Wreckers' Key (32 page)

I pushed my way out the door. As I was walking to Lightnin’, I saw a maid with a cart working outside a room. Under her blue pinafore uniform she wore what looked like a home-sewn dress, and her hair was tied up with a bandanna. I guessed she was Haitian. She responded to my question with a shy smile and invited me into the room. When I sat on the bed, I had a nearly overwhelming urge to climb in and pull the covers up over my head and hope the world would go away. I shook it off and reached into the nightstand drawer for the telephone book. I didn’t find anyone with the last name of Sparks, but I tipped the maid ten bucks. She deserved it—especially since she was probably working under the management of the asshole in the lobby.

I hopped in the Jeep and turned back out onto Roosevelt. The rain started falling as I headed for Key West Bight Marina. The only other person I knew to turn to was Ben. Maybe he knew computers like B.J. did and would be able to find Sparks on the Internet. I parked in the lot behind the Turtle Kraals Restaurant and cut through the gap next to the Waterfront Market, my baseball cap pulled low over my eyes to keep out the rain.

Out on the dock by the Schooner Wharf Bar, I was able to see the empty dock where Ben’s boat was usually tied up. Most of the other charter schooners were still in their berths, all charters canceled due to the nasty weather, but on Ben’s dock I had a clear view of his fishing boat, the
Rapid
. Wouldn’t you know he’d be the diehard sailor, taking folks out on a charter with
Hawkeye
no matter the weather? I could picture him telling them about his great-great-grandfather as he squinted into the rain and wind. I was wearing my rain slicker, but my pants were getting soaked. Damn. I was standing there cursing out loud when I looked down the dock and saw the stringy-haired fellow with his bike and dog, the same one we had seen that first morning I’d come ashore and had brunch with Nestor and Catalina. He was watching me swearing aloud to myself. Maybe he thought I was a kindred spirit of some sort.

“Excuse me,” I said, walking closer to him. “Do you know the guy who runs that black schooner that usually docks out there?” I pointed out to the empty pier. “The one called
Hawkeye
?”

“Most people don’t hear the voices like we do!” He seemed to be talking to someone sitting on my right shoulder. “They don’t understand that when the man says it is time to go, you have to go.”

“That schooner,
Hawkeye
, do you know when he usually gets back?”

“Alien abductions occur right under the noses of everyman. It happens all around us and we don’t even see. They walk right by and people don’t see the fear and the pain when the man is telling them it’s time to go. Go to the big mouth, he said. Stare into the precipice. Only the dark one has the courage to look you in the eye. Do you hear what I’m saying?” He reached out and grabbed my arm. “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Sorry, man, I’ve got to go.” I tried to shake him loose, but his grip was strong.

“The man says fuck you, and none of the others dared to look in the eyes of the damned.”

“Shit,” I said as I twisted my arm free and began to trot back to the Jeep. I could still hear him hollering after me.

“The dark one has eyes that look through to my soul. You must find him in your dreams.”

Way to go, Sullivan, I thought as I slid behind the wheel of the Jeep once more. You ask for information from crazy people and you expect rational answers. Not only did that guy not know what I was talking about, but I’d been asking a man who didn’t even live on this planet.

There was only one other thing to try. It was risky, but it might work. I had seen Arlen go into the offices of Ocean Towing that day. I turned up Simonton Street and headed for Fleming.

XXIX

The girl with the pierced nipple was sitting on top of her desk when I walked in. She was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt that had
D.A.R.E. to Keep Kids Off Drugs
written across the front, over white Capri-length pants and red Converse high-top sneakers, and she seemed to be holding some sort of yoga pose with her arms up high over her head, her fingers laced together.

“Hi,” I said, not caring if she thought me rude to break her concentration.

She didn’t look at me but she began whispering, “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine.” When she reached fifty, she lowered her hands and started shaking them as though she were trying to dry them off. “Sorry,” she said, only it came out shorry, and I was reminded of her tongue stud. “Nobody was in here so I decided to try my stretches. I have to hold that one for fifty counts. It drains all the blood out of my hands, though. Totally pins-and-needles time.”

I wanted to ask her why she did it, any of it—the piercings, the exercises—but after my experience with the man on the docks, I decided it might not be such a good idea.

“I was in here a little over a week ago. I don’t know if you remember me.”

“Sure I do. The boss was really pissed off after you left. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing. Really. I don’t know why he was mad. Anyway, today I have a favor to ask. When I was in here last time I met an old friend right outside. He came in after me. His name is Arlen Sparks.”

“Oh yeah, Sparky. I know him. He’s a cool old dude.”
 

So far so good. I’d come in here hoping I could get what I needed without crossing paths with Pinder. “Well, I’m trying to find Mr. Sparks. I’ve known him since I was a kid up in Fort Lauderdale, but I don’t have his Key West address. I was wondering if you could give it to me.”

“I don’t know about that. We’re not supposed to. I’d better go ask.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said, but before I could say or do any more she twisted her body and yelled in a surprisingly loud voice.

“Boss! Somebody here to see you.”

I contemplated running for the door. The fact remained, though, that this was my last hope of finding out what was going on, of finding Catalina and B.J., and the desire to know overrode any concerns about my personal safety. Well, almost. I backed my way to the door and noted the busy Chinese restaurant across the street as a possible escape path.

“Oh shit. What’re you doing here?” Pinder said when he appeared from the back office. His hair was disheveled, his clothes wrinkled, his eyes bloodshot. He looked like he was still hung over from a long night’s revelry. Judging from the look on the girl’s face, he didn’t smell too great, either. He didn’t give me a chance to answer. “One time you took a job from me. It was fucking pocket change. You’re like all the mainland chicks. So fucking superior.”

“I just came here to see if you would give me Arlen Sparks’s phone number and address.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“Mr. Pinder, don’t jerk me around. You know who I’m talking about.”

Pinder looked genuinely baffled. He glanced at his secretary, who was in the process of unbending her legs and climbing down off her desk.

“You know him,” she said. “Sparky, the sweet old guy with the really bad comb-over who sometimes delivers envelopes here for your partner?”

“Oh yeah, that guy. What do you want with him?”
 

Neville Pinder must have made a hell of a con man judging from his acting ability. “You know, I could almost believe you,” I said. “You’re good.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? You’re some crazy bitch. I don’t have time for this.” He turned to the girl, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Give her what she wants.” He turned back to me. “Then you get out of my office and stay out. You’re like a pimple on my ass. You’re yesterday’s news. I heard you’re selling out. About time. Like they say, don’t send a woman to do a man’s job.” He gave a couple of dry chuckles before he turned and disappeared down the hall.

The girl extended a tentative hand, holding a sheet of paper with an address and phone number scribbled on it. “He always says stuff like that to me, too.”

I took the paper and left the office, but as I walked back to where I had parked the Jeep on Simonton, I thought about how the girl had misunderstood my reaction to her boss. I wasn’t mad. I didn’t care if a twit like Pinder insulted me. The look on my face had been one of astonishment. If Neville Pinder really didn’t know anything about Arlen, who did?

The address she had given me was for a place on a street called Venetian Drive. I drove out of Old Town and headed back over to the commercial district along Roosevelt, where I pulled into a touristy shop that promised to sell me tickets for the Conch Train and various boat and snorkel trips. I checked out the free maps in the rack of brochures by the door but couldn’t find one that showed a Venetian Drive, so I wound up buying a detailed street map. I found the street located on the other side of the island, over by the airport. Ten minutes later, I was pulling to the curb in front of a small pink, boxy-looking house with a white-tile roof. The day had grown dark with the low clouds and slanting rain, but no lights illuminated the interior of the house. Arlen’s car was parked in the carport; farther up the street, I saw the familiar black lines of B.J.’s El Camino.

No one answered my knock. There was no doorbell. The knob would not twist in my hand. I tried going around into the carport where there was another door, this one with jalousie windows that probably led to the kitchen. My knocks there weren’t answered, either. I decided to try this knob. It was unlocked and turned easily in my hand.

The kitchen looked clean and tidy except for the fact that one of the chairs by the little eat-in kitchen table lay on its side. Through the arched passage, I could see into the living room, where a lamp lay on the floor. My wet boat shoes squeaked on the linoleum in the kitchen. I considered calling out, but decided I didn’t want to announce my presence.

From the kitchen doorway, I could see the front door and entry to my left, the living room mostly off to my right and the hall to the bedrooms straight ahead. All the doors were closed. It wasn’t until I was in the hall proper that I began to hear the sobs.

I put my ear to the first door. Nothing. I turned the knob and found a bathroom on the other side. The next door was quiet also. It led to what looked like a sewing room. I wondered how long it had been since she’d last worked in there. The second bedroom looked like a much more extensive radio room than the one he had at home. The equipment looked newer, too. A wooden workbench ran the entire length of the room, and conduit snaked up the wall to a four-outlet box above the table.

I knew even before I went into the radio room that the sobs came from the last room on the hall. It had to be the master bedroom. Hearing the depth of the anguish should have spurred me forward to try to help, but something told me it was too late. There is a sound to grief. I was afraid to go through that last door. I was searching for people I loved and in this moment for me they were alive still.

But postponing the knowledge wasn’t going to change what was. I stood with my hand on the doorknob, took a deep breath, and walked in.

Arlen lay on the bed spooning around the still body of his wife. Sarah’s mouth hung open, her cheeks sunk so deep the skin showed the outline of her teeth. The eyes, though open, were dry and dull, no longer the eyes of the woman I once knew. She was dressed in a pink nightgown, but the arms and legs that the garment did not cover looked like mere bones draped with a loose-fitting yellowish cloth.

The smell of death will always be tinged with the odor of the sea, for me. It is an organic earthy smell, as though whatever it was that once made that person live has gone to ground. I remembered a line from a poem I had read in high school.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
. I didn’t know about God or heaven or hell, but I believed in that force. Life. And when it fled the body and drove back into the earth, it left behind a dry husk and a smell that was distinctive over and above the odors of sickness and disinfectant and urine that so often accompany death.

I leaned against the dresser next to the door. Where most women might have had a jewelry box or a collection of perfume bottles, the dresser here held a collection of miniature art books. Sarah Sparks had been a fixture from my childhood. Like a beloved aunt, she had watched over us and made us feel safe in our world on that little cul-de-sac by the river. For Sarah, as for my father, death had come as a welcome release. But how well I knew that it didn’t make it any easier for those of us left behind.

I crossed the room and touched Arlen’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

When he looked up at me, I had to turn away. The pain pouring from those eyes was more than I could bear.

We stayed like that for a while, and then he got up and left the room. I followed him to the front door. His face was so swollen from crying, I might not have recognized him if I’d passed him on the street.

“Leave,” he said. “Leave me with her.”

“Arlen, I came here looking for Catalina. Where is she?” He put his hands to his face and ran his fingers up over his forehead and through his hair, pushing the long strands off his bald crown. “I don’t know.”

“You brought her here. You must know something.” There were those eyes again. I tried to hold his gaze. This time he looked away.

“All I wanted was the money. He told me no one would get hurt. But now she’s dead.” His eyes were filling with water again, and he was staring off as though he was looking at something far in the distance.

I grabbed him by his upper arms and tried to make him focus on me. “Who told you, Arlen?”

“I believed him. But she’s gone and now it doesn’t matter.”

“Arlen, I know Sarah is gone. But what about Catalina?” The fear that clutched my gut was making me dizzy.

“I didn’t know he was going to kill anyone.”

“Who did he kill?” I was nearly shouting. I squeezed his arms tight and gave him a single brisk shake.

It seemed to have an effect on him. His eyes returned to focus on my face. “I didn’t know before today. I never would have been a part of it if I’d known he was a killer. He told me there were others. He said it was getting out of control. He said you were the problem. That you’d always been the problem. Ever since you were children.” I’d like to say I had some inkling—that his statement didn’t catch me totally by surprise. But that would be a lie.