Welcome to Paradise (26 page)

"
Salud
."

"
Salud
."

*

Katy liked the car in powder blue, so powder
blue it was. Looked smart with the gray velour upholstery that, Al
knew from his swatchbooks, went for twenty-eight, thirty bucks a
yard. It was noon when they drove it off the lot in Miami, and they
headed straight for the causeway to the Beach, still determined to
have a day at least of real vacation.

They parked on Ocean Drive. Stylish cafes on
one side of the road, the endless Atlantic on the other. Nothing to
do but eat and stroll and gawk at people.

Katy unfolded smoothly, took a gulp of warm
salt air. "Finally," she said, "I feel like a regular tourist."

Al Tuschman leashed his dog and locked the
car and looked back across his bandaged shoulder. No one seemed to
be tailing him, no one fighting for his nickname or contesting the
space he took up in the world. "Seems a little tame."

"Tame's okay," said Katy.

He thought about that, and about the life
that he'd be going back to. The store, the diners, his garden
apartment condo. "Yeah," he said. "I guess it is." He craned his
neck at avenue and beach. "Eat or walk?"

"Eat."

They picked a nearby place for its mix of
shade and sun, then settled into varnished wicker chairs that faced
the sidewalk, ordered drinks and looked absently, distractedly at
menus. New lovers. There was everything to say and it was
frightening to have a conversation. Chitchat could sound too easily
like making plans; plans came too close to being promises. So they
silently held hands and people-watched. Models went by with
portfolios. Gym-boys sported cut-off shirts that showed their
waffled abs.

After a while, Al got reckless. He'd been out
of danger half a day and some element of risk was missing from his
life. So he said to Katy, "What'll you do when you get back? About
your apartment, stuff like that?"

She shrugged, pushed her big sunglasses a
little higher on her nose. "Move out, I guess. Find another place,
a job."

Al nodded. The nod was neutral,
matter-of-fact, but behind it Al was communing with his newfound
courage. The brave man didn't posture, didn't bargain. The brave
man seized the moment. Blandly, looking half away, he said, "Ever
spend much time in Jersey?"

Katy understood that this was not a promise,
that no promise was being asked for in return. Still, for new
lovers the entire world was wet cement; the lightest stepping left
its print. She looked at Tusch but was saved from answering by the
waiter's arrival with their lunch.

"Who's got the shore platter?" he asked.

He put it down in front of Al. Half a lobster
with a single claw outstretched. Curls of calamari piled up on
lettuce. Six clams laid out in a gleaming arc.

Al Tuschman looked at his new lover and just
shook his head. "I can't believe I ordered that," he said.

####

ABOUT THE AUTHOR— Laurence Shames has set
eight critically acclaimed novels in Key West, his former hometown.
Now based in California, he is also a prolific screenwriter and
essayist. His extensive magazine work includes a stint as the
Ethics columnist for
Esquire.
In his outings as a
collaborator and ghostwriter, he has penned four
New York
Times
bestsellers, under four different names. This might be a
record. To learn more, please visit
http://www.LaurenceShames.com
.

ALSO BY LAURENCE SHAMES—

FICTION—

Florida Straits

Scavenger Reef

Sunburn

Tropical Depression

Virgin Heat

Mangrove Squeeze

The Naked Detective

NON-FICTION

The Big Time

The Hunger for More

Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

*

IF YOU LOVED WELCOME TO PARADISE BE SURE TO CATCH
LAURENCE SHAMES' NOVEL:

I never meant
to be a private
eye.

The whole thing, in fact, was my
accountant's idea. A tax dodge. Half a joke. A few years ago I made
some money. Made it the modern American way: by sheer dumb luck,
doing work I hated, on a silly product that only made life more
trivial and more annoying. I took the dough—not a lot of dough, but
enough to live on for the rest of my life if I wasn't an asshole
about it—and moved full-time to Key West.

I'd had a funky little house there for
years. Wood frame, shady porch, tiny pool that took up most of a
backyard choked with thatch and bougainvillea. Vacation house.
Daydreaming about that place, the time I'd eventually spend there,
got me through a lot of crappy afternoons in my stupid office up in
Jersey. Now I wanted to really make it home.

So I told my accountant to free up some
cash. "I'm renovating. Building an addition."

"You're putting in an office," he informed
me.

"Office? Benny, I'm retired."

"Bullshit you're retired. What are you,
forty-four?"

"Forty-five."

"Forty-five you don't retire. Forty-five you
have a crisis and change careers."

"There's no crisis, Benny. I'm putting in
wine storage, a music room, and a hot tub."

He raised his hands to fend off the
information. "You never told me that," he said. "It's an office and
it'll save you thousands. Tens of thousands. Plus your car becomes
deductible."

I made the mistake of keeping silent for a
moment. Call me cheap. I shouldn't have even thought about it, but
the idea of saving tens of thousands made me pause.

"Become a Realtor," Benny suggested.
"Everyone down there becomes a Realtor, right?"

I'd dealt with Realtors in my life. "I'd
rather shoot myself," I said.

"Shoot yourself," he muttered, then started
free-associating. "Tough guy. Humphrey Bogart. Hey, call yourself a
private eye."

"Don't be ridiculous."

He quickly fell in love with his idea. "Ya
know," he said, "there's a lot of advantages. Private corporation.
One employee: you. You get a gun—"

"Benny, cut it out."

"—get a license—"

"How you get a license?"

"Florida?" he said. "Probably swear you
haven't murdered anybody in the last sixty, ninety days."

"Benny, I don't wanna be a private eye."

He paused, blinked, and looked somewhat
surprised. "Schmuck! Did I say you have to be a private eye? I said
we're calling you a private eye. You'll get some business cards,
put a listing in the phone book—"

"Commit fraud—"

"What fraud? You're committing failure.
Look, the government allows three years' worth of losses. By then
we've depreciated the work on the house, the car lease has
expired—"

Well, the whole thing was preposterous—and I
guess I kind of like preposterous. Having an amusing thing to say
at parties, occasionally in bars. Something incongruous and
intriguing. So on my tax returns, at least, I became a private eye.
Pete Amsterdam, sole proprietor, doing business as Southernmost
Detection, Inc.

That was two and a half years ago. I have a
license somewhere in a drawer, and a gun I've never fired rusting
in a wall safe. Until very recently, thank God, I hadn't had a
single client. Three, four times a year someone calls me up,
usually on some sordid and depressing matrimonial thing. I lie and
say I'm too busy; for some reason the potential client apologizes
and quickly gets off the phone, like I'll charge him for my
precious time. My only worry has been that the IRS might come
snooping around to see if I was legit. This has been a sporadic but
uncomfortable concern, since, for me, feeling legit has never come
that easy anyway.

But in the meantime the house improvements
came out beautiful, suited me to a T. I'm divorced. I live alone. I
guess I'm a little eccentric. Mainly it's that I don't pretend to
care about the things that most people pretend to care about. The
news. What's on television. The outside world. I have a small,
tight core of things that still can hold my interest; I arrange my
life as simply and neatly as I can around those things, and the
rest just sort of passes me right by. I like wine. I like music. I
like tennis. After that the list grows pretty short.

Must sound meager to people who live in
places where everyone is busy and engaged and avidly discusses
what's in the theaters or the paper. But Key West isn't like that.
Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or
shame. And you learn things from the place where you live. One of
the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment
can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.

So I've been more or less content down here.
Tan, reasonably fit, generally unbothered. I do what I want and,
better still, I don't do what I don't want. Which includes being a
private eye. In fact, two and a half years into this fraud of a
vocation, I'd practically forgotten I was listed in the phone
book.

Or I had until a few weeks ago, when the
client I'd been dimly dreading came marching into my unlocked
house, stormed past the wine room and through the music room, out
the back door and around the little pool, to catch me naked in the
hot tub and to turn my whole life upside down.

My hot tub
is under a poinciana
tree—except for the occasional falling pod, a perfect tree to have
one's hot tub under. Its branches are bare in the winter, when you
want the sun. In late spring it sprouts an astonishing flat-topped
canopy of bright red flowers, and in the summer it is mercifully
covered with tiny leaves that cast an exquisite dappled shade. Now
it was April and the milky buds were just starting to swell and
ripen. I looked up at them and thought about my backhand. I'd
played tennis that morning and had missed a couple of cross-court
passing shots. Probably hadn't dropped my shoulder low enough. I
closed my eyes and visualized the perfect motion.

The jets were on, pummeling my lower back.
The pump made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a roar. The
dreaded client was standing right next to me by the time I heard
her say my name.

"Mr. Amsterdam?
Mr. Amsterdam?

I opened my eyes. Tiny chlorinated droplets
got in them and made me blink. Through the blinking I saw her. A
blonde, of course; it's always a blonde, right? Tall. Green-eyed,
with a little too much makeup for the daytime. Coral-colored
lipstick that was a shade too orange for my taste. The top of a
frilly white bra beneath a loosely buttoned lime-green blouse.

Apologetically, the blonde pointed toward
the front door of my house. "I rang the bell," she yelled. "I
knocked. The door just opened. I really need to talk to
someone."

By reflex, I began to say what I always said
to the rare misguided souls who tried to hire me. But it was a
little hard, while sitting naked in the hot tub in the middle of
what, for most people, was a working day, to claim I was too busy.
So I said nothing.

"Please," the blonde implored. "A few
minutes of your time."

I looked at her. She had a face that held
attention. Not delicate but candid and determined, unflinching even
in her obvious distress. I felt bad that the noise of the jets was
making her yell. On the other hand, the bubbles were the closest
thing I had to clothing. I hesitated then figured what the hell and
switched the pump off. It was a very Key West way to hold a
meeting.

"You're a private detective?" said the
blonde. Her voice hadn't quite adjusted to the quiet, and it
sounded very loud.

I tried to talk but nothing happened. My
balls were half-floating like eggs in a poacher, and it's difficult
to lie when naked. I wanted to tell her no, I wasn't a detective,
the whole thing was a joke. Then I had an awful thought. Maybe she
was from the IRS. Sent to entrap me. They do things like that,
let's face it. Feeling ludicrous, I said, "I take on cases now and
then."

"But you're new," she said. "Am I
right?"

Absurdly, this made me feel defensive. What
did I look like, an amateur?

She must have seen the hurt pride in my
face. "That's good," she assured me. "This is a tiny town. I need
someone who isn't known."

I didn't ask why. I just sat there in the
steamy water. There was a silence, and I remember thinking: Now's
when she reaches into her purse for a crumbling yellow newspaper
clipping. I may not know diddle about being a detective, but I have
a certain rudimentary grasp of the detective story. Doesn't
everybody? We all grow up with it. It's like the thirty-two-bar
jazz tune. We get it without analysis because it's heritage.

And sure enough she reached into her bag.
But the clipping she came up with wasn't yellowed, it was mildewed.
That's what happens to newsprint in Key West. It sprouts small
black fuzzy dots that ripen from the inside out like certain kinds
of cheese. Eventually the mold digests the paper and eats the ink
and your memories are reduced to wet black dust. She dangled the
clipping in front of me. "Are you familiar with this story, Mr.
Amsterdam?"