For Whom The Funeral Bell Tolls

by Livia J. Washburn

  But the more I thought about it, the more concerned I was about Ronnie. Had something happened between them that drove Walter to kill himself?

  A wild thought crossed my mind. What if they'd had another argument, and it had escalated to the point that Walter had killed Ronnie? The remorse he would have felt because of that, not to mention the possibility of going to prison, might well have been enough to prompt his suicide.

  Or what if they had made some sort of crazed lover's pact to end their lives? Was Ronnie lying somewhere dead on the island, her body not yet discovered?

  "Miz D, you're lookin' kinda wild-eyed," Luke said, breaking into my grisly speculations. "Is something wrong? I mean, other than the obvious?"

  "No, I was just thinkin' about Ronnie Scanlon," I told him. "You haven't seen her this morning, have you?"

  He shook his head. "Nope. I haven't seen her since last night, before I headed for that poker game. She said she was going to stay in and read."

  I closed my eyes, reached up, and rubbed my forehead for a second. Luke didn't know yet what had happened the night before in Old Town. As we stood on the balcony, looking down on the lobby, I told him, quickly sketching in the details of running into Walter at Sloppy Joe's while I was with Rollie Cranston.

  "So after all that," I concluded, "I left Walter and Ronnie at Captain Tony's. That was the last time I saw either of them."

  "So maybe . . . Oh, crap! You think she killed him?"

  "Or maybe he killed her," I said, giving voice to the theory that had gone through my head a few minutes earlier. "Or maybe . . ."

  "Of course she could be in her room," Luke said when I couldn't go on.

  Well, that was so obvious I could have kicked myself. I turned away from the balcony railing and said, "Let's go find out."

  "Are you sure that cop won't mind?" Luke asked as he hurried after me.

  I fell back on my handy, all-purpose excuse. "He didn't say not to."

  I marched straight to the door of Ronnie's room and knocked. There was no answer. I tried the knob. Locked.

  Those results didn't do a blasted thing to ease my mind. I said, "Maybe I'd better try to find Detective Zimmer. The police can do a whole lot better job of searching for Ronnie than you and I can. They've got the manpower."

  "Yeah, but there's somewhere else we ought to try first," Luke said.

  "Where's that?"

  "Uh . . . Walter's room?"

  Luke reddened as he said it. I figured he could be married to Melissa for thirty years and still blush any time he said anything the least bit racy or suggestive around me. That was sweet, I thought. And he was right, of course. We didn't need to give up and go to the police until we had checked Walter's room. It was possible that Ronnie had spent the night there.

  I led the way, and when we reached the door, I rapped my knuckles sharply against it. There was no response right away, so I knocked again. My spirits sank as silence continued on the other side of the door. It looked like Ronnie wasn't here after all, and I was back to worrying about where she was and what might have become of her.

  Then the chain rattled as somebody unfastened it, and I was so tense that the sound made me jump a little.

  The deadbolt thunked, and then the door swung open. Ronnie Scanlon peered out at us. Her hair was a wild tangle, her face was puffy, and the eyes she blinked rapidly at us in confusion were bloodshot, but she was alive, no doubt about that.

  "Wha' . . . wha' do you want?" she asked in a voice husky with sleep. "Wha' time's it?"

  She had opened the door only a few inches. That was enough of a gap for me to see her bare shoulders. She had wrapped the sheet around herself when she climbed out of bed. You see people do that on TV and in the movies, but I'd never done it in my life. Obviously it did happen in real life from time to time, though, and Ronnie was proof of that.

  "Ms. Scanlon . . . Ronnie . . . are you all right?" I asked.

  She frowned. "I'm fine. Why wouldn't I be?"

  "What happened last night between you and Walter?"

  She drew herself up and gave me what she must have hoped was a haughty stare. The tangled hair and generally dissipated look sort of worked against that, though.

  "I don't think that's any of your business," she managed to say.

  "Maybe not, but it's police business," I said.

  "Police . . . police business? I don't understand . . ."

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs made me glance around. Luke must have looked, too, because he muttered, "Uh-oh."

  Detective Charles Zimmer was coming up the stairs, followed by one of the uniformed officers, and since we could see him, that meant he could see us, too. Judging by the frown on his face, he wasn't happy to find us talking to Ronnie Scanlon.

  "What's going on here?" Ronnie asked. She was starting to wake up more now. "Something's wrong. Where's Walter?"

  Zimmer reached the top of the stairs and started toward us. "Is that Ms. Scanlon?" he asked in his rumbling voice.

  "Who is that man?" Ronnie demanded, adding again, "Where's Walter?"

  I would have told her if Zimmer hadn't been right there. As it was, I said, "Ronnie, this is Detective Zimmer."

  "Detective . . . Oh, my God! Something's happened to Walter!" She threw the door wide open and rushed out, trailing the bedsheet behind her. "What is it? Where is he?"

  Zimmer took out his badge and showed it to her. "Ms. Scanlon, please calm down," he said. "I'm with the Key West Police Department. There's been an incident – "

  "It's Walter, isn't it? Something's happened to him!"

  "I'm afraid Mr. Harvick is dead."

  There's no easy way to tell somebody something like that. The news hit Ronnie like a physical blow, making her grimace and pull back. She let go of the sheet and started to bring her hands to her face in horror. Instinct made her grab the sheet again and gather it around her with one hand while the other covered her eyes.

  "No!" she wailed. "No!"

  Some people might have thought she was overdoing it. I didn't. Her reaction struck me as genuine, and I like to think that I'm a pretty good judge of people, being around as many of them as I am.

  "You weren't aware of what happened to Mr. Harvick?" Zimmer asked.

  "No! God, no! I still don't know what happened to him, just that you said he . . . he's dead!"

  The instinct to protect one of my clients welled up in me. I said, "Look, Detective, you shouldn't be talkin' to Ms. Scanlon while she's standin' here wrapped in a sheet. Can't you at least let her get dressed first?"

  He shot a sharp glance at me, as if to ask if I was telling him how to do his job. But he gave one of his minuscule shrugs and said, "I suppose that wouldn't hurt anything. Is this your room, Ms. Scanlon?"

  Ronnie had started to sob, so I answered for her. "This is Mr. Harvick's room."

  "All right, then maybe she'd better not go back in there. Why don't you take her back to her own room and let her get dressed."

  "She'll have to get her room key," I pointed out.

  Zimmer thought about it and nodded. He watched Ronnie like a hawk as she fumbled her room key out of her purse.

  "The two of you meet me in Mr. Bradenton's office," he said to me she was doing that. "He's agreed to let me use it for a little while."

  "We can do that," I said.

  "But don't say anything else to her about what happened," Zimmer warned me quietly in a stern voice.

  I nodded.

  Zimmer turned to Luke. "I haven't talked to you yet, have I? You're . . .?"

  "Luke Edwards," he answered. "Ms. Dickinson's assistant."

  "Well, you come on with me, then," Zimmer said to Luke as Ronnie stepped back out of Walter's room.

  They headed downstairs while I put an arm around her shoulders and steered her toward her room. Between sobs, she said, "Why . . . why won't he just tell me . . . what happened?"

  "You probably heard the detective. I'm not supposed to say anything else."

  "But it's ba
d, though, isn't it? Really bad?"

  "Just get some clothes on," I told her. "We'll go down and talk to him."

  Zimmer hadn't told me to go into Ronnie's room with her and watch while she got dressed, so I stayed in the hall outside the door, which I left open a crack. I didn't think it was very likely she'd try to climb out the window and make a getaway, but if she did I was hoping I'd hear it and be able to stop her.

  Nothing like that happened. She came out a few minutes later wearing Bermuda shorts, a sleeveless blouse, and canvas shoes. She had run a brush through her hair but she hadn't removed her smeared make-up from the night before. She looked about as good as anybody could expect under the circumstances, which was not very good at all.

  But she wasn't dead, and that was a considerable improvement over what I'd been worried about for a while.

  More people were starting to stir. The dining room opened at seven, and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee was in the air, tantalizing me. I tried to ignore it. I wasn't hungry – after what I'd seen on the beach, it might be a while before I had much of an appetite again – but a cup of coffee would have been mighty welcome right about then.

  We went into Tom's little office that opened off the lobby. With a couple of big guys like Zimmer and Luke already in there, it seemed pretty crowded. Zimmer sat behind the desk and motioned Ronnie into the chair in front of it. I thought he might tell Luke and me to get out, but since he didn't, we stood behind Ronnie. I rested a hand on her shoulder to give her some strength. When she heard what Zimmer had to say, she'd probably need it.

  He began by asking her, "Ms. Scanlon, when was the last time you saw Mr. Harvick?"

  "Why do you want to know that?" she asked right back at him. "You said he was dead, not missing."

  "Just answer the question, please."

  Ronnie took a deep breath. She said, "Last night, upstairs in his room. We came back here after we left Old Town. That handyman Tom can tell you. He let us in."

  "Handyman?" Zimmer repeated with a frown. Then he shook his head, apparently realizing that Ronnie didn't know who Tom Bradenton really was. "So you and Mr. Harvick spent the night together?"

  Ronnie lifted her chin defiantly. "Why shouldn't we? We're both grown adults."

  "I wasn't passing judgment, Ms. Scanlon, just establishing facts. Key West is pretty relaxed about such things."

  "Oh. Well, then, yes, Walter and I spent the night together. At least part of it. When I woke up this morning he was gone, and now you tell me that he . . . he's . . ."

  I squeezed her shoulder as her voice trailed off. I thought she was going to start crying again, but she brought herself under control.

  "So you didn't know when Mr. Harvick got up and left the room?"

  Ronnie shook her head. "No, I didn't. We had quite a bit to drink. I guess I was just sound asleep." She leaned forward, and her voice was drawn tight with strain and misery as she went on, "Please. You have to tell me what happened to him."

  Zimmer hesitated a couple of seconds before answering, "It appears that Mr. Harvick committed suicide. His body was found on the beach this morning. He had been shot with a shotgun."

  I was glad that Zimmer didn't go into gruesome detail. Ronnie would be able to fill in enough of the blanks herself when she stopped to think about Walter's obsession with Ernest Hemingway.

  She hunched over in the chair, covered her face with her hands, and cried quietly for several moments. We waited in awkward silence, unable to do anything else.

  Zimmer's cell phone broke that silence. The distinctive beat of the opening theme from Dragnet filled the little room. I looked across the desk at Zimmer and mouthed the word Really? He grimaced as he stood up and took the phone from his shirt pocket.

  He opened the phone and said, "Yeah, Doc?" It seemed kind of quick for the medical examiner to have already performed an autopsy on Walter, but I didn't know how many dead bodies they normally had in Key West.

  Zimmer listened intently. It was hard to tell from that great stone face of his what was going on in his brain, but I got a general sense that he didn't like what he heard.

  Finally he said, "You're sure?" Another pause, then, "No, I know you didn't graduate from a mail-order medical school, Doc. All right, thanks."

  He closed the phone and stood there. I could almost see the wheels turning in his brain.

  Ronnie lifted her tear-streaked face and asked, "Was that something about Walter? What is it?"

  "According to the medical examiner, Mr. Harvick didn't commit suicide after all, Ms. Scanlon," Zimmer said. "This is a murder investigation now."

  Chapter 14

  I'd like to say that I was surprised by that revelation . . . but I wasn't. Not really. I'd been waiting for that shoe to drop, and hoping that it wouldn't, ever since I'd seen Walter's body lying on the beach.

  The news had changed Detective Zimmer's demeanor. He wasn't taking the case only half-seriously anymore. He looked at Luke and me and said, "You two need to leave while I finish talking to Ms. Scanlon."

  I stiffened my back and said, "I don't think so."

  Zimmer looked at me in surprise, tilted his head a little to the side, and said, "Oh?"

  "That's right. I think Ms. Scanlon should have a lawyer here before she says anything else to you."

  Ronnie turned to look at me. She seemed confused.

  "This is simply an interview," Zimmer said. "Ms. Scanlon isn't being questioned officially."

  "Then everything she's already said to you would have to be considered off-limits when it comes to evidence, wouldn't it?"

  "Evidence!" Ronnie said. "You don't mean that he thinks I . . . that I would ever . . ."

  "Do you happen to be a lawyer, Ms. Dickinson?" Zimmer asked. "Or are you married to one?"

  "No to both questions," I told him.

  "And yet you seem somewhat familiar with criminal investigation procedure. That's interesting."

  "Somewhat familiar," Luke said. "Mister, you just don't know – " He stopped short and looked at me. "I, uh, probably shouldn't have said that, should I, Miz D?"

  "It's all right, Luke," I said. "Detective Zimmer is smart enough he would have found out sooner or later." I faced Zimmer and went on, "I've been involved in several murder cases in the past."

  "I was a suspect in one of 'em," Luke said with a slight note of pride in his voice, "but Miz D found the real killer."

  "Is that so?" Zimmer said. "That's even more interesting. You're some sort of . . . amateur detective, Ms. Dickinson?"

  "No, I just happened to figure out some things. You can call Timothy Farraday if you want to. He's an investigator with the Fulton County Sheriff's Department, and he'll vouch for me."

  "I might just do that. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't try to do any detective work on this case."

  "I wasn't planning to," I said honestly. "I'd just like to salvage as much of this tour as I can."

  "I'm afraid that's going to be pretty difficult for you now. For the time being, everyone who's here at the resort will have to remain here. There won't be any sightseeing until we get this matter cleared up."

  Or any fishing, I thought. Phil Thompson was going to be disappointed.

  But that was the least of my worries now.

  "I need to talk to my boss," Zimmer went on. "Ms. Scanlon, you can go back to your room if you want, or wherever else you'd like as long as you stay on the grounds."

  "What about my things that I left in W-Walter's room?" Her voice broke a little with emotion as she said his name.

  "They'll have to wait until Mr. Harvick's room has been searched."

  "You'll be getting a warrant for that?" I asked.

  He gave me a curt nod. "You can count on it."

  I wished I knew what the medical examiner had told him about whatever the autopsy had found to indicate that Walter was murdered instead of committing suicide. I figured the chances of Zimmer sharing that information with me were about as good as the chances of it snowi
ng in Key West for Christmas.

  I patted Ronnie's shoulder and said, "Come on. Let's get out of here."

  She was still so stunned by everything that had happened she was going to do whatever anybody told her to do. She got to her feet and looked at me. "I can't believe he's dead," she said. "Murdered."

  "I know. I'm havin' a hard time believin' it, too."

  We left Tom's office with Luke trailing us. Tom was across the lobby, talking to a teenage girl who was working behind the desk. When he spotted us emerging from the office, he crossed the room quickly toward us.

  "Is this mess all over?" he asked.

  "It's just gettin' started," I told him. "Detective Zimmer just got the word from the medical examiner that Walter didn't commit suicide. He was murdered."

  Tom's eyebrows rose in shock. "Good Lord!" he muttered. He looked at Ronnie and went on, "Ms. Scanlon, I'm so sorry."

  "Th-thank you," she said. She frowned a little. "You're the . . . handyman? The one who let us in?"

  "Ronnie," I told her gently, "this is Tom Bradenton. He owns the resort."

  "Oh!" she exclaimed. Even as upset as she was about Walter, she looked embarrassed by her mistake. "Mr. Bradenton, I'm so sorry – "

  "Please don't worry about it," he told her with a gentle smile. "People take me for the handyman or the gardener all the time. To tell you the truth, I sort of encourage it. If everybody knew I owned the place, I'd get all the complaints."

  "Well, I . . . I didn't mean anything by it," Ronnie said.

  "Luke, can you take Ms. Scanlon on up to her room?" I asked. "I want to talk to Mr. Bradenton for a minute."

  "Sure, Miz D," he said.

  "And then I guess you'd better start breaking the news to the other members of the group and let them know that for the time being they're confined to the grounds of the resort."

  He nodded without saying anything. I knew I had given him a lousy job. Some of the clients might be sympathetic when they heard about what happened, but others were bound to be upset and angry at having their trip interfered with.

  When Luke and Ronnie had gone upstairs, I turned to Tom and said, "I really am sorry about all this. Having a murder take place at your resort is bound to be bad for business."