Bad Monkey

Eight

The salesman at the Ford dealership informed Eve Stripling that the import duty on a new SUV in the Bahamas was 75 percent, a figure she made him repeat. After doing the math in her head, she realized that the new Explorer she’d been eyeing would cost, like, sixty-five grand.

“That’s robbery,” she observed.

“But I’m afraid it’s the law,” the salesman said sadly.

“My boyfriend’ll never pay that much.”

Eve walked off the lot thinking how strange it sounded when she said the word “boyfriend,” strange but also sort of exciting. She took a taxi back to town, complaining to the driver about the outrageous tariffs on automobiles. The driver said he’d paid almost fifty-two thousand dollars for his cab, a used Dodge minivan he’d located on Craigslist in Hialeah. Eve was genuinely outraged on his behalf.

Stopping at an outdoor bar, she ordered a Nassau Nemesis, one of many colorful rum beverages concocted for tourists. Parked on the street was a yellow Jeep Wrangler with a hard top instead of canvas. A For Sale sign was taped to the windshield. Eve inspected the vehicle, which appeared to be in good condition except for a thumb-sized rust spot on the hood.

She drank another Nemesis and asked the bartender to play some UB40. Then she ordered fried grouper fingers and carelessly dribbled hot sauce on the crotch of her white jeans. Normally she would have been mortified, but the booze was kicking in hard. She tucked a paper napkin over her lap and asked for a basket of fried shrimp, which she was heartily demolishing when the owner of the yellow Jeep showed up carrying groceries. Eve hurried to the street, her napkin flapping.

“How much you want for it?” she called out.

The woman set her bags in the Wrangler’s back seat. “Toidy towsend,” she said to Eve.

“No way. Twenty-five.”

“Wot!”

“Plus we need it barged down to Andros,” Eve said.

“Twenty-eight if you pay’n cash. Where you ship it, dot’s your prollem.”

Eve went to see the Bay Street banker who was their new best friend and withdrew the money for the Jeep, which she drove sinuously to the waterfront. There she connected with a craggy white Bahamian who agreed to barge the car to Victoria Creek for a thousand dollars. Eve haggled briefly and without much starch. Her mission had been to purchase wheels and, by God, that’s what she’d done.

On her way to the airport she called him in Miami. “You’ll like it,” she said. “It’s super sporty!”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s bright yellow, honey. I’m gonna call it Yellow Bird, like the song.”

“And this is your idea of what a new widow should be driving? Something sporty?”

Eve sighed. “Where we’re goin’, who’s gonna know? A whole new life is what you said. Isn’t that the whole point?”

“The point is not to stand out like a couple of dumbass expats. Staying under the radar, understand? Yellow Jeep, might as well ring a fucking cowbell every time we drive to town.”

He sounded on edge. Eve couldn’t blame him, all the pressure he’d been under. Both of them, actually—though at the moment she was feeling exceptionally smooth and ironed out, thanks to the rum buzz.

She said, “Honey, everything’s gonna be fine. Take a deep breath.”

“How much did they stick you for?”

“Twenty-eight even.”

“Automatic or stick?”

“You are too much.”

“White would have been a smarter color. Black even.”

“Boring. We’re islanders now, remember? You with the orange poncho.”

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“Soon as Claspers fuels up the plane.”

“Tell him to hurry.”

“Does that mean you miss me?”

“I can’t wait to get the fuck outta here is what it means.”

Eve laughed drowsily and said, “See you soon.”

A government man came all the way from Nassau to inform Neville that it was time to move. The sale of the family homestead to the white American named Christopher was official, the closing documents filed. Neville held no voice in the matter because his half sister, Diana, was the legal trustee. She lived full-time in Toronto with her acupuncturist fiancé and rarely came back to Andros, not even for homecomings. The government man told Neville he’d soon be receiving a cashier’s check for $302,000 Bahamian, which was half the property’s purchase price minus the broker’s commission, bank fees, lawyers and so on.

When Neville replied that he had no use for the money, the government man thought he was joking.

Neville didn’t have a wife but his three girlfriends heard he was about to become rich and started making demands. To get away he took his boat down to Mars Bay and went fishing for a few days. His only companion was Driggs the almost hairless monkey, whose unnerving resemblance to a psoriatic human delinquent served to keep both friends and strangers at a distance.

The patch reefs were teeming with groupers and mutton snappers, but Neville’s mood remained morose. He was deeply disappointed that the Dragon Queen’s voodoo spell had failed to waylay the mysterious Christopher and his lady friend. Currently the couple was renting a private home on the water near Bannister Point. Neville had yet to lay eyes on the man, who was rumored to wear a bright poncho and carry a gun.

As for the woman, Neville saw her for the first time when she stepped off a private seaplane at Rocky Town. She was kind of chubby though pretty: dark reddish hair and fair skin, with a spray of cinnamon freckles. The doctor flies attacked her hungrily, and both legs were trickling blood by the time she made it to the car.

Neville didn’t know anybody who knew her name. He didn’t know it, either.

What Christopher intended to do with the beachfront property had been the topic of many rumors, but the government man confirmed to Neville that an exclusive resort was planned, a private club offering time-shares to be rented out as luxury hotel suites. The marketing would aim at wealthy Americans, Brits and Asians. There would be a geisha-style spa, two freshwater pools, a tiki bar and a four-star Caribbean restaurant. Also: cabanas, kayaks, paddleboards, snorkeling—even clay tennis courts!

The first phase of construction would be twenty-five units. Andros being the largest and most undeveloped island in the Bahamas, the prime minister himself had promised to fly in for the groundbreaking.

“Dey gon call it Curly Tail Lane,” the government man told Neville.

Curly-tailed lizards were common throughout Andros. The stout little reptiles were bold and quick, and their twitchy courtship dance was always a hit with little children and tourists. Although Neville had no quarrel with the lizards, he thought Curly Tail Lane was a stupid name for Christopher’s building project.

“Green Beach is wot my grandfahdda always call de place.”

“Maybe once ’pon a time,” the government man said.

“Dis some bullshit,” Neville told him.

“Mon, you got a poymit fuh dot sick-ass monkey?”

Neville said, “Get off my land.”

He spent two extra days down at Mars Bay because an east wind blew twenty knots, and Driggs was prone to seasickness. The ice in the cooler melted, so Neville ended up giving all his fish to the cook at an eco-lodge in exchange for another bottle of rum, with which he hoped to recharge the Dragon Queen.

However, upon returning to Lizard Cay, Neville saw that Christopher’s crew had ripped out his wooden dock, every damn piling. He anchored his boat behind a neighbor’s place, leashed Driggs to the porch rail and hurried barefoot down the rocky cratered road. A new chain-link fence surrounded his land, complete with a padlocked gate and a No Trespassing sign. Neville scaled the fence and ran through the trees until he came to a rubble of blue cinder blocks where his family house had stood.

He fell to his knees and, because he was alone, sobbed freely. Then he pulled himself together, walked over to Christopher’s backhoe and urinated copiously into the fuel tank.

Yancy’s father was retired from the National Park Service though he still lived in Gardiner, Montana, at the north entrance of Yellowstone. Every summer Yancy would fly out to fish for cutthroats on Slough Creek, or do a float down to Yankee Jim Canyon. He looked forward to these visits but this year he couldn’t go.

“I’m working on a big case,” he told his dad on the phone. “A possible homicide.”

“Well, sure. I understand.”

“Sorry, Pop.”

“Maybe I can come down to the Keys and throw at some tarpon. I’ll stay out of your hair.”

Yancy said, “It’s just not a good time.”

He didn’t have the spine to admit that he’d lost his detective badge and gotten busted down to roach patrol. Too well he remembered his father’s heartsick reaction after he was canned by the Miami Police Department, a crushing setback that had occurred shortly after Yancy’s mother was lost to cancer. Yancy couldn’t bear to hear such disappointment in the old man’s voice again.

“Maybe we can fish together in the fall,” he said.

“I’m going on a steelhead trip to BC. You’d have a ball, Andrew.”

“Sign me up.”

Somebody was knocking on Yancy’s door. It was Miguel, the bee guy. He was wearing a full-on beekeeper suit, including a hooded veil.

He winked behind the mesh at Yancy and said, “Excuse me, sir. Tonight we will be removing a serious motherfucking honeybee hive from the structure next door. Until then perhaps you should stay inside. Unfortunately, the bees have been disturbed.”

“I appreciate the warning.”

Miguel winked again and cut his eyes toward the construction site. Evan Shook was watching from his Suburban, in which he had sealed himself against the ruthless swarm.

“A risky situation,” Miguel said, “but we are utmostly professionals.”

“That I can see.”

“Your neighbor, Señor Shook, he was stung many times. Lucky for him he is not allergic.”

“Nor am I,” Yancy said.

“Still, I would not take chances. Do you have any pets? Smallish children? You understand I must ask these questions. Would you be owning a pacemaker?”

Yancy was happy to play along. “No, sir. And I live here all by myself.”

“Excellent. We will be done by midnight.” Miguel went through the motions of handing Yancy a business card. “In case you are ever likewise troubled with bees. You can phone day or night. Also I am on Skype.”

“Good luck with that hive,” said Yancy.

“Vaya con Dios.”

“Seriously?”

Miguel smiled. “Shut your fucking windows, Andrew.”

Yancy buttoned up the house and headed down to Key West, where he’d set up lunch at a terrific Cuban place on Flagler with an ex–Border Patrol agent now working for Homeland Security. The man owed Yancy a favor and he stepped up big-time, bringing a printout that detailed the recent foreign travels of Mrs. Eve Stripling.

Caitlin Cox had said her stepmother was in the Bahamas, not Paris, at the time her father’s boat went down off Marathon. Caitlin’s proof was Eve’s phone bill, which showed numerous roaming charges from a wireless company based in Nassau. To Yancy, Caitlin had admitted stealing the bill from the mailbox at her father’s home in the hope of establishing the identity of Eve’s secret lover. Caitlin was certain such a man existed because she’d spotted her stepmother buying a swimsuit and designer flip-flops at a Bal Harbour boutique, two days before Nick Stripling’s funeral. Caitlin was there shopping for a black dress.

Mindful of her motive, which was gaining access to her late father’s wealth, Yancy nonetheless found the tip intriguing. Caitlin’s suspicions seemed to be partially confirmed in the records provided by his Homeland Security connection—Eve Stripling had in fact gone to Paris, although for only a week. Then she flew back to the United States, clearing Customs at JFK before taking a nonstop to Nassau. It was nineteen days later that she returned to South Florida on a private seaplane that landed at Watson Island. There she paid duty on thirty-four hundred dollars of women’s clothes and a ten-karat-gold men’s wedding band, which, according to her declaration documents, had cost a whopping one hundred and ninety-nine bucks. Yancy assumed it was the same gold band Eve had switched out for Nick Stripling’s expensive platinum one before burying his abbreviated remains.

Interestingly, she’d bought the replacement ring in the Bahamas before returning to Florida and reporting her husband missing at sea. The purchase made no sense unless she’d already known that Nick was dead and that his ring finger had been recovered, attached to his floating arm.

Yancy felt so energized by this disclosure that he picked up the twenty-eight-dollar meal tab, even though he’d barely touched his picadillo due to a suspicious-looking olive. Of late he was subsisting mostly on Popsicles and so-called energy bars, which came hygienically machine-sealed in foil although they settled in his stomach like bricks of industrial glue.

His friend from Homeland Security got up and said, “Thanks for lunch, Andrew. But anybody asks, we never talked.”

Yancy grinned. “Hell, I don’t even know your name.”

A squall blew across the island and Yancy drove around Old Town waiting for the rain to quit. On Fleming Street he passed Fausto’s grocery and thought of Bonnie, a.k.a. Plover Chase. With improbable ease he rejected the impulse to dial her number. Perhaps he was finally, at age forty-two, growing up.

He parked on Eaton Street and made his way to Duval. Even in the dead of summer it was crawling with overfed tourists courtesy of the cruise ships, which Yancy considered a vile and ruinous presence in the harbor. After grabbing a beer at the Margaritaville café he began searching the T-shirt shops for Madeline, girlfriend of the late Charles Phinney. He found her at a place called Chest Candy, which aggressively catered to strippers, transvestites and aspiring nymphomaniacs. The display window featured a blond-wigged mannequin wearing a diaphanous tank top with sequined lettering that said: CUM TOGETHER.

Again Madeline spooked when she saw Yancy, only this time there was no place to run. She yelled for the store manager, a sallow twit named Pestov who vanished as soon as Yancy inquired about his immigration status.

After locking the front door behind himself, Yancy cornered Madeline and asked what the hell was going on.

“I got a lawyer! So watch it.”

“Why do you need a lawyer?”

She said, “You told me you weren’t a cop.”

“I said not at the moment.”

Some dork wearing Teva sandals and black socks started rattling the doorknob. Yancy shooed her away. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said to Madeline.

“The cops think I set Charlie up to get ripped off.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Three times they had me in for questioning. What’d you tell them? Jesus, I need a smoke.”

Yancy said, “The police never even interviewed me.”

Madeline’s hands were trembling as she lighted up. “I’m gonna lose my damn job.”

“They’d be doing you a favor.”

She said, “I wouldn’t never hurt Charlie. He treated me good.”

“I believe you, Madeline. But I can’t help unless you tell me the truth. So let’s start over, okay?”

“Not here,” she whispered, glancing behind her. “The Russians, man!”

“Screw the Russians.” Yancy poked his face into the back room and said, “Yo, Madeline’s taking the afternoon off.”

“Is fine,” Pestov muttered sullenly from a closet.

“Thank you, comrade. And God bless America!”

Yancy drove Madeline out to Stoney’s, which naturally had been her and Phinney’s all-time favorite restaurant. They took a two-top in a corner and from the unkempt server Yancy was pleased to learn Brennan was away in Homestead, probably stocking up on frozen tilapia that would later be promoted to fresh swordfish on the menu.

Madeline asked for a vodka tonic and Yancy ordered a Coke.

She said, “I lied. I don’t really have a lawyer.”

“They tend to charge a fee.”

“Which I have about forty bucks to my name.”

“What have the cops told you?” Yancy asked.

“I got a record is the problem. Grand theft a long time ago, shoplifting, whatever. Plus they found out I’m way behind on my Visa card and also my rent, so I guess they think I lined up someone to shoot Charlie and take a cut of the cash. But I didn’t!”

Yancy believed Madeline, for he knew more about the murder investigation than she did. One of his fishing pals was a city police lieutenant who’d told him that the rented moped used in the robbery had been wiped totally clean of prints, even the gas cap and side mirrors, demonstrating an attention to detail not common among the local dirtbag element. The killer’s weapon hadn’t been found but the .357 shell casings and bullet fragments belonged to 158-grain Winchester hollow points, a premium load for a low-rent street crime.

Yancy said, “Tell me again how much cash Phinney was carrying.”

Madeline paused before answering. “Maybe twelve hundred bucks?”

“Last time you said it was a grand.”

“Well, I didn’t go through his fucking wallet and count it!” She took a slurp of vodka.

“You also told me he got the money from a dope deal.” Yancy was watching her eyes, which flitted everywhere but in his direction. “Who was he selling to, Madeline?”

“I never met the dude. What difference does it make?”

“Maybe Charlie overcharged him. Or maybe the stuff turned out to be stinkweed and the customer got pissed off.”

“No, no, that’s not it,” she said. “Everybody in town knew Charlie was carrying that money. He wouldn’t stop talkin’ about it. They probably followed us to the Half Shell that night and waited outside.”

Over the years Yancy had interviewed enough witnesses to know when one was winging it. Usually they were just trying to cover their own asses, a practice also favored by law enforcement professionals although Yancy had never quite gotten the hang of it. He told Madeline she had two minutes to come clean, and right away she began to shake and cry. Yancy scooted his chair closer and put an arm around her.

“Everything I told the cops is true except about the cash,” she said. “Charlie didn’t get it from sellin’ grass.”

“Did he steal it from someone?”

“No! He would never.” Her breath was stale and her hair smelled like an ashtray.

“Then where’d he get the money, Madeline?”

She pawed at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “It’s pretty fucked up,” she said.

“I need to know before I can help.”

“But you’re not even a real cop.”

Yancy gritted it out. “I’m on loan to another department, that’s all. Temporarily assigned. Now tell me the whole story.”

And Madeline was right. It was fucked up.

On the charter docks of South Florida there had evolved among a handful of unscrupulous captains a method of duping inept out-of-towners for extra money. The key prop in the scam was typically an Atlantic sailfish, caught on a previous trip and stored on ice in an aft hatch inaccessible to the paying clientele.

Once the boat was at sea, a mate first baited the outriggers and then the flat lines, which were trolled closer to the boat and often enhanced with a skirted plastic lure. Thus began a sporting day, with high hopes among the unsuspecting anglers. When the time was right, one of the mates would distract them with a clamorous false sighting of jumping porpoises or a cruising hammerhead shark, which the customers always pretended to see as they didn’t wish to be regarded as clueless rubes.

Binoculars were handed out and the anglers were directed to the bow of the ship in order to improve their view. At this juncture the mate would remove the dead sailfish from the cold hatch and covertly hook it to one of the flat lines. Once the jelly-eyed corpse was dropped in the water, the forward motion of the boat carried it back into the frothy wake.

A cry of “Fish on!” would go out, and one of the hapless sports—usually a hungover husband—would come lurching back to the cockpit, snatch the rod from the mate’s grasp and begin reeling like a madman. The boat’s towing of the limp billfish created enough natural drag to test the flabby muscles of most novices. Later they would brag to their pals back home that they’d whipped the sonofabitch in five minutes flat. As further testament to human vanity, no suspicions would be voiced over the odd fact that their trophy sailfish, a species renowned for its acrobatics, never once jumped out of the water.

At boatside, the mate would cap the charade by pretending to wrestle the prize into an unlocked fish box, where the entire party of numskulls could peek at it and snap pictures to their hearts’ content. The coup de grâce would occur back at dockside when the captain persuaded the lucky angler to have his catch mounted, later to be displayed on the paneled wall of his real estate office or perhaps in the family den. A tidy deposit would be forthcoming, divided by the captain and mates, and a few months later the client would receive via UPS an exquisite six-foot sailfish, painted cobalt blending to indigo and airbrushed with lateral dashes of silver and gold. The replica, manufactured by the taxidermist from a standard plaster cast, would be fixed in a lifelike leaping pose, its sharp bill aimed toward the clouds and its tall dorsal fin regally flared.

Of course by then the real sailfish had been recycled profitably and eventually dumped overboard, having decomposed to chum after five or six fake captures. It was a scam to be saved exclusively for the most witless of tourists, but it worked often enough to have been passed along over decades among a certain low-pirate class of sportfishing crews.

Charles Phinney didn’t learn of the trick from Captain Keith Fitzpatrick but, rather, from a stranger who’d approached him one evening at the Garrison Bight Marina while he was hosing down the Misty Momma IV. There was, however, a twist.

“It wasn’t a dead sailfish they wanted him to hook on the line,” Madeline told Yancy. “It was a dude’s cut-off arm!”

“Jesus.”

“I told Charlie it was the grossest thing I ever heard and he’d be crazy to do it. But he was gonna make three thousand cash.”

“Three grand?”

“I’m not shitting you,” said Madeline. “So he said okay.”

“And got paid?”

“Same day, in hundred-dollar bills. He made me swear not to tell anyone. He said they told him it was only a practical joke, no big deal. The arm came off a dead body from some mortician school.”

By now she was lapping a third vodka tonic. Yancy felt like having a stiff one, too, but he wanted to be able to remember every word. He’d write it all down as soon as he got home.

“The night before,” she said, “in Charlie’s apartment? We were so fucking nervous we got stoned out of our heads. I mean baked, okay? He had the … you know … in this big ice cooler, I’ll never forget—”

“Wait, Madeline, who gave Phinney the arm?”

“Someone brought it to the dock that same night, when he was alone on the boat. Anyway, the cooler—Charlie asks do I want to see the you-know-what and I said no freaking way, you asshole. But he takes the thing out, right? And it doesn’t look real but at the same time it’s too gross to be fake. And we both, I don’t know why, we just start laughing. He’s swingin’ the thing around like a baseball bat and I’ve got this half-calico kitty cat, Sheeba, all the fur on her back is stickin’ up. Charlie and I both just fell out, it seemed so damn funny. Sounds pretty fucking twisted, I guess, but it’s not like we put it up on YouTube or nothin’.”

“So it was really good pot,” Yancy said. Bonnie Witt’s reaction to the severed limb had been not so jolly, though, in retrospect, they hadn’t laughed very much as a couple. Again he asked: “Who brought the dead arm to Phinney?”

“Here’s the worst,” said Madeline. “We’re so trashed, Charlie grabs the middle finger on the hand, right? The bird finger? And he bends it up like this, so it looks like the dead dude is flippin’ us off! I ’bout peed my panties. But then he stuck the thing in the freezer and next morning it was all iced up, and he couldn’t bend the finger back ’cause he was afraid it would snap off. So that’s how it stayed when he took it on the Misty.”

“Captain Fitzpatrick didn’t know anything about this, right?”

“You kidding? He would have gaffed Charlie in the nut sack.”

She wanted another cigarette so Yancy followed her outside. He stood upwind and gulped the salty fresh air. The inside of Stoney’s smelled like fried sweat socks.

“Who else did Charlie tell about the arm?”

“Nobody but me,” Madeline said emphatically. “Soon as he sobered up he got semi-paranoid about it. But the money, you know, that was different. The night after he got paid he took me to Louie’s for dinner and bought a round for everyone at the bar, two hundred bucks.” She dragged hard and then flicked the butt into a rain puddle. “Nobody said he was Alvin Einstein.”

Yancy thought it was fortunate that Phinney and Madeline hadn’t pooled their genes. He said: “Who got Charlie to do this thing? Didn’t he mention the guy’s name?”

“Wasn’t a guy,” Madeline said. “It was a chick that brought him the cut-off arm, Charlie said. He didn’t know her name but she’s the one who paid him, too. A white chick in tight white jeans. Is that wild or what? Like she was on her way to the damn mall.”

Yancy patted her hand. “You need to get out of town.”