The Key Lime Crime

by Lucy Burdette

  “So she didn’t take any of your advice?” I asked.

  “I don’t think she actually wanted advice. I think she wanted investors. And I am a lone-wolf kind of guy.” He grinned, showing a mouthful of white teeth, and took a sip of his beer. “I also took a stab at reminding her that we already have serious bakers in town. At least two—at Old Town Bakery and Key West Cakes—and the chef at Moondog is pretty spectacular, too. And Cole’s Peace does a good job with bread and cookies. I told her she had to have something different to give her an edge. Or else she’d go the way of the sand the city adds to Smathers Beach after a storm—she’d wash out quickly like so many chefs before her.”

  He pushed the signed book across the table. “I never imagined she’d try to force her way into the contest with that hideous and pretentious mille-feuille.”

  “You knew nothing about her entry before the event?”

  “Nope. Everyone had their pie covered up so they could surprise and wow the audience. I was frankly shocked.” He looked over my shoulder at the tourists queuing up behind me. “Don’t forget to buy a raffle ticket for the pie drop. And try the key lime martini. They are fabulous.” He pointed to a bartender handing out plastic cups of something frothy and pale green. I wasn’t surprised to recognize him as Michael Nelson’s library assistant. The cost of living was high on this island and shooting higher. Lots of ordinary people worked two or more jobs to survive.

  I went to the desk to pay for the book. The bookshop owner, Suzanne, looked slightly frazzled but delighted with the turnout. “He’s good for business, isn’t he?” I asked with a smile.

  “Absolutely. And he’s a hoot too. Make sure you try one of David’s martinis. Christopher’s a wonderful bartender—executes a recipe perfectly.” She slid a bookstore bookmark into the book and handed it to me along with the receipt. “David borrows him for events when he’s not working a shift at the library. Beware, they do pack a punch. Don’t drink these if you’re driving your detective somewhere, or likely to get pulled over.”

  We both laughed, and I wondered briefly if she’d heard about my stop sign incident. I hated to think that story was already making the rounds. I walked over to the man tending the table at the end of the fiction bookshelves. I remembered that he’d been trying to contain the pie-throwing damage after the incident in the library auditorium, along with Michael, the administrator.

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Martini?”

  “Why not?” I said, thinking this could be another roundup article for Key Zest during the high season: key lime–flavored drinks were as hot as key lime pies, it seemed. He mixed Stoli Vanil, Licor 43, and heavy cream in a shaker with ice, shook it, and then poured it into a plastic martini glass rimmed with graham cracker crumbs. I took a sip.

  “Wow,” I said, as the heat of the booze blazed a path down my throat. “She wasn’t kidding—that packs a wallop. It’s nice that you can moonlight sometimes. My mother has a catering company, and she’s always looking for extra bartending help. Do you have a card?”

  As he shook his head, one diamond stud sparkled in his left earlobe. “I’m pretty well booked up even without advertising, so I can’t promise availability. The library aside, David has so many events planned for this season that I’ll be hopping.”

  “You were close to the action on Monday at the library.” I lowered my voice and glanced over at Sloan, who was charming a pair of tourist women who’d been sunburned to lobster red. “Did you see that pie-throwing business coming? We feel so terrible about what happened to Claudette. She had so much talent. It sounded as though your boss might have felt a little threatened by her.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “David’s not threatened by anyone. He’s a flat-out marketing genius. And not a bad cook, either, and definitely a pie whisperer. There would be no reason for him to feel threatened by her—they operated in different worlds. Refill?”

  “Better not,” I said. “I’d have to crawl home.”

  He winked. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A lot of people don’t know that the true secret to piecrusts is that the baker cannot talk to others while making it.

  — Maddie Dawson, Matchmaking for Beginners

  I collected Nathan’s mother, and we left the bookstore and walked the half block to Duval. Several police officers were posted at the corner, directing traffic. As New Year’s Eve drew closer, the crowds were continuing to mushroom. I wondered again how many revelers this island could absorb.

  “We’ll cross here to avoid the worst of the chaos and go over on Whitehead to Mallory Square. Stick with me,” I told my mother-in-law. I was tempted to take her arm and keep her close as we forded the sea of people. Afraid she might think that was patronizing, however, I didn’t.

  “Did you learn anything from Sloan?” she asked, when we’d emerged to a less crowded part of the block.

  “He really did not like Claudette. He claims he offered her a lot of advice and she appeared to take none of it. Maybe he saw her as competition? Or he felt dismissed?”

  “Did he not like her enough to kill her?” she prompted.

  I rolled that over in my mind. “Hard to say. He claims she wanted him to invest in her shop. But how much sense does it make to ask your competition to put money into your venture?” I shook my head. “The bookshop owner loves him, though. It’s not only that he brings traffic to her store; she seems to genuinely enjoy him.”

  “Murderers have friends and relatives, too, same as us normal people,” said Helen. “Usually these people come equipped with whopping blind spots. You hear them all the time on television after their neighbor or relative commits some horrendous crime. He was such a quiet boy, so devoted to his mother … and so on.”

  “In this case, the bartender described Sloan as a marketing genius and a pie whisperer,” I said. “While you were watching, did you get the sense he was lying? I’m super-curious about what you’d look for.”

  Helen shook her head. “I didn’t spot anything obvious. He could have been lying, but if so, he hid it well. I watch for things like sweating, blushing, dry mouth, tiny shakes of the head that go the opposite direction to what the person is saying … There are a lot of possibilities.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, wondering how she’d come upon this expertise she was describing. Maybe simply living with cops would be enough to sensitize you. Maybe I’d end up as a lie super-sensor too.

  “Another thing has been bothering me. I can’t imagine any of these key lime baker people having any connection with a criminal who is after Nathan,” I said. “Wouldn’t it have to be someone who’s recently arrived in Key West, who maybe isn’t known to the locals? The only real newcomer to town is Claudette, and she’s dead.”

  “Sometimes people delegate the worst jobs to their hatchet men,” said Helen, looking grim.

  I wished I hadn’t brought the subject back up, because it made me sick to my stomach to worry that deeply about my husband. I forced my mind over to another worry—smaller but more immediate: whether my mother-in-law and Lorenzo would hit it off. Not that it mattered in the long run, but I hoped she wouldn’t say something rude about his work, or communicate nonverbally that she thought him a crock.

  Every evening, street performers and buskers and bartenders and sellers of Key West T-shirts and jewelry and painted coconuts and other memorabilia set up to welcome tourists for the Sunset Celebration. The schedule of this event followed the path of the sun—so it began earlier in the winter months and started later as the days grew longer. Tonight, the sun had already dropped below the horizon, meaning that most of the celebratory crowd had left the square in search of more drinks and hopefully, for their sakes, dinner. The sky was still tinged with pink and orange, and the streetlights had come on, throwing enough light so we could see that some of the performers were in midshow. We stopped to watch Tobin and his partner, Dave, finish their acrobatics. Both wore distinctive red pants and bl
ack slippers. Tobin now stood on his partner’s shoulders, juggling fiery wands and keeping up a patter of conversation with the audience.

  “He’s a terrific athlete,” I told Helen. “He often plays tennis in the morning with the gang at Bayview Park.”

  In the far corner of the square, a collection of homeless types and teenagers had gathered to drink and talk. A whiff of marijuana floated in our direction and one girl’s hand-lettered brown cardboard sign told passersby that leftovers were gratefully accepted. I was glad I had given the boxed pizza leftovers to Miss Gloria to carry home, or I would have felt guilty about holding them back.

  We found Lorenzo set up near the water, his table covered by a deep-blue cloth and illuminated by a tall golden lamp. He was chatting with Dominique the cat man. His face lit up when he saw me, and he came over to give me a hug. I introduced them both to Nathan’s mother.

  “This is her first visit to Key West, so I told her she’d want to meet you,” I added, winking at Dominique.

  Helen was staring at them, taking in first Lorenzo’s white shirt, tie, and high-waisted black trousers, then the cat man’s yellow-and-black cat knee socks, his baggy knickers, his long curly gray hair.

  “He trains his cats to do amazing things, including jumping through fiery hoops,” I told her. “We tried working with Evinrude and Sparky, but it’s harder than it looks.”

  “Ees she purrfectly een harmony with the Universe?” Dominique asked in his exaggerated French accent, cackling with laughter and twirling on his tippy-toes. He loved tweaking the edges of a straightlaced customer with his antics. “I’m off to my kitties,” he called without waiting for an answer, skipping over the bridge toward his caged cats and their equipment, set up in front of the Margaritaville resort.

  “And Lorenzo, of course, is a brilliant reader of tarot cards.”

  Helen took a half step back from the table.

  “Sometimes Lorenzo does a three-card reading for me—if you’re not up for the whole thing,” I told her. “If you’re interested.”

  She shrugged. I felt a little bad about pushing her into this, but our joint anxiety about Nathan propelled me forward. I could have requested a reading for me, but somehow at this moment I felt like it was her unconscious knowledge and her feelings that he needed to channel. Finally she nodded, and we took the two seats in front of the table.

  After he had closed his eyes to meditate for a moment, Lorenzo explained that he would start by asking her to shuffle the deck. When she handed the deck back to him, he divided it into three piles and asked her to choose one. She tapped the pile on her left. He dealt out the top three cards: the three of swords, the moon, and the nine of swords.

  He studied the table, then looked at her face. “The three of swords can mean heartache, sadness, and pain—these can be old hurts, hard to heal. And sometimes there is a sense of guilt and remorse. Perhaps you have some regrets. Perhaps someone in your life was missing?”

  I glanced at the card again—a heart pierced by three swords.

  Helen’s face gave nothing away, neither confirmation nor denial.

  The second card showed a bright-yellow moon with a grim face staring down at two barking dogs and a lobster crawling from the water. “Sometimes people say this is the classic card representing fear. Because the moon is unknown. And we humans don’t know how to interpret shadows in our night—we don’t see them that clearly. Things may not seem as they appear. When the moon is out, it’s important that you allow your dreams and feelings to guide you.”

  Again, nothing from Helen. Although none of this so far conflicted with what I knew about her state of worry about my husband, it didn’t exactly make things clear, either.

  Lorenzo tapped the third card, the nine of swords. On this card, a figure sat up in bed with his hands in his face. Clearly distraught about something.

  “You may be having some sleepless nights,” Lorenzo said. “Again, it’s important to pay attention to your hunches and feelings. But also, get some perspective from outside sources.”

  Helen pursed her lips together but remained silent.

  Lorenzo reached across the table and touched her hand. “Follow your hunches. Sometimes we feel helpless, but when we look back, there were signs pointing to a path that we should have taken, or that might have illuminated the right direction, if only we had chosen to see them.”

  Finally she said, “I don’t believe in cards telling the future. But I do believe in receiving information by tuning in to my intuition.”

  Lorenzo nodded, his gaze focused deeply on my mother-in-law’s face. “In bygone days, women had an evolutionary advantage by sensing danger,” he said. “We’ve moved away from needing to worry about tigers and lions, but that doesn’t mean danger isn’t lurking. Remember, Hayley?” He switched his attention to me. “When Nathan was in trouble? You knew something terrible was wrong and you didn’t ignore it.”

  “Did you ever read The Gift of Fear?” Helen asked suddenly. “The author says when you are in danger, you’re filled with a powerful sense of knowing. And if you pay attention, it directs you.”

  Lorenzo was nodding again. I wasn’t sure they were talking about the same thing at all. But there was some overlap, and I was glad they’d found a way to connect. Nathan and Lorenzo had yet to find that kind of comfort together. As we gathered our belongings and left the table, I promised Lorenzo I’d call him for lunch when life slowed down a bit.

  I didn’t have the guts to ask her how she felt about Lorenzo’s words, but with all the talk about danger, figuring out who’d killed Claudette Parker was beginning to feel urgent. “We can swing by the Green Parrot and see if Paul’s there, if you have another stop in you?”

  Helen nodded her agreement.

  “Then you’ll be a quick three blocks from Mom and Sam’s place. We’ll pick up Miss Gloria’s car, and I’ll run you right over.”

  We walked along the pier, pausing for a moment to watch Dominique as he packed away his cats and their performance gear. A cluster of tourists stopped to buy his T-shirts, and he greeted them with moves I recognized from a childhood ballet class, a pirouette and grand jeté. Past his display, the harbor in front of the Margaritaville resort was in big-time party mode, the slips full of expensive-looking yachts. Some had parties or dinners raging on their decks in full view of the gawking passersby.

  “This scene is light-years from Houseboat Row,” I said with a laugh. “That suits us better—funkier and down-to-earth with real people as neighbors. People may envy us because they yearn to live in Key West on the water, but I don’t feel as though I’m rubbing my good fortune in their faces the way I would if we lived on a yacht.”

  “Your tastes are modest,” she said, “and I can see how that must appeal to Nathan. Trudy was on the opposite end of the spectrum, expensive and expansive. You should have seen her wedding extravaganza.”

  I didn’t know how I felt about this—hearing about my new husband’s marriage to the woman who had taken her place by his side before me. But I tried to remember that she was old news and I was fresh. Nathan barely talked about her, and I’d probably be better off leaving that alone. But on the other hand, I’d only seen Trudy once up close in Nathan’s office and once from a distance. She’d struck me as beautiful—stunning, really—and vivacious. And I was still intensely curious about why Nathan had chosen her and then why their marriage had ended.

  “What was the wedding like?” I asked, since she’d left an opening I could not resist.

  “Eleven bridesmaids in pink ruffles. And a ring bearer and two flower girls. If you can picture all that. She came from a Cuban family in Miami, with many cousins and childhood friends who couldn’t be left out without triggering World War III, or so she told him. So poor Nathan was left to rustle up eleven matching groomsmen.”

  “He must’ve been dying,” I said. Nathan was not the kind of man to have a group of close men friends. He loved his buddies at the police force, and he had workout friends, but
he seemed happy enough to leave all of them behind when he came home.

  “There were three bridal showers, and a bachelorette party where all those girls trooped off to Mexico. Trudy could not understand why Nathan didn’t want to go to Las Vegas or even some exotic surfing locale with her brothers and his coworkers. He finally folded and hosted a dinner for the male attendants, but only if they promised there wouldn’t be any strippers.” I couldn’t help a snort of laughter. This sounded so Nathan.

  “I suppose that when you’re in the police business, people’s thoughtless shenanigans seem less funny and entertaining than they might to another man,” said Helen. “But he’s always been a serious fellow. I should’ve warned you.”

  “I figured that out pretty quickly.” I felt my lips quirk into a smile. “It’s both aggravating and endearing.” I paused, then took the plunge. “But you loved Trudy dearly, that’s what Nathan suggested.”

  She smiled, looking a little sad. “We couldn’t have been more different. She is effusive and outgoing, and I am reserved and stiff.” She held her hand up. “No need to protest; I understand that much about myself. But we grew to love each other underneath all that.”

  At this point we had arrived at the Green Parrot Bar at the corner of Whitehead and Southard Streets. And the truth was, I was starting to feel a little queasy, happy to get away from Trudy as a topic of conversation. Even though it wasn’t a surprise to hear that Helen had loved her former daughter-in-law, and even though I was the one married to Nathan now, not her, I felt insecure enough that the confirmation stung.

  Although the Parrot, as the locals called it, loomed large in many tourists’ and residents’ minds, the bar was anything but fancy. Large wooden shutters opened to the outside, so the sidewalks became part of the party. A U-shaped bar surrounded by barstools took up one half of the interior, and further along there was a stage with rustic seating. A colorful parachute hung from the ceiling. Tonight most of the seats were taken and a bluegrass band played on the stage.