Bad Monkey

She would never forget those three letters because, as events unfolded, they came to stand in her mind for Low Rent Whore. Having nothing better to do on that slow afternoon, Dr. Rosa Campesino fed the tag information to a cop friend, who ran a statewide computer check and found one and only one blue Honda Accord registered with a tag beginning with LRW. It came back to a Sandra Jane Finn, white female, age twenty-nine, who was known to Rosa as a freelance hotel lifeguard and stand-up paddleboard instructor. For Daniel’s birthday Rosa had purchased for him a ten-foot Dragonfly and three private lessons, which had evidently evolved to include floating blow jobs on the Intracoastal Waterway.

That night Daniel broke down and admitted to the affair, lamenting his wretched luck that the Google vehicle had rolled past the marital homestead on one of the rare occasions when Sandy happened to be there. Usually they met at her place, he added ineptly. Rosa evicted him at scalpel-point, and over time she’d successfully swept him into a tiny moldy corner of her memory.

“You still talk to your ex?” Yancy asked.

“He’s deceased,” Rosa said, “but even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t call.”

A pod of dolphins rolled in the channel and Yancy patted softly on the water to draw them near. Rosa said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have children because her job presented such a depressing outlook for the human species. Yancy understood how she felt. Bonnie Witt had once tearfully begged him to impregnate her; the fact that he’d briefly considered the request was proof that he’d been crippled by romantic self-delusions. Their offspring would have been eternally fucked up, prime fodder for Dr. Phil.

The dolphins moved on, swimming leisurely with the tide. Yancy poled the skiff up on a grassy flat and staked off from the stern. He felt all right as long as he didn’t sit down. A colossal thunderhead bloomed to the west, smothering the sun but spreading a lavender veil of light.

“Tell me about the other patient you saw today,” he said to Rosa. “The one who didn’t whine and squirm.”

“You mean the suicide? It was a doctor, believe it or not.”

Yancy briefly thought of Clifford, but he remembered that the Witts were in Sarasota. Unless there was a medical convention in Miami …

“Please tell me he didn’t strangle himself with his pecker in his fist.”

“No!” Rosa said. “And, by the way, that wouldn’t be a suicide. That would be an autoerotic miscalculation. This fellow did the job with a handgun.”

“Messy, but less embarrassing.”

“He was also drunk out of his gourd, and probably loaded on oxycodone. They found prescription bottles all over his condo. We’ll know for sure when the lab finishes the toxicology.”

Yancy had stopped admiring the sky. “He wasn’t an orthopedist, was he?”

Rosa turned in the bow and looked up at him. “How’d you know?”

“His name was Gomez O’Peele?”

“Yes, Andrew, but how on earth—”

“I went to see him yesterday, after you and I had lunch. He used to work for Nick Stripling.”

“Jesus, maybe the guy freaked out after you braced him.”

“That’s not the reaction I got. He wanted cash money for being an informant. Did they find a note?”

Rosa shook her head.

“Then how,” Yancy said, “can you be sure he killed himself?”

“Point-blank wound, right temple. His prints on the weapon. No sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. His brother said he’d lost his job at a clinic and had financial problems, booze issues, drug issues.” Rosa raised her hands. “It’s textbook, Andrew.”

“Except maybe it’s not.”

“Did you see a gun when you were there?”

“No. What did he use?”

“A .357 Smith.”

“Let me take a guess on the ammo,” Yancy said. “Hollow points, 158-grain.”

“Okay, stop.”

“Just like the ones that killed Charles Phinney.” Yancy unstuck the pole and started pushing the skiff off the shallows. “When did this happen?” he asked.

“One of the doctor’s neighbors heard a bang around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. She knocked on the door, got no answer. Didn’t call the police because she had company—not her husband.” Rosa was frowning. “This morning a rabbi who lives in the building found blood spots in his parking space. They’d dripped from O’Peele’s balcony, where the body was found.”

Yancy was disturbed to think his visit had in some way precipitated the doctor’s death. Had somebody been surveilling the condo? Or maybe the shooter had followed him there. He thought of Eve and her boyfriend, their hushed and agitated conversation in the backyard on Di Lido Island. Had they been talking about O’Peele? Had they already shot him?

But why bother killing the guy, since Nick Stripling was dead and unreachable by prosecutors? A murder only made sense if Eve herself feared being indicted as a conspirator in the scooter-chair scam, and if she feared O’Peele would testify against her.