The Mango Opera (18 page)

“No need to be a wiseass, Rutledge.”

“I’ve got to run a load of throw rugs through the washer and dryer. I need to refold my underwear and dust the windowsills. Use the carpenter’s level to make sure all my framed artwork is hanging straight. Come to think of it, I’ve got to check the air pressure in my bike tires.” I took another slug from the OJ carton. I didn’t offer to share.

Hatch kept quiet.

“Okay, Avery, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll turn this sideways and ask my own question. I’ll tell you in advance that I asked this of several people in the last day or so. Why did you pretend not to know Julia Balbuena?”

He went for the calming effect of breathing through his nostrils. “What do you mean, pretend?”

“Why didn’t you identify the body? Tell me that.”

Hatch’s hand went for a cigar in the pocket, except there was no pocket. His eyes roved around at the three-foot level. They fixed on a small monstera plant in a weather-beaten Star Wars wastebasket.

“I’m a good detective. I told you that once, Rutledge. I’m good.”

“I’ve heard other people say that, too. I’m glad you agree.”

“I knew from 1980 that you had the hots for Kemp’s girlfriend. Ray told me about it. She wanted to be friendly after the three of you got back from Mariel. She kept wanting to invite you for dinner or meet you for drinks. He had to convince her that you were a pest, and you wouldn’t settle for friendship. You’d get possessive and grabby like you’d been when she dumped you for him.

“Ray Kemp asked you to go to Mariel because he figured you were over it, but afterward he had you pegged. He knew you were going for the goods. He told me about it, and I never forgot. Why the fuck do you think I had you come all the way from Key West when Lester was on the scene at Bahia Honda? You think I bought that bullhockey about you being expensive but good?”

“So the detective recognizes a body on the beach,” I said. “He doesn’t tell anyone who she is. But he remembers that Rutledge knew her half a lifetime ago. The detective thinks: That irrational freak. He’s always in trouble. Always five or ten miles over the limit. Who cares if he’s worked for the Department and the City for years? Who cares if he’s never had so much as a jaywalking citation? Wouldn’t it be great to set him up? Test the bugger to see if he perpetrated a few snuffs out and about the Lower Keys?”

He shrugged and gave a faint nod.

“Too far-fetched, Hatch. Julia Balbuena knew a thousand people in her lifetime. Maybe two thousand.”

Now his head nodded nonstop. “That’s how I do a good job. I fetch far. This time I fetched back six hours to where your girlfriend’s roomie is toast. And you’re rumbling around the murder venue like somebody official.”

“Which I am, from time to time.”

Hatch heaved himself out of the chair and shuffled toward the screen door. “Self-appointed, it appears. You a cop groupie, Rutledge?”

“I would be, but I can’t afford a scanner.”

“You think we don’t know about your odd jobs? You stole a sailboat three years ago.”

“Funny, Avery, the loss wasn’t reported. Maybe the captain in possession wasn’t the rightful owner. That was a favor for a friend. And I recall a Sarasota insurance investigator saying—in confidence, of course—that several deputies, your colleagues, were partners in a boat brokerage in Port Charlotte. They sold out after I recovered that yacht.”

Hatch started to say something, but changed his mind.

“Avery, you believe what you want, but Julia and Ray split up not long after the Boatlift. You didn’t see me beelining for Miami back then. Why would I want to kill her fifteen years later?”

He let the door slam on his way out. I stared up the lane as he waddled off toward Fleming.

*   *   *

A Cuban cadet in a blue uniform held the dripping AK-47. His poncho flapped against a pine sapling. His hands shook and one of his mismatched boots kept slipping in the mud. Only the weight of the weapon ensured his balance.

Mother of God, I thought. I am here for a quick down-and-back. Now I am eye-to-eye with where the bullets come out. I will sign the confession. I don’t want to die in my skivvies in the rain.

I went back to the anchor chain and the Danforth, concentrating on the chore at hand. I wanted the trainee not to feel threatened. I wanted the emergency of the moment, the mariner’s priority, to be more urgent than a sentry’s duty. Even to look again at the boy would challenge him. I did not wish to put my life under the trigger finger of this teenager. He acts brave as he confronts the Yankee invaders, I thought, but he’s shivering and he’s new at this. My legacy is seven thousand slides with no copyright stamps. I will make him wait to shoot me until I have finished tying these knots.

One more problem. If the wind shifted, as it should after an abrupt front, it would push
Barracuda
farther onto the beach and trap her in bottom ooze. We would need to free the boat. Untying knots wouldn’t do the job fast enough.

I worked to separate the Danforth from the heavy rope. Two soldiers holding AK-47s joined the young one. To maintain a shield of confusion, I made my task more complicated. I freed the anchor chain, tethered the rope to a broader tree, then turned bowlines around an adjacent trunk. Without facing the soldiers, I hefted the anchor and chain and retreated to the boat.

Through the slit of a cabin window I spotted Ray holding my camera to his eye. Christ, I thought. Taking snapshots of me, of my impending death in my Jockey shorts and this soggy windbreaker, on my film. With kiddie-cadets in the background. Let’s all get shot now. Get it developed and charge my account.

“Give me a knife,” I shouted toward the rear of the boat. “In case I have to cut this line in a hurry.”

Ray lowered the camera and pushed open a top-hinged window. “If you say so, commando. It’s your beachhead.”

That’s it, I thought. It’s my boat now. Until I get off—if I make it back on—I will make the decisions that count. This captain is shit for brains and a child to boot. I moved back through the muck, charading for the soldiers, using hand signals to indicate caution. The rain let up. Ray came to the bow holding the blade end of a carving knife.

“Toss it near the bushes, over there.” Somehow I mustered a calm tone. “Don’t hit the Cub Scouts.”

The knife landed flat. Without looking at the cadets, I walked four steps and jabbed the blade deep into the dirt next to the tree trunk. I turned to the soldiers, made a cutting motion over the rope, pointed to the knife, and made a pushing motion toward
Barracuda.
Even Castro’s conscripted grunts could understand that I had taken action for safety rather than aggression.

I waded out toward the stern and hauled myself back aboard. I found Julia hunkered down on the afterdeck, her face a flood of tears. Ray Kemp sat in the cabin, proud of himself, patting my camera like a puppy.

*   *   *

I had packed the photos in an Army surplus ammo box, watertight and bug-proof. Two hundred slides from Mariel Bay. None had been published because another photographer, another survivor, got back to Florida first. He made the magazine’s deadline and I ate six rolls of Kodachrome. A welcome-home meal. A week later the Mariel Boatlift was old news. I’d never sorted or filed them.

I checked them one by one with a magnifying loupe. Some weren’t too bad. I’d been trying to show differences and disparities. Filthy old shrimpers and workboats had nested in groups of eight or ten around two or three main anchors. Alongside them were luxury yachts and beamy sailboats designed to beat SORC racing class rules. Hundreds of filthy, battered fiberglass outboards had gathered in clusters as well. Sprinkled about the bay, underway, were Donzis and Cigarettes and Scarabs. Rich and poor waited in the same line, like the urinal lines in the Orange Bowl. We waited for the corroded bureaucracy to act. A rare victory for Castro’s flawed system of all for all.

In one series of shots Ray mugged for the camera and displayed a finger count of our days in port. Long ago I had put this group in order, to show a mutual friend Ray’s state of mind during the ordeal. On a sunny morning with two fingers in the air he looked fresh in a clean T-shirt. By four fingers he appeared frazzled, brushing his teeth as he grinned for the photo. Eight fingers flashed on a gray morning as he embraced and pretended to smooch an upright mop.

On the ninth morning, well after sunup, his hair matted and nasty, Kemp clutched a liter bottle of Havana Club Rum. He’d begun the bender the previous evening at sunset. It had included a midnight swim in the bay full of turds, oil scum, and garbage. Ray came away lucky from that one. The Cuban marines patrolling all night in motorboats had promised to shoot anyone in the water. On the tenth day he’d reached around Julia’s waist and jammed his arms down into her shorts. Ten fingers extended outward from the bottom hem. She bore an expression of disgust. Even then I could see the beginning of the end of their relationship.

I finally found the sequence I wanted. The half-dozen Ray had shot while I crawled through silt and mangrove roots trying to secure
Barracuda
to the shore trees. In the lee of the trees, the storm was a mere downpour. The Cuban soldiers who surrounded me looked malnourished. They appeared fearful, but willing to defend the homeland. There I was, carrying the anchor and chain back to the boat after I had removed them from the bowline. The Danforth anchor, with its dull, scratched aluminized finish. The big gash in its fluke where it had grabbed another anchor or a chunk of a wreck.

The duplicate Albury murder-scene prints from Duffy Lee were in a desk drawer. I didn’t have to check them, but I did to be certain. The surface texture was the same. The gouge across the fluke slashed at an identical angle. The Danforth was the same size. It was the same anchor.

That son of a bitch.

How had Ray learned about my friendships with these women? Why the women? Why not just me? Why now, after all these years?

At five minutes to three I walked across the lane and knocked on Cecilia Ayusa’s door. The puffy breeze fanned her wind chimes. The garlicky smell of boiled yuca drifted through the screens. Rhumba music, the kind that Carmen loved to play mornings after romantic encounters, played in a back room.

Cecilia came to the door wiping her hands on her apron. She pushed a few stray hairs off her forehead. Also one of Carmen’s habits. The women were like sisters, with Cecilia twenty pounds heavier and twenty years older. Always ready with a laugh, a bawdy remark, a brilliant smile, a sympathetic shoulder. I often accused her of spending her entire life in the kitchen. I had learned a few years ago that Cecilia was an expert diver. She’d grown up with three older brothers who were lobster-hunting legends. Two had moved to Tarpon Springs to become sponge divers. They had quit while still in their thirties, and retired back to Key West after the Boatlift dust had settled.

“You look like a dead person,” said Cecilia. “You need to eat and sleep and make love and get a sunburn even if you catch a cancer.”

“You have a way with words.”

Bilingual like her daughter, Cecilia could reconstruct English on the fly. Like many native Key Westers, she could mold it around Cuban idiom, Caribbean Spanish, traces of Bahamian phrasing, even urban slang. The crazy hybrid mix communicated exactly what the speaker wanted to say, made room for frank statements and hard truth. Many mistook it for a Bronx accent.

“They call yet?”

She pointed at the receiver. “That phone gonna ring in ten seconds.”

And it did. Cecilia grabbed it first and let fly with a barrage of questions. Then it was her turn to answer a few. Yes, Maria was fine. She had spent the day on a boat in the Snipe Keys with her uncle and cousins. Finally Cecilia put me on.

“Annie?”

“She went outside to turn off a sprinkler. We’ve got our little assignments around here.”

“How’s it going? You had something to tell me.”

“Better me than her. You told me that the guy who gave Monty Aghajanian the shaft was the guy she was seeing?”

“I recall that.”

“We’ve been talking about things. When she told me the man’s name I started to think, I know that name from somewhere. I figured it out.”

“He gets his name in the paper.”

“No, not that. You know, when you’re alone in the post office at six-thirty in the morning, with only one or two other people, putting up the mail and sticking it in the boxes? You don’t have a whole lot to think about. After a while, you get to know people by their mail. You follow me?”

“So far.”

“You see things, you remember them, you see them again a week later, a month later. I can tell you the name of everyone in Key West who gets
New Yorker
magazine. I know who doesn’t pay their bills and who gets letters from collection agencies in Marathon and Miami. I know when women get their child-support checks. I know who’s got money in a half dozen mutual funds and who’s getting mail from people in prison. I can tell you if someone’s got a gold credit card or American Express. Who’s got relatives in Cuba or Germany. It’s not like I’ve got a photographic memory, but after a while you know everything that’s going on with those boxholders.”

“Which brings us back around to Michael Anselmo.”

“Right. He’s been Box 6705 for about three months. He gets personal and business mail at that address. The strange thing, and why I noticed his name when Annie told me about him, he’s been getting weird postcards for the past couple of weeks. They’re old picture postcards from before postcards were glossy. They used to call them linen cards. Anyway, they’re always addressed in pencil. But they’re not from a prison, which is the usual tip-off with pencil addresses.”

“Okay.”

“They’ve been postmarked all over the place, from New York to Missouri to South Carolina, and all over. And this is what me and my co-workers have been noticing. They all sound threatening, like ‘Your day is gonna come,’ and ‘Everybody got to go sometime,’ and ‘Bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.”