The Naked Detective Page 7

  This was not a funeral I should have gone to. I'd been in some degree a party to the old bully's death. If I hadn't actually shoved him into the abyss, I'd certainly poked and prodded him toward the brink. Why show up now and take a chance on being recognized as the last visitor to his hospice room?

  Closure, I guess would be the fashionable answer. But I have a deep distrust of fashionable words like that. They blur specifics, flatten the wiggy details of real life. Frankly, I don't know why I went. After my ... my what? Not an argument, not a tiff, not even a misunderstanding. After my moment of doubt with Maggie, I'd had a troubled evening and a bad night's sleep, and found myself in that frame of mind where one loses confidence in the hard clear edges of notions like free will and conscious choice. It soothes our pride to imagine that we decide. But sometimes it just doesn't work that way. I showered and found myself dressing for a funeral.

  The real Conchs, having their roots in New England solemnity and Spanish decorum, are on special occasions a surprisingly formal people, even stuffy in a subtropical kind of way. Not wanting to stand out, I pulled on long pants and a clean white shirt. Real shoes, with socks. Shoes feel very hard when you haven't worn them for a while. Biking in long pants feels funny too, the way they flap against your calves. I rode down to the cemetery, locked my bicycle a decent distance off, and walked toward the assembled crowd before the Ortega mausoleum—a five-story concrete condo, maybe sixty units in all, with one crypt winking open on the penthouse floor.

  There were a hundred or a hundred-twenty mourners—a big turnout for Key West, where people pride themselves on seldom showing up. The older men wore suits; the women all wore stockings. It was blisteringly hot. Killer sun is a constant feature of Key West funerals, as drizzle can be counted on up north. You stand there and your neck burns and you sweat. In cases of real grief, emotion opens pores and you sweat even more. The priest sweats in his robes; the workers sweat in their canvas shirts. There is a grim, unspoken worry over putrefaction that tends to keep the ceremonies brief.

  I edged closer and heard part of a speech. The guy giving it looked vaguely familiar; I think he was on the city council. He praised Lefty as a pillar of the community—businessman, family man—the standard kind of speech. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Men in snorkels? Guys with blood on their suits? What I saw was a family—variations on a somber Spanish face. The men tended toward the craggy, with bent noses overhanging twitchy lips. The women had very deep-set eyes and the yellowish skin that was a class thing back in Cuba; it seemed to be the chin that determined who would cross the line into a sullen kind of beauty, and who would merely look severe. At the front of the throng I was pretty sure I saw the daughter. Her hair was pulled up, though little wisps had broken free and by now were plastered against her damp and reddening neck.

  The politician finished and the priest took over. I looked around some more, concentrating now on the faces that didn't fit the family mold. A few big fellows who kept plucking at their jackets— cops, maybe, uncomfortable out of uniform. Some men I took to be business associates, who comprised a pretty good sampling of South Florida hustler types—dudes with ponytails and earrings, pseudo-yacht club guys in blazers, a fat man sweating grease like a goose and daintily fanning himself like a Japanese lady. The associates seemed not sorrowful but bothered that they had to be here, just like they'd been bothered that they'd had to send showy and expensive flowers to the hospital. If lack of eye contact was any indication, a lot of these people didn't know one another; Lefty Ortega, trusting no one, had apparently kept the various aspects of his business as neatly separate as the mausoleum slots.

  The sun beat down. Wet places bloomed on people's clothes. The priest went from talking to chanting then suddenly stopped. Two morticians approached the coffin, which was resting on a platform that resembled a small painter's scaffolding. They fitted cranks to the base, then, with a medieval literalness, started jacking Lefty up to heaven. Soon he was above the level of the mourners' heads; next he pulled even with the lower fronds of the Christmas palms. The mahogany coffin glinted richly in the sunlight; the cranks made a lugubrious and rhythmic squeaking as the struts unfurled and stretched into big X's. Like the last passenger on a balky elevator; the dead man finally reached his floor. One of the morticians fitted his crank into a different socket, and the bed of the platform slid slowly into the open crypt. Lefty was deposited with a chilling thud; the withdrawn platform made a soft ringing scrape, like that of a pizza peel.

  A single whimper broke through the steamy motionless air. I guess Lefty had a wife. I guess she was too short to be seen at the front of the group.

  The heat-sapped party broke up quickly after that—too quickly for me to slip away ahead of it. The crowd opened so that close family had easy access to the limos waiting in the lane. To my horror; I found myself standing—exposed, conspicuous—squarely on the fault line where the group had split. I tried to shrink back among the other sweaty bodies; short of throwing elbows, there was no way I could retreat. I sidled as far as I could go, and braced for the moment when the dead man's daughter would walk right past. I imagined her meeting my eye, remembering, then pointing, accusing, maybe even screaming. The big men unaccustomed to their suits would lumber through the crowd and grab me. Would they regard me as police business or as an enemy better dealt with privately?

  I stood there. Half a dozen very old Ortegas moved past at a pace that was maddeningly sedate. Finally, the daughter; her arm around a tiny woman who must have been her mother, turned to follow. I held my breath. I thought to look away, but realized that such inappropriateness would only be a magnet for attention. I composed my face and fixed my gaze.

  And just as I'd feared, Lefty's daughter's eyes clamped on to mine nearly at once. She was wearing a tiny black hat with a veil. I hadn't known that women wore veils anymore, and I'm sure I'd never before been caught in a stare through one. I found it Gothic and riveting. Webby shadows stretched across her brow; her eyes were dark inside of dark, as sexily elusive as nakedness through gauze. Stripped of context, swelling into sunlight, the full red lips were almost lewd. Feeling weird and doomed and dizzy, I thought: If I have to be undone, let it be by such an archaically erotic graveyard stare as this.

  But Lefty's daughter didn't flinch, didn't accuse, didn't signal to her father's friends. Instead, she quickly, deftly reached down with the arm that was not around her mother and pressed a scrap of paper into my hot hand.

  I swallowed hard and squeezed it tight, and didn't dare even to uncurl my fingers until the crowd had wandered off, and I was safely on my bicycle once more.

  ———

  I went straight home, peeled off my sodden clothes, and immediately jumped into the pool. I swam a few laps of three or four strokes each, then curled into a ball and let myself sink slowly to the bottom. I liked it down there. There were no sounds, except for a soft hum that you felt more than you heard. Light congealed into a cool thin greenish batter. There was no one there to bother you. I wished I could have stayed there longer.

  Surfacing, I did the next best thing—waded to a shady corner and stood there chest-deep in the water. I thought about the note that Lefty's daughter had pressed into my hand. It was a very short note, consisting of nothing more than an address and a time. What intrigued me, though, was the question of when she'd found the opportunity to write it. She could not have noticed me before she was already front row center at her father's funeral. Did she rummage through her purse for pen and paper while the priest was chanting, while the body was ascending?

  Another possibility occurred to me—one I didn't like at all. Maybe the note had been written beforehand. Maybe it was part of a stratagem, a trap. The daughter, together with her father's thuggish friends, perhaps, had guessed correctly that the unknown man who'd visited the hospital might also show up at the funeral. But Conch decorum would disallow a violent scene at such a solemn event. Better, then, to lure the poor doomed sucker into a
n ambush.

  One gruesome notion leads to another, and for the first time in the couple of years since I'd stashed it there, I caught myself thinking about the never-fired nine-millimeter in the wall safe.

  The mere fact that I was thinking about it made me shiver in the tepid water. Guns really, really scare me; I wished I hadn't let myself be talked into getting one. I'm of the school that basically believes that soft middle-class people like myself should never own a firearm. The first time you whip it out, someone tougher, meaner, and with less to lose takes it away from you and shoots you with it, and you end up with your own bullet stuck in your liver like a garlic clove.

  But wait a second. It was the middle of a sunny day and I was standing naked in my bright blue swimming pool. What the hell was I doing, worrying about ambushes and guns, getting myself all jumpy? How had I let things go so far that images of wounds and mortal struggles were poisoning my mind?

  Well, however far they'd gone, I could stop them here and now. I knew how. I'd learned the one sure, simple way of avoiding ambushes of all descriptions: Mind your own business and stay the hell at home. That's all it took, and that's what I would do. I just wouldn't go to the address on Lefty's daughter's note. Not at the time she specified, not ever. Done.

  As if to lock in my fresh resolve, I took a big deep breath and drifted once again toward the peaceful void at the bottom of the pool. I felt the soft hum of the water, and watched the glinting light, and told myself I wouldn't go, I wouldn't go.

  PART TWO

  12

  I went.

  Of course I went. At 7:00 p.m., exactly as instructed. And with my gun still locked up in the wall safe.

  I left my house around twenty of. The sun had just set, and layers of pink cloud were stacked up amid slabs of lavender. Heat throbbed off parked cars as the air began slowly to cool. I climbed onto my bike and turned it toward the ocean.

  The address on the note was 2000 Atlantic Boulevard. This was Key West's biggest condo, a low waterfront fortress that well-off Conchs just loved. Typical, I guess. Relative newcomers like me were seduced by the charm of the old Conch houses—the grainy, pitted wood; the sloping floors; the bowed, eccentric door frames. Whereas the Conchs themselves couldn't wait to get out of those mildewed, termite-eaten wrecks. If they made a little dough, they blissfully moved to the cinder-block boxes of New Town, or into generic condos that might have been in Fort Myers or Fort Lauderdale. They'd had enough authenticity to last a lifetime. Now they wanted drywall, Formica, enough amps to run the microwave. Above all, central air-conditioning. They set the thermostat at fifty-five, moved the recliner over by a vent, and sat there basking in the glow of getting over.

  It was just before the hour when I reached the complex, and the truth is, I was pretty nervous. Felt it behind my knees. I took a quick detour to look at the water. It was dead flat, as it usually gets at dusk. It still looked milky green but it was near the moment when it turned to purple for the night. This happens with nothing in between, and it happens in a second. If you blink, you miss it.

  The water failed to calm me and I didn't see that I could stall much longer. I pedaled back toward the condo. I didn't go directly to the entrance but approached in a series of concentric, leaning arcs while I sort of scoped it out. What did I expect to see? Men in Ray-Bans hiding in the oleander bushes? No, if they were going to jump me, they'd wait until I got inside. I locked my bike and walked up to the board of names and doorbells. Ortega, L. was in 4E. I raised my thumb to ring. I hesitated. Odd-looking thing, a thumb. I thought about withdrawing it and fleeing, no harm done. The thumb jabbed forward and rang the bell.

  In a few seconds the buzzer buzzed. I pushed through the door and walked under an ugly chandelier throwing bad light on a cheesy mosaic. I went to the elevator and rode to the top floor. Ascending, I pictured Lefty being cranked up toward his crypt. The image wasn't comforting.

  The doors slid open on an endless hallway. Silent. Lit by Deco sconces throwing yellow scallops that folded onto the ceiling. I did the alphabet until I found 4E. I stalled for just a second more, then realized I should look jaunty and assertive, in case I was being examined through the little peephole. So I knocked before I was really ready. I was still clearing my throat and shuffling my feet when the door swung open and Lefty's daughter stood before me.

  I sure wasn't ready for the way she looked. She was wearing black silk slacks and a white satin blouse that was open a long way down. There was lace at the edges of her breasts, and a small, embroidered pale blue flower in between them on her bra. Her hair was pinned up, though more loosely than it had been before. Wisps of it escaped at her temples and thinned out into barely visible strands along her jaw-line. Her eyes were made up, deep-set, and they still seemed somehow veiled. In a musky voice with an edge that might have been ironic, she said, "I wondered if you'd come."

  I couldn't immediately get my mouth to work or my eyeballs to stay still. They wanted to look down her shirt but also wanted to check behind the door for people waiting to hurt me. Finally I managed to say, "Why wouldn't I?"

  To that she only shrugged. The lace and the little blue flower moved as she did so. She stepped to one side and motioned me into the apartment. My shoulders hunched as I leaned through the doorway. I was ready to be hit or grabbed. Nothing hit me except her perfume. It was too sweet and floral for my taste, but I liked that it was there.

  The carpet got thicker as I stepped into the foyer; the living room furniture, in turn, crystallized for me something that I hadn't quite been able to place about her clothes: Both seemed outside of their own time. Not retro-hip, not campy, just intriguingly misplaced. The high life, circa 1961. Pointy bra and sectional sofa. Bad sculptures that were lamps, and black stockings under black silk pants. There was even a wet bar in a tiled and mirrored alcove. It had its own small fridge and a see-through cabinet full of highball glasses and pony glasses and martini glasses. She went to it and offered me a drink.

  I felt like pinot noir but doubted I could get it. I asked for scotch and water. She poured me a quadruple and handed it over. Then she retrieved her own glass, which had ice and clear stuff in it. We clinked. We stared briefly at each other as we did so, then she dropped her eyes and I had the distinct impression she was checking out my legs. Have I mentioned I was wearing shorts? I'd put long pants on once that day—that was plenty. Of course, I'd forgotten to figure on the air- conditioning. The apartment was freezing and my leg hairs stood straight up in their follicles. I thought she smiled secretly as she waved me toward the sofa.

  She sat down on the edge and used her palms to smooth a space around her. "So, Mr.—"

  "Amsterdam. Pete Amsterdam. Pete." I'd staked out my own section of the sectional, from where I could look at her across a corner of the coffee table.

  "I'm Lydia." She sipped her drink and crossed her legs. The silk of her pants made a nice slidey sound and the momentum turned her hips and torso toward me slightly. "What sort of business did you have with my father Pete?"

  "Excuse me?"

  She lifted one eyebrow and shot me a gamy, can't-kid-a-kidder sort of look. "Come on," she said. "You went to see him at the hospital. You came to the funeral."

  Stalling for time, I thought I'd play it coy. "And this means we had something going on?"

  "Pete," she said, "my father kept me in the background, but I know quite a lot about his businesses. I know the men he's in business with." She paused, gave her hair a toss that didn't quite work with the hairpins in. She leaned forward with her chest. "Some of them I know quite well."

  Her tone left little doubt as to the sense in which she knew them, and I found it necessary to sip some scotch. I thought back to my deathbed chat with Lefty. Maybe he'd been raving, but he was pretty emphatic about a couple things. One was that his daughter had a problem. The other was that I shouldn't fuck her. I looked at her past the rim of my glass. Her lips were very red and moist. There seemed to be a hint of dampness in her cleavage too, eve
n in the cold apartment. Her thighs wriggled so that fabric squeaked; her tongue didn't seem to rest quite easy in her mouth. Could this be her problem, I wondered—that she was a nymphomaniac? I'd never been quite clear as to whether, in reality, there was such a thing, or if the nympho was a male invention, a figment to whom he could ascribe his own glandular excesses and itchy drawers. And if nymphos really did exist, why hadn't I met one twenty-five years ago, when we could have squared off as more equal contestants and really wrecked a room?

  "And now I'll be in charge," Lydia continued. "So there are certain situations I need to . . . get on top of."

  With that she drained her glass and got up to refill it. Vodka. Before she turned away from the wet bar, she took a couple hairpins out. "How's your drink?" she asked me.

  "Vast."

  She came back to the couch and sat this time on my section of the sectional. Perfume wafted. There was a moment of somewhat awkward silence, then she gave a quick giggle and pointed to my naked knee. "You always wear shorts to visit a lady in mourning?" That Conch decorum thing, I guess.

  "I guess I didn't think of it as a condolence call," I said.

  "No?" she said, and she put her arm up on the back of the couch. It was that symbolic enfolding gesture, the first sly move toward an embrace that men are usually the ones to try. "How did you think of it?"

  That stumped me for a second. I sucked at my drink. Then I said, "You invited me, remember?"

  "That's right. To ask you one simple question that so far you refuse to answer: What was your business with my father?"

  I tried to look like I was holding some marvelous and valuable secret. Her reasonable but wrong surmise had given me a handy smoke screen, after all. Only problem was, I had no idea what use to put it to. Finally I said, "You know, it's funny. You assume I had business with your father and your father assumed I was sent by somebody named Mickey."