3 A Brewski for the Old Man

by Phyllis Smallman

  A BREWSKI FOR THE OLD MAN

  ALSO BY PHYLLIS SMALLMAN

  Sherri Travis Mysteries

  Margarita Nights

  Sex in a Sidecar

  A BREWSKI FOR THE OLD MAN

  PHYLLIS SMALLMAN

  www.phyllissmallman.com

  This edition published in Canada in 2011 by

  Phyllis Smallman

  www.phyllissmallman.com

  Previously published by McArthur & Company, Toronto.

  Copyright © 2011 Phyllis Smallman

  All rights reserved.

  The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Smallman, Phyllis

  A brewski for the old man / Phyllis Smallman.

  (A Sherri Travis mystery)

  ISBN 978-1-55278-836-3 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-55278-910-0 (mass market)

  ISBN 978-0-9878033-2-0 (electronic)

  I. Title. II. Series: Smallman, Phyllis. Sherri Travis mystery.

  PS8637.M36B74 2010 --- C813’.6 --- C2009-907361-7

  Cover and text design by Tania Craan

  eBook development by Wild Element www.wildelement.ca

  For my children of the heart

  Margaret Everett

  &

  Dominic Wild

  C H A P T E R 1

  Brian Spears put his right hand up to his right cheek to cover his motioning left forefinger. “Is that a transvestite?”

  I looked down the bar to where he was pointing. “Either trannie or a regular guy who makes really bad clothing choices.”

  His voice rose with his eyebrows in outrage. “Do you allow them in here?”

  “Honey, I allow you in here, which goes to show how broad-minded I am…broad-minded and broad-assed, although I don’t think the two always go together.”

  Three stools away Peter raised his hand. He either wanted permission to leave the room or he was signaling for another drink. Since we were in the Sunset Bar and Grill down in Jacaranda, Florida, I was betting it was another Scotch he wanted and since I, Sherri Travis, was behind the bar, I went and got him a fresh drink.

  Customers were really ticking me off that night. Normally I can put up with any damn thing, but at that moment I wished they’d all disappear, which of course would make me do the same. You see, I’d recently acquired the Sunset — or at least the bank and a silent partner, who had way too much to say, allowed me to work here about twelve or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Nice of them, wasn’t it? Anyway, the whole world was bugging me that night.

  “You’re starting to sound just like Miss Emma,” Brian told me when I came back to drop off his third and last drink of the night.

  “Ah, so my surliness hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

  “Not for a moment.”

  Memories of Miss Emma brought an answering smile to my face. “Miss Emma hired me when I left Jimmy and came back to Jacaranda to start over. She owned the Sunset then.”

  Brian said, “Wasn’t she something?”

  I shook my finger under his nose and did a bad imitation of a wonderful old broad. “Be careful, girl. Pay attention and don’t believe everything you hear.” I laughed. “You know how I make a decision these days?”

  “I shudder to think,” said Brian, sipping his Grey Goose with lime.

  “I ask myself, what would Miss Emma do?”

  “Well, that should give you lots of scope for mayhem.”

  “If you can’t think for yourself, that’s what happens. You turn into someone else.” I glanced down the bar to where she had always perched on the stool farthest from the door, a living Buddha with piercing black eyes. “She could watch the whole room from there and sometimes, when I move quick, I think I catch a glimpse of her still watching the till like a hawk with his eye on a mouse.”

  “I thought it was the customers she had her eye on,” Brian said.

  “Oh, she watched the customers too, but it was the money that really interested her. By the end of the night she’d know within a buck or two what should be in the till. It certainly discouraged sticky fingers, always a problem when cash is involved, and it’s one of the reasons I slip behind the bar every night and mix a few drinks. Doesn’t hurt to keep a real close eye on things and let the staff know you’re there, just like Miss Emma did.”

  Brian added, “That woman knew everything about everyone, knew all their secrets and everything that went on in Jacaranda. She was a great big sponge, taking it all in and not giving anything back until you squeezed her real hard.”

  “And good luck to anyone trying that,” I added. “She’d probably bite their arm off.”

  “Yeah,” Brian’s blue eyes sparkled. “Miss Emma could be a bit gruff.”

  “Gruff? Hell, she was downright caustic,” I corrected. “Like the night a man sat down next to her and politely asked, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Miss Emma gave a gigantic shrug and said, ‘Smoke? I don’t care if you burn up.’”

  Brian wheezed with laughter, trying to get words out and pointing at me.

  “If you’re trying to tell me I’m beginning to act like her,” I told him, “I already know it.” Brian nodded madly in agreement.

  I sighed. “Yeah, these days I just don’t care if you burn up.” “Well, it hasn’t been a good year for you.” Brian wiped his face with a pudgy hand. “First we get hit by Hurricane Myrna and then you get kidnapped by a psychopath — bound to take the shine off the apple.”

  The summer before, Hurricane Myrna had blown through Cypress Island and almost destroyed the Sunset. The previous owner, the guy who’d bought it from Miss Emma, was in financial trouble and couldn’t find the money to rebuild. So, taking a nice little bit of insurance money I got when my god-awful husband was murdered, this fool rushed in where angels fear to tread and bought the Sunset. Unfortunately, the only thing I knew anything about was serving behind the bar. So there I was, up the yingyang in debt, learning on the job, and my partner…well, that’s another story.

  “How you doing, Sherri?” Brian asked and quickly raised his hand up to stop me from telling him I was just fine. “No, really, don’t just make a joke. I want to know. Are you able to sleep again?”

  “One good thing about the hours I keep, if I don’t stay up worrying about the bailiff visiting, I’m unconscious when I hit the bed.” I wasn’t being entirely honest with Brian. The panic attacks were milder but ghosts and angst crowded the darkness. But the ghosts were my secret, no need to share them with Brian.

  Miss Emma had known all about secrets. The day after I started work she knew about Jimmy, knew I’d left him to start a new life on my own and knew it was touch and go if I’d ever break free. Most of the story she got from me, not that she ever asked. Actually, she never showed much interest but I was compelled to tell her everything, just like her customers did.

  It always amazes me what people will tell a complete stranger after a little alcohol. Worse than that, it’s shocking what they’ll tell the person behind the bar, someone who actually knows their name and someone they’re going to have to face again. And after a night, or maybe an afternoon of standing with a foot on the brass rail, the next day they can’t meet your eye and treat you with great circumspection. They only return to normal after you win them over, make them think you’ve forgotten everything they said and certainly don’t hold any of it against them. You have to convince them it’s all water down the drain — and it pretty much is. />
  I knew everyone in Jacaranda, although I didn’t grow up there. We were too poor to live on Cypress Island. Even thirty years ago, working people had all been pushed back inland. I grew up just over the bridge on the mainland in a single wide trailer at the edge of a swamp. But every day, beginning in grade one, I came over the humpbacked bridge on a yellow schoolbus, with its roof painted white in an attempt to stop us kids from being fried by the sun, so I knew most of these people real well, except of course the tourists who swarmed down here like a cloud of locusts come November. In May they finally go North and leave us to ourselves again. Actually, they were the freest with secrets ’cause they’ll never see you again. The things those people get up to. A drink or two and you hear it all. I wonder if psychiatrists have ever considered serving their patients booze? It would work for me. A little liquid truth serum and I turn into a real motor mouth, boring even myself.

  But like I was saying, working behind the bar you hear all about people’s secrets. You hear who’s sleeping with whose wife; who’s on the edge of bankruptcy; and know who has the door open and is peeking out of the closet.

  “You listen with your deaf ear, you hear?” Miss Emma always advised.

  I wish I’d learned to take Miss Emma’s advice. Listening to other people’s troubles and caring, thinking I can actually help, are big failings of mine. I didn’t know it that night but other people’s secrets were about to drag me under, about to put me in harm’s way.

  C H A P T E R 2

  It was September. I was hanging on to the Sunset by my gnawed-off fingernails until the tourists arrived near Christmas and made me rich. Yeah, right, like that was ever going to happen. I’d never be more than one mortgage payment away from bankruptcy, but a girl can dream. I was only starting to realize how hard it is to own a white elephant and drive a Porsche, but that’s not what I want to tell you about. Let me tell you about collecting the rents.

  The Sunset is on the second floor of an old hotel out on the beach. Being on the second floor we look over the Beach Road traffic and acres of sand, dotted with colorful umbrellas, to the azure blue Gulf of Mexico. That’s what brings the money up the stairs or gets them into that tiny breathless elevator — an endless view of the gulf.

  Down below the Sunset are two stores: Rowell’s Books and News and the Beach Bag, owned by Rena Cagel, a store full of beach clothing, cheap boogie boards and gift items like pieces of driftwood painted with shore birds. After the hurricane ripped through Jacaranda I bought the building. The tenant for the clothing store didn’t return after the hurricane so Rena took over the lease. She worked almost as many hours a week as I did and without her sixteen-year-old daughter Lacey’s free labor it would have be impossible for her to keep going. On the misery-loves-company principle, the three of us became friends, Lacey, Rena and I. We shared stories and sympathy about living on the edge of financial disaster, but it was a limited friendship you understand, we never shared our pasts. There was enough in our present financial quicksand to fuel the discussion.

  The day after my conversation with Brian, I stepped out of the Sunset into a wall of Florida heat blown up from South America. At ten in the morning, when I arrived to start the day’s work, it was in the eighties. When I took the stairs down to the covered patio where the stucco walls were painted with beach scenes, herons, palms and umbrellas, the temperature had spiraled into the high nineties, but at least the gulf delivered a breeze to dry the sweat that popped out all over my body.

  “Excuse me.” A young woman in beach gear came towards me holding out a tiny camera. “Would you mind taking our picture?” She pointed out the right button to push and hurried to snuggle up against her two giggling friends who where already posing in front of a faux palm.

  Taking someone’s picture in front of the beach scene painted on the side of the building is a daily occurrence. This patio, where people waited for a table to come free upstairs, was an attraction all its own. It’s strange to me how many people have their picture taken here against the fake beach backdrop when the real thing is right across the road, but I feel I’m connected forever to people from all over the country through those photographs in unknown albums.

  I handed back the camera and stepped into the Beach Bag where Lacey was ringing up a purchase. Lacey was beautiful. There was no other word for her flawless golden skin, light brown hair and big hazel eyes. She had it all and, at thirty-one, I was just starting to look at young beauties like her with a tiny worm of jealousy and regret for what I’d had and didn’t realize. Then again, probably at sixty I’ll look at forty-year-olds the same way. Like the song says, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

  Lacey handed a shocking pink shopping bag to her customer and greeted me with a smile. “How’s it going, Sherri?”

  “Brilliant, I’m at least a hundred bucks away from disaster.

  And you?”

  She gave a soft lift of a shoulder and a lonesome fractured smile. “Okay.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “We’re surviving.” She was a kid who looked like she had everything, a terrific mom, looks, brains, but there was an air about her that said something was missing, a deep well of sadness I just couldn’t figure. This aura of sadness called out to me, tugged at my heart and spoke to my soul, awakening a strange protective instinct in me, something I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.

  Sometimes I feared for Lacey, worried that the blackness would swamp her, sweeping her away from us. Dramatic I know, but that’s how it seemed. She always made me want to start tap dancing or making funny faces, anything to put a smile on her face.

  “Mom said to give you this.” She opened the till and brought out an envelope. “Rent check.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to the bank. Want me to bring you back a burger from Fat Tony’s?”

  A faint smile teased her lips, the best I ever got from her. “Isaak will kill you if he finds you eating someone else’s food.”

  “True. He goes crazy if I eat anywhere else. I’ve started sneaking around and lying about why I won’t be eating in. Being unfaithful is a new experience for me. Who knew I’d be cheating on a food Nazi that I pay, but sometimes you just crave variety.” Her smile grew. I felt like I’d just won a marathon.

  “He’s a great chef, an asset for the Sunset and I was happy to steal him from the Bath and Tennis Club, but he’s killing me. I’ve gained ten pounds since he became chef. Want fries?”

  “Yup,” Lacey said.

  “We’ll go crazy. I’ll hide out down here with you and eat it. Isaak need never know.”

  Someone pulled up in front of the store. She turned to look and the laughter went out of her face, replaced by pain. Her back stiffened and her features hardened.

  “Lacey?”

  I stepped sideways to look out the window, expecting to see someone her own age, to see normal teenage stuff, broken hearts and broken friendships, but that wasn’t it. It was far worse than that — for both of us.

  The worst part of my past stared back at me. Lacey and I had something in common, shared a horrible secret. I looked to Lacey and saw my younger self in her eyes. I wanted to reach out to that other me, to comfort her, to make it right and to correct things left undone and erase an open sore in myself I’d nurtured too long.

  A ghost, no, more than a ghost, a nightmare lurked beyond the glass.

  C H A P T E R 3

  A hulking big boss SUV, black and raised up high over the wheels, crouched in front of the store. Spotlights that were mounted up near the roof, as if they were used for hunting down prey at night, gave it a malevolent, dangerous look. The driver, wearing a taupe-colored uniform, sat in the driver’s seat with both hands locked on the steering wheel and stared straight through us. He was thick-necked with a military-style haircut, the way he’d always worn it.

  Next to him, Rena, Lacey’s mother, bent towards him as she spoke, her body soft and yielding, cajoling him. It told everything about their relationship. She reached out a ha
nd to him, touched his arm, her body language saying she was begging. He didn’t respond.

  “Oh my god,” I said. The words slipped from me unheeded. This was the man Rena talked about in worshipful tones. This was RJ.

  I’d seen this scene acted out before in another time and another place. Only then it had been my own mother begging and pleading for love. Memories full of cruel, torturous emotions swamped me. For years, not a day had gone by that I hadn’t thought about him. Not a day I hadn’t cringed in shame at his memory. Now my feelings had changed. I wasn’t afraid or embarrassed or sad anymore. Now blind rage hurtled through my body like a runaway train.

  “Who is that?” I asked, although I knew perfectly well.

  “Ray John Leenders,” Lacey hissed. If I hadn’t already guessed, her tone would have told me all I needed to know about what the man behind the wheel had done to her. Bile rose in my throat. I covered my mouth with my hand.

  Rena bent forward to gather up her purse, paused, then leaned over to kiss Ray John softly on the cheek, cupping his square jaw with her hand. He didn’t unfreeze.

  She hopped down from the vehicle and closed the door gently with both hands. Rena was barely clear of the door when the brutish dark vehicle slammed backwards. The sign on the door said The Preserves, Security, R.J. Leenders. The SUV shot forward, hesitating but not stopping at the exit to the parking lot, before it took off down Beach Road.

  Rena, stepping delicately across the sidewalk in stiletto heels designed for sitting not walking, tip-toed to the shop. She was really quite young to have a sixteen-year-old daughter, only in her late thirties, and she worked hard to keep her figure and looks. A strawberry blonde, perhaps more blonde than she’d been born, she still had the unlined porcelain skin of red-heads.

  She stepped through the tinkling door. “Oh god, these shoes are killing me.” She gave us a glorious smile and minced towards the counter. “Ray loves high, high heels on me but then he doesn’t have to walk in them.” Behind the counter she bent to change into sandals, her breasts falling forward from the low-necked skin-tight tee. Her outfit was years too young for her, but I’d always assumed she dressed like that because most of the people coming into the store were young. Now I remembered that Ray John had always insisted that my mother dress provocatively. You don’t cover up a prize. The whole point is to show off a trophy and have it admired by other men.