Free Fatal Reservations by Lucy Burdette Page B

juggling his barbecue implements had been turned into an impromptu shrine. We moved a few steps closer to study the memorial.
    We love you, Bart! one note read, written in red crayon and tied around the neck of a blue rabbit.
    Another letter, nestled among some droopy green carnations, featured a stick-figure drawing of a man on a high wire holding several enormous forks, with a gold halo hovering over his head. Juggling in Heaven, the caption read.
    This I very much doubted.
    I spotted three men chatting underneath a palm tree twenty yards away; one of them I recognized as my homeless friend, Tony. I hadn’t seen him around in several weeks and I had begun to wonder whether he’d moved on from Key West. Maybe found a less expensive town where the cops didn’t know him well enough to hassle him. Sometimes he was happy to see me, other times not so much. But it seemed worth a try to see what he knew.
    “Good evening, everyone,” I said in a cheerful voice. I prodded Miss Gloria ahead of me toward Tony. “I’m not sure if you ever met my roommate, Miss Gloria.”
    She thrust her tiny hand out to him and he shifted his beer bottle from his right hand to his left. He grasped her fingers and then removed his battered cowboy hat and bowed.
    “It’s a pleasure to meet you, young lady,” he said. He gestured to the other two men, who had grizzled faces and looked to be in their early twenties. They were dressed in shabby pirate costumes. “Couple of my pals here,” he added. “There’s no need to learntheir names, because their act sucks, so I doubt they’ll be around much longer.”
    He cackled with laughter. The other men grunted and barely smiled.
    “Are you performing tonight?” asked Miss Gloria of the closer pirate.
    “That’s the plan,” he said. “Although the spot we were assigned stinks to high hell. The only traffic we’ll get is tourists looking for the damn restroom. I was just asking Tony here whether we might use Mr. Frontgate’s square since he sure ain’t gonna be performing.”
    Leave it to Tony to act like he was in charge of the performers’ grid, when I doubted he had anything to do with it. But on the other hand, with all the time he spent observing from the sidelines, he knew plenty about what happened on this island. And even if he had a low database of factual information on a topic, he never lacked confidence in his own opinions.
    I squeezed Miss Gloria’s arm just above the elbow, hoping she’d get the message to allow the man to talk. In my experience, pressing Tony for information didn’t work nearly as well as cutting the lead loose and letting him run.
    Tony set his beer on the curb and lit up a cigarette. “And as I was explaining to you before these lovely ladies stopped by, spaces are assigned according to how long you’ve been around. Mr. Frontgate, for example, had been here since the Dark Ages. You, on the other hand, washed in with the latest tide. And your act stinks like that, too.”
    The pirate puffed out his chest. “But at least we have something unusual to offer. At least we’ve tried to work on our performance.” He scrunched up his face in an expression of disgust and disbelief. “You want totell me that replacing knives with barbecue forks was considered a juggling innovation?”
    “It’s all about the schtick, man,” said Tony. “It’s all about how you sell your story. And Frontgate had a smooth patter.” He lifted his cowboy hat and swept his fingers through his oily curls. “And who you know—that matters in this backwater. Don’t you imagine that it doesn’t.”
    He sucked in a big drag of smoke, which made the skin around his lips pucker into a sea of wrinkles. Then he blew it out and said, “There was a new guy showed up here last year from California. I don’t remember where, exactly—Santa Barbara, maybe? He thought he was the cat’s pajamas.”
    He sucked on the cigarette again and I watched the ash burn red hot, almost singeing