The Naked Detective(50)

The power of suggestion instantly kicked in. I pursed my lips and pictured emeralds. I pictured pearls. I pictured super-fast computer chips. Then I said, "Wait a second. I have no idea if they were really smuggling."

Ozzie snickered as he reached into his bag for one of his appalling tank tops. "Okay," he said, "they weren't smuggling. They just felt like going for a little ride at four a.m. What were you, born yesterday?"

The question hung there as Ozzie's head briefly disappeared into his torn and faded shirt. I had a moment blurrily to reflect on all the things that had surprised me lately, all my recent blind-sidings by the unwholesome and illicit moves that people made. "You know," I said, "sometimes I think I was."





25


Finally I got to go to sleep, and you can bet I made the most of it.

I didn't toss. I didn't dream. I stayed down till 3:00 p.m., by which time the full heat of the day had collected and compressed in my upstairs bedroom, and I woke at last, as puffy and moist as a dumpling in a steamer. The pillow was wet beneath my head. The sheet was wet on top of me. This might sound gross but it felt totally wonderful. It was a jungle feeling, generative and raw. It suggested vines and parrots and lovemaking on piles of hot leaves.

I lay there awhile, savoring, then threw off the sheet and rolled over to a dry part of the bed. A new batch of sensations followed, no less delicious than the first. Evaporation cooled me; I tingled at the collarbones and hairline. I felt moisture wicking off my back, the skin shrinking ever so slightly as dampness was coaxed from it. Truth was, I could have been perfectly content for several hours, just lolling there, rolling, folding arms and legs in different combinations, trying out various configurations of sheets and pillows. Why not? Out in the world, things were befuddling and frustrating and complicated. Here, all was simplicity and peace. What's wrong with avoiding aggravation?

But finally, reluctantly, I rose from bed. I headed for the shower, then decided, no, I'd start off with a cool plunge in the pool. I grabbed a towel and went downstairs. Padded through the kitchen and out the sliding door to the sun-baked deck.

But I never made it into the water. I looked down and saw a pair of dead rats floating there, spinning lazily on the current from the pump.

They were palm rats—smaller and less filthy than their urban cousins, but rats nonetheless, and plenty unappetizing. They were just beginning to bloat. Their sparse fur had corkscrewed into tufts between which were lewd bare patches of stretched skin whose color was an ugly pinkish taupe. Their eyes were closed but the lids were an appalling red; their ears seemed to have grown soggy, and futile whiskers floated on the surface. Their tails had been tied together.

With a disgusted fascination, I watched awhile as the rats spun in their morbid circuit, and tried to figure out the meaning of this. Why two rats? Why tied together? Did they symbolize the two murdered men? Lefty and Lydia Ortega? I watched them and pondered. Sometimes their tails stretched out full length, then twanged back, pulling the corpses close together as in a dance routine. Maybe I was reading too much into this. There were two to make it twice as nasty. They were tied together so that I would know a human hand had intervened, that these were not simply unfortunate or klutzy rats that had fallen from a tree. They were supposed to scare me.

They did scare me, but in a delayed-reaction kind of way. I was still too groggy to get frightened all at once. Besides, I had practical matters to deal with. I had to get the rats out of the pool before they decomposed and gummed up the works.

I went over to the shrubbery and started looking for a stick. Call me squeamish—I don't like to touch dead things. If this is a superstition, it's a pretty primal one, I'd bet, based on the notion of death itself as a contagious particle, the mother of all germs. In any case, I found a fallen frond with a good hard spine, then waited for the rats to do a final do-si-do over to my side of the pool. I scooped them by the knot in their tails; they hung down like a pair of sausages; water dribbled from their mouths. I flung them back into the bushes. They spun slowly like the weighted snare that cowboys from the pampas use, then crashed through leaves and twigs and came to rest somewhere out of sight.

I shuddered and tossed away the frond. I looked down at the pool but there was no way I was getting in it so soon after death had visited. It occurred to me to put an extra chlorine tablet in the bobber. Then I sat down in a lounge chair; and finally the fear caught up with me, slow and whispering at first, then clamorous and strangling.

I'd just been put on notice that someone capable of killing was extremely pissed off at me. And all at once it seemed that, in everything I'd done so far, I'd been stupidly cavalier, careless and unserious. My approach had been pure Key West. Which is to say I'd been blundering along through a haze of heat and goofiness as though the standards of the outside world did not apply, as if doing things smilingly half-ass was good enough, because the whole thing was basically one big joke. To an extent that seemed suddenly incredible, I'd overlooked the simple facts that violence was violence, and murder was murder, and death was death, wherever you happened to be.