Welcome to Paradise (27 page)

My hands were soaking wet. I shook them off
and took the paper.

The headline read
apparent
suicide in key west harbor
, and it so happened it was a
story I remembered fairly well. A man had disappeared.

His pants and shirt and wallet and sandals
had been found at the water's edge down by the Fort Taylor jetty.
He'd left no note. The disappearance had occurred late on a
full-moon night, with a strong outgoing tide; the body had never
been found. The man's name was Kenny Lukens. He hadn't been in town
for long, and little was known about him. He'd lived on his
sailboat, which had a broken mast and a torn-up deck and was
resting in a cradle on the dry land of Redmond's Boatyard in the
Bight. He'd worked as a late-shift bartender at Lefty's, on Duval
Street. Seems he'd made no particular impression on his colleagues.
Not friendly, not unfriendly. No crazier than most and not
obviously despairing. No one knew of drug problems or romantic
disappointments. Kenny Lukens just checked out.

This had happened very soon after I'd moved
full-time to Florida—which is why I remembered it at all. I'd been
feeling both smug and terrified about disappearing to Key West: Was
I retiring at a lucky age to paradise, or making the first, half-
conscious movement toward oblivion? Kenny Lukens' story had made me
wonder what else would have to happen in a person's life so that
he'd need to disappear from Key West and toward that ultimate
retreat.

The blonde's voice pulled me out of my
thoughts. "Some people thought the suicide was faked," she said.
She said it with a hint of malice, though I couldn't figure who or
what the nastiness was aimed at.

"Faked why?"

She looked down at her fingernails, which
were the same pink-orange as her lips. Something unpleasantly
playful, goading, had come into her manner. "Isn't that the kind of
thing detectives figure out, Mr. Amsterdam?"

"Ambitious detectives maybe."

She pouted. She looked let down. I hate
letting people down, which is why I don't have that much to do with
people. There was a standoff. Finally I caved. "So you think Kenny
Lukens is alive?"

She kept on pouting. She was very good at
it. Just gazing wistfully between lashes that were lumpy with
mascara. The gaze, the sorrow, the needling hope—they all reminded
me how much I didn't want to be a private eye.

I dangled the soggy clipping in her
direction. "Look, I'm sorry, but it's not the kind of thing I
do."

I thought I'd sounded pretty final saying
that, but the blonde just stood there over me. This wasn't how it
was supposed to play. She was supposed to take the article back,
put it in her purse, bite her lip, and maybe start to cry. Except
she didn't. A long moment passed. The sun moved behind a poinciana
branch and threw me into shade. I made the stupid, fundamental
error of getting curious. "Who are you anyway?" I asked. "Ex-wife?
Girlfriend? Sister?"

She stared at me. Something vaguely
flirtatious happened at the corners of her mouth. She smoothed her
skirt across her hips and waved with the muscles of her stomach.
Then she reached up toward her hair. Her polished fingernails slid
along her temples, made her shadowed eyes bend upward at the edges.
She pried, apparently, beneath her scalp, then lifted off the wig,
beneath which was some prickly fuzz not much longer than a crew
cut. Tossing the ersatz coif onto a chaise, she reached into her
blouse, probed past the lace top of her bra, and plucked out two
perfect vinyl tits—which she placed on the damp edge of the hot
tub.

Her voice dropped three-quarters of an
octave. "How rude of me," she said. "I haven't introduced
myself."