Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 2

  3.

  While waiting to hear back from Benny Bufano, Meg unfurled her bright blue mat and did some yoga next to the pool. She’d stripped down to her bra and panties, then, realizing that the yard was quite perfectly private, had casually tossed the bra onto a nearby lounge chair. At 47, she was an extremely handsome woman, confident though not aggressive in her posture, easy in her smooth unfussy skin. Her arms and legs were lean and toned, her tummy was flat from all the planks and boat poses, and her smallish breasts were so far holding their own in the ceaseless fight against gravity. Her face could fairly be described as likeable and pert rather than classically beautiful, with a little nose, a playful mouth, and tiny ears unhidden by her stylishly short but above all practical haircut. Her eyes were hazel flecked with yellow, and at moments they seemed to open improbably wide to allow in more of the endlessly surprising spectacle all around her. At poolside now, she stretched and lunged and folded, and her husband watched her for a while with vague but genuine appreciation.

  Mixed in with the appreciation was just a touch of envy. Peter, once a pretty decent athlete--a somewhat geeky high school wrestler who had occasionally shocked opponents with sporadic and seemingly out-of-character bursts of scrappiness and even ferocity--would have liked to rest his mind awhile and exercise his body instead; but as usual his worrying got the better of him and he began to fidget.

  After a while he left the pool area and walked around to the side yard—the side of the house where the broken window was. He’d decided he needed to inspect the place more closely, though he had no idea what he hoped to learn by doing so. Had there been clues on the ground or in the shrubbery as to who or what had launched the coconut he would have had no idea how to read them. What should he be looking for? Footprints? Strands of hair or garment fibers caught on twigs? He stood there for some moments, chin in hand, trying to appear sagacious, knowing all the while that he was wasting his time.

  Then he heard a voice call out from the house next door. “Whatcha looking for?”

  He wheeled in the direction of the sound but at first saw no one. The house itself was an appalling shack whose wooden boards had originally overlapped but which had by now been warped and stretched so that there were dim and undulating gaps between them. The house had once been painted blue but all that remained of the paint were some random flecks of color that tenuously clung to the façade like exhausted butterflies. At the front of the shack, propped on cinder blocks, was a sagging porch whose splintery floorboards seemed to tilt in several planes at once. Peering through the gauzy foliage that sprouted between the two wildly unequal houses, Peter finally saw a very old man sitting in a rocker on the porch.

  Their eyes met, and the old man called out, “’Lo there, can I help you?”

  As a New Yorker, Peter was not accustomed to being so casually and heartily hailed by neighbors, but he tried to find the right tone to respond in kind. “Got a broken window last night,” he said.

  “Along about three a.m.,” the old man said.

  “Coconut came crashing through. You heard it?”

  “Heard something. I don’t sleep that good.”

  “Trying to figure out how it happened.”

  The old man said nothing.

  Peter said, “See anything?”

  “Nope. I don’t see that good. You a friend of the Bufanos?”

  “Actually, no, not really. We’re just here on a home exchange.”

  “A what?” the old man said. “I don’t hear that good. Whyn’t ya come over and say hello.”

  So Peter threaded his way through the plantings between the two yards and climbed a couple of weatherbeaten and untrustworthy stairs to the old man’s porch. The old man introduced himself as Mel and motioned his visitor into a creaky wooden chair whose back spindles yielded like loose teeth when he leaned even lightly against them. As he sat he studied his host, who had a face like one of those kitsch sculptures that people used to whittle out of drying apple cores. His bony chin jutted forward in front of a collapsed and lean-lipped mouth. His watery blue eyes were overshadowed by an angular brow that hung down like an awning. He said to Peter, “So you were saying something about a home on the range?”

  “No. I said it was a home exchange.”

  “Ah, home exchange. What’s that?”

  Peter told him.

  “So, like, you mean, you swap houses with somebody and you get to stay someplace for free? I should check into that sometime.”

  Peter said nothing, just discreetly glanced around him. On defeated hinges hung a screen door that featured an aluminum silhouette of a flamingo. The screen had holes in it. Some of them were patched with cotton balls and some with what appeared to be little wads of toilet paper.

  “So anyway,” Peter said, “I really don’t know the people we’re swapping with at all. I’m curious about them. You a friend of theirs?”

  “Friend?” said Mel, with a small shrug of his shrunken shoulders. “Just more like neighbors. The woman, Glenda her name is, her I’ve hardly seen. The guy, Benny, him I know a little bit. Seems like a nice fella. He comes by now and then to chat. Coupla times he brought beers. We drank beer and talked about pussy.”

  Peter wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly and so said nothing.

  “Pussy,” the old man said again, a little louder, attempting a smile that highlighted his lack of teeth. “That’s mainly what I like to talk about. You?”

  Peter hesitated then said, “Um, I’m married.”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “So, well, pussy just isn’t something I would tend to talk about.”

  “Too bad,” said Mel. “Me, I was in the Merchant Marine. Got pussy all over the world. Long stretches in between, of course. So when I finally caught some I had to make it count. Lemme tell ya about this incredible piece of ass I had in Manila in, oh, I guess we’re talking 1958.”

  “No,” said Peter. “That’s really okay.”

  The old man went on anyway. “Had the most amazing red-brown skin, like polished wood, like a fancy piece of furniture. Took her panties down and I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a pale place anywhere.”

  “Listen, I really don’t need to hear this.”

  “So we’re in this tiny room behind the bar, no door, just glass beads, and she starts—“

  “Mel, really, I’m happy for you but spare me, okay?”

  Peter’s tone must have firmed because the old man finally seemed to hear what he was saying. “You really don’t like talking pussy?”

  Peter said nothing. The old man didn’t seem offended, just truly surprised. There was a brief silence save for the creaking of the boards and a soft churring of palm fronds. Then Mel went on, “How ‘bout being married. Ya like that?”

  Caught a bit off balance by the sudden segue and the directness of the question, Peter stammered slightly before saying, “Well yeah, sure, of course I do.”

  “Wouldn’t’a worked for me,” the old man said, shaking his head so that the flaps of loose skin beneath his chin wiggled back and forth. “Too restless. Couldn’t sit still… Must be nice, though, having someone there. Someone you can count on.”

  Peter nodded and suddenly pictured his wife on her blue mat, doing her routine. Having someone there, someone to count on—maybe this lonely old sex fiend had just nailed what marriage was mostly about: Relying on someone, being together in the ordinary, uneventful times, not much being said or needing to be said. Cooking dinner. Reading side by side. Tugging a blanket back and forth in the middle of the night…

  “But listen,” Peter said, “I’m a little concerned about the broken window. The coconut. I don’t think it just fell out of a tree.”

  “No,” said Mel. “They don’t usually fall sideways.”

  “So we agree. You think somebody threw it?”

  “Coulda. There’s drunks. Kids. People who don’t like newcomers or fancy houses in the neighborhood. Stuff happens.”

  “Serious stuff? Like real
ly serious stuff?”

  “This is Key West, my friend. What are we calling serious?”

  Peter decided not to offer more detail. He said, “These people, Benny and Brenda—“

  “Glenda.”

  “Benny and Glenda. You think people don’t like them? You think they have enemies?”

  “You mean besides each other?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s why I asked how you like being married. I was thinking about Benny and Glenda. They didn’t seem to like it one damn bit.”

  “Oh?”

  “Used to fight all the time. Constantly. Big arguments. Threats. Yelling. Throwing things. Plates. Toasters. That’s why he’d stop by here, to get away from the arguing. You and your wife, you fight much?”

  “Hardly ever. And we don’t throw things.”

  “Well, anyway, they split up.”

  The simple statement puzzled Peter. He’d had a clear if undetailed image of a couple staying in the West End Avenue apartment and now he had to totally revise that image. Off the beat, he said, “So, they’re not together?”

  “Right. That’s what split up means. Don’t know if they’re divorcing or what, but she finally took off maybe a month ago after one last donnybrook. Screaming, doors slamming, then it got real quiet. Heard she went back to where she used to live. New York.”

  “New York?” said Peter.

  “New York,” the old man said again, a little louder. “You got hearing problems too?”

  Peter in fact had heard the words perfectly well but they had ramped up his worrying and also slightly shifted its trajectory. He thought again about the cryptic words scrawled on the coconut: She dies you die. This was the problem with bad grammar; it left meanings unclear, admitted of alternate readings. Was the intended message she dies and you die? Or was it if she dies, you die? To Peter this suddenly seemed far more likely. His instantaneous, paranoid but not illogical thought process went something like this: This guy Benny Bufano had a wife with whom he fought like crazy, but they probably would not have bothered fighting unless they really loved each other, and then she left him, which might or might not have been heartbreaking but was a humiliation at the least. She’d bolted to New York. Not long after, Benny, on what he admitted was a last minute impulse, went to New York as well. In February. Leaving his lovely Key West home at the choicest time of year in Florida. Why, except for some desperate purpose, would he do that? Why, unless he’d decided to track down and murder the wife he couldn’t live with and couldn’t live without? But then there came a complication: In despair and probably drinking heavily, he must have told someone his plan, and that someone, who didn’t realize that Benny had just left town, was promising to kill him if he followed through on it? If she dies you die. What could be clearer?

  Peter, suddenly close to full-blown panic, stood up so abruptly that old Mel flinched in his rocking chair. “You going?”

  Already heading down the creaking stairs, Peter said, “Got to think some things through. Got to talk them over with my wife.”

  “Must be nice,” the old man said to his retreating back, “having someone to talk things over with. Well, stop by anytime. We’ll talk pussy some more. You’ll get to like it, wait and see.”

  4.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” said Meg.

  She’d finished her yoga and was standing in the pool doing some aerobics. Her blue mat had been neatly rolled and put aside and her panties had been tossed onto the lounge chair with her bra. The sun was high by now and sharp yellow sunshine glinted on the water all around her, seeming to raise it into little curls like the tips on icing. The first inklings of a tan were starting to blossom on her neck and shoulders.

  Peter was pacing at the edge of the pool. “It’s not ridiculous. Tell me why it’s ridiculous.”

  Meg was doing that exercise where you trace out circles with your leg, first one direction then the other, then you switch legs and start the whole thing over. Without interrupting the flow, she said, “There are eight million people in New York. They go there for many different reasons. Going there to kill their wife is just not very high on the list of probabilities.”

  “We’re not talking probabilities. We’re talking this one particular situation. We can’t reach the guy. He hasn’t gotten back to us. Why not? What if it’s because he’s too busy tracking down his wife so he can kill her?”

  Not seeming unduly concerned, Meg said, “Well, that’s less bad than someone coming here and pushing us into chairs and doing the whole bit with the duct tape.”

  “I haven’t ruled that out either,” said Peter. “Believe me I haven’t.”

  Meg was doing jumping jacks now. The water seemed viscous as she leaped and subsided; thick, slow-motion droplets flew from her arms and torso. Just slightly short of breath, she said, “Look, his going to New York probably has nothing even to do with his wife. And if it is about the wife, maybe it’s something good. Maybe he’s trying to woo her back, have a rapprochement.”

  Peter crossed his arms in satisfaction as he crushed that cheerful assessment. “Very romantic. But then what about the message on the coconut? That’s just a coincidence?”

  Meg had to admit that the message on the coconut was awkward. She moved on to high kicks as she tried to figure a way around it.

  Peter went on in the meantime. “And here’s what’s worse,” he said. “Oh shit, I just thought of this. This is really bad. What if he murders her in our apartment? What if that’s his whole idea behind exchanging houses—so he has an anonymous place to do the deed? He lures her over there on some pretext or other—to talk about lawyers, talk about a settlement, whatever--and he bumps her off right there in our living room. Leaves her dead on the floor, maybe in that little alcove where the globe is. What then, huh? He takes off, no one even knew he was there, no one can trace his movements, and meanwhile we’ve got a corpse in our apartment stinking up the whole building. That’s great. That’s just great.”

  Meg said, “I strongly doubt we have a corpse in our apartment. Try to relax. Why not get in the pool. It’s heated. Perfect temperature.”

  “Right,” he said. “Get in the pool. La-di-da, we’re the obvious suspects in a murder case, let’s go for a swim. Let’s just backstroke all the way to the electric chair.”

  “Honey, there is no murder case. There’s no murder case, no duct tape, and no corpse. And even if there was a corpse, we wouldn’t be suspects. We’re here, we have an alibi. And there isn’t any motive.”

  “So now you’re admitting that maybe there is a body in our living room.”

  “I’m not admitting any such thing. Listen, I have an idea. How about a back rub? Take your shirt off, lie down on a lounge. I’ll rub your back. Nice and slow. It’ll help you calm down.”

  “Naked?”

  “No, just take your shirt off.”

  “No, I mean you. You’re going to give me a back rub naked? Right out here in the open like this?”

  “No one can see in.”

  Peter hesitated. Then he sighed, as though he’d be taking a big chance by letting his mind move away even for a moment from the problem at hand. But finally he took his shirt off and lay down on his stomach. The first feel of the air against his skin and the rays of the sun penetrating through it came as a genuine and profound surprise to him. Halfway through a New York winter he’d almost forgotten what those things felt like. The air, even as warm as it was, slightly tickled as it licked along his neck. The sunshine instantly coaxed open his constricted pores and drew forth a faint and sensuous film of perspiration, a kind of perpetual basting.

  Meg unceremoniously straddled his backside and started working on the knotted muscles of his shoulders. It soon became clear that they weren’t going to release without a fight. She urged him in whispers to let his mind slow down, focus on the breath.

  He tried. He really tried. It was truly difficult, and trying that hard only made it more so. But for Peter, being tightly wound wa
sn’t just a fleeting state but a defining habit, a stance toward life, a philosophy of nervous tension. And philosophies are probably not alterable by massage.

  Still, caringly, patiently, Meg worked on his stubborn shoulders, his neck, his spine. Now and then she managed to get a coo or at least a grunt of pleasure out of him, and when her fingertips told her that she had finally made some progress, she let her torso fold forward against her husband’s back and she nibbled on his ear. “Now I have another idea,” she purred. “Let’s make love.”

  That made Peter twitch. “Here? Now?”

  “Here and now is where we are. Come on, we’re in Key West, let’s misbehave a little.”

  She said this with a charmingly youthful what-the-hell giggle that not even her husband could resist and he turned over as she was smoothly rolling off of him. They were working together to get his belt undone when there was a knock on the front door. It was a jaunty, cheerful knock, and plenty firm enough to be heard out by the pool.

  “Oh shit,” said Meg, as she scrambled to her feet and scampered around to find her cover-up, “that must be the glass man.”

  “Glass man?”

  “I called him up between yoga and the pool. Can’t just sit here with a broken window, can we?”

  5.

  “Hm,” said the glass man, thoughtfully examining what was left of the smashed window. “Hit from the outside.”

  “Isn’t that how windows usually get broken?” Peter said.

  “That’s about what you’d think, idn’t it?” said the glass man, whose name was Freddy. He was tall and skinny, with high and stiff black hair that seemed to have been blown into a permanent off-center upsweep by the salt wind coming through the always open window of his truck. “I mean, that’d be the usual way. Busted from the outside in. But that don’t hold in what might be called domestic situations.”

  “You see a lot of those?” asked Meg.

  “Down here, hell yeah. Couples get liquored up, drugged out, next thing you know there’s a small misunderstanding and a mango or a six-pack or a fry pan gets heaved through a window. Yup, happens.”