Fatal Reservations by Lucy Burdette Page A

all the way to my neck.
    “Already,” she said, her eyes fluttering shut, “I feel some unrest. Perhaps there is a troubled engagement? Come sit with me and let’s puzzle this out together.”
    “Lordy, lordy,” muttered Miss Gloria under her breath. “We’d better get out of here before she eats us alive.”
    I extracted my fingers from the palm reader’s and assured her I’d return another time. Miss Gloria doused my hands with a little spray bottle of hand sanitizer and I rubbed them together. Then we headed for the alley in between the Cuban restaurant and the Waterfront Playhouse, which would funnel us out of the square, pausing for a minute to admire the antics of Snorkel the Pig.
    “Not for nothing,” said Miss Gloria, “but if you have an adorable animal in your act, you really need have no talent at all.” She laughed and then turned to look at me straight on. “Is it possible that Lorenzo really did kill a man? I admire your loyalty and all, and I love him, too, but if everyone says the same thing . . .”
    “All that tells us is the place is thick with mean gossip.” I pinched my lips together until they quivered.
    She patted my arm. “You’re right. Do you mind waiting a minute while I use the restroom?”
    “Of course not,” I said. I wouldn’t be caught dead in the public bathroom, but at eighty, if she had to go, she had to go. I moved to the side of the alley and leaned against the wall to wait. Across from me, a dark-skinned man piped out new age music from what looked like a homemade reed instrument into a microphone. How many CDs could he possibly sell in a night? Enough, I supposed, since he’d been here everytime I’d walked by. To my left, two more homeless men were watching a couple of stray cats squabble with loose chickens over kibbles.
    “Did the damn cops hassle you again this morning?” asked one man of the other.
    “They were all over me like fleas on dog-park dogs,” the second man grumbled. “Get used to it—they won’t back off until that GD murder is solved.”
    “I thought it was that fortune-teller. That’s what Louis told me.”
    “Louis told you? You might as well read the local rag as listen to that fool. He makes crap up just to hear himself talk. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit to hear he was the one stabbed poor Frontgate.”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him joust and feint with an imaginary sword. Fork, I supposed, was more accurate.
    “Why would he do that?”
    “Just for the pure mean fun of it,” said the second.
    Miss Gloria emerged from the bathroom, wiping her hands dry on her slacks. “Ready to roll.”
    By the time we’d tromped the blocks back to my scooter on Southard Street, we were exhausted (Miss Gloria) and starving (me). We stopped at the Kojin Noodle Bar takeout window and ordered a Saigon salad and a big bowl of sesame noodles with shrimp.
    With the food strapped to my basket, we zipped back to the houseboat. Miss Gloria fed the cats while I dished out our dinner. Then we sat out on the deck, watching the twilight fade into night, watching the pinks go to gray. When we’d inhaled every bite of the crispy vegetables with tofu and the spicy noodles, Miss Gloria retreated to the living room to catch her nightly dose of Jeopardy! and I stayed outside, thinking.
    First, I reviewed what Tony had told the new pirate performers about the guy who’d been beaten up for stealing from other people’s acts. I’d seen this undercurrent many times before on this island: Competition was fierce among restaurants, among shops, among bars, among artists, among writers. Each vendor scrambled to get attention from the tourists and thereby make a living selling whatever they had to offer. The murdered man, Bart, had been in Key West a lifetime in street-performer terms. What if he had insisted on his grandfathered right to the best spot on Mallory Square? What if he’d jumped what other performers might have considered a firm line? Would