The Naked Detective Read online

  The Jet Skis edged around the stern of the gambling boat and floundered there a moment, motors softly burping. I realized I was squeezing the gunwale of the skiff, sharp aluminum biting deep into my fingers. They were about to pass off the smuggled goods. I was about to witness it.

  Maggie handed me the binoculars; I pressed them to my exhausted eyes. The glasses brought me closer but also exaggerated motion—every wavelet, every lean. The image blurred and bounced; I struggled to hold steady, expecting to see ... what? I guess I expected pouches. Pouches like the one that Kenny Lukens died for; produced from mysterious compartments in the innards of the Jet Skis.

  But in fact there were no pouches. In fact there was no handoff. What actually happened was something altogether different and totally befuddling.

  The Jet Skis idled until a hinged panel was lowered from the transom of The Lucky Duck. The panel became a platform hovering barely above the surface of the water. One at a time the Jet Skis bumped up against the platform and were yanked aboard by a thick silhouette, a figure shorter and more muscular than that of Mickey Veale. The Jet Skis, their drivers—everything vanished into the belly of the gambling ship. All that was left was a faintly roiled piece of ocean with some dying eddies in it.

  Baffled, disbelieving, I kept on watching. After a moment some boards creaked faintly; a winch groaned as chain links grated. The platform lifted once again, the transom of the boat sealed off, and it was as if nothing whatsoever had transpired.

  I lowered the binoculars, let out the breath I'd been holding.

  I looked at Maggie. Maggie looked at me. The letdown and bewilderment were all there in the glance we shared. We didn't even need to shrug.

  31

  We sat there awhile longer unwilling to accept that nothing more would happen, that there'd be no bigger payoff for our numb butts and our cramped legs and our sleeplessness. But time breathed by, and nothing happened, and there was no bigger payoff.

  Eventually Maggie said, "Head in?" But it wasn't really a question and she was already moving back to start the engine when she said it.

  The skiff rocked as she yanked the starter cord. The flywheel clattered, gas exploded in the cylinder; but the motor didn't catch. She pulled again, and then again. The groaning of the piston and the splutter of exhaust grew louder with each try, and I started getting paranoid that we were making too much noise. I could not afford to be seen out here; I could not afford to get caught annoying Mickey Veale again. True, our dinghy was a mere speck on the water; with a low profile and no lights whatsoever. But we'd found the Jet Skis in the moon glow; anybody with binoculars could easily find us if he had a reason to look in our direction. I felt my stomach tightening with each abortive grind and pop; I kept expecting to be raked with a searchlight from the gambling boat.

  But the light didn't come, and at last the old engine turned over. With my back stiff and arms weak from fatigue and inactivity, I raised the anchor, and we veered away from The Lucky Duck and slowly headed back toward land.

  Subdued by disappointment, we stayed silent for a time. Then, apropos of nothing, Maggie said, "Wet suits. Goggles."

  "What about 'em?"

  "Not necessary," she said, "unless they were really covering some distance."

  "Like how much distance?"

  Maggie couldn't specify, and I think we both knew we were grasping, pretending to some insight that would make this errand seem to have been worthwhile. But in truth the errand was a washout. We were supposed to learn what Mickey Veale was smuggling. We were supposed to figure out if it could somehow be connected to a blackmail scheme aimed at the Ortegas. But we'd sat there all night and figured out zilch. How could we learn what Veale was smuggling on the Jet Skis if he swallowed up the whole damn Jet Ski?

  Sulking, we continued in. The first hint of day appeared in the east. It was extremely undramatic. The black sky turned purple and pushed up from the horizon like a fat man struggling to lift himself from bed. Stars flickered and went out. Off in the distance, Key West slept under the powdery orange blanket of its streetlights.

  As the purple was taking on its first tinge of dark red, Maggie said above the clatter of the motor, "But you never finished your story."

  "Hm?"

  "Your life before," she said. "What you were almost a success at."

  I puckered up my face and shook my head. I didn't see the point of resuming that conversation. I half regretted having started it, though I couldn't say exactly why.

  "Oh come on," coaxed Maggie, "don't get all tight and cool again."

  Tight and cool? I'd never thought of myself as tight and cool. I was just plain tired. Tired and gloomy and afraid. Besides, there are things you can whisper into a velvet quiet that you wouldn't shout above the ugly whining of an outboard engine.

  Was that enough excuses?

  "Pete," she said, "it isn't fair. You can't just break off in the middle."

  I had to laugh at that. She puts her clothes back on after sitting naked by my pool and showing me her breasts, and I can't break off in the middle? Plus there was another reason that the comment struck me bleakly funny. I said, "I always broke off in the middle. Why do you think I failed?"

  "Stop saying you failed." Then she added, "Failed at what?"

  I squeezed my knees. I blinked toward the sky. Mauve seams showed now between steely slabs of cloud; even their wan light was enough to hurt my eyes. I was worn down, nerves abraded, slaphappy. Finally I said, "Okay, okay, what I failed at, what I was trying to do ... I was trying to be a writer."

  "What?"

  Had I choked on the humiliating word, or was Maggie forcing me, for some therapeutic or sadistic reason, to repeat the galling and preposterous admission? I said it again. It sounded brassy and mocking in the vacant twilight.

  Maggie said, "I knew it!"

  "Then why'd you have to ask?"

  She didn't answer that. She said, "Were you already rich by then?"

  "I'm not rich," I said. "And that's a really gauche question."

  "It's not gauche. It's direct."

  "Well, the direct answer is that I was basically broke. The money I made, that happened later."

  "So you were living off your wife?"

  "Christ, Maggie—"

  "No value judgment," she said. "I'm just trying to understand. She supported you?"

  I blew air past my gums and vaguely wondered how I'd fallen into this ambush of a chat. Resigned, I said, "She was a lawyer. Made good money, liked the idea of having an artsy type in the family. Made her feel unconventional, I guess. But the novelty wore off."

  "So she left?"

  I nodded. I hadn't blamed her then and I didn't blame her now. True, her leaving stung me, shook me, but that had more to do with pride than love.

  Maggie paused but wouldn't quit. She said, "So what kind of writer are you?"

  " Was I." I scratched behind my ear. "I guess I'd have to say I was the kind of writer who never quite finished anything. Clever beginnings, interesting middles, then nothing."

  "Couldn't figure out the ending?"

  "Nah, it wasn't that. Maybe some days I told myself it was—but it wasn't. Any idiot can figure out an ending. Finishing is something else."

  "What else?"

  "Finishing takes . . . what does it take? Conviction. Confidence. Takes believing that you've earned it."

  "And you didn't think you'd earned it?"

  I just shrugged to that.

  "How come?"

  "If I knew that ..." I began, then abruptly broke off. If I knew that, what?

  I pushed out my lips and looked across the water. We were nearing the jetty at Fort Zack. Currents lifted a magenta chop. Channel markers flashed red and green. After a moment Maggie said, "Maybe finishing is just a habit."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "The conviction," she said. "The confidence. Maybe they come after. You finish something, then they're there."

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. I wasn't sure I got it. The
paradox struck me as a little glib, a little yoga-like. Frankly, I found myself irritated. In some perverse way, I cherished my failings; I'd lived with them a long time, was used to them in the way people get used to pets that smell. I sort of resented the idea of someone blithely stepping in and disinfecting them.

  I didn't have long to brood on this, because as we scudded through the harbor entrance, the shock of tropical daybreak made everything start over. Low clouds sundered like a cracking egg, and all at once the naked sun was there, orange yellow, flinging spiky rays up toward the zenith and out across the water, so bright, hot, and instantly sovereign that in a heartbeat it became hard to remember that night had ever been. A puff of breeze that seemed to be the sun's own breath bumped the sailboats on their moorings. On land, blank windows flashed suddenly silver; flat black palms turned green and animate and shook their heads.

  We were opposite Tank Island—excuse me, Sunset Key. Virgin daylight put a sharp gleam on the enclave's stamped tin roofs, and a jewel-like sparkle in its creamy yellow sand. Cool blue shadows stretched back from its contrived, imported dunes—and all at once I noticed something; or, to put it more precisely, something I'd been noticing for days finally ripened into meaning. I'd noticed it when I'd pulled my rented Jet Ski up onto the extended foreshore; I'd noticed it as I took in the view from Mickey Veale's study. Now, in the sharp and probing light of daybreak, it could hardly have been clearer: This was nothing like a natural Florida shoreline. True, Tank Island had been man-made to begin with, but it had been piled up from what was there and then been left alone. Whereas the real estate of Sunset Key had been designed, invented, tampered with, reshaped.

  Pointing, voice pinched, I said to Maggie, "That whole damn beach has been moved."

  I said it in the tone reserved for deep, original discovery. Maggie's response was deflatingly matter-of-fact. "Sure it has," she said. "Remember when the cranes were here, the barges? A year or so ago? They dredged and filled and planted for a solid week."

  Well, no, I hadn't remembered the cranes and barges. Maybe I was out of town. More likely, more characteristically, I just hadn't paid attention. Now I said to Maggie, "Go in closer."

  She nosed the dinghy toward the phony shore. I leaned forward and squinted at palms. I was struck by several things about them. Palms rustled softly and they threw long shadows. Alone or in small clusters, they back-bent with the prevailing winds. And they basically all looked alike.

  I found the trees that Kenny Lukens had been scrabbling under when he died, the ones that butted up against the fence. They were a pair; their bases perhaps four feet apart. For maybe ten feet up, their trunks diverged, then gradually leaned together in an inevitable parallel.

  I looked beyond the steel enclosure. Three, four yards inside it, there was a virtually identical pair of palms. The same distance apart. The same raised and stringy roots. The same windswept geometry.

  I rubbed my stinging eyes. Kenny Lukens had memorized the trees under which he'd stashed his treasure. Probably he'd counted steps up from the water's edge. He'd counted right, he'd remembered right, but new trees had been put in and the shoreline itself had been moved, widened as a stabilizing buffer for the private lots beyond. A final insult to poor strange Kenny: He'd died digging the wrong hole.

  I pointed past the fence to the farther set of trees. "The cranes," I said. "The barges."

  Maggie measured distance with her eyes. She understood. "Oh my God," she said.

  "Wanna bet that's where the pouches are?"

  She didn't take the wager. Instead, she blinked and panned across as much of the island as we could see from where we sat. She said, "I know a little bit about the setup here. It's a pain getting past that fence."

  Getting past the fence? Until she said it, I hadn't really thought of getting past the fence. I kept thinking that I'd done enough. Like figuring out where the pouches were, why no one had found them so far. Wasn't that enough?

  "Just one entrance," she went on. "By the dock where the island's own launch comes in. There's a guard there. You have to be a resident or an invited guest to be let in."

  I frowned up at the private island. It was elaborately landscaped. Manicured. Hibiscus shrubs had been sculpted into hedges; patches of coarse Bahama grass gave neatly onto beds of vinca and bird-of-paradise. This was a version of nature that took a ton of work. "How about if you're a gardener?" I said.

  Maggie lifted an approving eyebrow.

  Too bad, though, that the idea hadn't come a couple minutes sooner; and we'd gotten out of there by now. Because as I was speaking, The Lucky Duck—its bow wave pink, its windscreens glinting—roared by in its early morning return trip to its berth.

  The gambling boat stayed in the main channel, perhaps forty yards from where our dinghy lightly bobbed; and maybe I only imagined that it slowed as it was pulling even with us. But no— the drop in pitch of its engine was hard to deny. We turned our backs, whether soon enough or not we couldn't tell. We had no idea if we'd been noticed, if there was anyone to find it strange that we were reconnoitering at daybreak. But there was something slightly sickening in the way that Mickey Veale's spreading wake crawled beneath our little craft, slithering and undermining.

  The big boat lumbered past; the skiff eased off in its rocking. We swallowed fear and Maggie feistily picked up where we'd left off.

  "Gardeners," she said. "That could get us in."

  Us again. I didn't have the energy to argue. Even though my gut was telling me the whole thing was a really bad idea. Still, I said, "I think I know a way. I've got to talk to someone."

  The sun was already bleaching out to white, and the dark water had turned emerald. We sat there for a moment, letting the gambling boat get well clear of our path. Maggie seemed about to speak, then caught herself, then gestured toward the island and spoke up anyway. "Pete," she said, "you're going to finish this. I know you are."

  I didn't answer. I had my doubts. I yawned.

  "It's just a habit," she said, as she turned the skiff and motored slowly to the dinghy dock at Redmond's Boatyard.

  32

  Potatoes were frying at Raul's; coffee had just been brewed.

  We were among the very first customers, and we grabbed the choicest table—in the corner, next to a wall that dripped purple bougainvillea, under a mahogany tree. I suddenly realized I was famished. I ordered steak and eggs. Maggie laughed, but then she did too. You can't do this kind of stuff on oatmeal.

  Waiting for the food, I looked at her. I was so tired that my drooping eyelids started twitching. It occurred to me that we'd just spent the night together. We hadn't done what was usually suggested by the phrase, but it was plenty intimate nevertheless. I'd had time alone with her eyes, her mouth. We'd leaned against each other, our flanks making a hot seam against the misty coolness of the night. I'd seen her yawn and stretch.

  Now I watched her eat. I loved the way her loose blouse moved each time she raised her fork. I admired the little muscles in her forearm, which rippled slightly when she used her knife. She pressed her napkin to her lips and I felt their texture once again.

  After breakfast I walked her back to her brightly painted trawler. Then, some time after eight, I reclaimed my bike and rode to Bayview Park.

  I pulled into the shade of the players' enclosure. Ozzie Kimmel was sitting there, shirtless, in his perennial puke-green bathing suit. He was wrapping gauze around the handle of his racquet, concentrating so hard that his tongue stuck out from the corner of his mouth. He looked up as I approached and, tactful as ever, said, "You look like shit. Where's your stuff? You here to play?"

  I told him that I wasn't there to play.

  "Not here to play!" he parroted disgustedly. "What is with you, man? Look at you. Fuck has happened to bright-eyed Pete, here at eight and hot to—?"

  "Oz," I said. "I need a favor. It's important."

  "Important? Uh-oh. Guy starts thinking something's important, you know he's going down the—"

  "You
know who does the gardening for Sunset Key?"

  "You mean Tank Island? That abortion? That pimple on—"

  "Oz—who's got the contract for the landscaping?"

  He pursed his lips and rubbed his chin. "Why you wanna know?"

  "I can't tell you why I want to know."

  "Then I can't remember who has the gig."

  I said, "Oz, please don't be an asshole."

  He said, "I'm an asshole? 'Cause a you I'm getting really shitty tennis lately. When we gonna start playing again?"

  "When this is done," I said. "Few more days. I hope."

  He pouted, went back to gauzing up his racquet. "Okay," he said, "okay. I'm pretty sure it's Cayo Hueso Landscaping. Eddie Baskin."

  "You know him?"

  " 'Course I know him. Poor bastard's been rotting here almost as long as I have."

  "Take me to meet him."

  "Now? I'm here for tennis!"

  I just stared at him with tired pleading eyes.

  "Awright, awright," he said. "We'll take the cab."

  "The cab?"

  "It's a workday for me. I'm working—can't you tell? Christ, you don't even remember what days I work."

  ———

  "No way," said Eddie Baskin. "Could cost me the whole damn contract."

  We were standing in his backyard at the end of Elgin Lane. The yard was part nursery, part jungle, part alfresco tool-shed. Giant tree trimmers leaned on top of sky-flower shrubs; weed whackers stood like golf clubs in a row. Baskin himself was tall and skinny, but with huge gnarly hands and forearms. He had a ponytail and a torn shirt and some kind of funky coral necklace on a leather string. He also, according to Ozzie, had three trucks, a crew of twelve or so, and most of the town's high-end gardening work. A Key West type—the hippie bum with an embarrassing knack for making money.