Sex in a Sidecar

by Phyllis Smallman

  “No customers means no tips for you,” Chris said. If I’d been a dog I would have bit him. I was tempted to do it anyway but I’d probably get something disgusting.

  I added a little of the syrup, thick with age, to the melon and turned on the blender.

  Chris sat up straight. “Hey wait a minute. Who ordered those?”

  “I’m trying out a new drink.”

  “This storm is keeping away the customers and you’re wasting good booze on some stupid drink?” he howled.

  “Cheer up,” I told him. “This place may be a heap of matchsticks tomorrow, shame to waste all this lovely booze.”

  Chris slumped forward on the bar, holding his head in his hands.

  Gina got in on the party. “Don’t forget the storm surge.” “What?” he asked.

  I took over delivering the good news. “We could get a storm surge of six to ten feet. That’s where the real damage comes.”

  “Six feet?” Chris’s head shot up. “That will bring the water across Beach Road and into the stores downstairs.” “The excitement just never ends,” I said.

  “Oh my god,” Chris howled and sat up straight on his stool. “Do you think I should empty out the bar and restaurant? I could move everything inland. Just rent a U-Haul and head east.” He was beaming now, thinking he saw a solution to a potential problem. “Wouldn’t even have to unload it, just wait for the storm to pass and then run it back.” He bounced to his feet, ready to move, nearly dancing in anticipation at his brilliant idea.

  It brought me joy to burst his bubble. “Most people did that yesterday. Everybody else started when they woke up this morning. Where are you going to get the truck? Who’s going to load it?”

  “Oh.” He slumped back down on his stool.

  “They moved the stock out of the jewelry store and up to a bank vault in Tampa yesterday morning,” I told him, “which will be a mistake if Myrna hits Tampa. The Windcharmer loaded up their stock and moved it inland after lunch.”

  “Oh,” Chris said again.

  “You didn’t notice?” Gina asked.

  “Well, I saw the storm shutters come down.”

  I took pity on him. “No worries. Myrna isn’t going to hit here.” I turned on the blender. “This will be a big seller. Make us famous. Like a Singapore Sling or a Jamaican Mule. The Jacaranda Hurricane.”

  “It’s nice to see someone who enjoys their work,” Gina told me.

  “Everyone needs a hobby and this seems to be mine, trying out new drinks. No way anyone can call me an underachiever now. I’m going for greatness, Baby.” Chris whined, “It’s a waste of booze and booze is money.” Gina rapped her knuckles on the mahogany bar in front of him. “You should be more worried about murder than money.”

  “What?” he squeaked and swung around on his stool to look at her.

  “We were just talking about unsolved murders, Chris. Know any?” I asked, betting the sneaky little rodent spawn knew where more than one body was hidden.

  “I knew the woman who was murdered out on the beach,” Gina told him.

  “Really,” he said. Really as in “who gives a shit,” not really as in “tell me more.”

  Gina, bless her, didn’t know the difference. Drawing herself up and staring intently at Chris she began her lecture. “I think this murder is the work of a serial killer,” she jabbed a figure at him, “and serial killers don’t stop until they’re caught.”

  His eyebrows almost met his receding hairline and for a moment something besides his percentage of the take held his attention.

  Gina jammed her finger at him again. “Some people are just evil, you know.”

  “Geez!” He shot to his feet. “Aren’t things bad enough without this kind of talk? Do you know what a murder will do to business?”

  Gina ignored his interruption and slid halfway off her stool, following him in her excitement. “Criminals don’t stop. Murder, theft, fraud: when people get away with a crime once they go on. Someone has to stop them.”

  “I can’t take any more of this,” Chris said and headed for the door.

  I pointed after him with the paring knife and whispered, “There goes the murderer, a bent and perverted little man. And his mother had unnatural relations with a rodent.”

  Gina wilted against the bar.

  “Hey,” I said, feeling like a rat myself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be making jokes when your friend just died.”

  “She wasn’t my friend,” Gina said, tucking a loose fall of hair back behind her ear. “She was bossy and nasty.” I laughed. “Other than that, how’d you like her?” Gina lifted her head. Tears dampened her periwinkle blue eyes. “My sister was murdered too.”

  Chapter 6

  I looked around for the body and then asked, “When?” thinking like maybe five minutes ago, like there was a dead body real close, stuffed behind a leather chair or a potted palm.

  “Last April,” Gina replied.

  “Is that why this hit you so hard?” She nodded.

  I dried my hands on a towel. “Tell me about your sister.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “She was beautiful.” Her face softened. “She would be one of those women who come to Florida to be improved, although she really didn’t need it. Looking after herself was a full-time job for Sam, the only one she ever had. She took it seriously.” With a bittersweet smile Gina said, “She married well — several times. There was no need for her to work. Marrying well was her career.”

  “Sam called me every Sunday before lunch, no matter what. That was our time.” Her voice was soft, her thoughts in the past. “I knew as soon as she didn’t phone that Sunday morning, something was wrong.” Memory distorted her face.

  “I started calling every half-hour. When I couldn’t get her by four, I phoned the police. They checked out her house and said everything was fine: no broken windows or forced entry, but the next morning the maid found her. The police thought she had opened the door to her killer, someone she knew. He dragged her into the bedroom and…” She blocked her mouth with her fingers.

  I reached out and touched her arm. The bartender’s manual didn’t cover this situation.

  Gina sucked in her lips and then said, “The police haven’t solved it.” Her hands fisted on the bar and anger hardened her sweet face into hard angular lines. “I’m just so infuriated. He put the belt from her robe around Sam’s throat and choked her to death. I can’t stop thinking about how terrified she must have been.”

  “I went down to Asheville. A month passed. Nothing. The police kept telling me they were still working on it. I think they were just waiting for another woman to be strangled, reacting instead of acting, waiting for the killer to make a mistake.”

  She wrapped her hands around the empty coffee mug. “One day in late May I went into the police station to see if there was any news. I saw a man there. When I asked the detectives about him they said they were interested in him but they had to let him go.” Gina’s voice turned harsh and brittle with rage. “They didn’t have enough to charge him.”

  Silence. I waited.

  “So I hired a private detective.”

  “Did he find the killer?”

  She turned the mug around and around in her hands. “Maybe.”

  “That’s why you’re in Jacaranda!”

  She looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t want another woman to go unavenged. Bunny Lehre was like my sister in a way. Oh, I don’t mean Sam was nasty; she was just imperious and self-centered. Life evolved around her. She could be kind and generous to a fault but she also could be demanding. Especially with staff, she wanted what she wanted when she wanted and didn’t listen to excuses.”

  The weather station was issuing a special warning. I raised a finger to halt her story and turned up the radio. The storm was no longer going straight north but had
curved farther east and was now headed north by northeast, spinning closer still towards us.

  “Damn.” I turned down the sound as they started reviewing emergency measures. “It will hit up north of Tampa. We’ll be on the land side. That’s where the wildest winds are. It could get real dangerous. You should go.”

  “Not yet.” She was dry-washing her hands with worry. “I can’t leave yet.”

  “Even if the eye hits a hundred miles north, out here on the island there’s no room for error. Remember those tidal surges.”

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “Why? It’s just plain stupid to wait.”

  “You’re still here, what’s keeping you here?”

  It was a question I wasn’t prepared to answer. “If you don’t want to head to Pennsylvania, come up to Orlando. We can hang out for a couple of days and then come on back.”

  “There’s something I’m thinking about doing,” Gina told me.

  “There’s only one thing to think about doing…leaving.” Of course, the same held true for me. But I might miss Clay if I left too soon. Surely, if he loved me, he’d come back to Jacaranda and evacuate with me? He wouldn’t leave me to run for cover on my own. No matter what he was, Jimmy would have come back for me. Clay would too. “Ye ah, right,” the voice in my head said in disgust. “And while you’re at it, why not hang out here and wait for George Clooney to rescue you? It makes about as much sense.” The thing was, I didn’t need to be rescued, I’d been through this all before, but I just wanted him to be worried about me, to give into that worry and come back for me. And I didn’t want to spend days in a motel on my own. “You need to get out of here,” I told Gina.

  Gina shook her head, “Not yet.” The dry-washing of her hands said leaving was exactly what she wanted to be doing. It wasn’t false bravery or foolishness keeping her there. The weather terrified her. What was stronger than fear?

  Then it hit me. “You think the guy that killed your sister is in Jacaranda, don’t you?” I leaned towards her and whispered, “Who is it? Is it someone from the Sunset?”

  Chapter 7

  The swinging door from the kitchen crashed against the wall. Miguel stopped halfway through, a cooler in each hand and said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” He laughed. “From the looks on your faces you were expecting that Jason dude.” I took a cooler from him and said, “It’s the weather.” “Yeah, it’s really picking up out there. Blowing like hell. I don’t like it.” Short and solid, Miguel had a black fringe of hair cut straight across his forehead. That, and his proud hawklike nose set in a dark face, gave him the look of his Aztec ancestors. “This Myrna is one strange and dangerous lady.”

  “I thought that’s how you liked your women, Miguel.” I slid the cooler under the bar and Miguel set the other one on top of it. I pushed the coolers deeper behind the bar with my foot. No use giving Chris something more to get on me about.

  “This one’s too wild even for me.” He leaned on the bar and watched me add vodka to the blender filled with the pureed melon.

  I pulsed the blender and said, “Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women.” I poured carefully from each of the blenders. “My daddy sings a song about that combination.” I handed the glass to Miguel. “A little drink to toast this wild woman.” He sipped delicately like the connoisseur he was. “What do you think?” Miguel is my harshest critic, hard to please but spot on about what’s needed to make an ordinary drink truly awesome.

  “It may take me a few more glasses to decide,” he said, grinning broadly. “I’ll take this with me and consider it.”

  When he left I turned back to Gina, planted my hands on the bar and said, “Now, who’s the murderer?” She shook her head. “Not yet, I have to be sure.” “Not yet, not yet. That’s all I’m hearing from you.” Her obsession was growing old. Besides, how did I know any of it was real? Oh, the dead woman on the beach was real enough but how did I know that Gina had a murdered sister named Sam? Maybe Gina was trying to get attention, another thing that happened in bars. Not all the stories I heard were true and most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort to figure out which was which.

  Excited voices, loud and infused with the energy from the storm, came from the vestibule. We turned to the door to see who had entered. I patted my hair and squared my shoulders with a bright smile on my face for Clay. The noise faded away as the people entered the restaurant. The last tourists, feeling heroic and already practicing the story they’d tell back home, were coming in for lunch before they fled ahead of the storm. The palms scratching against the storm shutters and the whistling wind would hurry them along.

  My phone rang and I scrambled to answer it, heart racing. “Where are you?” Ruth Ann asked.

  “On the freeway. Can’t really talk, I’ll call from Orlando.” I hit disconnect. “My mother,” I told Gina.

  “You lied.”

  I picked my purse up and put it on the counter. “She expects it. Reality scares the shit out of her.” I dumped the cell phone in my purse. I wasn’t expecting any more calls. “Now what a bout you? When are you going to bust a move and get out of here?”

  “Soon, maybe I’ll just have a bite first so I don’t have to stop on the road.”

  “What do you want?” I asked, not at my most gracious; disappointment does that to me.

  She turned up her hands and shrugged, saying, “Just a ham sandwich.”

  I went off to the kitchen. I didn’t worry about leaving my purse right there on the bar. Why would I? She was rich; she didn’t need to steal from me. Besides I knew her, didn’t I?

  “How many murders have you had in Jacaranda?” she asked when I got back and set the sandwich down in front of her. She didn’t wait for my answer. “Maybe every couple of years some fool gets drunk and kills his wife or best friend.” She turned her palms up and lifted her shoulders. “No mystery. So the police here have no experience. Useless.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” She’d hit my reactor button, another Northerner saying the South just doesn’t measure up, saying everything is better up North. Well maybe everything except the weather. Even the snowbirds had to admit we excel at weather or we wouldn’t get so many of them down here where the only windchill they have to worry about is the one they get off their ice cubes. But they’re quick to point out that nothing else lives up to their expectations, so on pickups all over Florida you see bumper stickers saying “We don’t care how you do it up North.”

  “The man in charge of the investigation is named Styles,” Gina said. “I don’t think he’s very good. He’ll never solve anything.”

  I leaned on the bar and said, “Take it from me, Styles could find fly shit in pepper. Don’t underestimate him just because he’s as bland as Melba toast.”

  Chapter 8

  “You and I have this one thing in common, well two things maybe,” Gina said. “We both love golf and we’ve both been touched by murder.”

  Everyone in town knew about Jimmy, Jacaranda’s golden boy, so they were bound to talk about it; it was common knowledge, but it wasn’t something I talked about. Most things about me are boring or embarrassing, except for this part, the shocking horrible bit. Gina hadn’t been hanging out long at the Sunset when she first brought Jimmy’s murder up.

  A soft pinging at the cash register told me that someone had put in a bar order. I turned away. My hands went about their work while my heart fought down the ache. I could go days without thinking about it, weeks even, and then my treacherous mind would veer into dark corners and my wonky emotions would betray me. Jimmy Travis, my god-awful husband, had been murdered and I’d been the chief suspect in his death.

  Not that I’d believed Jimmy was dead, not for a moment. I’d just thought the huge orange ball of flame that consumed his boat was one more of Jimmy’s little scams. It wasn’t until the police showed me the wedding ring, removed from his severe
d hand that the cops found in the mangroves, that I believed Jimmy was dead. Not until that moment did I finally understand that Jimmy wasn’t going to come through the door and order a beer. Who wants to remember that kind of shit?

  Gwen Morrison, our glamorous blond waitress, sauntered through from the restaurant. “Customers at last. They’re complaining about the shutters being down. Want to watch the storm blow in.” She gave a huff of disgust. “I bet no one else comes in today. Everyone’s either getting ready to evacuate or already gone.”

  I added a martini to the half-carafe of house red. “We’re as stupid as Chris for hanging in.”

  Gwen said, “I’m only here ’cause Bobby is home hammering up plywood like a maniac. By the time I get back, the fool will have everything but the dining-room table nailed down.” Gwen grinned, “And I’m not too sure about that.” Not even a hurricane could dampen Gwen’s spirits.

  “Heading over towards Jacksonville?” Gina asked.

  “Naw, five miles inland, east of the Tamiami, we’ll be okay. As long as it doesn’t actually hit here, and it won’t, we’re safe. ’Sides, Bobby would never leave the place to looters, although why he thinks anyone would want our junk is beyond me.” She hefted the heavy tray onto her shoulder. “I’ll serve these guys then I’m out of here. I want to get off this damn island before the weather gets really nasty.”

  “Take care.”

  “You too, Sherri. See you in a few days.”

  I pointed to Gwen’s retreating back. “You should follow her example,” I told Gina.

  “I’ll go when you go. Now what about Clay? Why aren’t you heading out to meet him?”

  “Clay asked me to come up to Cedar Key but I wanted him to come here so we could evacuate together. But he said he’s too busy securing his job site.”