Dead on the Island

by Bill Crider

  "Because they might be telling the truth."

  I didn't say anything. It wasn't my daughter, and I wasn't the one trying to make up for whatever it was that I'd left undone, not this time I wasn't. But I knew the feeling. Somehow, through all of this, I was still trying to make up for Jan. I pushed that thought out of my head.

  "I'm going to be there a long time before you," I said. "You think they trust you?"

  "I guess they do. Nothing was said about the police this time. They must think I'm dumb enough to come alone again."

  "Well, you are. At least as far as they'll ever find out from seeing the car. Evelyn can drive you. I'll be arriving a little early."

  "How early might that be?"

  "As soon as I can get there," I said.

  Evelyn went back into the living room, where she made a bee-line for a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the little TV set.

  "I can't help it," she said, looking at me as she lit up. Her dark eyes were sunken. "I tried."

  I smiled. "I don't blame you. I almost want one myself."

  She held out the pack.

  "No thanks." I glanced back at the bedroom. "What do you think?"

  "He can make it. He's tough. That's one thing I've learned in the last couple of days. When I was trying to get him in the car? He was bleeding, and I knew he was hurt. I thought he might be dying. But he never said a thing, except 'Get us out of here.'"

  She didn't have to tell me that Dino was tough. My knee could testify to that. So could plenty of other people. Even in high school he was a terror. Everyone hated to scrimmage against him because he couldn't seem to get the idea that we were only practicing. He flattened everyone who came his way. No exceptions. No one could hit him hard enough or often enough to keep him down. Not for long.

  "He's tough, all right," I said.

  "I think the only thing that bothers him is that I don't have a TV in the bedroom," Evelyn said, waving her left hand at a plume of smoke that lingered in front of her face. "He makes me watch the soaps and tell him what's going on."

  "Move the TV," I said. "I'll help you."

  "Maybe tomorrow."

  I went to one of the platform rockers and sat down. "Tell me more about Sharon," I said.

  "More? Like what?"

  "I don't know, really. Is she strong-minded? Rebellious?"

  Evelyn got an ashtray out of a cabinet in the kitchen and sat down in the other rocker. "I don't know what you mean. Or what you're really asking." She stubbed out her cigarette.

  "What I'm really asking is whether you think your daughter would kidnap herself."

  I give her credit. She didn't appear shocked and didn't try to tell me that I was crazy. She actually thought about it. "I don't think so," she said finally. "Why?"

  "Resentment. I mean, she found out not just that you were a prostitute"--somehow I couldn't bring myself to use the word "whore" to her anymore--"but also Dino was her father. One of the richest men on the Island, and he never said a word to her. Never acknowledged that she was alive. Not that you were any help. Your pride, or whatever it was that kept you from asking for anything, didn't make things any easier."

  She lit another cigarette. "I guess it didn't. I'm sure it was a mistake, now. Dino isn't what I thought he was."

  I eased off a bit. "Maybe he was, at one time. Twenty years of watching daytime TV can change a man."

  She laughed. "Sharon is strong-willed," she said, to change the subject or to get back to what we were originally talking about. "I remember when she was a baby, before she could even walk. I had to keep her from pulling the pans out of the cabinets in the kitchen. One day after I'd stopped her at least three times, and then a fourth, she banged her head on the floor in frustration. She had a terrible bruise. I thought the neighbors would turn me in for child abuse."

  "Then you think it's possible?"

  "That she's behind all this? I suppose so, but it just doesn't seem likely. We've always had a close relationship. We talked about things."

  "But you never told her about Dino. You never told her about your past."

  She looked down. "It didn't seem to matter."

  "Things like that never do," I said. "Not until it's too late."

  ~ * ~

  When I left Evelyn's house, there was still a lot of time until 2:00 a.m. I drove by and fed Nameless, who ate only enough to keep himself from starving by the next time I came home. He certainly wouldn't deign to eat enough to acknowledge any degree of dependence on me.

  There was nothing in the house that I wanted to eat, so I dropped by a Stop-and-Go and picked up some Slim Jims and a couple of sixteen-ounce bottles of Big Red. The Big Red would be warm before I got a chance to drink it, but I would just have to suffer.

  Pelican Island, a very small island next to Galveston, must have seemed like a great idea to developers at one time, but it hadn't panned out. The expected boom had never occurred. Instead, all that occupied the island were the Seawolf Park, featuring a real WW II submarine, and the campus of Texas A&M's Galveston branch. The Causeway was certainly nice, though.

  I drove down 51st Street, but I didn't use the Causeway other than to get my bearings from it. I checked my speedometer so that I'd know when I'd driven a mile and turned left down Port Industrial Boulevard, which ran alongside the ship channel. At the edge of the channel I could see a huge square mountain of sulfur, bigger than my house. It was being chewed away and loaded on a ship.

  It was good to see the activity. There wasn't that much work for longshoremen in Galveston anymore. Some who had been living there for years were considering moving away to find jobs. The union wasn't painting a rosy picture of the future, either.

  I found the warehouse I was looking for easily, but I didn't stop the car. I drove on by and waited until I found a side street where a couple of other cars were parked. I pulled in behind one of them and left the Subaru there. I walked back to the warehouse, carrying my sack of Slim Jims and Big Red. The Mauser was stuck in my waistband, covered by the sweatshirt. There was no one around to see me.

  The warehouse stood on a block by itself, surrounded by what had once been a graveled parking lot. There hadn't been any traffic in the lot for a long time; it had sprouted weeds and grass, and weeds grew thick around the base of the building itself.

  I stood in an alley a block away and looked the warehouse over. It was a tin building, built up off the ground so that trucks could back right up for loading or unloading. On the side that I could see, there were three sliding doors, all covered with tin, that could be opened from inside.

  I went closer, and I could see that there was a double wooden door in one end, reached by steps leading up to a small porch. I circled around the building and saw three more sliding doors on the side opposite the others.

  I could almost feel the emptiness of the building. There was such stillness about it that it would have been almost impossible for anyone to be inside. The tin was weathered and gray, peeling away in places from the frame, which appeared to be made of the same huge timbers that buttressed the edges of the floor that I could see below the doors. These timbers were chipped and shredded by the bumpers and tailgates of the trucks that had backed into them and used them for cushioning for a good many years. In a couple of places around the bottom of the building, the tin was missing completely, but I could see nothing in the darkness underneath.

  I hadn't really expected anyone to be there, but I watched for an hour anyway, holding onto my sack and moving from place to place. An occasional car passed by, but never the same one twice. No one appeared to be interested in me. Finally, I went inside.

  Or underneath, to be more exact. The floor was so high that I really didn't even have to bend double to slip beneath the timber at one of the places where the tin was missing. I stood for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Eventually I could see that there were huge pilings holding up the flooring. I had hoped to find a break, a missing timber, but there was none. I couldn't do
any good under there, or I didn't think I could. So I lurked around under there until there were no cars coming and then came out and hopped up on one of the timbers jutting out from the sides. There was a powerful twinge from my knee to remind me that what I was doing probably was not just going to be a picnic with Slim Jims and soft drinks.

  I stood up and tried to slide the door, but it wouldn't move. There was no place to get a real grip, since the framing was all inside the building. Then I pushed hard at the bottom, which swung inward. I pushed even harder and made a space big enough for me to slip through.

  It was dark and dusty inside. There were gaps in the tin roof, so a little light got through. Dust motes spun in the stray beams of the late afternoon sun. I looked around. There were a few cardboard cartons in one corner. Their sides were collapsed and broken. A couple of empty Pennzoil cans lay beside them, triangular holes punched in the tops.

  There were four heavy posts supporting the roof. A calendar on one of them advertised FRED'S AUTO SUPPLY. The date was 1984. A faded picture showed a well-developed young woman with red hair, who was holding a wrench in one hand and a gigantic sparkplug in the other. She was wearing a very small and tight pair of overalls.

  I walked down to the double doors that opened onto the porch. They opened easily, and I felt a bit foolish. I should have tried the front entrance. To my right was a dilapidated platform scale. Three thick iron weights used for balance sat on top of the arm.

  Built into the corner of the warehouse was a restroom. I looked in. I've seen dirty restrooms before, but this one was a prize winner. The toilet might have been made of black enamel, except that a few streaks of yellowish white showed through. Most of the white paint had worn off the seat so that gray wood showed. Even the lavatory was filthy. Whoever had worked here hadn't possessed a strong sense of personal hygiene. Even allowing for the fact that the building had been vacant for years, the place was a mess. It looked as if it had been used for a century without being cleaned.

  There was one good thing about the bathroom, from my point of view. It had obviously been added to the building sometime after the original construction had been completed, and instead of extending the walls up to the high tin roof, the builder had made them eight feet high and had even put in a ceiling. I hoped the ceiling was sturdy enough to hold me.

  I pushed the scale over so that I could stand on the arm, and with a little scrabbling, holding my sack between my teeth, I got up. My knee was throbbing, but after I rested for a minute it was fine.

  There were a few boxes up there, filled with stuff that whoever had once owned the building had by now long forgotten: rolls of adding machine paper, stacks of invoices held together by string and crumbling rubber bands, and some grayish-green ledger books. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dirt and dust.

  I shoved the boxes as close to the edge as I could. I could sit behind them and relax as much as it was possible to do under the circumstances. I'm not allergic to dust, but it filled my nostrils and made me want to sneeze.

  To take my mind off things, I ate a couple of Slim Jims and drank a Big Red. I felt better, knowing that I wouldn't starve or die of thirst while I was waiting. After an hour, however, sitting on the boards began to make me sore. I shifted position as often as I could without making too much noise.

  A lot of things can go through your mind when you're waiting like that, waiting for something to happen and not knowing exactly what you're waiting for. I thought about Dino and Ray and the old days, the times we had. I thought about Jan. I thought about Evelyn Matthews and her daughter.

  For the first time, I wondered whether Evelyn could possibly be involved in the kidnapping. What if it was her resentment, rather than her daughter's, that had led to a desire for revenge against Dino? What if she had told Sharon about Dino and his part in her past? What if the two of them had cooked up the kidnapping between them?

  I convinced myself that it wasn't possible. If she had been in on things, Evelyn would simply have let Dino be killed at the airport rather than save him. She could have had both the money and her revenge, easily enough. No, it had to be Sharon.

  I sat there and constructed a new theory. Or revised the old one. Sharon and Terry had gone to Chuck Ferguson for help. He'd found the three bruisers through his contacts with the Houston underworld. It wouldn't be hard for him to find three men like that. He'd hired them, but they'd gotten greedy and begun eliminating the other participants in the scheme, starting with Shelton. Maybe Sharon had managed to escape them, but they still had Dino's name. So they decided simply to kill him and make off with the money. For that matter, maybe Sharon was already dead, buried somewhere on Bolivar. She wouldn't be the first person buried over there. Since they couldn't produce her, they had to kill Dino to get the money.

  It all sounded highly plausible while I was lying there in the dusty dark of the abandoned warehouse. I had a feeling that it wouldn't sound that way to me in the cold light of the outside. There had to be something I was missing, something that would clear everything up and bring it into focus. All I had to do was think of that one thing, and all would become clear. But I couldn't think of it.

  The time dragged by. Every time I punched the light button on my watch to check, five seconds would have rolled by. It seemed like five hours, which is the main reason I hate waiting.

  About eight o'clock I had another Big Red, and about five minutes later I realized that a major disadvantage of being where I was included the fact that the toilet facilities were separated from me by the ceiling. I didn't want to climb down, but I didn't want to use the Big Red bottle, either.

  So I went down. There was no water in the toilet, but that didn't matter. I pulled the decrepit door closed after I finished and climbed back up.

  Another hour or so passed, dragging by like a snake with a broken back. There was very little traffic outside. I amused myself by timing the passing cars, but I quit after three. The first interval was ten minutes; the next, fourteen.

  Finally I pulled a couple of ledgers from one of the boxes and used them like a pillow, lying on my back on the board ceiling. I would make a lousy fakir, but I tried to clear my mind and relax.

  Eventually, I did.

  16

  They came around midnight. It was very dark in the warehouse, and I didn't want to risk even the light from my watch, but midnight was about right.

  I had managed to relax almost too well. With my head pillowed on the ledgers and my back resting on the boards, I'd finally gotten to that semi-drug-like state between waking and sleeping where your thoughts and your unconscious mind become almost indistinguishable and it's hard to say whether you're asleep or awake.

  I was awake enough to hear the steps on the porch outside, at any rate, and by the time the two men got inside I was fully alert. I couldn't make out any features, of course, but in the moment that they were briefly silhouetted in the doorway I could see that they were certainly bulky enough to be two of the three I'd met already.

  In my drifting state of a few minutes before, I'd almost thought I was making some sense of the whole confused caper, but the sight of the two gorillas brought me to a hard reality that had to be dealt with on a purely physical level. They weren't something I could drift and dream about any longer.

  They stood for several minutes, almost motionless, probably waiting until they could see a little better. I could make them out only as darker blobs in the general darkness, and I was hoping they might have brought a flashlight. Not that I wanted them to turn it on and examine their surroundings too closely. I was fairly certain they wouldn't see me, but I didn't want them even to try.

  They were very quiet, and I found myself practically holding my breath. If it had been quiet earlier, it was deadly still now. I hadn't heard a car pass for so long that I couldn't even remember when the last one had been.

  After what must have been about ten minutes, though it seemed much longer, they began moving around the warehouse, still without spe
aking a word. No light was turned on, but they moved confidently, as if they knew where they were and could see well enough.

  One of them searched the room below me, which had the only window in the place. The door creaked when he opened it. I suppose the window gave him enough light to inspect the place. It was too small to require a lengthy investigation.

  The other man moved to the opposite end of the warehouse, then returned along the other side. They met in the middle.

  "So now what?" one of them said. His voice was so loud in the silence that I almost jumped. "We wait for a couple of hours?"

  "That's right," the other said. "We screw up this time, Lenny's gonna have our asses."

  I assumed that Lenny was the absent third man. I still wasn't sure which one he was, but something about these two--at least as well as I could see them--indicated that neither of them was the man I'd fought with. Something about the way they moved, the way they bulked in the darkness. I wasn't sure. But I thought that Lenny was probably that one. And he was missing.

  "Anything to sit on in this dump?" the first man said.

  "You can go in there and sit on the john."

  "Funny." The first man went over to the scale and sat on the platform. I could hear it clank. It wasn't much better than sitting on the floor.

  "You bring your gun?" the second man said. He sounded like he was from deep East Texas.

  "Damn right." The first man shifted on the scale to bring out a pistol. As he moved he rocked the balance arm, and the weights that were sitting on it clattered to the floor. In the confined space they sounded like an accident in an industrial foundry.

  "Goddamn, goddamn!" the second man yelled. "What the fuck was that?"

  "Just something on this goddamn scale," the first man said. His voice was a little shaky. "Calm down."

  "Goddamn, I almost shot you! You gotta keep quiet!"

  "Fuck it, Kirk, get hold of yourself. You're worse'n an old woman."

  "I can't help it. I don't mind beatin' a guy up, but this killin' business gets me nervous."