Murder Key

by H. Terrell Griffin

  I was not happy with myself. I had crafted a self-image that ran to the macho, and I was feeling a lot like a wuss tonight. I’m not sure what a wuss is, but I think it’s the opposite of macho.

  I had been to war, killed some people, got shot up, survived and lived a pretty good life. A few months before, I thought my life was over when three men tried to kill me on Egmont Key. I killed two of them, took some injuries to my own priceless hide, and never looked back. I was glad they were dead, and not me. It seemed like a good trade off, and I didn’t suffer the remorse that I’ve always heard good cops feel when they have to shoot some scumbag.

  But now I was scared. I didn’t like that feeling. Where had my old macho self gone? Perhaps it was just the result of that instant when I knew with absolute certainty that I was about to die. In every other time I’d faced death, I’d been moving, in action, trying to save my skin. At Tiny’s, I was frozen in place, unable to react. I’d waited for death for what seemed like a long time, although it was only a moment. It scared the hell out of me. That was an emotion I hadn’t felt in years.

  I knew I was going to have to get over this. Whoever tried to kill me was not likely to give up. I had no idea who wanted me dead, or why. But I figured if I was to survive, I’d have to find out who and why and put a stop to it.

  I owned a thirty-eight caliber snub-nosed revolver, the same kind of handgun that had almost killed me a few hours earlier. I hadn’t fired it in years. I took it out of the safe in my closet and spent an hour cleaning it. I clamped the holster to my belt and practiced drawing and dry firing the gun. I felt a little bit like Tom Mix, the old movie cowboy, but I was getting the hang of it. Old habits return quickly, and I’d once kept a weapon close at all times.

  Several years before, the Florida legislature had passed a law that allowed any citizen who took a one-day course and passed a perfunctory test on the use and safety of firearms, to be issued a concealed weapons permit. I had one. I thought it was time I took advantage of it.

  The phone rang. I answered.

  “Mr. Royal? This is Ken Brown at the Herald Tribune.” I hung up. It rang again. I ignored it.

  I knew some of the islanders would be worried when they heard about Tiny’s, and they’d be calling. I’d let the answering machine pick up, and I’d call my friends back later. The press could go to hell.

  I lay down on the bed with my revolver on the bedside table. The front door was dead-bolted and the sliding glass doors to my balcony overlooking Sarasota Bay were secured with steel rods in the slide-ways. I felt relatively safe as I drifted off to sleep.

  The dreams came that night, murky with dread and remorse. I hadn’t had them in a long time, but I knew the men knocking on my psychic door during that long night. I woke with the dawn, glad the specters were gone, but knowing they’d be back and that I could do nothing about it, except drink myself into a stupor. I didn’t want to start that again.

  37

  Murder Key

  FOUR

  The Blue Dolphin Café sits in the middle of the Centre Shops, a small strip mall with a tree lined parking lot near the north end of Longboat Key. Bill Lester was waiting in a booth when I came in. I was wearing a light windbreaker over a golf shirt, cargo shorts and boat shoes. Bill was in uniform, the two stars on his collar glinting in the fluorescent light.

  He said, “I hope you’ve got a permit for that thing.”

  I looked down at my belt line. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only to a trained observer, such as myself. Permit?”

  “Yeah, I got one. Want to see it?”

  “Your word’s good enough for me, Matt. Do you really think you need a gun?”

  “After last night, I’ll feel better just having it.”

  “Well, try not to shoot any innocent bystanders.”

  “Bill, I appreciate the cops at my place last night. I’m really spooked by this. Have you found out anything?”

  “No, and you know it’s being handled by the Manatee Sheriff’s Office. You’re not one of their favorite people.

  Longboat Key is a small island, about ten miles long and a quarter-mile wide. The Town of Longboat Key encompasses the whole island, but it’s divided by the county line that runs across the key at its middle. Manatee County is to the north, and Sarasota County lies to the south. When the very rare major crime is committed on Longboat Key, the Sheriff’s Office of the county in which the crime occurred handles the investigation. The Longboat Key Police Department is in charge however, and the deputies report to Bill Lester.

  “I’m not sure why I’m in such bad favor at the Manatee Sheriff’s Office,” I said. “I did what I had to do to save an innocent man. Banion was a bad guy.”

  I’m a lawyer by training, but I retired early and moved to Longboat Key. Some months before, I’d come out of retirement and tried a case defending Logan Hamilton from a charge of murdering his girlfriend. In the process I’d destroyed the reputation of a drunken Manatee County detective named Michael Banion, and Logan had been acquitted. Banion was a mean drunk who should have been put out to pasture years before.

  Bill said, “I think everybody was happy to see Banion retire, but the sheriff thinks he should have been the one to make that happen. Some of the deputies think you were overly aggressive in taking the guy on.”

  “Do you agree with them?”

  “Hell, no. And most cops I know think you did all of us a service. But there are those in Manatee County who spent their careers with Banion, and they feel that you brought about his death.”

  Two months after his retirement, Banion had put his service revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The psychological scars on his buddies, and on me, were still fresh.

  “So, you don’t think Manatee is going to go out of its way to find the shooter?” I asked.

  “They’re good cops, and they’ll do their jobs, but I don’t think anybody’s going to be putting in overtime on this one.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “Can you think of anyone who’d want you dead?”

  “Maybe some of Banion’s friends?”

  “I thought of that, but I don’t think he really had any friends. The deputies are just mad at you because he was a cop, not because they gave a shit about him. And they’re good cops. None of them would commit murder to avenge a dirt bag like Banion.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Be careful. I can keep my men at your place for a few days, but I’m sure you don’t want them following you around.”

  “I appreciate the effort, Bill, but those guys have other things to do. If the shooter wants me, he’ll just wait until you pull the guard off and come for me then. We might as well give him his chance sooner rather than later. Maybe Manatee will come up with something. Is there anything new on the dead Mexicans?”

  “No. The survivor is still in a coma. Sarasota County is investigating, but they think the forensics point to the survivor as the killer. Maybe they’ll know more when he wakes up. If he wakes up.”

  “Has anybody figured out where the boat came from?”

  “Not yet. It didn’t have any registration numbers, but they’re trying to track it through the serial number on the transom.”

  “Will you let me know if they figure it out?”

  “Sure.”

  We talked about fishing as we ate our breakfast. After Bill left, I lingered over a last cup of coffee, reading the Sarasota Herald Tribune. A front-page article reported the previous evening’s fracas at Tiny’s, identifying me as the intended victim, and stating that “Mr. Royal was unavailable for comment.”

  I’d be getting calls all day from concerned friends, and I didn’t feel up to discussing the damn thing. I didn’t know who was trying to kill me or why. Maybe it was some kind of horrible mistake, and the threat would go away. I heard a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me not to get my hopes up, that somebody was really trying to do me in. There was obviously somebod
y out there who didn’t think I was as good a guy as I thought I was.

  I paid my tab and left the restaurant. I drove to a public firing range on the mainland and put in a little practice time. I needed it.

  37

  Murder Key

  FIVE

  I had once been a trial lawyer in Orlando. I’d always loved the law, the give and take of the high-stakes poker game that a trial usually turned out to be. I missed that part of the practice, but there was too much of it I didn’t miss.

  The law had lost its high calling and turned into a business where the name of the game wasn’t justice, but billable hours. I mourned the law’s loss of its nobility, and I quit. I moved aboard a boat moored at a marina on Longboat Key, and spent much of my time getting drunk. A good man pulled me out of that losing proposition and talked me back into the practice to handle his case. We won, and I ended up with enough money to retire completely, buy a condo on the bay, and spend the rest of my days without the need to work for a living. I didn’t have enough to live lavishly, but I was comfortable, and that suited me.

  The key had become my home, and I had been accepted into the community of friends who lived there year-round. It was a good life of fishing, boating, and drinking with people who had come to the key from all over the world. Our circle included wealthy retired industrialists, working professionals, government employees and blue-collar workers who clung to their lives in the Village, the oldest settlement on the key. People cared about each other, rallied around in times of need, and never let the widows and widowers get too lonely.

  The rhythms of life beat more slowly on our small island, cosseted as we are by our isolation from the world at large, protected by bridges and bay and white sand beaches.

  In the gathering dawn, the sun rises from behind the mainland and gives our slice of paradise its reason for being. At the end of the day, when the sea birds head for their rookeries and the beach stragglers watch in amazement, old Sol sinks slowly into the Gulf, clothing its surface in brilliant colors and, on rare occasions, a quick flash of green that bedazzles his worshipers.

  It’s during the interval between those times, the alpha and omega of our day in the sun, that the islanders live and love and play and congratulate themselves for abiding in paradise. And when the sun goes down, we move from the beaches and the bay and into the bars. We drink and talk and tell the stories of our former lives in cold places, faraway.

  And when death comes to one, the others gather round the survivors, like elephants in the wild, to comfort the grieving and jolly them back to life.

  With each dawn, the cycle begins anew. Our key is a small place on the edge of a great ocean, and perhaps it is the awareness of our own insignificance that brings us a kind of frenzied serenity.

  I was content. Life was good on Longboat Key.

  I was ruminating on this as I drove from the firing range in eastern Manatee County and across the Cortez Bridge to Anna Maria Island. I turned south where Cortez Road ends at the Gulf. I drove over the Longboat Pass Bridge onto Longboat Key. Two miles south of the bridge, I turned into my condo complex.

  I called Logan, and he told me he was going to Tiny’s to watch some college football on the giant screen TV, and then would probably go to the Hilton for a drink to wind up the evening. I told him I thought I’d stay in with a good book.

  I was sitting on my balcony, halfway through Bob Morris’ latest novel. The phone rang occasionally, and I let the machine answer. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to anybody. The sun was low in the western sky, its rays reflecting off the cumulus that hung high over the bay, giving me a vision of pastel colors lightly daubed on fleecy clouds. The bay was still, the temperature in the low seventies. The roar of a go-fast boat assailed my ears as it headed south, its wake disturbing the wading birds on the edge of the channel. My cell phone rang. Few people had that number, so I answered.

  “Matt, it’s Billy. I hate to bother you, but we’ve got a pretty big crowd, and Logan isn’t holding up too well, if you know what I mean.”

  My old friend Billy was the bartender at the Hilton, and I knew exactly what he meant.

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said.

  “Thanks buddy.” He hung up.

  I slipped on my boat shoes and headed south.

  * * * * *

  The Hilton has an outside bar with a clear view of the beach about 200 feet away. Billy was mixing drinks as he’d done for twenty years behind the same bar. He was somewhat of a tourist attraction himself, as people from all over the world would return year after year to visit with Billy and have a few with the locals. He and Logan had been friends since they’d first gotten out of the Army as the war in Vietnam wound down.

  The sun was beginning its daily dip into the Gulf. Everyone at the bar, except Logan, was turned on his stool watching it. It was an event that never failed to move even the most cynical locals. I always watched for the flash of green that is said to show on the horizon just as the sun sinks finally beneath the surface of the Gulf. I had seen it once in Key West, but never here.

  The bar was full, and Logan sat at his usual place, squeezed between Mike Nink and an obese woman in a bathing suit done in a garish floral pattern. Her butt was the size of Indiana, and it appeared to be devouring the bar stool upon which it was perched. She had obviously been there awhile.

  The woman was leaning in close to Logan. “I’m jazzed, jazzed. Aren’t you?” she said.

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” asked Logan, as he leaned away from the boozy breath of the tourist from hell.

  “Jazzed. You know. I just left Milwaukee this morning and it was snowing, and now I’m sitting at a bar on the beach wearing a bathing suit. I call it the Longboat Jazz. You know, excitement, happiness, warmth. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Jeez,” murmured Logan. He had that look on his face that I knew well. He’d had one Scotch past what should have been his limit, and he was about to unload on the fat lady.

  “Logan,” I said. “Drink up and let’s go see Sam at Pattigeorge’s for a nightcap.”

  “Okay. ‘Bout time you got here. Jazzed. Christ, where the hell do these people come from?”

  He took a big swallow of his drink, got unsteadily off his stool, and started for the parking lot. Billy mouthed me a thank you from behind the bar. The fat woman gave Logan the finger.

  Pattigeorge’s was only about a mile down Gulf of Mexico Drive, but I didn’t think Logan would make it. The key was getting crowded with the snowbirds coming in for the winter, and our main street was packed with cars. It wouldn’t take much for a driver with too much scotch in him to cause an accident.

  My Explorer was parked in the lot bordering the beach. Logan was waiting on the passenger’s side for me to open my door and unlock his. Suddenly, the rear door window on my side exploded. Almost simultaneously I heard the crack of a high powered rifle.

  Logan and I both hit the ground, our military training taking over. I was lying on my stomach, trying to melt into the pavement. I could see under the car, Logan on the other side, hugging his piece of asphalt. He began to rise slowly, and I yelled, “What are you doing? Get down.”

  “I’m trying to see where the shot came from,” he said, sounding completely sober.

  He was on his feet, his head poking over the hood. “The shooter’s gone,” said Logan. I heard the roar of marine engines on the Gulf.

  I stood and watched a dark blue go-fast boat of about thirty feet coming on plane as it headed for deep water. Dusk was on us, and what light was left was quickly disappearing.

  “The shooter was in that boat,” Logan said.

  “The guy from Tiny’s?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he wasn’t wearing a cast, and that guy definitely had a broken arm last night.”

  “Who the hell are they?”

  “I’d sure like to find out.”

  We heard sirens headed our way. A cruiser and an unma
rked screeched into the parking lot, their blue lights throwing a strange pattern in the darkening night. The sirens stopped abruptly as the cruisers’ engines died. Someone in the bar had apparently called 911.

  “You guys all right?” asked Bill Lester as he strode toward us, gun drawn and hanging down along his right thigh.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Whoever it was is gone.”

  Logan began to tell him about the shot and the blue boat. When he finished, Lester looked at me, and said, “Matt, do you know a lawyer named Dwight Conley?”

  “Never heard of him. Why?”

  “Conley was an immigration lawyer in Sarasota. He was jogging on the beach on the southern tip of Longboat early this morning, and somebody shot him through the head with a high-powered rifle. A witness down the beach heard the rifle shot and saw a dark blue or black go-fast headed straight out into the Gulf.”

  “You think it was the same guy?” asked Logan.

  “Seems reasonable,” said Bill

  I said, “The shooter must be a hell of a shot if he could hit somebody in the head from that distance. The way the bottom slopes up out of New Pass, his boat must have been fifty yards from the beach. He was a lot closer to me and he missed. Maybe he was just trying to scare me for some reason.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that, Matt. He might have caught a little swell that threw his aim off. But I don’t think he was just trying to scare you.”

  “How would the shooter have known I was here?” I told Lester how I had come to be at the Hilton that evening.