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.”