Fatal Reservations : A Key West Food Critic Mystery (9780698192003)

by Burdette, Lucy

  After hanging up with Torrence, I noticed that Debo Dingler had texted me back and said she’d be at home this evening and welcomed a phone call. I felt so confused and discouraged that it hardly seemed worth calling. But if Lorenzo ended up in the slammer, I wanted to be able to say I had done absolutely everything in my power to prevent that.

  So I called Ms. Dingler, explained how Officer Ryan had suggested her, and told her I had a few questions about some former students.

  “Oh gosh, I’ve been teaching for a million years, and a million kids have come through my classroom,” she said. “But I’ll try to help if I can.”

  “The man who was killed earlier this week, Bart Frontgate—it seems that he grew up in Key West and attended the high school—does that name sound familiar?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Poor Bart Gates. My niece graduated that same year, so I remember him well. His life had all kinds of possibilities, but he wasn’t able to settle down and use his talents.”

  “Class clown,” I said, and she laughed. “There was a photo at the back of the yearbook that showed Bart with his arms around two girls. It looked like they were very chummy. One of them was Cheryl Lynn Dickenson, who was also murdered this week. Do you remember her?”

  “Cheryl Lynn,” said Debo. “She came down from Miami during my niece’s senior year and caused all kinds of chaos. By that I mean fights over girls, and drugs, and some petty thievery. Bart Gates was mixed up with her, too. She was not a good influence on a boy who was having trouble maintaining boundaries anyway. They were thick as thieves until Victoria died.”

  “Victoria?” I asked.

  A couple of dogs barked in the background, and Debo excused herself to quiet the animals. “Sorry,” she said when she returned. “I adopted a new puppy and the other three have not made the transition all that gracefully. Kind of like when Cheryl Lynn came to town.” She laughed. “There’s always something in my house. You were saying?”

  “I was wondering what happened to Victoria.”

  “Oh,” she said slowly, “that was a tragic time. It rocked the whole school for months and months. Young people that age feel losses so deeply—it’s like they haven’t had experience with protecting themselves from sorrow. Building up defenses, you know? My niece cried every night for ages.”

  “What happened?” I asked again after a pause.

  “Those kids went out boating and there was drinking and probably drugs, too, and Victoria fell overboard. She was too drunk to swim and the others weren’t able to rescue her in time. Tragic,” she said quietly.

  “Was there any question of foul play?” I asked.

  She clucked her tongue. “Not that I’m aware of. Bart left the island for a couple of years after he graduated, but he bounced back like so many people do.” She laughed. “I never meant to spend my whole adult life on this rock, either.”

  “It’s like a drug, once you get it in your system,” I agreed. “So Bart left for college?”

  “I don’t recall that he even made it through the first semester. Both of the guys in Victoria’s clique were stars of our Conch football team, but neither was good enough—or maybe disciplined enough—to make it in college. And after Victoria died, they started using heavier drugs,” Debo said. “Those four kids were tight as ticks, but the threesome didn’t survive the transition. I think underneath the acting out, they were too sad about their loss. You know how hard teenagers take things—but I said that already. Now I can’t believe three of them are gone, two of them murdered.”

  “What about the fourth, the other guy?” I asked. “He left the island, too?”

  “Oh no, you see poor Louis everywhere around town. He makes those hideous hats.” She snickered. “Don’t tell him I said that. I gather he’s rather proud of his work.”

  26

  The light had faded to an industrial gray, and the breeze was as heavy as teakettle steam.

  —Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

  After I’d hung up with Debo, I returned to the photos I’d taken in the high school and studied the one of the four students at the football game. Sure enough, the second player resembled a younger, unlined, undamaged version of Louis. My head was spinning with this latest revelation about Frontgate’s past.

  My first urge was to hunt for Louis and interrogate him about this history. I admitted to myself that it would be smarter to leave this to the police. Louis was a hothead to begin with, and probably drunk by this time in the evening. With a half hour left before the town meeting, I roared back over to the cemetery instead. Before I saw Torrence at the meeting and fed him more unwelcome suggestions and theories, I wanted to picture exactly how someone had killed Cheryl Lynn, then dragged her body over that tall spiked fence and stuffed it into the crypt. How was it physically possible? How would this not be noticed?

  I parked outside the locked gate near the sexton’s office and traced the sidewalk’s path along Passover Lane toward Windsor. The homes along the Passover Lane side of the cemetery were set well back from the road, behind heavy vegetation and tall wooden fences. And some of them were rental homes that were unoccupied for periods of time. So it was quiet and dark. On the other hand, I imagined that police patrols would have been stepped up, given the cemetery burglaries that had plagued this neighborhood. And residents would be watching out for themselves and one another more carefully, too.

  Twenty yards ahead, I noticed an empty grocery cart that had been pushed into the bushes against the cemetery fence. And suddenly I could imagine Cheryl Lynn’s body being trundled across the road in the dark. But what then? It would practically take an acrobat to finish the job. Now I had some sense of how the body could have been taken as far as the fence, but not over it—and not why …

  *

  I trudged up the steep stairs to the meeting room at Old City Hall. The space was much more crowded than it had been when I attended the city commission meeting only days earlier. The odors of perfume and alcohol permeated the room. I found a seat on the far right-hand side, next to the nice older couple I had met earlier that day while looking for ideas for my cemetery story. We greeted each other warmly.

  “I don’t know how long I can sit here,” said Brian to his wife. “My knee is killing me. I had a knee replacement earlier this year,” he explained to me, “and it’s still stiff and painful.”

  I nodded sympathetically but then zoned out and listened to the buzz of the waiting audience around us. The people on the island, especially those who lived around the cemetery, were not just worried about their stuff or their livelihoods. Now they were worried about their lives. I wondered what the chief of police could possibly say that would reduce the anxiety that gripped the town.

  The chief approached the podium with the mayor, who was dressed in khaki slacks and a white Hawaiian shirt with pressed pin tucks down the front. “Good evening, folks,” the mayor said in a genial voice. “We appreciate you coming out tonight. I promise this will be short. As you will have heard, the body of Miss Cheryl Lynn Dickenson was found in the cemetery yesterday afternoon. We express our deepest condolences to her family and friends.” He nodded solemnly, adjusted his glasses squarely on his nose. “The chief and I and all of our commissioners understand that the recent events in our community raise concern.”

  A murmur of voices rose from the audience. “More than concern,” he added, holding his hands up, as if to fend off a mob. “Fear for your families and yourselves. That’s exactly why we wanted to bring you up to speed on the investigation. Chief?”

  The chief stepped to the microphone, impeccably uniformed and taut with confidence. “Folks, it’s been a difficult couple of weeks. We lost two islanders, first Bart Frontgate and now Cheryl Lynn Dickenson. These were not random events. They were the work of someone who felt a deep and personal rage.”

  This was supposed to be reassuring?

  He cleared his throat and looked around the room, pausing to make eye contact with a handful of residents. “Now, what does
that mean for you people? It means that you are not in danger when you walk your dogs in the morning. You are not in danger strolling home from dinner at night. You are not in danger.”

  The crowd began to shout out noisy comments, and a crop of hands waved furiously. The chief motioned for silence and pointed to a woman in the front row. “I’ll take your questions one at a time.”

  “If you don’t have the killer behind bars, I don’t understand why we should feel safe.” The volume of her voice rose until she was shrieking. “What you’re saying makes no sense. We don’t feel safe.”

  The mayor moved forward again and leaned into the mic. “Quiet, please. Let’s show some respect. Let’s all listen carefully to what our chief has to say.”

  “Did Bart Frontgate drown or did he die from the stab wound?” yelled out the same woman.

  “Of course, the medical examiner will be the one to answer that question,” said the chief. “There are many factors to consider, including the damage to his organs and the condition of his lungs. We will release those findings when they become available and when we determine the information will not hamper our investigation.”

  “Do you have any suspects?” shouted another man sitting behind us.

  “We have a suspect in custody,” said the chief, his voice raised so he could be heard over the din. “We believe that both victims were killed by the same person, someone strong and with a powerful vengeance.” He explained about the department’s excellent record in solving other cases and how this one was about to join those ranks.

  I could count the ways he was wrong. First of all, they had Lorenzo in custody and I was certain he wasn’t the killer. Honestly, I didn’t think he was right about two victims, one killer, either. The methods were too different. One was sloppy. Stabbing someone to death with a fork in a rowboat seemed ridiculous. And then dropping the body into the water, where it washed up with construction flotsam and jetsam where any passersby could see. Seemed as though it hadn’t been planned at all, but had suddenly occurred to the murderer in a fit of rage.

  Cheryl Lynn’s death, on the other hand, may not have taken more time to plan. But hiding her body took a lot of effort to execute. The murderer had to pry out the cover on the container and stuff the body inside, then close up the crypt and attempt to make it appear as though nothing had happened. Never mind killing her in the first place. And dragging the body over the fence that guarded the cemetery.

  I leaned over to whisper to Brian. “I don’t think they have it right about one killer. The scenarios are too different.”

  “Say what?” he said, cupping his hand to his ear. I repeated my observation, a little louder.

  “Why don’t you tell that to the police chief?” Brian asked. “It’s time we started speaking up and not just accepting whatever the people with authority have to say. I, for one, would like to hear his answer.”

  Maureen nodded vigorously and leaned over to clasp my wrist. “I’ll bring it up if you don’t feel comfortable.”

  “That’s fine; I don’t mind.” I raised my hand and wiggled my fingers at the chief of police. When the mayor indicated it was my turn to speak, I stood up, introduced myself, and explained what I’d been thinking.

  The chief nodded briskly. “I appreciate that.” He flashed a winning smile. “Lieutenant Torrence has kept me apprised about your ongoing interest in this case. And I’m sure you can appreciate, Ms. Snow, that there are details related to these crimes which we cannot disclose to the public, even to satisfy your well-meaning curiosity.” Another tight smile. “Once the situation is resolved, then the details will become a matter of public record. But until the criminal is prosecuted and put away, we need to be very cautious about how much we can say.”

  As he was speaking, a man got up from his seat in the row ahead of me and stumbled across the laps of the people seated beside him. From the back, the man looked like Louis the palm-hat weaver—a man whom I now knew had a history with both of the murder victims.

  And in a flash it came to me that he owned a grocery cart like the one I’d seen resting against the cemetery fence—that in fact he kept his palm-weaving supplies and his finished hats in this cart. Or perhaps he didn’t own it, but he certainly made free use of it. And he could have used it to transport Cheryl Lynn’s body to what he’d thought would be her final resting place. And if he wasn’t an athlete now, he had been one in high school, when he played on the football team with Bart. According to my father, who knew these things and didn’t hesitate to remind me of them when he was feeling oldish, a man who played sports as a youth never loses his athletic ability. Even if his joints get a little creaky and his waistline thicker.

  Which meant that it wouldn’t have been impossible for him to vault over that fence, even with Cheryl Lynn’s body weighing him down.

  I excused myself and slid past Brian and Maureen. I needed to visit the restroom anyway. Then I would take the opportunity to talk to Louis. If he confirmed that he had been involved in the murders, or even said anything slightly fishy, this room was crawling with cops.

  All I had to do was shout.

  27

  It’s not so much that we lack food, I remembered Simone Weil suggesting, as that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry.

  —Pico Iyer, “Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind,”

  The New York Times

  I hurried to the back corner of the room and exited the glass doors to the hallway that led to the back stairs and the bathrooms. But the area was empty, no sign of Louis. The door to the bathroom was closed. I certainly wasn’t going to go in after him, but maybe … I rapped on the wooden door. “Louis, may I speak with you for a moment?”

  I heard the lock click.

  “Louis, I need to talk to you about your relationship with Bart Frontgate and Cheryl Lynn Dickenson.”

  “This is the men’s room, for christ’s sake. Leave me the F alone.”

  I knocked again. “You knew them both since high school—is that right?”

  “Go away,” he said. “Who do you think you are? The sheriff of Key West?”

  I rattled the doorknob. If he would only say enough to point the finger, I could grab a cop from the meeting and turn the situation over to them. I knocked and rattled again.

  “What part of ‘men’ don’t you understand?” he shouted.

  “Quite a bit, as it turns out,” I muttered to myself. But then I felt something poking my back and heard a low voice hiss, “Don’t make a move. Do not make a sound.” The man grabbed my left arm and twisted it behind me. “Come with me down the stairs and no one gets hurt.”

  I craned my neck around: Edwin Mastin.

  “What the hell?” I asked. Hard to take a fleshy restaurateur seriously.

  “Do as I say,” he said, “or I’ll take you out right here.”

  “Help! Louis!” I started to yell.

  “Shut up!” Edwin yelped, clapping a hand over my mouth and jerking me along with him. I stumbled down the stairs ahead of him, and he pushed me out the back door into the parking lot behind the building.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, once I could speak again. “Where you taking me?”

  “If you hadn’t insisted on sticking your nose into things, this wouldn’t be happening,” he said as he looked wildly around. His gaze searched the few cars and bicycles in the lot and then the trellised-in overhang that separated the building’s air-conditioning equipment from the parking lot. A door into the space was ajar; a padlock dangled from the latch.

  “Seriously,” I said. “What do you want?”

  He paused to stare at me. “I wanted you to shut the hell up about these murders. Cheryl Lynn deserved to be avenged. And Victoria before her.”

  “Cheryl Lynn? Did you kill her?”

  “Of course not,” he said, shaking me and jabbing what I now saw was a small gun harder into my side ribs.

  “Bart Frontgate, then?” I asked.

  He did not answer, just pulled me along t
he west side of the building toward Greene Street, which I took as confirmation.

  “I know that Bart and Cheryl Lynn were longtime friends,” I said, scrambling to get the conversation going so we could stop and talk instead of running through Key West with a gun. He looked disheveled and distraught, and now I did not trust that he wouldn’t hurt me, even if he didn’t mean to.

  “They were not friends,” he said. “He killed her. And he had been killing her for years, anyway, with all the sickness he pulled her into.”

  I struggled a little harder and Edwin yanked my arms behind my back so hard I nearly fainted from the pain. Just then Brian and his wife, Maureen, limped down the access ramp and headed toward their little car, a blue Jaguar. Edwin quickly stepped me over as Brian opened the car door, and waved the gun so they could see it.

  He pointed the gun at Brian but spoke to Maureen in a scary, low voice. “Ma’am, you get inside that trellis and you need to lie facedown, or I’ll shoot your husband.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t get these people involved.” He clicked off the safety on his gun and pointed it at Brian again.

  Maureen squeaked, “Please don’t hurt him.” She took a few steps back into the shadows of the storage abutting the brick building, dropped to her knees, and then sprawled facedown in the gravel. Her shoulders shook with weeping as he locked the padlock.

  “Pop the trunk,” he said to Brian. The trunk of the little Jag flew open, revealing a small space lined with a blue plaid blanket. “Get in,” he said to me. “Now.”

  “You know there’s no way to get off this island unless you drive up the Keys,” I said.

  Of course he knew this, but I was stalling, hoping that a plan would pop into my mind. Or that Louis would come to his senses. Or that someone else might have noticed me leaving or had heard me yelling and alerted the cops.

  “Once Maureen gets the police out here, they’ll be crawling like flies on roadkill up and down the whole string of islands. You’ll never get away with this,” I said, cringing at my roadkill metaphor.