Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

Last Island South by John C. Boland

© 2008 by John C. Boland

John Boland returns to EQMM this issue after a long hiatus. The Baltimore author has had a number of stories in our sister publication, AHMM, since his last tale for us in 1989. He also authored half a dozen financial mysteries in the 1990s, novels Publishers Weekly called “wry and intelligent” and “suspenseful... and satisfying.”

Don’t tell me about sunny Key West. I was painting a small, bad beach scene — just the ticket for some tourist who didn’t know yet that he wanted it — working in the cabin of my father’s boat, my feet freezing under two pairs of socks, chugging down my second pot of green tea, listening to the pinkety-pink of the leak in the head, when Hubbard Bennell hauled his 250 pounds aboard. In his yellow rain slicker, he pretty much filled the galley. “Have you got a job right now, Meggie?” he asked.

His tone implied he knew the question was impolite. Any half-competent investigator could find all the work she wanted in rowdy Key Wasted, couldn’t she?

I halfway liked him. He was a middle-aged Conch with sun scabs on the nose and the thickened hands of someone who had done real work before becoming a politico. He’d spent seven or eight years on the city commission without getting indicted, which was close to a local record. After the last municipal scandal over hack licenses, Hub had told a TV reporter that he was sure he wasn’t all that honest, no more so than the two commissioners who’d been arrested, so he guessed he was just slower to spot an opportunity. He said it with a melancholy, up-from-under grin. Dang if it ain’t sad what goes on here. A town where city fathers used to import marijuana loves winks and nods.

A job meant money, which I desperately needed.

“Nothing right now,” I said.

“Good, you can stake out my flight club. Somebody broke into the office last night.”

His flight club was actually an air-charter business, named by some long-ago eccentric who had flown rum over from Cuba. Hub’s business, so far as I knew, consisted of hauling tourists seventy miles out into the Gulf of Mexico for snorkeling trips among the Dry Tortugas.

We worked out the terms — that is, Hub told me what the gig was worth and I said okay. Then I called my sometime helper Babe McKenzie, who always needs a few bucks to feed her cats and her boyfriends.

Before dark, I hunkered down in Hub Bennell’s office, and Babe hid herself in the converted boathouse that served as a hangar for two island-hopping Cessna 185s. While we were doing that, somebody came ashore at my client’s stilt house two miles up the island and shot Hub deader than a crab leg.

I spent a lot of the night talking to the police.

Barry Irvington was my favorite cop when he was looking after me in a paternal way — not so favorite when he felt lonely and thought he needed a girlfriend thirty years younger than himself. Tonight he was red-eyed and rumpled, in a tan suit that belonged in a ’forties movie (one where the emotionally damaged hero washes ashore in the Tropics), his hair damp and finger-combed forward, his breath redolent of cigarettes. He wasn’t pretty and he was all business. Bennell had been a successful Key West businessman. He’d also been part of the political establishment. Right there, two strikes against me.

“He said he was worried about theft,” I repeated.

“Tell me again. Neither you nor the McKenzie woman saw anything?”

“There was a raccoon about eleven o’clock,” I reminded him. “But nobody out to steal an airplane.”

He was my friend, but he was also a cop. Five minutes into the interview, he’d checked my gun to see if it had been fired. It hadn’t been, not since I’d taken it out to the range two months ago, to satisfy myself I hadn’t forgotten everything Dad taught me about shooting. If you’re going to do security gigs in Florida, where everyone who isn’t officially a criminal or insane can get a carry permit, it’s stupid to work unarmed. I was carrying a Beretta .380 autoloader, which was a little too big for my hand.

Barry and I had already gone through the stuff about how Hub had acted: not like he expected someone to shoot him. Babe was getting the third degree, or at least a cup of coffee, in another detective’s car.

There was a tap at the window, and the deputy chief of police climbed into the backseat. Curtis LeMoye gave me a sour look. He hadn’t liked my father, and he saw no reason to like me.

“Why don’t you have her in handcuffs?” he grumbled.

Barry replied, “If she tries to escape, we can shoot her.”

LeMoye looked away from me. “We’re going to wrap this up, Irvington. I’ll leave a couple of guys on the scene. Zelda’s done with the body. Thinks he took two straight in the ticker, two in the head.”

He got back out into the rain. Barry gave Babe and me a ride back to her pickup truck at the flying club. As she cranked up the engine, she said, “Meggie, did Bennell pay you anything on account?” I had promised her a hundred dollars for the evening.

“No, sorry.”

“You’re not much of a businesswoman. Always get something on account.” She was in her mid forties, chesty as a sailing ship, blond as a swamp fire, opinionated as anyone’s mother. In upstate New York, she had been a sheriff’s deputy or a hooker, depending on how she felt when she told her story.

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said.

“I don’t see how,” Babe responded, and drove off.

Barry took me farther down the Atlantic side of the island to Hawkes’ Marina, where the masts of my father’s ten-meter fiberglass sailboat slashed the smudgy predawn. Boats can’t have premonitions, but this one looked as if it knew it had reached its last berth. Everything about it leaked. My father had been a serious drinker who hadn’t had time for boat maintenance. If the bilge pump ever died, the decks would be awash in twenty-four hours.

Dad hadn’t been great at family upkeep, either. My mother and I had been living in Connecticut when a cop called and asked if we were related to the Daniel Trevor who had been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Sailing alone, sixty-eight years old, probably with a celebratory glass of something in hand, toasting the windy sunset, toasting the frigate birds, stumbling on a coiled rope — something like that, dying stupid. A fisherman who came across the drifting boat towed it back to Key West. He refused a salvage claim because he thought Danny Trevor had been a hero. If you hit the right bars in the Lower Keys, CIA pensioners lean on their elbows recalling glory days on the Mosquito Coast. Or they try to remember the name of the guard who wired them up at Isla de Pinos. Like high school jocks reliving the big game of ’68.

Mom wasn’t interested in a half-sunk boat. I was four months out of college with no job in sight, so I came down to clear up the estate. Initially I thought there was nothing but the old ketch, which he called KeyHole, thinking it was funny painting a secret code word on the transom. Later I found the compartment in the ceiling, where he had stowed two handguns, one Ithaca side-by-side with jammed works, a couple of gray blocks of something that I knew, having never seen it before, was plastic explosive, and a fully automatic rifle without serial numbers. Altogether, enough to get me twenty years just for being an heir. What had he been planning?

I hadn’t told anyone about the compartment. Since the KeyHole wasn’t seaworthy, I couldn’t even haul the contraband out to the Gulfstream for disposal. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I could guard a lot of liquor stores without needing a cake of C4. My ex-boyfriend was back in New Haven, and I didn’t bear enough of a grudge to send him an exploding package.

When Barry dropped me off, the marina was quiet.

The man sitting in the cockpit of my boat didn’t belong there. He wasn’t trying to hide, maybe just the opposite, because the cigar tip glowed as I came down the walkway that Mimi Hawkes kept promising to repair. “Meggie,” he called — and I recognized the voice and stopped thinking “he.”

Apart from the cigar, Gloria Hasty could have been invisible in the dark. Black watch cap, black turtleneck, tight jeans, she was decked out for prowling. The watch cap hid short hair dyed so deeply red it looked metallic under the neon lights along the town’s main drag, where she bought dinner for tough boys who could have been her grandsons. We were a mile from Duval Street. Gloria stood up, and the cigar lit one hand well enough that I saw that it was all she was holding. The other hand was pushing back her watch cap.

“I’ve been waiting here for hours,” she complained.

“You should have called.” She was one of the few ex-Agency people my father counted as a friend. But it was after four in the morning and my mood was sour. “What do you want?”

“I got a sudden urge to buy one of your paintings, dear. Something with gulls and pelicans. Do you have any like that?” Her tone mocked both of us. My paintings were junk. She might hang one in one of the bungalows where her young men slept. A bad painting would be amusing, like the human curiosities. There was a flicker of light behind a curtain in the boat’s main cabin. When she saw that I had noticed, Gloria said, “I want you to meet someone, Meggie. Come on out, Tom! Switch on the deck lights.”

Blinking as the deck lights popped on, I moved a step closer.

“Tom’s housebroken,” Gloria announced as a shadow came out of the companionway and onto the aft deck. The shadow was tall and bearded and wore a big floppy safari hat, a black T-shirt, and a blazer with buttons that flashed almost as bright at Gloria’s cigar butt. He nodded across the space between us.

“You’re a pretty bad painter.” His beard was mostly white, and behind it he wore a big squinty grin.

“You broke into my boat.”

He gave a little shrug. “I’m not really housebroken. I’m Colonel Tom Parker.” He didn’t expect me to believe him. The name was one of those little jokes, like KeyHole, an all-purpose introduction as secret as a two-finger handshake while tugging your left ear: Langley calling.

Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I said, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Your old man was one of the great ones,” Tom Parker said. Having turned down coffee, he was sitting at the galley table, hands folded, showing a thick wedding band and clean fingernails. “He’d be sorry he didn’t get to go out in combat.”

If my father was sorry about anything when he died, it would be that he hadn’t had time for another Margarita. I didn’t think Parker had known him very well.

“Is that how you feel?” I asked. “Hoping to go out in combat?”

“Well, honey — officially I’m retired. Unofficially, I’m still in the game. Both me and Miss Gloria.”

Miss Gloria nodded vigorously. “We’d better tell Meggie what’s going on. A man named Hector Avila killed your client tonight, honey. Hector steals boats. Your client, Hubbard Bennell, has a boatyard. Guess what happens there?”

“I don’t know.”

Tom Parker stepped in. “The stolen boats get a new profile, fresh paint, brand new nameplate, made-to-order log books. Then some wetback takes ’em across to Veracruz — that’s the city named for the True Cross, kid — and they get sold to South Americanos who can afford both a hundred-foot boat and two mistresses. Hector Avila would steal the eyeballs off a corpse if there was a peso in it.”

“Where’s the boatyard?”

“Little east of Stock Island.”

“And why do you care?”

“CIA pension don’t stretch that far,” said Colonel Tom Parker. “But the marine-insurance people pay us pretty good. If we disrupt Avila’s export business, recover the last boat he pinched at Little Palm, me and Miss Gloria will clear about seventy-five K.”

“So you broke into my boat looking for Avila.”

“Naw, kid. I broke in ’cause I got bored waiting. Now the good news. If you want to help us, we’re good for a few hundred bucks. Help us a lot, there’s more.” He glanced around the cabin, which probably smelled musty if you hadn’t been living there. “Danny’s old boat looks like it could use repairs.”

The KeyHole needed more than repairs. The slip fee was due. My phone was running out of minutes. I had about seventy dollars to my name. For some reason — maybe it was the cold snap — tourists weren’t buying my paintings. I had been looking forward to a check from Hub Bennell.

“Why did Avila kill Mr. Bennell?” I asked Gloria.

“There’s no honor among thieves, Meggie. Even less with Hectorcito. I believe Tom is going to have to take him out.”

Tom nodded confidently.

Colonel Tom and Gloria shoved off before dawn, plowing across the small harbor in a Zodiac. I checked the hidden compartment, but there was no sign Tom had discovered it. His poking around seemed to have been random — correct that: eighty percent random, twenty percent perverted, which served me right for leaving personal items where the old creep could find them. I caught a few hours’ sleep with the hatches open, to blow out the stink of Gloria’s cigar.

By morning, the breeze pushing through the boat was warm, with a taste of Havana in it. I kicked off a sweaty sheet, plodded down to the marina for a shower, and then went across the road to the Carbuncle, a bikers’ dive, and ate chili for breakfast. Lem Samuel, the half-owner, claims the same kettle of chili has been simmering since the afternoon Nixon resigned. He had been letting me eat free because I was working on a portrait of him. His gray-streaked hair was almost Biblical in length, his bloodshot eyes could have been traced with red liner, and jailhouse X’s were tattooed on the backs of his fingers. I would have painted him for free.

“You want a beer?” he said.

It was eight-twenty in the morning.

“I can’t afford a beer.”

“You dance here on Friday night, I’ll pay you a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred wouldn’t cover the antibiotics.”

“Eat the chili, Meggie, it cures everything. Look at me. I don’t do doctors.” He leaned on the bar. “You hear about the murder?”

I waved him away. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“They say he was stabbed a dozen times right in his shop on Duval Street.”

I put down my spoon. “Who are we talking about?”

“Art dealer, important guy, Anders Hewitt. I don’t suppose he sells your paintings.” Grinning at close range, Lem showed me teeth that should have been in a mummy case. “Now let me ask you, what’s a rich guy doing in his gallery at five in the morning? That’s when he called the cops and spilled out onto the sidewalk.”

I still couldn’t face a beer, but I ordered a strong cup of coffee. That pot, too, had been brewing since the day Nixon resigned.

Duval Street commerce was at its finest. There were baby sharks in bottles, President bobbleheads, T-shirts with stale obscenities, then the art galleries — only one of those was roped off with yellow tape forcing pedestrians to walk into the street. A biker chewing on his wrist strap had one foot down, leaning toward a sweaty cop, whom I recognized as one of Deputy Chief Curtis LeMoye’s boys so I steered clear. There were blood spatters on the sidewalk outside the gallery, and the cop had his left heel in one of them. He was too busy chatting with the fellow on the V-8 to notice me peering in the shop window. The Last Island Gallery specialized in high-end art, oil paintings by people who had reputations, sculptures that looked liked they had come from Mayan ruins. Anders Hewitt, the late owner, got his picture in the newspaper every time the Arts Council donated a dollar to the homeless.

Barry Irvington came out of the gallery.

“Tell me you weren’t guarding Anders Hewitt,” he said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You want breakfast?”

The chili rumbled in my stomach. I shook my head. “What happened to Hewitt?”

“Fourteen knife wounds, started bleeding inside the store, made it to the sidewalk.” Barry walked me down the street, away from the biker and the cop. “We’ve got no weapon, no video, about a thousand fingerprints. I was hoping it’s a domestic thing, then there’d be a chance of solving it. But Hewitt lived with his sister, who says he was as sexless as a bee. No beefs with artists or customers. A wide circle of friendships, nothing intimate.”

For a minute I thought he was talking to himself, running through all the things he didn’t have. Then he said, “One of his friends was Hubbard Bennell.”

He was doing his job, trying to solve a couple of murders. I was doing mine, trying to make a living — which Tom Parker and Gloria’s gig promised to further. When I thought of one man with four bullets in him and another with fourteen stab wounds, I knew I was out of my class. I said, “Has the name Hector Avila turned up?”

“Where did you hear it?”

“Gloria Hasty paid me a visit last night. She had an old CIA type tagging along. They said Avila is a boat thief and that he killed Hub.”

Barry made a sour face. “How does Gloria know that?”

“Does Hub have a boatyard?”

“Yeah...”

I told him Tom Parker’s version of boat hijacking and refitting. As we talked, he thumbed through his notebook. “A couple of invoices at Hewitt’s gallery show payments to an ‘H. Avila’ for art.”

“So struggling artists survive stealing boats.”

“Avila isn’t struggling. Hewitt paid him an average of fifty thousand a month for most of last year. In fact—” he leafed back — “since April the payments added up to almost exactly fifty a month. Before that, it was thirty-five. Steady as rain. What does that have to do with stealing boats?”

We drove in an unmarked car across the bridge onto Stock Island and spotted the sign SAILHOOK MARINA arching above a side road like a leaping marlin. The sign offered boatyard services and storage. A handful of slips beside a concrete pier were empty except for a couple of pontoon boats with open, empty decks.

In the repair yard, two men were spray-coating the bottom of a cabin cruiser. When they saw Barry they removed their masks and switched off the compressor. He didn’t need to flash a badge. He probably didn’t need to put his fists on his hips, pushing back his jacket to reveal the gun on his hip, but he did.

“Who owns the boat?”

The smaller man was round, pale, and half bald. He wore a basketball shirt that exposed the red hair on his shoulders. “Calvin Bordreaux owns her, has for twenty years. You know Calvin?”

Barry looked the boat over. It didn’t fit the description I’d got from Gloria of the yacht stolen from the resort at Little Palm Island. It was stubby and old, needed varnish, and even with a clean bottom it looked too shabby to motor into a high-end resort. “What’s Calvin use her for?” Barry asked.

“He takes his wife out on Florida Bay and they listen to the radio. Maybe pretend to fish.”

“Have you had anything bigger in the yard? Say about fifty-five feet, Danish design. Called Bay Stomper?”

The other man, whose neck tattoos twined dripping daggers with skulls and butterflies, pointed to the boat slips. “Mr. Hub had one like that in the marina ten, twelve days ago. We didn’t do any work on it.”

His companion nodded. “Nice boat, but not the one you want. This was Morning Glory, out of Boca. Not much crew, one real mean Cuban. Told me to stay away from his boat.”

Barry was still sizing them up. For a yard that was supposed to refit stolen boats, the men seemed too relaxed. “You fellows usually work on boats like that?”

“I’d sure like to,” said the tattooed man.

“Have you worked here long?”

“Three years. But we do mostly small jobs, right, Hank?”

The red-haired man nodded.

As we walked around the yard, Barry said, “If this is a marine chop shop, I’m Jimmy Buffett. I’ve seen Hank at bars. He’s a lay preacher of some sort.”

“In bars?”

“Where would you expect to find lost souls? Next time, don’t believe everything Gloria Hasty tells you.”

“What about the Bay Stomper? And Hector Avila? Avila could have painted a new name on.”

“First, we only have Gloria’s word a boat was stolen. It hasn’t been reported to the Coast Guard.”

“A ‘mean Cuban’ could fit Avila.”

Barry nodded. “There was no address for Avila on Anders Hewitt’s invoices. Not much description of what Hewitt was buying, either — just ‘work of art.’ Did your two CIA pals mention whether Avila was an artist?”

“They said he was a killer.” Hands tucked into my back pockets, I watched the water. A couple of porpoises had come into the sheltered area herding baitfish. “They’ve got a source in your department, you know. A couple hours after Bennell got shot, Gloria and Parker were waiting on my boat, pitching the idea that Avila did it. There was a pretty good bet I would tell you.”

We drove back to town. Barry put a description of the Morning Glory out to local marinas. If you’re going to start searching for a single boat in the Lower Keys, you might as well also try naming frigate birds. He queried the national crime database on the name Hector Avila, got a dozen small charges from the ’nineties and an array of old mug shots. The most recent picture showed a narrow-faced man with long black hair. The men at Sailhook described their Cuban as over six feet, short-haired, and scrawny as a wood stork. The database had no current address on Avila.

Finding Tom Parker was easier. He had a suite at the Hilton looking down onto Mallory Square, where the pagans gather to celebrate sunset. Barry decided we should visit Parker in his room.

Two steps off the elevator, we heard a door open. A porky fellow in a gray suit stepped into the hall. I got a glimpse of a black brush cut, pug nose, bee-stung lips. He said a few words to someone in the room, then turned away from us and headed for a back stairway.

Barry unfroze. “That’s Lieutenant Kilgallen. He’s LeMoye’s assistant.”

“Assistant what?”

“Whatever the deputy chief needs, Larry Kilgallen fetches.”

“What do you want to bet, that’s Parker’s room he came out of.”

“I wouldn’t bet.”

“Let’s go see.”

“Let’s not.” He turned and pushed the elevator button. The car hadn’t gone anywhere. We went down to the lobby, out onto the square. It had turned into a bright, hot day, and a cruise ship was unloading a couple thousand tourists onto the pier, each of whom might buy a T-shirt or lunch, or get his pocket picked more directly, in any case contributing to the gross domestic product of the Conch Republic. The town had called itself a republic ever since a short-lived confrontation with the feds a quarter-century ago proved its rebellious spirit. When Dad took me on a boat ride out toward Fort Jefferson, spotting the sunken drug planes, he pointed out that none of them had carried untaxed English tea. He thought Key West should be called the Contraband Republic.

It was close to lunchtime. Barry got us a table on the square, ordered a Bloody Mary that put a little color in his cheeks. I had a diet ginger ale. “What do you think?” I said.

He found things to look at that didn’t include my eyes, which usually distracted him. The question hadn’t really come up, but I had assumed Barry Irvington was an honest cop, however you define that. He might look the other way for a friend — he had done so when I was getting wrecked saying goodbye to Dad — but I didn’t think he would look the other way because someone slipped him money.

His glance finally got around to me. “If Kilgallen and LeMoye have something going on, I don’t want to know about it. I could get used to living without my badge. Maybe I could get along without a pension. But I don’t want DEA getting a tip and finding a half-kilo of dope in my car. If it happened, nobody in the Department would jump up and say, ‘No, they got it all wrong, Irv’s a good cop.’”

“What about Parker?”

“Do you know Parker from before?”

“No. Dad didn’t bring his coworkers home. Parker says he’s retired.”

“Call him up and invite him down to lunch. I’ll be somewhere else. Tell him you need a few bucks so you can keep looking for Avila’s boat. Bat your pretty eyes at him.”

I used the Hilton’s house phone, and Parker came downstairs ten minutes later. He joined me at the table Barry had vacated. In daylight he looked older and flabby and the white beard had a yellow tinge. He was wearing a baby-blue guayabera shirt, cotton ducks, leather sandals over argyle socks. I wondered if this was a CIA-approved disguise. “You’re buying lunch,” I said. “I’m tapped out.”

“I think I can manage that, kid.”

“Also, I need a couple hundred on account.”

That widened his eyes. “On account of what?”

“If you’re looking for Avila, it’d help to put out word in the Cuban community. I can do that.”

He understood. There were bars in town where Anglo hombres weren’t welcome but an Anglo chick would get free drinks. “Also, if there’s money for whoever dimes him, it might go faster,” I said.

“Okay, two hundred.”

“You better make it five for the tipster. They need to believe you’re serious.”

He looked like he was passing a kidney stone. “All right. But the info’s got to be good.”

I ate a big lunch at Parker’s expense, collected two hundred dollars, and left him fumbling a credit card onto the check. A block later, Barry fell in beside me. “You’d better stay out of his way. He’ll know he was had. Parker had copies of police reports on last night’s murders. I’ll bet Larry Kilgallen left his prints on them.”

“You hit Parker’s room?”

“Crudely, too. Turned the place upside down. Borrowed an envelope at the front desk and mailed the reports to a lawyer. Parker also had mug shots of Avila, a nice little Walther .380 with two magazines. Hasn’t been fired for a while. Couple of phony ID’s. This guy is a clown.”

“He knows where my boat is,” I pointed out.

“Move in with me, he’ll never find you.”

“I’ll move in somewhere, but not with you.”

He tried not to look disappointed. I liked him a lot, but the poor guy was in his fifties.

I cleaned the stuff I needed out of my boat, made a deal with Babe McKenzie for a couple nights’ bivouac for a hundred dollars. She reminded me I owed her a hundred for the other night. She had a one-bedroom apartment in a decayed mansion close enough to Old Town that I wouldn’t need transportation. She let me have the couch and a corner of the fridge that wasn’t stuffed with cat food.

I met Barry at Anders Hewitt’s gallery and we took another look at the invoices made out to H. Avila. There were eighteen of them. None had an address or tax-ID number for Avila. The descriptions of the art Hewitt was buying were as skimpy as Barry had remembered, but the recorded amounts weren’t small: between eight thousand and twenty thousand dollars.

“That stuff should stand out even here,” Barry said. He led me through the gallery. There were five rooms. The blood spill was confined to the front gallery, where touristy stuff was on display. It was still high-end. The oil paintings of breaching killer whales — and when has anyone seen those off Key West? — were glossy and big, the kind hotels might hang in the lobby. Another room held paintings that didn’t have a local theme — still-lifes, landscapes, portraitists’ samples. Next-door was a den full of glass sculptures, some of them extraordinarily beautiful if you went for that sort of thing... and didn’t live on a rocking boat. There was a big, blue cresting wave so convincing that I looked for a surfer atop the glass. A little card beside each sculpture identified the artist and title and the nature of the glass. Beside the price was a small number-letter code.

“Are there numbers on Avila’s invoices?” I asked Barry.

He flipped through the pages. “A series: PC47, PC51, PC52, PC55, and so on.”

A large room at the end of a hall was filled with works tagged PC. The letters might have stood for pre-Columbian. H. Avila’s PC52 was a fat, malevolently ugly stone head the size of a pumpkin. The discreet little card said it was an Olmec deity, from circa 1,100 B.C. The price was fifty-five thousand dollars.

“Rents are high on Duval Street,” Barry murmured.

We scouted the rest of the room. There were twenty or thirty other items, most of them smaller than the head. They stood on tables, on Lucite shelves, in clear boxes. My guess about the meaning of “PC” was probably wrong. Some looked Mediterranean, others Asian. The lowest price was ten thousand dollars.

We couldn’t match any of the other items to Avila invoices. “Maybe Avila’s pieces sold,” I said. “Do you think the stuff’s authentic?”

“Maybe I’d better get someone in who knows,” Barry said.

As we reached the front, a voice snapped, “What’s she doing here?”

Curtis LeMoye’s sparse pink comb-over looked like it had just come in from the rain instead of from the sunny sidewalk. He could bake in the desert for a week and still look moist. The deputy chief had been leaning on a desk, studying an eight-foot-long nude painting that looked like a Modigliani. Maybe he planned to open a bar and needed a conversation piece.

“She has information that may help us,” Barry said. He told LeMoye that a man fitting Hector Avila’s description had briefly parked a boat at Bennell’s marina. “It looks like he also provided art to this gallery. That links him to both murders.”

“Do we have a picture — a description?”

“The photos are ten years old.”

“He’s Cuban, right? I’ll run him by some of my contacts.” He looked at me. “I wish the CIA stayed out of Key West.”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I told Barry I was glad to help and got out of there.

Gloria Hasty had a nineteenth-century house of Honduran mahogany facing Eaton Street, with two cottages around back behind a twenty-foot swimming pool. The cottages were where she put up her occasional boys, as she called them. There was no point in ringing at the front door. I opened the gate and went around back.

Gloria was in her swimming pool.

She was still wearing her midnight-prowler gear, minus the watch cap, so the red hair was a spiky halo. The pool was about eight feet deep at this end, and light and shadows wiggled on the surface, making it hard to tell exactly what I was seeing. Gloria appeared to have a spear of some kind through her chest. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. The alarmed girl on the pool apron with the sky behind her must have looked remote and useless from Gloria’s perspective.

“Turn around, dammit.”

I turned and came face to face with someone I hadn’t expected to see again. He wore a few days’ gray stubble, hair and brows were salt-lightened, cheeks were deeply sunken. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun. His eyes were hard and, for just an instant, murderous.

Still, it was the face I knew best, and missed most.

I said, “Hi, Dad.”

I wanted to hug him and blubber as if I were ten years old. But I was twenty-two and knew I had to make adult judgments about people, even him.

“Where did you get the shotgun?”

“From the house. Meggie, I heard you were down here. You look good. How’s your mom?”

Dating someone stable, I almost said. No point in taking cheap shots.

“Why were you in the house?”

“Looking for Gloria.”

“She’s in the pool.”

He took two steps, looked, muttered, “That’s great.” I couldn’t tell how he meant it.

We did our catching-up in one of the cottages. Dad perched on a chair where he could watch the yard. He was impressed that an old drinking buddy had towed the KeyHole, bemused that I was living aboard at the same slip he had used. He asked how I was making a living, and when I told him, he laughed a little. But the laugh was feeble. For the first time, he looked not just old but worn out.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Gloria and I took the boat out, and she pushed me overboard. She and I were — well, you know, spending time together. We had a lot in common.”

“I see,” I said crustily. Loyalty to Mom and all that.

“I was doing a little job, keeping an eye on some of the locals here. Gloria saw an angle.” He shrugged. “I was in the water two days, got picked up by a freighter headed for Tampico. It took a couple of months in the hospital before I was half-fit. One bullet messed me up a little.”

“One bullet?”

“She shot me a few times. Thorough lady, when she put her mind to something.”

“What did she do with the KeyHole?”

“Probably set it adrift a few miles out and took her Zodiac. She brought the inflatable in case we wanted to explore the mangroves. Nobody knew we’d gone out together.”

“She told me last night she was looking for Hector Avila.”

“Yeah?”

I told him about what had happened in town, and about Gloria and Parker’s visit.

“Describe the guy calling himself Parker.”

“Bearded, heavy, six-one, big wedding band, talk of not being housebroken, officially retired, called me kid.” I added, “He said you would be sorry you didn’t go out in combat.”

“But I did.” His smile was ragged. “The Parker description could fit a half-dozen guys I can think of. If he’s any good, he changes his appearance anyway.”

“According to Parker, Avila is running stolen boats to Mexico. He and Gloria said they were working an insurance angle.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. Avila was supplying art to Hewitt’s gallery.”

“Avila’s not in the art trade. He launders money for wise guys in Miami. He uses a boatyard, Hewitt’s gallery, probably a dozen other businesses that will do anything for ten percent. Gloria decided to take him out. She offered me first crack at the deal.”

“You didn’t agree?”

“I told her that messing with Avila was a fast way to get dead.”

“Tell me how the money-laundering works.”

“A guy like Anders Hewitt picks up a bunch of junk art, doesn’t matter what sort, creates a history. Supposedly it’s on consignment from an importer. It’s garbage. In a real sale, you couldn’t unload it for five grand. But he writes up a bill of sale for a hundred thousand, runs the money through his bank account, keeps ten or fifteen as his fee. Avila gets eighty-five thousand of his clients’ money back. Bingo, the capital is on deposit in Lauderdale or Miami for an import company owned by the wise guys. It started off as maybe racetrack skim or vigorish. Now it’s clean enough for casual inspection. The gallery owner’s biggest problem is deciding whether to report the fifteen thousand as income.” He yawned hugely. “I’ve been running on empty for a week. Got in twenty hours ago on a shrimp boat. Can I crash on the KeyHole?”

“Parker knows about the boat.” I told him about Sergeant Irvington ransacking Parker’s room. “He also had a visit from Lieutenant Kilgallen, who slipped out the back way like he didn’t want to be seen. Barry says Kilgallen is Deputy Chief LeMoye’s man.”

“Larry Kilgallen is one of the locals I was asked to watch.”

“Who asked you?”

He cracked an ugly grin. “People who knew I would work cheap. I don’t think they know Parker’s involved. And I never got a chance to tell them about Gloria.”

He slept for three hours while I kept watch. None of Gloria’s occasional boys was in residence. Nobody came around looking for her — or to clean the swimming pool. The only person besides us who knew about the body was the person who had put it there.

While he slept, I kept looking at him. I thought about calling Mom with the news, but she had had enough of this man for one lifetime. What had started out as heroic and romantic had gone bad. He had signed on during the Cold War believing everything, and had ended up believing nothing. And now... he had been in town twenty hours. Twenty hours ago, Bennell, Hewitt, and Gloria had been alive.

He got up late in the afternoon. When he’d had a shower and some coffee and food, we talked about stuff that had nothing to do with the case. He didn’t apologize for being a lousy husband or absent father. He had taught me to sail, and to shoot, and maybe to be too independent. Looking at me, he said he thought he’d done a good job.

After dark, he went into the water and pulled Gloria out. Wrapping her in a sheet, I saw more than I wanted to. The shaft through her body was a long African tribal knife, but it hadn’t made her only wound. She had been tortured. I went behind a tree and threw up.

Dad carried the body into the main house. Then we spent two hours in Bahama Village, making the rounds of places where he had friends. Twice we heard that a fat white guy without much money also was asking around. But nobody had seen Hector Avila in more than a week. That crazy Cuban? Oh, yessir, Mr. Danny, he likes them Chinese prostitutes upstairs of the bike rental. Yessir, that’s Hectorcito, same one as cut Shem the Tailor’s hamstring, Shem who specializes in pharmaceuticals.

It was a matter of time before Parker heard we were out there.

About one-thirty in the morning, a kid with a shaved head, awning-striped shirt, black trousers, shiny black tap shoes, and red suspenders came up to the bar at Puccini’s and handed Dad a note. The boy waited until I gave him five dollars, then ran out the door. Dad showed me the note, which said: 4 A.M. Room 407.

“That’s Parker’s hotel room.”

He nodded.

“We don’t want to go there,” I said.

“You’re not going. Parker and I’ve got business. Let’s camp at the boat for a while.”

I sat on deck in the dark while Dad used the head. He came topside carrying the knapsack I usually kept my paints in. Without asking I knew he had a gun in it. Under my breath, I said, “I’m coming with.”

He sat beside me. “You’ve never shot anyone, have you?” He took my silence as assent.

“We should be calling the cops.”

“Probably,” he agreed. I couldn’t see his eyes in the darkness, couldn’t tell what was there. “But that’s not how Parker and I play.”

“I thought you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t, but I know the type.”

Of course he did. The type was just like himself.

Colonel Tom Parker wasn’t alone, but we hadn’t expected him to be. Even indoors he was wearing the big safari hat. He also had a body-armor vest on his torso, the Walther holstered on his hip, and a small machine pistol hanging from his shoulder. But he had the courtesy bar open, and he was making a show of being hospitable, putting out whiskey and mixers alongside a can of nuts. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said.

Lieutenant Kilgallen sat at a table near the window, watching us from slitted eyes, puffy lips set, a reef of cash in front of him held together with rubber bands.

The only surprise I got was finding Barry Irvington sitting next to Kilgallen. He had his fingers laced behind his head like a spectator who didn’t find the proceedings interesting. He didn’t look at me. I thought, Oh, crap. It was my day for disappointments.

Dad dropped the knapsack onto the sofa, and nodded to Parker. “Hi, Lou.”

“Hi, yourself.” Lou’s grin was almost as big as his hat. “Took a year off my life when I spotted you walking around Bahama Village tonight. When Gloria says she’s done someone, I thought I could take her word for it. She used to be better.”

“She wasn’t bad.”

I leaned against the wall beside the front door. Lou, or whoever he was, winked at me. “Some girl you got there, Dan. First off, I’m sorry about Hector. I know he was your boy, but he had to go.”

I shot my father a look, but he was watching the stack of money in front of Kilgallen. Without moving his head, he said, “What happened to him?”

“Gloria figured there wasn’t room for all three of us, and she liked me better.” The beard split in a grin.

“Two’s better than three,” my father agreed.

Listening to him, my heart sank.

Kilgallen cleared his throat. “Avila went in the gulf last week. Guess he didn’t float as well as you did, Dan. By the way, doing you was Gloria’s move. I wasn’t consulted. I got nothin’ against you. Are we okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He patted the cash. “This is your cut of what we did through December. Figured it might square things.”

“It’ll help.”

“Okay. Let’s get to our problem. We got two dead people that have to be explained. Sergeant Irvington here has kindly volunteered to be the fall guy. It won’t be airtight, but it’ll work.”

Barry’s glance met mine. For the first time, I noticed that the hands behind his head were manacled.

“Why would he have killed Bennell and Hewitt?” Dad asked.

Kilgallen lifted his shoulders. “Greed. We pass the hat, put twenty grand in his bank account. That would buy a local cop. Then we have a scenario. Crooked cop gets caught and eats his gun. We’re covered. The money-scrubbing business goes quiet for a while. Three months from now, we’re back up and running. No one from Miami gets bent out of shape, except at Avila, who’s run off with their money. You’re the only one we gotta bring on board, Dan.”

“What about Gloria Hasty?”

“What about her?” Kilgallen said.

“She’s dead.”

Kilgallen’s head turned. “Lou?”

Lou didn’t apologize. “One of those things. It can fit the cop. Okay with you, Danny?”

“Just fine. So which of you took care of Bennell and Hewitt?”

“Gloria.” He stopped playing with the whiskey bottle. “They’d gotten cold feet. She did it nice and clean with Bennell but lost it on Hewitt.”

“Okay. Why Gloria, Lou?”

“She had Avila’s boat. There’s about two million in good checks on it.” Lou tapped his big fingers nervously on the top of the machine gun. “I got the location out of her this afternoon.”

“Where’s the boat?” Kilgallen demanded.

Kilgallen and Lou stared at each other.

“We’ll talk about that later,” Lou said.

“Yeah, we will. That leaves who deals with Irv. Any volunteers?”

I couldn’t look at Barry. He had befriended me, had helped me over rough ground. If I hadn’t told him about Parker, he wouldn’t be here.

“Volunteers?” Kilgallen repeated.

“Guess it’s my turn,” my father said. My heart dropped. He took a big handgun from his jacket and was two steps from Barry when Lou complained, “Cripes, not here! It’s my room. Besides, if people are going to believe the cop did it, we got to set the stage.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Take the cop over to Gloria’s. She’s dead in the pool. Shoot him with her piece. Like the lieutenant says, it’ll work.”

My father rubbed his chin. “We’ll have to drive. Who’s got a car?”

“Dad,” I said. I owed him a warning. Behind me, I had my gun out.

Lou looked at me, and his hand moved a little on the machine gun. “Uh, Danny, we got a problem. Your kid is pals with Irvington.”

“She’s just stringing him for me,” my father said.

“You still shoulda known better than to bring her.”

Lou had the machine gun. When there’s one in the room, you can’t point a handgun and tell the guy to drop it. Both men had had the same training. Lou was about half a second late in realizing that in getting close to the fall guy, Dad had closed the distance with him, too. The protective vest he wore had a vulnerable area at the armholes. It’s where unlucky police officers catch one now and then. Dad was at the wrong angle for that. He shot Lou in both knees faster than you can say the words, and the heavy man went down too shocked to scream. Before Kilgallen could move, Dad had a knee on Lou’s back and was aiming across the table.

I stepped away from the door to have a better angle on the lieutenant. His hand twitched toward his jacket. He scowled. “What’s this, Dan? You want everything for yourself?”

Dad wagged the pistol. “Pull your gun, Larry.”

Kilgallen thought about it and shook his head. Then he blustered. “This is a stupid move.”

“Not for me.”

I said, “Dad...”

“Last chance to go for your gun, Larry.”

Kilgallen sat stock-still.

“No? Let me tell you something that might change your mind. Hector Avila was my friend. He also was an undercover Treasury agent. That makes killing him a capital crime. So, Larry: Are you sure you don’t want to try for your gun?”

Kilgallen kept his hands still. “I’ll take my chances in court,” he said.

When you sit with your father at a comfy restaurant, enjoying the sunset and the Straits wind, nibbling stone crab and Margaritas, it’s not a good time to say you were ready to shoot him. Not an ideal time to admit just how close he’d come, when he was moving toward my favorite cop.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth when I thought Hector was alive,” Dad said, as if that little fib was the only thing between us. “Gloria, Kilgallen, Bennell, and Hewitt were running the local laundry operation. It wasn’t a stable partnership even before Gloria decided to take out Avila and keep the money.”

“She said there was no honor among thieves,” I said.

“Once Gloria had the checks, she had to clean up the scene. Bennell and Hewitt had to go. She was leading Lou around by the nose searching for Hector’s boat, which she already had.” He chuckled in admiration. “I figure Lou got her just before she would’ve gotten him.”

He still looked haggard, after twenty hours’ sleep and a medical checkup at taxpayer expense. We had spent the afternoon arguing about the KeyHole. He wanted me to keep the boat, while I wanted to go back to Connecticut. He planned to be in Miami for a while.

“Get the damned explosives off the boat and I’ll think about it,” I said.

“They’re gone.” He set his drink down. He’d had several, was in a mood to have more. We were in the last port south, and the drinking flag was up. “What do you think I had in the knapsack? That was my fallback position.”

“What — blow up the hotel?” He’d spent several minutes on the boat. I hadn’t guessed why.

“I didn’t know who we were dealing with till we got there,” he reminded me. “If there were more cops, if it wasn’t just Kilgallen, I might have had to run a bluff. Anyway, if the bag blew, it wouldn’t have gone beyond the room.”

“We were in the room.”

He looked at me oddly. “I told you I didn’t want you along.”

His coldness sank in, and for the first time I understood how he could have abandoned Mom and me. How he could shoot another man faster than a coin hits the floor. The emptiness in this man I had always loved was a mile deep. Too deep for me to continue to care about him.

He flicked a hand at a waiter, who came with another drink.