The Mango Opera (31 page)

“You remember an Ivy League dropout confessed?” said Bernier. “Some upper-middle-class guy in his twenties from Connecticut?”

“He confessed to the first two murders,” said Liska. “He stood fast on denying the third. We couldn’t package the deal, so it’s still open. Shit, we were lucky to catch him and solve the first two. Found the kid drunk in his car at Mallory Square.”

Bernier sat back. “Larry Riley knew the young man couldn’t have done the third one. Some kind of scientific mismatch.”

“Right,” said Chicken Neck. “The prosecutor waffled. We couldn’t close the case.”

“Riley also had a suspect. But Riley was new on the job, like you.”

Liska flinched. “Did he suspect a cop? Is that where this is going?”

“What made you think that?”

Liska considered his answer. “Local gossip.”

“Concerning a law-enforcement officer?” said Bernier.

Now I knew why Riley had played his cards close to his chest. He didn’t trust anyone in Key West except the feds.

Liska rubbed his cheeks as if checking his morning shave. “I am told by unimpeachable sources in the housewives’ telegraph that Mary Alice Noe once had a relationship with Billy Fernandez. At the Noe crime scene, Billy was not his usual lazy-slob self. He was inspection-perfect at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. He ran around like he’d already had fifteen cafés cubanos. He showed no emotion. He never mentioned an affair.”

Bernier stood and leaned against his desk. “I gotta say, you folks live in an offbeat little city.”

“I think Billy got himself in a little jam on Sunday,” I said.

Both men looked as if they might not tolerate a know-nothing civilian.

“Right after Sam was arrested for the Noe murder,” I said, “Billy tried to screw Raoul Balbuena out of a five-thousand-dollar reward. Raoul offered it to both of us on Saturday in exchange for information. I told him I didn’t want his money, but I called yesterday to tell him that Wheeler’s arrest was bogus. I got the impression that Fernandez was there with him. ’Course, if Billy’s innocent I may have to pay for that one down the road.”

We spent a minute or so studying the inlaid marble flooring. Offices down the hall provided background music. Two or three metal file cabinet drawers slammed shut, a beeping telephone went unanswered, a dot matrix printer scratched and growled, someone coughed loudly.

“Speaking for the American taxpayer,” said Bernier, “I hope that Billy Fernandez and Ray Kemp are enjoying the tender, loving care of the Balbuenas. Cut our expenses on prison and courtroom time. Speaking as an enforcement professional, we should assume that Ray Kemp is loose and has more nastiness on his agenda. Finding him is the toughie. Fernandez’ll be easy. He probably still thinks he’s got us all fooled.”

“And I get to take the heat.” Liska stood to leave. “It won’t go down as popular, me going out to the county and dragging in a sheriff’s detective for questioning.”

“We’ll look into nailing him on a civil-rights complaint,” said Bernier.

I thought of one more thing. “Bob, did you check the phone company records on that call into Kemp’s house?”

Bernier frowned. “Pay phone in Athens.”

Had Kemp laid the trap for Carlos and Emilio, or was it the other way around?

Liska and I walked to the courthouse parking lot. A tearful young woman sat on the Simonton Street curb nursing a skinned knee. A blue moped lay in the gutter, its handlebars cocked at a sharp angle. Liska turned away when he saw a police car approach.

“Liska!”

Bernier stood on the courthouse steps, a white-shirt beacon in the sunlight, ignoring the police activity around the injured woman at the curb. He waved us into the shade of the portico.

“Problem?” said Chicken Neck.

“That five-thousand-dollar reward? Fernandez collected.” Bernier’s voice dropped a level. “You know how certain faiths of Caribbean persuasion believe that animal sacrifices invoke the gods of judicial leniency? The carcass-retrieval team found Billy’s body two hours ago in Miami. Dumped on a loading platform behind the Federal Court House. Tossed in there with the dead black chickens and slaughtered goats.”

Liska winced. “Jesus Christ.”

Bernier continued, “His heart had been removed. The operation was clean, like a surgeon did the job. They stuffed five grand in twenty-dollar bills into the cavity.”

Fernandez had warned me about “Ogunito.” I described Billy’s rundown of bad-boy Carlos and Emilio, worshiper of sharp edges. “Are we the first people on the island to hear this?” I added.

Bernier looked offended. “I was the first. You two are the second.”

Liska dropped me off on Fleming at the head of the lane. I found six wilted doughnuts, two unfinished coffees, and eight messages. I wanted a shower but things were happening quickly. I needed to reach Annie or Carmen. I found a legal pad, a felt-tip pen, and pulled up a chair.

The first two calls were for Annie. Mrs. Embry, still looking for that bike, and a client looking for some paperwork. Sears wanted to sell me top-of-the-line aluminum siding. Duffy Lee Hall had an OM-2 and two lenses for sale. Laura Tate said to come by the Packet Inn for a drink later in the week. The police needed photographs of vandalism at their K-9 Training Center. Another business message for Annie. The final one was from Marnie. I called her back.

“Bernier gave me the green light on some of the stuff we talked about the other night,” she said. “So I rang that state representative who tried to buy me away from bothering Anselmo.”

“You lay out the skinny on the payoffs?”

“Laid the skinny on thick, if you can do that. About his granting Witness Protection to a noninformant, the possible payoffs, his meddling in Florida Department of Law Enforcement board activities. Plus, Sam told me about Anselmo’s trip to West Palm. That means the taxpayer paid for his clandestine rendezvous with a lady friend. ’Course, it’s your lady friend.”

“Her status is under review.”

“Good. Anyway, this political toe dancer backpedaled ninety miles an hour. Changed his tune big-time, and said he’d personally look into the Aghajanian decertification case. He would also petition the governor to reconvene the Board of Training and Professional Standards to initiate reinstatement proceedings. He said he’d report back to me on a daily basis until the entire matter was cleared up to the satisfaction of the voting and taxpaying public.”

“Sounds like a load of shit.”

“Loads of shit are what these people deal in. I’ve been rolling in it, secondhand, for years. This is a good sign, believe me. You got lunch plans?”

“I’ve got a date with a bar of Pure and Natural. After that I’m a free man.”

“Monty says he’s buying. An early celebration of getting his badge back. No matter what he says, Sam and I are picking up the tab. But I don’t know where we’re going. We’ll come by and get you.”

“Call Bob Bernier first. Billy Fernandez was found dead this morning. Off the record, there’s a chance he killed Mary Alice Noe.”

“Oh, God. What is happening in this little town of ours?”

“His body was found in Miami. My guess is the Balbuenas.”

“We’re selling so many newspapers, we had to delay printing three of the contract weeklies. People are scared to leave their homes. Even the grocery stores are losing business. Now this.”

“Maybe this will be the end of the storm.”

“I hope so. Take your time in the shower. It may take a while for me to file this story. After that we’ll all take the rest of the afternoon off. I promise.”

30

Shower time. Bernier’s people had not fixed my hot-water heater. Lucky to be in Key West. The cold spigot was warm enough to make a production of it. A moral dilution obvious: I suspected that an FBI agent had swiped my shampoo.

Someone once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song about playing the field in the singles scene: waking in sundry apartments, not looking for the ideal mate, but in search of the perfect shampoo. The world turned on surplus and scarcity. Some people had buckets of shampoo and no mangoes. I was out of shampoo in a yard with a tree. Some people have too many lovers. I had been accused. I kept thinking about Chicken Neck and Avery Hatch fighting over their wife. I tried not to think about Michael Anselmo, the four-for-four, wide-swath cocksman.

I had fashioned a drainage system from PVC pipe that funneled runoff to the bougainvillea and fruit tree. I’d hung a spring-hinged door and lined the stall with teakwood hooks for loofah sponges and shelves and soap caddies, plus a fancy mirror. There was room for two, standing up or sitting on the slat bench. For a while, stereo speakers had hung under the eaves. But there was no way to change tapes during a shower if the music failed to match or improve my mood. The speaker cones had rotted in the island humidity and I’d tossed them. I could sing in the shower if I needed music, my own bluesy opera under the open sky.

I bobbed around in my redwood cubicle as a breeze rattled surrounding treetops. I tested pattern and angle of spray, did the conditioner, lathered the body scrub as sunlight stabbed through high fronds and the mango tree’s lower limbs, watched fuzzy shadows dance the rear wall of the house, dared invisible mosquitoes to dive-bomb exposed skin. A long rinse. Birds flew overhead. A line of slender cumulus clouds to the north, a twin-prop plane on eastbound final to the airport. When I got a chance I wanted to sit and think about the strange and sudden tragedies of this town, to ponder reasons for all of its lunacy. To answer nagging questions about logic and timing and motives.

If Avery’s convoluted tale was accurate, for instance, and if Ray Kemp had structured his revenge scenarios to match affronts, as his pseudonymous short stories suggested, why had Kemp killed Julia in the style of
Twin Peaks?
For that matter, why had he killed her at all? Why hadn’t he killed Michael Anselmo, strangled him with a bra, or beaten him to death with a forty-pound law book?

Why hadn’t Anselmo done anything to protect himself after he’d received the cryptic postcards? I had warned Annie about Kemp, so Anselmo must have learned through Annie the source of those threats.

Why had Billy Fernandez, a former smuggler who’d covered his tracks with a law-enforcement career, a man with a kid in the Little League, arranged to have me crushed by a dump truck on U.S. 1? All he stood to do was beat me out of five thousand dollars. With his knowledge of Palguta and Carlos, their violent ways, why would he try to scam Raoul for a measly five grand? Why would he go for small potatoes? Why would he dare scam Raoul at all? Or did he have some other knowledge that might be worth bigger money?

Why, for another half-assed instance, was Avery Hatch not around when Sam Wheeler was being detained in the Monroe County jail? Why, suddenly, did he have to check out that storage shed? Unless he wanted to make sure that all that gear in the shed was finally gone. Unless he just wanted to get away from the action back at the jail.

Why had it taken me three years to realize that Annie’s refreshing beacon of honesty came equipped with a dimmer switch?

One thing about a cold shower, the water doesn’t get any colder. A bird I couldn’t identify warbled in one of the taller trees. A cloud floated under the sun. On a cool draft under the cloud I caught a whiff of something sweet, nonfloral, like one of Liska’s vintage discotheque colognes. I’ve never been able to identify scents, but a name drifted in with this odor. Why did the men who used Brut always wear too much?

Like a bad tune on the stereo speakers, the heavy smell yanked me out of my mood.

I turned off the shower, toweled my hair, and wrapped the towel around my waist. The shower had delivered its therapeutic relief. I checked the faucets to make sure they didn’t drip, stuck my toes into the rubber sandals and pushed open the shower-stall door. Carlos Balbuena was sitting in the yard pointing a gun at my chest.

I was about to die in my flip-flops.

Balbuena’s neck remained nonexistent. His dark face was relaxed but his eyes were focused, sharp as ice picks, ready to witness my death. He’d started a beard. A small gold ring hung from each earlobe. A Polo logo on his shirt.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

He didn’t care. “Get it, worm. You the smart one, we the dumb ones.” With each sentence he lifted his head, poked out his chin. The universal badass.

“I did your father two favors last night.”

“You so dumb to think Raoul might eat that bullshit about some other man there in Georgia to see me and Emilio. But that man got no name. You say that shit to protect your ass. We hear that ten million times.”

The neighbor’s spaniel whimpered through the fence. Something—a lizard or a palmetto bug—crawled across my right foot. I didn’t dare look down, away from Balbuena’s icy hard gaze. Keeping Carlos locked eye-to-eye prolonged his bragging session, prolonged my life.

“I’ve had twenty-four hours to tell a lot of people about it.”

“Right. That’s how a story work. But not how it work in trial and with the testimonies. You not there in that court, bubba, they got no evidence. Zip shit. No witness, no conviction. Right? Who’s smart, bubba? Who’s dumb now?”

He was right. Brains don’t mean shit without evidence. I had no leverage. My mind shot off on eddy currents, thinking how Annie might not grieve, how no one would understand the value of my Shelby. Sam had found a good woman. Monty would get his job with the FBI. Laura Tate was a missed opportunity. I’ll take a rain check in heaven. If I thought about those nipples I’d lose my focus on talking Carlos out of this.

“We know you hungry for the five K that other boy tried to fuck us on.”

“He got it straight through the heart.”

“Ahh. That’s another case, bubba. No proof, with you gone away.”

The mango tree hovered over us. In periphery I saw everything in the yard. Under the expensive new tarp, my toys, the Kawasaki and the Cannondale. Long spears of midday sunlight painted the patchy grass. My own world, a long way from facing down a Kalashnikov and wrestling a Gulf of Mexico nor’wester. I couldn’t vouch for fun in either episode. The Mariel Boatlift was forty percent of my life ago. Nothing was different. I would leave thousands of slides with no copyright stamps. My legacy would become public domain. Fat ladies sang of a shampoo shortage in the mango opera.