that I was close to striking a fighting pose. This was preposterous. I remembered reading, as a kid, that the person who threw the first punch was the one who'd run out of ideas. This notion had struck me as pretty wise but now I saw it was baloney. Who threw the first punch was the guy who believed he could score a quick knockout and not get hit back. By increments I hoped would be invisible, I started lowering my cowardly ass back into the seat.

  Luckily for me, Mickey Veale decided to play peacemaker. "Gents," he said, "let's not get all excited. I've got nothing to hide. Go ahead and ask your questions."

  Easy for him to say. By now my heart was in my mouth. I took a long, slow breath and tried to remember what my questions ought to be. "Okay, okay," I said. "Let's start with the first guy who was killed. Kenny Lukens. Worked at Lefty's bar. A couple of years ago he faked a robbery and ended up with something Lefty wanted pretty badly."

  "What?" said Mickey Veale.

  "He doesn't know!" said Cruz.

  "You don't know?" said Veale.

  "I don't know."

  "That's peculiar," said Veale.

  "Yeah, it is."

  "I mean, it's weird."

  "Yes," I said. "It's peculiar and weird. Can we move on?"

  I noticed then that Officer Cruz was shaking his head and smirking. I knew this was a comment on my interrogating skills and I confess it rattled me. I felt like an intern hacking off his first appendix with the master surgeon looking on. I bit my lip and blundered ahead. "Lukens bolted. Went to the Bahamas. Some time thereafter, a Key West guy showed up and threatened him."

  I was studying Veale, trying to gauge how much of this tale he already knew. His fat face had the elastic puffiness of rising dough, and about as much expression. "I'm not sure I follow you," he said.

  "This guy," I said, "was a regular at Lefty's. I think maybe he worked for you at Paradise."

  Veale poked a finger in his cheek. It sank in knuckle deep. "And what makes you think that?"

  I'd already started pushing breath when I realized that I couldn't tell him. If I told him about finding the matchbook, I'd have to mention the Hibiscus guest house in front of Cruz, and that might make trouble for Vanessa, which I'd promised that I wouldn't do. Worse, how would I know any of this except through a confidante of Kenny's?—and the thought of implicating Maggie made me feel ill. Some interrogator. I'm getting one-word answers or no answers at all, and had come a hairbreadth from spilling everything I knew. I sucked back whatever it was I'd started to say, and said instead, "Sorry—that isn't public information either."

  Veale turned his palms up, gave a little shrug, and looked at Cruz. Cruz shot him a disgusted glance then smirked again at me. I tried to sit tight but I squirmed. Squirmed, and tried to figure out what my next gambit ought to be. I felt outflanked, outclassed, and lousy.

  But it so happened that I'd brought with me a trump card. I hadn't decided if I would play it or save it; its mere possession was delectable. It should not, I knew, be played in desperation; but this was a rather desperate moment, and playing it was the only thing I could think of to do. So, with a gesture I envisioned as a compact yet dramatic flourish, I reached into a pocket of my shorts and produced the broken swizzle stick I'd dug up on Sunset Key. Slowly and por
tentously I placed it on the desk in front of Veale and Cruz.

  They looked at it and blinked.

  Speaking barely above a whisper; I said, "I found this right where Kenny Lukens was killed."

  A pregnant silence followed. I didn't actually expect a breakdown, tears, a spontaneous confession, but stranger things have happened. I leaned slightly forward in my chair.

  At last Cruz said, "Ah. Exhibit A. A piece of flotsam. You're pathetic, Amsterdam."

  I was less hurt by this than dazed. I eased back in my chair; crossed my arms in self-defense.

  "You know how much crap washes up on that beach?" the cop went on. "We've got twenty things like this already in the lab. Cigarette packs, sun-block tubes, plastic hotel keys. They mean nothing. Get a job, Amsterdam. Get a life."

  A life. For a while there I'd thought I had one. Now I shrank inside myself and pouted.

  The boat rocked. With malice posing as indifference, I watched as Cruz's fingers moved lazily, disdainfully toward my swizzle stick. I let the fingers get close enough that I could see the texture of their cuticles and discern the whorls on their tips, and then I snatched the stick away and returned it to my pocket. This was childish, I admit. But he'd insulted my find, my one and only piece of evidence, laughed it off as flotsam. I wasn't about to let him play with it, still less have it.

  A ridiculous standoff ensued—Cruz's empty fingers dangling in space, me sulking like a brat. Mickey Veale loomed larger than ever on the far side of the desk, seemed actually to swell into the role of grown-up referee in a scrap between ragged boys. He smiled in mock benignity and said, "Any more questions, Mr. Amsterdam?"

  I sulked and squirmed and could think of only one. "When the hell can I get off this boat?"

  24

  The answer, to my sorrow, was 6:00 a.m.

  I went back upstairs to the small hell of the casino and watched people die by the increments of a quarter or a buck. Around four o'clock a breeze came up, and things got really strange. The people playing slots were sitting in tall chairs with casters on the legs. When they pulled the handle, their momentum, added to the rocking of the boat, sent them rolling downhill through the haze of cigarettes to the far side of the cabin. Sometimes they slammed into a bulkhead. When the boat tipped back the other way, they hurtled once again toward their machine to see that they had lost. Now and then a slot spit forth a rain of coins at a trajectory like someone throwing up.

  I stepped outside to get some air. The moon was near the zenith, but the sky was soggy and there was a lack of conviction in the way it shone. Something awfully melancholy too—the humble sorrow of the perennial warm-up act, doing its best but doomed to be outdone, erased, by the gaudier talents of the headliner, the sun. Still, I watched awhile. The wind raised a light chop on the sea; moonlight put a milky gleam in the topmost curls of the wavelets. Now and then a green-gold arc of phosphorescence tracked the passing of an unseen ray. The drone of the casino was muted by the walls and windows and scattered by the breeze, spread thin till it could almost pass for quiet.

  Or it could until a different sound intruded. The sound was far away, and hard to locate in the wind, but it gradually resolved into the high nattering buzz of small engines—more than one of them, I thought. Early fishermen, probably, drinking coffee from thermoses and staking out their portions of the reef for dawn. I scanned the horizon but saw nothing. The engine sounds got closer, now taking on the rise and drop in pitch that went with little bounces in the chop. And finally, maybe a mile off and faintly mauve in the listless moonlight, I thought I saw a pair of misty rooster tails of the kind that were shot skyward not by boats but Jet Skis. I squinted toward these phantoms, trying to assure myself that they were really there, that they really were connected to the engine sounds.

  Then another detail barged in on the night. A cone of light flashed forth on the water underneath me. I couldn't see the source of the light, but it could only have come from our boat. It stayed on for some fraction of a second, switched off, and then switched on again.

  When the former dimness had returned, the motor sounds no longer seemed to be getting closer. I squinted toward where I thought I'd seen the rooster tails but saw only a featureless swath of predawn ocean. Gradually, the whine of engines fell away, restoring the flawed quiet of the background hum. The breeze dropped, the surface of the water healed itself; it was as if nothing whatsoever had occurred.

  Perplexed, exhausted, doubting my eyes, I tried and failed to make some sense of the dim vague episode. Then my brain shut down and, passive as a plant, I waited for first light.

  It came at last as an undramatic paling of the eastern sky, a lazy snuffing out of stars, then exploded in yellow slashes that sliced through lavender slabs of cloud, and seared the retina, and briefly made the ocean red as blood before turning it turquoise.

  It was already hot when The Lucky Duck groaned against its pilings and was made fast to the dock. I didn't see Veale or Cruz before I disembarked.

  ———

  In principle, I'm all for decadence. Crazy hours; the edgy desperate drive that peels the skin off life and pushes your face into the tart and pulpy stuff inside—why the hell not?

  I just don't seem to have the constitution for it. Up all night, I felt like shit. I'd never quite gotten drunk and I didn't have a hangover. I just felt dull and itchy and disoriented. The morning sunshine embarrassed me; I saw myself as an affront to the day. I craved sleep, but when I'd reclaimed my bicycle from its lockup near the dock, the moving desperate drive that air slapped some semblance of alertness into me and I wasn't sleepy anymore.

  Suddenly I wanted pancakes.

  Don't ask me why; I don't even like pancakes. But I rode downtown through empty streets and went to a place that opened early and served banana pancakes in an open courtyard full of cats and chickens. Drinking coffee, mopping syrup, glancing around at the other grubby souls who hadn't been to bed yet and whose tortured shirttails had long ago given up on staying in their pants, I wondered, with only minor anxiety, if this was what a nervous breakdown would be like: You still had a self, you still went through the motions of a life, but the life you were living no longer seemed congruent with the person living it. At forty-seven I knew who I was. I was a guy who hit the sack around eleven and woke up to an austere and wholesome bowl of cereal and fruit, a bonanza of vitamins and fiber. So who was this unshaven red-eyed impostor poking sodden pancakes with a slightly trembling fork?

  I started getting worried. A little angry too. That bastard Cruz was right—I ought to get a life, or at least preserve the little life I had. Why was I letting it go down the tubes? Well, I wouldn't let it, not without a fight. I would grab a piece of it and hold on, do something wherein I'd recognize myself. I slurped down the last of my coffee and decided, exhausted or otherwise, I would go and play some tennis.

  So I rode home, threw cold water on my face, tucked myself into my jock. By the time I made it to the park, it was around eight-thirty and the usual idiots were assembling. Including, of course, Ozzie Kimmel. He was holding forth in the shade of the players' enclosure, and when he saw me he sang out, "Aha! He's here!... You've been dodging me."

  I loved this about Ozzie. A more marginal person could hardly be imagined, and yet he kept right on believing that everything referred to him. "Don't be ridiculous," I said.

  "Come on," he said. "You stiff me, what, like three, four times already, then you show up on a day I drive. I'm usually not here."

  This reminded me that I no longer knew what day it was, still less what days Ozzie Kimmel worked. Vaguely I said, "So where's the cab?"

  "Fuck the cab. I didn't wanna. You got a game?"

  "No," I said. "I don't."

  At that he brightened, but cautiously. He'd been kicked before. But he couldn't quite keep his tail from wagging at the prospect of a ball to fetch. "We gonna play?"

  "Come on," I said. "Let's do it."

  So we played a set, and, boy, did I stink up the court. Ser
ved like hell, volleyed worse, and couldn't find my forehand. This was humbling but salubrious. Reminded me that leisure too was serious, required discipline, even passion. Do it half-ass and it was a thinner, poorer thing by far.

  Ozzie picked up the ball after my final errant shot and said, "Another set?"

  Slow and hangdog, I walked toward the net. "Oz," I whined, "I haven't slept, I got pancakes churning in my stomach like cement, and I think I'm gonna barf."

  "Excuses, excuses. What kinda weenie plays one set?"

  I put my racquet in its case.

  Ozzie still didn't believe I was quitting. "One more lousy set. You're nauseous, I won't use the drop shot."

  I draped a towel over my shoulder and started walking off the court.

  In a tone of compromise, he said, "Okay. Three games."

  Still moving away, I half turned to look at him. "Oz, you know anything about smuggling?"

  He didn't miss a beat, and of course he referred the question to himself. "I've done a little of it. Why?"

  "You've done a little of it?" I echoed stupidly.

  "In the seventies. Sure. Everybody did. Marijuana from Jamaica, Mexico, Belize. Came in in bales. Mother ships brought 'em almost to the reef, transferred 'em onto fishing boats. Which is where I worked. Sometimes bales fell overboard. Or guys got paranoid and ditched 'em. People found 'em on the beach. Called 'em square grouper. It was good. Everybody made some money."

  Seeking shade, I continued walking off the court. And tried to hide that I was slightly shocked. Was I Key West's last puritan, the last bourgeois? Here I was, supposedly hard-boiled and all that stuff, and everybody but me seemed so cool and so blasé about the various and sundry crimes they had committed.

  Ozzie might have read some disapproval in my posture. Or more likely he just felt like talking. "Hey," he went on, "smuggling is the whole story of this town. Rum-running, drugs—I mean, what's the point of living on a dinky island at the edge of nowhere if you're not gonna smuggle shit in?"