“Sounds like a blessing,” Christine murmured.
“She must have been pretty important,” Lina added. “Chief Barnett hurried over this afternoon right after it happened. And that lawyer, Boone, he called about an hour after that. Wanted to know if it was true. Tell me, Miss Manning, was that Clayton girl related to some big shot, or what?”
Chapter 18
PITCHING isn’t all in the arm. Fifty percent is smarts. Look at Spahn or Robin Roberts. They didn’t have to dish it up at ninety-five miles an hour every time; hungry hitters go for the bad pitch. If you’ve got smarts, you make ’em hungry. Look at Tug McGraw. God, think of Reggie, corkscrewed at the plate after whiffing a third strike. A hungry hitter, always waiting on that fastball.
Breeze Albury slid lower into the bathtub so the steaming water puddled on his chest. He kept his eyes closed.
The fastball is an overhand pitch, of course. Ricky throws it straight over, so straight that his arm seems to brush his right ear on the way down. A lot will depend on how the bones mend. He’ll lose some speed, that’s only natural. May take a year or so to get the muscle tone back in the forearm. There’s a chance he’ll lose the slider altogether, unless the bones mend just right. Good slider depends on a healthy arm, depends on an arm that can come right back at you with the big fastball.
Albury reached for the bar of soap, fragrant and oval. He lathered his chest and shoulders.
You can’t keep this sort of thing from the pro scouts. Word gets around fast. There’s no sense pretending it won’t hurt Ricky’s chances. Who wants to gamble a bonus on a lame arm? There’s a Nautilus machine at the high school. Still, it would be better to have one at home, so Ricky wouldn’t ever have to wait. Could probably buy a secondhand one from a gym in Miami.
Albury dried off with a pink towel. He struggled into a pair of too-tight French jeans, pulled on a strange blue T-shirt, and walked out of the bathroom.
“Now, that’s much better,” pronounced Christine Manning, sitting on the edge of her bed. “I hardly recognized you in the hospital.”
“It’s been a bad week,” Albury said. She handed him a cup of hot tea with lemon. “Hope I don’t split these trousers.”
“Don’t worry. They belonged to my ex. I don’t know why I haven’t tossed them out.” Christine shrugged. “Come on, I’ve got dinner cooking.”
Albury followed her out of the bedroom, glancing sideways at himself in a full-length mirror. He felt like a fag in the silly jeans, but his appearance was an improvement over the haggard figure Christine had led from the elevator at Duval Memorial. Moist-eyed, shaking like a sick hound. God, what must she have thought? His state of embarrassment was not relieved by the fact that he had completely forgotten her name. The face and figure stood out with clarity from that afternoon at the jail, but her name had eluded him. Albury had remembered it just as they were climbing the rain-warped stairs to her second-floor flat in an old Conch house on Margaret Street.
“All I’ve got is leftovers,” Christine said. “Part of a tuna casserole.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
She still wore the forest-green dress but had untied the bow at her neck and kicked off her high heels.
“I’ve got some stuff in the medicine chest. Disinfectants or antibiotics. You ought to put something on that cut. Exactly what, I don’t know. First aid is not my specialty. However”—she spooned some casserole on Albury’s plate—“if you ever want to sue the bastard who did this to you …”
“Miss Manning, I need a place to stay.”
“Please, it’s Christine. No man who’s used my bathtub has ever called me Miss Manning.”
“Christine, I can’t go back to the trailer. I’m sure they’re watching the trailer,” Albury said.
“The men who hurt your son?”
“Yes. They’re waiting for me to come back. They’ll be watching the trailer. The fish house, too. I only need a day or two.”
“It’s probably not a good idea,” Christine said. “How about some more tea?”
“Two days is all I need,” Albury said. “I’ll behave, counselor.”
Christine took her place across the table. Albury ate ravenously, rarely looking up, saying nothing. She watched his energy return and noticed something hard at work behind the deep green eyes.
“Consider my position down here,” she said. “It would hardly help the cause—mine or yours—if it became know that one of Key West’s celebrated dope smugglers was shacking up with the Governor’s special prosecutor.”
“No one will know,” Albury replied through a cheekful of tuna, “unless you’ve got a … friend. Someone who stays with you.”
“No,” Christine said. “That’s not it.”
“It’s all right, I don’t blame you,” he said. “I ought to be thanking you for letting me clean up. And the food, by the way, is very good.”
He certainly knew how to back off. “I couldn’t let you wander around the hospital looking like some kind of refugee,” she said.
Christine rose and began clearing the dinner dishes. She thought to herself: this man definitely is not an animal. A criminal? Probably so. But not a killer or a rapist. She remembered Veronica; Laurie and Peg Albury both had mentioned Veronica. Albury had been in prison when the girl had died. He had gotten out, gone back to the sea, and now stood an excellent chance of going to prison again. Another Conch success story.
Yet he was different from most of the Keys fishermen Christine had talked with. The gentleness was one thing, but it was the intellect behind the eyes that intrigued the lawyer. The first time they met she had longed to ask him: Captain Albury, why are you still here? Why haven’t you gone north, with the rest of the smart ones? You don’t sell seashells, peddle postcards with palm trees, or own one of the big beachfront hotels. Your heart obviously isn’t in the fishing anymore, and what you pay on that firetrap trailer each month could get you a sixty-foot lot in Ocala. With trees, no less, and shade. Why stay here? she had wanted to ask but had not. That first day, Breeze Albury had worn the ambivalent look of a big mutt that was either going to wag its tail or lunge for her throat.
“Let’s make an arrangement,” Christine said.
“Everyone wants to make a deal,” Albury grumbled.
“You can stay the night if you agree to talk to me about a few things.”
“You mean answer questions.”
“No, just talk. Tell me what you can about what’s happened. I know it’s bad. Chief Barnett is asking around about your boat, and I saw one of his men in the Cowrie talking to your girlfriend this afternoon. If you can tell me something about it, I might be able to help, captain.”
“Please quit calling me captain. I’m not a Pan Am pilot, I’m a goddamn fisherman. Can I have a beer? Do you have a beer?”
“Sure … Breeze.”
Later, sitting at opposite ends of a lumpy sofa, they talked. Two beers extracted Peg’s story. For Albury, that was the easiest: everybody sympathizes with a rotten marriage. Three more beers revived Veronica; he saw her with a can of orange spray paint, assailing the lobster buoys strung up behind the trailer in winter; and during the season, waiting in the dusk at Ming’s fish house for his boat, squealing when the rust-colored lobsters scrabbled and twitched on their way to the ice.
Albury was into a second six-pack by the time he began to recount Key Largo. The details of the killings were, he thought, unnecessary. He resolved also not to mention the Mayday, or the Diamond Cutter’s pathetic reply. What he did not mind discussing was the betrayal.
“Who ordered Oscar to kill you?” Christine asked.
“I don’t know, but his mind was made up. It all fell apart when he pulled the gun.”
“I saved the clipping from the paper. Somehow I had a feeling it was your boat.”
“It was, but I’ll deny it. If it comes to that, I’ll lie. In fact, I’m afraid there’s not much of what I’ve told you that could be put in a file. It’s true, all of it, but it
’s no good to you, Christine.”
“You could give me some names.”
“No way.”
“I know a few.”
Albury laughed derisively.
“Tomas Cruz?”
“Brilliant work,” Albury said. “And what will you do with the names? Put them in a file. What will you do with the file? Add it to the other files. And then what?”
Albury could see the sarcasm sting, but Christine pressed on. “What did you do,” she asked, “after the shootout on Key Largo?”
Albury crumpled an empty beer can. “Simple. I stole something that belonged to somebody else. Somebody who owed me a lot of money, and more. I told him he could have his property back when I got paid. His answer is there.” Albury jerked a thumb in the air. “In the hospital. My boy.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Do you ever stop with the questions?”
“I’m worried about you,” Christine said.
Albury slid closer on the couch. “What I’m going to do now,” he said, “is stop answering your questions. I’ve told you what happened. The good parts, anyway. If you want to know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after, try Madame Zuzu over on White Street. Five bucks for a thirty-minute reading, and you don’t even have to get her drunk.”
“Are you drunk, captain?”
“I suppose so, Miss Manning. I’m drunk and I’m tired and I hurt all over. The thing I care about most is lying in the fucking hospital with his arm pretzeled by some asshole Cuban. The thing I care about second is anchored out on some mangrove island with nothing but an antique bilge pump and two hare-brained boys between her and the bottom of the Gulf. The thing I care about third is probably doing crosswords or writing couplets about spoonbills to keep from worrying about me anymore. And, before you have a chance to ask, the reason I moved closer is that you smell so good and look so wonderful in your dress and your nylons—”
“Jesus.”
“You’re the one who wanted to talk.” Albury leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Christine pulled away until she felt his hands on her shoulders.
“What are you doing?” she said crossly.
Albury took her hands and stood up. “We’re going upstairs,” he announced.
Tentatively, Christine followed him out of the apartment, up two peeling flights to the roof. They stepped outside to a small wooden platform, framed on four sides by a hand-carved railing.
“It’s called a widow’s walk,” Albury said. “In the old day, Conch wreckers would come up here to search for ships on the rocks. You can see the reef from here.” He pointed east, out to sea, where a long slick curl of water shouldered the coral shelf. “The storms would throw the ships up on the rocks, and Key West would empty like a whorehouse on a Sunday morning. Boats out of every harbor, racing for gold or guns or rum. Whatever they could salvage.”
“Your relatives, too?” Christine said.
“Oh, I’m sure.”
“Did they find any treasure?”
“You bet,” Albury said. “Found it and lost it a dozen times over. It must have been a hell of a time. A regular tropical Klondike.”
Christine found his hands and moved them to her waist. “Are you sorry things have changed down here?”
“But they haven’t. Not really,” he said with a dark laugh. “Come up to the widow’s walk some night when a shrimp boat runs aground with a load of grass. The crew will start heaving those bales overboard to lighten her up, and pretty soon you’ll see the boats. From here you can see ’em racing out to scoop up anything that’s floating out there. Just like the old days. The spirit is the same.”
Christine pressed closer and Albury felt her hair against his cheek. “I can’t blame you for being so bitter,” she said.
“I would rather watch the moon,” he said, turning her around by the shoulders. His fingers found the top button of the forest-green dress. “You’ll never see a moon quite that color in Detroit or Huntsville, Alabama.”
Christine laughed softly. Albury’s fingers moved to the second button, then the third. “These islands have their own sky and their own moon,” he said.
A soft gust rustled the royal palm trees and brought goose bumps to Christine’s shoulders. She glanced down and noticed that her dress was below her waist, and that somehow a pair of coarse fisherman’s hands had managed to solve the riddle of her bra clasp.
“Breeze?”
He had dropped to one knee, cursing the skintight jeans. “Was your ex-husband in the ballet?”
“No, he was just … what are you up to?”
Albury found her nipples and moved his tongue from one to the other. Then he kissed her belly and played along the tan line. “These nylons have got to go.”
“Come up here,” Christine said, pulling at his shoulders until he rose to his feet. She stood on her toes and kissed him tenderly, her hands around his neck. “Let’s go back to the apartment.”
“I like it out here.”
“But I’m chilly.”
“I’ll cover you with something warm.” His hands dropped to her buttocks and she drew against him tightly.
“Jesus, Breeze.” She kissed at him feverishly, lips, neck, cheeks. “Where can we lie down?”
“We don’t have to lie down,” Albury said. “Can’t see the water if you’re lying down. Take off the stockings before you drive me crazy.”
Later, with their clothes in a pale heap on the roof, he lifted her easily, kissing her the whole time, lowering her onto himself until her legs tightened on his hips. Under a milky half-moon they made love standing, harder and harder, until they were both drenched in sweat. He stopped moving only when Christine cried out twice. He held her around him until her breathing softened.
“I thought we were going to fall off this thing,” she whispered.
Albury moved a hand absently along her bare back, the skin like cool velvet under his calloused fingers. It struck her that he had been silent, as they had made love, not in the shy or preoccupied way of some men, but in a manner totally dispossessed—all muscle and mouth and movement, without the smallest sigh or groan. And she was quite sure that his eyes had been open, fastened hard on the deep blue light of the sea’s horizon. Still, there had been a tenderness to it, a melancholy need every bit as urgent as the frantic passions of other lovers.
Christine nuzzled at his ear and smiled when she felt his light kiss. She rocked back, holding him by the shoulders, as he supported her full weight with a single hand under her buttocks.
“Let me down now,” she said. “I’ve got one more question. Now, don’t shake your head like that; just one more and then I’ll quit for the night.”
“OK, counselor.”
“Why do they call this a widow’s walk?”
“That’s easy,” Albury replied. “Because the sea is a widow-maker.” His eyes were fixed beyond the reef, and in the moon’s light, Christine was startled to see that they were not weary or cold, but almost exultant.
“It’s not the sea itself,” he went on, “but the chances that it makes a man take. Full of promise one moment, fury the next. It won’t often surprise a keen and reasonable man, but even after years it will make him take extraordinary risks. Not all the widows who watched from these roofs lost stupid fools out on that reef. Some of their men were fine, courageous. They just took a chance and lost. The sea itself behaved as it always has, and it didn’t really kill those men as much as it made them believe … made them believe they could do something that they could not.”
Christine spoke in a small voice that seemed to drop off the edge of the old house. “Is that what happened to you?”
“More than once,” Breeze Albury said, “but never again.”
Chapter 19
QUARRELING BLUE JAYS woke Albury. He felt stiff, and stale. Scrabbling for a cigarette, he encountered the note: “You sure beat hell out of a sleeping pill, but you’ll have to make your own breakfast, anyway.” Signed with
a bold “C.”
Breakfast would have to wait. Albury reached for the bedside phone.
“Hey, champ, how they hangin’?”
“Hey, dad.” Ricky’s voice sounded faraway, as though through a gauze. Probably was still doped up.
“Hurts, huh? But I took a look last night, and it didn’t seem too bad to me,” Albury lied. “Pain’ll go away quick.”
“Where are you, dad? I called the trailer and you weren’t there …”
“You must have scared the shit out of Laurie, telling her about the arm.”
“She wasn’t there, either.” Nor had she been long past midnight when Albury had called from the kitchen phone of a sleeping Christine Manning. “Dad, it’s my pitching arm. I asked the doctors this morning if I could pitch as good as ever once the cast is off, and they just shrugged.”
Ricky was fighting back tears. Albury watched his knuckles whiten against the plastic receiver.
“That’s no sweat, man. I talked to the chief doctor, and he said you’d be good as new. Then just to be sure, I called this guy in Boston—I was in the Navy with him—and his brother is the doctor who takes care of the Red Sox, a specialist. He wants to look at you as soon as they let you out of there. We’ll fly up.”
“The Red Sox?”
“I know they ain’t the Orioles, but they ain’t bad, either. You just got to be careful in Fenway that the right-handed batters don’t pull you over the wall—the Monster, they call it.”
“Yeah. Dad, they want to know if we’ve got insurance.” Ricky’s voice was fading.
“Sure, we do. The best. I’ll stop by and straighten that out when I come see you, maybe later today. Tomorrow for sure.”
There was a long pause, and Albury thought Ricky might have dozed off.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.”
“I will be able to throw again, won’t I?”
Tears stung the fresh cut on Albury’s cheek. He tried to keep his voice firm.