This put me in a dilemma that I guess real detectives must deal with all the time. Should I press on with details of the murder; or should I quiz her as to just what kind of lover she was looking for? Someone, perhaps, with proficiency at tennis and a passion for good music? What if he had to be able to touch his toes?
But Maggie changed direction and went on. "The place he stayed—I think it's called Hibiscus. On a side street in Bahama Village."
I drank some wine and heard myself say that I'd go down there tomorrow.
"You will?" said Maggie. There was simple gratitude in her voice, and when I met her eyes, I saw that they were opened very wide. She looked beautiful. Her brow was high and smooth, the full lips soft and slightly parted. Her expression was concerned and yet serene, and I could only wonder at a face capable of conveying both those things at once.
We looked at each other a little longer than was polite or safe, and in the stare I figured something out, or imagined that I did. I thought I knew now the kind of lover Maggie was looking for. She was looking for someone who would get involved, someone who would see things through. Which is to say, exactly the kind of man I wasn't, and didn't care to be; no—exactly the kind of man I'd given up on being. But in that moment, looking at Maggie's open face, I felt just the faintest quivering of long-dead fantasies of rescue and crusade, chivalry and sacrifice. Those quiverings scared the hell out of me and made me tingle.
I dropped my eyes and reached out for the Viognier. The bottle was empty. Now how the hell had that happened? How the hell was any of this happening?
9
News of the next calamity came not by way of the morning paper—it had occurred too late for deadline—but from the hyperactive mouth of Ozzie Kimmel, when I showed up at the Bayview courts for our customary Saturday game.
"D'ya hear?" he said, as he stepped out of the shadow of the players' shed and yanked off his stretched and faded tank top.
"Hear what?"
He scratched his hairy stomach, tightened the drawstring of his puke-green bathing suit. "Another fuckin' murder."
Instantly I felt a cold spot in my gut, a tightness in my throat. Police-blotter items never used to affect me like that. A murder was too bad for the person murdered. Why should it mean anything to me? "Who?" I said.
"Heard it on the fuckin' radio," said Ozzie. "Ya know what I don't get? The richer and more tarted up this town gets, the safer, cleaner they try to make it look, the more people that get offed."
"Ozzie—who was killed?"
He dived into his ratty bag, came out with a linty headband. "When I first came here, everyone was broke, everyone was stoned, the town looked like some Caribbean Third World piss- hole, everybody lived on cans of beans and bananas off of trees and farted all day long, and nobody got fuckin' murdered. Now and then, okay, someone took bad acid, tried to fly or fell off a boat and drowned. But murdered? No way."
"Ozzie, tell me who was murdered."
He hefted his racquet, took some practice swings, did some torso twists. "What? I can't remember."
"You just heard it on the radio."
"Yeah, but it was some kind of a funny name. Some Polish guy, I think."
"Polish?" I tasted something steely at the back of my throat. "Any chance he was Latvian?"
"Polish, Latvian, who gives a shit? Some poor bastard who just got over here and was fixing up a boat."
"At Redmond's?"
"I think they said Redmond's, yeah. So you heard about it?"
I wiped my forehead and put my racquets back into my bag. "I gotta go."
This flabbergasted Ozzie, cracked a central pillar of his world. "Whaddya mean, you gotta go? It's Saturday. We play on Saturday."
I climbed onto my bike.
Ozzie's amazement turned to indignation. "You can't just go! We're here. We're playing."
I started pedaling away.
To my back, he yelled, "I can't believe this! Wimping out! I'm taking a default!"
A default? The lunatic kept records?
I headed toward the harbor. Key West is a sleep-in town, and at 9:00 a.m. the streets were so quiet that I could hear the suck of my tires on the pavement. Cats slunk silently around garbage cans. Dogs snuggled against the bottom steps of porches. Tin roofs reflected sunlight and threw a silver glow on the undersides of palms.
The quiet was shattered as I neared the boatyard, though it was hard to say by what, exactly. There were no shouts, no sirens or machinery. It was more the nervous buzz of a threatened hive, the indistinctly roiled atmosphere of a place where something violent has happened.
The cops had placed a barricade across the entrance, just some splintery sawhorses whose legs stood uneven in the coral rock. Passersby gawked then moved along. I edged closer. At last, among the chastened hulks in their high, dry cradles, I saw Dream Chaser, cordoned off with yellow crime- scene tape.