Skinny Dip

  With that, Joey Perrone’s brother raised his burl walking stick, pushed open the door and walked out.

  After sleeping with Mick Stranahan, Joey concluded that her physical relationship with Chaz Perrone had not been as exceptional as she’d thought. While Mick wasn’t as robotically durable as her husband, he was far more attentive, tender and enterprising. For Joey it was something of a revelation. With Mick, there was no furtive peeking at his own clenched buttocks in the mirror, no collegial exhorting of his manhood, no self-congratulatory rodeo yells when he was finished. In Chaz’s embrace Joey had often felt like a pornographic accessory, one of those rubber mail-order vaginas. With Mick, she was an actual participant; a lover. The orgasms had been quake-like with Chaz, but then he would immediately demand to hear all about them; he was always more interested in the reviews than in the intimacies. With Mick, the climax was no less intense, but the aftermath was sweeter, because he never broke the mood by asking her to grade his performance. It wasn’t only because he was older and less egocentric than Chaz Perrone. No, Mick had manners. He knew how to stay in the moment.

  Joey lay her head on his chest. “It sure was nice of Corbett to leave us alone for the afternoon.”

  “A gentleman and a scholar,” Stranahan murmured sleepily.

  Corbett Wheeler had taken the Boston Whaler up to Virginia Key. From there a car service was supposed to ferry him to Fort Lauderdale for a meeting with Detective Rolvaag. Joey had offered Corbett the keys to the Suburban, which was parked in Coconut Grove, but he’d said no thanks. He feared that he might maim or murder somebody in a traffic altercation.

  As soon as the skiff had slipped out of sight, Joey and Mick jumped into bed and camped there. They remained comfortably entwined even when a squall blew across the bay, banging the warped wooden shutters of the house and whipping rain through the window screens.

  “I could live out here forever,” she said later, when the sun peeked out, “not that I’m inviting myself.”

  Stranahan said, “Consider yourself invited. But think about it first.”

  “You don’t want me?”

  “More than anything I do. There’s just not much to do around here. Some people find they need more than a sea breeze and a Kodak sunset.”

  “Some women, you mean,” Joey said.

  “Hell, I don’t even have a dish for the TV.”

  “Then that’s it, buddy. We’re through!”

  Stranahan tugged her close and kissed the bridge of her nose. He said, “Think about it first. Please?”

  “Geezer.”

  “Hey, I meant to tell you. That was a brave thing you did, getting back on that ship the other day.”

  Joey told him not to change the subject. “But, I admit, you looked damn sexy in the blue blazer.”

  “An historic moment,” he said, “never to be repeated.”

  “Well, I appreciate the sacrifice.”

  “You looked pretty hot yourself in that silky little number.”

  “Dirty old man,” Joey said.

  Boarding the Sun Duchess again had been nerve-racking and eerie. The deck was lower than the one from which Chaz had tossed her, but the view staring down was the same—terrifying. Joey was still amazed that she’d survived her plunge to the sea. She had never been a religious person, but ever since that night the concept of a beneficent and all-seeing God seemed not so implausible.

  “Sometimes I can still feel Chaz’s hands around my ankles.”

  “I wish I could make you forget,” Stranahan said.

  “They were so cold, like he’d held them in a bucket of ice,” she said. “Mick, is this brilliant plan of ours really going to work? Because I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “It’s not too late to pull the plug. From what I saw of Chaz in the canoe, he’s pretty much off the rails already.” Gently, Stranahan rolled Joey over onto her back. He propped himself on one elbow and looked down at her. “We could go see that detective tomorrow morning. Take our chances in court.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t risk it. Chaz is way too slick.”

  “He could’ve fooled me.”

  “Get a couple of women on the jury and watch out,” she said. “He’s got a way of working on the fairer sex. I’m living proof—barely living proof.”

  Stranahan said, “Okay. Then we go ahead like we planned.”

  “Right.”

  But Joey was queasy with doubt. What would her husband do when she surprised him? Try to bullshit his way out of it? Run away? Break down and blubber like a baby? Keel over from cardiac arrest?

  Attack her?

  Chaz’s reaction was impossible to predict, but Joey knew exactly what she intended to say; the questions had been gnawing at her since that long night at sea. She had come to believe that rage was what had kept her afloat all those hours, kept her clinging to the bale of pot—furious at Chaz, furious at herself for marrying such a beast.

  “Did I tell you about the poem?” she asked Stranahan. “It was the night he proposed. We were doing dinner at my apartment. He brought me a love poem that he swore he’d written himself. And me, the classic airhead blonde, I believed him.”

  Stranahan said, “Let me guess where he stole it. Shelley? Keats?”

  “Get serious, Mick.”

  “Shakespeare would be so obvious.”

  “Try Neil Diamond,” Joey said.

  Stranahan froze in mock horror.

  “Oh, Chaz was clever,” she said. “He knew I was too young to be a fan.”

  Laughing, Stranahan fell back on the pillow. “Which song? No, let me guess: ‘I Am, I Said.’ That’s pure Chaz.”

  “No, believe it or not, this one was called ‘Deep Inside of You,’ ” Joey reported ruefully. “ ‘Let me be the man who’ . . . blah, blah, whatever. God help me, I thought it was sort of sweet at the time. He wrote out the lines on the back of a wine label that he’d saved from our very first date. Unbelievable.”

  She turned on her side and Mick tucked against her.

  “A few months later I was talking to the bookkeeper at my parents’ casino,” she said, “a great old broad, as they say. She wanted to know all about my new husband, so I told her how romantic he was, how he’d written poetry for the night we got engaged. And Inez—that was her name—says to me, ‘Doll baby, I’d love to hear it.’ So I took the wine label out of the drawer where I kept all the mushy stuff Chaz gave me, and I read the verses aloud over the phone. And naturally Inez busts out laughing, just like you, and proceeds to give me the scoop on fabulous Neil, whom she’d seen no less than a dozen times in concert. Needless to say, she knew every damn song by heart.”

  “So, what did Chaz say when you busted him?” Stranahan asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Aw, Joey.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “The deed was done, we were already married. So I convinced myself that it showed how much he loved me, going to all the trouble of plagiarizing from some old pop star. I told myself he probably went through a hundred songs before he found just the right one. Hey, it’s the thought that counts—just because he ripped off the lyrics doesn’t mean he’s not sincere. And that’s how I rationalized keeping quiet.”

  Stranahan said, “You were afraid he’d make up a new lie if you braced him about it.”

  Joey nodded dismally. “Exactly. I didn’t want to give him the chance. I wanted to keep on believing it was a fluke.”

  “And here you are.”

  “Yeah, here I am.”

  Stranahan lightly kissed the back of her neck. “For what it’s worth, I can’t write poetry, either.”

  “Mick, why won’t you let me go to the memorial?”

  “Because you’re the dearly departed. You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “But I can wear a disguise,” she said. “Come on, I want to hear Chaz’s eulogy.”

  “I’ll take along a tape recorder. Maybe this time he’ll steal something off Sgt. Pepper.”

  Joey wriggle
d out of Mick’s embrace and relocated to the edge of the bed.

  “That phony lying bastard,” she muttered. “He’ll have everybody in tears.”

  “Not me,” said Stranahan, reaching out for her again.

  Twenty-six

  Stranahan drove to Boca in the old Cordoba, which he’d ransomed from the impound lot for three hundred bucks. He parked at a Winn-Dixie a few blocks from the church, so that no one would see him arriving with Joey’s brother. Stranahan had planned to wear the muskrat-brown hairpiece that Joey had bought for him at the Gallería, but he changed his mind. He wanted Chaz Perrone to recognize him right away from the canoe trip. He wanted to rattle the sonofabitch.

  The Catholic folk-guitar trio was called the Act of Contritionists. They were playing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” when Stranahan walked into St. Conan’s; he feared it was only a matter of time before they tackled “Kumbaya.” The church was three-quarters filled with Joey’s friends and neighbors, mostly women. Many had attended Joey’s wedding, and some might even have sensed she was marrying an incorrigible louse. They wouldn’t have said a word to her about it, of course, and she wouldn’t have listened if they had.

  Rose looked resplendently wanton in the front pew. She wore a tight knit top over a short black skirt, black fishnet hose and stiletto pumps. Her blinding dye job appeared freshly retouched, an onyx choker accented her long pale neck, and her lips were the color of fire coral. By comparison, the other members of Joey’s book group looked like spinster aunts. Near the rear of the church sat a medium-built, fair-skinned man in a dark gray suit that was shiny from wear. He had cop written all over him. Stranahan assumed it was Karl Rolvaag, and he chose a seat a dozen rows up, on the other side of the aisle.

  “Kumbaya” came and went, in rounds. Still no sign of Chaz Perrone. Stranahan began to worry.

  Joey’s brother had shed the drover’s coat for a three-piece blue pinstripe. He’d made a game effort to tame his beard and wild mane, but he still looked like an outlaw biker who’d been dressed by his attorney for a bail hearing. On the altar stood a velvet-cloaked table, upon which Corbett Wheeler had placed a framed eight-by-ten of his sister, who was sitting cross-legged on the grass next to a palm tree. Her hair was mussed by a breeze, and her laughing face was lit by the sun. The mourners would have been startled to learn that the photograph had been taken by Joey’s brother less than twenty-four hours earlier on a private island on Biscayne Bay, and that she’d been giggling at the sight of a prematurely retired middle-aged man baring his well-tanned ass, and that the same sinewy fellow now sat among them at St. Conan’s, waiting impatiently to deliver blackmail instructions.

  The guitar trio commenced an upbeat Calypso version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which Corbett Wheeler terminated with a brusque slashing motion across his neck. He approached the pulpit and introduced himself.

  “We’re here to celebrate the life and times of my magnificent baby sister,” he began. “Joey Wheeler.”

  At Joey’s insistence, her brother had agreed not to use her married name at the ceremony.

  “She was a fighter, a real tiger, but she also had a generous heart. She was always the idealist in our family, the dreamy romantic,” he said, “the one who believed in the innate decency and honesty of everyone she met. Sometimes, unfortunately, she was mistaken. . . .”

  Corbett Wheeler owlishly scanned the church as he let the sentence hang. Several mourners, evidently aware of Chaz Perrone’s serial infidelities, traded knowing glances.

  “Still, Joey never lost her belief that most people were basically good and honorable, deep down in their souls.”

  Her brother went on to tell a couple of stories, which got the crowd sniffling. The first was about their parents’ funeral, where four-year-old Joey stood at the grave site and sang “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” revising the lyrics to suit the peculiar circumstances of Hank and Lana Wheeler’s demise (“The bear is packed, you’re ready to go . . .”).

  The second anecdote concerned the tragic fate of Joey’s first husband, whose saintly virtues were enumerated at length by Corbett Wheeler, although he’d never met the man. “Benny was the light of my sister’s life,” Corbett said, generously overselling Benjamin Middenbock’s luminosity. “Before saying her final farewell, she placed in the casket his favorite fly rod and a selection of bass poppers that she’d tied and painted herself. She said she was glad, for the sake of the pallbearers, that Benny’s hobby wasn’t bowling.”

  It took a beat or two for the mourners to smile.

  “So, yes, Joey faced times of profound sadness in her life,” her brother continued, “but she never let herself be defeated by it. She never lost her sense of humor, or her optimism—she was the most positive person I ever knew. The most hopeful. And also the most unselfish. She could have lived like a princess but she chose a simple, ordinary life, because she believed that was the secret to true happiness. That, and fine Italian footwear. . . .”

  The line brought a weepy laugh from Joey’s fellow shoppers. “She wasn’t perfect,” her brother went on. “She had weaknesses, as all of us do. Impulsive moments. Blind spots. Lapses in judgment.”

  Corbett Wheeler stopped just shy of indicting Chaz Perrone by name. And where the hell was the would-be widower? Stranahan wondered.

  “No, my little sister wasn’t a perfect person,” her brother said in summation, “but she was a truly good person, and we’ll all miss her dearly.”

  A white-haired priest stepped forward and, in a lugubrious Eastern European accent, recited the Lord’s Prayer. The Act of Contritionists followed with a thirteen-minute rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” that left everyone sapped. Next up was Carmen Raguso, the Perrones’ most gregarious neighbor and the face-lift queen of West Boca Dunes Phase II. She told of the time that Joey had helped round up the stray cats behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken and then taken them for neutering to a veterinary clinic in Margate. Joey had paid for all the kitty surgeries—more than two thousand dollars total, Mrs. Raguso recalled. Another time Joey had arranged for a private sea-plane to transport an ailing bottle-nosed dolphin from a beach on Grand Bahama Island to the Seaquarium in Miami. The mammal, which had been suffering from a bowel obstruction, recovered fully and was returned to the sea.

  “Why couldn’t that dolphin have been frolicking in the Gulf Stream the night Joey fell off that ship, and come swimming to her rescue?” Mrs. Raguso said. “Why can’t life be more like the movies?”

  Other friends got up and attested to Joey’s quiet charity, love of nature and kindness toward the less fortunate. Rose was the last to speak. As she made her way to the podium, Stranahan noticed that the men in the audience, including Detective Rolvaag, seemed to perk up.

  “Joey was the star of our book club, without a doubt!” Rose began. “She was the one who got us hooked on Margaret Atwood and A. S. Byatt and P. D. James,” Rose bubbled. “Heck, we would’ve wasted six whole weeks on Jane Austen if it weren’t for Joey. She was a sweetie pie, sure, but she was also a firecracker. Not afraid to kick off her shoes, no ma’am. You should’ve heard her reading the juicy parts from Jean Auel’s latest! Lord, she almost made the walls blush.”

  Stranahan thought: My Joey?

  “Who is that gabby woman?” Chaz Perrone groused.

  Tool said nothing. In fact, he hadn’t said boo all morning. He thought it unforgivable that Chaz hadn’t invited his own mother to the memorial service.

  He and Chaz were watching the eulogies from the sacristy, out of sight of the assembly. Having falsely diagnosed himself with the West Nile virus, Chaz was in a shaky frame of mind. The stiffness in his neck was most likely the result of being belted by a two-liter bottle of soda, but in his hypochondriacal funk Chaz suspected it was the first telltale symptom of the bug-borne encephalitis, soon to be followed by fever, convulsions, tremors, stupor and ultimately a coma. At one point during the night he’d pleaded with Tool to take his temperature, but the sadistic bastard ha
d walked in carrying a frozen bratwurst and a jar of petroleum jelly.

  How insulting, Chaz thought, to die from a fucking mosquito bite.

  Payback from that hellhole of a swamp.

  By his own calculation, approximately half of the thirty-four bites on his face were either scabbed or inflamed, the result of relentless scratching. At their first meeting, outside the church, Joey’s brother had commented upon Chaz’s volcanic complexion and inquired somewhat insensitively if he’d been tested for monkey pox.

  Screw that sheep-humping wacko, Chaz thought.

  Hoping for a nugget or two he might crib for his own speech, Chaz tried to pay attention to Rose’s lively though meandering tribute. He found himself pleasingly diverted by the shortness of her skirt and the boldness of her stockings. She looked like a gal who knew how to spell f-u-n.

  “You ready, Charles?”

  Chaz jumped in surprise, Corbett Wheeler having slipped into the sacristy through the back door.

  “You’re the headliner, man. The one they’re all waiting to hear.”

  Chaz peeked out and thought: Who are all these people? He was surprised that his wife could draw such a crowd. Some faces he vaguely recalled from the wedding reception, but most were strangers. On the other hand, Chaz had seldom bothered to inquire what Joey did during the day while he was working, golfing or chasing other women. Nor had he displayed much curiosity about her past social life, before they’d met. Chaz’s domestic policy was never to ask questions that one wouldn’t care to answer oneself.

  “Who’s your friend?” Corbett Wheeler asked. Without waiting for a reply, he greeted Tool heartily and pumped his hand. “I can tell by your outfit you’re a man of the soil.”

  Tool had come to church wearing his black overalls, which he had laundered for the occasion. Chaz Perrone had not wanted him to attend the service, but Red Hammernut was emphatic.

  “I used to run crews on a vegetable farm,” Tool said.

  Joey’s brother beamed. “I’ve got two thousand head of sheep.”