The Naked Detective Page 18

  "Look," I begged, "we'll be on the island half an hour. Anything goes wrong, I stole the shirts, I stole the tools, this meeting never happened."

  "Why should I risk it?" Baskin said. "There's no reason I should risk it."

  "Yes, there is. It's real important."

  "To you maybe."

  "Not just to me. To a lot of people."

  "Like who?"

  "I can't explain right now."

  Baskin lit a cigarette, squinted past smoke at Ozzie. "Oz," he said, "I don't know this guy from Adam. Gimme one good reason I should trust him."

  My tennis buddy thought that over; a little longer than was flattering or reassuring. Finally he said, "He's very fair on line calls."

  The gardener said, "Line calls?"

  "All the times I've played him," Ozzie said, "I've gotten maybe two bad calls."

  Over several years and a hundred matches, he remembered two bad calls? What kind of lunatics was I recruiting as my allies?

  Baskin took a deep drag, slowly exhaled, and waved away the smoke. He frowned at Ozzie. He frowned at me. Finally he said, "Fuck it. Grab some rakes. Grab some shovels. I'll go inside and get a couple shirts." He headed for the house, looked back across his shoulder. "You get snagged out there, you're on your own."

  ———

  The tools did not quite fit in the trunk of Ozzie's cab. No matter how he laid them in, the handles stuck out past the fender. Finally he found a piece of fraying twine and tied the trunk lid down. I rolled up the borrowed shirts and held them on my lap.

  As we drove away from Elgin Lane, I asked him if we could drop the gear off at my house before returning to the park so I could get my bike. He surprised me then.

  He said, "I'll bring you down to where you get the launch. What time you wanna go?"

  I said, "You don't need to do that, Oz."

  "No problem. I wanna do it."

  "How come?"

  "How come?" He gave the steering wheel a little slap. He didn't look at me. He said, "You don't think I pay attention, do you? You don't think I notice things. How come? Because this is a big deal to you. That's how come."

  That put me at a loss. I swallowed. I said, "We'll be picking up another person."

  "The woman you hide in the backyard?" said Oz. "The one who makes your little thing stand up?"

  What could you do with a guy like this? I just looked at him and gave a cockeyed nod.

  "Very nice. Just say what time you want to be picked up."

  "Let's make it three." I thought about bed, how much I longed to be racked out, curled up beneath a steamy sheet. "No, let's make it four."

  "Whatever."

  He brought me back to Bayview. I said, "Thanks, Oz. Thanks a lot."

  He got shy and waved it off.

  I said, "Soon we're back to tennis. Really soon."

  "I'll kick your ass," he said.

  33

  I locked my bike to the palm I always lock it to, and trudged up the three porch stairs.

  It was around ten o'clock by now. Ten, in late April, is just about the time that the freshness of the morning has been all used up, and it starts feeling very hot, and somehow parched in spite of the humidity. The plants have given up the little dribs and veins of moisture they'd hoarded through the night; their leaves begin to curl. Shadows shrink inward like evaporating puddles; collected sun throbs upward from the pavements. I was glad to be going inside.

  I opened my front door. A wedge of sunlight slipped in with me, and in its yellow glare I saw a piece of paper on the floor. The paper was around four inches square—a torn-off sheet from a desk pad of some sort. I bent to lift it up. It had three words printed on it. The words were Stop Right Now.

  I read them with an odd dispassion. They reminded me of my fear but did not increase it. I found this strange. Fear had invaded my life only a day or two before, yet already it had become a given, like a chronic ache or a background hum of pipes. With a numbness that stood as a fair approximation of real calm, I read the threatening note again.

  Then I thought of something. I tracked down the matchbook that I'd found in Kenny Lukens' duffel and compared its writing with the note. It was hard to tell if they came from the same hand. Two different pens, two different thicknesses of paper. The matchbook had only numbers, and the person who scrawled on it had been drunk; the note had only letters, and was stone sober in its terseness. Still, there were definite resemblances: a certain impatient leaning of the characters, a jumpy tendency to lift the pen where other people might have made a curve.

  I concluded that the samples matched, then was unsure what, if anything, I'd proved. If nothing else, I became persuaded that the person I was most annoying was the right person to annoy. I wasn't sure I found this comforting.

  I went upstairs and had a shower. I didn't want the water to be hot; I didn't want it cold. I wanted it the same temperature as my skin so that it would lull me with the deliciousness of feeling like nothing at all.

  I fell into bed with my hair still soaking wet, and slept until midafternoon.

  ———

  I woke up nervous, suspecting that my earlier calm had in fact been nothing but exhaustion, a brief depletion of adrenaline.

  I went downstairs and put on a pot of coffee. While it was brewing, I jumped into the pool. It was slightly creepy, wading where the rats had floated; I couldn't yet bring myself to put my face in. Still, the pool was all in all a pleasure. I twirled in it, bent my knees so I was submerged up to the chin. Sunlight twinkled as I looked around my little yard. At the hot tub, the thatch palm, the table where I'd opened Maggie's robe.

  Bobbing, slowly turning, I suddenly felt a wistful, almost maudlin affection for my life, as if that life were a thing unto itself, a thing outside of me. It seemed insignificant and precious; it required no grandeur or meaning to give it worth; its value had to do with nothing large. The idea broke through to me, less with fear than sorrow now, that I might die before this thing was finished. But I would try to finish anyway. I no longer had any doubt of it. I would try my best to see it through, and I would find out if Maggie's notion made any sense at all—if finishing would somehow back- flow into me and teach me how to finish, or if this would prove to be just some isolated episode, a detour leading nowhere.

  I climbed out of the pool, dried myself, had some coffee and some food. And waited for four o'clock to come.

  Waited with no patience whatsoever. Suddenly I was eager almost crazed to power through to a conclusion. I couldn't pinpoint when or how my reluctance had been transformed into avidity, but this much I knew: What I was feeling wasn't courage—unless courage is nothing more than fear stood on its head. What I was feeling was the same dread that had been urging me to flee, except that now it made me itch to charge, to take my shot and get it over with.

  At ten till four I was on my porch, wearing a work shirt that bore the logo of Cayo Hueso Landscaping, waiting for Ozzie to come by and pick me up.

  ———

  I sat up front with him as we drove to Redmond's Boatyard.

  Amazingly, he hardly talked along the way. I could think of just one other circumstance in which Ozzie Kimmel didn't yammer. That was late in a tennis match, and only on those rare occasions when the outcome was in doubt. He was a spaceshot but he could focus when he wanted to.

  Now he pulled up alongside the chain-link fence at Redmond's. Carrying the extra gardener's shirt, I got out and crunched along the coral gravel toward Maggie's trawler. I walked right past Dream Chaser. The stanchions that had held the crime-scene tape were still in place, but the tape itself had already gotten cracked and tattered by the sun. I vaguely wondered who would get the job of cleaning up the blood and who the next owner of the cursed craft would be.

  I reached Maggie's boat and called up to her. She came out on deck and lowered the rope ladder. I climbed up. She kissed me on the cheek and we went down into the cabin.

  I told her about the note that had been slid under my door. "L
ook," I said, "you really don't need to do this part."

  With no hesitation, she said, "Then why'd you bring the shirt?" She reached out and took it from me.

  She turned her back and pulled off the blouse that she'd been wearing. I watched her naked shoulders, sturdy and just lightly freckled. I watched the clean cleft of that enviable spine. She poked her arms into sleeves and I sensed the lifting of her breasts, saw their slight tug on the skin of her sides.

  She buttoned up and faced me. There was something antic in the way she looked. The sleeves were much too long for her. The placket hung down to the middle of her thighs. She looked like a child dressing up. Except for her face, which was utterly composed and serious, the forehead intent but smooth. Efficient, she grabbed a canvas tote to put the pouches in.

  We left her trawler and walked back to the cab. Ozzie seemed distracted when we got there. At first he didn't say a word as we climbed into the backseat. When I made the introductions, he said only a perfunctory hello. I noticed that his eyes kept flicking toward the rear- and side-view mirrors. At first I thought that, in his adolescent way, he was checking Maggie out. But that didn't seem to be the vector of his gaze. I began to have misgivings. I kept them to myself.

  He put the cab in gear and we continued on our way downtown. The Sunset Key launch left from a private dock right next to the Hilton. The location was prestigious and wildly inconvenient. The only way to get there was to join the crush of traffic funneling toward Duval Street, then to crawl along the overburdened cobblestone lanes beyond it. With Ozzie drumming on the steering wheel, we idled past the tourist bars and T-shirt shops, braking now and then for oblivious pedestrians. The streets got narrower and narrower; Ozzie's eyes kept blinking toward the mirrors. My stomach tightened and began to burn; I wasn't sure if it was dread or just the traffic.

  At last we picked our way across the parking lot that led to the foot of the pier. Ozzie stopped the car. I reached for the door handle; he gestured for me to wait. We sat a moment.

  Then he said, "That's weird."

  "What's weird?"

  He studied the mirror some more. "When I stopped at Redmond's there was a black car tailing us. Now there's a dark blue one."

  "You sure?" I said.

  "I'm sure."

  "Two different cars?"

  "Two different cars. That's the part that's weird."

  I scratched my ear, pulled on my face. "Jesus, Oz, you could've said something sooner."

  "I didn't wanna worry you," he said. "You have enough on your mind." He paused then added sheepishly, "I can try and lose 'em. You want I try and lose 'em?"

  "A little late for that," I said.

  We sat in silence for a while, baking in the sun- shot cab.

  I mumbled, "Why the hell two cars?"

  Ozzie, backpedaling, trying to make amends, said, "I can lose 'em, we can come back later. Or tomorrow."

  We stalled some more. The cab was getting very hot and close.

  Finally Maggie said, "Look, we've come this far, let's just go and get the pouch."

  I said, "But if they're following—"

  She said, "What's the difference? Face it, we're not fooling anybody. Whoever's following— they've seen where we came from and they've seen where we're going. We've got shovels sticking out the trunk, for God's sake! So let's just go ahead and force their hand"

  Her vehemence embarrassed, impressed, and unsettled me. Something about it did not seem right. She was almost too determined, too unshakable. Either she was very brave ... or she had nothing to be afraid of. She was in cahoots with someone, after all. Someone who would appreciate her recovering the pouch. And would deal with the gullible idiot who'd helped to dig it up.

  Was it possible? After the kisses and the confidences? Not knowing seemed as unbearable as anything else that could possibly happen. I chewed my lip, and blew air out through my teeth, and reached once again for the door handle. I said to Ozzie, "Can you come back for us in an hour and a half?"

  He looked down at his watch. "Call it six- fifteen?"

  "Fine. And Oz—try not to get followed."

  We climbed out of the cab, and got the tools out of the trunk, and walked down the pier to get the launch to Sunset Key.

  34

  The launch ride was a somber one.

  Boarding with us were half a dozen residents of the private island. They wore seersucker shirts and beautiful belts. The women carried straw bags and the men had fancy loafers. They didn't sit near us, didn't even look at us. A class thing, I guess. We hunkered near the stern, and didn't talk, and tried to keep our rakes and shovels from chattering as the launch bounced in the harbor chop.

  On Sunset Key we walked up a floating ramp, then checked in with the security guard. The poor guy was around sixty, and they made him wear a mock-Colonial getup, with knee socks and a shirt with epaulettes. He pushed a sign-in sheet in our direction and said, "Funny time to be starting work."

  I scrawled a phony name and said, "No sense digging in the heat of the day."

  He said, "You got that right, Bubba."

  Fraudulent and nervous, I blathered on. "Gotta dig around some palms. Check out if they got a root dis—"

  Maggie kicked me in the ankle then. She was right to shut me up. We had the Cayo Hueso shirts, we'd signed the sign-in sheet; no one cared why we were digging. We stepped past the guard and moved coyly, indirectly toward the pair of palms that grew apart awhile then leaned together once again.

  Along the way, we passed a clubhouse, in front of which a few people were sitting on a patio and sipping gin and tonics. We passed a couple brand- new houses trying to look old, with prefab picket fences and sash windows whose sills had never been leaned on by a human elbow. Here and there the ersatz paradise was littered with building materials waiting to be slapped up before the new development lost its cachet or was blown to pieces by the first good storm. We edged around a half- framed dwelling then cut across grass and sand to the trees that were our destination.

  Stopping before them, we dropped our rakes and shovels. I could not resist an impulse to look back across my shoulder. But we were gardeners, there to do a grimy, sweaty job; we were being totally ignored.

  I turned my attention to the pair of palms. Suddenly I was far less confident than I'd been at daybreak that they were the right trees, after all. They mostly looked like the pair that was closer to the fence. It was plausible that Kenny had been fooled by the reengineering of the coastline. But none of this was definite, and if it wasn't right, we'd accomplished zero. The thought made my shoulders slump.

  I hid my doubts behind a tight little smile at Maggie. I picked up my shovel and started digging.

  It was nasty work. The sun was low but hot; it hit us broadside, the whole length of our bodies. The sand was heavy, and grains cascaded from the edges of the shovel, undoing part of every heave. Then there were the roots; palms have lots and lots of them. They're woody as bamboo, and they arc down in thick tangled bunches. Those bunches stopped the shovel blade with an abruptness that bruised the hand and jarred the wrist.

  I was quickly soaked with sweat. I stopped a moment to dry my face. I looked at Maggie, who dug with compact and rhythmic strokes. She glistened at the hairline and there were damp spots on her shirt. I went back to digging.

  Nasty work—but with a primitive excitement in it too. Digging for treasure. Digging for anything. Scratching and clawing so that something hidden might be brought to light. Having a goal that could be reached at any moment.

  But how deep did we have to dig? Kenny Lukens, in a hurry and probably without tools, would have dug a shallow hole. But what thickness of imported sand had been heaped on in the meantime? Two feet? Six feet? Did we have to dig deep as a mainland grave?

  The sand got wetter and heavier as we went. It got more like cement. We couldn't dig straight through it anymore; we had to shave it from the edges of the hole. The hole got deep enough to fill with shadow; the shadow was dank and chilled our legs. The
lip of the hole was at the level of our chests.

  Then Maggie's shovel scraped against something that wasn't sand and wasn't root. We knew this because it made a foreign sound, a little squeak. With another bite of the shovel, a corner of wet vinyl was exposed—the vinyl of a bank- deposit pouch. It wasn't quite at the bottom of the hole, but in, so to speak, the wall. She scraped at it like a terrier until it fell.

  I stepped across to help. Poking and twisting, I excavated a small niche. A second pouch came free.

  Maybe it was only the coolness of the shaded hollow, but as I stared down at the pouches, a chill seized my back and lifted the hair at the base of my skull. I looked at Maggie, to see if she was sharing my freaked and unhappy awe. There was a stolid satisfaction in her face, but it hardly seemed like gladness. We'd done what we set out to do. I guess this was a victory, but a baleful one. We were in possession of what everybody seemed to want; what certain people had shown that they would kill for.

  It occurred to me that wisdom would have been to leave the pouches where they lay and to bury them again. Instead, I bent to lift them. The first pouch I touched was swollen but soft, stuffed with what must have been a stack of mildewed cash, the take from Lefty's bar. But the second pouch had something hard inside. It had firm edges and sharp corners—a box of some sort.

  Again I glanced at Maggie but couldn't say a word. She climbed up from the hole and handed me the canvas tote. Without ever lifting the pouches out into the daylight, I slipped them into the bag. Then, on legs that quivered with a mix of edginess and plain fatigue, I scrabbled up from the hole as well.

  Quick and silent, we replaced the piled sand. We tamped it down; we raked it. Soon, light breezes and burrowing crabs and bugs would ripple through and make the place look as natural as it ever would. No one would know this sand had been disturbed.

  It was getting close to sunset now. Tatters of cloud hung near to the horizon and made the red rays intermittent. Music wafted across the water from the downtown bars. Reggae. Probably it had been playing for a while, but only now did it register. Other people were having a pleasant afternoon, normal for Key West if not for other places, lazy, aimless, sensual. Music and a mar- garita as the sun dived into the Gulf. God, I missed my life.