"But things didn't work out that way. Your plan, which you keep insisting was so terrific, ended up getting Shadow killed. "
He hung his head.
"It never occurred to us Darling would kill her."
"Why not? He'd killed Sonya. You knew he was a sadist and a freak."
"That was an accident. It happened in the throes of passion. Killing Shadow was cold and vicious. We just didn't anticipate…"
He was wrong. From what Scotto had told me, Darling had gotten carried away with Shadow too. But I didn't interrupt; the story, mercifully, seemed finally to be coming to its end.
"Darling and Mrs. Z had formed an alliance. They'd shown us they'd rather kill than pay. Even so, Kimberly wanted to keep pressuring them for money. But once I heard what happened to Shadow, I wanted out."
He paused, wiped his nose on his sleeve again. This time I looked away.
He waited until I faced him. Then he showed me a weak smile and went on.
"We had a fight. Kimberly said we had to continue. But I was the one who had the photographs, and I said no. That was it. She disappeared. I have no idea where. And you, you're all right now, because we dropped our demands. It's all finished now. It's over."
"Not quite," I said.
"Kimberly's gone, you're sitting here holding the pictures. But guys are coming around to my place trying to throw lye in my eyes."
"I don't know anything about that, Barnett. We never anticipated-"
I focused on him with total scorn.
"Yeah. So you say. Maybe I ought to go to work on your Hasselblads and finish off your slides."
"Go ahead, if it'll make you feel better. But it's Kimberly you want to punish. Sure, I was her partner. But I was a patsy too. The whole scheme was hers. She's the one who brought you into it."
After I untied Rakoubian, he massaged his repulsive hairy wrists, complaining that they'd gone numb. Then, when I got up to leave, he begged to show me some of his pictures, nudes he'd taken of Kim. they were exactly what I'd have expected, cheap secondrate pin-up stuff.
I tried to be polite, but when he complimented me on the nudes I'd taken of her, I told him to cut the collegial shit. I told him, as far as I was concerned, we had nothing in common as photographers.
He was offended by that, and even tried to protest when I started toward the door with his box of blackmail pictures under my arm. But he acquiesced when I pointed out that since I'd been set up to take the blame for them, the pictures now rightfully belonged to me.
It was two in the morning when I finally stepped out on the street, feeling wasted, desolate, utterly destroyed. I walked all the way back to my place, and as I did I thought the whole time about the awful way that I'd been used.
Kim's betrayal of me, as described by Rakoubian, was so monumental, it seemed beyond belief. to have set me up that way, to have left me there to take the rap, to have latched on to me just because I was a damn photographers scheme like that, so calculated and heartless, was something I could barely comprehend.
I played around with it awhile, trying to minimize her role. Supposing, I asked myself, I discount Rakoubian's assignment of the blame? Even then, if I believed the whole scheme had been his and she'd been only his confederate-even then, because of its awful logic, she'd still helped to set me up and throw me to the wolves.
Well, I didn't care about Rakoubian anymore. Or Mrs. Z. Or Arnold Darling-I didn't care whether he'd gotten carried away with Sonya, or what kind of a perverted sexual monster he might be. All I could think about was Kim, and the rage I felt against her. Better that she'd been just a call girl; at least there was a particle of degraded honor in that. I could find no merit in her having been a member of a kinky performance group. was this woman whom I had loved and held and kissed-was she really so cold, false, cruel and corrupt? Had I really been so unimportant, so insignificant in her life? Had she really held me in such contempt?
I had to know.
And I knew where to go to find the answer.
2
If your pictures aren't good enough, it's because you aren't close enough. You must be part of the event.
The following morning at La Guardia airport, I stopped to call Sal Scotto from a phone booth.
"Where you been?" he asked.
"Trying to get hold of you.
"I got your messages," I said, "but I've been out of town. "
"We need to talk."
"That's why I'm calling. I'm at the airport, about to leave again."
He hesitated.
"Don't think you should leave just now, Geoffrey. Dave and me, we need clarification on a couple things."
"Like what?"
"That super over in Devereux's building-we've been looking into him.
There're a few little items that don't quite add up."
"Forget about him."
"What do you mean 'forget about him'? You're the one steered us to him in the first place."
"I was wrong. He didn't do it."
"How do you know that?" He paused again.
"If you do know something, Geoffrey, you'd better tell me right now. Way I've gone out on a limb for you, wouldn't want to think you're jerking me around."
"You didn't go out on a limb for me, Sal. My life was threatened. I asked you for protection and you refused."
"Protection! That's in the movies! I did everything I could.
"Doesn't matter. Forget it. When and if I have something to tell, I'll tell you, okay? Meantime, my regards to your charming partner. 'Bye, Sal."
"Hey! Don't hang up… He was still sputtering when I did.
It's a three-hour flight from New York to Miami. Any month between December and March is a good time to go, and October and May can be okay too if you're not a nervous sweaty type and don't like to walk too fast.
But if you make the trip when I did, on the last day of August, and arrive a little after noon on what the natives tell you is the hottest day of the year, and if you haven't lived all that perfect a life anyway, and it's occurred to you you may deserve a little stint in purgatory for your sins, you will, upon arrival, have the opportunity to know just how hot the furnaces of hell are going to be.
Actually at first it didn't seem so bad. I stepped off my air-conditioned plane into an enormous air-conditioned airport full of congenial happy people, most of whom were speaking Spanish. From there I took an air-conditioned minibus to the parking lot of the car rental company of my choice, and there transferred into my rented airconditioned car.
It was the few moments in between when I was in the open air that I'll remember all my life. I'm talking about a dank humid ovenhot heat that hits you like a fist. I've photographed in the tropics, been baked and broiled and smelled the smells, but I never experienced such a scalding hotness as I did that August day. It was composed of torrid wind, coming off the Everglades, tainted with decay, then made noxious by aircraft and automobile fumes.
And I was about to drive a hundred sixty miles deeper into the fire. In retrospect, I'm glad I did. It would have been too simple to take the plane. It wasn't that the drive to Key West was all that difficult-I was one of very few maniacs braving the road that sweltering August afternoon. But those three and a half hours on the highway gave me a chance to rest and think, and also a sense of the distance I had to go.
If Key West is, as they say, "the end of the line," then it may be necessary to literally travel a little of that line in order to fully appreciate the meaning of being at its end.
The turnpike led me through the southern suburbs of Miami, then on to the fringes of Everglades National Park. The divided highway ended at Florida City, and from there on it was one long commercial strip of Long John Silver's, Captain Bob's, Bojangles, boat rental agencies and live-bait shops, Once on the Keys I started to move: Key Largo, Islamorada, Long Key, Conch key, Grassy Key, Boot Key, and then the interminable Marathon, after which the honky-tonk gave way to the empty road, an asphalt ribbon crossing the islands, rolling across the bridges. There was hardly another car in sight.