“I’ve been thinking,” I said. The twitch grew broader. “Maybe she was supposed to meet Sam’s murderer here and didn’t want to come alone.”
He canted his head to the side. “Possible.”
“There’s one thing that worries me about that. Where was his car? How did he get here?”
His forehead wrinkled. I could see he was interested in spite of himself. He considered it and finally said, “Maybe he was already here. Maybe she came back to pick him up.”
I shivered. “He could have killed me as well. That thought is keeping me awake at night.” “Well, it’s over. Trust me, he’s long gone.” No point in arguing. “Do you think Gina’s death has anything to do with the murder of that tourist?” I asked. “What was her name anyway?” “Lehre, Bunny Lehre.”
“Figures.” I jumped to my feet and brushed the sand off my butt.
“What?”
“The name Bunny. I have a theory. The more money, the dumber the name. Who would call their kid that? So what about this Bunny Lehre?”
“The details were all in the paper.”
“Which are?”
“She was a rich woman in her forties, here on holiday, and a temporary member of the Bath and Tennis Club. She’d had some plastic surgery and was recovering. She was strangled with the sash from her bathrobe. Now you know everything.”
“Except who killed her. And the answer is?”
“Early days for an answer.”
I could have screamed in frustration. “You are one impossible man to get information out of.”
“My job is to gather information not give it out.”
“Oh shit in a basket.”
He laughed aloud and started for the door.
“You’re going into the house, aren’t you?” I said, darting sideways around him, blocking the door. “Can I come in?” “You have no place in a police investigation.” I’m good at ignoring anything I don’t want to hear. “I’d really like to see the inside.” I backed up tight against the door with my hands braced on the frame.
He frowned down on me. “This is a police inquiry.”
“And I’m helping you with your inquiries.”
“I don’t think so.” He reached out a hand to move me aside.
“I’ll tell you one more secret if you let me come in with you.”
Chapter 34
“It’s your duty to help the police.” His hands settled on my shoulders to set me aside.
I held onto the door frame and resisted moving. “I will, inside.”
He hesitated. “Stay by the door. This may be a crime scene.” He took a key from his pocket along with a pair of latex gloves.
It was dark as night inside. Freaking out, I stayed within bolting distance of the entry, just leaning my body forward to have a real good look. Styles turned on a table lamp. The room was still gloomy and it smelled stale and musty. What had I expected? More bodies maybe, but there was no blood, no disorder, nothing except sand, which seeped in through the cracks and drifted around the usual shabby mismatched rattan furniture of beach rentals. It was anti-climactic.
Barely interested, he gave everything a brief look before he pulled out the first drawer of a faux wood end table, new the year I was born. I stepped into the room. He didn’t protest.
“Owners are German,” he said. “They rented to Ms. Gina Ross until the end of the month.” He removed a notebook from the second drawer and flicked through the pages before tossing it back. “What is it?” I asked.
“Just who to contact on the island for different services, they’ve got Sammy Horn listed as a plumber. That would be a mistake.” Everyone on the island knew Sammy’s reputation for being useless. Only people from away hired him and they usually ended up paying him to get lost.
“I didn’t know this was Gina’s house when we came out here.” I picked up a month-old Time magazine off the coffee table. “I can’t see anything here that looks like she left it behind. She told me she only had two suitcases. She wouldn’t come back because she’d forgotten a favorite scarf or a bottle of perfume, anything that could be replaced, but she came out for something.”
Unimpressed with my deductions, he slid past me and into a Spartan main bedroom off the living room.
“What else would bring her back?” I demanded.
“Don’t know.” Styles prowled ahead, turning on a light and opening the drawer in the bedside table. “But I’m happy to hear all your theories.” The bed was neatly made. There was nothing personal, no character — no sign that a woman named Gina Ross had ever stepped through the door and that the beach cottage was just patiently waiting for the next tenants to invade and abuse it. In the second bedroom, Styles closed the sliding door on an empty bedroom closet and went into the tiny bathroom off the hall with me right behind him.
In the bathroom, a faint odor of floral talcum powder lingered in the air and the tap dripped onto a big rust stain in the sink.
“Are you sure the owners were in Germany last Wednesday?” I asked.
He looked up from studying the cabinet under the sink. “Teaching your grandma to suck eggs, Ms. Travis?”
I grinned at him. “So what brought Gina here? This place is a dump but they probably get four thousand dollars a month for it. What brought her to Cypress and why did she rent this particular house?” “You tell me,” he said.
“She gave away about as much as you do.” He opened the medicine cabinet. A twisted tube of abandoned toothpaste and an over the counter bottle of crusted pink stomach medicine didn’t seem to interest Styles. I moved out of the doorway to let him back into the hall.
He’d almost reached the door to the kitchen when I gave him my first piece of information. “She hired a private detective to find her sister’s killer.” He stopped and gave me his full attention.
“I think the detective followed the killer here. I’m sure that’s why Gina was in Jacaranda. Find the detective; he’ll know who you’re looking for.”
“Does this detective have a name?”
“She never said.”
He turned away. I followed him into the kitchen. When he turned on the light a cockroach the size of my thumb skittled under the fridge.
“Where’s the detective from?”
“I didn’t ask.” I sniffed the air. “It smells of garbage in here. I bet she forgot to take it out before she left.” I stepped on the pedal of the silver trash can and stared down at the coffee grounds. “Aren’t you going through it for evidence?”
“Nope,” said Styles. He reached for the light switch, waiting for me to leave the room before he switched it off.
“Aren’t you going to fingerprint the place to see if someone else was living here?”
“Nope.”
“Lennie Brisco would.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you watch Law and Order? You should. Get a few tips from Lennie, you could solve Gina’s murder, arrest the guy and have the trial over in an hour.”
In the living room I asked, “Did you find an address book in her suitcase?”
Styles ignored my question and asked, “What’s the other secret?” He gave the ragged living room one last look.
Hadn’t I just told him about the private investigator? Did I owe him another? “Gina knew Bunny Lehre. She didn’t like her.” “And?”
“And she was convinced that the person that killed her sister also killed Bunny Lehre.” I sat on the arm of the beat-up old couch and watched Styles circle the room. “Gina predicted there would be another murder. She just didn’t know she’d be the victim.”
He stopped in front of me. “Anything else?” “Nope. That’s about it.”
He headed for the door.
Outside, there wasn’t any more to see than there had been inside, but we walked around the house to the gulf side of the cottage.
He kept his well-shined Oxfords away from the deepest drifts.
Styles wrinkled his nose. “Dead fish.”
“Didn’t you have fish back in New Jersey?”
“If we did I didn’t have to smell them.” He so didn’t approve of this untidy beach thing.
“Was anything missing from Gina’s belongings?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Well, was there anything there you’d expect to find but didn’t?”
“Interesting way of looking at things; I was just checking through what was there. What do you think should have been there?”
“Well,” I stirred the sand with my toe. My scarlet polish was showing white at its base. That would give me something to fill my empty evening. I looked up at Styles to see how he’d take my ideas. “I would think there should be a thick file on her sister’s murder, notes from the private detective that Gina hired. Maybe a file on who she thought did it. Clippings of other murders. Plus, she said she’d been reading up on serial killers. I’d think there would have been books or clippings, maybe even printouts from the Internet along with notes she’d made.”
Detective Styles looked like he had a bad case of heartburn. “I didn’t find anything like that.”
“Who did she know down here?” I asked. “Did she make any friends besides Bunny Lehre?”
“You’ve been thinking about this too much.” He did up the top button on his jacket and pulled down on the white cuffs. “Why don’t you go back to tending bar and leave this to me?”
I hopped over a sand drift. “Have you seen the Sunset? It’ll be months before I pull a pint in there.”
He turned away but stopped and looked back. “Take a vacation.” “I can’t.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I said. I shoved my hands deep in the pockets of my jeans. “Everyone is supposed to love to travel and want to be somewhere they aren’t. Not me. Where I am is fine with me. I get real antsy when I leave Jac. I actually thought of a vacation, of going to North Carolina to see my mother and sisters.” Running for cover was what I was thinking about. Finding somewhere that Gina’s murderer would never find me. I gave my head a shake. “Too much togetherness and I can’t breathe when I’m more than a few miles from the gulf.”
With a fleeting smile he said, “Go see Clay.”
Was there anyone in town who didn’t know about Clay and me? And were they all thinking I was letting a real good thing slip away?
Chapter 35
The small, mostly dormant, section of my brain where common sense resides said, “Listen to all this good advice you’re getting, call Clay and yell truce.” The everyday working part of my brain replied, “I’m still angry.” Over what, I wasn’t sure but I knew I was damn mad anyway.
And I wasn’t done with Gina’s murder the way everyone thought I should be. I went to the library and read everything I could find on Bunny Lehre’s killer.
There was a picture of her. I tapped it with a fingernail and said, “Gin and tonic.” In a bar, most of the time, you remember people by the booze they drink and it’s often the only name you have for them. Bunny Lehre was gin and tonic. I remembered another thing about her. Her tips were small when I served her, large when one of the guys did.
The article also said Bunny Lehre was in Jacaranda attending Dr. Travis’s clinic and a nurse by the name of Laura Bentley, a nurse supplied by Dr. Travis to stay with his patient post-op, was with her at the time of her death.
The victim had been strangled with an article of her own clothing. Just like Gina’s sister.
I phoned Laura Bentley. She answered on the first ring sounding a little breathless and said, “I’m just getting ready to leave for work. I can see you for a minute if you come right over.” I went right over.
Close to the Tropicana Apartments, the low concrete building was two storys high and suffered from poor construction, neglect and years of salt air. Dampness had gotten into the plaster finish and huge chunks were flaking off, giving the building a diseased look.
Nurse Bentley was in her late fifties, plump and well-scrubbed-looking, with only a hint of lipstick. She was dressed in white nylon pants and a white nylon top sprinkled with tiny pink flowers and she wore white trainers, as close to a traditional nursing uniform as you could find today. A watch was pinned to her impressive chest.
“I can’t understand why you want to talk to me,” she said, waving a plump hand towards a wingback chair and settling herself in a platform rocker across from me. “I can’t begin to guess why you’re here.” Her smile was sweet.
That made two of us but I didn’t let that stop me. Stumbling through life without a clue is par for the course for me. I tried the sympathy ploy. “I knew Ms. Lehre, the Queen of Mean. I can’t imagine having her for a patient.”
The rhythm of the rocker increased. Her lips pursed. “She was an unhappy woman.” A well-trained professional, she wasn’t going to be tricked into saying anything nasty about a patient.
“All the same, she did like to spread joy around, didn’t she?” No answer.
“I read in the paper that you were staying with her at the time of her death.”
The rocker hesitated. “I wasn’t there when she was murdered.” The rocking resumed. “I was away from the house.” “A good thing, you might have been killed too.” Her rocker slowed and she said softly, “I’ve thought of that.” Her right hand fluttered up around her neck as though she were imagining having a ligature tighten there. I wondered if her nights were as disturbed as mine: her sleep stolen by images of death. “My goodness, I never want to be that close to evil again.”
“How did Bunny Lehre come to hire you?”
“Mrs. Lehre employed me through Dr. Travis to stay with her for seventy-two hours after her surgery. That’s normal.”
“But you left the house?”
Reluctantly, she admitted this, “Yes.” Her hands worried the vee of her blouse. “Mrs. Lehre got a call that upset her.” Nurse Bentley pulled down on her top and smoothed it over her round stomach. “She wanted some medication to calm her.”
“Did you give it to her?”
The rocker went faster. “It wasn’t a drug that had been prescribed by Dr. Travis.” She spoke firmly, sure of herself now.
“But it was there in the house?” The rocker slowed, a cautious, “Yes.” “You wouldn’t give it to her?”
“She went to the bathroom cupboard and got it herself.” She tipped up her watch. “I must be going.” She pushed out of the rocker.
I stayed where I was. “And you left the house?”
“I went into Jacaranda to do some shopping for her.”
“What was the call about that got her so upset.”
“Money. She was swearing at someone and saying they hadn’t heard the last of her and she wanted an audit. That’s all I know.” She moved for the door. “I have another private duty case to go to.”
I had no choice but to follow her while saying, “ I understand this was the second surgery. There was one eight weeks before.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she answered, opening the door. I held out my hand. “Thank you for seeing me.” “You’re very welcome.” She smiled warmly. She started to speak then hesitated, and then she said, “I think it’s nice of you to want to help Dr. Travis and I’m glad you’ve made up with your in-laws. Families shouldn’t be separated. Mrs. Lehre didn’t have a case against him, you know. You needn’t have worried. If it had gone to court he would have won. But a plastic surgeon lives on his reputation and she could have done him a lot of damage. I suppose his insurance would have settled with her to stop the gossip.”
Chapter 36
For most people Florida is entertainment and holidays, high rises on sandy beaches, images seen in brochures.
My Florida also has long flat dusty roads between
moist ditches full of arrowroots and pickle weeds, beyond which are dense palmetto jungles topped by towering pines. In the dark and humid green underbrush small black feral pigs root for nuts and panthers still stalk their prey.
There are miles of open pasture where long-horned cattle, raw-boned and lean, graze with small white cattle egrets sitting on their back, picking at the vermin that bedevil the beef. Further inland, thousands of acres of the interior are given over to citrus groves and fields of vegetables.
Across the north is horse country, white fences enclosing rolling hills of emerald green pastures. Small freshwater lakes and ponds dot the whole state, which in turn is ringed by the ocean that draws the tourists. You can’t say that Florida is this or that — it’s all of them, something different for every person that crosses the state line. And I love it all.
Tamiami Trail runs down the west side of the state from Tampa, across Alligator Alley to Miami, a taste of Florida offering car dealerships, strip malls and high rises with occasional brief glimpses of the gulf. If you live on the west coast Tamiami is your life line.
Down Tamiami, south of Jacaranda, is the restaurant Peter Bryant owns. Big Daddy’s Oyster Bar is at the mouth of Caloocha Creek. A low-slung gray wood building, it sits on stilts above the marshy creek bed. A broad veranda across the front is filled with white rocking chairs where people shelter under red chili lights and wait for tables. It’s a mellow crowd. On a good night every chair will be swaying with potential diners who never grow impatient because there’s bar service out on the veranda.
I got to Big Daddy’s just after four but already those chili peppers were shining and the early bird special folks were rocking up a storm with the first of their two-for-one drinks clutched in their hands. Oh yeah, they were well on their way to being mellow.
I found Peter and Brian beneath a blue umbrella advertising light beer out on the huge deck overlooking the grassy creek.
“Hi,” I said as I passed their table on my way to the railing to drink in the million-dollar view. A mile from the gulf, the lazy waterway had spread itself out into a broad estuary. Seventy yards across the marsh dotted with wading herons and ibis crouched a dilapidated old trailer park. Sheltering beneath live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, it looked pleasingly charming. Even the rickety stick-like tilting gray docks, reaching out into the water away from the metal trailers, were beautiful.
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