Lydia reached up and cupped her breasts and gave them a little rub. "Did I say that, Pete? No, I didn't say that. Besides, you think he's harmless."
Like a drowning man I flailed after something to grab on to. "No," I said. "Blackmailing your father. It must go back that far."
Lydia pinched her nipples. They looked purple against her bright red fingernails. "Touch them, Pete. I want you to."
I said, "What's in the pouch, then—is it the payoff, or is it whatever it was Veale had on Lefty?"
Lydia sighed, and rustled her behind against the sofa, and abandoned her breasts, and went back to her drink. She took a reckless swallow then shot me a stare that was sardonic and desperate and held, perhaps, some shred of beaten hope.
"Ask your harmless friend," she said.
"For right now I'm asking you."
She ignored that. Her guard was up again and all she wanted was to taunt me. "Or are you too afraid?" she said. "Too afraid to touch me. Too afraid to ask your questions to anybody except a woman. Are you always such a coward, Pete?"
"I guess I am," I said, and rose to go.
Her insults dogged me as I went. I was gutless. I was sexless. I looked back once from the living room archway. Lydia's eyes were wide with fury and her body had hunched like she was throwing punches. All I could think of was a drowning swimmer who would flail and claw and fight off any chance of rescue.
27
If I'd been pale when I arrived at Lydia's, I was paler when I left.
Nothing was making sense to me. No, that's not true—certain things were beginning to fit together, I just didn't like where they were taking me. I'm basically lazy and I'm basically chicken— Lydia, damn her, had got that right. I'd wanted a quick and easy answer as to what the pouch contained, not another sordid wrinkle about blackmail. I'd been looking for a facile breakthrough that would get me out of danger, not some tangled hints that sucked me in still deeper. And the last thing I'd wanted was to be pushed into a confrontation with Mickey Veale.
Yet as I climbed onto my bike in the shadow of 2000 Atlantic, it was pretty clear that that's what needed to happen next.
Suddenly I had a bellyache. Maybe it was dread at the thought of sitting down with Veale, maybe it was the sludging up of little tubes and valves that occurs when sexual arousal goes too long unfulfilled. It seemed like twice a day I got sexed up and weirded out by Lydia, sexed up and shot down by Maggie. This could not be good for a guy's fragile plumbing.
I pedaled off, settling only gingerly on the hot and bouncing seat. I didn't know how to find Mickey Veale, but Paradise Watersports seemed the logical place to start. I headed across town toward the Hyatt.
Without really thinking about it, I took the shortcut through the cemetery. Once inside the fence, amid the croton bushes and the leaning headstones and the plastic flowers that the Cubans leave, I wished I hadn't. I couldn't help picturing Lefty Ortega, freshly cemented in his crypt. Morbidly I wondered how decomposed he'd be by now, what became of tumors when their victims had died. It was around five-thirty and still hot as hell; the slanting sun baked the unshaded walls of the mausoleums, and I wondered if bodies ever exploded in there. I pedaled faster till I was out the other side.
When I reached the harbor, I locked my bike and walked onto the dock where the Jet Ski concession was. I found the goofy kid with the lanyard around his neck. He went into his pitch like he'd never seen me before. To him I was just a tourist, after all, a wallet with a sunburn but no face.
"I was here yesterday," I reminded him.
He stalled at the part about how great sunset was. "Oh yeah," he lied. "I remember now. Ohio, right?"
"Jersey," I said. "Except I'm not. I'm from right here. And I need to speak with Mickey."
The kid stared at me. I couldn't tell if he was cautious or cagey or just plain dense. After a long moment I said, "So where is he?"
"I don't know."
"Where does he live? Does he have an office?"
"I don't know."
"He's your boss and he's a first-name kind of guy," I said. "I think you do."
The kid looked down at the water.
And then a strange thing happened. I found myself doing what a private eye does. Not posing, not pretending—doing it. I reached into a pocket and came up with a twenty. Folding it crisply, I slipped it to the kid between two fingers. When he took it I grabbed him by the wrist. Not real hard, just hard enough so that he'd pay attention. And sure enough, he told me that Mickey Veale mainly worked out of his condo at Harbor Watch.
So I pedaled off that way.
Harbor Watch was the fanciest of the developments crammed in recent years onto former navy property, and if it was true, as Ozzie Kimmel argued, that Key West had been divvied into fiefdoms, then it made perfect sense that Mickey Veale would live there. Cede the oceanfront to the Ortegas, keep the harbor side for himself. Fitting too was the reputation of Harbor Watch as the haunt of parvenus and millionaire snowbirds who didn't quite belong. Not more than six blocks from Duval Street, the place just didn't feel like part of the town; somehow the old grim military boundaries lived on in the imagination, made the area feel more like a base than a neighborhood.