Keyes said: “Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to go back to Miami and scare the shit out of everybody.”
“Exactly,” Wiley said.
“With what, Skip? A halter top and a dime-store medallion?”
Wiley shook his head. “Those are just freebies for the cops, old pal. No, the most significant thing you’ll carry back to civilization tomorrow is testimony.”
Keyes was getting tired. His arms ached, his wrists hurt, and invisible insects were feasting in his crevices.
“Okay, Skip, I’ll go back and tell the cops that a gang of crazed radicals dragged me out of a canoe, tied me to a tree, and gave me tea that tasted like goat piss. Is that what you want?”
“Not quite,” Wiley said. The smile was thin, the eyes cheerless. “We want you to go back and tell everyone that you witnessed a murder.”
Keyes went cold.
Wiley stood up and smoothed his pseudo-African smock. “Tommy! Jesus! Viceroy!” he called. “Go get Mrs. Kimmelman.”
The morning actually had started off well for Ida Kimmelman. The arrival of the Social Security checks was always a good omen, and then her sister called from Queens to say that Joel, Ida’s youngest nephew, had finally gotten into law school. It wasn’t a famous law school—someplace in Ohio, with two names—but Ida went out and bought Joel a card anyway. Basically he was a good young man, a little disrespectful perhaps, but deserving of encouragement.
The truth was that Joel, as most of Ida’s blood relations, couldn’t stand her. They had all been fond of Lou Kimmelman, a sweet little fellow with a teasing sense of humor, but for years the clan had puzzled over how Lou could put up with Ida’s tuba voice and her incredible charmlessness. Around the apartments the same was true: Lou was popular and pitied, while Ida was barely tolerated.
When Lou finally passed on, the social invitations dried up and the fourth-floor bridge club recruited a new couple, and Ida Kimmelman was left all alone with her dog Skeeter in apartment 4-K at Otter Creek Village. Somehow the U.S. government had overlooked Lou Kimmelman’s death and continued to mail a $297.75 Social Security check every month, so Ida was making out pretty well. She’d bought herself a spiffy red Ford Escort and joined a spa, and every third Tuesday she would drive Skeeter to Canine Canaan and get his little doggy toenails painted blue. Of course Ida’s Otter Creek neighbors disapproved of her extravagance and thought it tacky that she boasted of her double-dipping from Social Security. Ida knew they were jealous.
She was truly ambivalent about Lou’s death. On some days she felt lonely, and guessed it must be Lou she was missing. Who else had shared her life for twenty-nine years? Lou had been an accountant for a big orthopedic shoe company in Brooklyn. He had been a hard worker who had saved money in spite of Ida; Ida, who’d never wanted children of her own, who was always scheming for a new car or a tummy tuck or a new dinette. When it came time to retire, the Kimmelmans had argued about where they would go. Everyone on the block was moving to Florida, but Ida disliked everyone on the block and she didn’t want to go. Instead she wanted to move to Southern California and make new friends. She wanted a condo on the beach in La Jolla.
But Lou Kimmelman had been a shrewd accountant. One painful evening, two weeks before the shoe company gave him the traditional gold Seiko sendoff, Lou had sat Ida down with the Chemical Bank passbooks and the Keogh funds and demonstrated, quite conclusively, that they couldn’t afford to move to California unless they wanted to eat dried cat food the rest of their lives. Reluctantly, Ida had accepted the inevitability of Florida. After all, it was unthinkable not to go somewhere after your husband retired.
So they’d bought a small two-bedroom unit at Otter Creek, three doors down from the Seligsons, and Lou Kimmelman soon became captain of the fourth-floor shuffleboard team and sergeant-at-arms of the Otter Creek Homeowners’ Association.
One thing Ida Kimmelman didn’t miss about Lou, now that he was gone, was how he’d sit there in his madras slacks and blinding white shoes, watching TV in their new living room (which was hardly big enough for a family of squirrels), and ask, “Now aren’t you glad we moved down here after all?”