———
I learned of it next morning, bicycling to tennis.
Like I said, I don't read newspapers. But I do check out the headlines in the rank of vending machines in front of Fausto's market. There's something bracingly illicit about a quick, unpaid-for peek at the Times, the Journal, The Miami Herald. It pleases me, as well, to refresh each morning my profound incuriosity about what lies beneath the fold; let a banner announce the arrival of Judgment Day, I'll read the first two paragraphs and pedal on.
On this particular morning, however, the headline on the Sentinel grabbed me by the throat, put a burn in my stomach, and sent me scrambling through my tennis bag for quarters, man in woman's clothing killed on sunset key.
The article was brief, because the cops knew almost nothing and the reporter had been squeezed against a deadline. Just after midnight, as the shift was changing for the security guards, a woman had been discovered, crumpled and apparently passed out or asleep, against the metal fence that separated the foreshore from the private property. The patrolling guard, suspecting a homeless person of the type that used to litter Tank Island with soup cans and rusty shopping carts and the remains of campfires, called to the woman, then shook her, then finally realized, when the wig came loose and rolled away, that she was a man, and dead. The police determined that he'd been strangled, then shot in the back, and that he'd been dead about an hour. They had not been able to identify the body. They had no clues and made no surmises about the killing. There were a few details about the crime site: A shallow hole had been dug in the sand, as though someone were burrowing beneath the fence; the victim's arms were stretched out toward the hole; an unregistered dinghy had been pulled up on the beach.
I read this standing on the White Street sidewalk, the heightening sun on the back of my neck, my bicycle balanced between my thighs. I read it and felt . . . what? A sharp though more or less impersonal sorrow that Kenny Lukens wouldn't get to sail around the world. That, and—can I admit it?—some whisper of morbid envy that at least he'd gone with his dream apparently intact. But more than either of those things, I just felt strange. Strange that I'd spoken to someone hours before his killing. Strange that I knew more about it than the cops did, more than the newspaper was able to report. It scared me, this knowledge. I had no idea what to do with it.
I put the paper in my tennis bag, and for a while I just stood there, looking at the ground. Sandals scratched past on the sidewalk. People tied up their dogs and went into Fausto's for groceries. At length I continued rather numbly on my way. Life goes on, right? I didn't know what else to do; I followed my routine. Seeking calm and focus in the magnificent geometry of a tennis court, I showed up at Bayview Park and whipped out my racquet and somehow sleepwalked through two badly losing sets.
Afterward, my opponent, Ozzie Kimmel, said to me, with his usual sportsmanship and tact, "You played like a fuckin' spaz today."
I retreated into the shade of the peeling wooden enclosure where the waiting players sat. "Thanks," I said. "Got a lot on my mind."
"You?"
I ignored the sarcasm. I ignored a lot of things about Ozzie Kimmel, which is why we could still play tennis together and, up to a point, be friends. Ozzie was one of those people who'd been in Key West so long—since the early seventies, when he'd drifted in as a drug-taking, tambourine- banging hippie—that he'd become utterly unfit for living anywhere else. For one thing, he lacked the wardrobe. He played tennis shirtless, in a puke-green bathing suit; I'm not sure he owned a real pair of shoes. His manners and his self- control had atrophied; most people considered him an abrasive loudmouth. Most people were right. His natural mode of communication was the profane, relentless tirade, and he didn't care who he offended, if he even noticed. But what can I say?—I liked him. I'd never heard him say a single thing he didn't mean. And he had a beautiful half volley; he invented it each time with a lack of hurry that was pure Zen. Ozzie drove a cab, had for probably close to twenty years. He knew the town as well as anyone who wasn't born there.
I asked him if he knew anything about Lefty Ortega.
"Why?" he asked me back.
The simple question caught me by surprise. I understood at once that I couldn't answer it. Suddenly I had a secret. Suddenly I was supposed to be discreet, on guard. This was new and awkward and I hated it. "Just curious," I said.
"Old Conch family," said Ozzie. That was the local term for Keys natives. It carried great pride or great derision, depending on who was saying it. "Ya gotta love the Conchs," he volunteered.
"All they do is bitch about the island changing, but do they ever miss a chance to get in bed with a developer? I mean, if they hate change so much, why don't they get off their fat ass and get a fuckin' job so they can afford to keep their land?"