Miz Scarlet and the Acrimonious Attorney

by Sara M. Barton

  While Kenny continued to carry on, a strange sight captured my attention in the water below. I couldn’t fathom what I was seeing.

  “Don’t do it! Do not jump off this boat!” he yelled. “Did you hear me? If you jump off this boat and get eaten by a shark, I will never ever forgive you, Scarlet Wilson!”

  “Wait a minute...wait a minute...wait a minute! What’s that?” I leaned over, staring at the tiny blue cardboard box that bobbed up and down on a wave. It wore a white ribbon that was sopping wet, but I know a Tiffany package when I see one. “Get the hook! Hurry, Kenny!”

  “What?”

  “There’s the ring!” I screamed, panicking. “Get the hook!”

  “No, not the hook,” Van told Kenny, pulling him out of the way. “Allow me.”

  With experienced hands, the man scooped up that little blue box with his net and held it out to a much relieved wannabe fiancé. Before I knew what was happening, Kenny had dropped to his knees and was giving his speech.

  “Miz Scarlet, will you do me the honor of making my life a hair-raising, never-dull, constantly-challenging adventure and marry me?”

  “I...I....” After all this time, after years of wishing and hoping, of anticipating what might someday become reality, the moment was here and I was totally tongue-tied. “I...I....”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Kenny couldn’t conceal his disappointment.

  “I....”

  “I just asked you to marry me after you nearly gave me two heart attacks in less than twenty four hours and you can’t even turn me down graciously?”

  “I....” My brain seemed to instantly freeze up, leaving all my circuits on pause. I didn’t know what to do to restart it.

  “Relax, Ken. Can’t you see she’s in shock?” Gandy threw a towel around my shoulders and led me over to the fishing chair. “She just needs a minute to pull herself together. I don’t think she has any intention of turning you down. You don’t, do you?”

  I shook my head so fast I nearly got whiplash. Oh, this is not how I wanted it to go. I pictured us standing on the beach at sunset, the sky blazing with color. He would take my hand in his and....

  “Scarlet?” Kenny knelt beside me. “I’ve loved you through thick and thin, better and worse. I can’t imagine my life without you. Will you....”

  “Yes!” I interrupted him, grabbing his face with my hands and planting a big, wet kiss on those luscious lips of his. “This is real, isn’t it? You really do want to marry me?”

  “Will this prove it to you?” He untied the wet white ribbon from the waterlogged Tiffany’s box, pulled off the cover, and withdrew the smaller ring box. Flipping it open, he held it out to me eagerly. With trembling fingers, I took it from him.

  “Oh.” That was all I could say as I stared at the glistening gem.

  “Oh?” He looked crestfallen. “You’re disappointed. If you don’t like it, we can take it back and get a different ring.”

  “Oh.” Oh crap. What is wrong with me? I have so much to say and I can’t get the words out. “I....”

  “Seriously?” Kenny frowned. “After all we’ve been through, you can’t tell me what you think of the ring?”

  “I think she’s a little overwhelmed, Ken,” said Chewie. “Am I right, Scarlet?”

  I bobbed my head as I burst into tears. “This is...not how I...imagined it would...be.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I thought when we came down here, I’d be able to sweep you off your feet, but things just didn’t work out that way.” His hands were wrapped around mine as I clung to that ring box. “And I wanted to give it to you before I lost it again. If you want to, we’ll redo this whole proposal. We’ll take a romantic cruise and we’ll pop a cork on a bottle of Champagne....”

  “But that’s just it, Kenny.” Suddenly I found my voice. “This is so much more real than I imagined it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. As I tried to tell you, this wasn’t exactly the ideal....”

  “No, you don’t understand.” I looked into those eyes, desperate to make him understand. “I’m not complaining.”

  “You’re not?” His face was a study in confusion and consternation.

  “No. It’s so...us, isn’t it?”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, it’s us alright! Does this mean you like the ring?”

  “No, I don’t like it.” I was mesmerized by the square-cut center stone surrounded by bead-set diamonds. It reminded me of my great-grandmother’s Edwardian ring, the one I had coveted ever since I was a child.

  “You don’t.”

  “No, I love it!” Wrapping my arms around his neck, I pressed my lips to his.

  “Well,” said Gandy, “that’s our cue to make our exit. Come on, guys.”

  When we came up for air, I took the ring out of the box and held it out to him. “Can you help me put it on, please?”

  “Of course.” He slipped it onto my finger like Prince Charming handling that glass slipper. “It fits.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Your mother told me her emerald ring was just the right size and that you loved the style, so I took a chance and brought it to the jeweler’s, to find something like it.”

  “That’s why she wasn’t wearing it for the big party. What a sneaky thing to do.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, it did,” I laughed. “Wait a minute. Does that mean my mom knows about this?”

  “I needed an insider to help me.”

  “Drat, that means Lacey knows too.”

  “I’m afraid so, honey.”

  “Does Bur know?”

  “He’s my wing man.”

  “Well, at least Larry and Max don’t know.”

  “Actually....”

  “I’m the only one, besides Jenny, that had no clue?”

  “Well....”

  Chapter Thirty One

  “Oh ducky!” I sighed. I could just imagine the grilling in store for us when we got back. All those nosy parkers would be at the front door the minute we pulled into the driveway. I’d never hear the end of it, especially after they got the scoop on the proposal. “We cannot tell them what happened here today, Kenny.”

  “Right. Your mother would just freak out if she knew you jumped overboard into shark-infested waters.”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that. It’s the brain freeze I had that worries me.”

  “Why? Now that I’ve gotten your promise, I think it’s kind of cute.”

  “Cute, my Aunt Fanny! Can’t you just hear Lacey now? She’ll have more than enough material to rib me for a week!”

  “We could tell them that you were shaken up by the killer’s effort to catch you.”

  “No, after all the cases I’ve been involved with; it’s no secret that I roll with the punches pretty well. Those women know it’s the whole marriage thing that freaks me out.”

  He leaned over and kissed my hand. “We could make up a story. Why don’t we pretend that it went the way I planned it?”

  “Do you think they’ll buy it?”

  “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that will happen,” he laughed, “not without proof.”

  “Proof...yes, I think that might do it. How could we prove this proposal went well?”

  “I have an idea. Give me back the ring.”

  “Must I?” Now that I had it on my finger, I didn’t want to part with it.

  “Trust me, babe. This will be great.”

  “I hope so.” I stared down at that sparkling token of a love defined by one misstep after another. As I reluctantly slid the platinum band off of my finger, I had only one thing to say. “Goodbye, sweet ring. Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

  “That I shall say good night till it be morrow. Or at least until after we eat. Think you can handle that, Miz Scarlet?”

  “I do, as long as no calamity befalls us in the meantime.”

  We went out to dinner to celebrate our engagement. Kenny tipped off the staff
that he was going to pop the question to me and asked if someone could videotape the scene for posterity. He even handed one of the waiters his phone.

  This time when he dropped to his knee, I was prepared for it. I let Kenny get all the way through his speech before I threw my arms around him and gave him a big, enthusiastic “yes”. The dining room quickly filled with applause as the patrons and wait staff cheered for us.

  The jubilant, newly-minted fiancé hammed it up for the camera, knowing full well that the Googins girls and the rest of the gang at the Four Acorns Inn would eventually see it.

  “She said yes! We’re getting married!” he crowed, as the audience roared their approval. Take that, ladies! Miz Scarlet sealed the deal!

  Since the FBI needed a couple more days to pull together their case, we extended our trip to accommodate them. We spent Monday morning on a four-hour cruise around the islands, stopping to explore Indian Key Historic State Park and to snorkel at a nearby coral reef, before returning to Theater of the Sea for a tour of the exhibits. Late in the afternoon, we made the hour and a half drive down to Key West for dinner at Louie’s Backyard.

  “Do you know what’s really nice about this?” I asked him as we walked from the parking lot to the front porch.

  “No, what?”

  “It’s just you and me here. I really love spending time with you.” He didn’t say anything, but I felt his fingers curl around mine. “How can we keep this and still have the Four Acorns Inn?”

  “Ah, I like your thinking. Here’s what Bur and I came up with,” he replied.

  “You talked this over with my brother?”

  “I told you. He’s my wingman. He suggested that you and I live in the carriage house, but I have a better idea.”

  “You do?”

  “I think that we should take over the third floor suite at the Four Acorns Inn. And I think that we should offer Jenny my place in Wallace’s mansion. She’s old enough now for her own apartment. It would give her the chance to have some independence, but Bur will be around to keep an eye on her.”

  “And she’d keep an eye on him,” I laughed, knowing my older brother’s propensity for serial dating. He thought of Jenny as the daughter he never had and he was very protective of her. I had no doubt that he would scale back his amorous activities if she were around.

  “That sounds like a plan.”

  “It does. Maybe we could turn one of the empty storage rooms into an office for you.”

  “I’d like that, although I’m going to miss that library. We had some good times there, didn’t we?”

  “We did, especially when things got hairy at the inn. Every time I ran into trouble and you showed up to handle the security, I always felt safer knowing you were sleeping down there. All I had to do was holler bloody murder and you came running.”

  “That part wasn’t so much fun for me. Those heart-stopping screams were hair-raising. I had some sleepless nights watching over you from the library, love.”

  “I know. Maybe we should rename it the Captain Peacock Room in your honor.”

  “Maybe we should.”

  Tuesday morning, bright and early, we loaded up the rental car with our luggage and drove up to Miami. We had an appointment at the federal building to be interviewed about the events in Connecticut and Florida. It took more than two hours to go over everything.

  Alex Cushman sat at the head of the table, close to the display boards. Gandy and Chewie were at the opposite end. There were a couple of other FBI people in the room, one of whom filled in the chronology of events leading up to Philip Grimshaw’s murder in the parking garage and the subsequent investigations. Kenny and I shared our notes on the case. Once Alex was satisfied that he understood how we fit into the case, he asked his assistant to type up our statements, so we could sign them.

  While we waited for the aide to return, Alex gave us a briefing that just about knocked my huaraches off.

  “We’ve had some interesting developments,” he began. “As you know, we caught Joseph Monaco on Mudder’s Promise just as he was about to attack Scarlet. Since we had installed cameras on the boat in anticipation of his arrival, we were confident that the recordings would go a long way towards helping us sort out all of the players in the confidence games. The most surprising thing of all was that Johnny Zee had absolutely no idea that the Monacos and Margarita Grimshaw were using his boat for their blackmail scheme.”

  “What?” Kenny did a double take. “You’re telling me that Johnny Zee was not involved in all that?

  “How can that be?” I scoffed. “The man used chum in violation of his own rules for the fishing tournament!”

  “When we informed him that we had recovered Joseph Monaco’s hunting knife and that it still bore traces of Philip Grimshaw’s DNA and blood on the blade, Zee was genuinely shocked. He was even more stunned to learn that the Monacos extorted money from their victims while they were on his boat. It didn’t take him long to understand that the government could seize Siren of the Seas because it was used in the criminal conspiracy. As soon as Zee realized we were telling him the truth about the Monacos, he turned on them.”

  “He did?” That surprised me.

  “He did,” Gandy agreed. “He sat there like a man betrayed, fuming when he found out how much money the Monacos had scooped up in their little plot. It seems that Johnny was also one of their blackmail victims. He came clean on that.”

  “They extorted money from him?” I wasn’t expecting that bombshell.

  “They did. Their take was two and a half million dollars.”

  “Whoa! How did they do it?” I leaned on the table, fascinated.

  “They set him up. Zee left a charity gala and ran home to check on his first wife, Lavinia, only to find her dead at the bottom of the stairs. Greg Monaco arrived at just the right moment and played his role to the hilt, demanding to know why Zee had killed her.”

  Chewie explained the situation further. “Johnny was told that if he chose not to accept their help in covering up the supposed murder, he’d wind up in jail, serving a life sentence.”

  “That’s a hell of a pickle he got himself into,” I remarked.

  “It was and they really twisted the noose around his neck. About a week before Lavinia’s death, Greg Monaco confided to Johnny that he saw her doing the horizontal mamba with the landscaper in the pool house. Johnny immediately fired the guy and refused to let him back on the property.”

  “I assume communications between the Zees became tense as a result,” Kenny remarked.

  “The lies just about drove the man out of his mind. On the day of the gala, Johnny got an anonymous tip that Raul was calling Lavinia on her cell phone. He checked it and sure enough, Raul’s number showed up several times. What Johnny didn’t know was that Raul was getting messages from her, begging him to call her.”

  “Only it wasn’t Lavinia making the calls. Did the Monacos steal her phone?”

  “Yes, we believe so. Zee told us that Lavinia thought she had lost it a few weeks before, so she bought another one. On the night of the gala, the Monacos must have used the stolen phone to call the confused landscaper. One of the Jones sisters probably impersonated Lavinia, begging Raul for help and claiming that she was in danger. And when Lavinia left the party, Greg called poor Johnny and told him that he had just spotted the landscaper out by the pool house again. Zee just lost it.”

  Kenny filled in the next batch of blanks in the story. “Johnny was certain that she was slipping away to meet her lover.”

  “Exactly right, Ken. Greg must have chased Raul away, probably by threatening him with deportation. Lavinia was dead by the time Johnny got there. In a panic, Zee reached out to Monaco for help. That gave Monaco the opening to blackmail him. He could testify that Zee knew about Lavinia’s affair.”

  “But there was no affair.”

  “No. There was only that premeditated murder. Truth be told, Lavinia and Johnny really loved each other. He was utterly heartbroken when she d
ied.”

  “That poor man,” I sighed. “How awful it must have been for him.”

  “When we told Zee that we believe that Monaco orchestrated Lavinia’s death, he was prepared to kill the guy with his bare hands.”

  “But why did they have to kill her?” I wanted to know. Alex explained the twists in the sordid tale.

  “Lavinia suspected that the Jones sisters had been systematically ripping her off for years. It started with Juanita. She reported finding poor Lidia Shellenberger unresponsive a few years earlier. We believe that may have been another murder they committed. Anyway, Lavinia thought there was some jewelry missing after Lidia’s death, but Juanita claimed the jewelry was hocked to pay for the cocaine. Later on, when Margie went to work for Johnny, Lavinia confided to friends that she thought there was something fishy going on. That’s probably what led Greg to claim that he had proof that Lavinia was trying to cover up an affair,” Gandy told us. Chewie agreed.

  “They needed Johnny to inherit Lavinia’s estate, so they could blackmail him into giving them those millions,” the loyal sidekick acknowledged.

  “Wow.” That was all I could say as I sat there. Kenny echoed my sentiments.

  “Wow is right.”

  “Why didn’t they stop after they got all that money from Johnny Zee?” I looked around at the faces of the people sitting at the table. “Why did they expand their scheme? Didn’t they run the risk that they would get caught?”

  “They were greedy and their numbers just kept increasing. Margie and Ed Hawley hooked up years ago. We think that Sybil is actually Hawley’s kid. Who knows who fathered Misty? But they wanted the lush lifestyle for their little family. And as for Greg and Juanita, they had their three growing boys and all their expensive sea toys.”

  “But what did they do with all that money?” I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine how they spent it.