Octopus Alibi Read Online Free PDF

“Hurry. Don’t wear shorts.”
    *   *   *
    I walked outside, wondering why Teresa had neglected to lock the house. Marnie Dunwoody sat sideways in the driver’s seat, her legs dangling to the Jeep’s small running board, her cell phone to her ear. I stood back to give her privacy, watched a half-dozen palm warblers maneuver crazily around the yard’s trees and shrubs. They looked drunk, almost colliding with each other and with tree limbs. I guessed they had copped a buzz off ripe berries in the trees. Warblers are more common in October, rarely stopping in the Keys on spring migration. I’d heard that this year’s constant easterlies had forced them to land.
    Something made me look back at Marnie. Her face was fixed, ashen, her gaze unfocused. A moment later she clicked off.
    She read the same look on my face. She said, “Gomez?”
    “Dexter just hired me.”
    “Two in one day. Get your stuff. I’ll give you a ride.”
    “You look like you just lost a relative.”
    Marnie nodded. “Maybe the same way you feel about Naomi. A year before I started with the Citizen , a friend of mine volunteered me to help with Steve’s first campaign, when he ran for city commissioner that one term before he ran for mayor. I went into it two-faced, like a cynical bitch, looking to get the goods on a wily politician.” She stopped to take a deep breath. “For the life of me, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the guy. He had good ideas, he treated people fairly. If he said he’d do something, he did it, or he tried. He was a dork, socially, around women. I guess he was one of ‘the guys.’ He liked to have a few drinks and hang out. But he never chased groupies. As a politician, he fascinated me.”
    “So, you kept up with him?”
    “I’ve kept a file on him since my first week at the paper. He was my silent specialty, my pet project. I saw him as a man with a future. I kept track of his career and his decisions. Every two years I studied his campaigns. All this time, I hoped it would form a pattern—where he was coming from, who might own him, what he might do in the future. I thought I knew how he ticked. If he’d gotten into state or national politics, he was my story. If he’d gotten into a scandal, he was my story.”
    I said, “How does suicide fit the picture?”
    She shook her head. “Too many important things going on. Most of them good for the island. It’s like the city’s lost its last fragment of a conscience.”
    In spite of Marnie’s admiration, I knew that, in recent years, Steve Gomez had been tagged the “absentee mayor.” He’d missed commission meetings because he’d gone to hunt deer with friends in Texas or near the Everglades, or to shoot birds in Wyoming and Nebraska. He’d gone to out-of-town expos to promote industry for a tourist-trap island that needed new industry like Duval Street needed more T-shirt stores. He’d been zipped by the media for distant conferences on the public’s nickel. Mayor Gomez had ignored his critics. He’d let them have their say, refused to explain himself, and refused comment. He’d let his voting record speak for itself. He’d won each election with an overwhelming majority.
    For some reason, victory hadn’t been enough.
    “Maybe he had a health problem,” I said. “Depression, or indicators of Alzheimer’s. Maybe cancer that he’d kept secret.”
    Marnie looked at Fleming Street as if an answer might appear next to the stop sign. “Why do I have a feeling this town’s going to change because he died? I mean change big, and not for the better. I always thought the whole country got skewed after JFK was killed. Same idea, different scale.”
    “Teresa’s in for it,” I said. “This’ll be a PR nightmare.”
    “Hey, that’s why the police department calls her a media liaison. She’s a spokesperson, she’s got a business card, and she’s got to deal with the likes of me. It’s what she wants on her résumé, and it’s what