Dark Destiny

by Edward S. Aarons

  Edward S. Aarons (Edward Ronns)

  Dark Destiny

  ***

  ALL TOGETHER THEY SPELLED MURDER…

  M is for the MONEY that was hidden somewhere on Isla Honda…

  U is for the URGE that Sam felt when he looked at Mona…

  R is for the REVENGE Sam was determined to have…

  D is for DEATH which was working overtime on Isla Honda…

  E is for ELLEN who couldn't win against a sexpot like Mona…

  R is for the RUIN that Mona brought to every man who wanted her…

  That was the setup when Sam tried to learn the truth about his brother's death. How could it be suicide when all the facts spelled…

  MURDER?

  ***

  Scanning by unknown hero.

  OCR, formatting & proofing by P.

  ***

  1

  Sam Cortez watched the little car bounce along the winding dirt road that approached the beach. It would be Ellen Terhune, he thought, and he didn't want to see Ellen. He rolled over, feeling the heat of the sand burn his side and thighs. Under the robe he had brought to the beach were the marine glasses. He thought for a moment of jumping up and taking the binoculars back into the bungalow and then he decided there wasn't enough time for that. If Ellen saw the binoculars it didn't matter anyway. She knew what he was doing here.

  The wind had shifted during the morning to the northeast, coming across the Florida Straits from the Everglades. There would be a lot of mosquitoes on Isla Honda tonight. Meanwhile, the sun was hot and he had been in the water of the cove twice, swimming lazily, letting the other people in the house across the cove see him because he didn't want them to think he was being surreptitious in the watch he had imposed upon them. For three hours since lunch he had alternately dozed and swam and lay on the hot sand studying the big house over there through the binoculars. He had seen nothing unusual, but he did not feel impatient. Nothing had changed. In the three years since he had been away, the house where he had been born looked exactly the same. The people who lived there were different, that was all. And that was everything.

  His own bungalow, all that was left to him on the whole key, stood well back from the beach, sheltered by a clump of palmettos that looked rusted and yellow. It was a small, shingled house that originally had been designed for guests and had been separately deeded to him by his mother. It was the only thing left that he hadn't sold to pay Charley's debts. Everything else on Isla Honda, including his own boatyard, had gone to pay back the money lost in the Caribe Traders Bank debacle. He didn't like to think about it. He hadn't been here when it happened, when all the dirty accusations went back and forth, but in a way he was grateful that his brother Charley wasn't alive to hear the talk and the rumors. He had been in Korea when it all happened and now he was back.

  And nobody wanted him back.

  Maybe Ellen Terhune had been glad to see him and Benny Suarez, who had been his brother's business secretary and now owned a struggling shrimp boat business in Key West. But nobody else. Least of all, the people who now lived in the big house across the cove.

  Sam rolled over on his belly and propped the glasses up, his weight on his elbows, feeling the hot sand under his body. Ellen's car was nearer now, coming toward the cottage. He swept the white beach across the water with his glasses and saw Harry Lundy, the Ashton boatman, leave the schooner tied up at the dock over there and walk heavy-footed up toward the Spanish Romanesque house behind its white plastered wall. He looked for Mona Somerset, but he didn't see her and he was acutely conscious of not having seen her since yesterday. Maybe she had driven back across the keys to Miami Beach. But her husband, Bill, was still around. And so was John Ashton, Bill's uncle.

  Ellen stopped her car where the sand road merged with the beach. She got out, her blonde hair gleaming in the hot sun and waved and called, "Hi, Sam!" He only nodded in return. She wore a white linen dress with a wide red leather belt around her waist and even from the water's edge where Sam sprawled, he could see the wink of Mexican silver from the pin he had given her long ago, before he was recalled to service with the Marines. Ellen waved again and went into the bungalow and Sam sat up and blew sand off the binoculars and tucked them into the pocket of his faded beach robe.

  He dug his watch out of the robe and saw it was after three o'clock. The wind kicked up sand and stung his face and he looked across the cove again at the opposite beach, where the northeast breeze kicked up a small surf in the cobalt water. Lundy was out of sight again. He watched the palm trees bend in the wind and the hibiscus hedges over there seemed to shiver under the steady pressure. Charley had been very proud of those hedges, he remembered, and then he tried to thrust the angry pain out of his mind. Whatever they said about his brother, it wasn't true. He wished for the thousandth time that he had been here when it happened. But he had already been embarked for Tokyo and eventually the mud and dirt and death of the Korean front. He had learned about Charley's death first by mail from Benny Suarez and then from Ellen. He hadn't believed it. He had asked for leave to return home, but it wasn't granted. And afterward, when he had authorized the sale of his boatyard to pay Charley's debts, he had no wish to come home at all. Not after the things Ellen wrote him.

  Ellen came out of the cottage carrying two tall drinks. She kicked off her shoes and walked bare-footed across the coarse sand, tall and graceful, the wide linen skirt flattened against the full curve of her sturdy hips by the hot wind.

  "Rum and ginger ale," she said, "and a dash of key lime. Do you good, Sam."

  He grinned and spread the robe for her to sit down. "Unexpected service," he said. "You know how to make yourself at home."

  "Any objections?"

  "None at all," he said.

  The drink was cold and tangy. The hot wind made the palmettos rattle like dry sticks. Sand blew between them and Ellen settled herself on his worn cotton robe and took the binoculars from the pocket where he had put them. Her face was wry.

  "Still watching Uncle Ashton and the Somersets?"

  "Now and then," he admitted.

  "Or is it Mona that you watch?"

  He leaned back on his elbows, annoyed. "She's quite something to watch. You have to give her that."

  "You took her into Key West the other night. Without her husband. People are still talking about it."

  "Let them talk."

  "Do you like her, Sam?"

  "A lot," he said.

  Ellen's mouth was thin. "You'll never forgive me, will you?"

  "For jilting me and getting engaged to Charley while I was gone? I think you were smart."

  She shook her head. "No, I wasn't," she said quietly.

  "I'm broke and an outcast. My brother was a thief. I no longer have a share in the Caribe Traders Bank. It doesn't exist any more. And I no longer own the Isla Honda Boatyard. I've got three hundred and twenty bucks to my name, I'm an unemployed marine architect, and my name in the keys is mud."

  "I'll still marry you," she said.

  "Your simple faith is touching. In your letter, you said it wouldn't work."

  "I was a fool."

  "I don't think so. I think you were right."

  "Sam, please."

  "You started it," he said. "Pay attention to your drink."

  It was a quarter of a mile across the cove to the big house. He saw George, the houseboy, come out of the garage and walk along the tall hibiscus hedge and then turn in toward the house following Lundy's steps. From across the water there presently came the whir and beat of a gasoline power mower.

  Ellen touched the bridge of her nose with her forefinger. Her fingernails were long, but she wore only neutral polish on them and her hands looked smooth and deeply tanned, although a trifle large. She sai
d: "Hank Frye came around the shop to see me this noon."

  "The deputy?"

  "The big badge himself."

  "What did Frye want?"

  "He was after information about you. He thinks we're still sweethearts and that you tell me everything. I couldn't convince him otherwise."

  Sam displayed interest. "What did he want to know?"

  "Just why you came back, Sam."

  "This is my home," he said. "I've got a right to come home."

  "He thinks there's more to it and so do I."

  "Like what?"

  "Like the way you slugged that real estate agent when the poor man simply repeated what everybody else has been saying about Charley for the past three years."

  "Be careful," Sam said tightly.

  Ellen looked surprised. "Would you hit me, Sam?"

  "No. I just don't want to hear any more talk about my brother. I'm sick of it. It's all I've listened to ever since I came back. Every time I go into town for a drink I hear it. They look at me and snicker or else they look sympathetic. Poor Sam Cortez. His brother was an embezzler and he got caught at it and couldn't take it. So he killed himself. Poor Sam had to sell everything to make it good. Great tragedy. It's a pity." Sam's voice was tighter and higher. "I'm sick of it, Ellen. And I no longer believe it."

  "What is it that you don't believe, Sam?"

  "Charley wasn't a crook."

  "But there was all that evidence, Sam. They brought the papers over from Havana, from the Cuban branch. Charley's signature was on the papers. Everybody read about it. And the way he was found, with the gun in his hand-"

  "Go away," Sam said. "Leave me alone."

  Ellen said quietly: "Sam, didn't you realize how it would be when you came back? You're a Conch, a native, and all the other Conches on the keys know you. They aren't deliberately cruel, Sam. They mean well."

  "The hell they do," Sam said. "They laugh at me every time I tell them it's a lie."

  "Sam, how do you know it's a lie?"

  He thought, I can't explain it. I knew my brother and he was not a thief. Charley was fanatically honest. He loved everything there was in life and he never killed himself. He couldn't have. I remember how it used to be, I remember the man he was and it wasn't the way the police explain it. But you can't tell about it to someone else. You can't describe the companionship of a man who was your older brother, who raised you as a father, who taught you all the secrets of the Gulf Stream and took you hunting and fishing in the Everglades and even took you to Havana when you were seventeen to show you all there was to see and learn. People think of bankers as stuffy people, but Charley wasn't like that. Charley was healthy and happy and he lived with sunlight in his eyes. Sam felt an ache in his throat and pushed his memories aside. Sentiment would never prove anything. You can't explain it to anybody, he told himself, not even to Ellen Terhune who was going to marry Charley before it happened.

  Sam finished the drink Ellen had made and stood up, brushing sand from the sun-bleached khaki shorts he had used for swimming. He felt impatient, resenting Ellen's presence. He wanted to be alone. He wished he had come back here earlier, the moment he had been discharged from the Naval Hospital in San Francisco, instead of wasting all that time on the West Coast.

  He looked blankly at Ellen Terhune. Everybody was telling him to take it easy, to go slow. But it was not in his temperament to go slow. He had inherited his father's Spanish volatility and his mother's New England stubbornness. It was a combination that made him butt his head against a stone wall, but he would never give up and he would never accept the official reports calmly.

  Ellen spoke in her quiet voice. "What does John Ashton think about your living here in the bungalow?"

  "He doesn't like it," Sam shrugged. "He's told me all about the night Charley died. He knows why I'm here."

  "I wish I knew," Ellen said. She stood up, the wind swirling her white linen skirt, outlining her capable hips. Her waist was slender, almost fragile, yet she was built strongly, firmly fleshed, her face competent and quietly beautiful. She had made quite a success of her art shop and gallery in Key West since Sam had last seen her. She was quick and competent in business and she looked at him with a patient, proprietary air. "Have you talked to Ashton lately? I mean, since the first time?"

  "Of course. He wants me to move into the main house-as his guest I told him I'd only go back when the house belongs to me again."

  "But he knows you're watching him from here."

  Sam said: "I want him to know it. I want him to do something about it. Then maybe he'll make a mistake." He turned to her with sudden fierceness. "Somebody is going to make a mistake soon. Somebody is going to do something to start the whole thing up again and this time I'll be on hand to find out what really happened to Charley."

  "You'll only hurt yourself, Sam."

  "I don't care," he told her.

  "But I do."

  He started to walk away from her back to the bungalow. Ellen caught up with him then walked alongside. He thought about Ashton and Bill Somerset. Ashton had been his brother's occasional business associate, a frequent guest in the house in years gone by. According to the official record that Sam had demanded from the police, both John Ashton and his nephew, Bill Somerset, had been guests that night Charley killed himself. Ashton was cleared. The man knew nothing except that there had been a quarrel between Charley and two Cubans who had arrived on the island that night. Bill Somerset, who was fifteen years younger than his uncle, had been in the house, too. Bill wasn't married to Mona then. Bill had been sleeping in Sam's empty bedroom when he had been awakened by the shot. He didn't know anything either. Sam had questioned Bill more freely than anyone else, regarding Bill as a friend from their college days at Miami.

  Sam paused at the cottage door and folded the beach robe on a canvas chair and took the binoculars from the pocket Ellen stepped into her sandals again and jingled her car keys.

  "I'll wait for you and take you into town," she said.

  "I'm not going into town."

  "I'll cook dinner in my apartment," she said. "You look as if you could stand a square meal."

  "Thanks. But I want to stay here."

  "Would you like me to stay with you then?"

  "I'd rather not."

  "Listen, Sam. We're friends, aren't we? You don't hate me, do you?"

  "No, of course not."

  "But you don't love me, either."

  "I haven't thought much about it lately."

  Ellen smiled and sighed. "I wish you would. I wish you would let me help you. You're like the fuse to a stick of dynamite-you want everything here to blow up. But the fuse gets destroyed in the explosion, too. I don't want that to happen. I want to help you."

  "I don't need help, thanks."

  He waited on the little porch until Ellen got into her car and drove off and then he went inside, stripped off the shorts and took a cold fresh-water shower to sluice away the sand and salt on his skin. The bungalow consisted of two main rooms, a living room and a bedroom, with a tiny kitchen and bath in the back. It had been left unattended for a long time and the weeds and brush had grown up thickly around the back. Sam padded across the cool floor tiles into the kitchen, put a pot of coffee on the bottled-gas stove and then dressed slowly in gray gabardine slacks and a dark blue singlet. He was a tall man, twenty-nine, with thick blonde hair inherited from his mother and the dark, vital eyes of his father's Latin ancestry. His face was lean and hard and for the most part immobile with a vestige of watchfulness in it from his war years. His shoulders were heavily muscled, the result of long hours of swimming, and there was a long scar along the left side of his ribs where a Chinese bayonet had slashed for his heart.

  When the coffee was ready, thick and pungent in the Cuban style, Sam poured himself a cup and laced it with rum and went outside again to stand on the porch with the coffee and a cigarette. The sun was low on the western rim of the sea, touching the incredibly blue water with sullen fire. The wind stil
l continued from the northeast. He looked across the cove at the low red roof of Isla Honda and the trim schooner tied up at the little wooden dock.

  Home, he thought. He had never meant to return to the islands. He had been in San Francisco, working as a marine designer for a boatyard there, when Ellen had written again. Benny Suarez had written, too, and both letters contained the same news. A body had been found on Little Cat Key, four miles, east of Isla Honda. Not a body, really, just a little heap of bones, picked clean by the fish and crabs and bleached by the sun. A tourist had found the remains. It had been identified by the dentures after a week's delay, as that of one Hermonio Gabrilan, a Cuban, wanted by the police for questioning in the case of Charley's death.

  He hadn't known anyone named Hermonio Gabrilan. But Ellen's letter contained the details. He had read it over so many times that he could close his eyes and see her firm handwriting on the blue-tinted stationery, remembering every word.

  Darling, John Ashton testified at the inquiry that on the night Charley killed himself he had been visited by two employees from Cuba, a Hermonio Gabrilan and a Rafael Jaquin. They took two hundred thousand dollars in cash from the Havana office of the Traders Bank, but nobody knows why that sum was there or what it was intended for, except that it was withdrawn on a letter of authorization signed by Charles. Benny Suarez, who was in Havana then, knew nothing about it. Anyway, the police have been trying to find those two men for the past three years, ever since it all happened, and this is the first break they've had. The body is definitely identified as Gabrilan, but there's no trace of the money.

  A strange thing has happened, darling. A week after the identification, John Ashton returned to the islands. He's here now with his nephew, Bill. I remember Bill is a special friend of yours. He's married now. They rented Isla Honda-after you authorized selling the estate to make up the shortage, the house has been up for seasonal use-and old Mr. Crompton, the realtor, says Ashton insisted on having it. It's a rather strange coincidence, don't you think? It's odd that Ashton, who was at Isla Honda three years ago, should return like this as soon as Gabrilan's body turned up.