Bad Monkey (2 page)

In any case, Sonny Summers was fighting a lost battle. A crime-scene van had been waiting for the
Misty Momma IV
when it docked, so news of the icky discovery spread quickly. Worse, the boneheaded angler who’d reeled in the dead arm was showing the pictures on his cell phone to everybody at the Chart Room. There was even a rumor that he’d posted a photo on Facebook.

“I’m counting on you,” the sheriff said to Yancy, after Yancy finally answered the phone.

“How so?”

“I’m counting on you not to come back from Miami with that you-know-what.”

Yancy said, “What if there are no matching limbs at the morgue up there?”

“I need some optimism from you, Detective. I need some can-do mojo.”

“The Gulf Stream flows north.”

“Duh,” said Sonny Summers.

“Also, the prevailing breeze this time of year blows from the southeast.”

“I was born here, Yancy. Get to the point.”

“Factor in the wind and currents, the odds of that arm floating from Miami all the way down here are pretty damn slim—unless it was paddling itself.”

The sheriff was aware of Yancy’s employment history. “You don’t want to drive up to the big coldhearted city, that’s all.”

“What if they won’t take the case?”

“See, I’m depending on you to persuade them.”

“I can’t just leave a limb at the ME’s office if they don’t want it.”

Sonny Summers said, “Tomorrow I’m announcing that the investigation has been turned over to the appropriate authorities in Miami-Dade County. That’s the game plan, okay? This is officially no longer our headache.”

“I would wait a day to be sure.”

“Know what happened this morning? Some dickhead from Channel 7 calls up and says he heard that mangled corpses are floating up in Key West harbor!”

“Did you tell him to fuck off?”

“Call back tomorrow is what I told him. Wait for the media statement.”

“Our victim’s probably a rafter,” Yancy said. “Drowned on the crossing from Havana and then got hit by a bull shark or a hammerhead.”

“There you go!” the sheriff exclaimed brightly. “Aren’t most rafters on their way to Miami to meet up with family? So that’s where the goddamn arm belongs—Miami! End of discussion.”

“It’s not really up to me, Sonny.”

“Let me put it another way: There will be no human remains on my watch. Understand?
No human remains
.”

Those close to Sonny Summers sensed that he was sometimes overwhelmed by his elevated responsibilities. The transition from writing speeding tickets to commanding a recalcitrant law enforcement bureaucracy had been bumpy. One aspect of the new job that
Sonny Summers did enjoy was putting on a blazer and schmoozing with the chamber-of-commerce types.

Yancy tried to suggest that an occasional severed limb was no cause for panic.

“Really? The two-day lobster season is next week,” the sheriff said. “We’re expecting, like, thirty thousand divers.”

“A sea of reeking turds wouldn’t keep those lunatics off the water. What are you worried about?”

“We’ll speak again tomorrow,” said Sonny Summers.

Yancy said, “I’ll drive up there on one condition: You lift my suspension.”

“Not until after the trial. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“But it’s such bullshit, Sonny. I didn’t even hurt the guy.”

The sheriff said, “Talk to Bonnie. She’s the problem.”

Bonnie Witt, Yancy’s future former girlfriend, was prepared to testify that he’d assaulted her husband of fourteen years with a portable vacuum cleaner, specifically a tubular attachment designed for upholstery crevices. Clifford Witt had required some specialized medical care but he was more or less ambulatory within a week.

Sonny Summers said, “Of all the women you had to get involved with. Swear to God, Andrew. All the women on these islands.”

“Our love was like a streaking comet.” Yancy paused. “Her words, not mine.”

“Did you take a look at it? The …?”

“Arm? Yes, Burton insisted.”

“Any theories?”

“No,” said Yancy. “But it makes a dandy back-scratcher.”

“Call me on your way back from Miami. I want some happy news.”

Two

A clawing heat settles over the Keys by mid-July. The game fish swim to deeper waters, the pelicans laze in the mangroves and only the hardiest of tourists remain outdoors past the lunch hour. Yancy’s unmarked Ford was well air-conditioned but he still brought a box of Popsicles, which he positioned beside the disjoined limb in the cooler on the passenger side.

He was a pathologically impatient driver, and sucking on iced treats seemed to settle him. Bonnie had started Yancy on the Popsicle habit because she’d found it terrifying to ride with him on Highway 1. Mango was Yancy’s favorite flavor beside Bonnie herself. These were the sorts of sidecar thoughts with which he tormented himself.

The drive to downtown Miami usually took ninety minutes, but Yancy had stopped along Card Sound Road to purchase blue crabs, as there was still room in the cooler.

“Is this your idea of wit?” asked the assistant medical examiner, a serious brown-eyed woman whose name tag identified her as Dr. Rosa Campesino.

“Help yourself to a Popsicle,” Yancy told her. “However, the crabs are off-limits.”

He summarized Rawlings’s findings while Dr. Campesino removed the arm from the ice and carefully unwrapped it. She placed it on a bare autopsy table without commenting on the vertical middle digit.

“I suppose you’ve seen some winners,” Yancy said.

“And you brought this all the way from Key West because …?”

“The sheriff thought it might belong to one of your victims.”

Dr. Campesino said, “You could’ve e-mailed some photos and saved yourself a tank of gas.”

“Want to grab lunch?”

Finally, a smile. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

Yancy ate another Popsicle. Unless you happened to be deceased, there were worse places to hang out than a morgue in the summertime. The thermostat was turned down to about sixty-three degrees. Very pleasant.

Dr. Campesino returned with a printout of the county’s current inventory of body parts, listed by race, gender and approximate age—three partial torsos, two left legs, a pelvis, three ears, seven assorted toes and one bashed skull. None of the items belonged to a chunky, hirsute white male in his forties.

“I knew it,” said Yancy.

“Maybe next time.”

“Are you hungry?”

“My husband’s a sniper on the SWAT team.”

“Say no more.”

“Did you notice this?” Dr. Campesino pointed the eraser end of a pencil at a well-delineated band of pale flesh on the wrist of the darkened arm. “His watch is gone,” she said.

“It probably fell off the poor fucker while the shark was mangling him.”

Dr. Campesino gave a slight shake of her head. “Often in upper-arm amputations the victim’s wristwatch remains attached. Not so much in homicides. The bad guys either steal it to pawn, or they remove it to make the ID more difficult.”

Yancy was certain that Sheriff Sonny Summers wouldn’t want to hear the word
homicide
. “Then why wouldn’t they swipe the wedding ring, too?” he asked.

“You’re right. It looks expensive.”

“I’m betting platinum. The guy’s wife would be sure to recognize it.”

Dr. Campesino leaned closer to study the damaged stump of the limb.

“What now?” Yancy said.

“The end of the humerus is hacked up pretty bad.”

“Maybe he fell into the boat’s propeller.”

“That would be a different style of wound.”

Yancy said, “You’re killing me.”

From a tray of instruments the pathologist selected a pair of hemostats, with which she extracted a pointed tooth from one of several puncture holes in the upper biceps. She dropped the smallish gray fang into Yancy’s palm.

“I’m no shark expert,” said Dr. Campesino. “Some marine biologist could tell you what species this came from.”

Yancy pocketed the tooth. He asked how long the arm had been in the ocean.

“Five to seven days. Maybe longer.” The young pathologist took some photographs which she promised to upload in case another part of the same corpse turned up in her jurisdiction.

“Can’t you keep the damn thing here?” Yancy asked. “Honestly, it would save me all kinds of grief.”

“Sorry. Not our case.” Dr. Campesino was mindful of the blue crabs when she returned the orphaned arm to the cooler. “I’ll call you if we get something that looks like a match.”

Yancy was aware that the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office sometimes assisted other jurisdictions in difficult cases. He was also aware that his boss hadn’t sent him to Miami to initiate a murder investigation.

“Can we call it an accident? I mean, if you had to guess.”

“Not without a more thorough exam,” said Dr. Campesino, peeling off her latex gloves, “which I’d be happy to do if we had an official request from Monroe County.”

“Which you won’t get.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I’ll tell you over a strictly platonic lunch.”

“Nope.”

“Fine,” Yancy said. “So what would you do if you were me?”

“I’d go back to Key West and advise Dr. Rawlings to pack the arm in his freezer. Then wait for someone to show up looking for a missing husband.”

“And what if nobody does? It’s a cold business when true love goes south. Take my word.”

“Can I ask you something? Did you bend his middle finger up?”

“God, no! They found it that way!” Yancy moved the arm aside as he pawed through the cooler in search of another mango Popsicle. “Dear Rosa, what kind of sick bastard do you take me for?”

The person responsible for Yancy leaving the Miami Police Department was a sergeant named Johnny Mendez, who at the time was working with the Crime Stoppers hotline. To augment his salary Mendez would recruit friends and relatives to call in with tips on crimes that had already been solved, providing detailed information that detectives already knew. Then Mendez would backdate the tip sheet and personally sign off on the reward money, half of which he took as a commission.

Yancy had discovered the scam when he’d read a
Herald
story about a bus driver who’d received forty-five hundred dollars from Crime Stoppers for providing “crucial information” leading to the arrest of a man who stuck up a pedicure salon in Little Havana. Yancy himself had busted the robber, with no guidance whatsoever from the general public. The suspect had helpfully dropped his fishing license at the crime scene, and two days later Yancy jumped him while he was waxing the hull of his Boston Whaler.

The bus driver who’d phoned in the bogus tip turned out to be a second cousin of Sergeant Mendez’s. One morning Yancy boarded the cousin’s bus and sat in the first row and opened a notebook. After thirty-three blocks the driver spilled the whole story. He said Sergeant Mendez was upset to have opened the newspaper and seen the item about the reward, and had punished him by pocketing all but a grand.

That night, after too many rum and Cokes, Yancy decided it would be fabulously clever to dial the Crime Stoppers number and report Sergeant Mendez for grand theft and embezzlement. Mendez wasn’t a big fan of irony, and in any case he’d been busy covering his tracks. Yancy was eventually accused by Internal Review of making up lies about a fellow officer and of trying to extort money from Crime Stoppers. Yancy’s position was weakened by the transcript of his phone call
to the tip line, in which he suggested that a reward of fifty thousand dollars would be appropriate for the “courageous and upright deed” of exposing a crooked cop.

Yancy had delivered that line in a snarky and facetious tone, but the review board never got to hear the original tape, which had been mysteriously damaged by magnets while in Johnny Mendez’s possession. Suspended without pay, Yancy quickly ran out of money for his lawyer and had no choice but to resign from the department, in exchange for not being indicted. Sergeant Mendez denied all wrongdoing but was quietly reassigned to the K-9 division. Soon thereafter he was bitten in the groin by a Belgian shepherd trainee named Kong, and he required three operations, culminating in a scrotal graft from a Brahma steer.

Mendez retired from the police force on full disability at age forty-four. He lived on Venetia Avenue in Coral Gables. Parked in the driveway was a silver Lexus coupe undoubtedly purchased with Crime Stoppers proceeds. One solution to the severed-arm dilemma would be for Yancy to plant the limb in Mendez’s car, perhaps strung to the rosary that hung from the rearview mirror. Yancy discarded the idea—if by some chance Mendez overcame his panic and called the police, the arm would end up at the county morgue, where it inevitably would be traced back to Yancy based on information provided by the exquisite Dr. Campesino.

Over the years Yancy had conjured many irrational revenge fantasies about Johnny Mendez. For a time he considered seducing Mendez’s wife until he realized he’d be doing Mendez a huge favor. Mrs. Mendez was an unbearable harridan. Her features were a riot of futile surgeries, and she laughed like a mandrill on PCP. Yancy once bought her a margarita at the InterContinental, and for two solid weeks he’d slept with the lights on.

Now he was parked down the block from the Mendez marital nest. A fat Siamese was primping on the hood of the Lexus. Yancy assumed the animal belonged to Mendez, who seemed like a total cat person. The man’s inability to control K-9 candidates was further evidence.

Before Yancy could make up his mind about snatching the Siamese, his cell rang. It was the sheriff, probably seeking confirmation that the severed-arm transfer was complete. Yancy let the call go to voice mail.

On the drive back to the Keys he phoned Burton and gave him the bad news.

“They didn’t want the damn thing. Now what do I do?”

“Lose it somewhere,” Burton said. “That’s my advice.”

“Listen to you.”

“Seriously. Take 905 back through North Key Largo—there’s a dirt road about halfway that leads to an old cockfighting ring.”

Yancy wasn’t sold on the plan. “My luck, some birder will find it.”

“Not before the ants and vultures do.”