Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  “Down to the ground.”

  “Here comes the coffee,” she said. “Now the question is, how long until breakfast?”

  ii

  Wireman wasn’t at the morning-after breakfast, but he had reserved the Bay Island Room from eight to ten. I presided over two dozen friends and family members, most from Minnesota. It was one of those events people remember and talk about for decades, partly because of encountering so many familiar faces in an exotic setting, partly because the emotional atmosphere was so volatile.

  On the one hand, there was a very palpable sense of Home Town Boy Makes Good. They had sensed it at the show, and their judgment was confirmed in the morning papers. The reviews in the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the Venice Gondolier were great, but short. Mary Ire’s piece in the Tampa Trib, on the other hand, took up nearly a whole page and was lyrical. She must have written most of it ahead of time. She called me “a major new American talent.” My mother—always a bit of a sourpuss—would have said, Take that and a dime and you can wipe your ass in comfort. Of course that was her saying forty years ago, when a dime bought more than it does today.

  Elizabeth, of course, was the other hand. There was no death-notice for her, but a boxed item had been added to the page of the Tampa paper carrying Mary’s review: WELL-KNOWN ART PATRON STRICKEN AT FREEMANTLE SHOW. The story, just two paragraphs long, stated that Elizabeth Eastlake, a long-time fixture on the Sarasota art scene and resident of Duma Key, had suffered an apparent seizure not long after arriving at the Scoto Gallery and had been taken by ambulance to Sarasota Memorial Hospital. No word of her condition was available at press time.

  My Minnesota people knew that on the night of my triumph, a good friend had died. There would be bursts of laughter and occasional raillery, then glances in my direction to see if I minded. By nine-thirty, the scrambled eggs I’d eaten were sitting like lead in my stomach, and I was getting one of my headaches—the first in almost a month.

  I excused myself to go upstairs. I’d left a small bag in the room I hadn’t slept in. The shaving kit contained several foil packets of Zomig, a migraine medication. It wouldn’t stop a full-blown Force 5, but it usually worked if I took a dose early enough. I swallowed one with a Coke from the bar fridge, started to leave, and saw the light on the phone flashing. I almost left it, then realized the message might be from Wireman.

  It turned out there were half a dozen messages. The first four were more congratulations, which fell on my aching head like pellets of hail on a tin roof. By the time I got to Jimmy’s—he was the fourth—I had begun punching the 6-button on the keypad, which hurried me on to the next message. I was in no mood to be stroked.

  The fifth message was indeed from Jerome Wireman. He sounded tired and stunned. “Edgar, I know you’ve got a couple of days earmarked for family and friends, and I hate like hell to ask you this, but can we get together at your place this afternoon? We need to talk, and I mean really. Jack spent the night here with me at El Palacio—he didn’t want me to be alone, that’s one helluva good kid—and we were up early, hunting for that red basket she was on about, and … well, we found it. Better late than never, right? She wanted you to have it, so Jack took it over to Big Pink. The house was unlocked, and listen, Edgar … someone’s been inside.”

  Silence on the line, but I could hear him breathing. Then:

  “Jack’s severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock, muchacho. Though you may already have an idea—”

  There was a beep, and then the sixth message started. It was still Wireman, now rather pissed off, which made him sound more like himself.

  “Fucking short-ass message tape! Chinche pedorra! Ay! Edgar, Jack and I are going over to Abbot-Wexler. They’re …” A brief pause as he worked to keep it together. “… the funeral home she wanted. I’ll be back by one. You really ought to wait for us before you go in your house. It isn’t trashed or anything, but I want to be with you when you look in that basket and when you see what got left in your studio upstairs. I don’t like to be mysterious, but Wireman ain’t putting this shit on a message-tape anybody might listen to. And there’s one more thing. One of her lawyers called. Left a message on the machine—Jack and I were still up in the fucking attic. He says I’m her sole beneficiary.” A pause. “La lotería.” A pause. “I get everything.” A pause. “Fuck me.”

  That was all.

  iii

  I punched 0 for the hotel operator. After a short wait, she gave me the number of the Abbot-Wexler Funeral Parlor. I dialed it. A robot answered, offering me a truly amazing array of death-oriented services (“For Casket Showroom, push 5”). I waited it out—the offer for an actual human being always comes last these days, a booby-prize for boobs who can’t cope with the twenty-first century—and while I waited I thought about Wireman’s message. The house unlocked? Really? My post-accident memory was unreliable, of course, but habit wasn’t. Big Pink did not belong to me, and I had been taught since earliest childhood to take especial care of what belonged to others. I was pretty sure I had locked the house. So if someone had been inside, why hadn’t the door been forced?

  I thought for just a moment of two little girls in wet dresses—little girls with decayed faces who spoke in the grating voice of the shells under the house—and then pushed the image away with a shudder. They had been only imagination, surely, the vision of an overstrained mind. And even if they had been something more … ghosts didn’t have to unlock doors, did they? They simply passed right through, or drifted up through the floorboards.

  “… 0 if you need help.”

  By God, I had almost missed my cue. I pushed 0, and after a few bars of something that sounded vaguely like “Abide with Me,” a professionally soothing voice asked if it could help me. I suppressed an irrational and very strong urge to say: It’s my arm! It’s never had a decent burial! and hang up. Instead, cradling the phone and rubbing a spot over my right eyebrow, I asked if Jerome Wireman was there.

  “May I ask which deceased he represents?”

  A nightmare image rose before me: a silent courtroom of the dead, and Wireman saying Your Honor, I object.

  “Elizabeth Eastlake,” I said.

  “Ah, of course.” The voice warmed, became provisionally human. “He and his young friend have stepped out—they were going to work on Ms. Eastlake’s obituary, I believe. I may have a message for you. Will you hold?”

  I held. “Abide with Me” resumed. Digger the Undertaker eventually returned. “Mr. Wireman asks if you would join him and … uh … Mr. Candoori, if possible, at your place on Duma Key at two this afternoon. It says, ‘If you arrive first, please wait outside.’ Have you got that?”

  “I do. You don’t know if he’ll be back?”

  “No, he didn’t say.”

  I thanked him and hung up. If Wireman had a cell phone, I’d never seen him carrying it, and I didn’t have the number in any case, but Jack had one. I dug the number out of my wallet and dialed it. It diverted to voicemail on the first ring, which told me it was either turned off or dead, either because Jack had forgotten to charge it or because he hadn’t paid the bill. Either one was possible.

  Jack’s severely freaked, and you got to prepare for a shock.

  I want to be with you when you look in that basket.

  But I already had a pretty good idea about what was in the basket, and I doubted if Wireman had been surprised, either.

  Not really.

  iv

  The Minnesota Mafia was silent around the long table in the Bay Island Room, and even before Pam stood up, I realized they had been doing more than talking about me while I was gone. They had been holding a meeting.

  “We’re going back,” Pam said. “That is, most of us are. The Slobotniks had plans to visit Disney World when they came down, the Jamiesons are going on to Miami—”

  “And we’re going with them, Daddy,” Melinda said. She was holding Ric’s arm. “We can get a flight back to Orly from there that’s actually cheaper than
the one you booked.”

  “I think we could stand the expense,” I said, but I smiled. I felt the strangest mixture of relief, disappointment, and fear. At the same time I could feel the bands that had been tightening in my head come unlocked and start dropping away. The incipient headache was gone, just like that. It could have been the Zomig, but the stuff usually doesn’t work that fast, even with a caffeine-laced drink to give it a boost.

  “Have you heard from your friend Wireman this morning?” Kamen rumbled.

  “Yes,” I said. “He left a message on my machine.”

  “And how is he doing?”

  Well. That was a long story, wasn’t it? “He’s coping, doing the funeral parlor thing … and Jack’s helping … but he’s rocky.”

  “Go help him,” Tom Riley said. “That’s your job for the day.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Bozie added. “You’re grieving yourself, Edgar. You don’t need to be playing host right now.”

  “I called the airport,” Pam said, as if I had protested—which I hadn’t. “The Gulfstream’s standing by. And the concierge is helping to make the other travel arrangements. In the meantime, we’ve still got this morning. The question is, what do we do with it?”

  We ended up doing what I had planned: we visited the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

  And I wore my beret.

  v

  Early that afternoon, I found myself standing in the boarding area at Dolphin Aviation, kissing my friends and relatives goodbye, or shaking their hands, or hugging them, or all three. Melinda, Ric, and the Jamiesons were already gone.

  Kathi Green the Rehab Queen kissed me with her usual ferocity. “You take care of yourself, Edgar,” she said. “I love your paintings, but I’m much more proud of the way you’re walking. You’ve made amazing progress. I’d like to parade you in front of my latest generation of crybabies.”

  “You’re tough, Kathi.”

  “Not so tough,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Truth is, I’m a freakin marshmallow.”

  Then Kamen was towering over me. “If you need help, get in touch ASAP.”

  “Yep,” I said. “You be the KamenDoc.”

  Kamen smiled. It was like having God smile on you. “I don’t think all’s right with you yet, Edgar. I can only hope it will be right. No one deserves more to land with the shiny side up and the rubber side down.”

  I hugged him. A one-armed hug, but he made up for it.

  I walked out to the plane beside Pam. We stood at the foot of the boarding stairs while the others got on. She was holding my hand in both of hers, looking up at me.

  “I’m only going to kiss you on the cheek, Edgar. Illy’s watching and I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.”

  She did so, then said, “I’m worried about you. There’s a white look around your eyes that I don’t like.”

  “Elizabeth—”

  She shook her head a tiny bit. “It was there last night, even before she came to the gallery. Even when you were at your happiest. A white look. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that. I only saw it once before, back in 1992, when it looked for a little while like you might miss that balloon payment and lose the business.”

  The jet engines were whining and a hot breeze was blowing her hair around her face, tumbling her careful beauty-shop curls into something younger and more natural. “Can I ask you something, Eddie?”

  “Of course.”

  “Could you paint anywhere? Or does it have to be here?”

  “Anywhere, I think. But it would be different somewhere else.”

  She was looking at me fixedly. Almost pleadingly. “Just the same, a change might be good. You need to lose that white look. I’m not talking about coming back to Minnesota, necessarily, just going … somewhere else. Will you think about it?”

  “Yes.” But not until I saw what was in the red picnic basket. And not until I’d made at least one trip to the south end of the Key. And I thought I could do that. Because Ilse was the one who’d gotten sick, not me. All I’d had was one of my red-tinged flashbacks to the accident. And that phantom itch.

  “Be well, Edgar. I don’t know exactly what’s become of you, but there’s still enough of the old you to love.” She stood on tiptoe in her white sandals—bought specially for this trip, I had no doubt—and planted another soft kiss on my stubbly cheek.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for last night.”

  “No thanks required,” she said. “It was sweet.”

  She squeezed my hand. Then she was up the stairs and gone.

  vi

  Outside Delta departures again. This time without Jack.

  “Just you and me, Miss Cookie,” I said. “Looks like we closed down the bar.”

  Then I saw she was crying and wrapped my arm around her.

  “Daddy, I wish I could stay here with you.”

  “Go back, honey. Study for your test and knock the hell out of it. I’ll see you soon.”

  She pulled back. Looked at me anxiously. “You’ll be okay?”

  “Yes. And you be okay, too.”

  “I will. I will.”

  I hugged her again. “Go on. Check in. Buy magazines. Watch CNN. Fly well.”

  “All right, Daddy. It was amazing.”

  “You’re amazing.”

  She gave me a hearty smack on the mouth—to make up for the one her mother had held back on, perhaps—and went in through the sliding doors. She turned back once and waved to me, by then little more than a girl-shape behind the polarized glass. I wish with all my heart that I could have seen her better, because I never saw her again.

  vii

  From the Ringling Art Museum I had left messages for Wireman—one at the funeral home and one on El Palacio’s answering machine—saying I’d be back around three, and asking him to meet me there. I also asked him to tell Jack that if Jack was old enough to vote and party with FSU sorority girls, he was old enough to take care of his damned cell phone.

  It was actually close to three-thirty when I arrived back on the Key, but both Jack’s car and Elizabeth’s vintage silver Benz were parked on the cracked square to the right of Big Pink, and the two of them were sitting on my back stoop, drinking iced tea. Jack was still wearing his gray suit, but his hair was once more in its customary disarray and he was wearing a Devil Rays tee under his jacket. Wireman was wearing black jeans and a white shirt, open at the collar; a Nebraska Cornhuskers gimme cap was cocked back on his head.

  I parked, got out, and stretched, trying to get my bad hip in gear. They stood up and came to meet me, neither of them smiling.

  “Everyone gone, amigo?” Wireman asked.

  “Everyone but my Aunt Jean and Uncle Ben,” I said. “They’re veteran freeloaders, dedicated to squeezing a good thing to the very last drop.”

  Jack smiled without much humor. “Every family’s got a few,” he said.

  “How are you?” I asked Wireman.

  “About Elizabeth I’m okay. Hadlock said it was probably for the best this way, and I suppose he’s right. Her leaving me what may amount to a hundred and sixty million dollars in cash, securities, and properties …” He shook his head. “That’s different. Maybe someday I’ll have the luxury of trying to get my head around it, but right now …”

  “Right now something’s going on.”

  “Sí, señor. And it’s very weird.”

  “How much have you told Jack?”

  Wireman looked a bit uncomfortable. “Well, I tell you what, amigo. Once I started, it was damn hard to find a reasonable stopping place.”

  “He told me all of it,” Jack said. “Or so he claims. Including what he thinks you did about restoring his eyesight, and what you think you did to Candy Brown.” He paused. “And the two little girls you saw.”

  “Are you okay with the Candy Brown thing?” I asked.

  “If it was up to me, I’d give you a medal. And the people of Sarasota would probably give you your own float in the Memorial Day parade.
” Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets. “But if you told me last fall that stuff like this could happen outside of M. Night Shyamalan movies, I would have laughed.”

  “What about last week?” I asked.

  Jack thought about it. On the other side of Big Pink, the waves came steadily in. Under my living room and bedroom, the shells would be talking. “No,” he said. “Probably wouldn’t’ve laughed then. I knew from the first there was something about you, Edgar. You got here, and …” He ran the fingers of his two hands together, lacing them. And I thought that was right. That was how it had been. Like the fingers of two hands lacing together. And the fact that I only had one hand had never mattered.

  Not here.

  “What are you saying, hermano?” Wireman asked.

  Jack shrugged. “Edgar and Duma. Duma and Edgar. It was like they were waiting for each other.” He looked embarrassed, but not unsure.

  I cocked a thumb at my house. “Let’s go in.”

  “Tell him about finding the basket first,” Wireman said to Jack.

  Jack shrugged. “Wasn’t no thing; didn’t take twenty minutes. It was sitting up on top of some old bureau at the far end of the attic. Light from one of the vents to the outside was shining in on it. Like it wanted to be found.” He glanced at Wireman, who nodded agreement. “Anyway, we took it down to the kitchen and looked inside. It was heavier than hell.”

  Jack talking about the heaviness of the basket made me think of how Melda, the housekeeper, had been holding it in the family portrait: with her arms bunched. Apparently it had been heavy back then, too.

  “Wireman told me to bring the basket down here and leave it for you, since I had a key … only I didn’t need a key. Place was unlocked.”

  “Was the door actually open?”

  “Nope. What I did first was turn my key and actually lock it again. Gave me a hell of a surprise.”

  “Come on,” Wireman said, leading the way. “Show and Tell time.”

  There was a fair amount of Florida Gulf Coast scattered on the hardwood floor of the entry: sand, small shells, a couple of sophora husks, and a few bits of dried sawgrass. There were also tracks. The sneaker-prints were Jack’s. It was the others that made my skin freckle with goosebumps. I made out three sets, one large and two small. The small ones were the tracks of children. All of those feet had been bare.