“A little. I mean, how do you even…How?”
“You want details?” she asked, a little shocked.
“No.”
“It was just in fun, Bill. We were young…this was years ago. Melinda would come down to Key West with her college friends and hang out at the same places I did when I wasn’t on duty. One night we sat next to each other at Captain Tony’s and got to talking. A few drinks later and we were on the beach, me, her, and a half dozen of her friends. They were all paired up, boy-girl and making out on the beach. So it was just me and her, and joking around I said we should make out too. She laughed and said we should. Well, hell, I’d done plenty on stage with chicks so I kissed her. It was…nice. The beach, the booze, this pretty girl with soft lips. We made out for hours. A week later she came back to Key West and looked me up. That night we went all the way, and it was fun. So we did it from time to time, ya know, just as a lark. We became good friends.”
“You never let on to me that you were friends.”
“We weren’t sure how to play it. Things took off pretty fast, you gotta admit, sugar.”
“And you weren’t lovers.”
“We were never in love. Never lovers.”
“Why not?” I asked, lighting my fourth Camel.
“She was in love with someone else.”
“Oh, great. And banging you on the side.”
She took a deep breath, and a long drink. “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said, and finished the Scotch. She poured herself another, silently.
“So, what was it like?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I think that’s something you should ask Melinda, not me,” she replied, and drank down the double Scotch in a single throw.
+++
A crack of thunder and bolt of white lightning struck at almost the same time, jerking Melinda out of Eliot’s arms and jolting them both out the chair. “It’s on top of us,” Eliot said dramatically, throwing his arms in the air. Melinda looked out the little window at the beachfront. With the next lightning strike she could see the Gulf…and no beach.
“The beach is completely flooded, Eliot. We’ve got to move down to the Safe Room.”
“What’s the point, my dear? There’s no point.”
She pulled him up from the lounge chair, bringing him shakily to his feet. “You’re coming down to the Safe Room with me, now Eliot. No negotiation.” Being stronger than he, Melinda easily forced him to obey. A few minutes later they were at the doorway to the Shipwreck Bar where Jessica and I sat, smoking, drinking, and going out of our minds.
Melinda said from the doorway, “The beach and gardens are completely flooded. There’s no doubt now, the sea will reach the doorway to the Resort within the hour. We must go down to the Safe Room now.”
“Jesus H. Tapdancin’ Christ!” I shouted, the Scotch getting the better of me. “Already? I thought –”
“Whatever you thought, you thought wrong. Let’s move, now!” Melinda bellowed. “The building is wind resistant, but not waterproof.”
“And going twenty feet below sea level is a good idea to you?”
Eliot said in a quivering voice, “The Safe Room is sealed against the sea, Detective Riggins. It’s basically a sealed tank, with an excellent air vent – ”
“I know, I know, forty feet above sea level, I get it. I just don’t want to go swimming in that tank.”
“I’m sure you’ll all be safe there,” he said, and cast his eyes down to the carpet.
“Come on,” Melinda cried, “Let’s get going!”
Jessica and I followed Melinda and Hawthorn down the familiar back-of-the-house hallway to the Safe Room’s entrance. Once inside, Melinda shut and locked the two sealed doorways.
“How will we know when it’s safe to come out?” I asked genuinely.
“There’s a viewing hole built into the outer door. If we look out and see water, we don’t open it. Also, there’s a radio down here. We can call for help in the morning. These storms almost always last only a few hours, and the waters usually recede within a day.”
“If we make it through the night,” Jessica said, “The sun will be out tomorrow.”
We were silent after that. Hawthorn rested on a couch as the two girls and I made our way to the bar. Melinda poured us each a glass of Scotch, eighteen-year-old single-malt with a name I never heard of, better than the stuff we had upstairs.
“What, no Mai Tais or Zombies tonight, barkeep?” I asked jokingly, you know, to lighten the mood.
“No. Not tonight,” Melinda said solemnly, and I could swear I heard her say under her breath, ‘there better not be.’
We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, drinking. Hawthorn seemed to have fallen asleep on the couch. Jessica got up from her stool.
“I’ve got to use the lavatory. Be back.”
The minute she was out of sight, Melinda asked, “Did she…tell you, what you wanted to know?”
“Some,” I said, playing it cool. Melinda looked sad, exhausted and deflated all at once. “Not everything.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She told me that Bachman encouraged her to pursue me. She told me how you and her were and item.”
Melinda’s eyes got wide for an instant, then her face settled back into that expression of distraught melancholy. “She told you about that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you…angry?”
“Just that you both lied. And that neither of you told me a thing about it. I mean, not that it would be any of my business, normally, but this trip has been anything but normal.”
The room shook slightly, tinkling glasses and vibrating the bar stools. I looked around, startled.
“It’s just the waves, or the thunder. You can’t hear thunder much down here, not until it strikes very close.”
“Yeah, the thunder doesn’t bother me. It’s those waves you mentioned. But let’s get back to the subject. Why didn’t you tell me you knew Jessica so…intimately?”
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think you’d understand. Or worse.”
“Worse?”
“That you’d be…I don’t know, morally appalled by it all.”
“Me? Moral?” I laughed. If only she knew some of the things I’d done, the beatings I’d given to cons to get a confession, the borderline evidence planting to get a conviction, all in the name of morality. “No kid, two chicks going at it doesn’t turn me off. But you two…that’s a little hard to take, after what we’ve been through.”
Another tremor rattled across the room, and I could swear it felt like the whole building moved. “That normal?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Melinda said. “I’ve never been down here during a full-on hurricane before.”
“Great.”
I took another long drink of my Scotch. I wanted to keep my head, but it wasn’t playing out that way. My head was saying no, but my nerves were saying, “Drink up!”
“Melinda, there’re some things I need to know, besides what you’ve told me.”
“Like what? Just ask, William.” She looked down mournfully. “I’ve got nothing to hide now.”
“Did you run the girls and drugs here on the Island?” I just asked her flat. No use beating around the bush.
“I…Some,” she said hesitantly. “For a short time. Rutger…when I was twenty, he tried to bring me into it. He didn’t want me to make him…and Eliot…stop bringing in the girls, and the narcotics, because they were making so much extra money with it, and because it was keeping the Island in the black. I tried…I so wanted to please Eliot…but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“You supplied Jessica with her heroin, didn’t you. You turned her on to it.”
Tears started in her eyes and she made a sour face. “Where did you hear that?”
“First from a guy I didn’t trust. Then from a guy I do. Is it true?”
“No. I didn’t give her her first dose.” She got up
and paced around, holding herself with her arms folded around each other in a very worried, sad fashion. “But I re-introduced it to her. We were kids, teenagers. We were in Key West, having fun. She was already a – call girl, when I met her. She was already taking pills and occasionally cocaine. Friends I was with had heroin. I never used it, but for some reason I offered it to her. I know now what a mistake that was.”
“Yeah, a big mistake.”
“It’s part of what eventually ended our friendship,” Melinda said, tears now rolling down her beautiful, tan cheeks. I took a napkin from the bar and blotted them dry, lovingly, although I didn’t know why. “That put an end to…everything. The drugs replaced me as her companionship.”
“But you still had someone else to go to, didn’t you,” I said with no contempt in my voice or manner.
Her eyes flashed wide and bright, a scared little girl caught doing something naughty. She trembled visibly for a second, and pulled her arms in tight. I just stared straight into her big, brown eyes.
“How…how did you find out?” she asked, shaking.
“Roberts told me. I didn’t believe him. It seemed too…too far out there. So I asked a local I met on the trip, a guy who used to work for Eliot. He verified the story. How long were you sleeping with Eliot, Melinda?”
She was very quiet, very still. “From around the time my Mother passed away, when I was seventeen,” she answered, and the loudest crash of thunder I’d heard yet ripped through the room, shaking glasses and causing the ceiling to shake, raining dust and bits of paint down over the whole place. Hawthorn jumped from his chair in terror and screamed a fantastic noise. Melinda threw her arms around me and buried her head in my chest, and the patter of running feet from across the room brought Jessica up behind me. She threw her arms around me too, and I stood there mute, the two girls cowering and crying, locking me in a stranglehold, Hawthorn screaming his fool head off, and the thunder reverberating through the cavern like a train in the night, the unexpected noise of wind rushing through the resort as if the roof had torn off, the roar of a hundred thousand tons of angry ocean crashing against the Island.
Then the lights went dead, and my whole world went black.
Late Labor Day Monday, 1935
Eliot was no master Captain, but he knew how to motor his own yacht in the waters of the Florida Keys. Adding hurricane-force winds on that stormy Labor Day Monday gave him a challenge, but he still knew what he was doing. His passenger, however, wasn’t buying it.
“Eliot please!” Rose screamed as the black waves crashed over the bow. The sea was so angry that when they slipped into the valley of the waves they were engulfed by dark water, peaks high enough to obliterate the waning sunlight. It was like being entombed in water, she thought, and shivered at the idea. “Can’t we get on dry land? I’m fucking terrified!”
Eliot winced at her choice of words, even though he knew it was her uneducated attempt at conveying substantial fear. He cared not. He carefully maneuvered the craft through the undulating waves, taking every precaution against turning over. The storm hadn’t yet made landfall, and the rain was coming in sudden bursts with moments of lull. Visibility was poor, but still clear enough that he could see the Keys to his right and the marshy land ahead.
“Eliot! Answer me!”
Finally Hawthorn turned and looked at his stand-in wife. He said simply, “I’m done with you now. I no longer have any use for your services,” and without another word he swung the lead pipe he had kept next to the helm for just this moment, and winced only slightly as it crashed against the side of Rose’s skull. Somehow, it didn’t take her down, and she stood there on the back of the boat, her eyes crazed with terror and shock, blood pouring down her cheek and neck, just starring. He swung the heavy pipe again, this time backhanded, and crushed the right side of her brain, knocking her senseless. She dropped to her knees. Bits of skull and brain and hair clung to the pipe. She was still alive.
“Why won’t you die?!” Hawthorn screamed, and lifted the pipe high in the air. Through the wind and rain and crash of waves he heard Rose’s soft but angry voice say, “I’ll get you, Hawthorn,” and he brought the pipe crashing down in the middle of her skull, bashing in her brains and killing her, finally, as he intended. A sick feeling came over him, but it only took him a second to regain his composure. He threw the pipe overboard, then, without any emotion at all, threw Rose’s body over after it.
The rain washed the blood from the deck as Hawthorn gunned the throttle and made way for the marshes. He ran the boat for almost an hour, finding calmer waters and clearer visibility, and when he thought he was safe, he ran the boat right up into the marsh where it hung up on a patch of thick sawgrass. This is where he rode out the rest of the storm, waiting to be “rescued” early the next day.
In the cabin of his boat, as the tide roared against the hull, Hawthorn thought about the last words Rose said, about the people he left on Islamorada, about the countless women he…
He thought and thought, and a bottle of good brandy got him through the night, and he vowed that his old life was over. He vowed to move far, far away, someplace where the temptations of the Keys and Cuba and Hawthorn Island would be forever wiped away, a distant memory. He vowed to never take another human life again.
He would earnestly try to keep that vow, but it wouldn’t save him from his fate.
+++
In all my years I had never seen darkness so absolute, so all-encompassing as the giant black rag that stuffed itself into the Safe Room. My sense of space was completely out of whack. I felt the two girls holding me, shivering; I felt their hands but had no idea who’s they were; I felt hot, scared breath on my neck but didn’t know who’s breath it was.
For a moment, all was quiet. Then the thunder came, but it was no thunder.
Drums.
Deep, lurid, jungle drums, quiet at first, muffled, then louder, pounding harder as they came closer to the Island. We stood there stunned in the darkness, horrified, shivering. The pounding pounded faster, louder, penetrating our souls to the point of madness.
Hawthorn was the first to give way. He began screaming at the top of his lungs, “They’re here! They’ve come for me, Oh dear God, they’ve come for me!” Melinda, I think, began crying hysterically in front of me. I was pretty sure it was Jessica who was holding me from behind, cowering, whimpering. They had my arms locked down in their hold, and that was making me nervous. Finally, I said, “All right, girls, give me some space, I’ve got to find a flashlight or something,” and broke free of their grip. I pulled my Zippo out and gave it a flick. In the dim light from the lighter I could see Melinda’s face in front of me, streaked with tears. I turned to see Jessica…but she wasn’t there. As my eyes adjusted I could see her outline as she sat on the floor up against the bar, her knees tucked up under her neck, shaking back and forth. My mind swirled a minute, and I asked her, “Jess, how long have you been sitting there?”
“From before the lights went out. I’m scared as hell, Bill.”
“Then who the hell was holding me from behind?” I said to myself. Melinda of course heard me, and she started to shiver even more, her eyes widening and her throat making funny sounds. “Alright, doll, calm down. You’ll be ok.” I said, knowing she wasn’t.
“The drums,” she croaked out, “I...I know what they are...”
“Forget that now. Where can I find a flashlight?”
“Lights,” she managed, “Emergency lights, behind the bar, lead me there with your lighter.”
I did, and after stumbling around a minute the whole place was suddenly illuminated with a dull red glow, like something you’d see on a submarine. “Is this it?” I asked.
“No, it’s not supposed to look like this. Something is wrong.”
Yeah, something was wrong all right. And we were all about to find out just how wrong.
The drums grew louder, louder and closer, now in the room with us....and stopped.
Then a strange,
black shadow grew, hovering over the doorway, twisting and forming like a serpent. We didn’t notice it at first, not until our eyes adjusted to this new, reddish hue. Jessica was the first to see it, announcing it with a simple, “What’s that?”
Melinda and I looked where she was pointing, seeing only that the area in front of the doorway was in shadows, enough to darken the glow from the polished brass fittings. Then it moved, morphed sort of, getting larger and more distinct. It split and separated into two dark, swirling shadows, then three, then more and more until the entire wall was lined with human-shaped dark masses, evil figures hovering a foot or so off the teakwood floor... even in the dim, red light it was obvious that the floor was now wet beneath these shadows, as if the shadows were dripping seawater rudely onto it.
Between us and the wall of shadows sat Hawthorn, glued to his chair, his back to the shadows but his face showing extreme fear and panic.
“What is it, what do you see?” he managed to force out in a strange whisper.
Melinda said softly, “Eliot, no,” and ran to him, grabbing his arms and ripping him out of the chair. “Eliot, they got in!” she said to him almost hysterically, and I realized that she knew everything, knew what he’d been yammering about, knew what was happening all around us. She knew what happened in his room, and knew what was coming to get him. “We’ve got to get into the closet, it’s our last hope!” she cried, but Hawthorn resisted.
“It’s over, my dear, I’m through,” he said dejectedly. “I’ve not a choice. I’ve gotten away with my crimes for more than twenty years. Now I must atone for my sins.”
“Sins? What sins? What did you do that you could possibly deserve this?!” she screamed, but he didn’t answer. The shadows were upon them.
1935
It was early on the morning of Tuesday, September 3rd when the coast guard vessel found Hawthorn’s yacht. They sounded their horn and called out, but got no answer. It was only that Hawthorn was passed out, sleeping off his bottle of brandy that he didn’t hear…but the third blast jolted him, and with a stammer he cried out to the boatmen for help. An hour later he was in Homestead nursing a hot coffee along side dozens of others who had survived the Great Atlantic Hurricane.
Murder on Tiki Island: A Noir Paranormal Mystery In The Florida Keys (Detective Bill Riggins Mysteries) Page 44
