Murder at the Dolphin Inn

by C. S. Challinor

  Alma leaned forward. “Because, you know about the dead cats found on the doorstep?”

  “Aye, Michelle mentioned it yesterday when we were all in the guest lounge.”

  “Very peculiar,” Alma murmured, proceeding to sip her coffee. “So you think someone was out there?”

  Walt brought in breakfast plates wafting tantalizing vapors of bacon and hot buttered toast, and refilled the coffee mugs before waddling off again in distraction.

  “I can’t help but wonder,” Alma murmured, staring after him.

  Chuck squirted ketchup on his pair of perfectly round fried eggs. “Maybe he’ll dress up as his mother and stab some poor woman in the shower.”

  It seemed Walt Dyer, a character resembling the shy Norman Bates in Psycho, was the Shumakers’ prime suspect in his parents’ murders, though that didn’t prevent them from attacking their breakfasts with gusto. As they were finishing, Helen arrived, freshly dressed in crisp white shorts and a pale blue T-shirt. She carried their straw hats and a canvas shoulder bag, and clearly meant sightseeing business.

  “You must be Helen.” Chuck hurriedly wiped his hands on his napkin and shook hers.

  Alma beamed at her. “So nice to finally meet you. Shame we have to leave so soon. Especially with all the excitement. Rex has promised to call with updates.”

  Helen sat down with a cheerful smile. “I can’t say I entirely share his enthusiasm for murder, but he is very good at solving them.”

  Walter, who had appeared with the coffee urn, spilled a few drops on the floral tablecloth as he was filling Helen’s mug. He clucked an apology. “All finger and thumbs this morning,” he lamented, mopping up the spillage with a spare napkin. He entreated Helen to help herself to the cereal, fruit and pastries on the buffet table and took himself off again.

  Alma raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows at Rex. “A tad nervous, wouldn’t you say? He spilled that coffee when he heard Helen say you were good at solving murders.”

  “He must be under a great deal of stress,” Helen pointed out in her sensible way. “He just lost his parents and now he has to run this place on his own.”

  “A stroke of luck for him,” Chuck opined. “You weren’t here when Taffy and Merle were alive. At times you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.” He downed the dregs of his coffee and stared at his watch. “Well, all good things must come to an end. Back to the grind.” He pulled himself off the chair, his protruding stomach catching the edge of the table and threatening to spill the cream in the jug.

  “Your taxi is here,” Walt announced from the doorway.

  The Shumakers took their leave, reminding Rex to call them in Dayton. Helen went to the buffet table while Rex watched them pile out the front door with their luggage, assisted by Walt. At that point the Barbers entered the dining room. Divested of their pirate attire, they looked like everyday tourists. Rex introduced them to Helen.

  “Well, Chuck and Alma certainly seem glad to get away,” Peggy remarked as she sat down at a table with her husband.

  “I got quite the contrary impression,” Rex said. “Chuck could hardly tear himself away and was complaining that he had to get back to work and return to the cold weather in Ohio.”

  “Well, maybe they’re just glad to have gotten away with it,” Peggy emphasized with an enigmatic wink at Helen, who was returning from the buffet table with a bagel and a mound of green melon slices.

  “My wife has a very creative mind,” Dennis Barber remarked.

  Most women did, Rex had noticed. All the same, he wondered what had prompted Peggy’s suspicion of the Shumakers. A more ordinary and friendly couple you couldn’t hope to meet. He made such an observation to Peggy, keeping his tone light-hearted.

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” was her response.

  Rex readily admitted that one could not judge a book by its cover. On which subject, he recalled their novel showed a photo of the co-authors in black buccaneer jackets embellished with gold buttons, Dennis coiffed in the gold-braided tricorn hat he had with him prior to the book signing the previous day.

  When Peggy seemed disinclined to elaborate on her comments regarding the Shumakers, Rex inquired about their signing, and she informed him it had been a success and they had autographed thirteen copies. Helen said she was looking forward to reading The British Brigand and thanked them for the dedication. She inquired whether there was any romance in the novel.

  “Some, certainly. We try and appeal to a female readership as well. It’s not all rape and pillage.” Peggy described the hero to Helen as being loosely based on Admiral Sir Henry Morgan, a ruthless Welsh privateer who sailed the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, plundering the Spanish settlements and looting their gold. “In Panama City alone, he captured almost half a million pieces of eight,” she informed her audience. “An absolute fortune.”

  And no doubt Morgan and his merry band had consigned thousands of Spaniards to their death in the process, Rex thought. However, greed did not appear to factor directly into the murders at the Dolphin Inn. The Dyers had been struggling to keep the bed-and-breakfast going, and there did not appear to have been anything of value worth killing for and risking the death penalty. Pirates had been hung for their sins three centuries ago. Florida used lethal injection. Someone or some persons had taken a huge risk for no obvious gain.

  ~TWELVE~

  After breakfast, Rex and Helen made their way on foot past La Concha Hotel on Fleming and Duval, and south on Whitehead. The street accommodated grand clapboard homes and cottages in Caribbean pastels, small businesses, and low income apartment blocks, the sidewalks shaded by banyan and Royal Poinciana trees. After passing Bahama Village Market, they came to Hemingway’s address located in the Old Town.

  Behind a five-and-a-half-foot red brick and cement wall stood an unimposing but charming Spanish Colonial home built of limestone, with pale olive shutters flanking arched windows, and a veranda spanning the upper floor. Palm trees and lush foliage afforded additional privacy. Undeterred by the tourists and apparently quite at home, extra-toed cats stalked through the flowerbeds, lurked among the potted plants, and drank from the decorative tiled watering trough, a fixture from the men’s room at Sloppy Joe’s. Unlike the skeletal feline Rex had seen in the trash can the night before, these cats were well-fed.

  “Aren’t they adorable?” Helen said.

  Rex thought some of them looked downright grumpy. The guide claimed they were descendants of Hemingway’s pets, given him by a ship’s captain. Apparently, this polydactyl breed was ensured a surer footing on rough seas. Rex suspected the guide was spinning a yarn. It was widely believed that Hemingway had not kept cats until moving to Cuba.

  He had lived in this particular house throughout the 1930s with second wife Pauline Pfeifer, who had gone to the trouble and extravagance of having an outdoor swimming pool hewn out of the rock, the first pool to be built in Key West. Black-and-white photographs showed the literary icon in the company of big game spoils from hunting and fishing excursions in Africa and in the Gulf Stream. In the master bedroom, a ceramic cat statue, the replica of a gift from Pablo Picasso, graced a cabinet by one of the tall windows. Rex was beginning to detect a cat theme to his Key West trip. This was substantiated when he heard that an iron catwalk had led to Hemingway’s book-lined study on the second story of the carriage house. Here, on a gate-leg table below a giant deer head, the author had worked on the final draft of A Farewell to Arms and pounded away at the typewriter keys in the creation of For Whom the Bells Toll.

  It was all extremely fascinating, but Rex began to feel antsy. They had been at the museum for two hours. He wanted to get back to the Clown Case, as he now referred to it in his mind. Helen, sensing his impatience, led him out of the house and into the souvenir shop before they left. After a short browse, they selected a limited edition print, exotic and whimsical, of Hemingway’s home by Bostonian artist Robert Kennedy, which they planned to put in Rex’s converted hunting lodge in the High
lands to remind them of sunnier climes.

  “Now we can go,” she said after they had made their purchase and it was stowed in a bag.

  “Stay if you like. I can take the picture back to the Dolphin Inn.”

  Helen hesitated. “Okay, I will, if you don’t mind. I love this house. How lucky the Hemingways were to live here.”

  “I imagine Ernest wasn’t always a lot of fun to live with. Didn’t Diane say he was bipolar?”

  Helen playfully pushed him on his way and told him she would rejoin him for lunch.

  He wandered back to the guest house and went up to their room to drop off the print. The vase on the dresser had been refilled with a bunch of long-petaled yellowish flowers that exuded a fragrance so overpowering he went to open the French doors. From the balcony, he saw Diane Dyer reclining in a lounge chair by the pool, soaking up the rays, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Michelle sat at the pool’s edge, a fluorescent pink bikini skimpily covering her pale body, long legs submerged in the water. She too wore sunglasses, her dark hair bound in a ponytail.

  “Well, of course, you can do what you want,” Diane said in a cutting tone, the words carrying up to Rex on the balcony. “It’s just that, under the circumstances, it’s the least you could do.”

  “I didn’t ask for it.”

  “You ungrateful little madam! Then what were you doing here? You could share that money with Walt and me, no? It’s only fair.” Rex strained to hear every word.

  “You have the B and B,” the student protested.

  “Swap you, then. I know which I’d rather have.”

  Michelle kicked water off her foot. “I would stay, but Ryan wants to split.”

  “He’s not family. You owe it to Taffy.”

  “When did you start caring about Taffy?” Michelle retorted.

  “Listen to you. You’re just like her! Selfish! You should go to her funeral. She was your great-aunt, after all. Plus, she left you a small fortune. God, I could strangle her.” Diane stubbed out her cigarette and ground it vengefully into a metal ashtray on the concrete deck.

  Rex wondered why Walt had omitted to mention Michelle’s connection to the Dyer family when he was listing the guests the previous day. Nor had it come up in the conversation with the Shumakers and students in the guest lounge when they were all discussing the ex-owners. Presumably Alma had not known Michelle was Taffy’s great-niece, or she would not have made those unflattering remarks about Mrs. Dyer in the girl’s presence. In retrospect, Ryan had been tense and cautious…

  Michelle got up from the pool and yanked her towel off an adjacent lounge chair. Shuffling into a pair of flip-flops, she said something to Diane he could not hear and flounced off toward the building, passing below his balcony.

  He decided to go down for a chat with Diane and see what he could find out. Downstairs he bumped into Walt carrying a cardboard box in through the front door. An old red moped was parked by the white picket gate, a second box strapped with bungee cord to the back seat. A few spectators loitered on the sidewalk.

  “Can I help you with that?” Rex offered.

  “No, thanks. It’s quite light. It contains my ‘creatures of the night.’ ”

  Rex’s face must have shown his puzzlement.

  “My moths,” Walt explained.

  “Ah. So, you’re moving in?”

  “Sure am. A few more trips and I’m done.”

  Walt made his way down the hall to his parents’ old suite. Rex hastened to overtake him and opened the door to assist. A vision of yellow walls dazzled his eyes. He wondered how Walt had managed to wrest the suite from his sister’s grasp, but, from everything Rex knew, the son had greater claim to it, having had to put up with his allegedly insufferable parents for longer. He continued down the hall to the guest lounge.

  As he approached the pool, he said hello to Diane, who raised her sunglasses and squinted up at him, accentuating the lines spoking out from the corners of her eyes.

  “Hi. I'm grabbing a break while the kids are at school. I suppose I should be helping Walt clean up the rest of the fingerprint dust, but I'm allergic to dust of every description.” She brought the dark shutters back down over her eyes. “And mold and cat hair and pollen.”

  Rex availed himself of a lounge chair in the shade of the tiki bar. “How are things otherwise?” he asked.

  She grimaced. “There’s the funeral service to arrange, but who’s gonna come?”

  “None of the guests?”

  “Well, Michelle might be attending.”

  “That’s thoughtful of her,” Rex said as though he had not overheard the women’s conversation.

  Diane responded with a humph. “She’s Taffy’s long lost great-niece, if you must know. How precious is that?” she asked with arch sarcasm.

  “Why did she keep her identity a secret? I was speaking to her yesterday aboot Mr. and Mrs. Dyer, and she never let on.”

  Diane gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Would you, if you were related? Her visit was news to me, too. She checked in under her boyfriend’s name, Ford. She’s Cuzzens. I didn’t recognize her—hadn’t seen her since she was a kid in braces. And Michelle isn’t an unusual name in her age group. Her identity only came out when the cops questioned her. They came to me for verification. She said she told Taffy. I don’t know why it was such a big secret.”

  “So she came to visit her great-aunt?”

  Diane sucked hard on her cigarette. She nodded and jutted her chin on the out-breath, expelling smoke from both nostrils. “She’s at college in Florida. She’s second cousin to me and Walt. At least, I think that’s right. I was never interested in doing a family tree. Taffy was always bragging to her sister about how wealthy she was and how she was going to leave Michelle a huge inheritance.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Michelle lost her parents in a car accident, and was raised by my aunt Maggie. But the truth is, this place has a crippling mortgage, and business has fallen off in the past few years. My parents were getting ready to sell and go back to Vermont.”

  Rex nodded, pondering the ramifications.

  “They went up this summer looking for a place to retire. Merle missed the seasons. Walt and Raf were running the B and B, and it was doing good until Merle and Taffy came back. The guests didn’t like my mother, and my bean counter father tried to skimp on stuff. Walt won’t do that. He’s got better business sense.”

  “So Michelle gets a share of the Dolphin Inn?” Rex asked, knowing more than he let on.

  “Nope, equal split between Walt and me. Big whoop. But get this: Taffy and Merle each carried half a million dollars in life insurance policies. And guess who benefits?”

  “Michelle?”

  “You got it.” Diane inhaled aggressively on her cigarette and spewed out a cloud of smoke. “And it’s not as if she ever had to put up with them.”

  “Hardly seems fair,” Rex sympathized.

  “And me with two kids to support. I mean, you’d think Taffy could’ve left something to her grandchildren, whatever she thought of Walt and me. ‘I am so disappointed in my children,’ ” she mimicked in a parody of her mother, which Rex guessed was probably not too wide off the mark.

  “When did you know aboot the life insurance?” he asked. Had that been a factor in the murders?

  “Yesterday afternoon when I spoke to the family attorney.” Diane jabbed the cigarette butt into the metal ashtray beside her lounge chair. “When I first mentioned it to Michelle, she acted as surprised as I was, said she wouldn’t have to worry now about paying off her college loan. A million dollars! She could quit school and do whatever she wants. Her and her cute little boyfriend.”

  So, greed might be a motive, after all. Rex wondered if Detective Diaz was apprised of this development, but decided against asking Diane and coming off as too curious. He felt he was in a better position to elicit information from the residents of the B & B if they remained unaware of his semi-professional interest in the case.
Only the Barbers knew, and the Shumakers, who had left town. Clearly, Diane needed someone to vent to, and he was more than willing to provide a sympathetic ear.

  “I had to wait tables to pay for my degree. Taffy drank away my college fund.”

  “That must’ve been tough.”

  “I never invited them to the graduation. Figured they didn’t deserve it, and Taffy might have embarrassed everybody by passing out.”

  “It cannot be easy having an alcoholic parent,” Rex said, and meant it. If what Diane was telling him was true, she’d had a raw deal.

  “That’s not all.” She fired up another cigarette. “Taffy suffered from NPD. Except that she didn’t suffer from it—everyone around her did.”

  “Excuse me. NPD?”

  “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

  “I see.”

  The English language was becoming increasingly abbreviated. Soon everybody would be talking in code. “Was this a clinical diagnosis?”

  Diane almost choked on her cigarette. “Are you kidding? Taffy never sought help. She thought the sun shone out of her rear end. But I was there to witness her case history firsthand. She was a drama queen of the first order. Good drama or bad—it didn’t matter as long as she was the center of it. Even though she would subtly provoke a scene, you’d always get blamed for starting it. And then she would cry crocodile tears and say how mean and crazy you were. She was happiest when other people were miserable. It took dozens of sessions with a therapist and thousands of dollars to finally figure out that my childhood was abnormal. In fact, I didn’t have much of a childhood because she was the child. I also figured out that a lot of bad relationships in my life were not my fault.”

  Such a lot of anger and resentment, Rex thought. Was she truly over it? “Was your relationship with your dad any better?” he asked.

  “He was complicit—weak and spineless. He enabled my mother’s behavior. That makes him almost as bad.”

  Harsh words indeed. Rex dragged his lounge chair closer. His voice dropped to a conciliatory register. “Can’t have been easy for him.”