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.