Smokey Eyes

by Barbara Silkstone

  Lizzy shook her head. “You shouldn’t deal with her alone on the chance she’s the killer or just plain crazy. The park can be deserted on a weekday. I hate that you’re going alone.”

  “She all but slugged Chief Miranda going into the lineup, but I’ll be on my guard.” I punched my right fist into my left palm not fooling Lizzy—or me.”

  “Dave says Nancy has a hot temper. Talk about the chicken calling the kettle black.”

  Lizzy’s mixed metaphor cracked me up. “Not to worry. I’m wearing my kindly shrink suit. Even iceberg Grayson melted in my company.”

  “I think his melting had more to do with my caboose.”

  “That train has left the station, girlfriend! No more pantyhose for you.”

  After dropping Lizzy at her house, I headed south along Gulf Boulevard. I hung a left at the opulent Don Cesar Resort, crossed over the Bayway and then south again through Tierra Verde.

  The short drive had a comforting effect on my nerves. Nature brings balance and I needed balance. I glanced to my right and saw a dolphin leap from the aqua blue waters—was he a promise of a happy ending?

  Within a few minutes I arrived at the nature trail. Fort DeSoto was a portal into the natural beauty of Florida. Mangroves, wetlands, palm hammocks, native plants, and pristine white sand.

  The stunning architecture of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge with its twin golden sails caught the afternoon sun. A kayak glided on the colorless water. A shell-seeker walked within a few feet of a giant blue heron, each creature respectful of the other.

  Heavenly. Understandable why Nancy would wish to hide here.

  Holding my shoes in one hand I made my way to the beach, then walked along the shallow lagoon that separated the two strips of white sand. The tint of the tidal pool was surreal.

  The Very Crabby was moored sideways to the shore. It was plain dumb luck to find the sailboat so close. Nancy walked around the far side of the deck.

  With a wave, I called to her. If she refused to come ashore, there was no way I could get to her. I called again hoping she wasn’t ignoring me.

  I couldn’t see what she was doing on the far side of the boat. There would be no sense in outwaiting her. She could stay the night or just sail back to the yacht club if she wanted to avoid me.

  I waved again. The grit between my toes would surely end up in my pumps when I put them on again.

  Nancy vanished from the boat, the angle of sun blocking my view. She reappeared in a dinghy alongside the Very Crabby. Raising a paddle, she propelled herself to shore. The oar could be used as a weapon if she was so inclined. I felt vulnerable recalling the force of her hands when she grabbed me below deck. She was a powerful woman most likely in a high emotional state.

  Not a stick to be found—nothing but sand to throw at her if push came to push. But armed with my therapist smile, I hoped to win her trust—in order to see her convicted.

  Nancy dragged the dinghy ashore. Her grizzly hair and swollen eyes declared her a woman near the breaking point. Her bright colored Crabby Nancy’s Fried Fish T-shirt mocked her physical condition.

  “What do you want?” she threw the paddle into the dinghy and placed her hands on her hips.

  “Can we talk?” I gripped my shoes under the arches exposing the high heels—just in case I needed to do battle.

  “You look ridiculous in that business suit!” Nancy said. “People are going to think you’re a bail bondsman. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I feel as if you got the short end of the stick Brent Toast was wielding. Can we sit someplace?”

  Her shoulders drooped and her entire body seemed to collapse like a marionette with clipped strings. She pointed to a picnic table half hidden under a grove of palmettos and live oaks.

  I brushed a family of ants off the wood seat and settled onto a section of the plank that offered the fewest splinters.

  “Someone should teach you how to dress for the beach.” Her voice was husky as if she’d been crying.

  A critter bit me and I smacked my leg. A trail of ants adopted my left calf for military maneuvers. “If I jump up and dance, you’ll know I have ants in my pants.”

  She laughed. “We used to play that game when we were kids. Ants in the Pants.”

  Perfect opening for a friendly chat. “You have siblings in Florida?”

  “Grew up in Key West. Family’s scattered now.”

  I smacked a mosquito. “You want to talk about Brent. I’m a good listener.”

  “Don’t need no shrink.” Anger flared and then passed.

  “Not here as a shrink. Just tell me what you think I should know. Maybe I can help. You were the most distraught of anyone when he....”

  “So you don’t think I did it?”

  I diverted. “Why’d he try to swamp your boat? What was that all about?”

  “I once told him how much I wanted a sailboat. Toast had a mean streak. He was trying to damage the one thing that made me happy.”

  She pulled a lock of hair behind her ear. “Have you ever been used and then made to feel really stupid afterwards?”

  “Do flies fly? Do ducks duck?”

  She snort-laughed.

  “Brent was on your boat right before someone stabbed him. Why?”

  “If this comes to trial they’ll make you repeat what I tell you.”

  “Yeah.” The word came from my lips in the form of a whisper.

  She stared into my eyes, obviously judging me. The stare turned to a glazed look as though her mind was drifting away. “Brent and I had an affair.”

  A bug danced under my thigh but I held steady. The slightest move might bring her back and stop her from speaking.

  If she confessed, I would be the shrink who knew too much. The danger was if the confession wasn’t accompanied by true remorse, she could regret unburdening herself and come at me.

  Did she have a knife or gun concealed in her baggy clothes? I was determined to get a confession out of her, no matter what.

  I wasn’t defenseless. I had my high heels.

  Chapter 26

  A cloud passed over Nancy’s face as she stared at her sailboat bobbing gently in the shallow waters. Her expression resembled the look Lizzy got while watching WonderDog snoring at her feet. Could this rough woman love her boat as much as we loved our pets?

  “I’ve never had time for romantic entanglements,” Nancy said. “I spent years building up Crabby Nancy’s Fried Fish. It was my dream and I saw it through to completion. People don’t think of Starfish Cove without mentioning my fried fish.”

  She picked at the rough skin on the fingers of her left hand. “The restaurant business is a cruel master. You can’t look away for a minute—competitors, suppliers, and employee theft—it’s a twenty-four seven monster. I had no time for a man.”

  She looked older than her fifty years. Tired. Disillusioned. Depressed.

  “I was flattered when Brent came on to me. His sudden attention gave me something to look forward to. Not being a girly girl used to fending off men, it was like he filled a hole in my heart—a hole I didn’t even know existed.”

  She studied me. “I feel stupid telling you this but maybe I need someone to tell me I’m not crazy. The cops treated me like I was lying about everything short of my name.”

  I reached out and touched her hand. “The heart can be vulnerable, especially when the body is exhausted from chasing dreams.”

  “Thank you. That makes me feel better. Busy building for my future—alone but happy—suddenly a man steps in who seems to see the real Nancy Nemo—the soft side I hid from the world. Brent was ten years older. He’d accomplished a lot. I trusted him.” She thumped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

  “I haven’t had time to mourn the guy I fell in love with—I certainly am not going to cry over the guy knifed to death on my boat. They were two different men.”

  “Was Brent on your boat when he was stabbed?”

  “The cops asked me but I can’t be sure.�
� She glanced around as if someone might be listening. “I didn’t tell them because…well, it’s humiliating. Brent could be such a child at times. I hated that part of him.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “We weren’t seeing each other anymore when I bought the Very Crabby. Buying the boat for myself made me happy and that pissed him off. He hated seeing me happy after what I did to him.”

  What did she do to him? Wow. That would have to wait for later. This was no time to interrupt. Although she looked at me, I could tell she wasn’t seeing me.

  “I was very upset that he tried to swamp me. After we moored in the marina and my guests left, I went below deck to secure things. Brent showed up with a knife in his hand.”

  Kal said the murder weapon was from Brent’s boat. Toast brought the blade for his own murder.

  “Brent said he was going to get even with me for not helping him buy The Billows.”

  Helping him buy The Billows?

  Nancy slammed her hand against the table. “He was set on hurting me by damaging my boat. He lunged at the bulkhead with the blade threatening to sink Very Crabby—which would have been impossible using a knife. He’d been drinking heavily. We argued. He came to his senses. I pushed him up the ladder. He was gone. That was the last time I saw him alive.”

  “You told this to the police?”

  “I didn’t tell them about our argument because I thought it would put me in bad light. I told them I heard a second set of footsteps on the deck when Brent went topside. They acted like they’d already decided I was the one who stabbed him. Nothing I said made any difference to Chief Miranda. I’m not talking to him again until I’ve retained a good defense lawyer.”

  “Why’d you put Brent’s key fob in my purse?”

  She stretched her hands on the table, almost curling them into fists and then straightening. There was no sense in showing fear by moving away from her—I couldn’t get very far. I tightened my grip on one of my pumps, ready to swing the sharp heel if need be.

  “He dropped the fob when he attacked my boat. I put it in my pocket—figured I’d give it to him when he sobered up. He was in no condition to take his boat out again. When I heard the commotion topside, I tossed the fob in a pot under the sink to hide it from him if he came looking for it.”

  Perhaps I wouldn’t be waving a confession under Grayson’s nose.

  “I went topside to see what the screaming was about. Brent’s corpse was floating between our boats and I had his key to Toast of the Town below deck. How would that have looked? I had to get rid of it.”

  “Why not just throw the fob overboard?”

  “How many people were on the Very Crabby after we brought up his body? Six? Eight? Witnesses to any move I made. Instead, I slipped below, un-potted the fob and stuck it in your purse. They might search my boat but who would search you—Miss Goody-Two-Shoes? Officer Kal’s Girl Friday?”

  Any other time I would have taken great exception to the Officer Kal’s Girl Friday crack, but I stayed focused. “What did you have to do with The Billows?”

  She shrugged. “It’s going to come out anyway. Brent was piecing together a parcel of land along the beach. He owned almost a half-mile of waterfront land north of The Billows. It was after he learned I owned two parcels south of Kathy’s hotel that he found he couldn’t live without me.”

  This shouldn’t have been news to me. Jaimie blathered something about Brent owning beachfront land but like everything else she said, I took it with a grain of salt—now that I was planted in Starfish Cove—a grain of sand.

  “Once he completed his land grab—including The Billows and my property the Toast Family Fund would own the largest strip of beachfront property in the state.”

  “That would be worth a fortune,” I said.

  She nodded. “I refused to sell him my land. I was in love but fortunately not so blindly in love that I’d let him destroy my dream of building a retirement place on the beach, my own Tara, with plenty of land on each side to afford me total privacy. A place to sit on the porch and lose myself in the beautiful sunsets.”

  “Sounds lovely.” These weren’t the words of a woman about to confess.

  “Brent acted like he forgot about my land, but he didn’t forget about The Billows. Pillow talk always led to Kathy and her hotel. He knew we were friends, Not hanging out friends but neighborly. The poor girl dreamed of fixing up the hotel, restoring it to its former glory. I was pulling for her but not optimistic about her chances for success. He asked a lot of questions about her finances, if she had any secret backers, and such.”

  “That was some kind of pillow talk.”

  “The kind of pillow talk that finally opened my eyes. I didn’t have any inside information about Kathy’s business, but his persistence raised warning flags. Was he in love with me or my property? Did he think eventually he could charm me into selling it to him? His ego and his drinking exposed the sorry spoiled brat he was.”

  She wiped back a tear with her thumb. “He kept telling me about the misfortunes at The Billows. A plague of rats. Vandalization of the Tiffany glass windows. The ghost of a pirate. He knew too many details about these things, details that fell from alcohol-loosened lips. Every slurred word about The Billows turned me a little farther from him. More than that, it quickly turned my love to hate.”

  I’d misread Nancy. A gruff exterior, no doubt. But just a woman who bet her heart on the wrong man.

  She flicked an ant off the table. “Kathy didn’t stand a chance once her father passed. That’s when she brought in her brother, which is like handing an anchor to a drowning man. The one good thing about Sonny is also the bad thing. He’d do anything for his sister. Kathy acts naïve but she’s wily like her father. The old guy was a tricky bugger—just didn’t know beans about running a hotel.”

  Myron’s less than original words played in my mind. Follow the money. He was right I had to follow the money to The Billows.

  “So what did you do,” I said, “to incur Brent’s wrath besides not selling him your property?”

  “I told Kathy what Brent was doing to ensure the failure of the hotel. Right before he was stabbed I sassed off to him. I said if anyone was going to trick Kathy into selling it would be me. I didn’t mean it.”

  A police siren caused us to turn. Kal’s marked car came to a screeching halt not ten feet away from us.

  Chapter 27

  Kal’s eyes darted from me to Nancy and back.

  “Lizzy told me I might find you here. You ladies okay?”

  Nancy sniffed. “You’re not fooling anyone, Kal. You were afraid I’d harm your friend. Get it through your head. I’m not a killer.”

  She rose from the bench, brushing her backside. “If you have no objections officer, I’m going back to my boat.”

  “Thanks for being a good listener,” she said sotto voce to me.

  Kal waited until she was out of hearing. “Lizzy was worried about you. She called me and asked me to check on you. It seems to have gone well.”

  I was in an awkward position. In my unofficial non-paid position I should be sharing what I learned with Kal. But our deal with Grayson was secret and Nancy told me personal things that I had to respect. I couldn’t ethically tell Kal much. And there were things he hadn’t told me which the more I thought about the angrier I became.

  We sat side by side and watched Nancy paddle to her sailboat. The dinghy disappeared behind the Very Crabby.

  “I don’t think she’s our killer,” I said. “She’s a lot softer than she lets on.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Things you knew but didn’t tell me.” I didn’t care if I showed my anger. “You had to know she was having an affair with Brent. Did you know he was pressuring Kathy to sell The Billows to him? Or how about property ownership records? Brent owns most of the beach land north of The Billows. It’s not a motive to kill him, but it’s a piece of the puzzle.”

  “If I listed all the people Toast
bullied into buying or selling land, half the citizens of the Cove would be suspects.”

  I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. “You want me to share but you don’t. It appears we have a one-sided unpaid employment deal. I give and you take.”

  Listening to Nancy’s hurt had put me in a foul mood. “I can’t profile for you when you hold out on me.”

  Kal’s face reddened. “My apologies. Most of the things you just rattled off are common knowledge in the Cove. I forget that you’re new to our community. “I’ll try to keep you in the loop, when I realize you aren’t in it.”

  I turned my back to him. What he said made sense but I didn’t want to let him off the hook that fast.

  “Why do you think Nancy’s innocent?” He lowered his voice on the chance she might hear him over the stillness of the water.

  “Brent was a mistake, an embarrassment she’ll never get over in this little town. But an embarrassment is a long way from a motive and she has retirement plans that don’t include prison. She’s hurt, not murderous.”

  “Is that your professional opinion or a personal opinion after listening to a woman’s sob story?”

  Squinting my eyes I gave him my nastiest look. “Did you know the rats in the hotel were bought and paid for by Brent? He hired a rat-wrangler! Who thinks of such things?”

  “Brent Toast thinks—thought—of such things. He played dirty and he played dirty with Nancy but you think she’s innocent.”

  “An hour ago I was certain she killed Brent. Now…I believe she didn’t kill him.”

  “That leaves us with Chip and Jaimie Toast, Kathy and Sonny Angel and Grayson Cod.”

  Grayson! Had he caught up with Kathy and Sonny? I needed to talk to him ASAP. But I couldn’t share Grayson’s true identity with Kal—I’d promised to keep it a secret.

  “I’ve got a huge batch of cold cream to brew at my condo. Thanks for the safety check!” I strode to my car eager to make my getaway.

  The return drive to the shop seemed to take twice as long. I called Grayson three times. Nothing.