He waited while the commissioners nodded their agreement and the murmurs of assent faded behind him. “Mayor Cameron and I spoke earlier today, and he has graciously allowed me to make this announcement.”
Cameron smiled boyishly and made a kind of aw shucks head bob.
“As you know, the St. Johns Group is constructing a riverwalk as part of Matanzas Bay. In tribute to the passion and persistence the vice mayor demonstrated in his support of this project, I am proud to announce it will officially be named the William A. Marrano Riverwalk.”
The entire audience and the commissioners jumped to their feet and applauded Laurance’s announcement. Even the reporters from the St. Augustine and Jacksonville media followed suit. After the celebration died down, the mayor thanked Laurance, practically bowing before him, and plugged Saturday’s groundbreaking ceremony.
“Everyone is invited to the Malaga Street site for the groundbreaking this Saturday morning at ten. The St. Augustine High Jazz Band will perform and we’ll have free refreshments. Of course, you’ll have to listen to a few speeches first, but we’ll keep it short since Mr. Laurance is itching to get started.”
Outside, the wind rattled the windowpanes and I heard the muffled rumbling of thunder in the distance. Mayor Cameron glanced up at the high ceiling and then back to his constituents with a grin. “Surely, that’s Bill Marrano giving his enthusiastic blessing to this project.”
After they adjourned, I waited while the crowd filed out of the room. Sitting there, I thought about what I’d just witnessed. It had been nothing more than a public proclamation of support for Laurance, along with a fond farewell for Marrano. Thinking the evening had been a waste of my time, I prepared to exit the room only to find Tallabois blocking my way.
“Hoped I’d run into you again. Just didn’t think it would be so soon,” Tallabois said, his scarred face inches from mine.
I held my ground. “Figured you’d still be rooting through the azaleas hunting for your keys.”
“Boy, you better rethink your attitude or you’re in for some serious aggravation.” He jabbed a finger into my chest to make his point.
“Don’t do that,” I told him.
“You’re out of your league here, and I’m only giving you this one last warning.” Tallabois’ nose almost touched my own, and he poked his stubby finger into my chest again.
I thrust my hand up before he had a chance to remove his finger. With my thumb braced against his metacarpal joint, I pulled his finger back. This forced Tallabois to twist away trying to alleviate the pressure on his finger.
“I told you not to do that again.”
“You’re breaking it,” he managed to gasp through contorted lips.
“Did you know there are twenty-seven bones in your hand, and it takes four to six weeks for a fractured finger to heal?” I increased the pressure and Tallabois went down on one knee.
“Boys, this isn’t the time or place to be playing your macho games.” Kurtis Laurance tapped me on the shoulder. “Let him go, Mitchell, I want to talk with you for a minute.”
I released Tallabois’ finger and stepped back. Clutching his hand, Laurance’s security chief got to his feet. Nostrils wide, face flushed, he attempted to rush me, but Laurance put a hand on his arm and stopped him. Several members of Laurance’s entourage stood to the side, their eyes wide with shock.
“Lem, let’s say this game was rained out and call it a night. Go down and bring my car around for me.”
Tallabois ignored Laurance, edging toward me, his jaw muscles working furiously.
“I mean it, Lem. Go get the car.” Laurance barked out the order with an angry edge to his voice. He turned to the other two men standing nearby. “Why don’t you go down with Lem? I want to have a word with Mr. Mitchell here.”
Tallabois brushed my shoulder as he passed. The others followed him out of the room.
“I’m sorry about that,” Laurance said after Tallabois had left. “Lem sometimes lets his testosterone overcome his common sense, I’m afraid.”
“You might want to keep a tighter leash on your dog.”
“You may be right. Walk with me to the elevator, won’t you, please, Quint.”
“That was quite a love-in for your company,” I said, referring to the meeting.
“It must be apparent to you by now that you were the victim of bad information.”
“Apparently.”
“I tried to tell you Bill Marrano would never renege on a deal, particularly this one. Matanzas Bay was as much his concept for the future of St. Augustine as it was mine. Whoever told you he’d changed his mind was feeding you a load of crap. Probably self-serving crap.”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve lived in St. Augustine off and on for many years, Mr. Mitchell. Like all small towns, we have our share of good people who only wish the best for their community and act accordingly. Human nature being what it is, unfortunately, there are others who seem to delight in sowing the seeds of discontent.”
We paused in front of the elevator. He pushed the button for the first floor and turned toward me, his dark eyes twinkling under the overhead fluorescents. “And sometimes it’s difficult to tell one from the other.”
“I wonder why they wanted me to believe Marrano had changed his mind?”
The elevator door slid open, but Laurance wasn’t moving. He answered my question with one of his own. “Have you been to the Matanzas Bay construction site yet?”
“I’ve driven by, but I haven’t given it a white glove inspection if that’s what you mean.”
“Do me a favor and walk around it before our ground-breaking ceremony Saturday. I want you to pay special attention to the property outside the construction fence.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by this strange request. Laurance must have sensed my puzzlement because he said, “Humor me. After you have a chance to visit the site, we’ll talk again. I’m interested in your impressions, plus I’ve been thinking about what you said concerning Tallabois.” He shook his head as though he’d changed his mind about sharing something with me. “We’ll talk later,” he said, and we entered the elevator.
***
I emerged from city hall to a persistent rain. The black skies told me the storm front had settled in for the night. I sprinted through the downpour to my car parked around the corner, watching the drops splash on the brick-lined sidewalks. Above me, overhead arc lamps cast a saffron hue over the city.
Once inside my car, I used a handkerchief to wipe my dripping face, then pulled the phone from my coat pocket. I had turned it off before entering the city commission meeting, and when I powered it up, the phone beeped twice indicating I had a message. I retrieved the message and listened to Henderson’s strained voice.
“Quint, meet me at the lighthouse at seven tonight. Please, it’s important.”
There was none of Henderson’s gentleman-of-the-manor Southern charm in the message. Instead, I detected a sense of urgency. Possibly even fear. Then again, Henderson might be setting me up. If my paranoid theories were correct, and Henderson was somehow involved in Marrano’s and Sternwald’s murders, he might be afraid I was close to uncovering the truth about his role in all of this.
It was nearly eight, and I figured Henderson was long gone. Or perhaps he was waiting to ambush me. I weighed the odds on my Mitchell Risk-Taking Scale and decided to take the risk.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I made several wrong turns on the narrow roads as I approached the St. Augustine lighthouse, my eyes scanning the muddy sky for the telltale beacon flashing every thirty seconds. The drenching shower that greeted me when I left city hall had erupted into a full-blown thunderstorm with fiery spider webs of lightning fracturing the night sky. Florida leads the nation in deaths and injuries caused by lightning. Knowing this didn’t give me much solace as I parked my car under the trees next to the visitor’s center and watched the pounding rain turn the unpaved parking area into a swamp.
The museum an
d lighthouse normally closed at six, and I seemed to be alone in the parking lot. I flashed my high beams and peered through the fogged windshield hoping to see Henderson on the porch of the visitor’s center. No sign of life anywhere. Instead of mucking around in the storm, I circled the parking lot until my lights reflected off a gray Passat GLX half hidden behind a giant philodendron.
Someone parked the Volkswagen next to an exit path leading from the lighthouse to the parking lot. I surveyed the empty Passat before turning my attention to the rain-cloaked lighthouse, the top half draped in storm clouds and nearly invisible. Every thirty seconds the fixed flash illuminated the entire structure and I had a perfect view of the barber-striped tower.
I tapped the car horn twice not expecting a response and not getting any. If the Passat belonged to Henderson he may be inside the lighthouse where he couldn’t see or hear me. I slipped off the expensive sport coat I’d worn to the commission meeting and tossed it into the back seat. Unlocking the glove box, I pulled out the Maglite and noticed the Smith & Wesson I kept there for emergencies. It was a standard issue Model 10 service revolver with a four-inch barrel.
There had been many times during my career as a private investigator that I’d rather forget. Unpleasant cases, emotional clients, and uncomfortable surveillances. But except for a California case where a maniac off his meds attacked me, I’ve never felt personally threatened. I’m not anti-gun, but I rarely carry one.
Thinking back to what I learned about Henderson’s past, of Sternwald’s and Marrano’s murders, I figured it was better to be safe than dead. I pulled the revolver from the glove box and tucked it into my waistband.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open, ran to the Volkswagen, and shined the flashlight through the windows. Inside, I saw a stack of papers cluttering the back seat. It reminded me of the mess in his office. In case there was any doubt, Henderson’s black walking cane with the sterling silver lion’s head handle lay on top of the pile of papers.
Turning toward the open gate, I yelled, “Clayton, are you here?”
Along with the rain, the wind had picked up, sweeping in across Salt Run and carrying with it a sour odor of rotting foliage and swamp gas. My shirt and pants quickly soaked through, and water seeped into my shoes. A shiver coursed up my back and along my arms even though the temperature probably hovered in the mid-eighties.
With the drumbeat of thunder echoing in the distance, Henderson’s poem came to mind. I mumbled the last lines of the second stanza as water flowed down my face.
“… long sounds chilling my limbs,
freezing my breath.”
Pushing through the gate, I swept the Maglite in an arc ahead of me to be sure I didn’t trip over anything. Every thirty seconds the lighthouse flashed its nightmark, stabbing orange horizontal beams across the sky like the cross arms of a radiant crucifix. In the beam’s glow, I saw the red-topped lens room and the observation deck below it.
“Clayton, it’s Quint,” I bellowed as I approached the base of the tower. A small cottage-like structure served as the entrance to the lighthouse. Half of it was once the lightkeeper’s office and the other half used to store the lard and kerosene fueling the old lamps before electricity and automation took over.
A low wall of red brick surrounded the lighthouse grounds, and on the other side a thicket of live oaks and pines cast gloomy shadows each time the nightmark flashed. I hurried toward the entrance, rain whipping my eyes with each step. A cyanic shaft of light split the sky and disappeared into the trees, followed immediately by an explosive crack of thunder. My ears rang from the blast and my heart pounded in my chest from the near miss.
I paused at the door leading into the tower’s spiral staircase. Henderson told me he’d been given the key to the lighthouse. If it was locked he probably had come and gone. Perhaps he met someone else here and left with them, which would account for his car still sitting in the lot. He may have thought it important to meet me here, but I couldn’t imagine him still waiting for me in this weather, especially since I was an hour late.
The lighthouse door was unlocked. I unlatched it and shouldered it open, shining the light inside. “Hello,” I called out, pointing the Maglite up the stairs. “Is anyone here?”
Wind whipped through the trees. The clatter of rain slapping against the roof of the lightkeeper’s office made it difficult to hear, but I thought I heard a far-away sound like a muffled groan.
Stepping onto the staircase, I yelled out in frustration, “Clayton, where the hell are you?”
My words reverberated around the tower. Listening again for a reply and hearing only the storm’s fury, I guessed the noise I heard must have been the wind sweeping through the top of the tower. I briefly considered climbing to the top, but what was the point? Henderson wouldn’t be playing hide and seek games. Besides, I couldn’t see him climbing those stairs so soon after his knee operation.
I called his name once more. Still no reply. Frustrated and dripping wet, I decided to call it a night. If it was so damn important he could track me down tomorrow.
Opening the lighthouse door, I peered into the gloom, preparing to dash into the torrential downpour. I only made it to the bottom of the steps when a lightning bolt cracked loudly thirty feet away in the copse of trees behind the lighthouse. “Christ,” I sputtered as my heart jumped into high gear.
I edged along the side of the tower drawn by the lightning bolt. I stepped out into the rain, staring at the dark patch of trees behind the tower, wondering which of them has been struck. We had an old hickory tree in our backyard in Connecticut. I remember how my father had rigged a swing to its branches when my brother came along. He enjoyed that swing for nearly a year before the tree was blasted by lightning during a storm and died soon after.
A squawking noise above me caught my attention. Looking up just as the nightmark flung its ghostly ochre light across the murky sky, I saw a dark form hurtling toward me. Arms outstretched, legs flailing wildly, Clayton Ford Henderson plowed into the ground just a few feet from where I stood.
I gaped from the broken figure crumpled at my feet up to the vacant observation deck and back to Henderson’s body. Henderson’s arms were tucked beneath his body as if he tried to break his fall, and one leg pointed toward his head like a contortionist’s trick.
I edged closer, my Maglite sweeping over him. The left side of his face was imbedded in the soggy dirt. His guayabera shirt, the same one he wore when I last saw him, blossomed with an ever-growing pool of blood spreading out from his body and soaking into the ground below him.
As I bent over Henderson’s body, my imagination conjured the sound of mournful prayers and the gleam of candlelight dancing in the trees. His body seemed to twitch in the rain, and I half expected him to sit up and quote me another line of poetry. But I knew it was all illusion. Clayton Ford Henderson had written his last poem.
What were his final thoughts? He must have wrestled with inner demons too fierce to live with. Maybe the knowledge of how he’d treated his two children was too much for him to bear. I’d never know.
A wave of guilt swamped over me. If I hadn’t gone to the city commission meeting I would have received Henderson’s call. If only I’d been here earlier, I might have prevented this.
I’m not sure how long I knelt over his body, the rain pounding my back, before I came to my senses and realized I should call the police to report Henderson’s death. Thinking about the police finding the fastidious old poet in such a state made me want to clean the mud and blood from his face and comb his hair. Instead I walked toward my car to retrieve my cell phone.
Near my car, still absorbed in Henderson’s horrific fall, something caused me to turn around. My eyesight was nearly perfect in good conditions, but the gloomy night and drenching rain provided zero visibility. Squinting into the shadows, I thought I saw a figure dash behind the lighthouse and disappear into the tree line. Or did I? Was my imagination playing tricks on me again?
I
rubbed the rain from my eyes, remembering my earlier vision of candlelight and ghostly moans. “Hey,” I yelled after the apparition. No one answered, and I ran toward the lighthouse.
I hit a muddy patch of grass and one foot slid out from under me. I tottered on one leg momentarily trying to regain my balance before my legs split in different directions and I fell on my ass in a puddle. Getting to my feet, I rushed to the brick wall and stared into the darkness. Nothing. No sound except the rain. No one here except one sodden private eye and the ruined body of Clayton Ford Henderson.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The police black and white arrived ten minutes after my call followed quickly by the now familiar white SUV. Sergeant Buck Marrano always seemed available when the Bat Signal went up. He looked at me curiously as I told him about Henderson’s message, and then seeing the old man drop to his death. He listened to the phone message, and made a few notes.
“This is becoming a habit for you,” Marrano said.
“What is?”
“Finding dead people. I hope it’s a habit you can break because I’m getting tired of it.”
“You and me both. But I know one thing for sure.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t blame this on Poe. Not unless he knows the secret of walking through walls.”
“No problem there. Unless we find anything to the contrary, this looks like a clear case of suicide.”
The storm hadn’t lost any of its intensity, and we were standing under the back porch of the Lighthouse Museum while waiting for the Crime Scene Unit from the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office to arrive. One of the deputies had placed a blue tarp over Henderson’s body and the surrounding area, but the rain had surely washed away any meaningful trace evidence.
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