Naked Came the Manatee (1996)

  Fidel Castro waved his hand. "But the most important thing is, what shall I tell El Maniz about the missing cargo? Save me from these gringos with their missions. If Senor Peanut wants to get away from his wife, tell him to get a divorce. Involving himself in complicated matters of state... " He reached for a cigar. "If we could somehow put him together with the one who won't leave me in peace, what a pair, no?"

  Jake Lassiter entered the windowless, brightly lit morgue. His swollen knee hurt. He tried not to limp. Overhead, a buzzing fluorescent was starting to go. Jake didn't know how Britt did it. He could never get used to the smell of formaldehyde or the partially masked odor of rotting flesh.

  In the center of the room, Britt and Fay stood beside a metal table where a waxen cadaver lay over a trough. The women were talking to a medical examiner wearing steel mesh gloves, who was weighing a liver on a scale.

  Jake brightened; the pain in his knee subsided. Attractive women and the pursuit of truth were not mutually exclusive and it was good to hone one's skills.

  Fay heard him first. "Jake is coming," she said. "He's like the crocodile in Peter Pan. "

  "I never saw the movie," said Britt. "I was too busy hating my mother."

  Jake strode toward the women, then stopped abruptly, legs spread apart like the Colossus of Rhodes. He averted his eyes from the fluids running down the trough of the metal table, looked up instead at the buzzing neon light. "That's the second time you stood me up, Britt." Getting no response, he dropped his voice. It was low and husky. Women liked its sound. "You here to find a match for the head?"

  Fay turned away from the medical examiner, spoke into her chest. "Heads," she mumbled. "At least there appear to be two."

  Jake turned on his high-voltage Jake Lassiter laser beam stare. "No kidding?"

  "But that's not why we're here. There's more."

  "More heads?"

  Fay's eyes glistened. "This is no time to kid around. Phil is missing."

  "I hope you'd worry about me if I was missing."

  "It's a human rights thing, Jake. It isn't a contest. As far as I'm concerned, you and Phil are both ancient history, so don't ask me the question you always ask, the one-to-ten scale. The answer is, as I've told you before, even when it's bad it's good."

  They left the morgue after they had been assured by the medical examiner that although there were hip joints and quarter rounds washing up daily on the shores of Baker Haulover, so far there were no bodies without heads.

  Jake decided on a positive approach. "We don't need the bodies. Let's work with what we have. And what we have is a couple of heads that look like Castro. Are they really Castro? Who knows? We need an ID on at least one of the heads. You can do it with photographs or dental records if you can get them, but a positive nail takes DNA."

  Fay nodded her head. "We need to get an expert. Does anyone know Barry Scheck?"

  "I met him once," said Jake. "At a Bar convention. It was at a plenary session on prokaryotes and nucleopeptides. But I doubt he'd remember me."

  Britt fished something out of her memory. "You know Pupi Alvarez, the TV anchor? Pupi has a cousin by marriage, her name is Lilia something. According to Pupi, Lilia had a thing with Castro when she was young. She was a singer, played the Nacional Hotel before the Revolution. She met up with some of Castro's people, they took her into the mountains. Lilia didn't come down for two years. And get this, they said she kept a lock of Castro's hair."

  Fay wrinkled her nose. "I thought only santeros did that. Why would she keep his hair?"

  "It's a trophy thing."

  Jake hooked his thumb into his belt. "You think she still has it?"

  "Only way to find out," said Britt. "I'll put in a call to Pupi. Find out where she lives."

  Surrounded by sea cucumber and spider crabs, Booger fed among the swaying, strap-bladed turtle grass. Earlier, a marine biologist had tried to entice the manatee with lettuce in order to attach a radio transmitter and a yellow float to the creature's tail. Weary of impediments, and translating the event as danger, Booger rolled out of her grasp. Now, having forgone the lettuce, he was hungry.

  Booger ate his fill, including the narrow-bladed shoal grass, then swam toward shore to wait for the one in the diving mask to swim beside him and stroke his neck. He lay in the mud flats listening for outboard motors. A human with a familiar scent drifted toward him. Booger raised his snout, then wallowed toward the floating figure, discovering with a few playful taps that it was all wrong. The scent he'd known had turned, been tainted with death.

  After a while, he began to toy idly with the floating thing, a bloating body whose blood had settled in the extremities and whose limbs flopped lifelessly. Weary of having to push the corpse into the currents, Booger nudged it away and continued his vigil.

  The crumbling neighborhood, long since severed from its purpose by a cloverleaf expressway, lay baking in the sun. A gray mockingbird darted after a spill of corn flakes from a thicket of hubcaps and vines. Even in the late afternoon, heat shimmered from the asphalt like a mirage, while an empty Metrorail car glided silently above. Over the boarded-up storefronts and empty lots strewn with torn mattresses and rusted, red-tagged chassis, hung the smell of car fumes and jasmine.

  They pulled up in Fay's pickup truck in front of a sun-silvered frame bungalow. A boy in a Marlins baseball cap and high-top Air Jordans stood on a cinder block spray-painting a wall with a $2.99 can of orange Krylon.

  Watching the tagger were a knot of children of varying sizes. All movement ceased as Britt, Fay, and Jake stepped down from the cab of the truck.

  "Something must be gonna happen," said one child.

  "Jump-outs!" yelled another.

  The boy in the Marlins cap looked down in disdain from his surreal ab traction of hypodermics and coffins. "They look like undercover to you? Since when do undercover swivel they heads? More like they came to get a bump to keep them awake."

  "Watch the truck," said Jake, pitching a five-dollar bill.

  "Five is for the cab," said the boy in the baseball cap. "The flatbed and the aerial is gonna cost you ten."

  Lilia Sands's skin was the color of vanilla. Tight black, gray-streaked ringlets molded the curve of her well-shaped skull. Wrapped in a flowered silk kimono, she had clearly once been beautiful. Now she was comely, or handsome, or whatever euphemism people assign to women who are over the hill.

  Lilia Sands regarded Jake in frank assessment. "Didn't you used to play ball?"

  "Linebacker."

  "You look more like a tight end to me," she said.

  Britt smiled, glad that Jake was getting his comeuppance, then decided to cut to the chase. "Pupi Alvarez told us that you once knew Castro."

  "Yes, I knew him. It was a long time ago. I was with him in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Hiding out from Batista's planes in ferns higher than your head, with the smell of coffee blossom coming from somewhere below."

  Fay jumped in the way she dove. "Forgive the question, but we heard... someone said that you and Castro were intimate."

  Lilia laughed. "Did you ever sleep with a man on a cot? For two years? You, him, and his hobnailed combat boots? That's more than intimate. You have to be into revolution to do that."

  Fay imagined the permutations of bedding on an army cot. Jake was doing the same, while Britt maintained the ferret's focus that was her stock-in-trade.

  "We heard you saved a lock of hair," said Britt. "If you have it, it's very important."

  Jake intercepted the ball. "We need it," he said. "It could be evidence."

  "What kind of evidence are you talking about?"

  The throb of a pumping bass rumbled from a cruising car. Britt glanced outside, then stepped away from the window. "We can't tell you. We're asking you to trust us."

  Lilia continued to regard her visitors with a jaundiced eye.

  Britt played the Latin connection card. "Trust me."

  Lilia Sands evaluated the young woman before her, especially the tawny skin that
hinted of the Caribbean. She remembered that the crime reporter had gone to bat for a former player for the L. A. Raiders by the name of D. Wayne Hudson, a friend of Lilia's son.

  "I might have what you're looking for. Somewhere back here."

  Britt followed Lilia behind a tinkling beaded curtain to a bedroom with a chest of drawers. In the second drawer was a cigar box that smelled of patchouli. Lilia opened the box. Nestled in tissue paper were locks of hair of varying lengths and colors.

  Lilia smiled. "I got around," she said. She raked the locks with long, well-manicured fingernails and fished out a strand bound in a red and gold Montecristo wrapper.

  There was a knock at the front door.

  Lilia called through the beaded curtain, "Somebody see who it is."

  Jake and Fay exchanged glances. Could Hector or whoever he worked for have followed them? The rap was sharp and insistent.

  "I'll get it." Tensing his body for a straight buck up the middle, Jake threw open the door.

  The boy in the Marlins baseball cap and high-top Air Jordans stood on the threshold. "Where's Miss Lilia at?"

  Lilia swished her way past Jake. "What's happening?"

  The boy handed her a crumpled slip of paper. "Old man in cutoffs and sandals say to call this number."

  Lilia turned from the boy and slipped the paper in the folds of her kimono. "It's a message," she said.

  "Who from?" asked Jake.

  "Garcia," she replied.

  8. STRANGE FISH--Tananarive Due Lilia Sands worked her overpainted face into a frown. "Garcia? Which Gar-cia? Do you know how many Garcias there are in the Dade County phone book?" She studied the young messenger, who was orbiting her as though he expected a tip. I'll give you a tip, all right, kid, Jake Lassiter thought. You'd better earn that ten bucks I just gave you and go back outside to keep an eye on Fay's pickup.

  "What's his first name?" she asked the boy.

  He shrugged. "He said you'd know."

  Lilia smiled, then delicately raised her fingertips to her temple as if to brush away imaginary perspiration.

  "Ah..." she said, with a long, rapturous sigh. "That Garcia."

  Jake shifted his weight from one sore leg to the other. Time out, he thought. He, Britt, and Fay had come to Lilia's for a lock of Castro's hair--the real Castro's hair. So, they had what they'd come for. No need to tango here all day. Even a pit bull reporter like Britt had to know when it was time to move on.

  "Look, Miss Sands," he said, surprised at his own politeness, "we can bail out of here if you need to catch up on your phone calls."

  "This will interest you," Lilia said, holding up her index finger to silence Jake. (Watching, Fay and Britt both took mental note of this tactic in case it might come in handy someday.) Lilia cradled the receiver of her black novelty telephone, which was shaped like a baby grand piano. Each time she pressed a key, a tone sounded; she was dialing a laborious version of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

  Long-distance, Britt noticed.

  Off key, Fay decided.

  Damn annoying, Jake thought.

  "It's me. Put him on," Lilia said abruptly, in Spanish, and then she smiled and nodded, her green-flecked brown eyes wide with pleasure as she listened to an indiscernible voice. Hanging up, she surveyed her waiting audience as though she were reliving a finale number onstage at the Nacional.

  "I shouldn't tell you this... " Lilia began.

  But you will, Britt thought, perking up. Sentences that began with "I shouldn't tell you this" were verbal foreplay, and satisfaction was never far behind.

  "You didn't hear this from me, and don't ask who told me--but Miami is about to have an important visitor from Cuba. Believe me, when he comes, the people's reaction will make Nelson Mandela's reception in Miami look like the papal visit. He's coming soon, within days. He didn't say exactly when."

  "Give me a break," Jake said, not buying it.

  "It can't be," Fay said.

  "It is," Lilia said, beaming.

  Britt's brain was turning somersaults. Not one head, but two, and Fidel was still alive? And, apparently, intending to set foot in a city that nourished itself on fantasies about the day he would drop dead? Home to weekend commandos who would love to help him do just that, with a million-dollar price tag on his head?

  Castro is Coming! Britt was already thinking in headlines. This was top-strip, front-page, WW II type. She'd need to get on the phone and pull some favors with her sister-in-law's bureaucrat uncle in Havana to get confirmation.

  Britt's delight at the whiff of a huge story warred with her disappointment that the man who killed her father was still breathing. "I can't believe he's alive," she said.

  "Si, como no," Lilia said. "Of course he's alive. But if he's planning to come to Miami, he's obviously lost his head."

  Silence. The three of them started.

  "What do you mean?" Britt asked first.

  Lilia circled her finger around her ear. "You know... loco."

  The proportions of this story were growing in light-years, Britt realized. They'd been fearing riots if people thought Fidel was dead? What about the riots when word got out that he was about to enjoy a big plate of arroz con polio in the glare of fluorescent lights and mirrors at La Carreta?

  Did that phone call mean that this woman, a disenchanted revolutionary, was still maintaining her own special brand of diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro? And if that was the case, exactly how "inside" was her mysterious tipster on the phone?

  Britt, having a hunch--and her hunches were rarely wrong--fixed a probing gaze on Lilia.

  "Listen," Britt said, "on a scale from one to one hundred, if I ask how confident you are of that tip--how close your source is to Castro himself--where would it rank? Tell me that and we'll be out of your life."

  Lilia smiled a wide smile. She was reliving memories that had wiped thirty years from her face; there was no mistaking that despite politics, she was in love.

  "One hundred and ten."

  Right again, Britt thought. Fidel had been on the phone.

  Guess who's coming to dinner, Britt told herself, already writing her story's lead in her head.

  "Doesn't make sense," Jake said, holding the door open for Fay and Britt as they walked outside into the liquid afternoon heat. His hulking form stood high above the two women. "If Castro comes here, Miami's welcoming committee is going to grind him into hamburger. Or picadillo anyway. He won't last two hours."

  "Maybe that's what he wants," Britt said. "Think about it. Phony heads. A staged assassination. A reward for proof of his death. And where better than Miami? Everyone expects people to get killed in Miami."

  Fay, following them to the curb, was silent. She noticed that her pickup was now tagged KING in bright orange paint across the cab, and the kid had vanished. Jake cursed loudly, but Fay wasn't worried about her truck. She had other things on her mind.

  There was no mistaking that Pulitzer lust glazing Britt's eyes, so Fay figured her friend would head straight for the newspaper, where she'd be no help--and Jake was content, saying something about getting a beer. Him and his damned Grolsch. It figured. He'd always been too eager to punt on fourth down instead of going for it, she recalled from their brief courtship.

  To her, something just didn't add up. Even if those creepy Castro heads were part of some fake assassination scheme, how had one of them found its way into her grandmother's hands by way of Booger, the manatee? And they still weren't any closer to figuring out what had happened to Phil, her ex-husband, who'd been mixed up in bringing the heads in the first place.

  It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic, Fay thought. She could have told whoever had hired Phil that the guy couldn't be trusted to bring back the change from the grocery store, or even the groceries, much less deliver valuable cargo.

  The poor jerk had already tried to kidnap her to get the heads back once he lost them, and now they'd somehow led to his disappearance. He was a loser, but he was her loser, and it had touched
her to see him so shaken. Her stupid mothering instinct had drawn her to Phil in the first place, like a moth to a burning stick of dynamite. She should have listened to her grandmother and gotten a puppy instead, and she wouldn't be in this mess now.

  Granny.

  A thought made Fay shiver slightly, despite the hostile midafternoon sun: If Castro's heads had put Phil in danger, wasn't her grandmother in danger too?

  Granny had tucked the lone metal canister with Castro's head on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator--"Just in case it starts to thaw," she'd said, patting it like a leftover pot roast. "I'm not too fond of dead flesh at room temperature, Fay. Even a head of state."

  Fay wasn't crazy about dead flesh at any temperature, especially disembodied flesh. As soon as she got to a phone, Fay decided, she would give her grandmother a call, just to hear her voice. That way, maybe she could shake off the feeling, which had snaked its way around her middle, that something was terribly wrong.

  It was a body.

  Fishing off the bay at Peacock Park in Coconut Grove on Sundays, all day on Sunday, standing on the same spot of fine white sand beside his favorite clump of sea grape trees, Vernon Sawyer had seen enough floaters over the years to know one from a distance. And this one was bobbing only fifteen yards out, just beyond his plastic red and white cork, a patch of unexpected shade for a school of minnows that had just vanished underneath it.

  That was the thing about this park, which seemed to Vernon like a tiny strip of paradise for the common man. There was more to it than the neatly planted rows of coconut palms, or the view of the legion of rich folks' sailboats docked across the way. You never knew what you would find here, whether it was a squatters' campsite built from plastic wrapped around a trio of palm trees or an unforgettable conversation with a vagrant who'd seen the world and who understood its workings, inside his unkempt head, better than any coiffed, overfed politician he might ever meet.

  That was why Vernon came here for the surprises. It sure wasn't for the fish.

  Today's surprise, the body, was fairly fresh, hardly any swelling, not puffed the way bodies get when they've been in the water for days. Once, Vernon had seen a brother who'd ballooned so big that his skin had peeled off white, except in spots.