Gumbo Limbo Read online

  I took a strong first slug and looked over. I guessed Chris’s target was in her mid- to late thirties. The evening sunlight subtly streaked her shoulder-length auburn hair. She had the pale skin of someone who had just arrived in Key West, a small nose and pouty lips, a faint sunbather’s glow on her high cheekbones. Her side of the conversation—what I could hear—showed confidence and a capacity for amusement. A woman at ease with herself.

  Chris hurried down the bar to refill several wineglasses. The woman tilted her drink, a short rocks cocktail, for a strong hit. Her expression drifted from conviviality to concern. Perhaps she’d been camouflaging nervousness, perhaps it was the twitchiness of someone with a tightly wound mental clock. Her dark eyes glanced my way and caught me looking. She swung around on the swivel stool, relaunched her smile, and asked if I was a fisherman too. With her eyes set wide apart, her mouth more friendly than pouty from that angle, she reminded me of a television actress, though I never bother to learn their names. One of those big-framed eyeglasses types who usually portray lawyers. She didn’t have glasses but wore mid-thigh shorts and had the muscular, feminine legs of a Nautilus instructor. The way she’d chugged her drink told me that she’d seen as many late parties as workout machines. I noted worry wrinkles at the corners of her mouth.

  “I fish when there’s time to get in the boat,” I said. “If I called myself a fisherman, the whole town’d burst into laughter. Or tears.”

  “Well, you look outdoorsy. That’s why I asked.”

  “There’s no middle ground in Key West. Either you work and play outside, or you’re a hermit or a drug addict. I go stir-crazy if I’m inside too long. I start bouncing off walls.”

  Her smile returned. “Hell, I’ve been stir-crazy since sixth grade.” She stuck out her hand. “Abby Womack, I’m from Milwaukee and I’m not a fisherman.”

  As I said my name a jet-ski buzzed close to the deck and drowned out my voice. I waited for it to gain distance, then repeated myself.

  “Hey, I would’ve introduced you, Rutledge. You’re quick tonight.” Chris sounded miffed, but I knew he wasn’t. He’d been a bartender for years, lucked out with more than his share of young women. Chris’s social life wasn’t so much easy-come-easy-go as it was plenty for everyone. Someone had once joked that he owned the island’s largest collection of wrinkled bar napkins, each adorned in feminine cursive with a first name and a hotel room number.

  Abby Womack tilted her head toward Chris. “He’s not only met me, Alex has asked me to dinner.” She turned back toward me and dropped her voice. “I budgeted for this vacation. I’m sure you locals have favorite spots, off the beaten path. Island atmosphere, good food, all that … Unless you’ve got other plans, you pick the place, I’ll buy.”

  A disappearance, a street death in Old Town, a ransacked apartment … Now a lovely stranger arbitrarily had decided I was a catch. Did everything balance out in the end?

  “I accept. Why me?”

  “Let’s say you’re the man I’ve been looking for.”

  I smiled and killed the impulse to raise an arm to check body odor. I raised my drink instead. “I’m not just some guy you found?”

  “Clever,” she said. “Now I’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t have left if you’d acted right.’ We can write country songs all night long.”

  “What is it about me that fits your parameters?”

  “I recognize your face from old photographs. I know your name from old conversations.”

  “If I’d ever met you, I promise, I’d remember.”

  She hesitated. “Seventeen years ago I was Zack Cahill’s mistress.”

  Her words stopped me cold. “I’ve never heard of you.”

  “That fact bothered Zack for the year our affair lasted. He didn’t tell you because he didn’t want to compromise your loyalty to Claire. Before we went our separate ways, we became partners in a sizable business deal. It’s still ongoing. But I think he might be in trouble. I can’t find him. I need your help.”

  She had to be at least forty or forty-two. “Whole lotta secrets goin’ on.”

  “No shit.” Her chrome bracelet shimmered as she fluffed her hair.

  We settled our tabs with Chris and walked out through the restaurant. Two Pepto-Bismol-pink taxis waited at the Waddell curb. The driver of the first one, a gnarled coot with a Greek captain’s hat and long gray ponytail, helped me hoist my Cannondale onto his trunk-mounted bike rack. My mind spun like crazy, but I couldn’t think of a restaurant that would give us decent food and privacy. I told her so, and suggested that we share the rum in my kitchen and call for a delivery from a Thai restaurant.

  That was fine with Abby Womack.

  I asked the driver to take us to Dredgers Lane.

  As the cab bounced down Simonton, she told me that Zack had called her three days earlier. “He asked me to fly to New Orleans for a meeting. I showed up, another person showed up, Zack didn’t. That’s not like him. He’s always the ultimate pro, fastidious about appointments, being on time. In all these years, that was a first. I waited all day and all night for him to get in touch. He knew where I was staying. He could’ve found me through my message service. He never called. I flew here out of desperation.”

  “Why here?”

  “Long story. I’ve been an investment counselor since I graduated from Northwestern. A long time ago, on Zack’s request, I structured a significant equity placement for a non-revocable trust. I designed it, Zack did the investment work. I didn’t know the background facts, but I was told that the capital package came from Key West. The New Orleans meeting was related to that deal. Zack’s message led me to think that it was time to distribute the trust.”

  “Where does New Orleans fit in the deal?”

  She furrowed her forehead. “A new twist. It wasn’t an original factor. Now it is. Ethically speaking, I’ve already said too much. It’s just … you know, I’m worried about him.”

  The cabdriver asked if he could drop us on Fleming. He didn’t want to attempt navigating the narrow Dredgers Lane right-of-way in the dimming light. Abby helped me extract my bike from the taxi’s carrying rack. Walking to the house, I said, “What is there about the distribution to inspire worry?”

  Her mouth slammed shut. All I heard were sounds of cicadas and tree frogs. If I was going to get an answer, I’d have to extract it gradually. The first thing she did inside the house was kick off her shoes.

  We talked for three hours, stopping only to eat, pour more rum, and use the bathroom. I offered to close up the house and run the air-conditioning, but Abby insisted I keep things as I usually have them, twin ceiling fans at slow speed in the living room, single fans in the kitchen and bedroom.

  Admiring my house plants, rearranging my furniture, occasionally wiping perspiration from her forehead with paper towels, Abby Womack related her history with Cahill. She had initiated the liaison after meeting him at a tax seminar. It had been a yearlong fling, with mid-week sex in a dozen different hotel rooms, friends’ apartments, even parked cars. Zack had rolled with the affair until Claire, after seven years of marriage, suddenly became pregnant. Unsure how to deal with the new development and the illicit relationship, Zack had waffled. In the end Abby had ended things. “I didn’t mind busting up a shaky marriage. That was just business, as they say. But I wasn’t going to break up a family, good or bad.”

  “This is a part of Zack’s life I knew nothing about.”

  She looked away and said, “I knew I made the right decision when I left him. But all these years there’s been this half-full, half-empty feeling. I once called it the five-percent loneliness factor. How’s that for business jargon?” She laughed at herself and glanced over for my reaction. “I’ve been happy, in general. But my memory of Zack has been a perpetual rain cloud hovering a mile west of the picnic.”

  I abbreviated the tale of my morning bicycle search. Then Abby wanted details, exact times, wanted to see the Rolex watch, wanted to know more about how I’d met Zack, and h
ow often we’d been in touch, both over the years and recently. She asked for the exact wording of the call from Sloppy Joe’s, then asked if I’d write down a list of hotels I had called.

  I was bothered by her reluctance to explain the equity placement. Hoping that the Mount Gay rum had inspired a loosening of professional ethics, I took another tack. I began telling her about the days when I first bought my house, when Zack and Claire, before the twins were born, used to visit five or six times a year. I suggested that, when the Eagles were singing “Life in the Fast Lane,” and every maniac on the island was acting it out, significant capital had only one likely source in Key West. Abby hemmed and hawed but said nothing. I pushed, perhaps too hard. She declined to identify the investors or to give details on how the investment task had been accomplished.

  We both stopped talking, exhausted, booze-drunk but energy-sober. She walked to the kitchen to refill our glasses. I observed her figure, the tone of her thighs and calves, the prominent tendons at the backs of her knees and ankles. Without question, I understood the attraction Zack must have felt. But not his willingness to deceive Claire.

  “So there’s a chance your lover included you in a criminal conspiracy,” I said when she returned to the living room. “Did you see that as a favor or an opportunity?”

  She looked away from me. “Zack was a gentleman. I knew nothing about a conspiracy. I still know nothing … if there was one. I received a check drawn on a trust account and a copy of the trust agreement. All up-and-up.”

  “But you knew.”

  She turned back toward me. “Are you taping this?”

  “Is Zack’s involvement in this conspiracy the reason you fear danger?”

  “I don’t think the danger is coming from law enforcement, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Why was he hired in the first place?”

  She looked off again, toward the ceiling. “The impression I got, my take on it, some people had a windfall and wanted to invest for the future.” Her eyes came back to me. “Or do you mean … Why did they pick Zack?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know.”

  It was eleven-thirty when Abby returned from a trip to the bathroom and said, “Why did he call you from a bar? If he wanted to drink at nine in the morning, why didn’t he just show up at your door with a six-pack?”

  I had no answer for that.

  “Do you have a pool?”

  “Not even a Jacuzzi.”

  “I’m not used to feeling so sticky. I feel like I’ve got tiny grains of sand all over my face and my arms and my legs. I even smell fishy.”

  “It’s dried salt. Ocean humidity. The wind picked up around sunset. Put mist in the air.” Rum talk: I added, “There’s a shower in the yard. Go for it.”

  She didn’t flinch. “Soap, shampoo, towel? Already out there?”

  “The first two, yes. There’s a low-watt light on a motion detector.”

  “Bring me a towel in three minutes, okay?” She began to unbutton her blouse as she walked toward the side porch. “And a fresh tall one of what we’ve been having.”

  Abby faced away and dropped her blouse and bra on the porcelain table. The bra had put red marks just under her shoulder blades. I saw what would happen next. I wished that time would slow, that her next moves would take hours. I wanted to memorize every curve and follicle and tuck. I wanted it to be wide-screen, with high-volume Surround-Sound so I could hear the elastic separate from skin, hear whispers as inner thighs softly rubbed. I wanted to know the moisture, inhale the air that had touched her. Instead, I watched through a fog of alcohol, the unfocused, harsh rush of adrenaline. Her shorts and panties hit the porch deck. I felt a wrenching in my lap. My heartbeat became a compression hammer in my chest. She straightened, stepped away from the shorts, dropped her bracelet on the table, and went out the door. I sat as if paralyzed. In the eighty-degree heat of the evening, I shivered.

  Pulling a fresh towel from the bathroom shelf, I suddenly realized that, all evening, I’d neglected to check my machine for messages. There were two. The tape rewound, then kicked in: “Teresa Barga, here. It’s twenty after six and it’s too hot to go running, so I’m going to go back to the office to catch up on work, and then I’m going out for a drink. I was looking for company. If you get this message, call me at the city. Otherwise, some other time soon, okay?” The second message was a dud. I got to hear someone exhale and hang up.

  I mixed two new drinks, then sat under the ceiling fan I’d installed on the porch. Moth wings flapped against the screens. Somewhere in the neighborhood a television played at high volume. Jay Leno. Two or three mopeds ran the stop sign at Fleming and Frances. Tree frogs croaked in the dark as my close friend’s ex-lover splashed in my open-air shower. Her story had thrown a wrench at my image of Cahill. I’d rehashed the day’s events enough times to finally, mercifully, draw a blank. It hadn’t broken my heart to stand in my own house and gawk at a naked woman, especially since it had been four months since I had parted ways with my lover of three years.

  The sound of the shower diminished. Abby cried out in a long exhalation. I surmised that a palmetto bug had invaded her space; I doubted that anything as serious as a scorpion had attacked. She moaned again. Concerned, I opened the screen door and almost fell into the yard. Another gasp. For the sake of propriety—or some other reason, in near drunkenness—I hesitated to barge in. Another shuddering moan. As I hurried toward the shower door, the rush of water sounded even more muffled. I saw only one foot on the teak grate flooring. The other must have been on the shower stall’s narrow seat. As I reached for the door a blissful wail filled the yard.

  She had reached a magnificent orgasm.

  I retreated to the porch. Louder splashing resumed. After a minute the water shut off. Abby called to ask for the towel. I dangled it over the shower door and again retreated. A minute later, with her hair slicked back, the towel around her waist, she walked onto the porch, picked up her clothing and her fresh drink, and glided past me into the living room.

  “Feel better?” I immediately regretted my choice of words.

  She turned to look back and said, “The wind makes the palm fronds sound like waves hitting a beach.” She wadded her bra and stuffed it into her purse. Her breasts were classically lovely, the right one slightly larger, her nipples puckered from the coolness under the fans. “I know. I sound like I live on the mainland.” She stuck her arms into her blouse, pulled her bracelet onto her wrist, and, still facing me, dropped the towel so she could pull on her panties. She had trimmed her dark, coppertinged pubic hair to a rectangle the size of a pack of matches. She knotted the blouse’s loose hem corners, folded her shorts, and laid them across the top of a chair. “Also,” she added, “I’m a fool for pulsating shower heads on flexible hoses.” For a moment she gave in to melancholy, then flashed a quick smile. “The price one pays for being attracted to men who are already taken.” She peered into the kitchen. “I didn’t finish my dinner. Can I stick those plates in the microwave?”

  I tried to answer but slurred my first two or three words. I’d attained the state Sam’s fishing friend Norman Wood called “drunk, sexy, and harmless.” Not that I had been invited to partake. Not that I would try. She had said that her romance with Zack was history; I knew that history has a way of doubling back on us. It was his affair, not mine. Somehow, Abby and I had silently agreed on traditional hot-tub rules: see all, think what you want, but touch not. Her manner invited observation, nothing more. That was fine with me.

  She punched the microwave buttons. “I love your place. It makes me miss my cats. That motel room I’m in smells like fifteen years’ worth of roach spray and Lemon Pledge.” She opened the oven and stuck her finger into the food to assess temperature. “Do you have a futon?”

  “The frame fell apart. You’ll have to use it on the floor.”

  Her eyes locked onto mine. “Will you help me find him?”

  “He could be on a Greyhound Bus in Orlando by n
ow.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. I don’t know why I feel so compelled to help the bastard …” She smiled wistfully and looked away, then turned and held out her hand. “Team?”

  I shook it. “Team.”

  She asked how to unlock my bicycle in case she woke early and felt like a ride. I opened a fresh toothbrush for her before she took her shift in the bathroom. Later I heard her rustling around in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, then moving around in the living room. I fell asleep before she hit the futon.

  In the middle of the night I got up to use the john. In the glow of outside illumination—a neighbor’s crime light and a street lamp over on Fleming—I saw Abby Womack with the top sheet pushed off the futon, my old Full Moon Saloon T-shirt hiked up to expose her smooth pale belly, her right hand inside her underpants, comforting more than five percent of her loneliness.

  5

  Gray light hung behind slits in the blinds the next time I got up. Distant lightning launched a roll of growling thunder. I needed to get my tail in gear. I didn’t know what time Duffy Lee Hall might arrive in his darkroom. I wanted to connect as early as possible. I half-expected Cahill to call with a bizarre tale or booze-logic explanation.

  Abby Womack had stacked the rolled-up futon and folded T-shirt on the rocking chair. For some reason the house smelled of cinnamon. I checked at the kitchen window. She had borrowed the Cannondale. Low clouds hovered, more violet than gray. Shrub leaves reflected dark, gloomy blues, bleak tones not shown on postcards. I sensed a strange neighborhood quiet. The peace put me on edge until I realized that the weather had chased away sunny-day industry, the hammer ensembles, Skil saws, and backup beepers employed by property renovators and the city’s perpetual water main and sewer repair crews.