The Mango Opera (2 page)

He nodded. “I am grateful, bubba, that you did not put ‘good’ in front of the word ‘morning.’ Two reasons.”

“Two dead people?”

“No, one. Ellen Albury. The pretty one from Milt Russell’s office.”

“I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“Someone used the Cablevision wire to tie her wrists to a boat anchor in the front room. They handcuffed her ankles together. Covered her mouth and nose with duct tape. It took her a while to suffocate.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah. Your ex-girlfriend found her like that.”

Now I understood Annie’s abruptness this morning. “She tell you it’s ‘ex’?”

“She found the body when she came in a few minutes after seven.” Monty’s expression went neutral, to the stoic pose that law officers assume when they deliver bad news. “Said she was living here, but she’d spent the evening elsewhere. A name was mentioned. You might say her alibi is tight.”

“Seven this morning?”

Monty realized that he had touched a nerve. “Sorry, Alex. You look like I kicked you in the nuts.”

“Where is she now?”

“The backyard with the sheriff’s deputies. Hatch and Fernandez.”

Inside the city’s jurisdiction? “This isn’t the county, Monty.”

Aghajanian’s eyes grew vacant. “Hatch and Fernandez represent the multi-agency Monroe County Violent Crimes Task Force. They’re trying to link it to that ugly one on Stock Island a few days ago. They’re fishing, trying to connect this Albury woman with the other victim.”

I pulled two 35-millimeter cameras out of my bag and looped their narrow cloth straps over my neck. “This Stock Island murder is news to me. Forsythe must have handled it.”

Monty scanned Olivia Street, the die-hard habit of a watchful cop. “How’s work?”

“One article assignment. Zip shit for advertising. I’m drifting in the creative doldrums. My cameras are going dry.”

“Like my brain. This desk job is not my idea of adrenaline rush.”

“How goes the appeal?”

“I’ve about given up. The FBI has age limits. Another six months, I’ll be thirty-eight. Sometimes you get the wienie.”

Sometimes the wrong people get the wienie.

“What’s the other reason it’s not a good morning?”

“I had Sam Wheeler booked for a half day out by Woman Key.” Monty checked his watch. “By now, that first hook and release was history. The first Coors was upside down in about fifteen minutes. I ask you, bubba, how often I get a day to fish, to go screw off on the shallow salt water? One good thing, Sam won’t peg me for the deposit.”

“City need photos?”

“Ask Chicken Neck. He’s hiding in that Taurus with the A/C blowing down his custom-made royal-blue polyester shirt. Waiting his turn.”

“Must tighten his jaw, having to wait for Hatch.”

“I think Neck is over that wife thing. He knows the hell Avery Hatch is going through with that woman, paying for his long-dickin’ the hard way. Anyway, Neck’s got him a new deal with a fat Cuban lady. Between you and me, Chicken Neck is laughing at Mr. Hatch. Like he did him a favor by snarfing his old lady. ’Course, the two of them aren’t going out of their way to be friends.”

“I’m going to go see how Annie’s holding up.”

“Come visit at the city someday soon. We’ll get a ropa vieja down at Lechonera.” Monty’s face went grim again. “One other thing, bubba.”

“What’s that, partner?”

“Don’t get weirded out when you go in the front room. That dead woman and your girlfriend? Could have been twins.”

Hearing it was weird enough.

I didn’t want to get involved talking with Chicken Neck Liska, the ranking detective with the Key West Police Department and America’s last remaining throwback to the days of disco shirts and gold chains. I approached the idling squad car, pointed at my cameras, then pointed to the house. My luck dropped ten points. He motioned me over and cracked his window.

“Yah, go by the back door and act busy and hurry them county dipshits. Tell ’em they can bullshit later. We got real work to do. Don’t touch the front door or any windows or light switches.” Liska ripped a single rectangle from a paper-towel roll and wiped sweat from his jowls and neck. “Don’t touch a fuckin’ thing. Tell the sweaty one with the Honduran horsecock in his fat mouth to air out the joint, too.”

The shotgun house at 812 Olivia represented a hundred years of Key West. Built to rent to immigrant cigar makers a century ago, it had been restored to lease for top dollar today. Many homes in Old Town had been refurbished, some elegantly, some not. They were set close together, close to the sidewalk. The unrestored ones were easy to spot with their rusted, unpainted tin roofs.

I loaded color in one camera, black-and-white in the other, shot a few frames of gingerbread trim and window shutters to establish location on the film, then headed around back. Alongside the board-and-batten building, spiderwebs from croton bushes snagged my camera bag. Sparse grass struggled in the packed, sandy soil. Someone had dumped two boat batteries back in there, a touch of poor housekeeping that did not meld with what appeared to be a recent renovation. I rounded the corner.

Avery Hatch had heard me coming. He glared over his shoulder. “Those city wussies sent your ass to give us county men a hint.” Spittle and flecks of cigar-wrapper tobacco rode his lower lip. “We’re stinking up their show and they’re late for coffee break.” He turned back around and used the palms of both hands to smooth the hair above his ears. A quick application of brow-sweat hair gel. A webbed plastic chair suffered under his weight.

Billy Fernandez, an equally unsociable Sheriff’s Department detective, slouched, bored, in a similar chair next to Annie Minnette. Billy was in his early thirties. I’d watched his hairline work its way backward an eighth inch every twelve months since I started part-time work with the county ten years ago. Billy’s thick mustache made him look as if a black caterpillar had crawled onto his upper lip and died there. I hadn’t seen him change his expression in years.

Annie gave me a narrow-eyed “What are you doing here?” stare. I looked away. A rusted washing machine occupied a concrete slab next to the back door. A mildewed Pawley’s Island rope hammock hung between two sapodilla trees.

“So?” said Fernandez.

“Thought I’d get a few before Riley’s people arrive.” I pulled a small flash unit from my bag.

Hatch turned again. “Look here, Rutledge. Cootie Ortega left ten minutes ago. He was trying to beat the black-bag squad, too. And you know what? He even had on a shirt, official as hell. It said ‘Crime Scene Unit’ on the back. Blue shirt, white lettering. You’re not wearing an official shirt. Did the city call you, or is it you need snapshots for your personal collection?”

Avery had always thought of me as a post-hippie beach bum who couldn’t possibly deserve a job with the county. The idea that his income and mine came from the same till didn’t fit his self-image. He waited for my response. It was a good question. Neither Monty or Liska had mentioned Ortega.

I locked him eye-to-eye. “Most of us understand that Cootie’s the mayor’s wife’s cousin,” I said. “Nobody at the city has the balls to fire him. Every time he works, the evidence gets trashed in court. Like Forsythe working out of your Marathon Substation. Marathon’s a big town now. You ought to be able to find somebody with a brain. But the county calls me only when Lester’s busy. The city calls me when they don’t want their case flushed down to Castro with Cootie Ortega’s evidence and the rest of the city’s shit.”

“Gentlemen.” Annie stood. “It is time for our talk to end.”

The pain and finality in her voice settled it. Fernandez dragged himself out of his chair, and Hatch flipped through a small steno pad to amend his notes. Annie walked toward the rear of the yard.

I let myself in the jalousied back door, wondering whether Annie Minnette was grieving for her lost roommate or reminiscing about the night she’d spent with her tight alibi. I could learn his identity without much trouble. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I sure as hell would rather hear it from her.

The kitchen smelled of paella. Odors and steam from five generations of Cuban meals had impregnated the walls. A Fantasy Fest poster from 1985 hung between varnished pine cupboards. My boat shoes squeaked on the hardwood floor in the narrow hallway. A pair of black-and-neon-yellow Rollerblades lay against a discount-store stereo. Pictures of strangers sat on glass-topped wicker tables. A peace lily in a red clay pot needed watering. Someone had stepped on a video cassette of
Angel Heart.

I had made it inside. I had bullshitted my way into documenting a murder scene for no good reason. I had no real desire to view the deceased, no need to build a corpse portfolio. So much for curiosity. This job made those sensitive portraits of rock stars and authors a piece of cake.

Ellen Albury’s body lay between two chairs in the living room. Someone had found the charity to cover her face with a section of cloth. I had to lift it to take the photographs. Aghajanian had warned me. I am sure that he had meant facial similarities, though death had distorted her features, but there were others. Either Ellen owned an identical Mickey Mouse T-shirt or she had borrowed the one that Annie treasured. She had Annie’s high cheekbones and shoulder-length brown hair. Even the hipbones were the same, the high-rise underpants, the shape of her thighs, the pubic outline.

“Hey, Rutledge!” Billy Fernandez ambled down the hallway twirling his keys on one finger. “Different anchors have different names, right?”

“Yeah.” I gathered my composure.

“Whad’ya call that one, bubba?”

I looked over to check. “A fifty-pound Danforth.”

“Ah, yeah. How you spell that?”

It occurred to me to spell f-i-f-t-y. Someday I would print bumper stickers to distribute in Florida that said,
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE WAY AHEAD OF ME
! I spelled “Danforth.”

Billy wrote it down. He left without a thank-you.

Once I started photographing, I viewed objects in the room, including the late Ellen Albury, as items in the viewfinder. I’ve learned to use my camera as insulation. Documentation requires objectivity: you remain detached, an arm’s length from the situation. I worked with both cameras and framed out a series of overlapping shots with each one. I took note of furniture that appeared out of place or too perfectly placed. I shot details of cigarette stubs and debris like the chewed toothpicks and disassembled Bic lighter on an end table.

I finished the color film first and dropped the OM-2 into my bag. I exited the back door, found no one in the backyard, took a shot of the hammock in black-and-white, and walked around to the front. Larry Riley, Monroe County’s ponytailed medical examiner, leaned against the picket fence and sipped from a ceramic mug. No sign of Annie’s Volkswagen. An ambulance had claimed its parking spot.

Chicken Neck Liska emerged from his climate-controlled Taurus and began to escort two younger investigators into the house. He held out his palm. “Give me the film. I’ll have Ortega develop it for us. Quicker that way.”

The last person I wanted touching my work was Cootie Ortega, the cousin of the wife of the mayor. He was an odds-on bet to overdevelop, expose, or scratch my negatives. But Liska had me in a bind, and the film was my ticket out. If he wanted it, I had to give it to him. Or explain in detail what I was doing there in the first place.

“I shot a roll of black-and-white.” I turned my back to the sun, rewound the film, and popped open the OM-4. “Favor. Don’t hold it in the direct sunlight.”

“Invoice me. The usual.”

I recalled Liska’s inaccurate but constant reminders that I made more in an hour than he did in a day.

“It’s only nine o’clock, Rutledge. Have a nice day at the beach.”

I packed my photo gear as I walked back to the motorcycle. I couldn’t help thinking: What if Annie had been home? What if she’d walked in as the murder was happening? She may have treated me like crap, but she didn’t deserve harm. A bigger question also loomed. If the two women were so similar, could Annie have been the target instead of Ellen Albury?

Annie’s wake-up knock on the door had been a surprise. The next ninety minutes had shot my day to hell. The beach did not sound appealing.

Nothing sounded appealing. I headed back to the house.

3

For the past four or five years, Sam Wheeler and I have met for lunch on the Wednesdays he hasn’t had a charter. He tended to be fully booked; our routine tended toward the Wednesdays with the nastiest weather. For a while we’d skipped around, field-testing new restaurants as they appeared on the island. But the skimpy gut luggage posing as cuisine, promoted as healthy, had driven us back to our old standby, the Half Shell Raw Bar at the old shrimp docks.

Back when Bob Hall shucked thirty dozen a day and Cowboy Ron sang country classics, locals had kept the place alive. Even after the Half Shell had become a popular tourist spot it never lost its dependable menu. The place was decorated with road signs and hundreds of old vanity license tags lined up to read as statements. Eight on a wall near the entrance stated:
OOH YEP KILROY GONE HOP ON ISLANDS DAILY.
Two plates above the restroom door proclaimed
TINKLE CRISIS.

In recent years the Half Shell had become center stage for a mischievous day-shift bartender. A survivor of the Fort Lauderdale party-bar circuit and the mother of two grade-schoolers, Peggy Sue Peligrosa dispensed seafood, street directions, drinks, slander, and off-the-wall gossip. Anyone not an island resident was a Griswold—after the family in
National Lampoon’s Vacation.
A tourist with a sense of humor and a respect for the tip jar could gain acceptance. Locals got the worst of Peggy Sue’s jokes, honesty sessions, and hangover harassment. Her voice was loud but not grating, and Sam and I came for the entertainment as well as the food.

I met Sam at noon. He climbed out of his ’69 Ford Bronco as I coasted my bicycle onto the tarmac at the foot of Margaret. Sam’s rust-perforated truck had evolved into rolling poetry: a starboard list, aluminum cans a foot deep in the pickup bed, a coat-hanger antenna, and its interior awash in business cards, unopened credit-card offers, and sun-roasted coffee cups. Wheeler earned top dollar as a light-tackle guide. He lived in a modest house and collected military retirement pay. He could afford ten Grand Cherokees, but he took pride in sticking with the old seacoast refugee. He’d hired a local artist to paint “Eddie Haskel Edition” under each windowsill.