Bone Island Mambo (41 page)

The man tapped his finger on a dashboard gauge. “We lose this cold air, mon, or I got to go.”

He was wise to worry on a ninety-degree, late-April day. He was idling his motor with the air conditioner cranked to full blast Most cars, it wouldn’t take ten minutes for the engine to boil over. I leaned forward, checked his temp needle. It was dead center normal. Engine heat was not his problem.

Sam had been inside the sand-colored building for only seven minutes. I had no idea how long he would be in there. I slid the man twenty bucks—a third of it his tip. Better to sweat in the open air than to melt into vinyl seat covers, forced to listen to radio drivel. Sam’s housemate, Marnie Dunwoody, had loaned us her cell phone. We could call another cab when Sam was free.

A damp heat hit me as I climbed out. The driver backed away, spun his steering, went full throttle. He almost hit a Sheriff’s cruiser at the entrance apron. The deputy sneered, shook his head, and drove calmly to a parking slot as if near-misses happened all the time. He got out and slammed the county car’s door. He was about five-eight, with a crew-cut, huge muscles, a thick neck and broad chest He wore a red polo shirt, a gold badge clipped to his belt a weapon in a hip holster. He ignored me as he strode to the building. A lawman on a mission. I could’ve been dancing on stilts, juggling hand grenades. He would have ignored me.

Broward County’s a tough beat.

Sam had shown up on Dredgers Lane at seven-thirty that morning. He knocked on my porch door and whistled through the screen. Teresa didn’t hear him. She was dressing with the bathroom door shut. That was strange in itself because she usually performed a get-dressed tease in front of me.

I heard Sam’s knock with my head under the pillow. It
was too early for a social visit, and Sam never came by without calling first He looked whipped, puzzled. He skipped the salutations. “You got a busy day?”

I thought about the legal pad list, chores I’d put off, bills I hadn’t paid, quotes I should have mailed days ago. I pictured my last-minute scramble, getting from the house to the airport two days from now. Then I thought about everything Sam had done for me.

He said, “I mean, if you’re busy, Alex . . .”

“Nothing I can’t ignore.”

“I need to be in Lauderdale for a couple hours. I bought two tickets for a turnaround. I’ll buy us a good lunch. We’ll be back on the island by five.”

With the constant easterlies, the past couple weeks of twenty to twenty-five knot winds starting to abate, I’d have guessed that Sam would want to spend his day fishing, catching up with regular customers. He was dressed for work. He’d become sensitive to sunlight in recent years, and always wore lightweight long-sleeved shirts and long trousers. But I noticed that he wore sneakers instead of his leather boat shoes. I couldn’t imagine a fishing guide and Vietnam veteran needing a traveling companion. I decided to let him explain when he was ready.

I said, “Is there time to brush my teeth?”

“Take a shower. The flight’s not till eight-twenty. I’ll make coffee.”

Sam spoke softly as he drove his old Ford Bronco to the airport “Not really my business, but is Teresa that unpleasant every morning?”

“She does her major thinking when she wakes up. That brain whips up to speed before the coffee hits. Plus, she worked late last night.”

He shifted his cup from one hand to the other so he could shift gears. “She doesn’t like dawn distractions?”

“Especially when she clocks out at midnight. I keep my distance.”

“The woman in the bubble?”

I laughed. “With me outside, looking in.”

“Tell me again that apartment deal.”

“Her landlord went to monthly rentals, on short notice. He jacked up the rent more than double. It’s gone from being an apartment to a condo, then a residential atrium. They’ll probably advertise it as a two-bedroom, two-bath estate.”

“So, you got a roomie?”

“Hell, for eight months we’ve been living together in two places. We’ve had to commute ten blocks back and forth. This should be easier.”

“So far?”

“Three days. Too soon to decide.”

Sam drove another block, then said, “I got a call an hour ago from a deputy medical examiner in Broward. They found a dead woman up there, beat up bad, dumped on a tree lawn in a ritzy community. They say it’s my sister, Lorie. They want me to go through the formalities, sign the positive piece of paper.”

“The sister you’d lost track of?”

“Since the mid-eighties.” Sam paused, then said, “The same month the Challenger blew up, Lorie went poof, too. She’d sent me a photograph, she was holding a snook she’d caught in Chokoloskee. I called a few days later, and the phone was disconnected. I never heard from her again. My sisters up north, Flora and Ida, never did either.” Sam went silent a moment, then added, “Lorie had problems back then with abusive boyfriends. Strange, she was still in Lauderdale.”

“How did they track you down?”

“An old picture of me in her wallet. I mailed one to each sister from Fort Benning during Jump School. Lorie probably couldn’t read yet Florence was about to start school. Little Ida, come to think of it, I don’t know if she was born. I signed the backs of the photos, ‘Love, Brother Sam,’ with my service number under my name. I was one gung-ho son of a bitch.”

Sam was quiet on the flight It’s not easy to talk on a
droning commuter plane, anyway. This one was full of sunburned Spring Breakers, leaving the party early. We’d bought the
Key West Citizen
and the
Miami Herald
before boarding, and swapped sections during the flight. Several articles normally would have drawn comment from Sam. He’d had nothing to say. Not even a wisecrack about toasted college kids. Our friendship had endured because we could survive silence in each other’s company. But this deflated mood was not reflective or pissed-off quiet. In the years I had known Sam, I’d never seen a silence of sadness.

Sam nudged me, pointed as we descended over the Everglades on final glide into Lauderdale. Months ago he’d described the huge highway cloverleaf below us. The Interstate had wiped out Andytown, the crossroad where Sam had grown up. He still could claim Muncie, Indiana, as his home town. But his sisters at home, all born in Florida, had lost their roots to the road planners, the graders and cement mixers.

After we touched down, Sam said, “Lorie was so damned stubborn, like my old man. She and the old man were going at it in the car one time, back when 441 was in the Everglades. He was snarling and she was snapping, arguing over nothing. He pulled to the shoulder and told her he wasn’t going to have her damned sass. She could change her tone or walk home. She got out and slammed the door. A mile down the highway I realized he wasn’t going to stop. He was going to let a nine-year-old girl hike ten miles on a rural two-lane. I told him to let me out, too. He did, and drove away. I’d walked maybe two minutes back in Lorie’s direction. The next thing I knew a big Olds-mobile sedan pulled over to pick me up. She’d thumbed herself a ride. We damn near beat the old man home.”

“How did he react to that?”

“He never said a thing. She never did, either.”

“Tough little girl.”

“I guess not tough enough.”

The sun stared down at me as if I was on trial. I found shade next to a drainage culvert, stood under a tree hung with flaming crimson blossoms. I checked my watch, then told myself to quit checking my watch. The cabbie was halfway back to the airport hack line. I still smelled of clove gum and curry.

The Broward Medical Examiner Lab was typical of Florida single-story bureaucracy. I suspected that a county architect, in a hurry to get to happy hour, had whipped out the plans on a Friday afternoon. A landscaper had saved his ass with shrubs and trees. I found it strange that Broward had set the laboratory in a Dania Beach neighborhood of upscale trailer parks and mid-scale condos. A trump of all flags at half-mast, an empty flagpole, stood near the building’s entrance. Its hoist ropes fluttered in the breeze. Heavy hooks slapped against the hollow pole.

None of this had diddly to do with my upcoming job on Grand Cayman. But the setting brought to mind the conflict in my career, the fact that I dealt with a weird blend of beautiful and gruesome, of fulfilling assignments and a few that had been draining and dangerous.

Three years ago I had thought that part-time forensic work would simply boost my finances and fill unproductive time. I had started with the Key West Police Department, jobs that didn’t require science or complex procedures. My name got passed around. Within months, Monroe County’s detectives were calling, when their full-timers were overworked or on vacation. I had been reconsidering my sideline for over a year. The only good thing was having extra bucks to put toward my bills. The bad part was how close I’d come to tragedy, how crime jobs had dragged me into a realm I’d avoided most of my life. I still managed to work regularly, mostly out of town, doing journalism, or ad agency shoots, or magazine features. But those gigs didn’t promise me anything for the future. Within the past few months, two ad clients had been bought out Their assignments had vanished along with their corporate names. Even with the Grand Cayman job, my year could be as hollow
as the empty flagpole. Unless I hit a jackpot, I still had seven more years of mortgage payments. My short-notice forensic jobs could make the difference between eating and going hungry.

Sam once wisecracked, “If you or I ever go broke, we can blame domestic taxes and imported beer.”

His one-liner was going south. Along with my bank balance.

At ten after twelve a white cab rolled into the parking lot. The woman at the wheel yelled, “Yo, Rutledge?”

I nodded.

“You’re on the clock, honey. Your buddy watched your cab leave, so he called me. Damn, you’re a tall one. Your buddy got a relative in there?”

“That’s what they told him.”

She shut off the motor, dropped the keys in her shirt pocket, and pulled out a box of Benson & Hedges. She was dressed twenty years younger than her face, fighting time. She had spent a few years on the beach, too, or else smoking had parched her skin.

“Cross your fingers,” she said. She fired a cigarette, and held it high so the smoke wouldn’t blow my way. In her other hand she held the cigarette box and a Bic pinched between her thumb and two fingers. She waved that hand toward the building. “They’ve been wrong in there before.”

“You don’t look as nervous as the man who brought us here.”

“Black man?”

“Yes.”

“They’re immigrants from the voodoo league of nations. They’re afraid their spirits will escape inside the morgue, or their souls will be gang-banged to the sound of a hundred batá drums. Or dead people walking—zombies and fire-hags—will dance a
rada
in their rearview mirrors. This is the tissues and sympathy hack. I get sent here a lot.”

“You deal with it okay?”

She waved again. “I used to work inside a door that’s inside that door right there.”

“For the county?”

She nodded. “I saw what came through the back, the messes they offloaded. I never got used to it, but it didn’t weird me out. When I was inside, I taught myself not to react, not to have feelings. I don’t know how I did that Looking back, I worry about that part of my personality. I worry about it more than ghosts or bad luck or whatever.”

“So it’s immigrants fighting their imaginations?”

She nodded and inhaled hard. Sucked smoke down to her knees.

I said, “Imagination can be more powerful than reality.”

“They’d be shitless for sure, if they ever saw the real thing.” The smoke leaked from her lungs as she spoke. She patted the taxi’s roof. “The heat of the day, the nutso Gold Coast traffic, this job is heaven. Take my word.”

“Heaven?”

“Well, raw heaven.”

Sam stepped out of the building, flinched, and put on his sunglasses. He walked toward us without expression. His walk carried more resolve than before, as if he had promised himself a course of action.

“You hungry?” he said.

“Was it bad?”

“Yep, bad,” he said. “But it wasn’t her. You hungry?”

I wasn’t, but I shrugged.

Sam asked our driver to take us to Ernie’s Restaurant

“Eighteen-hundred block of South Federal,” she said, then looked me in the eye. She had told me that people behind those doors sometimes got it wrong. She wanted to win her point.

I nodded, silently gave it to her.