“Soon, then.”
“The funeral home says there’s not much to do. Being it’s just, you know, an arm.”
“They can fix that middle finger, no problem.”
Eve Stripling looked puzzled.
“Not that you’d have an open casket,” Yancy added. “But just in case …”
“Oh, right. Good idea.”
He got out of the car. “Again, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Inspector.”
Behind the wheel Eve Stripling appeared smaller and almost contorted. With a shudder she hunched forward, squeezing her eyes closed, and it was Yancy’s impression that she was trying very hard to cry.
Five
Miguel was no beekeeper; he made that clear. He was an exterminator of bees, a highly trained assassin.
“Tell me what you’ve got,” Yancy said.
“There’s an old wood house on Ramrod, the whole east wall. I am ripping it apart tomorrow.”
“I hope the hive is large.”
Miguel laughed, flashing a gold-tipped incisor. “The hive is a motherfucker, Andrew. You cannot believe how big.”
“But how are you going to move the damn thing?”
“Don’t worry. It is what you hire me for.”
“And the bees will follow? That’s the part I don’t understand.” Yancy had a vision of Miguel’s truck weaving down Highway 1 while enclouded by a seething swarm.
“They sleep at night,” Miguel said. “I got a system.”
“Dead bees won’t do the trick. They have to be alive.”
Miguel gave a sigh he reserved for thick-skulled gringos. “For sure, Andrew. Alive.”
“How much do you charge?”
“For such a fucked-up job? Three hundred, plus gas.”
“I can probably swing two-fifty.”
“Bullshit,” Miguel said. Then: “Okay, two-fifty.”
Yancy handed him a piece of paper with the address. Miguel glanced at it and said, “Who lives here?”
“Nobody. It’s under construction.”
“Excellent, my friend. Where you want me to put the hive?”
“The master bedroom would be lovely. It’s on the top floor, facing the Gulf.”
“No problem.” Miguel took the cash from Yancy and counted it. “Here is the thing, Andrew, because I am what you call a straight shooter. When they find that motherfucking hive, the people that own the house, I’m the one they gone to call first.”
“Well, who else?” Yancy said.
“ ’Cause I’m the top bee guy from here to the Redlands.”
“Everybody knows that, Miguel. Everybody.” Yancy envied the man’s pride in his work. “Shook is the owner’s name. When he calls, I’m thinking maybe you could be tied up for a while—let those poor honeybees have some fun.”
“I got so much fucking jobs right now, my wife she is ready to kill me.”
“All right, then. Mr. Shook can wait.” Yancy gave Miguel another twenty-dollar bill.
“You want, I’ll e-mail to you some pictures, Andrew. For proof.”
“Not necessary, amigo. I’ll know when it’s done.”
Miguel was grinning as Yancy got in his car. “You look sharp, man, all pimped out. Must be some world-class pussy waiting up on the mainland.”
“Actually,” said Yancy, “I’m going to a funeral.”
A short death notice had been posted on the Herald’s website: Nicholas Joseph Stripling, age forty-six, of Miami Beach. Survived by his loving wife, Eve, and one daughter, Caitlin Cox. Private services to be held at the Neo-Pentecostal Church of Faith, followed by interment at the St. Lazarus Gardens and Water Park in North Miami.
North Miami!
The drive took almost four hours in manic traffic, Yancy cussing humanity most of the way. He owned one dreary black suit that he’d bought years earlier for his mother’s service, and he hadn’t worn it since. Now the coat hung too loosely on his frame, Yancy having dropped so much weight since becoming a restaurant sleuth. The paradox wasn’t lost on him—he’d worked many bloody crime scenes and never once felt queasy, yet the glimpse of a desiccated rat carcass in a vat of stale muffin mix left him poleaxed with revulsion.
So far, the only good thing about the job was that nobody complained if he didn’t show up. The restaurant owners were relieved not to be inspected, and they made no inquiries to Yancy’s supervisor regarding his whereabouts.
His decision to skip work and attend Nicky Stripling’s burial was out of character for two reasons. First, Yancy had always been a punctual public employee and, second, he strenuously avoided graveyards. A morgue full of chilled stiffs was no problem, but for some reason a field of sunlit tombstones gave him the willies.
Ever since meeting Eve Stripling, Yancy had been sleeping poorly, nagged by the missing pieces of her story—a story of no evident interest to anyone but him. It was an easy matter to feed Nick Stripling’s name through the state crime computer, revealing a single arrest and conviction at the age of twenty-seven. The colorful details were in a file at the courthouse.
Young Nicky had had a minor role in a common Florida insurance scam in which fraudsters would intentionally crash cars into innocent drivers and then submit mountains of phony medical claims, which the victims’ insurance companies almost always paid off. Stripling acted as the driver and was skilled at directing each staged collision with such finesse—front bumper angled into a rear rocker panel, the impact buffered by a subtle last-second deceleration—that neither he nor any of his co-conspirators received so much as a knot on the head. Whiplash was the faked injury of choice because of its domino cascade of serial billings and easy profits. The lineup of complicit health-care providers included an alcoholic chiropractor, a senile orthopedist, an unlicensed radiologist and a battalion of nonexistent physical therapists. Nick Stripling’s take for each crash was relatively paltry, so he’d turned state’s witness at the first prodding from investigators. He ended up getting ninety days in the county jail and five years’ probation.
From such inauspicious beginnings Stripling was somehow able to retire in his forties. Yancy was curious to know the secret of the man’s prosperous turnaround.
No more than fifty hardy souls showed up for the funeral in a baking summer heat that undulated off the bright green grass. Yancy feared he might sweat through his suit. Eve Stripling wore a black dress, black heels and a veil. She sat in the shade under the canopy before a walnut coffin piled with wreaths. Yancy wondered if the mortician had prorated his embalming fee, since there was only one limb to bury.
A young blond woman, also dressed in black, sat at the opposite end of the first row. Yancy assumed she was Caitlin Cox, Nick Stripling’s daughter from a prior marriage. From her body language Yancy perceived that she wasn’t enamored with her father’s current wife. Wearing saucer-sized sunglasses, Caitlin Cox fanned herself and every so often whispered to her buzz-cut husband, who was built like a stevedore.
Yancy kept well back from the mourners and remained standing. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he noticed he wasn’t alone; two other men were maintaining a practiced distance, and their suits were charcoal gray, not black. Law enforcement of some sort, Yancy guessed. They were sweaty, too. August in the city could wilt a soul.
A generic silver-haired preacher rose and said saintly things about Nick Stripling before the coffin was lowered. Eve Stripling stood up and thanked everyone for coming. She said she’d placed in Nick’s casket a childhood Bible and his favorite speargun. To Yancy it seemed a bold hobby—spearfishing—for a mediocre swimmer, as Mrs. Stripling had described her late spouse when she came to collect his left arm.
After the mourners broke into small groups and headed for their cars, Yancy approached the two cop types and said, “Friends of the deceased?”
No response except barracuda stares. Both of the men had brown hair, light eyebrows and cinder-block chins.
“You must be feds,” Yancy remarked.
“Don’t be an
asshole,” said one.
“That’s bad luck, swearing in a cemetery. Like a Gypsy curse.”
The men turned to leave.
“Or maybe it’s blowing each other in a cemetery,” Yancy said. “I forget which.”
He found himself dodging Eve Stripling, although she probably wouldn’t have recognized him in a suit and a tie. While waiting for her limousine to depart, Yancy drifted off among the sun-bleached headstones. Almost immediately he came across some unlucky bastard who’d been born on Yancy’s very own birthday and now lay six feet under. Yancy’s respiration shallowed and his palms moistened and his skin felt like it was crawling with centipedes. He stumbled a few plots farther, dropped to one knee and upchucked on the final resting site of one Marlene Suzanne Moody, who by Yancy’s quick calculation had passed away at age ninety-nine and was now safe from indignity.
After wiping his cheeks and smoothing the wrinkles from his pants, Yancy made his way back to the funeral canopy. Only Caitlin Cox and her husband remained at the grave. They stood shoulder to shoulder, saying nothing.
Yancy walked up and offered his condolences.
“Were you a friend of Dad’s?” she asked.
“I’m Inspector Yancy, from the Keys. I was in charge of your father’s remains.”
He presented one of his old detective cards. He figured what the hell—his cell number hadn’t changed. Caitlin’s husband asked Yancy why he’d come to the burial.
“Sometimes, in these cases, the family has questions. I just wanted to be available.”
It was a smooth response, caring yet professional. Yancy had polished the wording while waiting for the funeral procession to arrive.
Caitlin put his card in her handbag. A pair of cemetery attendants hung back on the edge of the shade. They weren’t allowed to start shoveling the dirt over Nick Stripling’s coffin until all the mourners were gone.
His daughter said, “I do have a question, Inspector.” Yancy liked the Scotland Yard-ish ring of his new title. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
“We peeked at it in the funeral home—Dad’s arm.”
Jesus, Yancy thought. Don’t tell me they were too lazy to fix the finger.
“It happened during rigor mortis,” he said.
Caitlin Stripling Cox seemed puzzled. “What on earth are you talking about?”
Her husband spoke up. “She means the wedding ring. Tell him, sweetheart.”
“Eve switched it out,” she said.
“The one I saw on your father’s hand looked like platinum,” Yancy said.
“That’s right. And the one he’s wearing now is yellow gold. Fourteen karat, maybe.” The downgrade was reported with somber disdain.
“Is it possible Eve decided to keep the original ring for sentimental reasons?”
“Lots of stuff is possible.” Caitlin frowned down at the casket. Yancy hoped she wasn’t expecting him to pry open the lid and appraise the substitute wedding band.
“Why don’t you ask Eve about it?”
“Because she hates me and I hate her. She’s a vicious cunt, by the way.”
Caitlin’s husband said, “Sweetheart, please.” His shirt collar was soaked, and a crystal droplet of perspiration clung to one of his ear-lobes. Yancy didn’t stare.
“A vicious greedy lying cunt,” elaborated Stripling’s daughter.
“It’s a rough time for everyone,” Yancy said.
“Is that legal—taking his ring?”
“As his wife, she’s entitled.”
“She probably stole his goddamn watch, too!”
Caitlin Cox was in her early twenties. Yancy figured she must have been a baby when her old man was staging auto accidents to rip off insurance companies.
He said, “The watch was already gone when they found your father’s arm.”
“Are you still on the case, or what?”
“I was in charge of delivering the remains. Unless some new information turns up, there’s not much else to be done.”
Caitlin laughed acidly. “I told you so, Simon,” she muttered sideways to her husband. “Nobody wants to investigate.”
“Investigate what exactly?” Yancy asked.
“Eve killed him, Inspector. She murdered my father.”
Simon Cox put an arm around his wife. “Okay, that’s the Xanax talking. Let’s go home, baby.”
Yancy offered to meet with them later in private. Caitlin said there was no point. “Don’t you see? She already got away with it!”
Her husband steered her away from the grave, Yancy following.
“What makes you think she killed him, Caitlin?”
“Oh, please.”
“Did your dad say something about Eve? Was he unhappy in the marriage?”
Caitlin pulled free of Simon and spun around. “How the hell would I know if he was happy or not? I haven’t talked to the sonofabitch in years.”
The captain of the Misty Momma IV was Keith Fitzpatrick, a fourth-generation Conch. His father had smuggled ganja from Jamaica, his grandfather had shipped rum from Havana and his great-grandfather had salvaged wrecked schooners that had been lured by deviously placed torches to the unforgiving reefs of Key West. Keith Fitzpatrick himself was a renowned fish hawk, booked years in advance, and therefore satisfied to abide the law. He made good money because he ran a thirty-eight-footer with only one mate.
Yancy met him for a beer at the Half Shell Raw Bar on the harbor. The motto of the place was “Eat It Raw!” Tourists went berserk for the T-shirts.
Fitzpatrick said, “Andrew, I heard Sonny canned your ass.”
“Temporarily.”
“That sucks.” Fitzpatrick’s face was boot brown except for a white goggle stripe from his sunglasses. His forearms were like glazed cudgels, his hands scarred and scaly.
“They got me doing restaurant inspections,” Yancy said.
“No way. You aren’t the one that shut down Stoney’s?”
“Listen, man, that kitchen—it was crawling with everything. So gross.”
“I love that place,” said Fitzpatrick.
Yancy placed the small gray shark tooth on the bar.
Fitzpatrick picked it up between a thumb and forefinger and turned it in the light. “Nuthin’ special,” he said.
“What kind is it?”
“Looks like a bonnethead. Maybe a baby lemon.”
“But not a bull shark or a tiger, right?”
Fitzpatrick shook his head and chuckled. “Not this little runt, no.”
“That’s what I think, too,” said Yancy.
Bonnetheads, the smallest species of hammerheads, averaged only about three feet in length. It was unlikely that any shark so small would be far offshore feeding on a human body, competing with the monsters.
“Where’d the tooth come from, Andrew?”
“That arm you snagged.”
“No shit?” Fitzpatrick examined it once more. “Don’t make sense, unless the dead guy’s boat sunk in the shallows. Which I heard he went down off Sombrero Light.”
“Let’s say he drowned in deep water and the body washed up on a flat.”
“What flat?”
“Let’s just say.”
“Still don’t explain how his whole arm got twisted off the way it did,” said Fitzpatrick. “I never seen a bonnethead could do that. You?”
“Nope. I don’t believe it’s possible.”
“So what is it you think happened? Tell me.”
“I’m not sure.”
“But Sonny’s keepin’ you on the case.”
Yancy gave a misleading wink. “Let’s not advertise it. Want another beer?” He ordered a couple more Budweisers.
Fitzpatrick asked if other body pieces had been found. “A leg or a head? Whatever.”
“Nothing but that arm.”
They were interrupted by a pushy fellow in a papaya polo shirt who recognized Fitzpatrick from a fishing website and wanted to go “load up” on mahi the next day. Fitzpatrick said he was boo
ked until the Second Coming, but he provided the name of another charter captain.
When they were alone again, Fitzpatrick turned to Yancy and said, “How you doing on roach patrol? It’s got to be different.”
“Look at me.” Yancy flapped his shirt collar to display his new pencil neck. “Every time I walk into a joint, all I can think about is maybe some guy in the kitchen is greasing his ass with the pizza dough. Crazy shit like that, swear to God. I can barely stand the sight of food.”
“Come on, man, you gotta eat. Let’s get some conch fritters.”
“Go for it. I’m full.”
“Promise me you won’t shut this place down, too. I’m dead serious—you’d start a damn riot.”
Yancy said, “You knew Randolph Nilsson, right? The last guy who had my job.”
“Yeah, he was married to my second wife’s third cousin. Or maybe it was my third wife’s second cousin. Anyhow, I’m the one scattered his ashes out by the Mud Keys. He was only fifty-three at the end. But life ain’t fair, right?”
“No, Keith, it’s not.”
Two more bottles of beer appeared on the bar counter, along with a platter of raw oysters. Fitzpatrick turned to scout the room, which had filled with lobster people and locals. His gaze fixed on a rangy, black-haired kid sitting beside a hard-looking blonde at a corner table. The kid wore a tight T-shirt and a scraggly pubic goatee. In his mouth bobbed an unlit cigarette, and both arms were extravagantly tattooed in a Neptunian motif. He gave Fitzpatrick a smirking salute, and the captain nodded back.
“Who’s the Tommy Lee impersonator?” Yancy asked.
“He used to mate for me,” Fitzpatrick said, “till a couple weeks ago.”
“What boat is he on now?”
“The S.S. Jackoff.”
“Gotcha.”
“Mr. Charles Phinney, he don’t need to work no more. Or so he informed me the night he quit. This was after I chewed him out for not hosin’ off the tackle and wipin’ down the teak. He says, ‘Fuck you, old man, you can stuff this shitty job.’ ”
“Now he’s buying you beer and oysters,” Yancy said, “and dating hookers.”
“Showin’ off is all. He said he come into serious money, but that could mean he won eighty-five bucks on the Lotto scratch-off. Now all of a sudden he’s Donald fucking Trump.”