On my way to Bayview Park, I'd stopped, as usual, before the rank of newspaper machines in front of Fausto's market. And there, above the fold in the Sentinel, was word that Lefty Ortega was no more.
I should not have been surprised—though of course I'd wanted to believe that the docs would get the tough old bastard stabilized, that he'd resume his wigged-out drifting toward the end, and that the crisis precipitated by my visit somehow wouldn't count. So I forced myself to act like I was shocked, riffled quickly through a weak repertoire of amazement—the caught breath, the tsking of the tongue. Then I dug two quarters from the bottom of my tennis bag, and, in what was quickly turning into an unhappy and life-draining habit, I bought the goddamn paper and read it standing on the sidewalk.
The article did not specify the time of Lefty's death, but said that it was afternoon. This sent me delving into morbid subtleties. If he was dead by the time the running medics reached his bedside, did that mean I killed him? How about if he jerked and gurgled another twenty minutes? How about an hour? Did some kind of buzzer go off when the period of guilt expired? But come on, the guy was dying anyway. Then again, everybody murdered is dying anyway. Maybe the miserable bully had one kind and charitable thought left in him, one instant of joy, one spoonful of redemption. When could you say with certainty that somebody was finished?
This philosophical muddle soon gave way to practical considerations, in the midst of which I vaguely realized I was thinking like a criminal. Who'd seen me at the hospital? I'd asked for Lefty at Intensive and at Critical. There was a duty nurse in Hospice who'd probably noticed me hanging around; there was the smiling woman with the cart of magazines. And there was Lefty's daughter—at least I assumed that's who she was. We'd exchanged a glance when she came out of the room, and it had seemed to me that her eyes were dry enough to see through. All these people were witnesses, potential enemies. I wasn't used to having enemies. I wasn't used to feeling furtive. And, now that I thought of it, I'd never regarded myself as an unhealthy person to be around. Why was everyone I met suddenly dying?
Distractedly scanning the rest of the front page, I noticed a small follow-up item about the killing on Sunset Key. The cops had still not managed to identify the victim. Big surprise. They were asking anyone with information to come forward. Fat chance. No chance now. Let them figure out on their own who Kenny Lukens was, and that these two deaths were, in some murky way, connected.
I threw the paper in the garbage, as if by trashing that one copy I could erase the day's events. A homeless guy came along and plucked it out ten seconds later. I continued on my way to tennis, and of course I played like shit. Who wouldn't have?
But the strangest thing about that tennis game was that I didn't go home afterward. I always go straight home from tennis. Get out of my sweaty clothes, have a soak or a swim, analyze, regroup. This, I realize, may seem like just some aimless, trivial routine. To me it's much more serious than that. It's ritual, one of those carefully evolved, scrupulously repeated patterns that define a life, that make it recognizable to the person living it. Violate those rituals, disrupt those private ceremonies, and who knows what else will go ker-blooey?
Still, when I'd packed up my gear and dropped it in the basket of my bike, I just couldn't get the thing to steer toward home. It pointed stubbornly downtown and toward the harbor. Gradually I understood that it was pointing toward Redmond's Boatyard. I felt I had no choice but to follow it, even though I couldn't tell if it was Kenny Lukens or Maggie the yoga teacher I needed to get closer to.
Redmond's is at the north end of the Bight, at a nick in the shore that not long ago was known as Toxic Triangle. The old electric plant looms over Toxic; the gigantic coast guard pier hems in one side of it. The water part of the Triangle used to be a seedily carefree place where nobody paid rent and hardly anyone had all their teeth. Derelict boats tied lines to tilted pilings or settled gently into dockside muck; their denizens nailed lawn furniture onto splintery decks and lived on six-packs and pork rinds. People slept in hammocks slung from masts, and scruffy dogs ran around with fish heads in their jaws.
Local wisdom had it that Toxic was too funky and too outlaw ever to be gentrified. Ha. It's called North Haven Marina now—another of those places whose former moniker has been officially expunged. Costs two bucks a foot to park your boat there for a night, and dock girls trained to call everybody Captain come running up to pump your gas.
A small irony is that Redmond's dry dock used to be the upscale part of Greater Toxic. People actually paid for space there. There were showers, electricity—it was practically suburban. Now, next to the gleaming new marina, Redmond's seemed a blot and an embarrassment. The yard was dusty and unpaved; the vessels anything but yachty. How long till the city found a way to worm out of the lease?