The realtor turned around in gravel cul-de-sacs, leaned low across the steering wheel as he pointed out his listings. At length the three of them were standing in the kitchen of a pink stucco cottage, when Bert said, "I'm curious about the neighborhood. Who lives up here?"
The faucet in the sink was dripping. The realtor discreetly tried to make it stop. "Very mixed," he said. "Better- off Conch families—big move up for them. Professionals, doctors from the hospital. Snowbirds who don't like the noise in Old Town."
"Ah," said Bert, picking lint from the dog that was hanging from his hand. "We heard there were some Russians lived up here. The guys with all the T-shirts."
"Markov," said the realtor, with an insider's quiet certainty. "Very wealthy man. A few others. Very quiet, keep to themselves. Live out farther toward the point."
"Maybe we should look out there," Bert said.
"Pricey," warned the realtor.
Sam Katz had been looking in the microwave, checking where the rays came out. Such a simple invention; he wished he'd thought of it. He said, "Two pensions, no babies. Pricey doesn't matter."
So they got back in the car and headed toward the Gulf. The lots got bigger, the houses sprouted breezeways, guest wings. When swaths of open water appeared past barricades on dead-end streets, Bert said, "Ya mind we swing by Markov's place? I hear it's a helluva house."
The realtor turned left, then right, then pointed toward a large establishment that looked confused. Brick pillars guarded both ends of a horseshoe gravel driveway. Trellises of bougainvillea were squandered on a huge garage. An orange tile roof was slashed open by a stone chimney. The informality of a shady porch slammed into the pomp of an entranceway with columns.
"What helluva house?" said Sam Katz. "Borax. A mishmosh."
Confidentially, the realtor said, "Money can't buy taste."
"And happiness can't buy money," said Bert. "Ya got anything on this street?"
The realtor put on the brakes, considered. "This street, no. Closest thing, around the corner. On a side canal. Eccentric little house."
"We're on the eccentric side ourselves," said Sam.
"Kitsch with attitude," the realtor said. "Between us, sort of homo barocco."
So they went around the corner and pulled into the driveway of a mint-green house that seemed to have been built by someone with a fetish for tile. A tile walkway led to the front door, which in turn was framed in tile. The entryway floor was tile in a sunburst pattern. The countertops were tile, a wide band of tile went all around the kitchen like a belt A path of tile meandered through the living room; Bert put his dog down and the creature's tiny claws made a bone-dry ticking sound. The tile flowed beneath the sliding glass back door to form a tile patio that extended halfway to the seawall.
Sam Katz ran his hand along a coffee table topped in tile and said, "Looks like the men's room in Grand Central."
"Easy to keep clean," said the realtor. "No mildew. Good if you have a problem with mold."
"Problem wit' mold," said Bert the Shirt, "I'd be dead ten times already." He gestured all around himself. "Who else is onna street, across the way?"
"Don't know," said the realtor. "But it's mostly owner- occupied. Very quiet, I assure you."
Bert said to Sam, "Take it for a month?"
Sam said, "We haven't seen the bedroom, the bath."
Bert rolled his eyes. "Okay, Sam. Go look at the bathroom."
Sam followed a line of tile down the hallway. Bert lightly drummed his fingers on a mosaic-sided hutch.
After a moment Sam's voice came reverberating as though from a dormitory shower. "Tile," he reported. "Tile up the poopik."
"We'll take it for a month," Bert said to the realtor.
Lieutenant Gary Stubbs sat in his cramped and dingy office, watching water droplets dribble from his ancient air conditioner and arc gently to the floor.
Before him on his scratched-up desk were two manila envelopes, which together comprised what he'd come to think of as the Dead Russians in Paradise file. Lazslo Kalynin. Throat cut in a purported burglary. Except no one but the department politicians believed it. Burglars in this town were crack heads, coke fiends. They were strung out and they were amateurs. They left fingerprints, and if they had to kill someone, they hacked him thirty, forty times, poking till they found an artery. Kalynin's killers had made no errors and their killing was as neat as surgery.
Then there was Jane Doe of the Russian undergarments. Not a clue on her, other than two lungsful of saltwater, proving that she'd gone down breathing. Suicide was possible, though that long thin bruise across her chest didn't go with suicide. Besides, who drowned themselves with shoes on?