Scavenger Reef(44)

"Coffee in bed," Augie was saying. He was smiling, he woke up cheerful. He sipped the hot brew a little awkwardly, brown drops clung to his unruly white mustache. "Makes it all worthwhile just to get coffee in bed-

Nina sat softly next to him and stroked his hair. "Darling," she said, "something happened to Fred last night. I found him dead this morning."

Augie frowned and sighed. He sipped coffee and looked out the bedroom window. It was a flat still morning, the breeze had yet to rouse itself, and neither plants, people, nor even lizards seemed quite awake yet either. "Smart bird," he said at last.

"He's here," Nina resumed. "Do you want to see him?"

Augie nodded, and Nina brought him the dead bird the way a mother brings a sick child a favorite doll. The painter took the rigid parrot and laid it against his shoulder. He stroked the sleek green feathers, kissed the top of the beak where the flat hard nostrils were, then stoically handed the stiff bundle back to his wife.

"Should we bury him?" Nina asked.

Augie pressed his lips together and shook his head. 'That wouldn't be doing him a favor." In Key West, not even people got buried; their caskets were stacked three-high in concrete hurricane-resistant mausoleums. The ground was so rocky and the water table so near the surface that even shallow holes filled almost instantly with a gray seepage that oozed through the limestone like milk through a sponge, "just wrap 'im up and toss 'im."

Nina took the corpse to the kitchen, swaddled it in newspaper, and dropped it in the trash, where it lay oblivious among the mango peels, the coffee grounds, the squashed tart in its foil shell.

It was not until hours later, when she was at her gallery and losing herself in the savingly precise task of cutting a mat, that the truth of what had happened flooded in on her with the sudden slow momentum of a car crash. Her breath caught, her stomach knotted. Her hand slipped, the knife zigged crazily across the drafting table and clattered to the floor. Nina didn't pick it up. Paralyzed by an awful certainty, she stood there pale and rigid; and the sunlight coming through the gallery window held no cheer but only a viscous gluey weight.

"Lemme make sure I have this straight," said Detective Sergeant Joe Mulvane. He sat on a corner of his desk and let the thick part of one beefy thigh hang over the edge. His knee almost touched a file cabinet. The tiny office had no window, and a greasy oscillating fan was pushing the stale air around. "Your bird died and you think someone is trying to murder your husband."

Nina Silver squirmed in her aluminum chair. O.K., it sounded ridiculous. Probably she hadn't done the best job of explaining. But how could she be expected to be cool, organized, thorough? She was panicked. She'd dropped everything, locked the gallery, and ridden her old fat-tire bike as fast as she could to the undistinguished building that served as city hall, police headquarters, and Key West's central firehouse. She'd dashed up the handicapped ramp, sprinted a flight of anciently linoleumed stairs, followed the faded arrows to the police part of the premises. She'd arrived sweating and winded. Instant airtight logic was a little too much to ask on top of that.

"Sergeant," she said, "I'm telling you—that tart was poisoned."

"If we had it we could test it," said Mulvane. "Or if we had the bird."

"I know, I know," said Nina. "But I told you. I didn't think. I threw it away. The housekeeper took the trash out—I checked with him. The garbagemen came. The tart. The bird. They're gone."

Mulvane drummed lightly on his desk with the fingers of one hand. Of all the kinds of people who settle in Key West, not the least numerous are those for whom Key West would seem the most unlikely place on earth, a purgatory almost, and Joe Mulvane was one of these. He had a pale freckled complexion that could not stand the sun. He was thickly built with larded muscle; you could picture him shoveling snow in a T-shirt, and the heat was for him as much a torment as it is to a long-haired dog. He was not a bigot, but nor did he exactly revel in human diversity. He belonged, it seemed, in a blue-collar suburb south of Boston, a place where people had basement workshops and basketball hoops in the driveway; yet he was restless, perverse, and spirited enough to flee where he belonged.

"Look, Mrs. Silver," he said, "I understand you've been under a lot of strain—"

"Don't condescend to me, Sergeant," the former widow cut him off. "I'm not a child. I'm not a hysteric. The fact is there are a lot of people who would profit from my husband's death."

Mulvane pursed his lips and lifted his red eyebrows. When paranoiacs started ascribing motives, it could sometimes get interesting. "Like who?"