"I've learned a good way to avoid domestic violence," Suki said. "I live alone."
"Are you in danger at this moment?"
"I wish I knew."
"Don't we all. Hold on a minute." He vanished from the line.
Suki was standing at a pay phone whose base was sunk in a square hole in concrete just inside the seawall. She looked down at the ocean. Tiny birds were pecking bubbles at the shoreline; farther out, egrets were stalking, their necks as fast as snakes. She'd sewn her dress and washed her hair, and now she felt it drying in the sun.
After a while another voice came on the line. "Lieutenant Stubbs," it said. "Can I help you?"
Suki repeated her complaint.
"Attempted murder is a very heavy charge," said Stubbs. "Are we talking battery? Are you saying someone hit you?"
"I'm saying someone strangled me, gave me up for dead, then tried to drown me in a car."
"Sounds like more than battery."
"Thank you."
"And your assailant, you know him?"
"Thought I did. Yes."
"His name?"
"Lazslo."
"Lazslo?"
"Lazslo Kalynin. Runs the T-shirt shops."
There was a pause. Suki heard a scratching sound as the phone was rubbed against a shirt. When Stubbs came on again, he said, "Where are you? I'll come talk with you in person."
"I'm at a pay phone," Suki said.
"Where do you live?" said Stubbs.
"I live on Newton Street, but I'm afraid to go there. I'm staying with some friends."
"And where do they live?" Stubbs asked, with a patience that did not come naturally.
Suki hesitated, looked out at the ocean. Pelicans were diving, then shaking water off their heads like dogs. "Lieutenant, look," she said, "the place they live, it's not exactly legal. I wouldn't want to cause them any—"
"Lady," said Stubbs, "this is homicide, not the building department. Just tell me where you'll be in fifteen minutes."
Lieutenant Gary Stubbs was leaning back against the sauerkraut steamer, a pocket-size spiral notebook in his hand. He didn't wear a uniform, but a rumpled khaki suit that creased up like a concertina behind the knees and at the elbows. He was more thickly built than was ideal for the climate, with a bullish neck that always chafed against his collar. He had a squashed nose and shadowed jowls that never looked quite shaved. He riffled backward through his notes and said, "Let's make sure I have this right. You met him in the course of selling ads?"
"That's right," said Suki. "Six, eight weeks ago." She was sitting in the hot dog's only chair, a fifties dinette job with rusted legs and a torn red vinyl seat. Fred and Pineapple, congenitally shy of cops, had gone for a stroll by the ocean.
"And he was interested in you. Romantically."
"Apparently," she said.
"But what you wanted from him—"
"Look, Lieutenant," Suki interrupted. "It was dumb. I told you that. I thought if I could get a really down-and-dirty story about the T-shirt shops—"
"They'd fold their tents and go away," said Stubbs, "and Duval Street would be a funky locals' drag again."
"That was the fantasy, I guess," said Suki.
"And in the meantime," said the cop, "you could stop selling ads for a living."
"Exactly. Be a reporter instead."
"That's a move up?" asked Stubbs.
"Everything's relative. To me it is."
"Lois Lane."
Suki gestured upward toward the concave wiener in the roll. "Except when I needed rescuing I got Pineapple and Fred instead of Superman. And things blew up before I could file my story."
"Your story," said Stubbs, frowning at his notes. He leaned more heavily against the steamer, shifted the cross of his ankles. "That's the part that sort of loses me. Russian gangsters? Money laundering?"
"Those stores," said Suki, "the rents they pay. They can't be making money."
"I've heard that theory before," said Stubbs. "Look, Ms. Sperakis, no offense but you're a typical Key Wester. You can't stand change. Whenever something comes along—"
"This isn't just something coming along, Lieutenant. This isn't a McDonald's where there used to be a fritter stand. This is organized crime. The things he said to me—"
"While trying to seduce you, Ms. Sperakis. Let's be frank, okay? Men have been known to fling an awful lot of bullshit while trying to seduce a woman."
"Let's be frank, Lieutenant: Every woman past the age of twelve is well aware of that... And for a while, yeah, he was bullshitting, I totally agree. But then it changed. He was opening up, cleaning out—"