For Whom The Funeral Bell Tolls

by Livia J. Washburn

  In addition to all this, there was a shelf of books devoted to Ernest Hemingway, including his novels, the complete short stories, all the standard biographies, critical studies, even a travelogue by a guy who had journeyed all over the world retracing Papa's footsteps. Some of them I'd heard of, some of them I'd even read, but there were others that were new to me, even though they were old.

  I pulled one of them off the shelf. It was called Tarpon Days, Whiskey Nights and was by Cap'n Jacob Morris. That was the way it was written on the title page, "Cap'n". He'd had a charter boat anchored at Key West during the Thirties and evidently had been good friends with Hemingway. I flipped through the book, which seemed to be a series of stories about various fishing trips.

  I had spent too much time thinking about Walter Harvick's murder. Less than eight hours had passed since Luke had pounded on my door that morning with the bad news, but the time since then had been crammed with speculations and revelations, none of which, in the end, really amounted to much as far as I could see. So I took Cap'n Jacob's book back to the desk, sank down in the comfortable leather swivel chair, and told myself I was going to read for a while and take my mind completely off what had happened. I was going to let myself be transported back to those carefree times of the Thirties – carefree in Key West, anyway, after the boom began when the railroad was completed – a time when the days had been full of sunlight and laughter and fishing and the nights full of whiskey and stars and passion . . .

  I don't know how long I read before I fell asleep in the chair. If it had been a TV show of a certain vintage and mindset, everything would have gotten blurry and I would have found myself in a dream sequence, back in Key West in the Thirties, dressed in gorgeous period clothes, hanging out with Papa and John Dos Passos and Martha Gellhorn.

  But nothing of the sort happened. I was tired, and I just . . . fell asleep.

  Chapter 24

  "I sort of hate to wake you up," Tom said with a note of amusement in his voice. "You look so blasted adorable, sitting there that way."

  I sat up sharply. The book that had slid down to my lap fell to the floor with a thud. Feeling groggy, I reached down to pick it up.

  "Let me get that for you," Tom said as he came over to the desk. "Reading about the old days, eh?"

  I shook my head in an attempt to clear some of the cobwebs out of my brain as Tom bent over to pick up the book. He was about to put it back on the shelves when I said, "Wait a minute!"

  He looked back over his shoulder at me. "What is it, Delilah? Are you all right?"

  "Let me see that book again," I said, then realized I'd been sort of abrupt with him. I added, "Please."

  "Sure." He handed it to me. I opened it and started flipping through the pages, trying to find where I'd been reading when I dozed off. I had noticed something right about then that sort of lodged in my brain . . .

  "There it is," I said as I stabbed a finger at the page. "Bedford Key."

  Tom frowned and shook his head. "What are you talking about? I never heard of a Bedford Key, and I grew up here."

  I held up the book and pointed. "The old ship captain who wrote this book talks about going on a fishing trip to the Tortugas with Hemingway and some other people from Key West. A squall came up, and they ran their boat into a cove on Bedford Key to wait it out. Evidently the experience soured Hemingway on the place, because he would never go back there."

  "Well, I suppose it's possible," Tom said with a dubious look on his face. "It's not unheard of for a smaller key to get swamped in a hurricane and wash away enough so that it doesn't resurface. This Bedford Key might be like that, and that's why I've never heard of it."

  I set the book on the desk, still open, and stood up to go over to the map. I leaned close to it and studied the Dry Tortugas. They were made up of seven main keys, but there were smaller islands dotted here and there in the vicinity. One of them might be Bedford Key.

  "Why is this important?" Tom asked.

  "Because when Walter was arguing with Rollie Cranston at the Hemingway House yesterday about who knew more about Hemingway, Walter said that he even knew what had really happened on Bedford Key. He said it like it was some sort of secret, and knowing it put him ahead of Rollie."

  Tom just looked baffled and shook his head. "You think this Bedford Key business, whatever it was, had something to do with him being murdered?"

  "Keeping secrets is one reason people commit murder in the first place," I said. "I need to find Detective Zimmer and talk to him. Maybe he can get the Coast Guard to look for Bedford Key. There could be some evidence hidden there."

  "That's a good idea," Tom said, "but Charles isn't here anymore. I ran into him a little while ago, and he told me he was going back to the police station. He wanted to go over everyone's statement, and if he couldn't find anything else promising he was going to release people to go on about their business."

  If Zimmer did that, the killer might get away. I wasn't sure of his identity yet, but thoughts were whirling through my head . . .

  "Listen," Tom went on, "I know Charles Zimmer pretty well, and he isn't going to call in the Coast Guard on some wild goose chase like that, not without some pretty good indication that this Bedford Key is connected to Harvick's murder."

  "I'll just have to talk him into it."

  Tom frowned. "I tell you what I'll do. It's still early enough in the afternoon that there's time to sail over to the Tortugas and have a look around. I can check out all the smaller keys and see if there's anything out of the ordinary about any of them. If I find anything, then when I get back you and I can go see Charles and tell him about it."

  "You'd do that to help me?" I asked.

  "Sure." He grinned and shrugged. "I'm the boss here, remember? I can take off the rest of the afternoon if I want to."

  "All right," I said. "But on one condition . . . I go with you."

  He looked surprised. "I thought you didn't like being out on the water."

  "I don't," I said, and the thought of sailing more than sixty miles to the Dry Tortugas, on top of everything else crowding into my head just then, really made me queasy. "But this was my idea, and I ought to see it through."

  He looked at me for a long moment, then shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said. "My catamaran can make it in an hour and a half."

  "What about your great-grandfather's old fishing boat?" I asked. "Did you get it running well enough to make a trip like that?"

  "Well, yeah, I guess, but it's slower. If we take it, we probably won't get back here until after dark."

  "That's all right. I think I'd be less likely to get sick on a more substantial boat like that."

  I thought he might argue with me, but he just nodded and said, "Sure, if that's what you want, Delilah. Come on."

  "Right now?"

  "We really don't need to waste any time if we're going to take that old scow of mine."

  He was right, I told myself. Now that I might be on the trail of Walter Harvick's murderer, there was no time to waste.

  We left the office and he hustled me out a side door and along a path until we reached one of the larger paths that curved through the grounds. We went by the same sign I had seen earlier when I was with Detective Zimmer. When we walked past the stable there was no sign of the female groom. Tom led the way to the riding trail, but less than twenty yards along it, a smaller trail branched off to the right. I remembered him saying that the dock where he kept his boats was over here on this part of the resort, beyond the area frequented by the guests.

  There was no beach here. The trees grew almost all the way to the water. In an opening in the growth, an old wooden dock jutted out with a vessel anchored on either side of it. The sleek, modern catamaran was to the left, an old, somewhat battered-looking fishing boat to the right. The name Lucky Boy was painted on the prow. The paint was peeling in places.

  "Your great-grandfather Claude's boat?" I said.

  Tom nodded. "That's right. Are you sure you want to take it
instead of the cat?"

  "I'm certain," I told him. "I'll feel a lot better on it."

  "All right. She's gassed up and ready to go. Let me give you a hand."

  The dock was high enough that it wasn't hard to step from it onto the deck of the Lucky Boy. Tom untied the lines, then hopped aboard and went into the small, partially enclosed cabin to start the engine. A couple of fishing chairs were bolted to the deck toward the back of the boat.

  The engine caught with a grumbling growl. Tom looked back over his shoulder at me and called, "You'd better put on a life jacket."

  "I can swim," I told him.

  "I don't like taking anybody out in deep water unless they're wearing a life jacket," he insisted. "I'll feel better if you do."

  "All right, that's fine."

  He pointed to a built-in chest with a lid. When I lifted it I found several of the bulky orange things. I strapped myself into one of them. It wasn't very comfortable, but better than drowning, I thought.

  Tom backed the boat away from the dock, then spun the wheel, eased the throttle forward, and sent us into open water. The tree-lined shore fell away behind us. I looked around the small cabin and spotted a narrow set of stairs leading down.

  "What's down there?" I asked Tom, pointing.

  "A little sleeping cabin and head," he said. "Also access to the engine room."

  "The head's like the bathroom, right?"

  "That's right. You need to use it?"

  "Well, we did leave the house pretty abruptly."

  He laughed. "Go ahead. It'll take us a couple of hours to get where we're going. There's no point in you being uncomfortable."

  I eased my way down the stairs. So far my stomach was behaving, but I didn't know how long that would last. We hadn't come very far from land, and the water was pretty calm so far.

  He was right about the head being small. I thought that the combination of a stomach virus and claustrophobia would be downright disastrous. But I did what I needed to do and climbed back up into the pilot house or whatever you call it on a boat like that.

  "The last time I was on anything that floated, it was a Mississippi riverboat," I told Tom. "Not everything worked out that great, but at least I didn't get seasick."

  He stood at the wheel with casual ease, and I could imagine him as a dashing buccaneer. He glanced over at me and said, "Was that during one of those other murder cases you investigated?"

  "Yeah. We were sort of stuck on the riverboat, so the sooner the killer was found, the better."

  "And you found him."

  "That's right. Luckily we found the bomb in time, too."

  His eyebrows went up. "Bomb? You really have lived an exciting life, Delilah Dickinson."

  "Just in bits and pieces," I said with a laugh. "Most of it's pretty, well, normal."

  "I'm not sure I can imagine you ever being normal," he said, "and I mean that in a good way. You're a real bloodhound, aren't you?"

  "You mean that in a good way, too?"

  "Actually, I do. Once you sink your teeth into something, you don't let go, do you? You're not going to give up until you figure out who killed Walter Harvick."

  "I don't intend to," I told him. "I don't know if being that stubborn is good or bad, but it's just the way I am."

  "Well, we'll be at the Tortugas in a couple of hours, and maybe you'll find what you're looking for."

  "I hope so," I said.

  * * *

  The Lucky Boy wasn't fast, but it cut through the water at a steady pace and I found that it didn't bother me too much. I probably would have gotten sick in a hurry if the boat had stopped and I could feel it moving up and down on the waves. That was why deep-sea fishing didn't interest me at all. I knew I'd be miserable if I ever tried it.

  I sat on a barstool-like chair next to a chart table at one side of the cabin while Tom handled the wheel. We talked about this and that as time passed and we drew closer to our destination.

  "Did you ever know your great-grandfather?" I finally asked him after almost two hours at sea had gone by.

  "I knew him pretty well when I was a little boy. He lived to be almost a hundred years old. He was a mighty tough old bird, Claude Bradenton was."

  "I imagine you had to be tough back in those days if you were runnin' rum in from Cuba."

  "That's right. Folks solved their problems with tommy guns."

  "But then he became a gentleman resort owner."

  "Sure. People can change." He peered out over the water in front of the boat, and a note of mingled nostalgia and regret came into his voice as he said, "I really loved that old man."

  "That's why you want to protect his reputation?"

  Tom glanced at me and laughed. "What reputation? I told you, he was a rum-runner."

  I took a deep breath and glanced back toward Key West. "But you didn't tell me he was a murderer. Is that what he did on Bedford Key, Tom? Killed somebody?"

  Tom's head jerked toward me, his smile vanishing.

  "Is that why you killed Walter?" I went on. "You didn't want him finding out the truth and revealing it to the world?"

  He stared at me for a long moment, then said, "I think the heat must be getting to you, Delilah. You're saying crazy things now."

  I shook my head and said, "Not really. Walter knew something happened on Bedford Key. He even had a pretty good idea what it was. I don't know how he knew, but he'd been devoting most of his free time for years to studying Ernest Hemingway. He uncovered enough hints, probably in correspondence and old newspapers and things like that, to put together a theory, but he needed proof and he thought he could find it on Bedford Key. But to do that he needed somebody to take him there. He tried to hire Clint Drake's boat, but Drake was already chartering his boat to Phil Thompson. So when Walter got back to the resort last night, he asked the handyman . . . you, Tom, because he didn't know you owned the place . . . if you could help him find a boat to charter. He even explained why he needed one and what he was looking for. That's when you told him that you had a boat and would help him. You arranged to meet with him last night and take him over to the Dry Tortugas so he could search there today. That's why he was near the stable last night when Matt Altman saw him. He was going to keep his appointment with you."

  It was a long speech and I didn't have any real proof of any of it. But I was willing to bet that if a forensics team went over this boat with the proverbial fine-tooth comb, they would find evidence that Walter had been here. Right here in this cabin, maybe.

  Tom laughed. "Well, I would be offended if I didn't know by now that you're addicted to playing detective, Delilah. You made up that whole bizarre story just so you'd feel like you 'solved' the crime. But you couldn't prove any of it even if it was true, which it's not." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, though. I sort of thought we had something nice going on between us, but I'm not sure that can happen if you can convince yourself so easily that I'm a killer."

  "Oh, it's not gonna happen," I said. "I think you only got close to me so you could keep an eye on me and make sure I didn't get any ideas about you. I told you everything I was thinkin', and you encouraged me, even helped me, to go down every blind alley I came up with. But then I saw that book and remembered about Bedford Key, and that made me think about Walter lookin' for a boat and a skipper he could hire, and that brought me around to you. I remembered where your dock was, and that fit right in with where Matt Altman saw Walter last night. You weren't workin' on the engine this mornin' at all. You were cleanin' up after yourself."

  Tom couldn't muster the tolerant smile anymore. It dropped away from his face and was replaced by a look of mingled anger and sadness. For a second I thought the anger was going to win out and he was going to come after me, but then he sighed and his shoulders slumped.

  "I couldn't let the little weasel do that to Claude," he said quietly. "I just couldn't. But I didn't mean to kill him. I was just trying to scare him."

  "You didn't put him on his knees and make him beg for his li
fe?"

  He looked at me, aghast. "Good Lord, no! I showed him the gun and told him to forget about Bedford Key, and then he . . . he attacked me! He was like some crazed ninja nerd. I shoved him, and the gun was in my hand, and he fell over backward and it went off . . ." Tom took a deep, ragged breath. He shook his head and went on, "Now what the hell am I going to do with you?"

  That was the question, all right. He had admitted that he'd killed Walter Harvick. If he didn't want to go to prison for that, he had to kill again, but this time the victim would be me.

  "You're gonna have to get rid of me," I said. "That's what you planned to do when you offered to take me over to the Dry Tortugas, wasn't it? Choke me to death, maybe, and drop me over the side. You could claim it was an accident. You could say that I was seasick and leaning over the side, and I fell, and you couldn't find me in time to save me. Nobody would ever be able to prove otherwise."

  He let go of the wheel and turned toward me. "I still could, you know."

  "But you won't," I said, "because there's a Key West police boat with Detective Zimmer in it about half a mile behind us. He's probably watching us through binoculars right now. I texted the whole story to Luke when I was down in the head, right after we started, and told him to get Zimmer and come after us. It took them a while to catch up, but they're back there."

  Tom turned to look, and I saw despair wash over him when he spotted the police boat in the distance. Then his back stiffened and he glared at me.

  "Your word against mine," he said. "My so-called confession won't be worth a damn in court."

  "You can take a chance on that if you want to."

  "That's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm a gambler, just like old Claude."