"I'm looking for a friend," I said.
"I hope you find one," said Vanessa. She flashed the smile and gave me a mischievous half-wink.
"His name's Kenny Lukens."
She turned her face toward one exorbitantly fleshy shoulder, thought a second. "No one by that name staying here."
"This would have been three, four days ago."
She shook her head, a little quickly for my taste.
I glanced over toward the counter. "Isn't there a register you could check?"
"Hon," she said, "I only got five rooms."
"He might have used a different name."
I thought her face got just a little less friendly then, protective of her clientele. "That makes it tougher, doesn't it?"
"He's about six-foot, white, has green eyes and hair just longer than a crew cut."
"Different name," she said, "maybe he wanted to be left alone."
I ignored that since I had no answer for it. "He might've been in drag."
"You a cop?"
"No."
That wasn't good enough for Vanessa. She fixed me with big dark steady eyes that coaxed forth more information.
"I . . . I'm . . . I'm a private investigator." There, I'd said it. Aloud and of my own free will. For the first time ever, I believe. I braced myself to be laughed at and unmasked. I waited for disbelief and mockery. It didn't come. "Name's Pete Amsterdam."
Vanessa said, "Somebody paying you, Pete Amsterdam?"
"Excuse me?"
"To make trouble."
"I'm not trying to make trouble."
"Then why you looking for him?"
I licked my lips. PI's had to say hard things sometimes, and they always said them straight. "Because he's dead."
"Dead?"
"The body they found on Tank Island a couple nights ago? That was Kenny Lukens. The police don't seem to know that. They won't learn it from me. He almost was my client. They don't have to know that either, okay? Will you help me out?"
Vanessa took a moment to expel a long slow breath. "Listen, I'm hanging on by a thread here. I can't afford a mess."
"I understand," I said. "I'm asking you to trust me."
She looked at me hard. I stared right back. Two small-timers trying to do the right thing and not get hurt for doing it. Frankly, I was touched by the slimness of our respective chances.
Vanessa said at last, "There was a guy who stayed here that might've been your man. Paid cash. Called himself Josh." She moved behind the counter, flipped a page of the register. "Josh Slocum."
My mouth curled because it so happened that I recognized that alias. Joshua Slocum, New England sea captain, first man ever to sail alone around the world. Wrote a book about it.
"That'd be him," I said.
"Nice person," said Vanessa. "Quiet. Considerate. Nervous though."
"Anybody with him? Anybody visit?"
"No," she said. "All by his lonesome. Paid for three nights, stayed for two. Never came back for his things."
"You still have them?"
She didn't answer, just squeezed her lips together, paused, then gestured for me to follow her. She led me down the hall and out the back door to a courtyard, where a handful of guests were having breakfast next to a big octagonal hot tub. Beyond the tub was a small outbuilding, totally swathed in raspberry-colored bougainvillea. Vanessa's studio apartment. It had African fabrics and pictures of women embracing on the walls. There was a small neat kitchen with many jars of grains and spices.
Vanessa reached into a closet and came out with a yellow nylon duffel, the kind that's shaped like a sausage and opens on top. She handed it to me and I didn't quite know what to do with it; I couldn't haul it on my bike. "Mind if I look through it here?" I asked.
She gave an uneasy shrug, and I dumped the contents onto her bedspread. It made for quite a still life, and I tried not to feel like a ghoul or a voyeur riffling through the stuff. Sweat socks and stockings. Jockstraps and bras. Sandals, pumps; sun-block and eyeliner; panties for every mood and occasion. I told myself I was there not to gape at underwear but to look for clues—which made the process not a jot less weird. Five minutes ago I'd finally fessed up to being a private eye, and here I was, sifting through a corpse's personal effects like I knew what I was doing. The power of the things we call ourselves . . .
I tossed aside razors and rouge, foundation and foot powder, looking for something of consequence. A journal would have been nice, but Kenny Lukens didn't seem to have kept a journal. There wasn't even an address book—but then, a person whose past could kill him any day wouldn't have much use for one. I pocketed a handheld compass, which I thought to give to Maggie as a keepsake. And I took a matchbook that intrigued me—there always has to be a matchbook, right? This one was from a place called Freddy's Beachside on Green Turtle Cay, in the Bahamas. But what I found of interest was a phone number scrawled inside that started with the digits 294. That's a Key West exchange.