His desktop computer told him that the Anselmo case was now online in the can’t-crack site Mobile used to coordinate police work now. There were some additions from the autopsy and a background report on Anselmo, but nothing that led anywhere.
He sighed. Time to do some shoe-leather work.
The Busted Flush was back at its dock. McKenna had changed into a beat-up work shirt and oil-stained jeans. Sporting a baseball cap, he found the crew hosing off a net rig inside the big aluminum boathouse nearby. “Pitscomb around?” he asked them, rounding the vowels to fit the local accent.
A thirty-something man walked over to McKenna. One cheek had a long, ugly scar now gone to dirty pink. His hair was blond and ratty, straight and cut mercifully short. But the body was taut and muscular and ready; the scrollwork tattoos of jailhouse vintage showed he had needed for much of his life. He wore a snap-button blue work shirt with a stuck-on nameplate that said Buddy Johnson. Completing the outfit was a hand-tooled belt with carry hooks hanging and half-topped boots that needed a polish pretty bad.
“Who wants to know?”
The stern, gravel voice closed a switch in McKenna’s head. He had seen this guy a decade before when he helped make an arrest. Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they yanked the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.
“Lookin’ for work,” McKenna said. This guy couldn’t be heading up the operation, so he needed to go higher.
“We got none.” The eyes crinkled as if Buddy was trying to dredge up a memory.
McKenna shifted his own tone from soft to medium. “I need to see your boss.”
Still puzzling over the memory, Johnson waved toward the boathouse. McKenna walked away, feeling Johnson’s eyes on his back.
Pitscomb was at the back of the building, eating hog cracklings from a greasy bag, brushing the crumbs into the lagoon. Carrion birds eyed him as they drifted by on the soft slurring wind, keeping just above the gnarled tops of the dead cypress, just in case they saw some business below that needed doing.
Pitscomb was another matter. Lean, angular, intelligent blue eyes. McKenna judged that he might as well come clean. He showed his badge and said with a drawl, “Need to talk about Ethan Anselmo.”
Pitscomb said, “Already heard. He didn’t come to work that night.”
“Your crew, they’ll verify that?”
He grinned. “They’d better.”
“Why you have an ex-con working your boat?”
“I don’t judge people, I just hire ’em. Buddy’s worked out fine.”
“What do you do for the Centauris?”
“That’s a Federal matter, I was told to say.”
McKenna leaned against a pier stay. “Why do they use you, then? Why not take the Centauri out on their own boat?”
Pitscomb brushed his hands together, sending the last of the cracklings into the water. “You’d have to ask them. Way I see it, the Feds want to give the Centauris a feel for our culture. And spread the money around good an’ local, too.”
“What’s the Centauri do out there?”
“Just looks, swims. A kind of night off, I guess.”
“They live right next to the water.”
“Swimming out so far must be a lot of work, even for an amphibian.” By now Pitscomb had dropped the slow-South accent and was eyeing McKenna.
“How far out?”
“A few hours.”
“Just to swim?”
“The Feds don’t want me to spread gossip.”
“This is a murder investigation.”
“Just gossip, far as I’m concerned.”
“I can take this to the Feds.”
Again the sunny smile, as sincere as a postage stamp. “You do that. They’re not backwoods coon-asses, those guys.”
Meaning, pretty clearly, that McKenna was. He turned and walked out through the machine oil smells of the boathouse. Buddy Johnson was waiting in the moist heat. He glowered but didn’t say anything.
As he walked past McKenna said, using hard vowels, “Don’t worry, now. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in nearly a week.”
Buddy still didn’t say anything, just smiled slyly. When McKenna got to his car he saw the reason.
A tire was flat, seeming to ooze into the blacktop. McKenna glanced back at Buddy, who waved and went back inside. McKenna thought about following him but it was getting warm and he was sticking to his shirt. Buddy would wait until he knew more, he figured.
He got his gloves from the trunk, then lifted out the jack, lug wrench, and spare. He squatted down and started spinning the nuts off, clattering them into the hubcap. By the time he fitted the spare on the axle and tightened the wheel nuts with the jack, then lowered it, he had worked up a sweat and smelled himself sour and fragrant.
The work had let him put his mind on cruise and as he drove away he felt some connections link up.
The Pizottis. One of them was a real professor, the kind he needed. Was that family fish fry tonight? He could just about make it.
Since Linda died he had seen little of the Pizotti family. Their shared grief seemed to drive them apart. The Pizottis always kept somewhat distant anyway, an old country instinct.
He drove over the causeway to the eastern shore of the bay and then down through Fairhope to the long reaches south of the Grand Hotel. He had grown up not far away, spending summers on the Fish River at Grammaw McKenzie’s farm. To even reach the fish fry, on an isolated beach, he decided to take a skiff out across Weeks Bay.
The Pizottis had invited him weeks ago, going through the motions of pretending he was family. They weren’t the reason, of course. He let himself forget about all that as he poled along amid the odors of reeds and sour mud, standing in the skiff. In among the cattails lurked alligators, one with three babies a foot and a half long. They scattered away from the skiff, nosing into the muddy fragrant water, the mother snuffing as she sank behind the young ones. He knew the big legendary seventeen-footers always lay back in the reeds, biding their time. As he coasted forward on a few oar strokes, he saw plenty of lesser lengths lounging in the late sun like metallic sculptures. A big one ignored the red-tailed hawk on a log nearby, knowing it was too slow to ever snare the bird. By a cypress tree, deep in a thick tangle of matted saw grass, a gray possum was picking at something and sniffing like it couldn’t decide whether to dine or not. The phosphorus-loving cattails had moved in further up the bay, stealing away the skiff’s glide so he came to a stop. He didn’t like the cattails and felt insulted by their presence. Cattails robbed sunlight from the paddies and fish below, making life harder for the water-feeding birds.
He cut toward Mobile Bay where the fish fry should be and looked in among the reeds. There were lounging gators like logs sleeping in the sun. One rolled over in the luxury of the warm mud and gave off a moaning grunt, an umph-umph-umph with mouth closed. Then it opened in a yawn and achieved a throaty, bellowing roar. He had seen alligators like that before in Weeks Bay where the Fish River eased in, just below the old arched bridge. Gators seemed to like bridges. They would lie in the moist heat and sleep, the top predators here, unafraid. He admired their easy assurance that nothing could touch them, their unthinking arrogance.