The Mango Opera (21 page)

“Well, he doesn’t fit our type profile for serial crime. That gives him some distance. But not much.”

“So where’d the bomb come from?”

“The big leagues. It was a mix of commercial mining explosives. Tovex and Drivex. They look like greasy white sausages, crimped at both ends with metal staples, nasty to handle. They’re hard to get, except in West Virginia, in any hardware store. At least that was the case a couple years ago. The law may have changed by now.”

“How was it set to blow?”

“Two different ways. An electric blasting cap and an M-100 firecracker, both wired to filaments in bulbs like they use in taillights. The bulbs were wired to the brake-light circuit. Broken glass, intact filament. Once the driver hits the brakes and holds his or her foot down, the bulb would last about forty seconds in the open air. It’d glow white-hot and light the M-100 fuse. Plus, when the bulb burned out, it’d trigger the electric cap. Crude, rude, and fail-safe. Either way the explosive gets a boost.”

“Why wasn’t the thief blown to hamburger?”

“German engineering, the way the factory pieces together sections of VW convertibles. That and luck.”

“Why West Virginia?”

“Who knows? It’s solid rock, and people need holes for their outhouses and graves and coal mines.”

“I’ve got to go, Bob.”

“Can I ask a favor?”

I told him he could ask.

“You’re a focal point. I’d like to put a man in your house until you get back. We’ll bring in groceries and bed linen.”

And search my house for evidence of my involvement in pot smuggling, you chickenshit bureaucrat. On the other hand, I felt reassured having someone looking out for the homestead. Plus, I had nothing to hide.

“I’ll leave a key under the Christmas cactus,” I said. “Be prepared. The neighbors are going to ask who you are. Tell my houseguests there’s no cream for coffee. It’s been a few days since I’ve been to the grocery.”

*   *   *

I did not have the energy to push it. I found a speed just above the limit and put my brain on cruise control. In the Key deer slowdown zone on Big Pine, I zeroed in on one question. If the ex-girlfriend link was real, what had I done to provoke all this ugliness and violence? Nothing came to mind. And knowing nothing about the killer or his motives, there was nothing I could do to change it. All I could do was try to stop it. I quit thinking again.

Except for the beam of the cycle’s headlight, my ride through the desolate areas of the Keys and across the longer bridges was like being aboard a sailboat at night, up close to the flavor and moods of the sea. Ships’ lights glowed in the distance and gave the only clues to the horizon. At the south end of Marathon a wobbly pickup truck pulled in front of me as it departed a bar. A double downshift and a swerve cleared me from danger. Two close calls in two days, though this had been the lesser of the two. It would have done no good to confront the loadie in the GMC. Sooner or later a semi would T-bone his pickup, shatter his legs, bounce his skull against the roof, and the
Herald
would have another five inches to fill.

An hour later, behind a line of traffic north of Jewfish Creek, I laughed at the brake lights, the slowing, the movement to the right in the four-lane passing zone. The tourists’ radar detectors had picked up Southern Bell’s microwave tower on Card Sound Road. For once, the locals could speed up and go to the head of the line. I hit the Turnpike in Florida City, turned east on 836 behind the airport, and connected with with I-95 near the center of Miami. A friend once told me that cycle riders in Miami are classified as targets of opportunity. Traffic was light and my last few miles were easy. I found the Enchanted Forest address about twenty after eleven.

Carmen’s cousin lived in an elaborately lighted home in an area bordered by canals. The motorcycle engine had buzzed me into one large nerve ending. I felt shaky on solid ground, like a sailor who steps onto the dock after a long voyage and becomes seasick from lack of rolling motion. A jovial man answered the door. My height, probably in his mid-thirties, he wore silk pajamas and a short inch-thick terry-cloth robe. He looked like a blond stand-in for the Marlboro Man. If this guy is gay, I thought, I’m Nancy Reagan.

He introduced himself as Thadd, “with two
d
’s.”

Well, maybe so.

“Give me your things and let me make you a drink. You’ve been through so much turmoil, and I like the name Alex. I like any name with an
x.
Max, Rex, Tex, all of them. Of course those have only three letters and you have four. You must be a wreck.” He put my helmet and duffel bag on a chrome-and-leather love seat in the foyer and led the way into the kitchen. “The girls and David have gone to bed. Not together, of course.”

“I could use a plain beer and first a bathroom.”

Thadd pointed. “Mi casa, su casa. We leave before eight for Key Largo, so sleep as late as you like and ignore the telephone. Our machine will pick up.”

I turned a rheostat to light the bathroom. Seashells in a glass jar, pastel wallpaper, metallic accents, shell-shaped soaps, a philodendron wandering up one wall, spray bottles of cologne on the counter. Like a hundred thousand others in Florida. I looked into the mirror. Haggard. Four days in a whirlwind. Little sleep and a predawn alarm seventeen hours ago. My eyes, mouth, and facial skin drooped. Ah, yes. The springer spaniel.

*   *   *

Annie stared as I entered the kitchen. Her mouth smiled but her sleepy, sad-sympathetic eyes sent a cross-message. Thadd had vanished and Annie held the beer I’d requested. She took a sip before she handed it to me. I kissed her forehead.

“I want to hug you,” she said softly, “but I’m too sunburned. I’m sorry.”

I chuckled. “You’re not accustomed to being a tourist.”

“You’re right, and it’s not the life for me. I’m going stir-crazy. Thadd said good night and to put your big motorbike in the garage. I think he likes your big motorbike.”

“Can I see your sunburn?”

“Yes, but you’ll just want to do something. Let’s do it in the morning, after we talk.”

“I still want to see.”

She opened her robe and showed me. She wasn’t completely right about wanting to do something. She was a beautiful sight, and I could have spent hours just staring at her, but I wanted to hear what she had to say. I kissed her again on the forehead and went to move the Kawasaki.

20

The bedroom’s second-story screened veranda overlooked a large free-form pool. Glossy patterned tiles surrounded the pool and reflected the yard’s accent lighting. In underpants and T-shirts, Annie and I lay in side-by-side cushioned lounges under a slowly turning fan. The fan rustled the potted plants that lined the floor along the porch screens. A massive thunderstorm painted the sky to the north, and through a break in the trees we watched the light show roll down the East Coast. Lightning streaks jumped between tall thunderheads and split and stabbed downward. Ahead of the weather the streetlights of Hallandale painted a weird neon glow on the cloud bottoms.

We sat there and didn’t talk. It was time for the Big Discussion, but I was too fatigued to begin and she was too full of nerves. We listened to frogs and the distant buzzing of traffic.

Annie and I had mastered abstract communication. We almost always got along well, but we had tended to stockpile stubborn pride. Her mother once said that our romance reminded her of her own in-laws. They were such bad drivers that the only reason they’d lived beyond sixty was they’d never met each other coming the other way.

She broke the ice. “Did you dream about me while I was living on Olivia?”

I wondered whether this might be a great time to lie my ass off. “Well, no,” I said. “My sleep wasn’t deep enough to register a dream. I can tell you that I missed the balalaika.”

“It’s not like either of us can play it.”

We had bought the three-stringed instrument in the gift shop of a Florida museum that had exhibited the treasures of the Russian czars. It had been one of those afternoons when everything felt right. We’d spent hours wandering, holding hands, speculating about wealth, ogling other people’s money. “It’s important to have cultural decorations,” I said. “My life feels larger when the balalaika is on display.”

She rested her hand on my forearm. “Am I a decoration?”

“A loaded question requires return fire. I learned that from an attorney.”

“Fire away.”

“My life felt larger when you were around.”

She squeezed my hand. “Okay, past tense. What’s the next thing on your mind?”

“For two years you’ve said that you love me. On Wednesday you said that you’d been fighting the fact that you love me. Are you fighting the fact or the process?”

“Oh, Alex, I don’t know how to answer your questions. You analyze things so much.”

She had a point. I wasn’t sure where I’d drummed up that one.

She moved her hand back up my arm. “You’ve always been much better with words. I mean, I say what I feel but I don’t expect it to stand up in a court of law.”

“As I hinted a moment ago, you’ve been trained in techniques for that line of work. You’re supposed to be able to weave words into bullwhips, aren’t you? Turn a caress into a sucker punch? Let’s try this. What do you like least about me?”

“Loading up, are we? Okay, sometimes you breathe through your nose when you sleep. It’s like a jet stream across the pillow. It wakes me up. What do you like least about me?”

“Falsehood by omission.”

She flinched. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Of course you do.”

“If not saying things is the same as telling lies, who can ever be innocent?”

“Very good. Now we’re into situational ethics.”

“I know where you’re going with this.”

“Then you can drive,” I said. It was time for my safety net. I wanted to believe, if only until morning, that she felt remorse.

The thunderstorm reached North Miami and the light show intensified. Jagged zaps leaped between the low and high clouds. Thunder shook the house and smells of electricity filled the air. Taller pine limbs began to bend and whip and whistle.

Annie shifted to a matter-of-fact tone. “I was infatuated with Michael. I knew that you disliked him. For obvious … well, for selfish reasons, I couldn’t bring up his name. I guess at first I was trying to cover my ass. I was hedging my bet. If he turned out to be a bad bet I didn’t want to lose you. I moved out because I didn’t want to get involved with him while I shared your house. Am I making sense so far?”

“Okay.” So much for legal preliminaries. The groundwork of the argument.

“Since then I’ve tried to blame it on tropical ennui. Or some other wispy notion that doesn’t explain anything. I admit it, I was taking too many things for granted. I assumed that I could move back into your house without a problem. I figured you’d forgive me. Now it looks like you might not.”

The price one pays for not being combative. “The toughest thing to forgive is your silence,” I said. “You didn’t tell me a blessed thing. You didn’t say squat. There’ve been times in my life when I’ve felt lost. This variety of lost was a new one.”

She hesitated. “After I realized how badly I’d acted, I was afraid you’d tell me to stay the hell out of your life. I was thinking that at Ellen’s funeral.”

Lightning flashed and the afterimage left me seeing Annie in the amber and green tones of a color negative. I smelled approaching rain, the breeze ahead of the storm less humid than the still air of five minutes earlier.

“You didn’t help things, by the way,” she said. “Why didn’t you turn into a pestering jerk? I wanted you to grovel and act like a whiny asshole, or get jealous. You didn’t come around looking for me, causing scenes, throwing bricks through my windows, chasing me through restaurants.”

“You’ve been watching daytime TV.” The rain began with a bright flash and a crack of thunder. The yard lights flickered and went out.

She remained quiet a minute or two, then said, “Getting involved wasn’t what I expected it to be. It went downhill after the first couple of days.”

“Please. No box score.”

“I don’t mean to sound like that. I’m just trying to say that after weeks of pondering, it dawned on me that most of the time I was away I was thinking about you.”

“Now you’re coming out of the woods. I like the sound of that.” Fatigue was setting in. My responses felt as if they were floating to the surface rather than snapping to mind. The whole house had lost power. Without the ceiling fan, the porch became close and smelled of mildew.

“Can I explain one more thing?” said Annie. “About that last night I stayed with him? Before I found Ellen?”

“Okay.” This might throw her back into the forest. Another bolt of lightning struck nearby. For an instant the pool glowed quartz-blue. The thunder rattled the house. I wondered if the ceiling fan might fall in my lap, but the concussion diminished.

The waves of raindrops on the shingled roof forced Annie to raise her voice. “I got spring fever on Tuesday. I came home from work early so I could drive out to County Beach and soak in the sun and play tourist. I walked in the back door and they were doing it in the kitchen. Michael and Ellen. My boyfriend and my roommate. Right on the floor. It’s sort of weird to watch a man’s butt bounce up and down on your kitchen floor. I didn’t recognize him at first. But he stopped and looked over his shoulder at me. All he could say was, ‘Oops,’ and all I could do was run away. But I had nowhere to go.”

“What time was that?”

“Four-fifteen, four-thirty.”

“So where
did
you go?”

“I drove up the Keys. I got to the other side of Marathon and asked myself where the hell I was going. I stopped for a margarita at that Holiday Inn where the road turns off to Key Colony Beach, where my parents’ friends, the Gordons, live. Then I drove back into Key West and watched the sun set into the Gulf.”

“How did you wind up on Ellen Albury’s bicycle?”

“I was tired of driving and it was dark and I wanted to go home. But I didn’t want to talk to Ellen. I didn’t want to be pissed anymore, and I would’ve gotten that way if we’d had to face each other. The house was lit up. I could see her walking in the living room and down the hall. It looked like she was alone. So I left my car in the street and took her bike. We both had keys to it. I thought about riding over to your house, but I didn’t have the guts for that either. Anyway, I went down William Street. Right away I met Michael coming the other way on his bicycle. He claimed he was coming back to Olivia to find me and apologize. He asked me to come to his house to talk it out, so I did. The truth is, I only wanted a place to sleep, and I didn’t think he’d be in any kind of shape to want sex. His house was the safest bet. For a coward like me.”