The Snowfly (50 page)

I could sense that Collister's stories could ramble on for hours.

“You said there was a book collection. Where's Gentry live?”

Collister stopped. “Hard to say. Heaven maybe. Or Hell. I don't have an opinion one way or the other. He's gone.”

“Fishing?”

“Yorkie croaked, but that's not all.”

At Sturdivant's Collister had seemed more solid and reliable than the others. Now I was beginning to question my judgment. “Dead is dead. What else can there be?”

He said with a conspiratorial laugh, “Hemingway, he's not dead! At least not the last time I heard. That deal out there in Idaho? Not him. He staged the whole damn deal. It was just so much bullshit. I guess he got sick of being the big-shot writer, sick, doctors pawing, critics kicking his ass, his editor wanting more, ex-wives taking what he had. You know they were giving him shots at Mayo? All he wanted was for people to leave him alone so he could chase trout. So he made it look like he'd killed himself and now he's a free man.”

Collister's grip on reality was evaporating in front of me. He didn't believe in the snowfly, but he was sure Hemingway had faked his death. “Ernest Hemingway is alive? Says who?”

“Yorkie. He used to go meet him here and there. They chased fish together and let me tell you, that was a pair to draw to. Yorkie looked upon himself as the author's protector, not that he needed protecting, except from himself.”

“York Gentry and Ernest Hemingway.”

“Jesus, listen up. Hemingway just pretended he was dead. Yorkie was alive then. They used to meet at different places. Now Yorkie's gone.”

“And nobody ever figured out any of this?”

“Some people know, but Hemingway used to be a reporter. Maybe some of the brotherhood wanted to give him a break and let the dog sleep.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “Maybe Yorkie faked
his
death.”

Collister gave me a blank look. “Why the hell would he do that?”

“He was famous, like Hemingway.”

Collister laughed. “Yorkie would've loved being famous, but he never was. Hemingway hated the spotlight most of the time. Yorkie got drunk and fell off his boat two years ago. He was never found, but bodies in shark waters seldom are. Do you want help or not?”

“Sorry. The Hemingway thing threw me.”

“That doesn't mean it's not true.”

Which was exactly my point about the snowfly. “I just want to know where Gentry's books are.” I also had an urge rising to put my fist through the door screen and Collister must've sensed it because he held up his hands and smiled.

“Easy there, Crash. Yorkie loved fishing. Truth is, I don't know that the little peckerwood could read a word, but he had this big-ass library in a building next to his house. Now it's a half-ass museum. What books he ­didn't have, he compiled in a list. You know, everything ever written about fishing. Thing is, it's private. You gotta have a connection to get in.”

“Where is it?”

“Key West,” Collister said.

“Can you get us in?”

“Why the hell would I want to look at a bunch of old books?”

“Not you and me,” I said. I invited him outside and pointed to Ingrid. “Her and me.”

“I'll call ahead for you,” he said, riveting his eyes on Ingrid. I couldn't blame him for staring.

“How about calling now?”

“Maybe we should take her a glass of juice or something,” Collister said.

“Please, Carl. Make the call.” Hemingway, for Chrissakes. I decided not to tell Ingrid about that part. She'd think I needed a shrink. And maybe she would be right. This snowfly thing had moved my bubble way off center.

“No problem, Crash,” Collister said.

 

•••

 

York Gentry's place was close to water, not far from Harry Truman's vacation White House in Key West. There was a large, plain metal building behind the small pink cottage that had been his house.

“There sure is a lot of running around on this vacation,” Ingrid said as we parked.

“This is the last stop,” I said, hoping I was right. There was a blue 1956 DeSoto parked in the small gravel lot beside the building. Ingrid made a pass by it and peeked in as we headed up to the larger building.

We were greeted by a youngish man wearing a faded Green Bay Packers hat. He seemed nervous, his arms darting here and there.

“I'm Rhodes,” I said. “This is Ingrid Cashdollar. Carl Collister called about our visit.”

“I'm Adams.”

“Nick?” I said, intending a joke.

He gave us a stupefied grin. “How'd you know?”

This was getting weirder by the minute. “I'm trying to trace an unpublished manuscript,
The Legend of the Snowfly,
by M. J. Key.”

Adams said stiffly, “We'll have to go to our whatchmacallit—card catalog. Mister Gentry's collection is big, but he didn't own everything.”

“Did you know him?” Ingrid asked.

“No, ma'am. I'm just doing a favor for somebody.”

There were books everywhere in the building, more on floors than on shelves. The place looked in disarray.

Ingrid whispered, “Some museum. I've seen dumps organized better than this.”

Adams went to a wall of metal cabinets and pointed. “File cards. If a book isn't listed in there, it doesn't exist.” He stepped aside, making it clear whom he expected to do the work.

“What do you mean, if it's not here it doesn't exist?”

“Mister Gentry didn't want to own everything as much as he wanted to know where everything was. Most of the cards refer to books that aren't here.”

I started thumbing through cards. Whoever filed them had not done a very good job. They were not quite in alphabetical order.

Ingrid wandered around while I searched and I heard her ask Nick Adams, “Are you a fisherman?”

“No, ma'am,” he answered.

I found no entries for Key's published books or for the manuscript. Strange. The same thing had happened at Michigan Tech.

Ingrid was suddenly beside me, her hand on the small of my back. “Do any good?”

“Nope.”

She whispered, “I doubt our genial host will be much help.”

“What?” I looked over at her.

“He just split,” she said with a nod toward the front door.

“Maybe it's lunchtime.”

“It's four o'clock, Bowie.”

“This is Florida.”

She rolled her eyes and clutched my arm. “There's a sign on the door we came in that says they close at five. So why is he leaving at four?”

I was trying to think about Key. “You're the cop. You tell me.”

She smiled, but there was no mirth in it. “He said he's not a fisherman.”

“Lots of people aren't.”

“Then how come the backseat of the DeSoto is loaded with fishing tackle?”

“Maybe he borrowed it from somebody.”

“If it quacks like a duck,” she said, her smile gone. “I'm going to look around. I've got a feeling.”

Not a good one, I surmised. The answer was in a room upstairs. An old man was curled up on a ratty couch. Ingrid poked him and got no response.

“Deep sleeper?” I asked.

“Call for an ambulance,” she said, kneeling beside the man.

I thought she was kidding.

“
Now!
” she barked in her cop voice.

 

•••

 

A local cop named Fowler came. He was humongous with long greasy blond hair, a rumpled uniform, and
semper fi
tattooed on his left forearm. He wore shorts and sweated like he had just run ten miles.

The old man on the couch was the real curator and his name was Adams, Harold, not Nick. The identity of the young man with the DeSoto was anybody's guess. Harold Adams had been drugged, which left his memory patchy as he was driven off to the hospital in an ambulance. Ingrid and I recounted our story several times for Officer Fowler, who had a tendency to address Ingrid's breasts when he was talking to either of us. Curator Adams was not going to be much help until morning and we were politely instructed to remain in town. Fowler thoughtfully arranged a room for us at the Flamingo View Court, which was pale blue in color, had no view, no flamingos, and no court.

We ate spicy conch fritters and shrimp salads for dinner and went to bed early.

I awoke with Ingrid in the crook of my arm, her mouth open, her breathing deep and even. I was getting accustomed to having her close and I loved the natural perfume of her skin.

She awoke later with fluttering eyes and stared upward and said, “Great. Giant cockroaches on the ceiling.”

“Palmetto bugs,” I said. They were everywhere.

“What's the difference?”

“A rose by any other name. That cop really looked you over yesterday.”

“I'm a one-man woman,” she said, nibbling my ear. “Serially speaking.”

“I'm moved,” I said.

“You will be soon,” she said, sliding her hand down my belly.

Later that morning we met with a detective with a Van Gogh beard at the library. Harold Adams was there too. He still looked shaky.

“What a mess,” Adams declared, looking around.

“Sleeping pills,” the detective said.

Harold Adams added, “The jerkwad was here when your friend Collister called. He said the heat had gotten to him and he just wanted air conditioning. I could appreciate that.”

Ingrid looked at the detective. “What about the DeSoto? There can't be two bright blue ones like that in the world, much less in the Keys.”

“We've got a BOL on it,” the detective said. “We'll find it. Eventually.”

His response reminded me of Ingrid's when my car was stolen in Dog River.

We told our story again and the detective left.

“He was after something,” Ingrid announced.

Adams looked at her. “The detective?”

“No, the other Adams.”

“Could take me a while to figure out if anything's gone,” the older Adams said.

“Couple of days?”

“More like three,” Adams said.

“Good,” she said, looping her hands through my arm and looking up at me. “That means we are on vacation for the next three days, right?”

“Right,” I said.

We found another motel with a semiprivate beach and Ingrid was out on the sand and crushed shell dust almost before we were checked in.

“You'll burn.”

She glanced up at me. “What's a vacation without some self-inflicted pain?”

“You'll be sorry.”

“Vinegar salves all,” she said with her usual style.

I couldn't sit in the sun the way she could so it was my job to shuttle back and forth from the beach to Sunny's Clam Bar, fetching drinks. We drank Ron Rico dark mixed with orange juice, Ingrid's idea: We called them Ingrid Libres. Each glass came with a tiny turquoise-and-coral paper parasol. Ingrid planted them in rows in the sand, a graveyard for “small dead soldiers.” After our fourth drink, she shucked her top.

Curator Harold Adams eventually came to see us. Mostly he stared at Ingrid. I had been over to the library several times over the three days, but he had shooed me away.

“There's no card for the manuscript in the index, and none of Key's published books on the shelves. Was, but not now.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

I noticed his eyes move in sync to a rivulet of perspiration running off the slope of Ingrid's left breast.

“Uh, well,” he said. “I know we had Key at one time.”

“ ‘Had'?”

“Not now. The index card for his manuscript is gone. I know, because I remember that snowfly silliness. Only one manuscript is known to exist, but its whereabouts has never been verified and even if Yorkie had known where it was, he didn't have the kind of money you need to buy really rare stuff.”

He was wrong about the number of manuscripts and I knew where both were or had been, sort of. “The cards and books have been misplaced?”

“Gone,” he said. “As in purloined.”

“But you remember a card for Key's manuscript.”

“Sure do. Yorkie used to talk about the snowfly all the time.”

I stared at Ingrid, who gave me an overly sweet smile. “You knew Gentry?”

Adams nodded. “Sure did, and he was fixated on that bug. Papa too.”

“Papa, as in Hemingway?”

“Yep, the two of 'em, but they both died before they could chase after the god-blamed thing, which is just as well.”

I suddenly felt weary and sank to the sand beside Ingrid. Collister had told me Gentry and Hemingway were close and I had doubted him. Now I was hearing they were both interested in the snowfly. Collister swore the snowfly was bullshit, but insisted Hemingway had faked his suicide. Would I ever untwist all of this?

“Do you think the ‘other' Adams took the card?” I asked the curator.

“If I was a betting man, which I ain't.”

When he walked away, Ingrid lifted her sunglasses. “Does this mean our vacation's over?”

I had a powerful urge to move on, to hunt and chase. But what and where? Velocity without direction was not progress. “How do you feel about staying through the weekend?”

She said, “Why don't we discuss this in our room?”

It was a long, leisurely discussion with few words and a great deal of laughter.

 

•••

 

The following Tuesday morning we were at Ingrid's house west of Dog River. She was putting on her uniform. She carried a Colt .357 magnum in a black holster and I couldn't stop staring at it. It was so huge and she was so small. Guns had always unnerved me, especially in Vietnam, where they had been ubiquitous. My father had been a hunter and I had grown up in a community of hunters, but I had never been comfortable around firearms. The old man and Queen Anna both insisted I learn to shoot, and I had. The old man said I was a natural, but each can and bottle I shattered turned into a living creature in my mind. For me, the psychic weight of bullets in a gun quadrupled its weight. I had no ethical hangups over hunting and hunters. It just wasn't for me. You couldn't release the dead.