Bad Monkey

Six

The typical Key West murder is a drunken altercation over debts, dope or dance partners. Premeditated robbery-homicides are rare because they require a level of planning and sober enterprise seldom encountered among the island’s indolent felons.

Charles Phinney was already dead when Yancy reached his side. He lay fish-eyed and soaked with blood, the pockets of his black jeans jerked inside out. His companion, who turned out not to be a hooker, said the killer rolled up on a blue moped, shot Phinney twice, stole his cash and took off. She said the man wore a camo sun mask and a red or orange rain poncho, which would have drawn notice anywhere except Margaret Street on a Friday night.

Because of the location of the crime, the city police—not the sheriff’s office—would be handling the investigation. Uniformed officers taped off the intersection at Caroline and kept the crowd back while a paramedic pounded for show on Phinney’s chest. Keith Fitzpatrick, whose leathery face had drained to gray, hung around until the kid’s body was loaded into an ambulance. Then he said he was going home and drink himself to sleep.

Yancy remained at the scene with Phinney’s girlfriend. Her name was Madeline and she worked at a T-shirt shop on Duval. She said the shop was owned by Russian gangsters, and that’s who killed Phinney.

“They must’ve heard him braggin’ about the money,” she said.

Yancy asked how much he was carrying.

“Thousand bucks, maybe.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“A job.” Madeline sniffed and looked away. Tears streaked her chalky makeup.

Yancy said, “What was he dealing—coke? Meth?”

Madeline turned back with a narrow look. “You a cop or something?”

“I’m on sabbatical.” Which was true enough.

She wiped her eyes. “I never seen anybody get shot before. Goddamn.” She said she and Phinney had been dating only a month or so. “He was selling pot,” she added.

Yancy noticed her reading his reaction, trying to figure out if he believed her.

He said, “So what happened was he made a big score and quit his job on the Misty.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“And you really think your bosses killed him for a grand?”

Madeline seemed to be reconsidering her theory. “Will I have to, like, go to court?”

“If there’s a trial, sure.”

“Thing is, Charlie was talkin’ all over town. The Russians weren’t the only ones knew he had a wad.” She shrugged. “Could’ve been anybody that shot him.”

Yancy overheard one of the city detectives say that the blue moped was a rental. It had already been found, abandoned in an alley off Southard.

“I can’t afford to lose my job,” Madeline said. She wore her bleached hair in a spiky crop. Her hands were rough and her eyes were old-looking. Yancy figured she had fifteen years on Phinney.

“You got a smoke?” she said. “I’m comin’ apart here.”

“I quit a long time ago. Sorry.”

“Oh. You’re one of them.”

Yancy picked a virgin Marlboro off the pavement. It was the same one Phinney was mouthing when he’d walked out of the oyster bar, the one he had paused to light when the robber on the moped shot him.

Madeline took the dead man’s cigarette from Yancy’s hand and said, “Why the hell not?”

• • •

That same night, 264 miles away, a man on the eastern coast of Andros Island lightly tapped on the door of a woman known as the Dragon Queen. When she let him in, the man, whose name was Neville, said, “I need some woo-doo on a white mon.”

The Dragon Queen sat down in a flaking wicker chair. “What de hell’s wrong wit your boy dere? He dont look right.”

“Dot’s not my boy,” Neville said. “Dot’s a monkey I look ahfta.”

He’d won the animal in a game of dominoes with a sponger from Fresh Creek. The sponger told him it was the same monkey from the Johnny Depp pirate movies, which were filmed nearby in the Exumas. Neville named his new pet Driggs and he fed him too much deep-fried food. Before long the monkey got wrinkled and tufts of fur began falling out. He defiantly refused housebreaking so Neville made him wear disposable baby diapers with holes cut out for his tail. Now the nearly hairless creature was hugging Neville’s left leg and chittering in dread of the voodoo woman.

She rocked forward to squint. “He sure dont favor you, suh. Bettuh talk to de missus and find out who she been messin’ wit, ha!”

Neville let it go. The Dragon Queen was either far-sighted or wasted, possibly both.

“Who dis white devil you wish to be rid of?” she asked.

“He go by de name Chrissofer.”

Neville presented a bottle of Bacardi 8, which he had traded for a bucket of conch meat and two hogfish with the captain of a yacht anchored in the South Bight. It was well known that the Dragon Queen was partial to good rum.

“You got any ting belongs to dis mon?”

“Piece a shoyt.” Neville unfolded a teal-colored part of a sports shirt of the vented style that American sportsmen wore to the bonefish lodges. Neville had recovered the fragment from Christopher’s garbage can.

He said, “I want you pudda spell on ’im.”

The Dragon Queen had a pink batik scarf swirled ’round her head, and a necklace strung with polished bivalves. She took the piece of the white man’s shirt and sniffed it.

“I do dis ting fuh you, he might go’n die,” she said.

Neville thought about it. “Whatever God’s will.”

“Where de white mon aht?”

“Bannister Point. Dey said yestuhdey he go eat lunch aht de conch shack in Rocky Town. ’Im and his woman.”

“He like dot place, huh?” The Dragon Queen opened the rum and filled a stained coffee mug. She didn’t offer any to Neville, which was fine. He was nervous being in the same house, her house, because of her reputation as a wanton man-eater. Three of her much younger boyfriends had fallen dead under murky circumstances. A fourth had fled Andros, supposedly to Cuba. Neville concentrated on avoiding the Dragon Queen’s gaze, which was said to bewitch even the strongest of men.

She asked about Christopher’s woman. “A white lady?”

“Yeah,” Neville said. “She come ’n’ go.”

“Wot her name?”

“I dunno. She keep to huhself, same as ’im.”

“So, tell me why you wish bod fuh dis mon.” The Dragon Queen was smiling now. She had a mashed-up nose and the overbite of an ancient tortoise.

Neville said, “Juss so he get off de island, no matter how.”

“All right, suh.”

She traced her callused brown fingers along the strip of fabric, which was coiled like a boa in her lap. “He not a Bahamian, dis white devil. He not from Freeport or Abaco.”

“No, ma’am, dot’s true. He from de States.”

“Den woo-doo must be extra strong. Cost more, too, you unnerstahn.”

“All right.”

“Bring me nodder bottle a rum.”

Neville nodded. “Dot I will.”

“And next time, you stay ’round to keep me comp’ny. But not tonight.” The Dragon Queen pointed to the door.

Neville’s heart was hammering as he got on his bike and pedaled away down the scraped coral path. The diapered monkey, riding on Neville’s head, maintained his perch by clinging fiercely to Neville’s ears. His tiny fingertips were moist and the nails felt sharp. Neville was grateful for the moonlight that helped him find his way.

Desperation had driven him to visit the voodoo lady. The white man named Christopher was planning to put up a resort for rich tourists on a stretch of waterfront where Neville lived, where his father and grandfather had lived before him. Recently Neville had been ordered to pack up and move. A letter was delivered saying his half-sister in Canada had sold the family property on Andros and upon closing would send Neville his share of the proceeds, which he didn’t want.

What he wanted was to live and die on the beach, under the shade of casuarinas.

Nobody at the government office in Lizard Cay or even Nassau could straighten out the situation, so with trepidation Neville had turned to the Dragon Queen. He was unaware that his problem lay beyond her supernatural powers and was in fact connected to faraway criminal events in the Florida Keys, including the cold-blooded murder that very evening of a foolhardy boat mate named Charles Phinney.

Neville’s bicycle jounced off a rocky divot as he coasted downhill, and a sharp pinch of pain caused him to cry out. “Bod monkey! Bod monkey!”

But the frightened animal kept his teeth buried in Neville’s scalp until they skidded to a stop in front of the house.

Yancy got home around midnight and rolled a joint. The stuff was called Trainwreck yet it failed to knock him into a proper stupor. Although he’d seen a number of dead gunshot victims, he remained disturbed by the pooled emptiness in Charlie Phinney’s eyes.

A check of his cell phone revealed, to his surprise, three messages from three different women. It had been eons since such a fine thing had happened.

The first caller was Bonnie Witt, formerly known as Plover Chase, who’d called from Sarasota to leave the following voice mail: “Hey, it’s me. Don’t get all hot and bothered, but I’ve been thinking impure thoughts about you. Cliff hasn’t touched me in ages because he’s experimenting with autoerotic asphyxiation—you know, where guys beat off while they’re faux-strangling themselves? Very classy. Anyhow, he’s a total klutz, as you know, so I’m pretty sure he’s going to hang himself to death one of these nights in the broom closet. Twice already I found him passed out on the floor, blue as a jellyfish. And yesterday he showed me how to use a portable defibrillator, just in case he screws up. I guess what I’m saying, Andrew—and God knows I don’t expect you to wait around—I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’ll be single again soon. Anyway, give me a call.”

The second voice mail was from Dr. Rosa Campesino, whom Yancy had texted during an idle period at the crime scene, while detectives were interviewing Phinney’s girlfriend. The pathologist sounded very interested to hear that the shark tooth she’d tweezered from the severed arm belonged to a small specimen, possibly an inshore species:

“That definitely raises the possibility of foul play. This boat captain you spoke with, would you consider him an expert? Just to be sure, you should send the tooth to the Rosenstiel School at the University of Miami. They’ve got some of the top shark people in the world. Maybe you could keep me posted on how this all sorts out, okay? Also … well, I want to apologize for telling a small lie the day you came to the office. I’m not really married to a sniper on the SWAT team. Actually, I’m not married at all. Sorry I jerked you around—just wasn’t in the mood for lunch.”

The last message was from Caitlin Cox, estranged daughter of the late Nicholas Stripling, who said: “Sorry to hassle you on a weekend, Inspector, but remember what I told you at the funeral? About my stepmother, that greedy hose monster? Well, now I’ve got proof! Seriously, it’s a lock. So call me right away. I mean, if you want to be a big fucking hero and solve this case.”

It was an avalanche of information for a stoned person to absorb. Yancy kicked off his flip-flops and stretched out on the kitchen counter and blinked up at the curled ceiling panels. A mental picture of Dr. Clifford Witt masturbating bug-eyed with a noose around his neck caused Yancy to wonder if Bonnie’s husband had actually enjoyed the vacuum-cleaner assault that had cost Yancy his detective job. The phone message gave him no reason to believe Bonnie would come rushing back to the Keys, even if freed by widowhood from Clifford’s grasp. Yancy leaned toward the hard-edged view that she was regretting her tipsy confession and was angling to keep his hopes for romance alive so that he wouldn’t spill the beans about her fugitive status.

The call from Rosa Campesino was more intriguing, as it opened a door to future communications and possibly a date. At least that’s how Yancy chose to construe her words. He’d never wooed a coroner and wasn’t sure how to read the signals. He would replay radiant Rosa’s message tomorrow, when his head was clear.

Finally, there was Caitlin Cox. Yancy doubted that she had absolute proof her father had been murdered, but she might have stumbled across something worth knowing. He decided to meet with her, and not just because he was bored out of his skull on roach patrol. Yancy felt a cop-like responsibility to sort out the truth about Nick Stripling, whose severed arm had been the centerpiece of Yancy’s freezer during all those days when nobody had wanted it.

Furthermore, Yancy perceived—even under the woozy sway of ganja—an opportunity for redemption in the event that Eve Stripling really had killed her husband and tried to make it look like a boat accident. If Yancy, riding solo, was able to nail the widow for homicide, what else could Sheriff Sonny Summers do but reinstate him to the force?

That was Yancy’s last fanciful thought before floating to sleep on the kitchen counter, and awaking hours later to the sound of a scream.