The Naked Detective(12)

"He wasn't gay," she said. "He cross-dressed now and then. Two very different things. He was a complicated person. A dear person. Can we talk?"

I looked down at a lime-green weevil chomping on a leaf. I didn't feel like talking, not about Kenny Lukens at least, but I was raised to be polite and I didn't see how I could kick this person off my porch. "Listen," I said, "I really don't want—"

"Please," she said, her voice dropping to a companionable whisper. "You and me—you realize we might be the only two who know that it was Kenny out there?" She gestured in the general direction of Tank Island—excuse me, Sunset Key.

"Us," I put in, "and whoever killed him."

She ignored that. "Isn't it weird to be the only ones who know?"

"Yeah. It is. But I still don't see—"

"What we have to talk about? What it would accomplish? It won't accomplish anything. Kenny's gone. It's finished. That's why I feel like talking. Understand?"

I didn't understand. But already I was getting to like this woman's voice. There was something in it that reminded you that it was made of breath. "What's your name?" I asked her.

"Maggie."

"Nice name." I paused and sipped my drink and looked at her some more. She had steady gray eyes, innocent of makeup, and her top lip was prominent, Egyptian almost; the center of it dipped down into a sensuous nub. She had a depth of tan that only locals get, a tan that, like the polish on good marble, seemed to reach a ways beneath the surface; yet her skin looked very supple, faintly moist with herbal things. "Can I tell you something, Maggie? I just got home from Lefty Ortega's bedside, and I'm feeling pretty lousy."

"He talked to you?" She seemed impressed. I guess that was my compensation.

"He raved at me. He's on morphine. I have no idea what any of it meant."

"It's a start."

"It's a finish." I said it more harshly than I'd meant to, and then, of course, I felt bad.

She took it in and nodded gently. She paused then said, "I like grappa too."

"How you know it's grappa?"

All she did was close her eyes and deeply sniff the still and humid space between us. Looking back, I guess that was the moment I began to fall a little bit in love with her. No, wait—that's glib and quick and overly dramatic, exactly the kind of thing a detective story makes a person say. Let's just leave it that I was impressed as hell that she could divine the presence of grappa vapors in the air; and intrigued by the guiltless pleasure in her face as her eyes fell closed.

"Come on inside," I said. "I'll pour you some."

We went into the living room. She claimed a corner of the sofa, sitting diagonal and crossed- legged so that her long dress stretched across her knees and made a basket of her lap. I fetched grappa. We clinked glasses and then I retreated to a chair. She gestured toward the walls, which have some pictures on them. Not museum grade but not crap either and some care had been taken with the framing.

"Nice place," she said. "You have a trust fund?"

It was such a marvelously gauche question that I snorted. Clearing liquor from my sinuses, I said, "Excuse me?"

"Come on," she said. "No one makes money in this town. You live like this, either you're retired or you have a trust fund."

It so happens that my father was a furniture salesman who died broke. I didn't have a trust fund. "Let's leave it at retired."

"What from?"

"Nothing important," I said. The under-statement of the year. I sipped my drink and changed the subject instantly. "Where do you live?"

For some reason she seemed surprised I didn't know. "That's how I met Kenny. I live in the boatyard."

Brilliantly I asked, "On a boat?"

"Broken-down old trawler," she said. "Cheap and roomy. Propped in a cradle. All the romance of living aboard without the nuisance of actually being in the water."

"Ah," I said.

That seemed to wrap up the discussion of affordable housing, and there was a lapse in the conversation. Lapses are dangerous.

"Pete," Maggie said—it was the first time, except for introductions, that she'd used my name, and she helped herself to it just like she'd claimed the corner of the couch, with an utter lack of formality or self-consciousness—"did Kenny tell you he was being followed?"

I felt my fingers clench around my sweating glass. "Now wait. I thought you said—"

"That it's over. That there's nothing to accomplish." She gave a pained little smile that was not quite an apology. "I know, I know. But it haunts me. . . . Did he say anything to you about it?"