“That’s sad, that you lost so much just as you were succeeding in life.”
“That’s life,” I said, and lit up a couple of smokes. I gave one to Jessica and blew a smoke ring with mine.
“So that’s your history. What about now? What do you like to do when you’re not catching criminals or digging up skeletons?”
“Oh, I don’t know. After work I usually hit this little lounge across the street from my New York apartment. They have decent chow and a swingin’ jazz combo that plays on weekends. I hang out with the musicians a lot, they’re the beat type, way out there and a little screwy, so different from me it’s fun to talk with them. Plus they’re a good source of info on anything heavy going down in the city. They all smoke reefer but I don’t bug them about it…and in turn they turn me onto people pushing the big stuff.”
“More work.”
“Work is my life.”
“You don’t do anything for fun?”
“Like what, golfing? I live in a city. When I want to do something fun I take in a show, or a movie. Sometimes I dig the museums. Sometimes I go to the burlesque shows, but I don’t usually have any fun because I see all the crime associated with them, the dope, the graft, the prostitution.”
“Yeah,” she said somberly.
“I don’t mean you, kid. I know you’re not mixed up in all that. If you were you wouldn’t be here with me, I’m guessing.”
She didn’t answer right away. “No, I try to stay away from all that,” she finally said, and that little pause made that ‘click’ in my head go off again. Now I knew what that click was; I’d been ignoring it for hours, but all those little clicks were adding up and my brain wouldn’t push them away anymore. Jessica simply wasn’t being straight with me, just like I wasn’t straight with her. She told me she was a hostess, which she is, but she held back that she was a stripper who performed live shows depicting steamy sexual acts between women at a private club in Key West. That’s pretty big, as far as “holding back” goes. I knew plenty of dames that worked shows like that in the city, and there were very few who were straight. Most were damaged goods in one way or another. Some were junkies who did it for the money to get a fix. Some were just plain old-fashioned nymphos. Some were forced into it because they were weak-minded and fell in with the wrong kat. Some were hookers. Some were just plain, honest girls who found a way to make fast cash without doing a lot of work. I was hoping that Jessica was the later. Hoping, but not a hundred percent sure. Click.
“How did you get into that business anyway, kid? Were you that hard-up for cash?”
She shifted uncomfortably in the bed. Her head was swimming with the alcohol now, the great stuff that made her forget all the things she wished had never happened in her life. But it also screwed up her judgment, and she was afraid she’d tell me things she didn’t want me to know, secrets of her past that needed to stay buried like the broken skeleton on Tiki Island.
“When I got back from Miami I was flat busted broke. I didn’t have anywhere to stay, no money, nothing. So I went to a friend and asked for help. She told me she didn’t have any waitressing jobs or anything available, but she could put me up for free for a couple of nights if I was willing to show my tits on stage and shake a little ass at this private club owned by a guy she knew. Believe me, I didn’t want to do it, but then I figured what the hell, and that night Ginger was born.”
“And it just snowballed from there?”
“Yeah, pretty much. After a couple of nights it didn’t seem so bad, so I went to work full time. I got a free room and decent money. After the stage show I’d sit with the customers, talk to them, flirt with them, and they’d tip me, sometimes big. A few regulars got to liking me, and bought me gifts, nice things. Then I was told I had to do the sex show if I wanted to stay on.”
“They rope you in with the money, then make you do the nasty stuff to keep it, seen it a million times,” I said.
“Yeah. Something like that. Anyway the money was too good to pass up so I gave it a whirl. Turns out it wasn’t so bad after all. The other girls were in the same boat so we were all nice to each other, and got along great. But I started to get a reputation in town. Jessica started to fade away. Ginger took over. And Ginger wasn’t a nice girl.”
“So how did you get out of it?”
“Out of it?” she laughed. “Oh, I’m not entirely out of it. Well, not until tonight.”
“Why tonight?”
She sighed, and took a long swig of Bourbon before continuing. For the first time she slurred a little. “Roberts, Bill. Roberts runs the club. It was him who forced me to do the show.” And some other things too, but she didn’t tell me that.
1935
Anger. Fear. More Anger. Anguish, confusion, sadness. Extreme anger. These were the emotions ripping through Eliot Hawthorn on that hot July day in 1935 as he docked his boat in his private Key West slip. Roberts was waiting at the dock along with two of his police buddies.
“Hello, Mistuh Hawthorn.” Roberts yelled in his heavy southern drawl. “Got yo’ message. What’s on yo’ mind, so urgent?”
“Just you, Roberts. The other two will have to go. This is something I need you to do alone.”
“Ok, boys, you heard the man,” he said and the two tipped their hats and walked off. “Anything I can do for you Mistuh Hawthorn, jus’ name it.”
“I need someone followed, Roberts. They can’t know you’re tailing them. And no one – and I mean no one can know you’re doing this for me. Anything you find out, you tell me only. If a word of it gets out, I’ll know who to come after, clear?”
“You knows there ain’t no reason to worry ’bout me, suhr. My lips is sealed shut.”
“Good. I’ll give you the details on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“We’re going to that little den of yours on the east end. I need to find a girl.”
“What girl?”
“Any girl as long as she’s blonde, looks about thirty and is between five-foot-two and five-foot-four.”
“Kind of sounds like yo’ describin’ Missus Hawthorn.”
Eliot held back his emotions as he spoke. “That’s not really any of your business now, is it Roberts? Just find me the girl.”
“Ok, suhr. I’m sorry for askin’. Jus’ strange, in all the years you been taken prostitutes to yo’ parties, they all been from Havana. And I knows as a fact you ain’t nevuh took none fo’ yo’self, bein’s yo’ married an alls.” Roberts was no fool. He could spot something funny from a mile away, and he knew something was funny now. He didn’t really care what Hawthorn wanted a blonde hooker for; all he knew was there was probably a way for him to make an extra buck on it, if he could figure out the angle.
“Let’s just say she’s for a friend, Roberts, and leave it at that.”
“Yessuh,” Roberts said, but he was far from leaving anything at that.
1956
I woke up Friday morning a little confused. The Bourbon had knocked me out, and at first I didn’t know where the hell I was. The room was bright; the fiberglass curtains did very little to keep the morning sun out. The whir of an air conditioner fan filled the room, and it was so cold I thought I was back in New York. I turned and for the first time saw Jessica sleeping, a beautiful girl even in slumber. She always seemed to get up before I did, but not today. She was sleeping like a babe.
I pulled my aching carcass out of the bed and assessed the evening’s damage in the bath mirror. There was a nasty scrape on my left cheek, red but not bloody. There was a bruise below my mouth, and several on my gut. My right side ached where I got rabbit-punched, but the ribs where intact. One knee was skinned where I hit the bricks, and the knuckles of my left hand were red and swollen from back-handing Roberts. Now I wished I’d done more. I wished I’d shot the sonuvabitch through his fat gut, where it would hurt the most. But I knew he’d never use his right hand the right way again, and that made me happy.
“Jessica, wake up do
llface, it’s almost ten and I want to catch the ten-thirty back to Tiki Island.”
“Let me sleep, honey. I have to work tonight. Just leave the cas...” she stirred a little and her eyes opened wider. “Just leave the air on high for me.”
“You’re not coming back to the Island?”
“I can’t hun, I have a shift at La Concha, three to three, and I can’t miss it. I need the dough, you know?”
I did. I was on vacation, but Jessica wasn’t. She needed to work and it was selfish of me to keep bugging her to stay with me. In a few days I’d be gone, and she’d probably never see me again.
What a depressing thought.
“Ok, kid. But hey, wait a minute…you promised me a haunted house, if I remember right.”
She opened her eyes again and sat up. “Ain’t you seen enough?” she asked in a frightened tone.
I didn’t really care about ghosts. I just wanted to spend more time with her.
“Nope. If there’s really ghosts in the world, I want to see one close-up. You game?”
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and yawned. “Ok, I’ll show you the place. Shouldn’t be too bad in the daylight, I guess. I need a shower first, though.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She got out of bed and slipped off her clothes, letting them drop to the floor. She was good at that. “Well come on, we can save some water if we do this together,” she said with that breathy, sexy way she had of making every word sound like pure sex. I followed her into the bath. We didn’t save any water.
An hour later we were driving the new Chevy to Old Town with the top dropped and the radio swinging. I cruised the Bel Air up Whitehead to Truman, then cut over to Frances that led us to the Key West Cemetery. Jessica pointed at a spot to pull over, right next to the fence and across from a street called Petronia.
“Creepy place,” I said as I parked. “What’s with all the cement boxes?”
“If you dig down five feet you hit water here. So the coffins are put in shallow graves lined with concrete, or above-ground cement caskets. Or Mausoleums. See?” She pointed at a large brick structure with an iron grate. Inside rested two caskets.
“Creepy,” I repeated.
“Yeah…you should see it at night.”
“Nix that. Now where’s this spook joint?”
She waved for me to follow her up the street and across, where we stood in front of a big wooden house that had seen better days. The houses to the left and right didn’t look much better but were obviously lived in. This one had all the earmarks of being abandoned. Weeds growing through the front steps, glass missing from windows, holes in the roof. A pair of dirty gray-white curtains billowed out of the second floor window, giving the effect of a phantom moving in and out of the room.
“Nice place. What’s the rent go for?”
“Can’t rent it out. Plumbing’s shot. Come on, let’s go inside.”
We walked carefully up the creaking steps. Flecks of gray, peeling paint shifted under our feet and drifted down from the sagging overhang of the porch. Once close up, I took the whole place in.
Like most of the houses in Old Town, this one was a two-story, late Nineteenth Century job with clapboard construction and a tin roof. The house had been white once, but now sported a dirty gray luster reminiscent of old socks. The first floor windows were boarded up, and the front door hung partly open on rusted hinges. Paint was peeling off everywhere exposing dry, cracked hardwood bleached by the sun. A rotting rocking chair, legs broken on one side, leaned against the wall. The porch floor was a mockery of splintering wood and moldy, rotted black carpet. A piece of plywood had been placed in the middle for ingress through the front door.
“Doesn’t look very safe, kiddo,” I said testing the wood. “I’d hate to get an ankle stuck in the floor.”
“Just stay on the plywood and you’ll be all right. Same on the inside. The floors are all shot to hell from rain leakin’ in. Lotta water damage. It’s a real mess.”
She wasn’t kidding. As she opened the parched wooden screen door it broke apart in her hands and clattered to the floor with a bone-cracking sound. I winced. Then she pushed the heavy wood door open, and as it creaked on its ancient hinges I saw what she was talking about.
“Ya’ll watch your step,” she said, and her slight southern drawl instantly became thicker, more pronounced, as if she’d gone back in time to a period when she was a different Jessica.
We were in the living room, a large room that took up half the first floor of the house. Light seeped in through cracks in the walls, the ceiling, the boards over the windows, enough to cast a gray glow over everything. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling revealing broken lathe and rafters. Striped wallpaper, once blue and white, peeled from the walls from the top down in an eerie brown curl. Under it mold turned the plaster a mottled black and gray slime. Broken plaster and shards of glass littered the floor along with old newspapers, broken bits of furniture and beer bottles. To the right sat a small sitting room, brightened with more light as the boards from the window had been pried off. The ceiling had completely caved in and the room was impassable. To the left were the stairs heading to the second floor; they looked sturdy but I didn’t trust them at all.
“The kitchen’s in the back,” Jessica whispered and led me through a door along the plywood path.
The kitchen was a disaster. A long porcelain sink and counter occupied the entire back wall. It had collapsed on one side under the weight of piles of iron pots, pans, and assorted junk. Most of it was covered with a wet rust, and stunk like old metal and decay. A 1930s icebox stood in pieces next to the heap, its doors ripped off and thrown on the floor. The kitchen table, large and made of hardwood, sat warped and cracked in the middle of the room, broken dishes and pie tins and booze bottles piled high. A single green metal lamp hung from the ceiling. An antique gas stove, rusted and decrepit, completed the look.
“Looks like someone was here having a party not too long ago, by the looks of the booze bottles,” I said.
“Sometimes hobos would crash here, hang out during storms or cold nights. Not anymore. They know better.”
“To dangerous.”
She laughed. “No, too scary. There’s been a lotta stories about this place. Just last summer they found a man in here dead, a hobo that was tryin’ to get outta the rain. When they found him, his face was froze-up in a kind of horror, eyes open wide, mouth in a scream, hands curled all up like he’d had the devil scared in him.”
“I’ve seen bodies like that. All sorts of things happen to a body after it dies, you know.”
“Believe what you want, detective. He wasn’t the only one. Let’s go up stairs.”
“Is it safe?”
“Should oughtta be,” she said and led me into the living room and up the steps. Someone had recently nailed boards across the worst ones, it seemed.
“How long has this place been abandoned?” I asked as we slowly climbed the embattled staircase.
“Let’s see…Nineteen-forty…eight…nine…about seven years, give or take.”
“What happened here?”
She didn’t speak again until we reached the landing. A long, narrow hall to the right, filled with old bottles, pieces of junk, crates, and newspapers and covered in broken plaster and peeled paint stared back at us. On the left were four doors, on the right were two. An open window at the end of the hall let in plenty of stark, gray light. Everything was gray. Even Jessica looked gray in this place.
“To the left are the kid’s bedrooms and the washroom. This first door on the right is a sewing room. Last door on the right is the large bedroom.”
She opened the door to the sewing room. Something moved in front of us and I had the .38 out in a split second. It would have done no good against the billowing curtains, same ones I saw from the street.
“Jesus! Damned curtains.”
“Damned everything in this house,” Jess said. “This is the room where they found the ma
n. It’s also the room where two women were tortured and murdered back around 1948.”
“That’s why the place was abandoned,” I muttered.
“Not entirely. It was vacant when the murder happened. For a bout a year, I think, the house was up for sale. But no one would buy it because of the noises.”
“What noises?” I entered the room. A broken pedal-powered sewing machine leaned against the side wall, and a heap of moldy, wet clothes and sheets filled a corner. A large black stain filled the center of the floor. Smaller black stains splashed the walls and ceiling. “They were stabbed to death, weren’t they.”
“Throats cut, there in the middle.”
“Blood stains on the walls and floor. Gaddamn.”
“The guy who done it killed himself too. Slit his own throat out back in the yard,” Jessica said with no feeling.
“So, what noises?”
“Moans. Whispers. Stuff like that. Voices in the night. Footsteps.”
“Sounds like a Vincent Price flick.”
“Vincent Price would run outta here screamin’,” she said flatly and turned, moving back out to the hall. She passed two of the left doors and opened the third. A shiver went up my spine as we looked in. Jessica let out a little whimper.
In the middle of the room was a broken, twisted metal baby carriage, 1930s vintage. The canvas was rotted and ripped, the wheels bent. A child’s desk and chair sat in the corner under a thick layer of dust. But what really gave us the creeps was the doll.
“She’s still here. I can’t believe after all these years, it’s damned near impossible but she’s still here.”
“Who?”
“Rebecca.”
“Who’s Rebecca?”
“My doll,” she said and stepped into the room.
The doll stood up against the wall under the open window. Time was not good to it. Its china face was cracked and flaking, its clothes rotted and faded. The china hands were broken and missing fingers, and the black hair was a tangled mess of cobwebs and dead bugs. But the eyes…piercing blue eyes, bright as the day they were manufactured. It was damned creepy. She seemed to be staring at us…following us with those eyes no matter where in the room we went.
Murder on Tiki Island: A Noir Paranormal Mystery In The Florida Keys (Detective Bill Riggins Mysteries) Page 20
