Murder in Tropical Breeze (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 1)

by Mary Bowers

  “You threw the glass into the pool?”

  I may have gone off on him at that, but he got the point that it was an accident, that the drowning itself was an accident, that she must have been dead at the bottom of the pool when we’d gotten there in the first place, which everybody would realize when the blasted tox screen thing came back from wherever those things come back from and everybody could see that she was drunk and there were no suspicious bruises on her body and that she just plain drowned, dammit!

  “Ladies,” he said, “I think I’m going to have you both stop talking to the police immediately. Now, let’s back up and go over things exactly as they happened, starting back at the resale shop when you decided you were going to go over to Cadbury House.”

  We revolted. We’d just been over it all to the point of exhaustion with the police, but after a few quiet words from Michael we realized this situation was different. He was on our side, he was sympathetic, and eventually we settled down and gave him a clear account of things.

  “Well, I’m not a criminal lawyer,” he said, giving me chills, “but I can give you advice. You’ve already answered all reasonable questions, and I don’t see what else the police could need from you. If they ask for anything else, call me. But I wouldn’t assume right off the bat that they think you did anything wrong. Obviously, you were trying to save her.”

  He was right; the police didn’t bother us after that. People were shocked by Diana’s death, but not surprised really, since her drinking had been an open secret in Tropical Breeze to everybody but me.

  It was a shock to everyone when The Beach Buzz reported that the police, having found Vesta’s old meds in the kitchen, had turned them over to the Medical Examiner, and he had ordered a specific test for Vesta’s pain pills, and the results had come back positive. The glass had been useless after it had fallen into the pool, but the vodka bottle had been damning: somebody had dissolved a massive dose of oxycodone in the open vodka bottle and left it for Diana to drink while she swam.

  The only fingerprints on the prescription bottle were mine and Myrtle’s, and the only ones on the vodka bottle were Diana’s and Myrtle’s.

  Chapter 24

  They didn’t immediately throw Myrtle and me into the slammer, but I began to think it was only a matter of time.

  I stayed close to the cat, for all the good it did me. I had stopped going into town because I didn’t want people asking me questions. The shelter was set up to run by itself unless a crisis arose, so I didn’t go there. Actually, all I can clearly remember from the next few days was that I stayed in my house, absorbed by the eyes of the goddess, almost comatose, as if she’d put me on hold.

  On Sunday morning, I woke up knowing that the spell had been lifted. I looked across the bed at the cat and she ignored me. I had a sudden urge to escape, and I quickly got out of bed and got away from her.

  Observing things from a lofty height might be good enough for a goddess, but I was a mortal, and things were closing in on me. I couldn’t escape the thought that Bastet believed that Diana had killed Vesta, and now that Diana was dead, she was satisfied. That left me dangling, but would a goddess care about that?

  It had become an unbreakable habit to wear the cat pendant at all times, and as I curled my hand around it while I drove, I considered snapping it off and throwing it out of the driver’s-side window. Only the thought that it was Vesta’s, that I was wearing it for her now, not the goddess, kept me from doing just that.

  I needed to get proactive, so I went straight to the source of all knowledge in Tropical Breeze: Bernie Horning, editor-in-chief of that gossipy rag, tourism guide and coupon clipper’s dream, The Beach Buzz. She ran the newspaper from the back den of her house, which she told me was the only place she smoked the cigarillos she liked to wave around. She was only hooked on the smokes while she wrote. She lived on the same block as Myrtle and Florence. It was too early for many people to be out, and I hoped to pop in and out of town before anybody saw me.

  Bernie was home when I rang her doorbell, and let me in with a direct look and a lifted eyebrow.

  “On the lam?” she said.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Well, come on in and have some iced tea. I was about to take a break anyway. Did you hear the latest?”

  “Oh, God, what now?”

  “Jordan’s back.”

  “Well, of course he’d come back. Even if he didn’t like Diana, his father needs him now.”

  “That’s not the newsy part. What’s new is that he’s back without the ravishing Carmen. He dumped her.”

  I turned and stood still. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Apparently, neither did she. Word is she’d been about to dump him, back when it looked like he wasn’t going to get much extra out of his trust fund for a couple of years. After his main trustee died, she was all over him again. And now all of a sudden, according to my sources, he took her back to Miami so he could break up with her. Now what do you suppose that was all about?”

  “I have no idea. What sources?”

  “You know I’ll never reveal that. Torture me, put me in jail –”

  “Facebook, right?”

  She grinned and gestured toward the long counter that separated the kitchen from the family room. I hiked myself up on a tall chair and rested my elbows on the cool granite, putting my hands on either side of my face.

  “Young love,” I said heavily. “She’ll be hooking up with somebody else by tomorrow night.”

  “You think it’ll take that long?”

  I gave her a sidelong look. “They’ll survive. Both of them. I’m not so sure about the rest of us.”

  “That bad, huh?” She went to the fridge.

  “You tell me. What does the boyfriend say?”

  Bernie claims not to be dating the County Sheriff, and he is almost three decades younger than her, but he must get a kick out of her because he’s always at her beck and call, and they frequently have lunch together over at Don’s Diner.

  “Kyle is not my boyfriend,” she said loftily. “I keep telling you, I’m only using him for information and free lunches. I quit using him for sex when I turned eighty.”

  She’s always telling people that, and Kyle never gets tired of it. He laughs like he’s demented when he’s with her, which might actually be better than sex.

  She set my glass in front of me and put the sugar bowl beside it with a spoon. “So you’re here to pump me for information.”

  “Yes, and I’m tired of the whole mess, so don’t play games with me. Do they think I did it? And more to the point, do they think Myrtle did it?”

  She stopped joking around. “You? They’re not sure, but if so, they think you were in it with Myrtle for some reason. Myrtle? I think so. She’s a nasty old cuss, and she’d just been fired. They’re trying to figure out if Myrtle thought Diana had killed Vesta somehow.”

  The idea startled me. “Seriously?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a thought. Mind you, they don’t think Diana killed Vesta, but they want to know if Myrtle thought she did. So,” she said coyly, “is that what Myrtle thought?”

  She hadn’t sat beside me, probably because she couldn’t hike herself up onto the tall chairs any more, and, as she told me once, when you sit down you eventually have to get up again and the getting up part isn’t always easy. So she was standing inside the kitchen itself resting her hands on the lower level of the counter and the reporter’s hat was firmly on her head, so to speak.

  “No,” I said quickly, but Bernie is pretty sharp. She saw right away that I didn’t really know. “She just wanted to go to the house to pick up some things she hadn’t had time to grab when Diana threw her out, and we didn’t even get to do that. We’d already put her little writing desk into my SUV, and the cops took it out again and made us leave it, along with everything else.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “They had their reasons. Had you gone through all the stuff she was packing, or were
you letting her do it by herself?”

  “A little bit of both. Why?”

  “Because there might have been something there she didn’t want you to see.”

  I thought back to that afternoon a few days before, when Myrtle and I had been in her room, packing. She had insisted on handling some things herself, but at the time I thought she was just being her usual crotchety self. And she had wandered away from me and been alone in the house for quite a while before I’d gone and found her in Vesta’s bedroom. At the time I’d just been annoyed at the delay because I wanted to get out of there. The thought that she had something to hide had never occurred to me.

  “What specifically are we talking about, Bernie?”

  “A little costume. I mean a little costume. One of those Halloween lingerie things.”

  “What kind of a costume? You mean like Vampirella?”

  “Sort of. In this case, a nurse’s costume. With white, thigh-high stockings and a garter belt, and a frilly little skirt that wouldn’t cover the whole backside. Also the cutest little old-fashioned nurse’s cap, with a red cross on the front of it. Did you see anything like that?”

  “Myrtle had that?”

  Bernie smirked and said, “Put that in your blender and hit the go button. The cops don’t know what to make of it. Like Kyle said, ‘Myrtle is 69-years old, but whatever.’ But since I’ve given you the tip, let me know what you think. Frankly, the police are out of ideas on this one, or I wouldn’t have told you. And if you happen to talk to Kyle, you don’t know anything about it.”

  “Absolutely,” I said, thinking hard. “Did they – you know – check it for DNA?”

  She smirked again. “No crotch to the thing, but no, no DNA. It’d been washed in bleach, stockings and all.”

  “Huh!”

  I tried to picture Myrtle Purdy, acidulated spinster, in possession of an x-rated sex-romp get-up. Okay, I was able to make my mind take that in, but when it came to putting the thing on and parading around in it, my mind didn’t just reel, it shut down.

  I shrugged.

  “I got nothing,” I told Bernie.

  “Well, work on it. I think this nut’s going to be too tough to crack for all of us. Cops have dirty minds, but this is beyond even them. You may have to do some heavy hinting to Myrtle herself to find out why she had it. She won’t admit to the detectives that she even knew about it, but she had to: it was hidden under some things she’d packed in a box while you were there with her. Next time be a little more nosy, dear. And let me know what you find out, or I’ll never tell you a secret again.”

  I hopped down from the tall chair. “Deal. Thanks for the iced tea.”

  “And the nurse’s costume.”

  “No, no thanks for that. It’s already giving me a headache.”

  Her laughter followed me out the door.

  On my way back to my SUV, Florence came pelting out of her house in her Sunday go-to-church dress, looking like a Dresden china figurine in distress.

  “Taylor, Taylor, I saw your car and I’ve been waiting for you to come out! You have to come inside the house with me before Myrtle gets back from church! I was getting ready to go myself, but I need to talk to you, even if I do miss church.” Which illustrated her desperation better than I could with any words. It also illustrated how things were going between the sisters, if they wouldn’t even walk to church together.

  They had a tiny wooden bungalow which was just big enough to move around in without knocking things over if you pulled your elbows in and were careful. It was dark inside, and naturally old-fashioned, since it had been furnished and decorated by their mother sometime just after the end of World War II. I entered the tiny foyer and found myself staring at a mirrored shadowbox full of china dogs, lambs and cows, the little ones tethered to the big ones with slender golden chains. I hadn’t seen one of those since 1958.

  “The police were here!” Florence wailed, tearing me away from the china cows.

  “Did they want to arrest Myrtle?”

  “No, not yet, but they will! I know it. She’s at church now, and she was extra-long at confession yesterday. I asked her what she was talking to Father about and she just glared at me.”

  “Well, what did they want? The police, I mean.”

  “They had a search warrant!” she said, dissolving into tears and tottering over to an old leather armchair to collapse. Through the hands she held over her face, she cried, “I never dreamed in all my life we’d be treated like criminals and have police in the house going through our drawers and things as if we were hiding pot or crack or whatever it is. Thank God Mother didn’t live to see this!”

  Wicked came tiptoeing around a low coffee table and moved quietly into Florence’s lap, curling up tightly. He glanced up at her, then looked at me with worried golden eyes. In her distracted state, Florence didn’t even seem to notice him.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I said, going over to the trembling little figure huddled in the chair. I tried to think of something reassuring to say without having to go to confession myself, and there wasn’t much. I couldn’t very well say the police wouldn’t arrest Myrtle, because they might. I briefly considered asking if she knew anything about the nurse’s costume, but decided I’d better not. She’d be sure to ask Myrtle about it, and I wanted to tackle that job myself, and in just the right way. I realized that I was absently stroking Wicked while I hovered over Florence, taking comfort since I couldn’t give it.

  Finally she looked at me with swollen eyes and said, “You’ve got to help us, Taylor! I can’t bear it! Myrtle’s not easy to live with, but she’s a good woman in her own way. She’d never kill anybody no matter what they did to her.”

  I patted her arm and said, “I’ll do my best. I’m trying to find out a few things. Maybe I can help. Anyway, I’m going to try.”

  Gazing past me, Florence gave a sudden cry. “There’s Myrtle coming up the sidewalk! Quick, out the back door, or she’ll know what we’ve been talking about, and there won’t be any peace in the house for the rest of the day.” Wicked jumped down and streaked away.

  I snuck out the back door and walked down the sand-and-gravel alley that ran behind the houses, then walked around the corner and back to my car, hoping Myrtle hadn’t recognized it. At least I was parked in front of Bernie’s house, a few doors away. Only as I was fastening my seat belt did I realize how much I was shaking.

  Chapter 25

  Since it was Sunday and Girlfriend’s was closed, I really had nothing else to do in town, and all I wanted to do was go home. Once there, I threw myself down on the couch and just stared at Basket as if she were to blame for everything. Heck, maybe she was. She was a goddess, after all. She looked back at me coolly, knowingly, maddeningly.

  Seeing Florence like that had shaken me to the core, and I suddenly lost it.

  “Okay, Basket, or Bastet, or whoever you are, I’ve had it. I need help, and if you’re here on some kind of a mission, you’ve got to work with me. Vesta’s dead. Diana’s dead. If that’s enough for you, it’s not enough for me, and it’s sure as hell not enough for the police! I could end up in jail for this, and Myrtle’s on the verge of being arrested. I can’t just keep groping around in dreams hoping you’ll grant me an audience and give me a hint that makes sense, and I’m tired of being your eyes and ears but getting nothing in return. Why are you here? What do you want? Was Vesta murdered? Diana was murdered – who killed her? And why? Answer me, or so help me, I’ll throw you out the door. No! I’ll take you over to the shelter and put you in a cage, and then find a home for you with somebody who has a toddler who gives you baths in the toilet! You talk to me, or I’ll . . . .”

  I began to dissolve in tears of frustration. The afternoon sun was streaming in the wide living room window, and everything about my familiar house surrounded me with normalcy, but in the moments that followed, the sun grew dim and the air filled with far-away sounds and the scent of burning spices came to me and made me drowsy. Through my lowering ey
elids I saw her figure rise before me, absorbing the light and releasing only a shimmer. A green glow tinted the walls. I found I could make out the music now, a sinuous line from a stringed instrument, accompanied by a rattle and hiss, as if a snake were singing along in its own language.

  “Why does it matter to you?” she said.

  “Because I am in danger now, and my friend is in danger too.”

  “You do not like her. And she is old. She will have to come past me and cross the river soon.”

  “Not that soon! Time means nothing to you. Myrtle has years ahead of her yet, and she’s innocent!”

  “Are you so sure?” Her amusement was maddening. I could find nothing to say. “Time flows on, woman, and all fall before it. But you have done well. You have helped me have my revenge, and the one who died in the water did not matter. I saw that when she first came before me. Now all is lost to the evildoer, and I am satisfied. The mystery will unwind itself, and the one who took my servant from me will be punished.”

  “What if the police don’t figure out what happened and the wrong person is punished?”

  She lifted her head and gazed away. I could see that this part of the problem hadn’t interested her. Perhaps she hadn’t even thought of it. Then her focus hit me again like a physical push.

  “Yes. That may be. I thought I could go on, but I must stay a little longer, and I must use you again.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She laughed. “What is already in your mind is ready to be used. Use it.”

  Tears filmed my vision; I didn’t know what she was talking about, and my mind began to spin pictures at me.

  “Close your eyes,” she purred, becoming distant. “I will show you what you already know. Think of the cross-currents moving about you, of the people drawn to one another and away from one another in waves of fortune and unbridled will. You have seen it all pass before your eyes. Here -- I will let it pass again, and you must see this time.”