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1
I never meant to be a private eye.
The whole thing, in fact, was my accountant's idea. A tax dodge. Half a joke. A few years ago I made some money. Made it the modern American way: by sheer dumb luck, doing work I hated, on a silly product that only made life more trivial and more annoying. I took the dough—not a lot of dough, but enough to live on for the rest of my life if I wasn't an asshole about it—and moved full-time to Key West.
I'd had a funky little house there for years. Wood frame, shady porch, tiny pool that took up most of a backyard choked with thatch and bougainvillea. Vacation house. Daydreaming about that place, the time I'd eventually spend there, got me through a lot of crappy afternoons in my stupid office up in Jersey. Now I wanted to really make it home.
So I told my accountant to free up some cash. "I'm renovating. Building an addition."
"You're putting in an office," he informed me.
"Office? Benny, I'm retired."
"Bullshit you're retired. What are you, forty-four?"
"Forty-five."
"Forty-five you don't retire. Forty-five you have a crisis and change careers."
"There's no crisis, Benny. I'm putting in wine storage, a music room, and a hot tub."
He raised his hands to fend off the information. "You never told me that," he said. "It's an office and it'll save you thousands. Tens of thousands. Plus your car becomes deductible."
I made the mistake of keeping silent for a moment. Call me cheap. I shouldn't have even thought about it, but the idea of saving tens of thousands made mepause.
"Become a Realtor," Benny suggested. "Everyone down there becomes a Realtor, right?"
I'd dealt with Realtors in my life. "I'd rather shoot myself," I said.
"Shoot yourself," he muttered, then started free-associating. "Tough guy. Humphrey Bogart. Hey, call yourself a private eye."
"Don't be ridiculous."
He quickly fell in love with his idea. "Ya know," he said, "there's a lot of advantages. Private corporation. One employee: you. You get a gun—"
"Benny, cut it out."
"—get a license—"
"How you get a license?"
"Florida?" he said. "Probably swear you haven't murdered anybody in the last sixty, ninety days."
"Benny, I don't wanna be a private eye."
He paused, blinked, and looked somewhat surprised. "Schmuck! Did I say you have to be a private eye? I said we're calling you a private eye. You'll get some business cards, put a listing in the phone book—"
"Commit fraud—"
"What fraud? You're committing failure. Look, the government allows three years' worth of losses. By then we've depreciated the work on the house, the car lease has expired—"
Well, the whole thing was preposterous—and I guess I kind of like preposterous. Having an amusing thing to say at parties, occasionally in bars. Something incongruous and intriguing. So on my tax returns, at least, I became a private eye. Pete Amsterdam, sole proprietor, doing business as Southernmost Detection, Inc.
That was two and a half years ago. I have a license somewhere in a drawer, and a gun I've never fired rusting in a wall safe. Until very recently, thank God, I hadn't had a single client. Three, four times a year someone calls me up, usually on some sordid and depressing matrimonial thing. I lie and say I'm too busy; for some reason the potential client apologizes and quickly gets off the phone, like I'll charge him for my precious time. My only worry has been that the IRS might come snooping around to see if I was legit. This has been a sporadic but uncomfortable concern, since, for me, feeling legit has never come that easy anyway.
But in the meantime the house improvements came out beautiful, suited me to a T. I'm divorced. I live alone. I guess I'm a little eccentric. Mainly it's that I don't pretend to care about the things that most people pretend to care about. The news. What's on television. The outside world. I have a small, tight core of things that still can hold my interest; I arrange my life as simply and neatly as I can around those things, and the rest just sort of passes me right by. I like wine. I like music. I like tennis. After that the list grows pretty short.
Must sound meager to people who live in places where everyone is busy and engaged and avidly discusses what's in the theaters or the paper. But Key West isn't like that. Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or shame. And you learn things from the place where you live. One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.
So I've been more or less content down here. Tan, reasonably fit, generally unbothered. I do what I want and, better still, I don't do what I don't want. Which includes being a private eye. In fact, two and a half years into this fraud of a vocation, I'd practically forgotten I was listed in the phone book.
Or I had until a few weeks ago, when the client I'd been dimly dreading came marching into my unlocked house, stormed past the wine room and through the music room, out the back door and around the little pool, to catch me naked in the hot tub and to turn my whole life upside down.
2
My hot tub is under a poinciana tree—except for the occasional falling pod, a perfect tree to have one's hot tub under. Its branches are bare in the winter, when you want the sun. In late spring it sprouts an astonishing flat-topped canopy of bright red flowers, and in the summer it is mercifully covered with tiny leaves that cast an exquisite dappled shade. Now it was April and the milky buds were just starting to swell and ripen. I looked up at them and thought about my backhand. I'd played tennis that morning and had missed a couple of cross-court passing shots. Probably hadn't dropped my shoulder low enough. I closed my eyes and visualized the perfect motion.
The jets were on, pummeling my lower back. The pump made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a roar. The dreaded client was standing right next to me by the time I heard her say my name.
"Mr. Amsterdam? Mr. Amsterdam?"
I opened my eyes. Tiny chlorinated droplets got in them and made me blink. Through the blinking I saw her. A blonde, of course; it's always a blonde, right? Tall. Green-eyed, with a little too much makeup for the daytime. Coral-colored lipstick that was a shade too orange for my taste. The top of a frilly white bra beneath a loosely buttoned lime-green blouse.
Apologetically, the blonde pointed toward the front door of my house. "I rang the bell," she yelled. "I knocked. The door just opened. I really need to talk to someone."
By reflex, I began to say what I always said to the rare misguided souls who tried to hire me. But it was a little hard, while sitting naked in the hot tub in the middle of what, for most people, was a working day, to claim I was too busy. So I said nothing.
"Please," the blonde implored. "A few minutes of your time."
I looked at her. She had a face that held attention. Not delicate but candid and determined, unflinching even in her obvious distress. I felt bad that the noise of the jets was making her yell. On the other hand, the bubbles were the closest thing I had to clothing. I hesitated then figured what the hell and switched the pump off. It was a very Key West way to hold a meeting.
"You're a private detective?" said the blonde. Her voice hadn't quite adjusted to the quiet, and it sounded very loud.
I tried to talk but nothing happened. My balls were half-floating like eggs in a poacher, and it's difficult to lie when naked. I wanted to tell her no, I wasn't a detective, the whole thing was a joke. Then I had an awful thought. Maybe she was from the IRS. Sent to entrap me. They do things like that, let's face it. Feeling ludicrous, I said, "I take on cases now and then."
"But you're new," she said. "Am I right?"
Absurdly, this made me feel defensive. What did I look like, an amateur?
She must have seen the hurt pride in my face. "That's good," she assured me. "This is a tiny town. I need someone who isn't known."
I didn't ask why. I just sat there in the steamy water. There was a silence, and I remember thinking: Now's when she reaches into her purse for a crumbling yellow newspaper clipping. I may not know diddle about being a detective, but I have a certain rudimentary grasp of the detective story. Doesn't everybody? We all grow up with it. It's like the thirty-two-bar jazz tune. We get it without analysis because it's heritage.
And sure enough she reached into her bag. But the clipping she came up with wasn't yellowed, it was mildewed. That's what happens to newsprint in Key West. It sprouts small black fuzzy dots that ripen from the inside out like certain kinds of cheese. Eventually the mold digests the paper and eats the ink and your memories are reduced to wet black dust. She dangled the clipping in front of me. "Are you familiar with this story, Mr. Amsterdam?"
My hands were soaking wet. I shook them off and took the paper.
The headline read apparent suicide in key west harbor, and it so happened it was a story I remembered fairly well. A man had disappeared. His pants and shirt and wallet and sandals had been found at the water's edge down by the Fort Taylor jetty. He'd left no note. The disappearance had occurred late on a full-moon night, with a strong outgoing tide; the body had never been found. The man's name was Kenny Lukens. He hadn't been in town for long, and little was known about him. He'd lived on his sailboat, which had a broken mast and a torn-up deck and was resting in a cradle on the dry land of Redmond's Boatyard in the Bight. He'd worked as a late-shift bartender at Lefty's, on Duval Street. Seems he'd made no particular impression on his colleagues. Not friendly, not unfriendly. No crazier than most and not obviously despairing. No one knew of drug problems or romantic disappointments. Kenny Lukens just checked out.
This had happened very soon after I'd moved full-time to Florida—which is why I remembered it at all. I'd been feeling both smug and terrified about disappearing to Key West: Was I retiring at a lucky age to paradise, or making the first, half-conscious movement toward oblivion? Kenny Lukens' story had made me wonder what else would have to happen in a person's life so that he'd need to disappear from Key West and toward that ultimate retreat.
The blonde's voice pulled me out of my thoughts. "Some people thought the suicide was faked," she said. She said it with a hint of malice, though I couldn't figure who or what the nastiness was aimed at.
"Faked why?"
She looked down at her fingernails, which were the same pink-orange as her lips. Something unpleasantly playful, goading, had come into her manner. "Isn't that the kind of thing detectives figure out, Mr. Amsterdam?"
"Ambitious detectives maybe."
She pouted. She looked let down. I hate letting people down, which is why I don't have that much to do with people. There was a standoff. Finally I caved. "So you think Kenny Lukens is alive?"
She kept on pouting. She was very good at it. Just gazing wistfully between lashes that were lumpy with mascara. The gaze, the sorrow, the needling hope—they all reminded me how much I didn't want to be a private eye.
I dangled the soggy clipping in her direction. "Look, I'm sorry, but it's not the kind of thing I do."
I thought I'd sounded pretty final saying that, but the blonde just stood there over me. This wasn't how it was supposed to play. She was supposed to take the article back, put it in her purse, bite her lip, and maybe start to cry. Except she didn't. A long moment passed. The sun moved behind a poinciana branch and threw me into shade. I made the stupid, fundamental error of getting curious. "Who are you anyway?" I asked. "Ex-wife? Girlfriend? Sister?"
She stared at me. Something vaguely flirtatious happened at the corners of her mouth. She smoothed her skirt across her hips and waved with the muscles of her stomach. Then she reached up toward her hair. Her polished fingernails slid along her temples, made her shadowed eyes bend upward at the edges. She pried, apparently, beneath her scalp, then lifted off the wig, beneath which was some prickly fuzz not much longer than a crew cut. Tossing the ersatz coif onto a chaise, she reached into her blouse, probed past the lace top of her bra, and plucked out two perfect vinyl tits—which she placed on the damp edge of the hot tub.
Her voice dropped three-quarters of an octave. "How rude of me," she said. "I haven't introduced myself."
