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 smalclass="underline" 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.