Stormy Weather Page 12

  Bonnie Lamb awoke in Augustine's arms. Her guilt was diluted by the observation that he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She didn't remember him dressing during the night, but obviously he had. She was reasonably sure that no sex had occurred; plenty of tears, yes, but no sex.

  Bonnie wanted to pull away without waking him. Otherwise there might be an awkward moment, the two of them lying there embraced. Or maybe not. Maybe he'd know exactly what not to say. Clearly he was experienced with crying women, because he was exceptionally good at hugging and whispering. When she found herself thinking about how nice he smelled, Bonnie knew it was time to sneak out of bed.

  As she'd hoped, Augustine had the good manners to pretend to stay asleep until she was safely in the kitchen, making coffee.

  When he walked in, she felt herself blush. "I'm so sorry," she blurted, "for last night."

  "Why? Did you take advantage of me?" He went to the refrigerator and took out a carton of eggs. "I'm a heavy sleeper," he said. "Easy prey for sex-crazed babes."

  "Especially newlyweds."

  "Oh, they're the worst," said Augustine. "Ravenous harlots. You want scrambled or fried?"

  "Fried." She sat at the table. She tore open a packet of NutraSweet and managed to miss the coffee cup entirely. "Please believe me. I don't usually sleep with strange men."

  "Sleeping is fine. It's the screwing you want to watch out for." He was peeling an orange at the sink. "Relax, OK? Nothing happened."

  Bonnie smiled. "Can I at least say thanks, for being a friend."

  "You're very welcome, Mrs. Lamb." He glanced over his shoulder. "What's so funny?"

  "The jeans."

  "Don't tell me there's a hole."

  "No. It's just-well, you got up in the middle of the night to put them on. It was a sweet gesture."

  "Actually, it was more of a precaution." The eggs sizzled when Augustine dropped them into the hot pan. "I'm surprised you even noticed," he said, causing Bonnie to redden once more.

  In the middle of breakfast, the phone rang. It was the Medical Examiner's Office-another John Doe was being hauled to the county morgue. The coroner on duty wanted Bonnie to stop by for a look. Augustine said she'd call him back. He put the phone down and told her.

  "Can they make me go?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Because it's not Max," Bonnie said. "Max is too busy talking to Rodale and Burns."

  "A white male is all they said. Apparent homicide."

  The last word hung in the air like sulfur. Bonnie put down her fork. "It can't be him."

  "Probably not," Augustine agreed. "We don't have to go."

  She got up and went to the bathroom. Soon Augustine heard the shower running. He was washing the dishes when she came out. She was dressed. Her wet hair was brushed back, and she'd found the intern's rose lipstick in the medicine chest.

  "I guess I need to be sure," she said.

  Augustine nodded. "You'll feel better."

  Snapper's real name was Lester Maddox Parsons. His mother named him after a Georgia politician best known for scaring off black restaurant customers with an ax handle. Snapper's mother believed Lester Maddox should be President of the United States and the whole white world; Snapper's father leaned toward James Earl Ray. When Snapper was barely seven years old, his parents took him to his first Ku Klux Klan rally; for the occasion, Mrs. Parsons dressed her son in a costume sewn from white muslin pillowcases; she was especially proud of the pointy little hood. The other Klansmen and their wives fawned over Lester, remarking on the youngster's handsome Southern features-baffling praise, because all that was visible of young Lester were his beady brown eyes, peeping through the slits of his sheet. He thought: I could be a Negro, for all they know!

  Still, the boy enjoyed Klan rallies because there was great barbecue and towering bonfires. He was disappointed when his family stopped attending, but he couldn't argue with his parents' reason for quitting. They referred to it as The Accident, and Lester would never forget the night. His father had gotten customarily shitfaced and, when the climactic moment came to light the cross, accidentally ignited the local Grand Kleagle instead. In the absence of a fire hose, the frantic Klansmen were forced to save their blazing comrade by spritzing him with well-shaken cans of Schlitz beer. Once the fire was extinguished, they placed the charred Kleagle in the bed of Lester's father's pickup and drove to the hospital. Although the man survived, his precious anonymity was lost forever. A local television crew happened to be outside the emergency room when the Kleagle-hoodless, his sheet in scorched tatters– arrived. Once his involvement in the Klan was exposed on TV, the man resigned as district attorney and moved upstate to Macon. Lester's father blamed himself, a sentiment echoed in harsher terms by the other Klansmen. Morale in the local chapter further deteriorated when a newspaper revealed that the young doctor who had revived the dying Kleagle was a black man, possibly from Savannah.

  The Parsonses decided to leave the Klan while it was still their choice to do so. Lester's father joined a segregated bowling league, while his mother mailed out flyers for J. B. Stoner, another famous racist who periodically ran for office. Politics bored young Lester, who turned his pubescent energies to crime. He dropped out of school on his fourteenth birthday, although his preoccupied parents didn't find out for nearly two years. By then the boy's income from stealing backhoes and bulldozers was twice his father's income from repairing them. The Parsonses strove not to know what their son was up to, even when it landed him in trouble. Lester's mother worried that the boy had a mean streak; his father said all boys do. Can't get by otherwise in this godforsaken world.

  Lester Maddox Parsons was seventeen when he got his nickname. He was hot-wiring a farmer's tractor in a peanut field when a game warden snuck up behind him. Lester dove from the cab and took a punch at the man, who calmly reconfigured Lester's face with the butt of an Ithaca shotgun. He sat in the county jail for three days before a doctor came to examine his jaw, which was approximately thirty-six degrees out of alignment.

  That it healed at all was a minor miracle; Snapper was spitting out snips of piano wire until he was twenty-two years old.

  The Georgia prison system taught the young man an important lesson: It was best to keep one's opinions about race mingling to oneself. So when Avila introduced Snapper to the roofing crew, Snapper noted (but did not complain) that two of the four workers were as black as the tar they'd be mixing. The third roofer was a muscular young Marielito with the number "69" tattooed elegantly inside his lower lip. The fourth roofer was a white crackhead from Santa Rosa County who spoke a version of the English language that was utterly incomprehensible to Snapper and the others. Although each of the roofers owned long felony rap sheets, Snapper couldn't say that his feelings toward the crew approached anything close to kinship.

  Avila sat the men down for a pep talk.

  "Thanks to the hurricane, there's a hundred fifty thousand houses in Dade County need new roofs," he began. "Only a damn fool couldn't make money off these poor bastards."

  The plan was to line up the maximum number of buyers and perform the minimum amount of actual roofing. By virtue of owning a suit and tie, Snapper was assigned the task of bullshitting potential customers through the fine print of the "contract," then collecting deposits.

  "People are fucking desperate for new roofs," Avila said buoyantly. "They're getting rained on. Fried from the sun. Eat up by bugs. Faster they get a roof on their heads, the more they'll pay." He raised his palms to the sky. "Hey, do they really care about price? It's insurance money, for Christ's sake."

  One of the roofers inquired how much manual labor would be involved. Avila said they should repair a small section on every house. "To put the people's minds at ease," he explained.

  "What's a 'small' section?" the roofer demanded.

  Another said, "It's fucking August out here, boss. I know guys that dropped dead of heatstroke."

  Avila reassured the men they could get by with doing a square,
maybe less, on each roof. "Then you can split. Time they figure out you won't be back, it's too late."

  The crackhead mumbled something about contracting licenses. Avila turned to Snapper and said, "They ask about our license, you know what to do."

  "Run?"

  "Exactamente!"

  Snapper wasn't pleased with his door-to-door role in the operation, particularly the odds of encountering large pet dogs. He said to Avila: "Sounds like too much talking to strangers. I hate that shit. Why don't you do the contracts?"

  "Because I inspected some of these goddamn houses when I was with building-and-zoning."

  "The owners don't know that."

  Chango had warned Avila to be careful. Chango was Avila's personal santeria deity. Avila had thanked him with a turtle and two rabbits.

  "I'm keeping low," Avila told Snapper. "B-and-Z's got snitches all over the damn county. Somebody recognizes my face, we're screwed."

  Snapper wasn't sure if Avila was paranoid or purely lazy. "So where will you be exactly," he said, "when we're out on a job? Maybe some air-conditioned office." He heard the roofers snicker, a hopeful sign of solidarity.

  But Avila was quick to assert his authority. "Job? This isn't no 'job,' it's an act. You boys aren't here 'cause you can mop tar. You're here 'cause you look like you can."

  "What about me?" Snapper goaded. "How come I was hired?"

  "Because we couldn't get Robert Redford." Avila stood up to signal the end of the meeting. "Snap, why the hell you think you got hired? So people would be sure to pay. Comprende? One look at that fucked-up face, and they know you mean business."

  Maybe an ordinary criminal would've taken it as a compliment. Snapper did not.

  All the mattresses in Tony Torres's house were soaked from the storm, so Edie Marsh had sex with the insurance man on the BarcaLounger. It was a noisy and precarious endeavor. Fred Dove was nervous, so Edie had to assist him each step of the way. Afterwards he said he must've slipped a disk. Edie was tempted to remark that he hadn't moved enough muscles to slip anything; instead she told him he was a stallion in technique and proportion. It was a strategy that seldom failed. Fred Dove contentedly fell asleep with his head on her shoulder and his legs snagged in the footrest, but not before promising to submit a boldly fraudulent damage claim for the Torres house and split the check with Edie Marsh.

  An hour before dawn, Edie heard a terrible commotion in the backyard. She couldn't rise to investigate because she was pinned beneath the insurance man in the BarcaLounger. Judging from the tumult outside, Donald and Maria had gone rabid. The confrontation ended in a flurry of plaintive yips and a hair-raising roar. Edie Marsh didn't move until the sun came up. Then she stealthily roused Fred Dove, who panicked because he'd forgotten to phone his wife back in Omaha. Edie told him to hush up and put on his pants.

  She led him to the backyard. The only signs of the two miniature dachshunds were limp leashes and empty collars. The Torres lawn was torn to shreds. Several large tracks were visible in the damp gray soil; deep raking tracks, with claws.

  Fred Dove's left Hush Puppy fit easily one of the imprints. "Good Lord," he said, "and I wear a ten and a half."

  Edie Marsh asked what kind of wild animal would make such a track. Fred Dove said it looked big enough to be a lion or a bear. "But I'm not a hunter," he added.

  She said, "Can I come stay with you?"

  "AttheRamada?"

  "What-they don't allow women?"

  "Edie, we shouldn't be seen together. Not if we're going through with this."

  "You expect me to stay out here alone?"

  "Look, I'm sorry about your dogs—"

  "They weren't my goddamn dogs."

  "Please, Edie."

  With his round eyeglasses, Fred Dove reminded her of a serious young English teacher she'd known in high school. The man had worn Bass loafers with no socks and was obsessed with T. S. Eliot. Edie Marsh had screwed the guy twice in the faculty lounge, but he'd still given her a C on her final exam because (he claimed) she'd missed the whole point of "J. Alfred Prufrock." The experience had left Edie Marsh with a deep-seated mistrust of studious-looking men.

  She said, "What do you mean, if we go through with this? We made a deal."

  "Yes," Fred Dove said. "Yes, we did."

  As he followed her into the house, she asked, "How soon can you get this done?"

  "Well, I could file the claim this week—"

  "Hundred percent loss?"

  "That's right," replied the insurance man.

  "A hundred and forty-one grand. Seventy-one for me, seventy for you."

  "Right." For somebody about to score the windfall of a lifetime, Fred Dove was subdued. "My concern, again, is Mister Torres—"

  "Like I told you last night, Tony's in some kind of serious jam. I doubt he'll be back."

  "But didn't you say Mrs. Torres, the real Mrs. Torres, might be returning to Miami—"

  "That's why you need to hurry," Edie Marsh said. "Tell the home office it's an emergency."

  The insurance man pursed his lips. "Edie, every case is an emergency. There's been a hurricane, for God's sake."

  Impassively, she watched him finish dressing. He spent five full minutes trying to smooth the wrinkles out of his sex-rumpled Dockers. When he asked to borrow an iron, Edie reminded him there was no electricity.

  "How about taking me to breakfast," she said.

  "I'm already late for an appointment in Cutler Ridge.

  Some poor old man's got a Pontiac on top of his house." Fred Dove kissed Edie on the forehead and followed up with the obligatory morning-after hug. "I'll be back tonight. Is nine all right?"

  "Fine," she said. Tonight he'd undoubtedly bring condoms-one more comic speed bump on the highway to passion. She made a mental note to haul one of Tony's mattresses out in the sun to dry; another strenuous session in the BarcaLounger might put poor Freddie in traction.

  "Bring the claim forms," she told him. "I want to see everything."

  He jotted a reminder on his clipboard and slipped it into the briefcase.

  "Oh yeah," Edie said. "I also need a couple gallons of gas from your car."

  Fred Dove looked puzzled.

  "For the generator," she explained. "A hot bath would be nice ... since you won't let me share your tub at the Ramada."

  "Oh, Edie—"

  "And maybe a few bucks for groceries."

  She softened up when the insurance man took out his wallet. "That's my boy." She kissed him on the neck and ended it with a little bite, just to prime the pump.

  "I'm scared," he said.

  "Don't be, sugar. It's a breeze." She took two twenties and sent him, on his way.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On the drive to the morgue, Augustine and Bonnie Lamb heard a news report about a fourteen-foot reticulated python that had turned up in the salad bar of a fast-food joint in Perrine.

  "One of yours?" Bonnie asked.

  "I'm wondering." It was impossible to know if the snake had belonged to Augustine's dead uncle; Felix Mojack's handwritten inventory was vague on details.

  "He had a couple big ones," Augustine said, "but I never measured the damn things."

  Bonnie said, "I hope they didn't kill it."

  "Me, too." He was pleased that she was concerned for the welfare of a primeval reptile. Not all women would be.

  "They could give it to a zoo," she said.

  "Or turn it loose at the county commission."

  "You're bad."

  "I know," Augustine said. As legal custodian of the menagerie, he felt a twinge of responsibility for Bonnie Lamb's predicament. Without a monkey to chase, her husband probably wouldn't have been abducted. Maybe the culprit was one of Uncle Felix's rhesuses, maybe not.

  Without reproach, Bonnie asked: "What'll you do if one of those critters kills a person?"

  "Pray it was somebody who deserved it."

  Bonnie was appalled. Augustine said, "I don't know what else to do, short of a safari. You know
how big the Everglades are?"

  They rode in silence for a while before Bonnie said: "You're right. They're free, and that's how it ought to be."

  "I don't know how anything ought to be, but I know how it is. Hell, those cougars could be in Key Largo by now."

  Bonnie Lamb smiled sadly. "I wish I was."

  Before entering the chill of the Medical Examiner's Office, she put on a baggy ski sweater that Augustine had brought for the occasion. This time there were no preliminaries to the viewing. The same young coroner led them directly to the autopsy room, where the newly murdered John Doe was the center of attention. The corpse was surrounded by detectives, uniformed cops, and an unenthusiastic contingent of University of Miami medical students. They parted for Augustine and Bonnie Lamb.