In any case, the Harbor Watch condos commanded drop-dead sunset views and, not surprisingly, as I learned from the rank of doorbells, Mickey Veale had one of the primo top-floor units. I rang and waited to be buzzed in.
Instead of a buzz I got the housekeeper; a woman's voice with a heavy Spanish accent, asking who it was.
I announced myself.
"Who?" The tone made it clear I was nobody to her.
I gave her my name again and said it was important.
"You wait one second please."
I waited. A schooner went by. Its sails turned orange as they swiveled toward the sun.
"Meester Veale say he talk to you already."
"He's absolutely right. On that we agree. But I need to talk with him again."
"Please, you wait."
Finally the buzzer buzzed. It sounded grudging and resentful. I went upstairs and found the condo door already open. The housekeeper was standing in the doorway. She was wearing tight pink shorts and had the tails of a lime-green shirt tied against her midriff. Her high shoes gave a pert tilt to her butt but didn't look ideal for vacuuming. She didn't say hello. She said, "Only a few minutes, yes?"
I nodded and stepped past her. I hoped she had other strengths than housekeeping, because the place was basically a mess. Pictures, mostly nudes, hung crooked on the walls. Surfaces were littered with random stacks of paper. There was the oily smell of a stove that needed cleaning.
After a moment Mickey Veale emerged from a hallway. He was a bit of a mess himself. He was wearing enormous, tent-like khaki shorts and a black tank top that was not equal to the task of containing him. Flesh and tufts of hair overflowed the armholes; the crater of his navel could be discerned through the stretched cloth across his belly. He was barefoot; he left pale footprints on the blond wood floor, and the footprints were surrounded by misty auras like breath on glass. He said, "What is it, Amsterdam?"
I told him I had a few more questions.
He said, "I'm pretty busy."
I lied and said that I was too. "So let's not waste time."
He looked at me a moment and sucked his teeth. He was different today, but I couldn't pinpoint just how. Without the casino audience, he seemed less alert, less energized, less bent on performing. His legs were very pale, and this made him seem faintly pathetic. He seemed weary and burdened—but burdened by what? Guilt? Remorse? Or just the banal pressures of trying to run businesses in a town where hardly anybody cared? Resigned, he gestured for me to follow him.
We padded down a corridor his damp feet sucking at the floor. He turned into a den that was chaotic but had a stunning view. He sat down heavily in a rolling chair behind a desk strewn with brochures and invoices and poker chips.
I got distracted by the sunset through the window. The sky was pulsing yellow and the water of the harbor was a copper color; boats trailed chevrons that foamed up white and then turned a patina green. Beyond the harbor and before the Gulf was Sunset Key. Its awnings gleamed and its yellow sand twinkled, and the truth was it didn't look like a Florida Key at all. Florida Keys are shallow domes of muck; the former Tank Island had been sculpted into a Caribbean fantasy of dunes and berms and bulkheads. It was fake but you couldn't say it wasn't pretty in the thick red light. I gestured toward the panorama. "Helluva spot, Mickey."
Dryly he said, "I thought we weren't wasting time."
The comment cut short my rhapsodizing, and I sat on the edge of a straight wooden chair. Wasting time or no, I took a moment to study my host. He had broken capillaries in his eyelids and a tense bulge at the hinge of his jaw. A man with an awful, gnawing secret. Unless it was only my impatience and my fear that made me think so. I said, "Okay, Mickey, then I'll get right to the point. Why were you blackmailing Lefty Ortega?"
He didn't answer immediately. First his neck seemed to thicken with a surge of rising blood, then his face darkened with a flush that was not red but bluish. It dawned on me that here was a guy who would die of stroke. At last he said, "What!"
"I think you heard the question."
He shook his head and tried to smile. The result was toothy and grotesque. He said, "That's ridiculous."
"Maybe. But it would explain some things that are sort of murky otherwise."
"Like what would it explain?" he challenged.
"Like, for instance, why Lefty, on his deathbed, was paranoid that I'd been sent by somebody named Mickey. Like, why Lydia hates your guts and is always siccing me on you, but is too afraid of you to ever make it clear just why."
Veale had folded his hands and was listening carefully, as if he were his own jury. "It's my fault Lydia's a scattered cokehead?"
Cokehead? She hadn't been hopped up when I was there—or had she? That's not the kind of thing I'm very good at noticing. I just marked it down as one more case of Veale and the Ortegas saying nasty things about each other at every opportunity.