Octopus Alibi by Tom Corcoran Read Free Book Online

four.
    I listened to a jet goose its engines at the airport, a half mile distant.
    We fly on with our lives. Except for Steve Gomez and Naomi Douglas.
    “Hey, bubba.” Cootie Ortega waved me to the Florida room. He held the door to allow me inside, into the shade. “How you be, amigo?”
    “Be tired of dead people.”
    Ortega agreed. “Always, I’m that way, bubba. I hate these dead-people jobs, but this one, you know … I just couldn’t. Lemme ask, you shoot that Olympus brand, right? You wanta buy some used camera stuff?”
    The man saw the handwriting on the wall. He knew that his ace had been played, that his city job was in jeopardy.
    I played dumb. “You trading up to digital, Cootie?”
    “I’m going to that medium format, Rutledge. I like those como se llamas , those Hasselblad deals. I want to shoot art photos out by Marvin and the Snipe Keys.”
    “Birds and fish, Cootie? Cormorants?”
    “No way, bubba. I can’t do nature crap.” He walked to the door. His footsteps echoed off the floor tiles. He waved southward as if the Snipe Keys had mysteriously appeared on the Salt Flats. “Gonna take some tourist girls out there for beauty work. Little tan titties, butt-floss bathing suits. I’m gonna enter me some art shows, win me a bunch of prize money. Once I lay in my reputation, I sell sunset pictures to big corporations to hang in their meeting rooms, you know what I’m saying? Bucks.”
    Grief takes odd forms. “That’s a concept, Cootie.”
    He said, “So … how about it?”
    “I’ve got everything I need. I’m not feeling all that rich.”
    “I’ll do you right,” he said.
    “See if you have an Olympus eighty-five lens, Cootie. I can always use a backup. Or maybe a forty lens. You could sell me an OM-4 camera body, if the price was right.”
    “I’ll have to look,” he said.
    “You do that. Bring the gear by the house, but call first, okay?”
    Yvonne Gomez came onto the patio, pain-faced, deflated. I didn’t know the woman, but I nodded hello. She stared at me as if I were a wood post. She was having a bad day, but she also looked like a woman who could make any occasion unpleasant. I turned to leave the sunroom and noticed two glass-front cases on the side wall. One held a dozen kelly-green ribbons. The one that read FIRST PLACE—CARAMBOLA was from last year’s Florida Keys Tropical Fruit Fiesta, and FIRST PLACE—LONGAN was from the year before that. I didn’t read the others, but I was sure that Gomez had competed well, for years, in multiple categories.
    The other glass case was designed to hold four shotguns. Two sets of pegs were empty.
    I found Detective Hayes alone on the painted driveway. No city officials, no media people in sight. He handed me the keys to Teresa’s motor scooter. “Marnie had to leave,” he said. “Ms. Barga needed to get to her office for a few press releases. She rode with the city commissioners. She said you’re invited to dinner on somebody else’s nickel. An old friend or something.”
    “That’s what I hear.”
    “She asked if you’d call her personal cell number.”
    I said, “Who found the body?”
    “Next-door neighbor. The man heard a boom, thought a gas can on his boat had exploded. He came out to the seawall and saw the truth. He was still heaving in the canal when I got here.”
    “Two guns in the glass case, back there in the sunroom.”
    “I saw,” he said.
    “Gun number three was out by the canal.”
    “I know your next question,” said Hayes. “Go on home.”
    “You need me to drop off your film?” I said.
    Hayes handed me two rolls of Kodacolor. “We’ll split the chore. You drop ’em off, I’ll have the prints picked up tomorrow.”
    “Did Gomez have a part-time caretaker for this place?”
    Hayes looked disgusted. “How the hell should I know crappy details like that? You want me to go in there and ask his grieving wife about plants and trees? I’d like to be home right now, drinking a beer like