For Whom The Funeral Bell Tolls

by Livia J. Washburn

  The moon was high enough to scatter silvery light, and the white sand reflected the glow so that while it wasn't as bright as day out here, we had no trouble seeing as we walked along. Tom and I both took off our shoes to make walking in the sand easier. I had my sandals in my right hand, his shoes were in his left. That made it easy for him to reach over with his right hand and clasp my left. There was nothing awkward about it. It felt as natural as can be.

  "This is beautiful," I murmured. The waves whispered in on our left, and stars twinkled in the black sky overhead. Key West gave off enough light pollution to wash out some of them, but I could still see a lot more stars here than were ever visible back home in Atlanta. "There are so many of them."

  Tom seemed to know what I was talking about. He said, "You should see them sometime when you're out on the ocean or the Gulf, far away from anything. The whole sky is covered with little pinpoints of light. It's amazing."

  "I'm sure it is."

  He came to a stop, and we turned toward each other. He said, "Amazing," again and leaned toward me.

  His shoes hit the ground, and my sandals joined them a second later. Our arms went around each other.

  A handsome man, a beach, moonlight, a million stars . . . It would have been going against fate if I didn't kiss him.

  So I did, and it was every bit as good as I expected it to be.

  But no matter how good it was – and my heart was pounding when we broke that kiss, let me tell you – I knew I was barreling right toward a mistake. Two more days and I'd be headed home, and I just wasn't the type for a one night stand. Or even a two night stand, for that matter. After that I might not ever see Tom Brandenton again.

  Until the next time I brought a tour group to Key West, I reminded myself.

  Still, I didn't much believe in long-distance relationships, either. There were just too many things working against it, no matter how good it felt to have Tom's arms around me and the taste of his lips lingering on mine.

  "I . . . need to go back in," I whispered. "To my room. Alone."

  "Are you sure about that?" he asked me.

  Good grief, no, I wasn't sure! That's what I wanted to yell. But the rational, reasonable part of my brain made me say, "Yeah, I'm sure."

  "Okay." He rested his hands on my shoulders. "We had a nice walk on the beach, anyway, didn't we?"

  "Really nice," I said.

  "And you're not leaving for a couple of days yet. Maybe we can do this again."

  "Maybe," I said, although I thought it would probably be a mistake on my part if we did. I might not be able to be this strong again.

  "Can I walk you back to the main house?" he asked.

  "You'd better," I told him. I bent and picked up my sandals, he got his shoes, and we turned back toward the trees and the path to the house.

  He took my hand again. I didn't pull away.

  The next two days, I thought, were going to be mighty interesting.

  Chapter 10

  I made it back to my room without my resolve weakening enough to make me give in to what I really wanted to do. I even went to sleep without too much tossing and turning first, although I was a little restless.

  Sometime during the night something woke me. I rolled over, blinked bleary-eyed, and sat up to look toward the window. I even got out of bed and walked over to the window to move the shade aside and look out. Nothing but darkness relieved here and there by the lights in the trees, which had been turned down so that they were only dim glows. I listened and heard only the faint hum of the air-conditioning. Not having any idea what had disturbed my sleep, I went back to bed and crawled under the sheet.

  I didn't even glance at the clock, which was on the other side of the bed from the window.

  I dozed off again without much trouble, and nothing else bothered me until somebody started pounding on my door like he was trying to knock it down. When I jerked upright in the bed, I glanced toward the window and saw light coming around the shade. It was morning.

  And something was wrong. I could tell that from the urgency of whoever was hammering at my door.

  I stood up, grabbed my robe, and shrugged into it. I dragged my fingers through my hair, trying to get some of the sleep tangles out of it, as I stumbled toward the door. When I got there, I called, "Who is it?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I could have looked through the little peephole to see who was being so heavy-handed.

  The reply came back before I could do that. "It's Luke, Miz D. We've got trouble."

  "Oh, Lord," I muttered. No tour ever goes off without a single hitch, but for some reason I'd sort of been holding my breath ever since we'd gotten to Key West, hoping that nothing too bad would happen. From the sound of Luke's voice, that hope had been futile.

  I unfastened the deadbolt and pulled the door open. He stood there with his hair tangled from sleep, too. He had dressed in a hurry, pulling on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and sticking his feet in sandals.

  "What is it?" I asked him. "Tell me somebody's not dead. Please."

  "I don't know about dead, but somebody's bound to be hurt. The cops are here, and an ambulance, and that guy Tom Bradenton told me to find you. I ran into him in the lobby when I went down to see what was going on. The sirens woke me up."

  I had slept right through them.

  "Tom didn't tell you what was going on?" I asked.

  Luke shook his head. "No, just that I should find you and bring you down to the beach."

  If I'd been the type to cuss, I'd have let loose with a few blue howlers just then. I didn't know what had happened, but I was sure it was bad enough. The fact that it had happened on the beach where I had gone walking with Tom . . . where we had kissed . . . just made it that much worse.

  "Hang on," I told Luke. "I'll be ready in a minute."

  I shut the door. The clothes I'd been wearing the night before were still handy, lying on a chair. I got into them as fast as I could, grabbed my phone from the bedside table, and stuck it in my pocket as I was stepping into my sandals. Then I opened the door and said to Luke, "Let's go."

  I didn't hear any commotion as we went downstairs, so I supposed all the sirens had gone silent. Nobody else was moving around the main house, either, which told me the hour was early. We passed a clock in the lobby. A glance told me it was a few minutes after six o'clock in the morning. The sun was up, but just barely.

  Luke groaned as we went outside. "Does it have to be so bright already?" he said.

  "Let me guess. You did some drinkin' along with your poker playin' last night?"

  "I didn't think I drank that much. I guess I'm not really used to rum."

  "Yo ho ho and a bottle of," I said.

  "Don't joke about it, Miz D," he pleaded. "That sunlight's like knives in my eyes."

  "You'll get used to it," I told him.

  I didn't explain that I was joking only to take my mind off what we were about to find out. I knew it couldn't be anything good, and I had a hunch it was going to be pretty bad.

  Several police cars and an ambulance, all with their lights flashing, were parked in the lot to the side of the main house, but I didn't see anybody around them. I heard the crackle of radio chatter coming from the vehicles. Luke and I kept moving.

  Tom Bradenton came around a bend in the path ahead of us. He looked shaken and upset, and when he spotted us his face grew even more haggard. He held up a hand and said, "Delilah, I think you'd better stop right there."

  "You sent Luke to find me and bring me to the beach," I reminded him.

  "Yeah, but now I think you don't need to see this," he told me with a shake of his head.

  That made me angry. If the problem was something that involved me or one of my clients, then I didn't want anybody trying to keep me out of it. It wasn't like this was my first rodeo, either. I had been knee-deep in trouble several times in the past.

  "No offense, Tom, but get out of my way," I said. "I need to know what's going on, so I can deal with it."r />
  Tom shook his head again and said, "There's no dealing with this."

  Dreading what I was going to see, I moved past him and walked quickly toward the beach. My stride was firm and determined, but it was definitely at odds with what was going on inside me. A big part of me wanted to turn around and run the other way as fast as I could. The responsible part wouldn't let me do that . . . damn it.

  The trees opened up on the broad stretch of white sand that ran as far in both directions as the eye could see. Against that pristine beauty, the thing that lay on the sand about halfway from where I stood to the water was shockingly ugly and out of place. It was a man's body, lying on its back. That would have been bad enough by itself.

  The fact that the body didn't have a head, or a whole head, anyway, made it even worse. Much worse.

  I stopped in my tracks and swallowed hard. I wasn't the queasy type, but if I had eaten recently, I think I would have lost it then.

  As it was, Luke came up beside me, stopped just as abruptly as I had, and gulped a couple of times before he turned and dashed off into the trees.

  My heart pounded so hard it felt like it might burst right out of my chest. I willed myself to stay calm and glanced around as I heard a foostep. Tom came up behind me. I thought the clothes on the body looked familiar, but I said, "Do . . . do you know who it is?"

  "It's Mr. Harvick," he said. "That's what I heard one of the cops say when he checked the ID in the poor guy's wallet."

  "Walter," I whispered.

  Several men were standing around the body, not getting too close, all of them in police uniforms except for one. He hunkered closer to Walter, obviously studying the scene intently. The ambulance crew stood off to the side, waiting with a gurney and a body bag.

  Something else caught my attention. I said, "What's that lying on the sand beside him? Is it . . ."

  "A shotgun," Tom said. "That's right. From the looks of it, he, uh, put the barrels in his mouth and used his toe to, uh . . ."

  He shook his head, so horrified that he was unable to finish.

  "Just like Hemingway," I said, and even I could hear how hollow my voice sounded.

  "His idol, I guess."

  I turned to look at Tom. "But that happened in Idaho, not Key West."

  "I know. It doesn't make sense to me, either."

  I forced my brain to start working again and asked, "Who found him?"

  "Those two elderly ladies in your group. Mrs. Horton and Mrs. Dunn. They said they got up early to come down here and walk on the beach before it got crowded."

  The beach wouldn't be crowded today, I thought, except with cops. It was a crime scene now.

  Then I spared a moment to think about how terrible that must have been for Doris and Julia. They must have been shocked beyond belief to find Walter like that. I would have to talk to them as soon as possible and offer what little comfort I could.

  "Do you have any idea when it happened?"

  "The ladies came down here about thirty minutes before sun-up," Tom said. "Sometime before that is all I know."

  I thought about being woken up in the middle of the night. Something had disturbed me, and a shotgun blast is pretty loud. Could I have heard it all the way from the beach, even with the window in my room closed? It was possible, I thought. Under the circumstances, maybe even likely.

  I wished I had thought to look at the clock while I was up. Telling the cops that I woke up during the night wouldn't mean anything. Telling them that I woke up at a specific hour might have been helpful if they were able to establish an approximate time of death for Walter.

  Luke joined us at the edge of the beach. His step was none too steady and he still looked a little green. "Man," he said, "I've never seen anything like that before . . . and I never want to see anything like it again!" He had to swallow. "Is that Mr. Harvick?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Poor Walter."

  "Why would anybody do something like that to themselves? I just don't get it."

  Neither did I. In all the time I'd spent with him, Walter hadn't once struck me as suicidal. Arrogant, opinionated, downright unpleasant at times, sure, but not suicidal.

  The man who had been studying the body stood up and came toward us. Like so many men in Key West, he wore a lightweight shirt with bright flowers on it, along with khaki trousers and tennis shoes. He was black, probably a couple of inches over six feet, with a broad spread of shoulders and a pleasantly ugly face. As he came up to us, he reached in his pocket and took out a leather folder that he opened to reveal a badge.

  "Detective Zimmer, Key West PD," he introduced himself. "Are you Ms. Dickinson?"

  "That's right," I told him. In khakis and flowery shirt, he didn't look much like a cop, but that was Key West for you.

  "Good," he said in his deep, powerful voice. "I've got some questions for you."

  Chapter 11

  "His name was Walter Harvick," I said, "and the credit card number he gave me was good. That's really all I know about him, Detective."

  "Surely you know more than that, Ms. Dickinson," Zimmer said. "You spent a day and a half with the man, isn't that right?"

  "Only part of the time. I met him in Miami day before yesterday, when my tour group assembled to come down here, but we haven't been together all the time since then."

  We were still standing at the edge of the beach, but I had turned so that I didn't have to look in the direction where Walter's body was. Zimmer didn't seem to mind. He had asked Luke and Tom to go back to the house and wait for him there. I wasn't sure why he didn't conduct his interview with me at the house, too, unless he was suspicious of me for some reason and wanted me close to the body in the hope that it would make me uncomfortable.

  It certainly did, make me uncomfortable, that is, even though Zimmer had no reason to be suspicious of me. I guess he didn't know that, though.

  "How did Mr. Harvick behave during the trip?" Zimmer asked now. "Did he get along with all the other tourists?"

  I hesitated. I know I shouldn't have, but I couldn't help myself. And I could tell by the flicker of interest in Zimmer's eyes that he noticed, too.

  "Mr. Harvick didn't really have that much to do with the other tourists," I said. "I guess he got along all right with them."

  "Except the ones he had problems with," Zimmer said. "Or was there only one?"

  "There weren't really any problems. Just minor disagreements. Irritations. You know, the kind of things that happen when people who don't really know each other have to spend time together."

  "Tell me about them," Zimmer urged.

  I could see that he wasn't going to be satisfied until I told him what he wanted to know, so I said, "Mr. Harvick got into a little argument with one of my other clients at the Hemingway House yesterday. But it didn't amount to anything. There were hardly any harsh words exchanged."

  Zimmer took a small notebook and a pen from his shirt pocket. The detective's best friends. "What was this person's name? The one Harvick had the argument with?"

  "Matt Altman. He's here with his wife Aimee. They're not much more than kids. Haven't been married long."

  "Honeymooners, eh?" Zimmer wrote in the notebook and shook his head. "You'd think they'd have better things to do than squabble with another tourist."

  "Yeah, you'd think so," I agreed. "But like I said, it didn't really amount to much."

  "Who else had trouble with Harvick?"

  "I wouldn't really call it trouble. He had a little romance going on with one of the other tour members."

  "Male or female?"

  "Female," I said. "As far as I could tell, Mr. Harvick was straight."

  "Uh-huh. What's the woman's name?"

  "Veronica Scanlon. She goes by Ronnie," I added, although I didn't see how knowing that would do Zimmer any good.

  "Lots of arguments between them? Hurt feelings?"

  "Not really. It's just that I don't think Walter took their relationship quite as seriously as Ronnie did. You can't really blame him f
or that. They'd known each other less than twelve hours when it started."

  Zimmer wrote in his notebook again. When he finished, I said, "Can I ask you something, Detective?"

  "Go ahead."

  "From the way you're talking, it sounds almost like you think Walter, Mr. Harvick, might have been murdered. I thought he, uh, committed suicide."

  Zimmer's massive shoulders rose and fell an inch or so. "That's certainly what it looks like. The scene's consistent with that finding. But that's not up to me to determine. The medical examiner will be here soon. In the meantime, I thought I ought to find out as much as I could about the situation. And being a detective . . ." He surprised me with a big grin. "Homicide is sort of what first comes to mind, you know?"

  I knew. It was the first thing I had thought, too, when I saw the police cars and the ambulance. But that was the same sort of response that a body lying on a beach with its head more than half blown off would garner, no matter who pulled the trigger.

  "Did Harvick seem suicidal to you?" Zimmer went on.

  I had to shake my head and say, "No, not really. But I've never actually been around anybody who . . . who did that. So I don't know. I run a travel agency. I'm not a clinical psychologist."

  "Neither am I. Who else had trouble with Harvick?"

  The sudden shift in the conversation, back to interrogation mode, almost threw me. That was probably what Zimmer was counting on.

  "As far as I know, he got along fine with everybody else on my tour," I said.

  "What about people who weren't on your tour?"

  I had hoped he wouldn't catch that angle. But he had, so I didn't see that I had any choice but to answer. If Zimmer backtracked the tour, he would find out about what had happened at the Hemingway House anyway.

  "He got into an argument with one of the guides at the Hemingway House," I said. "As a matter of fact, Walter sort of got into it with the same fella the night before that at Sloppy Joe's. He was one of the Hemingway look-alikes, and he didn't much like it when Walter told him he didn't look anything like Hemingway."

  "You know this man's name?"

  "Rollie Cranston."

  I hated throwing Rollie under the bus like that, but I figured that the medical examiner would say Walter had killed himself and any sort of murder investigation would be over before it really got started. I was hoping that Detective Zimmer wouldn't even have to talk to Ronnie Scanlon or the Altmans or Rollie Cranston.