Bad Monkey

Twelve

After Neville’s home on Green Beach was demolished, he went to stay in Rocky Town, where he alternated sleepovers with his girlfriends. The backhoe Neville had attempted to sabotage was running fine again, joined by a bulldozer that had arrived on a barge from a bankrupt development on Chub Cay.

To watch over the Curly Tail Lane construction site, the rich American called Christopher recruited some pinheaded brute from Nassau. The fellow had a high crinkled forehead and small malformed ears that looked like fetal fruit bats. People said he used to work at Fox Hill prison but got fired for brutalizing inmates with a marlin billy. Christopher put a rusty, camper-style trailer on the property, and that’s where the new man slept. Occasionally Neville spotted him in town, eating at the conch shack, but he never lingered.

On the same day Christopher’s new earth-chewing machine appeared, Neville went back to see the Dragon Queen. He presented to her a man’s black nylon sock that he’d snatched from the same garbage can as the shirt fragment, outside the house rented by Christopher and his woman. The Dragon Queen frowned when Neville handed her the sock, which had a hole in the heel.

“Dis all you got fuh me?”

“Please, madam. I dont have much time.”

“Look how big dis mon’s feet be! No wonder my udda coyse dint woyk.”

Something about the Dragon Queen seemed different, and at first Neville couldn’t figure it out. Then, when she reached over and deftly snatched a doctor fly from his arm, it struck him: The woman was dead sober. The hairs on Neville’s neck prickled when she plucked one wing off the fly and then watched it spin helplessly across the warped plank floor.

He said, “I kin go bok and look fuh sum ting more. Wot is it you want?”

The Dragon Queen grinned. She had perhaps seven teeth in her whole mouth. “Wot do I want? I want you, suh.”

It was a moment Neville had been fearing; the Dragon Queen’s rapacious appetite for men was legendary. Not wishing to become her next doomed lover, he’d prepared a defense.

“No, madam, I got de clap.”

“Lemme have a peek.” She rocked in her wicker chair and lit a cigar.

Neville shook his head. “Dot’s not proper.”

The Dragon Queen was firm: No sex, no more voodoo curses on Christopher. Neville was angry but he held back. Instead he said, “De mon already rip down de house where my own fahdder was born. He toyn it into a heap a goddamn rocks.”

She spat and said, “White devil.”

“Den help me take ’im down.”

“You don’t got de clap. Drop off your pants, bey, so I kin see your ting.”

“Wot else you take fuh pay? All I got is foity dollahs.”

The Dragon Queen chuckled and shut her eyes and blew a wreath of smoke that smelled like rancid mulch. “Mistuh Neville, where’s dot little pink boy a yours?”

“He’s outside. Why you ask?” Neville had leashed Driggs to the handlebars of the bike.

“So, den, here’s wot we do.” The Dragon Queen cracked one eyelid. “You give dot boy to me, as my own, and I’ll pudda coyse on dis white devil Chrissofer make ’im dread sorry he ever set foot on dis island. Maybe even kill de mon, fuh true. Dot’s all I want from you. No money, no fucky, juss Driggs.”

“Madam, I tole you. Dot’s not a real boy.”

“So you say.”

“Why you want ’im fuh?”

“It’s lonely here on dis dusty hill. I gotta pull de wings off flies juss so dey stay ’round to keep me comp’ny. Dot ol’ Driggs, he could dance hoppy circles ’n’ make me lof all night long. Nodder ting, I kin teach ’im how to pour my rum drinks and rub my feets.”

“But—”

“Dot’s my final offer, suh. If you want sum bigass woo-doo, either gimme de boy or every fine inch a your manhood.” The Dragon Queen stubbed the cigar and dropped it inside the black sock that Neville had taken from Christopher’s trash.

“Madam, he’s not a very good monkey.”

“Oh, I know.”

Neville wasn’t sure why he cared about Driggs, who had a corrupt streak and no appreciation for Neville’s many acts of kindness. The animal was dexterous and conniving, but discipline was almost impossible because Driggs retaliated with filthy bites to soft-tissue targets such as calves and thighs. Even when unprovoked, the creature traveled with a septic disposition. On the streets he shrewdly singled out white tourists and approached them for handouts. Those who balked might be punished by a rabbit punch to the genitals, or the nasty twist of a nipple. On one occasion, a German teen who tried to snap a picture of the animal was flogged with her own bikini top.

Driggs’s noxious attitude baffled Neville, although he suspected a dietary deficiency. He’d become worried when his little sidekick started molting, yet all efforts to wean the monkey from conch fritters and johnnycakes were vehemently rebuffed. Neville’s girlfriends were scared of Driggs and demanded that the scabby demon remain tethered outdoors during Neville’s nocturnal visits. The monkey’s response was to dig both hands into his diaper and hurl handfuls of feces at the windows, a raucous spectacle that had pitched Neville’s love life into a stall.

“He smot. Dot I kin tell,” said the Dragon Queen. “I teach ’im some prime woo-doo moves.”

“Butchu ain’t gon hoyt de fella, right?”

“Wot!” Indignantly she flapped her hem up and down, Neville turning away.

“Hoyt dot little fella?” she cried. “Come back in a few days, see if you don’t find de hoppiest pink boy in all de world. Under my roof he gern live like de Prince a Wales!”

Neville said Driggs was worth eight hundred dollars, which was what he’d been told by the sponger who’d given him the monkey years earlier at the domino game.

“Eight hundred! Dot’s crazy talk,” said the Dragon Queen.

“He was in de movies wit Johnny Depp. It’s no lie.”

“Cap’n Jack Sparrow? You fulla crap. Your boy played de bod monkey?”

“Yes, madam, in all dose pirate movies. And he is a monkey,” Neville reiterated.

The Dragon Queen crowed uproariously. “You bring me dot boy Driggs fuh payment, I put a jumbo coyse on your white devil.”

Neville was torn. “Led me tink wot to do. I come right bok.”

Outside, Driggs squatted on rash-covered haunches beneath the gumbo-limbo tree where Neville had left him. It was a repugnant scene that would alter both of their lives. The Huggies diaper lay shredded on the ground, and Neville’s bicycle seat was slathered with fresh shit.

Neville’s outrage swelled as he appraised the stinking mess. “I fed up wit your foolishness!” he snapped. “Come den, let’s go see your new momma.”

The monkey stopped gnawing on his leash and looked up. His upper lip wormed into a reflex sneer, but his rosy bald brow furrowed in consternation.

“Dot’s right,” Neville said. “Dis is good-bye.”

The owner of Big Luke’s Lobsteria was Luke Motto, a former Thoroughbred jockey who stood five-two. He was called Big Luke because he was the tallest among six siblings.

The Lobsteria was Yancy’s first official stop after a ten-day sick leave (ordered by Lombardo), during which Yancy went fishing alone every morning. For privacy he chose the Content Keys, and wore only his boxers while poling the skiff. The salt air hastened the healing of his gouged ass and also the mangrove scrapes on his limbs. His headaches ceased shortly after the bruises disappeared. As a treat he landed several good bonefish and an eighty-pound tarpon. Twice Rosa drove down after work and stayed the night.

“You double-clicked that fucker,” Big Luke said accusingly.

“I’m afraid not.”

They were arguing about German cockroaches, which Yancy was required to count during all restaurant inspections. The pest census was a challenging aspect of the job although Tommy Lombardo, Yancy’s instructor, had provided little guidance. For reasons unclear to Yancy, the state of Florida required that live roaches and dead roaches be tabulated separately. Perhaps a deceased roach was deemed less repellent to diners than a crawling one, but in truth the contamination differential was negligible—insect parts versus insect droppings.

Yancy himself favored dead roaches because live ones were too quick, a coppery flash disappearing beneath a shelf or baseboard. During his first week on the job, and uncertain of protocol, Yancy included in his live-specimen tallies only those he was able to corner and kill. Many others escaped, and he was nagged by a sense of falling short in his duties.

So, to the dismay of unsanitary proprietors such as Luke Motto, Yancy developed a method of herding and capturing live roaches that allowed a more precise accounting. In his right hand he wielded a billiard cue to which he’d bolted the head of a badminton racket. In the other hand he carried a DustBuster, a lighter, updated version of the device he had ingloriously deployed against Dr. Clifford Witt in Mallory Square.

One brisk pass through the kitchen of Big Luke’s Lobsteria filled the vacuum with a pulsing, melon-sized mass of roaches that Yancy neutralized by vigorously shaking the filter compartment until the captives were too addled to mount an escape. He then dumped his catch on a butcher-block cutting board, and got down to business with tweezers and a thumb-activated ticket counter he’d bought on Amazon for $2.99.

“That one right there—you did him twice!” Luke Motto insisted.

The total of live roaches was up to sixty-eight, which in Yancy’s view qualified as an infestation. “And I haven’t even checked the pipes under the sink,” he remarked through his hospital mask.

“Don’t!” Luke Motto bleated.

“I got five bucks says we break two hundred today.”

“And I got a C-note and a free shrimp hoagie says you cut me some slack.”

“If you had half a brain, Luke, you’d spend that money on an exterminator.”

With every click of the counter, Yancy dropped another dizzy roach into a large Ziploc baggie. Lombardo hadn’t instructed him to preserve the insects as evidence, so he didn’t. Customarily, after presenting his inspection report to the disgruntled owner, Yancy would dispatch the roaches by placing the baggies under a tire of his car and flattening them on his way out of the parking lot. It wasn’t an authorized technique for disposal, but so far none of the restaurateurs had lodged a complaint.

“You can’t just barge in here and shut me down!” Luke Motto protested. “This ain’t Nazi Russia!”

Yancy tuned him out while completing the order for a temporary suspension. He offered the phone number of a Marathon pest control company and told Big Luke he’d be back in three days for a re-inspection. Then he squashed the roaches with his Subaru and drove to Duck Key to view the condominium belonging to Eve and Nicholas Stripling.

The building superintendent gave up the key as soon as Yancy displayed his health department credentials. For a weekend condo it wasn’t bad. The living room featured a balcony view of the Atlantic, while the bedrooms overlooked a polyp-shaped swimming pool with a slightly discolored kiddie pond. In the closets of the condo Yancy found men’s and women’s outdoor clothes, fishing rods, spearguns, flippers, dive masks, snorkels and a roll of clear Visqueen poly sheeting of the type used to protect carpet and furniture from splatters while a room was being painted—or a human body was being chopped to pieces.

The second scenario occurred to Yancy after he spotted a hatchet, scoured clean, inside the dishwasher. It made sense that if a woman was involved, the hatchet would have been rinsed of gore before being placed in a dishwasher rack amid wine glasses and salad bowls. Yancy reached into the opening of the garbage disposal and carefully probed the movable blades. All he recovered was the fractured chip of an olive pit.

Next he went to the double shower in the master bedroom and unscrewed the drain cover. He employed a bent coat hanger to explore the pipe, which yielded a clot of jet-black hair. Ensnared in the yucky clump were three sharp-edged, whitish fragments no larger than kitten’s teeth. Yancy deposited the entire tangle in another baggie, locked up the condo, put the key under the mat and returned to his car. There he phoned Caitlin Cox and said, “I believe I know where they murdered your father.”

Her reply caught him by surprise: “Actually, Inspector, we need to talk.”

Yancy cranked up the Subaru’s fitful AC and waited.

Caitlin said: “Look, I was wrong about Eve. There’s no hot boyfriend in the Bahamas—she stopped there on the way home from Paris to visit one of her uncles. And Dad’s wedding ring? The only reason she swapped it out for a cheapo? She didn’t have the heart to leave it on his hand inside the coffin. She got a jeweler in Bal Harbour to hang it on a necklace and, God, I feel like such an a-hole. The more I think about it? Seriously.”

Yancy was miffed at himself for not seeing it coming. “Caitlin, listen to me. Eve bought that replacement wedding band in Nassau before anyone told her your dad was missing, much less dead, which means she already knew. And, just so you’re up to speed, the nonexistent boyfriend tried to kill me the other night. I’m pretty sure he was wearing your father’s wristwatch.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Okay, I made it all up. Because, truly, I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Look, man,” she said. “I’m super sorry I got you involved, but I was so bummed about losing Dad I guess I didn’t want to believe the truth. He swamped his boat and drowned, end of story, just like the Coast Guard said. I mean, bad shit happens to fishermen all the time, right? The perfect storm, whatever.”

Yancy told her about the plastic sheeting and the hatchet he’d found in the condo. “And also some white bony fragments in a shower drain.”

“Oh please,” said Caitlin. “Broken stone crab shells, probably.”

“What about the hand axe?”

“Dad used the flat side to crack the claws. Just a couple of taps is all it took.”

Yancy knew he couldn’t bring Caitlin around, but he was curious to learn how the deal went down. “So you’re not mad anymore about Eve getting the whole two million from his life insurance?”

“No way.”

Then came the edgy pause. Yancy smiled and put the car in gear.

“Anyhow,” Caitlin continued, “turns out Eve and I are what you call co-beneficiaries. We split the money fifty-fifty. So I guess Dad wasn’t so pissed at me after all.”

“When did you find all this out? Because last time we spoke, you expressed the view—and I’m quoting more or less faithfully—that your ‘greedy slut of a stepmother’ was screwing you over.”

Caitlin said, “Because I was super upset, okay? I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Until?”

“I saw Eve, and there was Dad’s wedding ring on her neck. Then she told me about the insurance policy and other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

“You know. Inheritance stuff.”

Yancy thought: All that’s missing is a winning Lotto ticket. “And where did this healing conversation take place?” he asked Caitlin.

“She took me to lunch.”

“Yes, I can picture it. Where are you now?”

“At the courthouse.”

“Let me guess: Where you just finished telling the judge you totally agree with Eve—your dad should be declared legally dead.”

“Yeah, so?” On the other end, Nick Stripling’s daughter seemed to be clearing a chunk of cactus from her throat. After the guttural delay she said: “What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway? You never heard of closure? Families are supposed to come together, no matter what.”

“And nothing says closure like a million bucks.”

“Dad died when his boat sunk, just like they said. Let it go, dude.”

“Not possible, Caitlin. We’ll chat again, you and I.”

“Why? No, we won’t!”

“Then tell me his name.”

“Who?”

“The mystery uncle in Nassau.”

Caitlin said, “You’re such a dickhead.”

Yancy tossed down the phone and gunned his car toward a gap in the traffic, heading up the Overseas Highway.