Bad Monkey

The moment she hung up, he said, “Who was that, sweetheart?”

“You won’t believe it—my former stepmother, all sweet and friendly.”

“Eve?”

“Swear to God.” Caitlin wore an odd smile. “She wants to get together, just her and me. A girls’ day.”

“That’s messed up. What did you say?”

“I said, Are you paying?”

For once Yancy didn’t mind driving to Miami. Dr. Rosa Campesino had agreed to meet for lunch. On the Eighteen-Mile Stretch he got stuck behind a minivan with a CHOOSE LIFE bumper sticker.

“Choose the accelerator! How’s that for starters?” Yancy was shouting, pounding the horn.

He didn’t mind if people advertised their religious views on their cars, but those who did invariably were the slowest, most faint-hearted drivers. It was uncanny, and all road cops knew it to be true. If God was my co-pilot, Yancy once groused to Burton, I’d have the fucking pedal to the metal soon as I left the garage.

Rosa arrived in her morgue scrubs at the restaurant, and she looked fabulous.

“What happened? You’re so skinny,” she said. “I’ll order for both of us.”

They were seated at a café on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. The menu was promising, but the night before Yancy had dreamed about Stoney’s Crab Palace—mouse tracks on a Key lime tart.

“I’ve been fighting a stomach flu,” he said.

Undaunted, Rosa ordered them veal with penne pasta. She wore a fresh touch of lipstick but no other makeup, which Yancy found wildly beguiling. This he recognized as the onset of infatuation.

“Did you get fired? Tell the truth,” she said.

He felt his neck get hot. “It’s more like a probation.”

“No, I’ve been checking up. You’re quite the renegade, Andrew.” She was smiling, thank God. “I’ve heard of Sergeant Johnny Mendez, by the way. Not a good guy.”

“A congenital crook,” Yancy said. “Disgrace to the uniform, et cetera.”

“Still, you could have handled it better. Now, what happened down in the Keys?”

“That I’d rather not discuss.”

“Too bad,” Rosa said. “My life coach told me not to sleep with anybody who harbors a murky past.”

“What about a murky present?”

“I don’t really have a life coach, Andrew. However, I do believe in full disclosure.”

He coughed up the whole story with a facsimile of contrition. His crude assault on Dr. Clifford Witt didn’t seem to shock Rosa, but then again she was a coroner in an urban combat zone.

“Last week I did a post on a man who had a clarinet up his colon,” she reported. “That’s not what killed him, by the way. It was a single gunshot to the head from a jealous lover. She played the oboe.”

“Shakespeare was born too soon.”

“So you lost your detective job and now you’re inspecting restaurants for rat poop and bacteria. Not exactly a lateral career move.”

Yancy said, “I’m righting the ship, even as we speak.”

The pasta and veal arrived. It was delicious, but he backed off after a couple of bites. Rosa asked for an update on the severed arm, and he told her what he’d found out. She was intrigued by the dead-sailfish scam.

“That’s a classic,” she said.

“I’m thinking the wife and her boyfriend killed Stripling, or had him killed.”

“Before or after they sunk the boat?”

“Doesn’t matter. They chop off one arm and take the expensive wristwatch, but they leave the platinum wedding band as part of the act, so that Eve can make a show of identifying it later. Then they put the arm in the shallows off some secluded beach so the bonnet sharks can gnaw on it, purely for appearance.”

“How’d she pick this Phinney character to smuggle that nasty thing onto a boat?” Rosa asked.

“You hang around the docks, it’s not hard to find somebody who’d sell their own mother’s kidney for three thousand bucks. Once that tourist on the Misty reeled in Stripling’s arm, Eve was golden.”

“Until Phinney started blabbing about the money.”

Yancy nodded. “That’s why he got shot. It wasn’t a robbery. Hell, he’d already blown through most of the dough.”

“You said the shooter was on a moped? That’s like Bogotá in the old days.”

“Mopeds are all over Key West. This one was a cash rental on a stolen driver’s license—somebody hired by Eve, I’m betting. Or possibly it was the boyfriend himself who pulled the trigger.”

“Whose name you don’t know.”

“Hey, I’m just getting started.”

Rosa said, “Eat your lunch, Andrew. It’s sinful to waste good food. I thought you said the widow’s love hunk was in the Bahamas.”

“That’s what I was told. It’s a quick flight to Florida.”

“There must be a record of that. He’d have to clear Customs.”

“Only if he’s an upright, law-abiding citizen,” Yancy said. “A seaplane could fly in low and land anyplace. It’s risky, but so is murder.”

Because of the poor condition of Stripling’s arm, determining the precise date and time of his death was impossible. The crime had probably occurred when Immigration records showed Eve to be in Nassau. However, with access to a floatplane and an outlaw pilot, she could have flown straight to the Keys, killed her husband, staged the boat accident and been back in the Bahamas by nightfall.

“Super bold,” Rosa said.