by Ron Base
He sat on the edge of the bed taking deep breaths. He heard a noise from the other room. Visions of Reno O’Hara breaking into the house assailed him.
Get a grip, he told himself. Newspaper deadlines did not loom. Bad guys were not invading. They were safe.
He knew this time of night; the hours of nightmares and demons and endless uncertainty. Gloom floated, death was close.
Had he heard something?
He rose from the bed and slipped across to the bedroom door. He peered out through the shadows occupying the house at this hour. Nothing moved. All was quiet.
“My love,” Freddie called. “Come back to bed. It’s all right.”
And maybe it was.
8
Happy tourists filled the visitors center the next morning. There was no sign of threatening evil in the person of Reno O’Hara—good news for Sanibel tourism, better news for Tree. Feeling more relaxed, he got himself a cup of coffee and then leaned against the counter trading pleasantries with the trio of volunteers on duty.
Rex Baxter came down from his office, brightening as soon as he saw the reception area full of visitors. “Anyone here from Chicago?”
One of the tourists recognized him from his weatherman days. Pleased, Rex soon was holding court. “I’m not from Chicago originally,” he said. “I was born on the Oklahoma panhandle. The panhandle’s so flat you can watch your dog run away for two days.”
The group exploded in laughter.
“People always ask me why I left Chicago,” Rex continued. “I always tell ’em it’s because the weather is so easy to forecast down here. You just paste a smile on your face and say, ‘Sunny.’”
Someone asked if he knew Barack Obama in Chicago. Rex got that question all the time, and he didn’t like it. He had left town by the time the future president came along. “I knew Mayor Daley, though. Mayor Daley said I was his favorite weatherman.”
“That’s the last mayor?” the visitor from Chicago said.
“No, no, his old man,” Rex said.
The Chicago visitor looked blank-faced.
“What you want to do,” Rex went on, relieved to change the subject, “you want to get over to the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. That’s where we got the replica of the biggest darn gun you ever laid eyes on.”
“What are you doing with a gun over there?” someone wanted to know.
“Ding Darling was a world famous cartoonist, a household word. I grew up reading his stuff at a time when editorial cartoonists still had real influence, him more than most. He was also a pioneering conservationist who did more than just about anyone to get the wetlands around here protected.”
“Ding owned a gun?” One of the visitors sounded nonplused.
“No, no. It wasn’t Ding’s gun, but he had it hanging on the wall in his office. Blunderbuss of a thing, used by Maryland poachers in the 1930s. The poachers filled the rifle full of buckshot, aimed it at a flock of ducks and pulled the trigger. Blam! Blam! Killed dozens of birds with a single shot, an environmental travesty, of course, the sort of thing Ding Darling fought against his whole life.”
Scattered applause warmed Rex to his subject.
“What me and a couple of buddies have done, we’ve built a replica of the gun, trigger mechanism, the whole thing.”
“You can shoot this mother?” The question came from a tourist displaying a large belly beneath a red golf shirt.
“You bet,” said Rex. “We got her loaded up with buckshot. You folks are around Saturday, come on over to Ding Darling’s. We’ll be giving demonstrations, aiming it at targets we got set up. It’s something to see, I promise you.”
An excited murmur was followed by assurances from his eager audience that they would be there. Rex pumped hands and slapped backs before making his way over to where Tree was finishing his coffee.
“You should go over and have a look at that gun, Tree.”
“I will, Rex.”
“It’s something else.”
They stood looking at one another.
“What, Rex?”
“That woman.”
“What woman?”
“The one upstairs in your office.”
“There’s a woman in my office?”
“Wasn’t sure you knew.”
“Rex, for God’s sake. You should have said something before now.”
“Didn’t know what to think of some babe who wasn’t Freddie in your office.”
“Babe?”
“She’s a bit of a babe, yeah.”
“You might think she was a client, Rex. That might have crossed your mind. I am a detective, after all.”
Rex looked at him as though he was crazy.
Tree hurried up the stairs. The woman sat in the visitor’s chair. As soon as he saw her, he knew who she was. He’d seen her photograph in the papers often enough. She wore a white dress with a scooped neckline and a flared skirt that showed off long tanned legs.
“The door was open so I walked in,” she said in a throaty voice. Exactly the voice Tree would have imagined.
He squeezed past her to his desk.
In the detective fiction he read as a kid, the femme fatale appeared at the detective’s office in chapter one. She kept crossing and uncrossing long legs. The thought of female legs crossing gave Tree a frisson of adolescent lust. This wasn’t exactly the first chapter of Tree’s life. Nothing about his life, or anyone else’s, ever fell into anything as neat as a chapter. He was no longer certain of lustful frissons either, or whether there were such things as femmes fatale, only stupid men. But if there were, the woman seated in front of him certainly would qualify.
She said, “I wasn’t sure if I had the right address. I always thought this was the Chamber of Commerce Visitors Center.”
“It is,” he said. “But they let me have an office here.”
The woman glanced around. “The Sanibel Sunset Detective Agency?”
“I’m the Sanibel Sunset detective.”
“There’s only one of you?” Surprise marred the perfect symmetry of her face.
“I bring in associates when needed,” Tree lied.
“I was driving by. Well, I drive by here a good deal. I’m up at Captiva.” She spoke in a flat, slightly accented drawl, mid-Atlantic. A voice that had spent more time in Europe than it had “up at Captiva.”
“I saw your ad in the local paper.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never hired a private detective before. I’m not at all sure how it’s done.”
“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is, and then we can take it from there,” Tree said in his most reassuring voice. It went nicely with his sympathetic face.
“Now it sounds as though I’m seeing a therapist.” The hint of a smile. Tree smiled back.
“I should probably tell you my name. That would help.”
“It would,” Tree agreed.
She took a deep breath. “My name is Elizabeth Traven.” She looked at him expectantly. “Traven. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“You’re Brand Traven’s wife. The media mogul.”
“Media mogul,” she repeated. “Sounds funny, like a comic book hero. Media Mogul.”
“Media Mogul is in jail.”
“A federal prison,” Elizabeth Traven corrected. “The Coleman Federal Correctional Complex.”
“That’s a maximum security facility, isn’t it?”
“There’s a minimum security wing where Brand is housed. I mean it’s prison. Maximum. Minimum. Whatever. It’s still prison.”
“A fraud conviction.”
“They accused him of defrauding his company. But they actually convicted him on a single charge. Obstruction of justice. Nonsense. Because he moved a few boxes.”
Tree aimed a sympathetic nod in her direction, remembering the boxes contained evidence pertaining to the case. The removal had been caught on a security camera.
“How’s he doing up there?”
“Brand is doing fine. Brand alw
ays does fine. No matter what. That’s Brand. He adjusts to his circumstances. He survives. That’s what he does.”
A fleeting, uncertain look was followed by silence. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Tree tried not to look. Elizabeth Traven cleared her throat.
“We’ve lived in New York and London for the past twenty years or so. Captiva is our winter retreat. But ever since Brand’s been at Coleman, I’ve stayed here, driving to see him three or four times a week. You spend a lot of time waiting at Coleman, in a kind of holding room where they put inmate wives and girlfriends, lawyers too, but mostly it’s the women. It becomes sort of a bonding thing. In a way, we all become inmates.”
She glanced out the window, as though the rest of her story might be in the parking lot.
“I’ve become friends with a woman whose husband is a dealer in stolen goods, at least that’s what she says. He’s serving time for manslaughter, which means he killed someone but didn’t do it intentionally. According to my friend, her husband never killed anyone unintentionally. So there you go, Mr. Callister, these are the kind of people you get involved with when your husband ends up in prison; the criminal class. I suppose in your line of work, you are used to such types.”
Tree nodded solemnly, as though intimately familiar with the criminal class.
“Well, for me, it’s alien territory, let me assure you. But I like Michelle. Something rather captivating about her. Fascinating.”
“Michelle?”
“Michelle Crowley.”
Tree put on his glasses and made a note. Elizabeth Traven said, “You wear glasses?”
“Just for reading.”
“Everyone calls her Mickey. Hispanic mother who was a drug addict. Black father doing life in Idaho or some such place. A brother was killed in a drive-by shooting. Stories of growing up in the Overtown section of Miami that are not to be believed.”
“She lives around here now?”
“Fort Myers. She had to take the bus to Coleman, which isn’t easy, so I drove her back and forth on the days when I visited. It was nice to have the company. You’ve got nothing in common, really, but in fact for the moment you’ve got everything.
“A few times we ended up eating together because it was late after the drive back, and neither of us felt like cooking. Then she began calling me—late at night, first thing in the morning.
“After that, she would show up at odd hours. I’d drive to the supermarket or walk on the beach, and she’d follow me.”
She paused and looked at him. Tree threw his glasses on the desk. “It sounds as though there might be reason for concern.”
She re-crossed her legs. He fought off memories of the bad women who filled the paperback detective novels of his youth.
“So that’s where we are at the moment,” Elizabeth said. “I find her actions threatening. I’m never sure when she’s going to appear, and I’m not certain what she will do next. I don’t want to go to the police, because she hasn’t done anything. Maybe she is just lonely, and needs a friend and has gone a little overboard. I don’t know.”
“What can I do to help?” Tree was pleased with the way he phrased the question. It had a nice professional ring to it.
“You may or may not know, I’m a writer.”
“A biography of Karl Marx.”
Elizabeth looked pleasantly surprised. “Among others, yes. I’m trying to finish a new book. Trotsky. His life and times. He’s giving me enough trouble. I don’t need any more distractions. I’m feeling vulnerable, perhaps a little more frightened than I like to admit.”
“Why don’t I see what I can find out about this woman, ascertain what she’s up to, what sort of threat she presents, and then get back to you. We can decide on next steps from there.”
“What do you charge for this sort of thing, Mr. Callister?”
“Two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.”
The deal breaker. Would he pay two hundred dollars a day for his services? No. But Elizabeth Traven was made of stronger stuff. “How be I pay you for a week? Throw in one hundred dollars for expenses. Would that be enough?”
Tree’s throat was dry. “I don’t see why not.”
She bent to pick up the plum-colored Gucci bag on the floor beside her. She opened the strap and withdrew a wad of one hundred dollar bills. Did the wives of jailed rich men carry their wealth around in Gucci bags? A little known fact about the rich in American life.
She counted out fifteen bills and laid them on the desk. Tree tried not to look at the money. Elizabeth Traven re-crossed her legs and returned the purse to the floor.
“Would you like a receipt?”
“No. But there is one more thing.” She studied him with pale eyes that Tree imagined might be able to see right through a person such as himself, a person trying to be one thing when he was something else entirely.
“What’s that?”
“In addition to purchasing its services, I assume I am also buying Sanibel Sunset Detective’s discretion?”
“You are, absolutely.”
“This business between us must remain strictly confidential.”
“That goes without saying,” Tree said.
“Does it?” She sat up straight. “Well, just in case, now it’s been said.”
“I’m going to need whatever information you have on Mickey Crowley.”
“Such as?”
“A photograph would help.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Her address?”
“All I have is where I dropped her off. MacGregor Woods on Barrington Court.”
“What about her husband’s name?”
“It’s Dwayne.”
“Dwayne Crowley?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“What about a description of Mickey?”
“Let me see. African American. About five feet, three inches tall. Slim figure. Rather attractive, in a dusky sort of way. Short black hair. Yes, and she has some sort of tattoo on her shoulder. A rose, I think.”
Tree retrieved his glasses from the desk and then spent some time writing down the information. “I’ll need your phone number.”
She rose to her feet. “I’m impressed you know about the Marx book.”
“The crazy days in Vienna before Karl and his brothers got into comedy.”
She aimed a level gaze at him.
“You’ve heard those jokes before,” he said.
“Let’s meet again next Wednesday, Mr. Callister. Here in your office. Hopefully, by then you will have some results.”
He watched her leave. Or rather he watched her behind moving beneath the material of the dress. He shouldn’t have been doing that, but he was a detective, after all. That’s what detectives did. They watched things.
9
Think about it,” Rex Baxter said. “These are grown men wearing tights.”
Friday nights Rex presided over Fun Friday, which consisted of a group of local business people and their spouses gathered at the Lighthouse bar for drinks and, depending on the mood, dinner. Tree bought Freddie a glass of chardonnay as he listened to Rex in conversation with Todd Jackson.
“And not just tights. These guys run around in capes and masks. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if you walked out in the street like that?”
“I like Batman,” Todd said, sipping a Heineken. “And I liked the first Spider-Man. Didn’t like the others, though.”
Todd, polished a walnut brown, operated Sanibel Biohazard, “a crime scene clean-up company,” as he described it, that did a thriving business in the Naples-Fort Myers area.
“Batman’s a good example of what I’m talking about,” Rex continued. “How does he even get into that outfit? It’s skin tight, for God’s sake. Try getting into a skin-tight jumpsuit some time. See how long it takes you.”
“Somehow on the big screen it all makes sense,” Todd said.
“Doesn’t make any sense at all. You’re a young guy, you’re pissed off at
the world, so you put on a pair of tights and a mask to fight crime? Come on. Try it. See how far you get.”
“I don’t fight crime,” Todd said. “I clean it up.”
“Not only does the public accept this nonsense, it flocks to movie theaters to see it. These movies aren’t just popular, they are phenomenal hits all over the world. I don’t get it, I really don’t.”
“That’s why all these movies are set in big Northeast cities,” Todd said. “Can you imagine your average superhero in tights and a mask down here? Too hot. He’d have to wear a bathing suit.”
The electric keyboard player crooned “My Heart Will Go On.” Freddie nudged Tree. “Who can resist?”
“Not me,” Tree said.
She put her drink on the bar and led him onto the dance floor. Tree told her about his encounter with Elizabeth Traven.
“Elizabeth Traven came to see you?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“This afternoon?”
“This morning, first thing, actually.”
Freddie shifted against him. He held her close.
“No comment?” Tree said.
“She’s a hottie.”
“A hottie?” His mind flashed to a view of Elizabeth Traven’s legs. “She’s too old to be a hottie.”
“Tree, she’s still a hottie.” Freddie, adamant.
“She wrote a book on Marx. The philosopher. Not one of the brothers.”
“Stalin, too. She’s very anti-communist.”
“She’s doing Trotsky. One of my favorite communists.”
“Her books are doorstoppers,” Freddie said. “I’m surprised she has the time, what with her interestingly checkered past.”
“We all have one of those.”
“An interestingly checkered past? Not me.”
“Two ex-husbands? That’s checkered.”
“Just seems boring to me.”
“Maybe that’s how Elizabeth sees her life,” Tree said.
“The rumors about Bill Clinton?”
“There are rumors about Bill Clinton and everyone.”
“Not about Bill and me,” Freddie said.
“One of the reasons I married you,” he said. “Everyone else was sleeping with Bill Clinton.”
“Either that or you had already married them.”
