Murder at the Dolphin Inn

by C. S. Challinor

  “I know what you mean.” The notion of Walt being a closet pervert had not escaped Rex, whatever Helen said about his upbringing. No question, the innkeeper was a strange individual.

  They continued to scrutinize the bistros and restaurants. At the storefront of a costume and lingerie store, white clown masks with round red noses, rubbery lips, and stringy orange hair sticking out at the sides seemed to jeer at Rex for not having solved the Dyer case.

  “Sod off,” he told the grinning masks topping the star-spangled clown suits.

  “Are you talking to those clowns?” Helen asked in amusement. “They look harmless enough to me.”

  Not to Rex. He found he was developing an aversion to clowns. “If it is, as you say, a house of ill repute, and it’s on Duval, it’s more likely to be at the quieter end of the street,” he decided.

  Trudging back in that direction, he entered a convenience store and made inquiries. To his embarrassment, the House of the Rising Sun, far from being a bar, proved to be what Helen had supposed, and the store clerk gave him complicit and explicit directions as to its whereabouts.

  “You’re blushing to your red roots,” Helen noted when he re-emerged onto the sidewalk.

  “I wish you had come in with me. I think I was mistaken for a john.”

  Helen laughed outright, but had the grace not to say, “I told you so.” He led her across the busy street and down one block to a private residence with an innocuous façade lit with fairy lights. “This must be it. Looks respectable enough...”

  “Are you proposing to go inside?” Helen inquired with a distinct lift of her left eyebrow.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. I was just curious.”

  “Curiosity got the cat,” she quipped.

  “And satisfaction got him back—and made him fat.”

  Why did everything keep coming back to cats? And black beards? He was reminded of an errand.

  “Ready to head back?” Helen asked.

  “Not quite,” he prevaricated.

  “Oh, and what other entertainment have you got planned for us this evening?” she asked with an ironic smile.

  “I promised I would deliver a pizza to the cemetery.”

  Her expression changed to one of total stupefaction, tinged with dismay. “I see. Well, never let it be said you don’t know how to show a girl a good time,” she muttered, and added: “How far?”

  ~TWENTY~

  “Watch your step,” Rex cautioned as they stumbled between toppling gravestones and vine-choked tombs silhouetted beneath a pale moon intermittently obscured by whispering palm fronds. Barely sufficient light enabled him to find his way without tripping over and dropping the flat cardboard box, from which escaped the fishy aroma of anchovies. All the same, he wished he’d thought to bring a small flashlight. The cemetery looked nothing like it did during the day.

  “What is Willie like?” Helen inquired.

  “Willie is somewhat poetic. He talks in quotes. I think he used to teach English.” The man had clearly fallen on hard times. Wasn’t that a novel by Dickens?

  “And this is where he lives?” Helen asked incredulously.

  “He has a makeshift shelter here. He said the caretaker lets him stay in return for doing odd jobs around the place. Willie is quite a character. I think you’ll appreciate him.”

  “I’m sure I will. Goodness, I’m glad I wore sandals and not heels. I never expected to be hiking up and down Duval Street all evening and trekking across a pitch-black graveyard.”

  “This way.” Rex led her off at a tangent, recalling landmarks from his previous visit, a broken urn here, a tall cross there, a peculiar configuration of headstones.

  After a few minutes, he glimpsed an orange pinprick of light bobbing in the dark, and made his way toward it, Helen close behind him. He found Willie seated on his raised slab smoking the glowing butt of a cigarette. A bed of leaves overlaid by a canvas sheet covered the ground beneath the tombstone, reinforced on three sides by cardboard and corrugated iron to shield him from the elements.

  “Welcome to my boudoir,” Willie said.

  “Where is Macavity?” was the first question out of Rex’s mouth as he looked around for the vagrant’s faithful old cat.

  “Rest easy, my friend. He is still with us in the land of the living. But he is a nocturnal creature, and his instinct is to hunt.” Willie spoke in his slow gruff voice, carefully enunciating his words around missing teeth. “On occasion he is still able to catch some prey, and brings it back as an offering to the gods.”

  “I think it’s just a gift for you,” Helen said sensibly, staying close to Rex. “I had a cat that left birds and mice on my back doorstep.”

  “My fiancée Helen,” Rex introduced her.

  Willie stood up but hesitated to take her hand. He seemed shy in her presence and averted his eyes. He took the pizza box with mumbled thanks and set it down on the stone slab.

  “Do you have everything you need here?” Helen asked with tender-hearted concern.

  “A dry place to sleep, a drop of wine to warm my heart and my thoughts, and I am content.”

  “Rex said you were an English teacher?”

  “An adjunct professor of literature at a revered college. I told my students to stop wasting their time reading longwinded critiques by academics who couldn’t write a novel to save their lives, and to go—go!—out into the world and see and write about it themselves. A long story. And in short, I was fired.” His toothless mouth clamped shut and disappeared into his beard.

  Rex thought sadly that Willie’s drinking might have had something to do with his professional decline.

  “I am reduced to frequenting the library and opening books I cannot keep. I love the smell of new books. I would go into Borders Express and fill my lungs with the rarefied scent of virgin paper.” Willie held his nose aloft and closed his eyes as if to conjure up the scent and savor it—a feat indeed over the reek of anchovy and pepperoni. “But, sadly, it closed.”

  Rex felt Helen’s elbow nudge him gently. “Well, let us not detain you further,” he said, finding himself elevating his diction in the vagrant’s presence. “Unless there’s anything you’ve remembered since our conversation this morning?”

  “The scene at the Dolphin Inn is as I described it. The dark beard, the glinting knife or dagger, the clown costumes, the Dyers cowed and cooperative.”

  “Thank you, Willie.” Rex was encouraged that the homeless man had recalled their conversation down to the last detail. He had even added a couple of embellishments, namely the dagger and the attitude of the Dyers in the face of their ordeal, both of which seemed plausible under the circumstances. It proved Willie could retain information over limited periods of time at least. “Enjoy your meal,” he said.

  “I shall. I thank you.”

  As Rex and Helen moved away, a white bib and forepaws appeared in the dark from behind a gravestone, where Macavity must have been waiting. Leaping onto the tomb, he began pawing the box that Willie had set on his lap.

  “Patience, my good fellow,” Willie bid him. “The anchovies are all for you.”

  “How sad,” Helen said when they were out of earshot.

  “You never cried over the Dyers,” Rex pointed out, guiding her by the hand.

  “I never met them.”

  “Probably wouldn’t have made a difference if you had.” He was beginning to think there was no one at all to mourn the old couple, not even their children.

  At night the presence of the tens of thousands of interred and entombed bodies felt almost palpable. Headstones stuck out of the ground in a semi-circle of crooked teeth, the gnarled arms of trees reaching out fingers to snag their hair as they passed. Breaths of a breeze licked Rex’s neck. Or perhaps it was instinct alerting him to some unseen danger and making his hairs stand on end. A twig cracked in the darkness as an owl let out a loud to-wit, to-woo. Startled, Helen tripped on a piece of masonry lodged in the ground, and Rex hastened to steady her.


  A milky glow rose in the clearing around them, deathly quiet but for the rustle of nocturnal creatures in the shadowed leaves and undergrowth. He had spotted several large iguanas earlier in the day, and knowing Helen’s aversion to reptiles, hoped they did not come toe to toe with one, or else eye to eye with one in the trees. He was relieved when he saw the Frances Street gate in the distance. Helen had begun to limp slightly.

  “How are you bearing up?” he asked.

  “My sandals are beginning to rub, but it’s only a few blocks to the B and B. I can take them off when we reach the street.”

  Rex was extremely apologetic when she showed him the red blisters on her toes under a streetlamp, but she said it had been in a good cause.

  Partly in a good cause, he reflected, but whether their night excursions led to a break in the case was less certain. At this point it boiled down to a killer with a black beard, if Willie was to be believed. Yet this did fit Peggy Barber’s description of a “swarthy” visitor who had come to the Dolphin Inn looking for Taffy two years ago. Furthermore, Diane had said her mother’s supplier of gin and baubles was someone called Blackbeard.

  Good luck finding this character, he told himself.

  By the time he and Helen reached the Dolphin Inn, they were more than ready for their comfortable four-poster bed. Rex glanced at his watch: almost eleven. The front door was locked. Helen brushed the soles of her feet on the indoor mat, and noiselessly they mounted the stairs in order not to disturb the Barbers, who had gone to bed early.

  At the turn in the banister, Rex heard a door on the above landing open and close with a thud. Michelle’s and Ryan’s voices whispered urgently together as their key was loudly inserted and turned in the lock. Young people were not always respectful of other peoples’ repose, Rex considered more censoriously than he might otherwise have done had he not been so bone-weary and aware of his earlier headache making a comeback. He cleared his throat and jangled his keys to announce his presence downstairs. They might have been discussing something private, and he drew the line at eavesdropping on conversations unless the speakers were raising their voices.

  The young couple appeared on his floor, dressed to go out, Ryan’s hair still wet or perhaps gelled, Michelle wearing a short red sequined dress. The four of them exchanged goodnights as Rex and Helen entered their room.

  He opened the balcony doors to air the room, but did not sit outside taking in the night air on this particular occasion. He was too tired and, much as he was loath to admit to himself, a little discouraged with progress in the case. Where did one begin to look for a stranger with a black beard, or a person disguised with one?

  The next time he stood on his balcony, early the following morning and still in his dressing gown, he had to rub his eyes to make sure he was not dreaming. A female body lay motionless at the bottom of the kidney-shaped pool.

  ~TWENTY-ONE~

  Rex raced down the stairs, desperate to save the young woman if there still remained a chance. Thoughts raced through his mind. Where was Ryan? Did Michelle’s guardians still live in Vermont? Walt would have to contact them with the sad news of her death. How and why had this happened? And had it to do with the Dyers’ murders?

  The money she had been left was the obvious conclusion. He ran through to the guest lounge where the drapes were drawn across the glass sliders. His sleep-stiffened fingers wrangled with the catch. He finally burst onto the patio.

  Face down on the pool floor at the deep end, long dark hair undulating beneath the surface strewn with bougainvillea petals blown from the bushes, the clothed woman was incontestably dead. A long red scarf leashed around her neck had been suctioned into the outlet drain. Now that he was nearer the victim, he realized, with some measure of relief, that it was not in fact Michelle Cuzzens in the water. From the balcony he had confused the water-darkened hair with the girl’s raven tresses. This woman was tall too, but curvier. Who was she? Not a guest at the Dolphin Inn, and yet she did seem familiar.

  He speculated she had been choked by the scarf, leaving no more evidence than in the strangulation of the Dyers. Drowning the victim outright would have proved a riskier process, involving more resistance and a certain amount of splashing. Several windows overlooked the pool. Even dumping a dead body in here was chancy. So why chance it? Another statement being made, he reasoned.

  Walt materialized beside him, mouth agape. “You...what...how?” he began, echoing Rex’s own questions.

  “Call Detective Diaz on this number.” Rex thrust the business card at him which he’d had the presence of mind to snatch up from the desk in his room. “Quick!”

  Walt staggered off to phone the detective, glancing in horror over his shoulder. Helen called out to Rex from their balcony. “Listen, I thought... Oh, my God! Rex! Is that... Surely not a dead body in the pool?” She clamped a hand to her mouth.

  Rex entertained the fleeting and inconsequential thought that the balcony scene was somewhat farcical, save for the tragic circumstances.

  “Walt went to ring the police. Stay upstairs,” he told Helen. “And lock the door.”

  “Is she the woman we saw the other night? The one wearing a red silk scarf? I can’t believe it...”

  Rex kneeled as close to the edge of the pool as he dared without compromising potential evidence, and attempted to get a better look at the corpse. The jewelry on her arm and hands glittered under the sun-refracted surface.

  “Poor lass,” he muttered to himself.

  “I never saw her before.” Walt, returned from his mission to call the police, hovered at a short distance.

  “Well, what is she doing in your pool?”

  “I have no idea!”

  “Where’s Diane?”

  “Not here yet.”

  “Who else is around?”

  “No-no one,” Walt stammered. “I mean, Michelle and Ryan will still be in bed. They usually get up late. They’re staying for free until the funeral. Michelle is family, after all, and they don’t have much money,” he went on, talking for the sake of talking. “At least not until the insurance company pays up. The Barbers should be down for breakfast soon. What are they going to think?”

  “Where were you last night?” Rex could not be sure when the drowning took place, but the woman was dressed up as for a night on the town. As the students had been.

  Walt’s nose twitched. His timid gaze reverted to the body in the pool. “I went out at ten-thirty.”

  “Until what time?”

  “Midnight. I never checked back here. No reason to. I went straight to bed.”

  Ryan and Michelle had left the guest house at around eleven. Rex and Helen had gone to bed shortly thereafter. The balcony doors to their suite were open all night. He had not heard a thing, and it was unlikely Helen had either since she took sleeping pills on vacation. If the Barbers had been asleep, there would have been no lights on at the back of the bed-and-breakfast from eleven o’ clock or so until Michelle and Ryan returned, possibly sometime in the wee hours of the morning. The killer/s might have seen Walt leave on his moped and waited until the coast was clear. These thoughts flooded Rex’s brain in a swirling tsunami.

  “The police will want to know where you went,” he told Walt.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Why not?”

  “People would get the wrong impression.”

  “What sort of impression are they going to get now?” Rex pointed into the pool. “If you have an alibi, all to the good.”

  “Why did this have to happen last night?” the innkeeper wailed. “I hardly ever go out.”

  “So, where did you go?”

  “Nowhere.”

  Rex curbed his impatience. “If by chance it has anything to do with the House of the Rising Sun, it can’t be worse than having another murder at your B and B.” Bed-and-breakfast-and-bodies, Rex thought. “In fact, it seems you have been doing some good deeds at the Rising Sun.”

  Walt had started guiltily at each men
tion of the establishment. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he griped. “Not sure where you got your information.” He regarded Rex with suspicion and a hint of resentment. “But okay then, I used to work there as a part-time assistant manager to subsidize what my parents were paying me. Jobs are not that easy to come by around here,” he said in his defense. “My job was to oversee the girls and make sure the clients didn’t try anything on, beyond what they paid for.”

  Rex had difficulty imagining Walt in the role of enforcer, but nodded in encouragement for him to continue.

  “These are just ordinary girls trying to make ends meet,” Walt explained. “Most of them can’t even reconcile their checkbooks. I loaned one of them rent money so she wouldn’t get evicted. I still go over once in a while to make sure they’re okay. That’s where I was last night.” A pause. “How did you know?”

  “Twisted Angel sang your praises.”

  At first Walt looked dumbstruck, and then beamed under his thick glasses. “Angel—he’s like a legend around the island. And a good guy to have on your side.”

  Rex reflected that he, personally, would not want to get on the biker’s bad side.

  “But this whole thing is a disaster,” Walt mumbled, gazing back into the pool, and then looking away quickly. “Things were just beginning to get back to normal.”

  When was it ever normal? Rex wondered.

  “Swimming in stilettos?” Detective Diaz asked behind them, making Rex jump. “I’d recognize those ankles anywhere. Keep back, now. We’re gonna have to process the area.” He got on his cell phone and issued brief instructions to the person at the other end as he visually scanned the surroundings. “Chances slim to none we can lift footprints off this aggregate concrete pool deck,” he said, mostly to himself, before cutting the connection.

  Walt besieged him, a blubbering wreck. “Who is targeting my B and B?” he wailed.

  “Wish I knew.” Diaz strode over to the fence and, grabbing the pool skimmer, extended the net under the water and tilted the blurry face toward him.