POLICE CAR EXPLODES
Richmond firefighters work on a city homicide detective’s car engulfed in flames on a quiet residential street. The Ford LTD was unoccupied when it exploded last night. There were no injuries. Arson is suspected.
At least there was no reference to whose house Marino’s car had been parked in front of or why, thank God. All the same, my mother would see the photograph and she would try to call. “I wish you’d move back to Miami, Kay. Richmond sounds so awful. And the new medical examiner’s office is so lovely down here, Kay–looks like something out of the movies,” she would say. Oddly, it never seemed to occur to my mother that there were more homicides, shoot-outs, drug busts, race riots, rapes, and robberies in my Spanish-speaking hometown in any given year than in Virginia and the entire British Commonwealth combined.
I would call my mother later. Forgive me, Lord, but I don’t have it in me to talk to her now.
Gathering my belongings, I crushed out a cigarette and immersed myself in the tide of tropical clothes, duty-free shopping bags and foreign tongues flowing toward the baggage area, my handbag pressed protectively against my side.
I didn’t begin to relax until several hours later as I sped along the Seven Mile Bridge in my rental car. As I drove deeper south, the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic on the other, I tried to remember the last time I had been to Key West. Of all the times Tony and I had visited my family in Miami, this was one outing we had never considered. I was fairly certain the last time I had made this drive, I had made it with Mark.
His passion for the beaches and the water and the sun was a devotion returned in kind. If it is possible for nature to favor one creature over another, nature favored Mark. I could scarcely remember the year, much less where we had gone, on the occasion he had spent a week with my family. What I remembered with clarity were his baggy white swim trunks and the firm warmth of his hand in mine during our strolls across cool, wet sand. I remembered the startling whiteness of his teeth against his coppery skin, the health and unsuppressed joy in his eyes as he looked for shark’s teeth and shells while I smiled in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. Most of all, what I could not forget was loving a young man named Mark James more than I had thought it was possible to love anything on this earth.
What had changed him? It was hard for me to fathom that he had crossed over into enemy camps, as Ethridge believed and I had no choice but to accept. Mark was always spoiled. He carried about him a sense of entitlement that comes from being the beautiful son of beautiful people. The fruits of the world were his to enjoy, but he had never been dishonest. He had never been cruel. I couldn’t even say that he had ever been condescending to those less fortunate than himself, or manipulative with those vulnerable to his charms. His only real sin was that he had not loved me enough. From the distant perch of my midlife perspective, I could forgive him for that. What I could not forgive him for was his dishonesty. I could not forgive him for deteriorating into a lesser man than the one I had once respected and adored. I could not forgive him for no longer being Mark.
Passing the U.S. Naval Hospital on U.S. 1, I followed the gentle shoreline curve of North Roosevelt Boulevard.
Soon enough I was threading my way through a maze of Key West streets in search of Duval. Sunlight painted the narrow streets white as shadows of tropical foliage stirred by the breeze danced across the pavement. Beneath a blue sky that went on forever, huge palms and mahogany trees cradled houses and shops in spreading arms of vivid green as bougainvillea and hibiscus wooed sidewalks and porches with bright gifts of purple and red. Slowly, I passed people in sandals and shorts, and an endless parade of mopeds. There were very few children and a disproportionate number of men.