Sunburn(37)

Debbi slipped out of the smock she wore over her bathing suit. Sunburn had freckled her shoulders; wisps of red hair escaped from the clip at the nape of her neck and tickled the peeling skin. "You're pathetic, Gino." She wanted a shower. She went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.

Gino sat bolt upright in the bed. His glands were telling him he'd been insulted, wronged; now he couldn't even get an answer to his question. Naked, hairy, furious, he bounded off the mattress, lumbered to the bathroom, and hammered on the door. "Who is 'e, goddammit?"

Debbi turned the shower on, got ready to step in.

"Answer me, you tramp!" screamed Gino.

Serenely, Debbi eased herself into the hot rain of hissing spray. Gino punched the door. Then he slammed it with his shoulder; the wood creaked on the hinges. Debbi thought, Oh hell, let's not have the police. She reached around the shower curtain and undid the lock. Gino bulled against the door again. This time it opened easily. The big man's momentum carried him skating naked across the damp tiles of the bathroom floor. He bounced off the far wall, hit his chin on a towel rack, and ended up sitting on the toilet. He'd used it last; the seat was up.

Above the hiss of the shower, Debbi said, "He's a dog, you asshole."

Now Gino was confused. "Who's a dog?"

"Don Giovanni," she said. "Your father's friend Bert? His dog. I gave 'im a laxative."

Gino said nothing, just sat there on the pot. Debbi poked her wet head from behind the curtain. "Maybe you should take one too, Gino. Improve your disposition. When we gettin' outa here?"

The big man shifted on the lip of the bowl, groped for a way to get on top of things again. "Gettin' out?" he said. "You're the one who's always sayin' why don't we stay awhile, settle in."

It was Debbi's turn not to answer. She put her head under the full force of the shower, reveled in the streaming oblivion of it. She was over wanting to settle in. She'd crossed the line. Probably she'd crossed it days before, but now she knew she'd crossed it. All she wanted now was to be done with Gino.

———

At around four o'clock that afternoon, Marge Fogarty, the silver-haired copy editor and receptionist at the Key West Sentinel, stepped into Arty Magnus's cubicle and told him there were two men who wanted to see him.

The editor looked up from his computer screen. "Who are they?"

"They wouldn't say," said Marge.

"Dirt-bags? Crackpots?" That's who usually clamored for the attention of newspaper editors: people with festering grievances, paranoid obsessions, people who had worn out the ears of everyone they knew.

Marge peeked over the top of her bifocals. "They don't look local and they seem respectable."

Arty gave a resigned shrug, and Marge went to fetch the visitors.

In a moment she was back with a white man and a black man. The black man was tall, with wide-spaced eyes and a grayish dusky skin; his hair was silver on the sides and he was fastidiously dressed in pleated poplin trousers and a mint-green oxford-cloth shirt. The white man was short and knobby; he wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt whose banded sleeves were snug against his bulging triceps.

"What can I do for you?" Arty said to them, polite but not too welcoming.

For a moment they didn't speak. They waited for Marge Fogarty to withdraw, waited to see if she would close the door to Arty Magnus's office. But this was Key West; there was no door. The only modicum of privacy was afforded by the rumbling, groaning air conditioner at the editor's back. The FBI men eased forward to get within the shadow of its noise and presented their credentials.

Arty glanced at the badges, the ID cards. He felt a flutter of that absurd inchoate guilt that even saints must feel when confronted on any pretext by a cop. He tried to smile but his lips stuck to his teeth. "What brings you to Key West?"

If this was the old we-know-that-you-know game, Mark Sutton had no patience for it. "A friend of yours," he jumped right in. "You visited with him last night. You arrived by bicycle at six-thirty-six p.m., you left at eight-fourteen. We took the liberty of following you home."

Arty folded his hands in front of him. He did not consciously decide to fib; he fibbed, rather, on a protective hunch, an instinct, though he could not have said who he was protecting, or precisely why. "You mean Joey Goldman? Yeah, he's a friend of mine. But what—"

"You met his father?" asked Ben Hawkins.

"Yeah, I've met the old man. Sure."

"You know who he is?" Mark Sutton asked.

It dawned on Arty quite suddenly that his guests were standing and he was sitting. His tiny office had no extra seats. Fetching a couple might be a good way to gain some time to think. Rising, he said, "Lemme grab some chairs—"