“Madam, please,” Neville protested.
“Wot’s wrong wit dot ugly boy of yours? Am I de first grown woman he ever seen naked as God made us?”
Neville lied and said he was late to meet a boat mechanic in Rocky Town. He dug into a pocket and came up with twenty-one Bahamian dollars, which he counted out and placed on the table next to the rum. The Dragon Queen sighed, tucking the bills into her damp bony cleavage.
She said, “I will need some udder poysonal tings belonging to dis mon. Dot shoyt is all boined up.”
Neville told her he’d come back with something better. That evening he would snoop in the trash cans outside the big oceanfront house that Christopher was renting. That’s where he’d found the piece of shirt.
“Now, put dot sweet pink boy on my knee,” she said, jabbing a dirty fingernail toward Driggs. “Lemme have a squeeze.”
“No, madam, he bites.”
“Wot!” She craned forward like a buzzard, studying the face of the trembling animal. “I tink someone pudda bod coyse on dis youngstah long time ago. But, see here, I kin make ’im good as new. Juss leave ’im wit me.”
The monkey hissed and vaulted out of her reach. Neville followed him out the door.
Dinner was superb. Yancy cleaned his plate for the first time in weeks. Afterward he took Rosa out on his skiff. She asked why he hadn’t remarried after Celia left him. He told her he’d come close twice. Rosa’s own marriage had lasted three years and fizzled with nobody to blame, or so she said.
The truth was more depressing, laid bare by Google Earth. It happened on a rare slow day at the Miami-Dade morgue, when she had only one autopsy scheduled—an elderly female tourist who had straightforwardly drowned at Key Biscayne, a tragedy witnessed by fourteen blood relatives, none of whom could swim a lick. Why a family devoid of water skills chose to vacation at a seaside resort was beyond Rosa’s scope of inquiry. The postmortem was completed by lunchtime and she had the afternoon to kill.
That’s when a blood tech named Gaylord showed her the Google Earth app, which he downloaded to Rosa’s office desktop. Soon she was enjoying aerial views of the Hoover Dam, the Malecón in old Havana, and even—more impressively—her parents’ home in Union City. From thousands of feet in the sky she could still make out the old sycamores lining each side of the driveway, the rectangular outline of her mother’s flower garden and a blurred image of her backyard swing set, which her father sentimentally refused to dismantle.
Next Gaylord loaded Google Maps with a street view, which sent Rosa eagerly cruising the roadways of her youth. There was the Ferraro house—Bobby Jr. had asked her to the junior prom; the shutters were now periwinkle blue, not white like before. The two-story where Angie Fernandez and her sisters had lived looked deserted, a sign planted in the dead lawn saying the place was up for sale by some bank. Also gone were the Sotos, who’d come from Cuba with Rosa’s parents; the new owners had erected a tall wooden fence and nailed up a Beware of Dog sign embellished with the silhouette of a snarling pit bull.
It was only natural for Rosa to check out her present Miami neighborhood and the dwelling she shared with Daniel, her then spouse, who worked as a teak carpenter on yachts. The driver of the Google camera truck had chosen a sunny morning to map the streets of Morningside, and Rosa thought their small home looked tropical and welcoming—the red barrel-tile roof, the green ivy nibbling at the bright stucco walls; in the front yard, ponytail palms, crimson bougainvilleas and a birdbath carved from limestone.
The only thing out of place that day, when the Google crew with their roof-mounted cameras rolled by, was a car Rosa didn’t recognize in the driveway. The car was parked next to Daniel’s Ram pickup, and it appeared to be a late-model Camry or an Accord; who could tell the difference? Dark blue was the color, though, definitely. The car had a Florida license plate that was partially fuzzed in the video—Gaylord surmised that Google did that on purpose because of privacy concerns—although upon enlargement Rosa was able to identify the prefix, which was LRW.
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.”