Duma Key

i

Two nights later I painted the ship for the first time.

I called it Girl and Ship to begin with, then Girl and Ship No. 1, although neither was its real name; its real name was Ilse and Ship No. 1. It was the Ship series even more than what happened to Candy Brown that decided me on whether or not to show my work. If Nannuzzi wanted to do it, I’d go along. Not because I was seeking what Shakespeare called “the bubble reputation” (I owe Wireman for that one), but because I came to understand that Elizabeth was right: it was better not to let work pile up on Duma Key.

The Ship paintings were good. Maybe great. They certainly felt that way when I finished them. They were also bad, powerful medicine. I think I knew that from the first one, executed during the small hours of Valentine’s Day. During the last night of Tina Garibaldi’s life.

ii

The dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but it was vivid beyond my power to describe in words, although I captured some of the feeling on canvas. Not all, but some. Enough, maybe. It was sunset. In that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange, then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.

Silhouetted against that furnace light was a three-masted derelict. The ship’s rotted sails hung limp with red fire glaring through the holes and rips. There was no one alive on board. You only had to look to know that. There was a feeling of hollow menace about the thing, as though it had housed some plague that had burned through the crew, leaving only this rotting corpse of wood, hemp, and sailcloth. I remember feeling that if a gull or pelican flew over it, the bird would drop dead on the deck with its feathers smoking.

Floating about forty yards away was a small rowboat. Sitting in it was a girl, her back to me. Her hair was red, but the hair was false — no live girl had tangled yarn hair like that. What gave away her identity was the dress she wore. It was covered with tic-tac-toe grids and the printed words I WIN, YOU WIN, over and over. Ilse had that dress when she was four or five… about the age of the twin girls in the family portrait I’d seen on the second floor landing of El Palacio de Asesinos.

I tried to shout, to warn her not to go near the derelict. I couldn’t. I was helpless. In any case it didn’t seem to matter. She only sat there in her sweet little rowboat on the mild red rollers, watching and wearing Illy’s tic-tac-toe dress.

I fell out of my bed, and on my bad side. I cried out in pain and rolled over on my back, listening to the waves from outside and the soft grinding of the shells under the house. They told me where I was but did not comfort me. I win, they said. I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

My missing arm seemed to burn. I had to put a stop to it or go crazy, and there was only one way to do that. I went upstairs and painted like a lunatic for the next three hours. I had no model on my table, no object in view out my window. Nor did I need any. It was all in my head. And as I worked, I realized this was what all the pictures had been struggling toward. Not the girl in the rowboat, necessarily; she was probably just an added attraction, a toehold in reality. It was the ship I had been after all along. The ship and the sunset. When I thought back, I realized the irony of that: Hello, the pencil-sketch I’d made on the day I came, had been the closest.

iii

I tumbled into bed around three-thirty and slept until nine. I woke feeling refreshed, cleaned out, brand-new. The weather was fine: cloudless and warmer than it had been in a week. The Baumgartens were getting ready to return north, but I had a spirited game of Frisbee with their boys on the beach before they left. My appetite was high, my pain-level low. It was nice to feel like one of the guys again, even for an hour.

Elizabeth’s weather had also cleared. I read her a number of poems while she arranged her chinas. Wireman was there, caught up for once and in good spirits. The world felt fine that day. It occurred to me only later that George “Candy” Brown might well have been abducting twelve-year-old Tina Garibaldi at the same time I was reading Richard Wilbur’s poem about laundry, “Love Calls Us to the Things of the World,” to Elizabeth. I chose it because I happened to see an item in that day’s paper saying it had become something of a Valentine’s Day favorite. The Garibaldi kidnapping happened to be recorded. It occurred at exactly 3:16 PM, according to the time-stamp on the tape, and that would have been just about the time I paused to sip from my glass of Wireman’s green tea and unfold the Wilbur poem, which I had printed off the Internet.

There were closed-circuit cameras installed to watch the loading-dock areas behind the Crossroads Mall. To guard against pilferage, I suppose. What they caught in this case was the pilferage of a child’s life. She comes into view crossing right to left, a slim kid dressed in jeans with a pack on her back. She was probably planning to duck into the mall before going the rest of the way home. On the tape, which the TV stations replayed obsessively, you see him emerge from a rampway and take her by the wrist. She turns her face up to his and appears to ask him a question. Brown nods in reply and leads her away. At first she’s not struggling, but then — just before they disappear behind a Dumpster — she attempts to pull free. But he’s still holding her firmly by the wrist when they disappear from the camera’s view. He killed her less than six hours later, according to the county medical examiner, but judging by the terrible evidence of her body, those hours must have seemed very long to that little girl, who never harmed anyone. They must have seemed endless.

Outside the open window, The morning air is all awash with angels, Richard Wilbur writes in “Love Calls Us to the Things of the World.” But no, Richard. No.

Those were only sheets.

iv

The Baumgartens departed. The Godfreys’ dogs barked them goodbye. A Merry Maids crew went into the house where the Baumgartens had been staying and gave it a good cleaning. The Godfreys’ dogs barked them hello (and goodbye). Tina Garibaldi’s body was found in a ditch behind the Wilk Park Little League field, naked from the waist down and discarded like a bag of garbage. Her mother was shown on Channel 6 screaming and harrowing at her cheeks. The Kintners replaced the Baumgartens. The folks from Toledo vacated #39 and three pleasant old ladies from Michigan moved in. The old ladies laughed a lot and actually said Yoo-hoo when they saw me or Wireman coming. I have no idea if they put the newly installed Wi-Fi at #39 to use or not, but the first time I played Scrabble with them, they fed me my lunch. The Godfreys’ dogs barked tirelessly when the old ladies went on their afternoon walks. A man who worked at the Sarasota E-Z JetWash called the police and said the guy on the Tina Garibaldi tape looked very much like one of his fellow car-washers, a guy named George Brown, known to everyone as Candy. Candy Brown had left work around 2:30 on Valentine’s Day afternoon, this man said, and hadn’t returned until the next morning. Claimed he hadn’t felt well. The E-Z JetWash was only a block from the Crossroads Mall. Two days after Valentine’s, I came into the Palacio kitchen and found Wireman sitting at the table with his head thrown back, shaking all over. When the shakes subsided, he told me he was fine. When I said he didn’t look fine, he told me to keep my opinions to myself, speaking in a brusque tone that was unlike him. I held up three fingers and asked him how many he saw. He said three. I held up two and he said two. I decided — not without misgivings — to let it go. Again. I was not, after all, my Wireman’s keeper. I painted Girl and Ship Nos. 2 and 3. In No. 2, the child in the rowboat was wearing Reba’s polka-dotted blue dress, but I was pretty sure it was still Ilse. And in No. 3 there was no doubt. Her hair had returned to the fine cornsilk I remembered from those days, and she was wearing a sailor-blouse with blue curlicue stitching around the collar that I had reason to remember very well: she’d been wearing it one Sunday when she’d fallen out of the apple tree in our back yard and broken her arm. In No. 3 the ship had turned slightly, and I could read the first letters of its name on the prow in flaking paint: PER. I had no idea what the rest of the letters might be. That was also the first painting with John Eastlake’s spear-pistol in it. It was lying loaded on one of the rowboat’s seats. On the eighteenth of February, a friend of Jack’s showed up to help with repairs to some of the rental properties. The Godfreys’ dogs barked gregariously at him, inviting him to come on over any time he felt like having a chunk removed from his hip-hop-jeans-clad buttsky. Police questioned Candy Brown’s wife (she also called him Candy, everyone called him Candy, he had probably invited Tina Garibaldi to call him Candy before torturing and killing her) about his whereabouts on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day. She said maybe he was sick, but he hadn’t been sick at home. He hadn’t come home until eight o’clock or so that night. She said he had brought her a box of chocolates. She said he was an old sweetie about things like that. On the twenty-first of February, the country-music folks took their sports car and went boot-scootin back to the northern climes from whence they’d come. No one else moved in to take their place. Wireman said it signaled the turn of the snowbird tide. He said it always turned earlier on Duma Key, which had zero restaurants and tourist attractions (not even a lousy alligator farm!). The Godfreys’ dogs barked ceaselessly, as if to proclaim the tide of winter vacationers might have turned, but it was a long way from out. On the same day the boot-scooters left Duma, the police showed up at Candy Brown’s home in Sarasota with a search warrant. According to Channel 6, they took several items. A day later, the three old ladies at #39 once more fed me my lunch at Scrabble; I never so much as sniffed a Triple Word Score, but I did learn that qiviut is a word. When I got home and snapped on the TV, the BREAKING NEWS logo was on Channel 6, which is All Suncoast, All of the Time. Candy Brown had been arrested. According to “sources close to the investigation,” two of the items taken in the search of the Brown house were undergarments, one spotted with blood. DNA testing would follow as day follows night. Candy Brown didn’t wait. The following day’s newspaper quoted him as saying to police, “I got high and did a terrible thing.” This was what I read as I drank my morning juice. Above the story was The Picture, already as familiar to me as the photo of Kennedy being shot in Dallas. The Picture showed Candy with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi’s wrist, her face turned up to his questioningly. The telephone rang. I picked it up without looking at it and said hello. I was preoccupied with Tina Garibaldi. It was Wireman. He asked if maybe I could come down to the house for a little while. I said sure, of course, started to say goodbye, and then realized I was hearing something, not in his voice but just under it, that was a long way from normal. I asked him what was wrong.

“I seem to have gone blind in my left eye, muchacho.”

He laughed a little. It was a strange, lost sound.

“I knew it was coming, but it’s still a shock. I suppose we’ll all feel that way when we wake up d-d—” He drew a shuddering breath. “Can you come? I tried to get Annmarie from Bay Area Private Nursing, but she’s out on a call, and… can you come, Edgar? Please?”

“I’ll be right there. Just hang on, Wireman. Stay where you are and hang on.”

v

I hadn’t had trouble with my own eyesight in weeks. The accident had caused some loss of peripheral vision and I tended to turn right to look at things I’d formerly picked up easily while looking straight ahead, but otherwise I was fine in the vision department. Going out to my anonymous rental Chevy, I wondered how I’d feel if that bloody redness started to creep over things again… or if I woke up some morning with nothing but a black hole on one side of my world. That made me wonder how Wireman could have managed a laugh. Even a little one.

I had my hand on the Malibu’s doorhandle when I remembered him saying that Annmarie Whistler, whom he depended upon to stay with Elizabeth when he had to be gone for any length of time, was on a call. I hurried back to the house and called Jack’s mobile, praying that he’d answer and that he could come. He did, and he could. That was one for the home team.

vi

I drove off the island for the first time that morning, and I broke my cherry in a big way, joining the bumper-to-bumper northbound traffic on the Tamiami Trail. We were bound for Sarasota Memorial Hospital. This was on the recommendation of Elizabeth’s doctor, who I’d called over Wireman’s weak protests. And now Wireman kept asking me if I was all right, if I was sure I could do this, if it wouldn’t have been better to let Jack drive him so I could stay with Elizabeth.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Well, you look scared to death. I can see that much.” His right eye had shifted in my direction. His left tried to follow suit, but without much success. It was bloodshot, slightly upturned, and welling careless tears. “You gonna freak out, muchacho?”

“No. Besides, you heard Elizabeth. If you hadn’t gone on your own, she would have taken a broom and beaten you right out the door.”

He hadn’t meant “Miss Eastlake” to know there was anything wrong with him, but she’d been coming into the kitchen on her walker and overheard his end of our conversation. And besides, she had a little of what Wireman had. It went unacknowledged between us, but it was there.

“If they want to admit you—” I began.

“Oh, they’ll want to, it’s a fucking reflex with them, but it’s not going to happen. If they could fix it, that would be different. I’m only going because Hadlock may be able to tell me that this isn’t a permanent clusterfuck but just a temporary blip on the radar.” He smiled wanly.

“Wireman, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“All in good time, muchacho. What are you painting these days?”

“Never mind right now.”

“Oh dear,” Wireman said. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s tired of questions. Did you know that during the winter months, one out of every forty regular users of the Tamiami Trail will have a vehicular mishap? It’s true. And according to something I heard on the news the other day, the chances of an asteroid the size of the Houston Astrodome hitting the earth are actually better than the chances of—”

I reached for the radio and said, “Why don’t we have some music?”

“Good idea,” he said. “But no fucking country.”

For a second I didn’t understand, and then I remembered the recently departed boot-scooters. I found the area’s loudest, dumbest rock station, which styles itself The Bone. There Nazareth was screaming its way through “Hair of the Dog.”

“Ah, puke-on-your-shoes rock and roll,” Wireman said. “Now you’re talkin, mi hijo.”

vii

That was a long day. Any day you drop your bod onto the conveyor belt of modern medicine — especially as it’s practiced in a city overstuffed with elderly, often ailing winter visitors — you’re in for a long day. We were there until six. They did indeed want to admit Wireman. He refused.

I spent most of my time in those purgatorial waiting rooms where the magazines are old, the cushions on the chairs are thin, and the TV is always bolted high in one corner. I sat, I listened to worried conversations compete with the TV-cackle, and every now and then I went to one of the areas where cell phones were allowed and used Wireman’s to call Jack. Was she good? She was terrific. They were playing Parcheesi. Then reconfiguring China Town. The third time they were eating sandwiches and watching Oprah. The fourth time she was sleeping.

“Tell him she’s made all her restroom calls,” Jack said. “So far.”

I did. Wireman was pleased to hear it. And the conveyor belt trundled slowly along.

Three waiting rooms, one outside General Admitting, where Wireman refused to even take a clipboard with a form on it — possibly because he couldn’t read it (I filled in the necessary information), one outside Neurology, where I met both Gene Hadlock, Elizabeth’s doctor, and a pallid, goateed fellow named Herbert Principe. Dr. Hadlock claimed that Principe was the best neurologist in Sarasota. Principe did not deny this, nor did he say shucks. The last waiting room was on the second floor, home of Big Fancy Equipment. Here Wireman was taken not to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a process with which I was very familiar, but instead to X-Ray at the far end of the hall, a room I imagined to be dusty and neglected in this modern age. Wireman gave me his Mary medallion to hold and I was left to wonder why Sarasota’s best neurologist would resort to such old-fashioned technology. No one bothered to enlighten me.

The TVs in all three waiting rooms were tuned to Channel 6, where again and again I was subjected to The Picture: Candy Brown with his hand locked on Tina Garibaldi’s wrist, her face turned up to his, frozen in a look that was terrible because anyone brought up in a halfway decent home knew, in his or her heart, exactly what it meant. You told your children be careful, very careful, that a stranger could mean danger, and maybe they believed it, but kids from nice homes had also been raised to believe safety was their birthright. So the eyes said Sure, mister, tell me what I’m supposed to do. The eyes said You’re the adult, I’m the kid, so tell me what you want. The eyes said I’ve been raised to respect my elders. And most of all, what killed you, were the eyes saying I’ve never been hurt before.

I don’t think that endless, looping coverage and near-constant repetition of The Picture accounts for everything that followed, but did it play a part? Yeah.

Sure it did.

viii

It was past dark when I finally drove out of the parking garage and turned south on the Trail, headed back toward Duma. At first I hardly thought about Wireman; I was totally absorbed in my driving, somehow positive this time my luck would run out and we would have an accident. Once we got past the Siesta Key turnoffs and the traffic thinned a little, I started to relax. When we got to the Crossroads Mall, Wireman said: “Pull in.”

“Need something at The Gap? Joe Boxers? Couple of tee-shirts with pockets?”

“Don’t be a smartass, just pull in. Park under a light.”

I parked under one of the lights and turned off the engine. I found it moderately creepy there, even though the lot was well over half full and I knew that Candy Brown had taken Tina Garibaldi on the other side, the loading dock side.

“I guess I can tell this once,” Wireman said. “And you deserve to hear. Because you’ve been good to me. And you’ve been good for me.”

“Right back atcha on that, Wireman.”

His hands were resting on a slim gray folder he had carried out of the hospital with him. His name was on the tab. He raised one finger off it to still me without looking at me — he was looking straight ahead, at the Bealls Department Store anchoring this end of the mall. “I want to do this all at once. That work for you?”

“Sure.”

“My story is like…” He turned to me, suddenly animated. His left eye was bright red and weeping steadily, but at least now it was pointing at me along with the other one. “Muchacho, have you ever seen one of those happynews stories about a guy winning two or three hundred million bucks on the Powerball?”

“Everyone has.”

“They get him up on stage, they give him a great big fake cardboard check, and he says something which is almost always inarticulate, but that’s good, in a situation like that inarticulate is the point, because picking all those numbers is fucking outrageous. Absurd. In a situation like that the best you can do is ‘I’m going to fucking Disney World.’ Are you with me so far?”

“So far, yeah.”

Wireman went back to studying the people going in and out of Bealls, behind which Tina Garibaldi had met Candy Brown to her pain and sorrow.

“I won la lotería, too. Only not in a good way. In fact, I’d say it was just about the world’s worst way. The lawyering I did in my other life was in Omaha. I worked for a firm called Fineham, Dooling, and Allen. Wits — of which I considered myself one — sometimes called it Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum. It was actually a great firm, honest as the day. We did good business, and I was well positioned there. I was a bachelor, and by that time — I was thirty-seven — I thought that was probably my lot in life. Then the circus came to town, Edgar. I mean an actual circus, one with big cats and aerialists. Most of the performers were of other nationalities, as is often the case. The aerialist troupe and their families were from Mexico. One of the circus accountants, Julia Taveres, was also from Mexico. As well as keeping the books, she functioned as translator for the fliers.”

He gave her name the Spanish pronunciation — Hulia.

“I did not go to the circus. Wireman does the occasional rock-show; he doesn’t do circuses. But here’s the lottery again. Every few days, the circus’s clerical staff would draw slips from a hat to see who’d go shopping for the office snacks — chips, dips, coffee, soda. One day in Omaha, Julia drew the marked slip. While coming back across the supermarket parking lot to the van, a produce truck entering the lot at a high rate of speed struck a line of shopping carts — you know how they stack them up?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Bang! The carts roll thirty feet, strike Julia, break her leg. She was blindsided, had no chance to get out of the way. There happened to be a cop parked nearby, and he heard her screaming. He called an ambulance. He also Breathalyzed the produce truck driver. He blew a one-seven.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes, muchacho. In Nebraska, a one-seven means do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to drunk. Julia, on the advice of the doctor who saw her in the Emergency Room, came to us. There were thirty-five lawyers in Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum back then, and Julia’s personal-injury case could have ended up with any one of fifteen. I got it. Do you see the numbers starting to roll into place?”

“Yes.”

“I did more than represent her; I married her. She wins the suit and a large chunk of change. The circus rolls out of town, as circuses have a way of doing, only minus one accountant. Shall I tell you we were very much in love?”

“No,” I said. “I hear it every time you say her name.”

“Thank you, Edgar. Thanks.” He sat there with his head bowed and his hands on his folder. Then he dragged a battered, bulging wallet from his hip pocket. I had no idea how he could bear to sit on such a rock. He flipped through the little windows meant for photographs and important documents, then stopped and slid out a photograph of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a white sleeveless blouse. She looked about thirty. She was a heart-stopper.

“Mi Julia,” he said. I started to hand the picture back and he shook his head. He was choosing another photo. I dreaded to see it. I took it, though, when he handed it over.

It was Julia Wireman in miniature. That same dark hair, framing a pale, perfect face. Those same dark solemn eyes.

“Esmeralda,” Wireman said. “The other half of my heart.”

“Esmeralda,” I said. I thought the eyes looking out of this photograph and the eyes looking up at Candy Brown in The Picture were almost the same. But maybe all children’s eyes are the same. My arm began to itch. The one that had been burnt up in a hospital incinerator. I scratched at it and got my ribs. No news there.

Wireman took the pictures back, kissed each with a brief, dry ardor that was terrible to see, and returned them to their transparent sleeves. It took him a little while, because his hands had picked up a tremble. And, I suppose, he was having trouble seeing. “You actually don’t even have to watch those old numbers, amigo. If you close your eyes you can hear them falling into place: Click and click and click. Some guys just strike lucky. Hotcha!” He popped his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The sound was shockingly loud in the little sedan.

“When Ez was three, Julia signed on part-time with an outfit called Work Fair, Immigration Solutions in downtown Omaha. She helped Spanish-speakers with and without green cards get jobs, and she helped start illegals who wanted citizenship on the right road. Just a little storefront outfit, low profile, but they did a lot more practical good than all the marches and sign-waving. In Wireman’s humble opinion.”

He pressed his hands against his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Then he let his palms fall on top of the file-folder with a thump.

“When it happened, I was in Kansas City on business. Julia spent Monday to Thursday mornings at Work Fair. Ez went to a daycare. A good one. I could have sued and broken that place — beggared the women who ran it — but I didn’t. Because even in my grief, I understood that what happened to Esmeralda could have happened to anyone’s child. It’s all just la lotería, entiendes? Once our firm sued a Venetian blind company — I wasn’t personally involved — when a baby lying in his crib got hold of the draw-cord, swallowed it, and choked to death. The parents won and there was a payout, but their baby was just as dead, and if it hadn’t been the cord, it might have been something else. A Matchbox car. The ID tag off the dog’s collar. A marble.” Wireman shrugged. “With Ez it was the marble. She pulled it down her throat during playtime and choked to death.”

“Wireman, Jesus! I’m so sorry!”

“She was still alive when they got her to the hospital. The woman from the daycare called both Julia’s office and mine. She was babbling-crazy, insane. Julia went tearing out of Work Fair, got into her car, drove like hell. Three blocks from the hospital she had a head-on collision with an Omaha Public Works truck. She was killed instantly. By then our daughter had probably already been dead for twenty minutes. That Mary medallion you held for me… that was Julia’s.”

He fell silent, and the silence spun out. I didn’t fill it; there’s nothing to say to a story like that. Eventually he resumed.

“Just another version of the Powerball. Five numbers, plus that all-important Bonus Number. Click, click, click, click, click. And then clack for good measure. Did I think such a thing could happen to me? No, muchacho, never in my wildest, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine. My mother and dad begged me to go see a psychiatrist, and for a little while — eight months after the funerals — I did indeed go. I was tired of floating through the world like a balloon tethered three feet over my own head.”

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“I know you do. We checked into hell on different shifts, you and me. And out again, I suppose, although my heels are still smoking. How about yours?”

“Yeah.”

“The psychiatrist… nice man, but I couldn’t talk to him. With him I was inarticulate. With him I found myself grinning a lot. I kept expecting a cute chick in a bathing suit to trot out my big cardboard check. The audience would see it and applaud. And eventually a check did come. When we married, I’d taken out a joint life insurance policy. When Ez came, I added to it. So I really did win la lotería. Especially when you add in the compensation Julia received from the accident in the supermarket parking lot. Which brings us to this.”

He held up the slim gray folder.

“The thought of suicide had been out there, circling closer and closer. The primary attraction was the idea that Julia and Esmeralda might also still be out there, waiting for me to catch up… but they might not wait forever. I’m not a conventionally religious man, but I think there’s at least a chance that there is life after death, and that we survive as… you know, ourselves. But of course…” A wintry smile touched the sides of his mouth. “Mostly I was just depressed. I had a gun in my safe. A .22. I bought it for home protection after Esmeralda was born. One night I sat down with it at the dining room table, and… I believe you might know this part of the story, muchacho.”

I raised one hand and seesawed it in a maybe sí, maybe no gesture.

“I sat down at the dining room table in my empty house. There was a bowl of fruit there, courtesy of the home shopper I employed. I put the gun on the table, and then I closed my eyes. I spun the bowl of fruit around two or three times. I told myself if I picked an apple out of the bowl, I’d put the gun to my temple and end my life. If it was an orange, however… then I’d take my lottery winnings and go to Disney World.”

“You could hear the refrigerator,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said without surprise. “I could hear the fridge — both the hum of the motor and the clunk of the ice-maker. I reached out and I picked an apple.”

“Did you cheat?”

Wireman smiled. “A fair question. If you mean did I peek, the answer is no. If you mean did I memorize the geography of the fruit in the bowl…” He shrugged. “Quién sabe? In any case, I picked an apple: in Adam’s fall, sinned we all. I didn’t have to bite it or smell it; I could tell what it was by the skin. So without opening my eyes — or giving myself any chance to think — I picked up the gun and put it to my temple.” He mimed this with the hand I no longer had, cocking the thumb and placing the first finger against the small circular scar that his long, graying hair usually hid. “My last thought was, ‘At least I won’t have to listen to that refrigerator anymore, or eat one more gourmet shepherd’s pie out of it.’ I don’t remember any bang. Nevertheless, the whole world went white, and that was the end of Wireman’s other life. Now… would you like the hallucinogenic shit?”

“Yes, please.”

“You want to see if it matches yours, don’t you?”

“Yes.” And a question occurred to me. One of some import, maybe. “Wireman, did you have any of these telepathic bursts… weird receptions… whatever you want to call them… before you came to Duma Key?” I was thinking of Monica Goldstein’s dog, Gandalf, and how I seemed to have choked him with an arm I no longer had.

“Yes, two or three,” he said. “I may tell you about them in time, Edgar, but I don’t want to stick Jack with Miss Eastlake for too long. All other considerations aside, she’s apt to be worried about me. She’s a dear thing.”

I could have said that Jack — also sort of a dear thing — would probably be worried, too, but instead I only told him to go on.

“You often have a redness about you, muchacho,” Wireman said. “I don’t think it’s an aura, exactly, and it’s not exactly a thought… except when it is. I’ve gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto.”

“When I was stuck for a word.”

“Were you? I don’t remember.”

“Neither do I, but I’m sure that was it. Red’s a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there’s something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get… you know…”

“A little pissed off?”

I thought of how I’d taken Pam by the throat. How I’d tried to choke her.

“Yeah,” I said. “You could say that.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my… my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it’s like?”

“Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet.” He paused. “Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t damnation, only an apple. ‘In Adam’s fall, sinned we all.’ I said that out loud. Then I said, ‘Fruit-bowl.’ I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail.” He laughed. “Of course I know some of the things I remember aren’t true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

“I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of congealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, ‘I’m a dandy in aspic’ and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, ‘No jelly in the fruit-bowl.’ And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I’d shot myself. It seemed more likely that I’d gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That’s where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother’s name. Instead I said, ‘Cash crop in the groun, lan’lord soon be roun.’”

I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum.

“Were you angry?”

“No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There’s no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It’s acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it.” He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they’ve pulled — forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

“That’s when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar — the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all.”

“Or a reasonable facsimile,” I said. “Christ, Wireman.”

“I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth.”

Suddenly I understood why they’d X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

“Wireman, can I ask you something?”

“All right.”

“Are a person’s optic nerves… I don’t know… bass-ackwards?”

“Indeed they are.”

“So that’s why your left eye is fucked up. It’s like…” For a moment the word wouldn’t come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. “It’s like contracoup.”

“I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it’s my left eye that’s fucked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.

“Then I went to bed and tried to sleep. I might as well have tried sleeping in the middle of a brass band. I didn’t sleep for four days. I felt I would never sleep again. My mind was going four thousand miles an hour. This made cocaine seem like Xanax. I couldn’t even lie still for long. I managed twenty minutes, then leaped up and put on a mariachi record. It was five-thirty in the morning. I spent thirty minutes on the exercise bike — first time I’d been on it since Julia and Ez died — showered, and went in to work.

“For the next three days I was a bird, I was a plane, I was Super Lawyer. My colleagues progressed from being worried about me to being scared for me to being scared for themselves — the non sequiturs were getting worse, and so was my tendency to lapse into both pidgin Spanish and a kind of Pepé Le Pew French — but there can be no doubt that I moved a mountain of paper during those days, and very little of it ever came back on the firm. I checked. The partners in the corner offices and the lawyers in the trenches were united in the belief that I was having a nervous breakdown, and in a sense they were right. It was an organic nervous breakdown. Several people tried to get me to go home, with no success. Dion Knightly, one of my good friends there, all but begged me to let him take me to see a doctor. Know what I told him?”

I shook my head.

“‘Corn in the field, deal soon sealed.’ I remember it perfectly! Then I walked away. Except I was almost skipping. Walking was too slow for Wireman. I pulled two all-nighters. The third night, the security guard escorted me, protesting, from the premises. I informed him that a rigid penis has a million capillaries but not one scruple. I also told him he was a dandy in aspic, and that his father hated him.” Wireman brooded down at his folder briefly. “The thing about his father got to him, I think. Actually I know it did.” He tapped his scarred temple. “Weird radio, amigo. Weird radio.

“The next day I was called in to see Jack Fineham, the grand high rajah of our kingdom. I was ordered to take a leave of absence. Not asked, ordered. Jack opined that I’d come back too soon after ‘my unfortunate family reversals.’ I told him that was silly, I’d had no family reversals. ‘Say only that my wife and child et a rotten apple,’ I told him. ‘Say that, thou white-haired syndic, for it did be mortal full of bugs.’ That was when the roaches started to come out of his eyes and nose. And a couple from under his tongue, spilling white scum down his chin when they crawled over his lower lip.

“I started to scream. And I went for him. If not for the panic button on his desk — I didn’t even know the paranoid old geezer had one — I might have killed him. Also, he could run surprisingly fast. I mean he sped around that office, Edgar. Must have been all those years of tennis and golf.” He mulled this for a moment. “Still, I had both madness and youth on my side. I had laid hands on him by the time the posse burst in. It took half a dozen lawyers to haul me off him, and I tore his Paul Stuart suit-coat in half. Straight down the back.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “You should have heard that hijo de puta holler. And you should have heard me. The maddest shit you can imagine, including accusations — shouted at the top of my lungs — about his preference for ladies’ underwear. And like the thing about the security guard’s father, I think that may well have been true. Funny, no? And, crazy or not, valued legal mind or not, that was the end of my career at Findum, Fuckum, and Forgettum.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“De nada, all for the best,” he said in a businesslike tone. “As the lawyers were wrestling me out of his office — which was trashed — I pitched a fit. The grandest of grand mals. If there hadn’t been a legal aide handy with some medical training, I might have died right there. As it was, I was out cold for three days. And hey, I needed the sleep. So now…”

He opened the folder and handed me three X-rays. They weren’t as good as the cortical slices produced by an MRI, but I had an informed layman’s understanding of what I was looking at, thanks to my own experience.

“There it is, Edgar, a thing many claim does not exist: the brain of a lawyer. Have any pictures like these yourself?”

“Let’s put it this way: if I’d wanted to fill a scrapbook…”

He grinned. “But who’d want a scrapbook of shots like these. Do you see the slug?”

“Yes. You must have been holding the gun…” I held up my hand, tilting the finger at a pretty severe downward angle.

“That’s about right. And it had to’ve been a partial misfire. There was enough bang to drive it through my skull-case and deflect the bullet downward at an even steeper angle. It burrowed into my brain and came to rest. But before it did, it created a kind of… I don’t know…”

“Bow-wave?”

His eyes lit up. “Exactly! Only the texture of brain-matter is more like calves’ liver than water.”

“Euuuu. Nice.”

“I know. Wireman can be eloquent, he admits it. The slug created a downward bow-wave that caused edema and pressure on the optic chiasm. That’s the brain’s visual switching-point. Are you getting the richness of this? I shot myself in the temple and not only did I end up still alive, I ended up with the bullet causing problems in the equipment located back here.” He tapped the ridge of bone above his right ear. “And the problems are getting worse because the slug’s moving. It’s at least a quarter-inch deeper in than two years ago. Probably more. I didn’t need Hadlock or Principe to give me that information; I can see it in these pictures for myself.”

“So let them operate on you, Wireman, and take it out. Jack and I will make sure Elizabeth’s okay until you’re back on your…” He was shaking his head. “No? Why no?”

“It’s too deep for surgery, amigo. That’s why I didn’t let them admit me. Did you think it was because I’ve got a Marlboro Man complex? No way. My days of wanting to be dead are over. I still miss my wife and my daughter, but now I’ve got Miss Eastlake to take care of, and I’ve come to love the Key. And there’s you, Edgar. I want to know how your story comes out. Do I regret what I did? Sometimes sí, sometimes no. When it’s sí, I remind myself I wasn’t the same man then that I am now, and that I have to cut the old me some slack. That man was so hurt and lost he really wasn’t responsible. This is my other life, and I try to look at my problems in it as… well… birth defects.”

“Wireman, that’s bizarre.”

“Is it? Think of your own situation.”

I thought of my situation. I was a man who had choked his own wife and then forgot about it. A man who now slept with a doll in the other half of the bed. I decided to keep my opinions to myself.

“Dr. Principe only wants to admit me because I’m an interesting case.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I do!” Wireman spoke with suppressed passion. “I’ve met at least four Principes since I did this to myself. They’re terrifyingly similar: brilliant but disassociative, incapable of empathy, really only one or two doors down from the sociopaths John D. MacDonald used to write about. Principe can’t operate on me any more than he could on a patient who presents with a malignant tumor in that same location. With a tumor they could at least try radiation. A lead slug isn’t amenable to that. Principe knows it, but he’s fascinated. And sees nothing wrong with giving me a little false hope if it’ll get me in a hospital bed where he can ask me if it hurts when he does… this. And later, when I’m dead, perhaps there’d be a paper in it for him. He can go to Cancún and drink wine coolers on the beach.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Ain’t in the same league as those Principe eyes — those are harsh. I get one look at em and want to run the other way while I still can. Which is pretty much what I did.”

I shook my head and let it go. “So what’s the outlook?”

“Why don’t you get rolling? This place is starting to give me the willies. I just realized it’s where that freako grabbed the little girl.”

“I could have told you that when we drove in.”

“Probably just as well you kept it to yourself.” He yawned. “God, I’m tired.”

“It’s stress.” I looked both ways, then turned back onto the Tamiami Trail. I still couldn’t believe I was driving, but I was starting to like it.

“The outlook is not exactly rosy. I’m taking enough Doxepin and Zonegran now to choke a horse — those’re anti-seizure drugs, and they’ve been working pretty well, but I knew I was in trouble that night we had dinner at Zoria’s. I tried to deny it, but you know what they say: denial drowned Pharaoh and Moses led the Children of Israel free.”

“Uh… I think that was the Red Sea. Are there other drugs you can take? Stronger ones?”

“Principe certainly waved his prescription pad at me, but he wanted to offer Neurontin, and I won’t even chance that.”

“Because of your job.”

“Right.”

“Wireman, you won’t do Elizabeth any good if you go bat-blind.”

He didn’t reply for a minute or two. The road, now all but deserted, unrolled in front of my headlights. Then he said, “Blindness will soon be the least of my problems.”

I risked a sideways glance at him. “You mean this could kill you?”

“Yes.” He spoke with a lack of drama that was very convincing. “And Edgar?”

“What?”

“Before it does, and while I’ve still got one good eye left to see with, I’d like to look at some more of your work. Miss Eastlake wants to see some, too. She asked me to ask. You can use the car to haul em down to El Palacio — you seem to be doing admirably.”

The turn-off to Duma Key was ahead. I put on my blinker.

“I’ll tell you what I think sometimes,” he said. “I think that this run of fabulous luck I’ve been having has got to turn and run the other way. There’s absolutely no statistical reason to think such a thing, but it’s something to hold onto. You know?”

“I do,” I said. “And Wireman?”

“Still here, muchacho.”

“You love the Key, but you also think something’s wrong with the Key. What is it about this place?”

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s got something. Don’t you think so?”

“Of course I do. You know I do. The day Ilse and I tried to drive down the road, we both got sick. Her worse than me.”

“And she’s not the only one, according to the stories I’ve heard.”

“There are stories?”

“Oh yeah. The beach is okay, but inland…” He shook his head. “I’m thinking it might be some kind of pollution in the water-table. The same something that makes the flora grow like a mad bastard in a climate where you need irrigation just to keep the frigging lawns from dying. I don’t know. But it’s best to stay clear. I think that might be especially true for young ladies who’d like to have children someday. The kind without birth defects.”

Now there was a nasty idea that hadn’t occurred to me. I didn’t say anything the rest of the way back.

ix

This is about memory, and few of mine from that winter are as clear as the one of arriving back at El Palacio that February night. The wings of the iron gate were open. Sitting between them in her wheelchair, just as she had been on the day Ilse and I had set out on our abortive exploration southward, was Elizabeth Eastlake. She didn’t have the harpoon gun, but she was once more in her two-piece sweatsuit (this time with what looked like an old high school jacket thrown over the top), and her big sneakers — looking black instead of blue in the wash of the Malibu’s headlights — were propped on the chrome footrests. Beside her was her walker, and beside her walker stood Jack Cantori with a flashlight in his hand.

When she saw the car, she began struggling to her feet. Jack moved to restrain her. Then, when he saw she really meant it, he put the flashlight down on the cobbles and helped. By the time I parked next to the gateway, Wireman was opening his door. The Malibu’s headlights illuminated Jack and Elizabeth like actors on a stage. “No, Miss Eastlake!” Wireman called. “No, don’t try to get up! I’ll push you inside!”

She paid no attention. Jack helped her to her walker — or she led him to it — and she grasped the handles. Then she started thumping it toward the car. By then I was struggling out on the driver’s side, fighting my bad right hip to escape, as I always did. I was standing beside the hood when she set the walker aside and held her arms out to him. The flesh above her elbows hung limp and dead, pale as dough in the headlights, but her feet were planted wide apart and her stance was sure. A breeze full of night perfumes blew back her hair, and I wasn’t a bit surprised to see a scar — a very old one — denting the right side of her head. It could almost have been the twin of my own.

Wireman came around the open passenger door and just stood there for a second or two. I think he was deciding if he could still take comfort as well as give it. Then he went to her in a kind of bearlike, shambling walk, his head lowered, his long hair hiding his ears and swinging against his cheeks. She put her arms around him and pulled his head down on her considerable bosom. For a moment she swayed and I was alarmed, wide-set stance or no, but then she came straight again and I saw those gnarled, arthritis-twisted hands begin to rub his back, which had begun to heave.

I walked toward them, a little uncertainly, and her eyes turned toward me. They were perfectly clear. This wasn’t the woman who had asked about when the train was coming, the one who had said she was so fucking confused. All her circuit-breakers were back in the ON positions. At least temporarily.

“We’ll be fine,” she said. “You can go home, Edgar.”

“But—”

“We’ll be fine.” Rubbing his back with her gnarled fingers. Rubbing it with infinite tenderness. “Wireman will push me inside. In just a minute. Won’t you, Wireman?”

He nodded against her breast without lifting his head or making a sound.

I thought it over and decided to do what she wanted. “That’s fine, then. Goodnight, Elizabeth. Goodnight, Wireman. Come on, Jack.”

The walker was the kind equipped with a shelf. Jack put the flashlight on it, glanced at Wireman — still standing with his face hidden against the old woman’s bosom — and then walked to the open passenger door of my car. “Goodnight, ma’am.”

“Goodnight, young man. You are an impatient Parcheesi player, but you show promise. And Edgar?” She looked calmly back at me over Wireman’s bent head, his heaving back. “The water runs faster now. Soon come the rapids. Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I did know what she was talking about.

“Stay. Please stay on the Key, no matter what happens. We need you. I need you, and Duma Key needs you. Remember I said that, when I slip away again.”

“I will.”

“Look for Nan Melda’s picnic basket. It’s in the attic, I’m quite sure. It’s red. You’ll find it. They’re inside.”

“What would that be, Elizabeth?”

She nodded. “Yes. Goodnight, Edward.”

And as simply as that, I knew the slipping-away had begun once more. But Wireman would get her inside. Wireman would take care of her. But until he was able to, she would take care of them both. I left them standing on the cobbles beneath the gate arch, between the walker and the wheelchair, she with her arms around him, he with his head on her breast. That memory is clear.

Clear.

x

I was exhausted from the stress of driving — I think from spending the day among so many people after being alone for so long, too — but the thought of lying down, let alone going to sleep, was out of the question. I checked my e-mail and found communiqués from both my daughters. Melinda had come down with strep in Paris and was taking it as she always took illness — personally. Ilse had sent a link to the Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times. I clicked on it and found a terrific review of The Hummingbirds, who had appeared at the First Baptist Church and had had the faithful shouting hallelujah. There was also a picture of Carson Jones and a very good-looking blonde standing in front of the rest of the group, their mouths open in song, their eyes locked. Carson Jones and Bridget Andreisson duet on “How Great Thou Art,” read the caption. Hmmm. My If-So-Girl had written, “I’m not a bit jealous.” Double-hmmmm.

I made myself a bologna and cheese sandwich (three months on Duma Key and I was still a go for bologna), then went upstairs. Looked at the Girl and Ship paintings that were really Ilse and Ship. Thought of Wireman asking me what I was painting these days. Thought of the long message Elizabeth had left on my answering machine. The anxiety in her voice. She’d said that I must take precautions.

I came to a sudden decision and went back downstairs, going as fast as I could without falling.

xi

Unlike Wireman, I don’t lug my old swollen Lord Buxton around with me; I usually tuck one credit card, my driver’s license, and a little fold of cash into my front pocket and call it good. The wallet was locked in a living room desk drawer. I took it out, thumbed through the business cards, and found the one with SCOTO GALLERY printed on it in raised gold letters. I got the after-hours recording I had expected. When Dario Nannuzzi had finished his little spiel and the beep had beeped, I said: “Hello, Mr. Nannuzzi, this is Edgar Freemantle from Duma Key. I’m the…” I paused briefly, wanting to say guy and knowing that wasn’t what I was to him. “I’m the artist who does the sunsets with the big shells and plants and things sitting on them. You spoke about possibly showing my work. If you’re still interested, would you give me a call?” I recited my telephone number and hung up, feeling a little better. Feeling as if I’d done something, at least.

I got a beer out of the fridge and turned on the TV, thinking I might find a movie worth watching on HBO before turning in. The shells beneath the house had taken on a pleasant, lulling sound, their conversation tonight civilized and low-pitched.

They were drowned out by the voice of a man standing in a thicket of microphones. It was Channel 6, and the current star was Candy Brown’s court-appointed lawyer. He must have held this videotaped press conference at approximately the same time Wireman was getting his head examined. The lawyer looked about fifty, and his hair was pulled back into a Barrister Ponytail, but there was nothing going-through-the-motions about him. He looked and sounded invested. He was telling the reporters that his client would plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

He said that Mr. Brown was a drug addict, a porn-addicted sex addict, and a schizophrenic. Nothing about being powerless over ice cream and Now That’s What I Call Music compilations, but of course the jury hadn’t been empanelled yet. In addition to Channel 6’s mike, I saw NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN logos. Tina Garibaldi couldn’t have gotten coverage like this winning a spelling bee or a science fair, not even for saving the family dog from a raging river, but get raped and murdered and you’re nationwide, Swee’pea. Everyone knows your killer had your underpants in his bureau drawer.

“He comes by his addictions honestly,” the lawyer said. “His mother and both his stepfathers were drug addicts. His childhood was a horror during which he was systematically beaten and sexually abused. He has spent time in institutions for mental illness. His wife is a good-hearted woman, but mentally challenged herself. He never should have been on the streets to begin with.”

He faced the cameras.

“This is Sarasota’s crime, not George Brown’s. My heart goes out to the Garibaldis, I weep for the Garibaldis” — he lifted his tearless face to the cameras, as if to somehow prove this — “but taking George Brown’s life up in Starke won’t bring Tina Garibaldi back, and it won’t fix the broken system that put this broken human being on the streets, unsupervised. That’s my statement, thank you for listening, and now, if you’ll excuse me—”

He started away, ignoring the shouted questions, and things might still have been all right — different, at least — if I’d turned off the TV or changed the channel right then. But I didn’t. I watched the Channel 6 talking head back in the studio say, “Royal Bonnier, a legal crusader who has won half a dozen supposedly unwinnable pro bono cases, said he would make every effort to exclude the following video, shot by a security camera behind Bealls Department Store, from the trial.”

And that damned thing started again. The kid crosses from right to left with the pack on her back. Brown emerges from the rampway and takes her by the wrist. She looks up at him and appears to ask him a question. And that was when the itch descended on my missing arm like a swarm of bees.

I cried out — in surprise as well as agony — and fell on the floor, knocking both the remote and my sandwich-plate onto the rug, scratching at what wasn’t there. Or what I couldn’t get at. I heard myself yelling at it to stop, please stop. But of course there was only one way to stop it. I got on my knees and crawled for the stairs, registering the crunch as one knee came down on the remote and broke it, but first changing the station. To CMT: Country Music Television. Alan Jackson was singing about murder on Music Row. Twice going up the stairs I clawed for the banister, that’s how there my right hand was. I could actually feel the sweaty palm squeak on the wood before it passed through like smoke.

Somehow I got to the top and stumbled to my feet. I flicked all the light-switches up with my forearm and staggered to my easel at a half-assed run. There was a partly finished Girl and Ship on it. I heaved it aside without a look and slammed a fresh blank canvas in its place. I was breathing in hot little moans. Sweat was trickling out of my hair. I grabbed a wipe-off cloth and flapped it over my shoulder the way I’d flapped burp-rags over my shoulder when the girls were small. I stuck a brush in my teeth, put a second one behind my ear, started to grab a third, then picked up a pencil instead. The minute I started sketching, the monstrous itch in my arm began to abate. By midnight the picture was done and the itch was gone. Only it wasn’t just a picture, not this one; this one was The Picture, and it was good, if I do say so myself. And I do. I really was a talented sonofabitch. It showed Candy Brown with his hand locked around Tina Garibaldi’s wrist. It showed Tina looking up at him with those dark eyes, terrible in their innocency. I’d caught her look so perfectly that her parents would have taken one glance at the finished product and wanted to commit suicide. But her parents were never going to see this.

No, not this one.

My painting was an almost exact copy of the photograph that had been in every Florida newspaper at least once since February fifteenth, and probably in most papers across the United States. There was only one major difference. I’m sure Dario Nannuzzi would have seen it as a trademark touch — Edgar Freemantle the American Primitive fighting gamely past the cliché, struggling to reinvent Candy and Tina, that match made in hell — but Nannuzzi was never going to see this one, either.

I dropped my brushes back into their mayo jars. I was paint up to my elbow (and all down the left side of my face), but cleaning up was the last thing on my mind.

I was too hungry.

There was hamburger, but it wasn’t thawed. Ditto the pork roast Jack had picked up at Morton’s the previous week. And the rest of my current bologna stash had been supper. There was, however, an unopened box of Special K with Fruit & Yogurt. I started to pour some into a cereal bowl, but in my current state of ravenousness, a cereal bowl looked roughly the size of a thimble. I shoved it aside so hard it bounced off the breadbox, got one of the mixing bowls from the cupboard over the stove instead, and dumped the whole box of cereal into it. I floated it with half a quart of milk, added seven or eight heaping tablespoons of sugar, then dug in, pausing only once to add more milk. I ate all of it, then sloshed off to bed, stopping at the TV to silence the current urban cowboy. I collapsed crosswise on the counterpane, and found myself eye-to-eye with Reba as the shells beneath Big Pink murmured.

What did you do? Reba asked. What did you do this time, you nasty man?

I tried to say Nothing, but I was asleep before the word could come out. And besides — I knew better.

xii

The phone woke me. I managed to push the right button on the second try and said something that vaguely resembled hello.

“Muchacho, wake up and come to breakfast!” Wireman cried. “Steak and eggs! It’s a celebration!” He paused. “At least I’m celebrating. Miss Eastlake’s fogged out again.”

“What are we cele—” It hit me then, the only thing it possibly could be, and I snapped upright, tumbling Reba onto the floor. “Did your vision come back?”

“It’s not that good, I’m afraid, but it’s still good. This is something all of Sarasota can celebrate. Candy Brown, amigo. The guards who do the morning count found him dead in his cell.”

For a moment that itch flashed down my right arm, and it was red.

“What are they saying?” I heard myself asking. “Suicide?”

“Don’t know, but either way — suicide or natural causes — he saved the state of Florida a lot of money and the parents the grief of a trial. Come on over and blow a noisemaker with me, what do you say?”

“Just let me get dressed,” I said. “And wash.” I looked at my left arm. It was splattered with many colors. “I was up late.”

“Painting?”

“No, banging Pamela Anderson.”

“Your fantasy life is sadly deprived, Edgar. I banged the Venus de Milo last night, and she had arms. Don’t be too long. How do you like your huevos?”

“Oh. Scrambled. I’ll be half an hour.”

“That’s fine. I must say you don’t sound very thrilled with my news bulletin.”

“I’m still trying to wake up. On the whole, I’d have to say I’m very glad he’s dead.”

“Take a number and get in line,” he said, and hung up.

xiii

Because the remote was broken, I had to tune the TV manually, an antique skill but one I found I still possessed. On 6, All Tina, All the Time had been replaced by a new show: All Candy, All the Time. I turned the volume up to an earsplitting level and listened while I scrubbed the paint off.

George “Candy” Brown appeared to have died in his sleep. A guard who was interviewed said, “The guy was the loudest snorer we ever had — we used to joke that the inmates would have killed him just for that, if he’d been in gen-pop.” A doctor said that sounded like sleep apnea and opined that Brown might have died from a resulting complication. He said such deaths in adults were uncommon but far from unheard-of.

Sleep apnea sounded like a good call to me, but I thought I had been the complication. With most of the paint washed off, I climbed the stairs to Little Pink for a look at my version of The Picture in the long light of morning. I didn’t think it would be as good as I’d believed when I staggered downstairs to eat an entire box of cereal — it couldn’t be, considering how fast I’d worked.

Only it was. There was Tina, dressed in jeans and a clean pink tee-shirt, with her pack on her back. There was Candy Brown, also dressed in jeans, with his hand upon her wrist. Her eyes were turned up to his and her mouth was slightly open, as if to ask a question — What do you want, mister? being the most likely. His eyes were looking down at her, and they were full of dark intent, but the rest of his face showed nothing at all, because the rest of his face wasn’t there. I hadn’t painted his mouth and nose.

Below the eyes, my version of Candy Brown was a perfect blank.