The Mango Opera (3 page)

The Bronco’s hinges were shot. Sam lifted the driver’s-side door to hook the latch. “I spilled steaming café con leche in my lap,” he said. “I braked to miss some dimwit from Broward, and I can’t sue for groin damage. Pepe’s doesn’t have a million dollars.”

I wedged the bike into a rack near the wharf’s edge and chained the frame to a crossbar. Sharp odors from the basin—rotted fish and decay—wafted on the fluky breeze. “I got up early and I saw a dead person.”

“You got involved in that, too?” Sam tugged on his long-billed ball cap. “I lost a charter with Monty Aghajanian. He wants to make it up next Tuesday. I think I got a conflict.”

“He told me that he’d missed the trip. Genuinely pissed.”

We worked our way past a clutch of elderly tourists crowded in the Half Shell’s doorway. A Little Feat song played loudly as a hostess with a crew cut pointed us toward two stools at the far side of the bar. Peggy Sue sounded an ahh-ooga horn and reached into the beer cooler.

As we reached the empty stools, Sam twisted his face into a scowl. “How come this place always smells like last night’s beer?”

“I don’t know, Sammy.” Peggy Sue turned to someone behind the oyster bins. “Hey, Backassward, was it slow last night?”

“Yep, slow,” someone mumbled.

“There you go, Sam. You called it. We’re still serving last night’s beer. I always said you had a good nose.”

Sam’s grin became an uncharacteristic leer. “That’s not what you raved about a couple years ago.”

Peggy Sue planted a hand on her side-slung hip. “You remember that far back, big boy? You got me when I was a baby. I didn’t know any damn better. Why is a new husband like linoleum?”

Sam shook his head. “I’ve heard it. But first I lived it.”

Peggy Sue grinned and snapped open our beers. She dropped them on coasters in front of us and turned to another customer. “Corn and slaw with that flounder, ma’am? Put hair on your chest. Make you horny and dance in church.”

Wheeler had ten or eleven years on me, but his physique—that of a lacrosse or rugby player—went beyond the picture of health in the Keys. He was thick through the neck and shoulders, with huge forearms and beefy hands. You could not accuse Sam of being unkempt, but his sandy hair never looked as if a brush had come near it. His rugged face stayed tanned except for the reverse raccoon areas around his eyes where sunglasses shielded the skin. He went tropical formal: always a threadbare but clean denim work shirt, long khaki trousers, Topsiders without socks, and a pair of high-dollar polarizing specs, either on his face or suspended on a nylon lanyard.

Sam had been to Vietnam and preferred not to discuss it. After years of friendship, I knew only that he had received the Silver Star for bravery. He’d never offered details. Other vets had told me that a Bronze Star was special, but a Silver Star, if you lived to pin it on, indicated a whole other level of action.

“The dead girl was Annie’s new roommate.”

Sam perched his cap on the counter. “How did they do her?”

I told him about the duct tape, anchor, cable cord, and handcuffs.

“Came equipped for the job, eh?”

“And I just realized that something bugged me about that anchor. It was identical to the one on
Barracuda,
the boat I rode to Mariel.” The Mariel Boatlift, the odd influx of Cuban refugees in 1980, had almost cost me my life. It had filled the media with emotional hoopla and flooded South Florida with immigrants. I was paid two thousand dollars for taking pictures, but I’d spent ten days in a Cuban harbor trapped on a boat with four other people and barely survived a vicious storm during an overnight trip home with another twelve refugees aboard. It had cured me of war-zone journalism.

“Mariel.” Sam turned to face the waterfront. His eyes squinted and he looked to be conjuring up volumes of ancient details. “Long time ago.”

“Stamped indelibly in the gray matter.”

“Where was Annie when the roomie got it?” said Sam.

“Spent the night elsewhere, according to Aghajanian.”

“Meaning not your place, either.”

“Correct. And now she wants to move back in.”

“And that’s okay with you?”

Good question. “Call me ambivalent. All this caught me by surprise. You catch me thinking about forgiveness, remind me to be pissed.”

Peggy Sue approached with an order pad. “You talking about that murder on Olivia? I heard it on the radio. Kinky girl that worked for the lawyers?”

Sam quit staring at the docks. “Kinky?”

“Not being kinky myself, I don’t know firsthand. You spank me if I’m lying. But you know, you hear stories. By Cayo Hueso standards she was normal as apple turnover. She came in every so often, sometimes for lunch with people in office-worker clothes. Sometimes at night with different guys. She was fun to have around.”

Sam and I ordered grouper sandwiches, and Peggy Sue drifted down the bar to chat up two ponytailed carpenters from the wood shop on Caroline. Sawdust was sprinkled in one guy’s beard. The man with the blue bandana around his head was missing the tips of both index fingers.

Sam turned again toward the docks. “What kind of inquiry was going down on Olivia Street?”

“You ever see those photographs of five or six toothless hillbillies in hitch-up overalls and crooked ball caps, leaning on shovels and grinning like idiots? The caption goes, ‘Our Helpful and Courteous Staff Is Always Ready to Assist You.’”

“I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “In the Army the MPs were the ones too dumb to scrub latrines.”

“Sam, this is an island. Connected by road to that thumb of a crowded mainland, but a real island surrounded by salt water. With cruise ships, speedboats, shrimp boats, Navy ships, and regular old motorboats.”

Sam waved his arm toward the waterfront. “Lobster boats, sailboats, and big white yachts.”

“And houseboats and dinghies. Billy Fernandez grew up here, and the dummy doesn’t know a Danforth from a trailer hitch.”

“Much tradition has washed out to sea. The brains of the forefathers are out there energizing the phosphorescent plankton. These days they know more about frozen pizza and remote controls, and less about navigation and tidal action. Sad, sad.”

Two more beers appeared in front of us. Sam’s broad, sunburned hand pushed his empty to the far edge of the bar, then grabbed the fresh bottle like a lifeline. “I gotta quit this three-beers-at-lunch bullshit. This is a day’s quota.”

“You make it sound like doctor’s orders.”

Sam toned down his voice. “Last time I saw him, he asked about my habits. What’ve I got to hide? I told him four or five beers a day, which I’ve been proud of since I quit the hard stuff. ‘What about weekends?’ he says. I tell him, ‘Pretty much the same.’ So he says, ‘About a case and a half a week, then?’ and I agreed with him. So he taps on his calculator for a minute and says, ‘That’s seventy-eight cases a year. A hundred and seventy gallons.’ That’s what got me.”

I tried to imagine the weight of a hundred gallons of beer.

Sam waved his bottle at me. “What percentage of my last fifteen years has been spent taking a leak? How many hundreds of hours with my pecker in my hand, waiting for my used beer to rejoin the ecosystem? Hell, I’ve even carried beers into the john so I could keep drinking while I peed out the last one. Go into Fausto’s and check out gallon milk jugs. Whatever they got, imagine a hundred and seventy of them and think of your kidneys.” Sam hoisted his Amstel, took a long sip, and said: “Monty Aghajanian told you about Annie’s alibi?”

I looked over and nodded.

“Aghajanian’s pretty straight, isn’t he?”

“I’d trust him down to the wire,” I said.

“Tell me the deal on the city getting sued by that car thief.”

“The city’s insurance paid the twenty-five grand, except the guy isn’t spending his money the way he wanted. He’s supposedly up in Raiford for an armed robbery on Big Pine.”

“I can’t remember why it all went down.”

I had to think for a minute. “It was right after Monty joined the force, nine or ten years ago. Out near Searstown he blue-lighted a Firebird with no headlights. The joker bolted over Cow Key Channel, past Boca Chica, all the way up to Summerland. Some deputies stopped traffic on Big Pine and two FHP troopers wedged their Mustangs onto a bridge to form a blockade. The Firebird stopped, but the jerkoffs in the car wouldn’t get out.”

Sam laughed. “They took themselves hostage?”

“Monty parked so they couldn’t retreat, and he’s in a big adrenaline huff. He tapped his flashlight on a side window to get their attention. The window shattered. It wasn’t intentional, but Monty reached in and unlocked the door and pulled one guy out of the front seat. A minute later three guys are facedown and cuffed on the pavement.”

“With you so far.”

Our fish sandwiches arrived as “Brown Sugar” faded into “Kodachrome” by Paul Simon—a favorite of mine for all of its lyrics, not just the photo reference. We decorated our fish with the rabbit food, plugged some Pickapeppa Sauce and ketchup to the side of the fries, and dug in.

I took my time with the first bite, then continued. “The scumboys bonded out like it never happened. The next morning Nicky Bryan, ace attorney, boogaloos into the chief’s office. Affidavits from three douchebags, glossy pictures of the busted window, and a hospital report. One guy had to have a glass particle removed from his eye. No permanent damage, but he wasn’t the driver, so he wasn’t charged with anything. He’s filing police brutality charges against Aghajanian. A manufactured case, pure and simple. The city settled. The punk waltzed with twenty-five thousand and the Key West Police Department gave Monty a month’s unpaid vacation.” I took a second bite of the fish.

“Jesus.”

“It gets worse. An assistant federal prosecutor up in Miami gets in the act. Name of Michael Anselmo.”

Sam sneered. “Now working out of Key West.”

“No!”

“Yes. He fishes Captain Turk on the
Flats Broke,
that Maverick in the slip next to mine. I figure this guy’s been an asshole since he learned to tie his shoes. Turk’s almost throttled him once or twice.”

“Well, he’s a born crusader. Gonna defend our Constitutional rights until his butt bleeds red, white, and blue. He couldn’t tolerate a rogue cop whuppin’ on a citizen. Son of a bitch got a grand jury to indict Officer Aghajanian on a civil-rights beef.”

The noise in the bar jumped a couple of levels. The passing Conch Tour Train blew its whistle, and Peggy Sue answered with her ahh-ooga horn.

Sam wiped his hands on a paper towel and pushed his plate to the far edge of the bar. “I knew he was an asshole, but not a dangerous gaping one.”

“Monty had to hire Jimmy Pinder, but Pinder took it on for free because he already had a hard-on for the prosecutor.” I looked down. I still had half my sandwich to go. “Anyway, Anselmo put the pressure on Pinder. Said he was going to see Monty’s ass in jail if he didn’t cop to a misdemeanor in return for dropping the felony.”

“Nothing subtle about the boy.” Sam pointed to my food but motioned for me to keep talking.

“So much for Pinder’s hard-on. Monty pled the misdemeanor. But the judge asked for a conference. Turns out the judge didn’t see much merit in the case. When he found out that Anselmo had laid on heavy pressure, he went ballistic. Back in the courtroom he ripped Anselmo to shreds, in front of the jury and all of the people waiting for other cases to be heard. Anselmo got a professional slap in the face, in public.”

“So the misdemeanor plea cost Monty his badge?”

I shook my head. “Monty’d already done his suspension. The plea had no effect on his job. Shit, he got promoted to undercover narc not long after that.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen him unshaved, dirty clothes, looking like a zonk.”

“But jump ahead two years. All along, Monty’s applying to the FBI. He gets rejected twice. He starts to think it’s because he’s a white male instead of an Asian-Hispanic hermaphrodite or something. He didn’t hide the misdemeanor, so I guess the Feebs figured the past is past. Finally they called him back for a physical and a sit-down test like graduate-school SATs. They said it was a go, and gave him a date to report to Quantico for basic training. Monty and his wife put their house on the market, he gave notice at the city. They started to celebrate. He even bought a new car.”

Peggy offered us two more beers, and Sam shook his head. He held on to his empty, just to have something in his hands. “We still haven’t gotten to the badge deal?”

“Right. So Milt Russell, Ellen Albury’s boss in the Public Defender’s Office, is up at the Federal Building in Miami. He runs into the butthead. Anselmo says, ‘How’s my friend Aghajanian?’ Milt told him about the FBI and, to quote Milt, Anselmo ‘reacted unprofessionally.’ Which means he threw his briefcase down a hallway and sucker-punched a tapestry that fell off the wall into a potted plant. He ranted and raved and drew a crowd, then bellowed, “We’ll see about this FBI bullshit,” and disappeared into his office. Next thing Monty knows, some state police standards commission reopens the old civil-rights complaint. He has to appear in front of an FDLE review board in a hotel dining room somewhere up near Jacksonville. On the spot, the FDLE yanked his badge.”

“At which point the FBI pulls the plug…”

“Yeah. They tell him no way. So it’s a double slam, just because of a chance conversation in Miami. Monty’s out of the FBI and he’s off the police force.”

“And he can’t prove shit that Anselmo dropped the dime.”

“What’s to prove, Sam? The review board did the dirty work.”

“Anselmo gets revenge for being cussed out by the judge. Off-the-wall revenge, but revenge.”

“Sometimes the wrong team wins.”

Sam tugged his hat onto his head. “Monty pissed in a large way?”

“Monty’s dreamed about the FBI since he was twelve. He made the grade and, poof, it went away. It proves you can try to be normal, and still get sucked into the craziness. Sex and politics, religion and cash. Mix any two and watch ’em crash.”

“You just make that up?” he said.

“I think I did. I also finished my lunch. Why is Anselmo in Key West now?”

“The way Captain Turk tells it, the man’s not happy.”