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Authors: Laurence Shames
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It's Saturday. We play on Saturday."
I climbed onto my bike.
Ozzie's amazement turned to indignation. "You can't just go! We're here. We're playing."
I started pedaling away.
To my back, he yelled, "I can't believe this! Wimping out! I'm taking a default!"
A default? The lunatic kept records?
I headed toward the harbor. Key West is a sleep-in town, and at 9:00 a.m . the streets were so quiet that I could hear the suck of my tires on the pavement. Cats slunk silently around garbage cans. Dogs snuggled against the bottom steps of porches. Tin roofs reflected sunlight and threw a silver glow on the undersides of palms.
The quiet was shattered as I neared the boatyard, though it was hard to say by what, exactly. There were no shouts, no sirens or machinery. It was more the nervous buzz of a threatened hive, the indistinctly roiled atmosphere of a place where something violent has happened.
The cops had placed a barricade across the entrance, just some splintery sawhorses whose legs stood uneven in the coral rock. Passersby gawked then moved along. I edged closer. At last, among the chastened hulks in their high, dry cradles, I saw Dream Chaser , cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.
Old salts will tell you that certain boats are just plain cursed. A virus of disaster inhabits their very decks and fittings, bringing ill winds voyage after voyage, misfortunes season after season, persisting even in the face of changing ports and changing owners. Superstitious nonsense, of course. But looking at Dream Chaser —its wrecked rigging still unrepaired, its sanded but as yet unpainted bottom splotched with putty, its last two owners untimely dead—it was hard to feel immune from superstition.
Still on my bike, I rolled up to the cop who was manning the entrance and asked him what had happened.
Gruffly he said, "Nothing I can talk about."
"It's already on the radio," I told him.
"Can't help that."
"Look, can I go in? I have a friend inside." I gestured in the direction of Maggie's trawler with its begonias and geraniums.
"Residents only," he informed me.
"I'm worried about her," I said.
"Lots of people are worried."
"Is everybody else okay?"
"Far's I know," he said, and then we had a little standoff. The cop didn't come right out and tell me to get lost, but his sour, pinched expression behind the Ray-Bans let me know that I was bugging him. He stared at me in the petty, bullying way of certain small-town cops who want to let you know they are memorizing your face, and that some time it will cost you. I stared back for an instant, and wondered if this guy had been a friend of Lefty Ortega's, one of the flunkies whose mission it was to make sure that the guys who ran the town were free to do their business.
But what I was mainly thinking in that moment was what a sorry excuse for a detective I was turning out to be. Real PI's knew how to talk to cops, manly man to man, how to wheedle information. A real PI would have gotten past the barricade, past the crime-scene tape, would have managed to get aboard that cursed boat. A real detective would have smelled the blood and noticed some small but crucial thing that everyone else had overlooked. Instead, I just sat there on my bike, knowing that I seemed to the cop like one more weenie with white shorts and a tennis racquet. Still outside the perimeter of real involvement, I flinched from his belittling stare and pedaled off.
But in no particular direction. I was edgy and nervous and didn't feel like going home. I felt an itch I couldn't place at first. Gradually I recognized it as something that long ago, up north, I used to feel quite often: the itch of purpose, the itch to get something accomplished. But what?
With nothing much in mind, I leaned and swooped through random streets. Not till I'd crossed the ugly clutter of Duval did I realize I was heading to Bahama Village to check out the Hibiscus guest house.
Bahama Village is about the last part of Key West that
I climbed onto my bike.
Ozzie's amazement turned to indignation. "You can't just go! We're here. We're playing."
I started pedaling away.
To my back, he yelled, "I can't believe this! Wimping out! I'm taking a default!"
A default? The lunatic kept records?
I headed toward the harbor. Key West is a sleep-in town, and at 9:00 a.m . the streets were so quiet that I could hear the suck of my tires on the pavement. Cats slunk silently around garbage cans. Dogs snuggled against the bottom steps of porches. Tin roofs reflected sunlight and threw a silver glow on the undersides of palms.
The quiet was shattered as I neared the boatyard, though it was hard to say by what, exactly. There were no shouts, no sirens or machinery. It was more the nervous buzz of a threatened hive, the indistinctly roiled atmosphere of a place where something violent has happened.
The cops had placed a barricade across the entrance, just some splintery sawhorses whose legs stood uneven in the coral rock. Passersby gawked then moved along. I edged closer. At last, among the chastened hulks in their high, dry cradles, I saw Dream Chaser , cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.
Old salts will tell you that certain boats are just plain cursed. A virus of disaster inhabits their very decks and fittings, bringing ill winds voyage after voyage, misfortunes season after season, persisting even in the face of changing ports and changing owners. Superstitious nonsense, of course. But looking at Dream Chaser —its wrecked rigging still unrepaired, its sanded but as yet unpainted bottom splotched with putty, its last two owners untimely dead—it was hard to feel immune from superstition.
Still on my bike, I rolled up to the cop who was manning the entrance and asked him what had happened.
Gruffly he said, "Nothing I can talk about."
"It's already on the radio," I told him.
"Can't help that."
"Look, can I go in? I have a friend inside." I gestured in the direction of Maggie's trawler with its begonias and geraniums.
"Residents only," he informed me.
"I'm worried about her," I said.
"Lots of people are worried."
"Is everybody else okay?"
"Far's I know," he said, and then we had a little standoff. The cop didn't come right out and tell me to get lost, but his sour, pinched expression behind the Ray-Bans let me know that I was bugging him. He stared at me in the petty, bullying way of certain small-town cops who want to let you know they are memorizing your face, and that some time it will cost you. I stared back for an instant, and wondered if this guy had been a friend of Lefty Ortega's, one of the flunkies whose mission it was to make sure that the guys who ran the town were free to do their business.
But what I was mainly thinking in that moment was what a sorry excuse for a detective I was turning out to be. Real PI's knew how to talk to cops, manly man to man, how to wheedle information. A real PI would have gotten past the barricade, past the crime-scene tape, would have managed to get aboard that cursed boat. A real detective would have smelled the blood and noticed some small but crucial thing that everyone else had overlooked. Instead, I just sat there on my bike, knowing that I seemed to the cop like one more weenie with white shorts and a tennis racquet. Still outside the perimeter of real involvement, I flinched from his belittling stare and pedaled off.
But in no particular direction. I was edgy and nervous and didn't feel like going home. I felt an itch I couldn't place at first. Gradually I recognized it as something that long ago, up north, I used to feel quite often: the itch of purpose, the itch to get something accomplished. But what?
With nothing much in mind, I leaned and swooped through random streets. Not till I'd crossed the ugly clutter of Duval did I realize I was heading to Bahama Village to check out the Hibiscus guest house.
Bahama Village is about the last part of Key West that
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