"I'm sorry. I can't talk. Not now. Not yet."
I sat down again and looked into her puffy eyes, seeing the same doomed beauty the photographers found so compelling. She shook her head, as if arguing with herself. I waited. She would tell me; if not today, tomorrow.
"You look terrible," Chrissy said after a moment, forcing a laugh. Then neither of us said a word. We sat that way a moment. The only sound in the room was the tick of an old schoolroom clock on the wall, its second hand jerking along. From somewhere on the other side of the window, a buzzer sounded and an electronic door banged shut.
"A man raped me once," she said. "In Paris."
Another sound then, too, the crack of the fortune cookie splintering in the palm of my hand.
"I suppose you'd call it date rape. I was coked out at a party filled with Mexican drug dealers, French playboys, American models. Some combination, huh? Today, I don't even remember his face. He owned some shitty line of ready-to-wear, had pomade in his hair. At the time, I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill all of you."
I reached out and took both her hands in mine. "All of who?"
"You, Jake. Men! I wanted to kill you all."
Guilty as Sin
I aimed my ancient but amiable chariot south on Useless 1, passing endless fast-food emporiums, gas stations, and strip shopping centers in Kendall and Perrine. The old engine was humming, all 400 cubic inches of the Olds 442 convertible, vintage 1968. Canary-yellow with a black canvas top, a four-speed stick, a four-barrel carburetor, and twin exhausts. Four-four-two, get it?
I picked up the turnpike extension and passed through mango groves and tree farms near Homestead, then got off and found the old highway again, entering Monroe County where bait and shell shops joined the burger joints as roadside attractions. I cruised through Key Largo, which now has all the charm of Altoona but ten times the traffic.
At a little past six P.M., I turned into the sandy driveway on the gulf side of Islamorada and parked in the shade of a coconut palm. The TV blared through the open windows, Granny Lassiter still believing that air conditioning caused arthritis. Doc Charlie Riggs sat in a rocker on the porch of the old cracker house with the slanted tin roof. He was snoozing, a book folded across his chest. Medico-Legal Investigation of Death. Sleep well, Charlie. You already know everything about the subject.
I opened the screen door and walked inside. Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson were yelling at each other in the Florida room.
"You want answers?" Nicholson shouted with the impatience of a Marine colonel not used to being cross-examined.
"I want the truth!" Cruise demanded, all decked out in his Navy JAG uniform.
"You can't handle the truth!" Nicholson fired back from the witness stand.
"Hello, Kip," I said to the towheaded twelve-year-old boy sprawled on the floor watching the tube.
" 'Lo, Uncle Jake," the kid mumbled, without looking away from the screen.
I wandered into the kitchen just as Jack Nicholson was launching into a diatribe about a world with walls and the men who guard them. Granny Lassiter hovered over the stove, slicing cabbage palm—called swamp cabbage hereabouts—into a frying pan filled with sizzling bacon. Supposedly, the native Calusas taught Ponce de León's Spaniards all about this delicacy. I'll have to ask Granny. She was probably there.
"Well, look what the cat drug in," she greeted me, as always.
"Hello, Granny," I said, and just to embarrass her, I gave her a peck on the cheek.
"Don't be making a fuss," she said, waving me off with a spatula.
Granny wore khaki shorts, climbing boots, and a T-shirt with the slogan I STILL MISS MY EX, BUT MY AIM IS IMPROVING. Her hair was jet-black, except for a white stripe down the middle, but the last guy who called her "Skunky" got brained with a tarpon gaff.
"You hungry, Jake?" she asked. She checked on a pot, boiling with hopping John, black-eyed peas, and rice. In the sink, a bucket held several pounds of fresh frog legs soaking in beer.
"Had a late lunch. Chinese. But I can always eat."
"Chinese," she sniffed. "All that mono-sodium polluta-mate will shrivel your testicles." She gestured toward the bucket of marinating frog legs. "Give me a hand here."
I grew up in this house, hanging on to Granny's apron strings, so I didn't need instructions or a second invitation. I just dipped a pair of legs into a bowl of milk and eggs, sloshed them through a dish of flour, then dropped them onto a hot griddle.
"Seen your pit-cher in the paper," she said, pointing toward the refrigerator. Indeed, the clipping was held there by a magnet shaped like a stone crab. Some wit had added a mustache and hat so that I looked like a villain in a silent movie, the heroine unconscious in my arms.
"I see Kip's been practicing his artistry again."
"Don't stifle the boy, Jake." She looked into the sizzling pan. "And not so much flour! Those hoppers lose their taste with all that breading."
I hadn't even known I had a nephew, or a half sister, until Kip was arrested for spray-painting graffiti on a movie theater that had changed the advertised showing of Casablanca to Revenge of the Nerds III. I got him probation and became his semilegal guardian, though Granny helped out considerably.
On cue, Kip's bare feet padded onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen. "All righty then!" he proclaimed with a goofy Jim Carrey grin.
"Kip, did anybody ever tell you that you watch too many movies?"
"Yep. And Uncle Jake, did anyone tell you that you look guilty?"
"What?"
"In the paper. Doesn't he, Granny?"
"Guilty as sin," she agreed.
"Neat, Granny," Kip said, laughing. "That was a movie. Rebecca De Mornay's a lawyer who defends Don Johnson on charges he killed his wife. 'Course she falls for him."
"Ain't that a conflict of interest?" Granny asked,
