Old salts will tell you that certain boats are just plain cursed. A virus of disaster inhabits their very decks and fittings, bringing ill winds voyage after voyage, misfortunes season after season, persisting even in the face of changing ports and changing owners. Superstitious nonsense, of course. But looking at Dream Chaser—its wrecked rigging still unrepaired, its sanded but as yet unpainted bottom splotched with putty, its last two owners untimely dead—it was hard to feel immune from superstition.
Still on my bike, I rolled up to the cop who was manning the entrance and asked him what had happened.
Gruffly he said, "Nothing I can talk about."
"It's already on the radio," I told him.
"Can't help that."
"Look, can I go in? I have a friend inside." I gestured in the direction of Maggie's trawler with its begonias and geraniums.
"Residents only," he informed me.
"I'm worried about her," I said.
"Lots of people are worried."
"Is everybody else okay?"
"Far's I know," he said, and then we had a little standoff. The cop didn't come right out and tell me to get lost, but his sour, pinched expression behind the Ray-Bans let me know that I was bugging him. He stared at me in the petty, bullying way of certain small-town cops who want to let you know they are memorizing your face, and that some time it will cost you. I stared back for an instant, and wondered if this guy had been a friend of Lefty Ortega's, one of the flunkies whose mission it was to make sure that the guys who ran the town were free to do their business.
But what I was mainly thinking in that moment was what a sorry excuse for a detective I was turning out to be. Real PI's knew how to talk to cops, manly man to man, how to wheedle information. A real PI would have gotten past the barricade, past the crime-scene tape, would have managed to get aboard that cursed boat. A real detective would have smelled the blood and noticed some small but crucial thing that everyone else had overlooked. Instead, I just sat there on my bike, knowing that I seemed to the cop like one more weenie with white shorts and a tennis racquet. Still outside the perimeter of real involvement, I flinched from his belittling stare and pedaled off.
But in no particular direction. I was edgy and nervous and didn't feel like going home. I felt an itch I couldn't place at first. Gradually I recognized it as something that long ago, up north, I used to feel quite often: the itch of purpose, the itch to get something accomplished. But what?
With nothing much in mind, I leaned and swooped through random streets. Not till I'd crossed the ugly clutter of Duval did I realize I was heading to Bahama Village to check out the Hibiscus guest house.
Bahama Village is about the last part of Key West that could really be called a neighborhood. It still features curbside games of dominoes, and corner groceries that compete on the charm of their owners and the coldness of their beer. Generations of families still live together here. Houses are passed on, patched and propped up with cinder blocks and railroad ties; they lean but they endure. Not that the Village is immune from change. Homesteading whites who can't afford the other parts of town are picking up some bargains—you see earnest young white women in torn jeans and bandannas, scraping paint, raking improbable gardens. Gay pride flags hang from porches here and there. But the pace of change is slow for now, as languorous as the streets themselves, and has a human face. It won't stay that way; and as I rode past the rib joints and the fried-fish stands, I vaguely wondered if the hovering developers would let Bahama Village keep its own true name, or if they'd decide that the suggestion of blackness might keep the millionaires away.
On Louisa Street between Emma and Thomas, I stumbled onto the Hibiscus. It had a brightly painted wooden sign out front, and frankly, I found it sooner than I wanted to. I'd been enjoying the feeling of having a project, yet without having to do anything but push the pedals and look around. Now I had to talk. Now I had to play a part.
I locked my bike and went up a set of porch steps that closely resembled my own. All basically alike, these old Conch houses; part of their appeal. This one had been converted so that the small front parlor was now the office. There was a chest-high counter that held a rack filled with the relentless promotional brochures—fishing trips, nightclubs, sunset sails. Potted palms and ficuses brought the outdoors in. A doorway led to the guest rooms that, boardinghouse style, gave onto a common hall. I slapped the little silver bell atop the counter and waited for someone to appear.
After a moment, a woman came bustling along.
She was black, had cornrowed hair; and went about two-forty, with an astonishingly confident smile that seemed to go with someone more conventionally attractive, and that carried all before it. In one breath she said an extravagant hello, told me her name was Vanessa, and asked if she could help me.