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had just been released from prison. He was hosting a triple-table of local barflies and players. His two or three years upstate had aged him. I couldn’t recall the problem that had brought him down. Probably bolita, the Cuban numbers racket Anything else would’ve been a stiffer sentence. At one point a local madam—retired, still young—had entered. She’d beelined for Big Dex. Gushes and hugs. Before she moved away from the table, she’d smooched all the others, too. Former clients.
    I recalled Dexter Jr. from the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. Those had been the years when the island hadmade its transition from a sleepy tourist outpost worried about hippies to a smugglers’ haven full of boozy spring break college kids and summer people in motor homes. Little Dex ran with a group of local kids, the sons of men in power among whom skin color mattered little. They were the last Conch boys to scoot around the harbor in open outboards, small sponging skiffs powered by fifteen-horse motors. It may have been the last generation to appreciate Keys traditions and lore and customs. Some of the boys grew into men like their fathers: car dealers, construction bosses, bankers, restaurant owners. Some had turned to drugs—pot and cocaine and Quaaludes. A few had slid to importation and serious criminal activity. Fewer had become cops.
    I’d heard a while back that Dexter Hayes, Jr., had begun college in Tallahassee, and I recalled having seen a bubble of intelligence in the kid’s face. I’d read it as hope for something bigger than his father’s tainted footsteps. Then I’d heard, after a couple of years, that he’d flunked out of law school. I’d lost track of him, hadn’t seen him, hadn’t thought of him except that night in 1995, in the Hukilau, when his father had been kissing a whore.
     
    I last saw Sam Wheeler on Christmas Day. The next morning he and Marnie had driven to Miami, no warnings, no farewells. They’d flown down to Jamaica. Sam had canceled three charter bookings with serious anglers, January first-week regulars since the eighties. Marnie had put her
Key West Citizen
job in peril by giving short notice and taking vacation without prior approval. But her newspaper colleagues knew she needed slack. She and Sam had desperately needed a break from Mamie’s brother and Heidi, the woman Sam called “Butt’s moody lollipop”—in reference to her shape.
    I found Sam remodeling the broad porch that bordered three sides of his one-and-a-half-story Conch cottage. Tools and tape measures laid out. Dust everywhere. The nervous, pre-holiday Sam Wheeler had returned to normal calm, hisindustry the by-product of a refreshed outlook.
    “You survived your time away,” I said.
    He didn’t look up from mitering an eight-foot one-by-two. ‘I’m a brand-new man.”
    Sam was out of uniform. Unshaved, a bandanna around his head, shirtless in drawstring cotton shorts and high-top sneaks. A light-tackle guide, he usually wore khaki trousers, long-sleeved denim shirts, deck shoes, a long-billed cap. His tan, in another locale, would be a trucker’s tan, though after Jamaica he was dark in places he protected while flats fishing. Enough blond remained to camouflage the gray so typical, these days, of a Vietnam vet Sam’s upper bulk had for years threatened to become paunch, but hadn’t succeeded. He wore the horn-rim eyeglasses he rarely showed in public.
    I said, “How’s Marnie?”
    “She called from the office, shell-shocked. Told me about it She wanted to stay and work. We’ve been dealing with a better mood since Jamaica, until an hour ago.”
    I didn’t know whether Marnie had told Sam about her relationship with the dead man. I did not want to be a news bearer.
    I said, “The yard smells like boiled snapper.”
    “You’ll get your chowder after you earn it” Wheeler gave his chore precise attention. He made a cut raised the hand saw, carefully set the wood aside. He chose an identical piece