The Mango Opera (27 page)

“Cream,” said Sam.

“Black,” I said.

Sam checked the weather map on the back page of the front section. “Like I predicted, the weather in the Keys turned to crap. I ain’t missing a thing.”

“Was Noe a wife beater?” I said.

“She never said. I figured out she was still in love with him, so I made some excuse about my work schedule and stopped going by. I couldn’t quit thinking about her. I kept catching myself looking for her in the yard, letting myself get bothered by those cars out front. I guess she fell into that category that you described for Julia Balbuena. I always held out for the impossible reunion.”

I knew words would fall flat right at the moment.

“On one hand,” said Sam, “Bruce Noe had no reason to kill his ex-wife. I’m not positive. I don’t think there was alimony going out. He was the one wanted out of the marriage.”

“That leaves out jealousy, maybe. What’s on the other hand?”

“He’s tight with Steve Gomez and a couple of the commissioners. He hangs around with cops. He had an above-average opportunity to pick up details on the other murder scenes, if he wanted to put it to use.”

“He was out of town for the weekend. If he was behind it, he had a helper.”

Sam agreed. “Someone who didn’t know his knots, who didn’t know that he was supposed to pluck his twanger and leave a calling card.”

“The detail that never leaked out.”

Sam looked me in the eye. “She said she knew you.”

I nodded again.

“She on the list of ex-girlfriends, Alex?”

“Technically, yes,” I said, then paused to consider my phrasing. Was Sam going to become angry over an event that happened years before he even met the woman? “In a practical sense, we hardly knew each other. We took drunk a few days before her wedding. What a gentleman would call a half-night’s stand. Her idea.”

Now Sam was shy of words. I had told it straight. I hoped he would drop the subject. He did. “This rainy day in Georgia is lame and ugly,” he said. “We should have brought walkie-talkies.”

“Low-tech?”

“We get separated, one of us gets his ass in a sling, practical. Low-tech is duct-taping somebody’s mouth and nose shut.”

“How about weapons?” I said.

“What’d you come here to do?”

“Deliver the shitbird to justice.”

“Well, yes. One must presume that he does not wish to come along.”

We still had ten minutes to wait when a middle-aged man in a postal clerk’s uniform walked into the luncheonette. He brushed raindrops off his shoulders and stamped his feet on a rectangle of carpet near the door. The waitress had prepared a cardboard tray. Four coffees with lids, stir sticks, a mess of sugars, several cream thimbles. Sam approached the man and asked directions.

“Y’all wouldn’t believe how many questions like that I get,” he said. “The government needs to change the system, get rid of rural route numbers. Go north out of town to a shut-down Gulf Oil, take a left. One mile along, go right where it says ‘Karma Farm, Two Miles.’ That’s County Five, but it’s Postal Route Three.”

“Karma Farm?” said Sam.

“Longhairs,” said the postal clerk, knowing that the word explained itself. It would break his heart to learn that ninety percent of the nation’s longhairs are on Country Music Television. On his way out the door he turned to ask what box number we needed.

“Thirty-five,” I said. “Name of Crane.”

The clerk scowled. “That boy with the satellite scoop? What’s he havin’, a yard sale? I sent two Mexicans to that place twenty minutes ago, Puerto Ricans, they all the same. Danged wetbacks sneak into the country, drive a shiny-paint Mercedes-Benz, gold hubcaps. I gotta buy the wife a used Toyota…” He chewed his lips and kicked at the doorsill. He’d pronounced it “Tie-ota.” The door closed behind him.

Sam said, “You look like you just crapped your pants.”

“Let’s save time and head back to Atlanta. If the Benz had Dade County plates, Kemp’s having a soul talk right now with Julia’s brother and his father’s pet thug. There won’t be anything left for us to do.”

Sam dropped several dollar bills on the table. “Let’s go get in line. Maybe Kemp needs us to run for Band-Aids.”

We hurried through the drizzle to the car. Sam pulled into an alley behind the restaurant, found a side street, then accelerated onto the main road. He crooned a soulful “… was a rainy night in Georgia…”

I suddenly figured how the Balbuenas had found Ray. “Talk about the Cuban network,” I said. “What’d Bernier say last night, that the Kemp file had been checked out?”

Sam turned at the empty Gulf station, an old oil company approximation of art deco. “Miami is complicated,” he said. “You need money to survive. After that, your human value is based on connections.”

“It didn’t work for Julia.”

26

The Delray Crane address fell among a string of brick ranch-types spaced apart in hilly country not fully recovered from winter. Most properties had a mobile home or two out back. Wedged between two clumps of oaks and set twenty yards off the two-lane, the two-story frame farmhouse looked especially neglected in the rain. It needed more than just paint. The front porch was filled with dead plants and weathered furniture, and the yard had not received its first mowing of the year. The driveway’s twin ruts flowed with red dirt runoff. An empty two-stall carport behind the house looked ready to collapse into the crabgrass. A row of chicken coops ran along what I guessed to be the back boundary of the property. Noticeably out of place was the Direct TV receiver dish between the house and carport. The well-maintained silos on the rise to the north probably belonged to a neighbor.

There was no sign of the Mercedes-Benz or the Mitsubishi pickup truck.

Sam eased into the driveway, then onto the grass to keep from hitting potholes under puddles. We stopped next to a broken wheelbarrow full of magnolia sprouts. The front door of the house was ajar. In spite of the dim light, there were no lights inside. Sam turned the key and stared out the windshield.

“Not a warm welcome,” I said.

“Wish I’d worn a jacket,” said Sam. “I also feel naked without a pistol.”

“Honk the horn a bit. See if anyone comes out.”

“We’re not even sure this is Ray Kemp’s house.”

We knocked on the doorframe and yelled hellos. We peered into the gritty windows, seeing nothing in the darkness. We finally invited ourselves in. Sam went down the center hallway. I crept up a creaky stairwell and caught stale smells of mildewed vinyl upholstery and furniture stuffing. A twisted bedsheet lay on the floor outside one bedroom. Another room was full of boxes and junk: an ironing board, baseball equipment, a Seagull outboard motor on a stand. The bedroom had all the personality of the motel in Monroe, Georgia: a thrift-shop dresser with two drawers left open; magazines stacked around the bed; an old Princess-style telephone on the floor, tipped on its side, off the hook. A bright orange athletic jersey had been tossed in a corner.

Upside down in a cheap frame on top of the dresser was a photograph that looked at least twenty years old. I turned it over: an older couple in aviator-type sunglasses and Bermuda shorts standing next to a ’76 Cadillac convertible.

An upside-down photo?

Sam’s voice from downstairs. “Nobody here but us bulldogs.”

I didn’t want to leave fingerprints. I snagged a sock from the top open drawer, wiped the photo frame and hung up the Princess phone.

Sam had Ziploc baggies over his hands. He opened kitchen cupboards, one by one. “If we hadn’t dropped in, the house would’ve burned down. That pot was boiled down to the last half-inch of water. My guess is, ol’ Ray left in a hurry.”

“I wonder how it feels to ride a thousand miles in the trunk of a Mercedes.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Give me another minute to look around.” I figured the house had to hold some kind of clue to the murders, or to Ray Kemp’s motives. A copy of
Sports Illustrated
sat on the arm of a lounger. On a Formica table in the front room was a manual called “How to Write Effective Short Stories.” I slid a tattered bookmark from between its pages. Dated 10 May 80, it was the boat owner’s copy of the customs and immigration form that Ray had submitted on our return to Key West from Mariel on
Barracuda.
It bore his name, Julia’s name, my name, and the names of the twelve strangers who had been delivered to freedom on that day. Strange that he would keep a souvenir of the Boatlift. It had not been a banner day for the captain. Any one of the refugees would have appreciated it more.

“We’ve got the right house,” I said quietly.

Sam opened the drawers of a battered metal desk. “No utility bills or check stubs. Like he’s already moved out.”

“Maybe he wasn’t home when they got here. Maybe Charlie Balls flipped on the stove to leave his signature on the place.”

The kitchen wall phone rang. I wasn’t sure what to do. After the second ring I walked the short hallway, stuck my hand in a Ziploc, and picked up the receiver. I heard a snap and then silence. I hung it up.

“Check out these old postcards,” said Sam. I walked back toward the front door. Suddenly Sam’s face filled with disbelief. He pointed out a front window. Two vans and six sedans sat in the front yard. I glimpsed the initials on the back of a man’s nylon jacket: FBI.

A hundred ball-peen hammers slammed into my back. The explosion in the kitchen blew us both out the door and off the porch. Twirling fireworks filled my vision, and I was flat out on the wet grass with my arm twisted under my body and the taste of blood in my mouth. Two of the hammers had struck my ears directly. When I tried to sit up and move my head, splinters of glass sprinkled from my hair to my forehead.

“We alive?” Sam’s voice sounded far away but I felt an elbow hit my ribs.

I leaned to one side and shook shards off my eyelids, then opened one eye to see Sam crawling away from the porch.

A voice quivering with forced calm said, “Get a move on. There could be another bomb. The whole place could go.” Someone grabbed me under one arm.

My eyes were full of grit. The baggie was still on my right hand. It hurt to move my mouth. We figured later that Sam’s shoulder had caught the front door framing and we’d been spun off the porch in a tangle of wicker strands and parts of a plastic clock that had hung in the hallway. Our heads had banged together—that’s how I wound up with a black eye and a broken front tooth. One of my shoes had landed twenty feet away.

*   *   *

I remember being propped against the trunk of a dark blue Crown Victoria, watching a black-clad SWAT crew exit Ray Kemp’s house. The team looked to be at parade rest; they had discovered what we knew: that the lights were out and nobody was home. My lights had been knocked halfway to Tennessee. I kept thinking how much I wanted a Dustbuster so I could clean the crap out of my hair. At one point I thought I saw Sam walking around the yard, picking up the postcards he’d wanted to show me.

“Too bad you aren’t carrying a gun,” said a thirtyish frat-type in a cable-knit crew-neck sweater. “We could have you on an even-dozen state and federal charges.” On second glance he looked like the kind of mean-spirited pretty boy who’d beat up his Pi Phi sweetheart for shaking her fanny too much at the sock hop. “Just don’t try to bullshit us,” he warned. “Don’t try to tell us you learned how to make bombs by copying a recipe off the Internet.”

I did not want to be this boy’s friend. I heard myself moan, then whisper, “I was cleaning it … and it went off.”

I believe at that moment I faded out again.

*   *   *

The next thing I knew, I was being helped into our rental car. Covered with mud, holding the shredded remains of my shirt, I rolled into the front seat. Sam opened the driver’s door, flopped his butt on the seat hard enough to bounce me, threw a wad of muddy postcards on the floor, and finally got the ignition key in the slot.

“Don’t say a fucking word until we’re out of here,” he said without moving his lips. “Keep quiet. Just don’t talk.”

And then we were driving away from the ruined house and the squadron of federal agents. I noticed only one other thing. None of the neighbors on the rural road had come outside to investigate the explosion.

*   *   *

A map in the glove compartment showed the quickest route to Atlanta was up to I-85 and straight west. It hurt to move, but I slowly gathered the old postcards from the floor of the car. Lithographs from the late forties or early fifties. A collection of old linen cards, from tourist traps in the eastern part of the country. Identical to the mysterious cards that Michael Anselmo had been receiving. But why would Kemp have sent threatening notes to the man who had provided him freedom in Witness Protection?

“Why are we free to go?” I said. “That one schmuck was already reserving us rooms in the Federal Prison System.” Every time I said an
s,
my broken tooth whistled.

“You owe Bernier a favor,” Sam said solemnly. “Size large.”

“What, to fit his hotshit ego?”

“No, to wrap around his heart. I suggest you call him from the first pay phone we see.”

“I need a shirt to wear on the airplane.”

*   *   *

Before we got onto I-85, just outside of Commerce, Georgia, Sam swung into a beer-and-candy store attached to a filling station. I got on the phone.

“Took a chance on you,” Bernier said brusquely. “They were playing with the idea that you rigged your girlfriend’s car with Tovex.”

“How do you know it wasn’t me?”

“The lab techs determined that the jury-rig couldn’t have been installed at an earlier date and set to blow later. It was probably hooked up during Ellen Albury’s funeral. You were stumbling around the beach at Bahia Honda about then, and your witness was a Monroe County deputy.”

“So you checked me out…”

“You want more? The night the Guthery girl got killed, you were drunk on your ass in Louie’s Back Yard. Kim, the pretty bartender lady, told me you sat at the service bar in the lobby until she closed it down. She had to call a taxi for you. You couldn’t have squashed a cockroach, much less gone to Stock Island and murdered someone. Now tell me what the fuck you and Wheeler are doing in Georgia.”