Dear Killer (Marley Clark Mysteries)

by Lovely, Linda

  “Okay, we’re here. I’ll behave if you will.”

  Here was the entrance to the Dear Club, a thirty-year-old edifice. The latest island developer had spent four hundred thousand dollars on a facelift, but the major surgery yielded disappointing results. The cosmetic tucks and stitches remained obvious. Rain wept through ill-fitting windows and pooled in carpeted sinkholes, breeding oases for mold spores. However, if you kept your eyes on the intricate crown moldings, starched white linens and swanky delicacies served at soirées, the Dear Club made a passing stab at elegance.

  I spied Jack Bride’s golf cart blocking the entrance. With shoulders hunched, the avid gardener busily shoveled material from a wooden cargo bed fastened in the space typically reserved for ferrying golf clubs.

  “Oh crap,” I muttered, knowing I’d precisely summed up the problem. “Let me out. I’ll try to cajole Dr. Bride into going home before someone calls security.”

  I approached the angry septuagenarian with faked nonchalance. The retired professor of etymology and his wife, Claire, moved to the island when deer outnumbered people. Six months ago, he’d buried Claire, a lovely lady who succumbed to Alzheimer’s. A lot of people dismissed Bride as a nutter, but I admired him. He insisted on caring for his wife at home, even though his devotion took a heavy toll.

  His white-hot hatred of Dear’s developer stemmed from a letter he received a year ago revoking the couple’s club membership. To maintain a semblance of normal life, Dr. Bride occasionally took his wife out for supper. One night, she hallucinated the waiters were armed gunmen and briefly freaked. The club’s tactless response earned an ardent enemy.

  The manure in the back of Dr. Bride’s buggy heavily scented the air. As he inserted his shovel in the steamy pile, I placed a hand on his shoulder. He spun toward me, his shovel raised like a club. For a moment, I feared he’d bonk me. His greasy gray hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in days. His bloodshot eyes darted wildly as if searching for unseen demons.

  “Jack, please don’t do this. If they call the sheriff, he’ll cart you to jail.”

  Dr. Bride lowered his smelly load. “Oh, it’s you.” His gaze bored into mine.

  He looked me up and down, taking in my purple pantsuit, considerably uptown from my usual T-shirt and shorts attire. “You’re not joining them, are you? I heard they were having some fancy banquet. Celebrating their butchery of our island. Gathering to shovel more crapola. So I decided to do likewise. Let the bastards step in it. Let ’em reek.”

  I touched the hand gripping the shovel. “You’re angry. But, Jack, if you go to jail, who’s left to apply pressure? Try to keep them honest? There are better ways to protest. Sic DHEC on them. Get the university involved.”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “It’s Claire’s birthday,” he said softly. A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “Think what Claire would have wanted. Go home, Jack.”

  He nodded, head down, shoulders stooped. Slowly he got in his cart and slipped away, leaving only a few shovels’ worth of manure to decorate the marble-tiled portico.

  “You’re a wonder.” Janie grinned. “What did you say to the old coot?”

  “Hey, how about a little compassion?” I snapped. “He’s not an old coot, just distraught. His crusade’s a way to deal with his grief.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip. Let’s find someone to hose off the tile.”

  Figuring we might nab some kitchen workers taking a smoke break, we meandered around to the side entrance. We hadn’t walked far when Janie grabbed my arm.

  “Look over there. What in hell has gotten into everyone? It looks like Sally may take off one of her stilettos and hammer it through Gator’s head.”

  A spotlight used to accent the club’s frou-frou landscaping spilled light on Sally’s rage-reddened face. Often she played the Southern belle, shamelessly flattering her senior partner. Tonight, though, she was giving Gator what-for, poking a red-lacquered fingernail in his chest and adopting his curse-laced lexicon. The “Goddammit” and “Summabitch” seasonings rang clear across the yard, but not the conversational meat.

  Janie collared an unlucky club employee and sent him to scoop the poop.

  “Let’s get to the banquet room,” she muttered. “This better not be a preview. I didn’t work my fanny off organizing this shindig for them to pull this crap.”

  We entered the lounge adjacent to the banquet room. Though things seemed peaceful, Janie stiffened and moaned. “Oh great, Gator brought his wife. Bea was supposed to be out of town. Wait till Sally sees her. If you thought she was mad before…”

  “Don’t you like Sally? I thought you two got along.”

  “We do,” Janie answered. “For a while, Bea carped at Gator to fire me. Didn’t want him to spend so much time with another woman. Said a male assistant lent more prestige. Sally stood up for me. Hell, if a catfight does break out, I’ll dive right in and claw on Sally’s behalf.”

  Janie snagged two caviar-smeared crackers from a wandering server before she continued. “Bea is none too keen about Sally being a company officer. But Gator’s explained the facts of life—he doesn’t have the money to buy Sally out. Plus I think Little-Miss-Trophy-Wife finally decided Sally and I were too decrepit to be competition. As if either of us would share a bed with Gator. Yuck.”

  Bea accepted a tall pink drink from the bartender. While the bottle redhead was young—late twenties—I suspected her rebuilt chassis had high-mileage. According to the island rumor mill, a steamy extramarital affair had allowed the former masseuse to trade up the husband ladder from the roofer she’d left behind. That was three years ago.

  Bea, like the clubhouse, had been treated to a makeover. Women who’d met Bea in her former life swear the woman once sported a nose like Cyrano and had difficulty filling a “B” cup. Now her nose was bobbed so short I wondered how she kept on sunglasses. Conversely her boobs had ballooned to the size of blue-ribbon eggplants.

  The overhaul hadn’t improved the woman’s disposition. I’d never seen a spontaneous smile. Maybe Botox injections made her lips incapable of one.

  Janie leaned close and whispered in my ear. “The last time Sally dropped by, she asked if I knew why Bea didn’t wear underpants. When I shook my head, she provided the answer—‘To get a better grip on her broom.’”

  Janie chortled so hard she choked on her canapé.

  As we walked toward the bar, Gator and Sally arrived, smiles plastered on their faces. However, Sally’s complexion remained mottled by anger. The minute Gator came into grabbing range, Bea snagged his arm and clung to him like kudzu.

  Sally spied us and strode purposely our way. The woman was an enigma. Bright, decisive, articulate, funny. Yet when men gathered round, she regressed into a simpering belle routine. Janie labeled it camouflage: the good old boys paid her less attention if she conformed to stereotype. The strategy let her siphon information she could put to good use.

  “Hey, Janie, Marley,” she said. “I want y’all to do me a tiny favor. Don’t make a fuss when you see I shuffled the place cards. I put you two at the table with Bea and Gator and switched me ’cross the room. Now I could have fun sittin’ by Bea and taking potshots, but most whiz over her pointy little head, and I promised I’d lay off Princess Titsy tonight.”

  “Okay, but that’s no tiny favor,” Janie replied. “Remind my boss that I’m worth twice my salary.”

  “You got it.” Sally winked and snagged a glass of wine from a waiter.

  For the next half hour, we milled. Janie chatted; I eavesdropped. As a known quantity with no stake in the island’s real estate games, I functioned as sound-absorbing wallpaper. But, while everyone talked about Stew, not a soul speculated on enemies or motives. His colleagues seemed as puzzled as the cops.

  When Sally finally strode to the podium, I was quite ready to heed her request that everyone take a seat. Janie and I slid into chairs at a round, eight-person table. Gator and Bea sat directly across from us. />
  Gator had prematurely gray hair, a florid face, and jagged teeth yellowed from nicotine. According to Janie, he had the attention span of a gerbil, a host of nervous tics, and was pure good ol’ boy, though his friendship code required no sanctions for backstabbing.

  Watching Bea pet him was enough to make a grown woman gag. You’d have thought Gator was a matinee idol. Apparently Bea wasn’t about to let another young hussy steal her prize. Having massaged Gator’s tired muscles—all of them—when he was wed to the first Mrs. Caldwell, the lady knew how easy it was to tempt her man to stray.

  Bea was famous for verbally abusing the help and loudly criticizing anyone who didn’t show her deference. Employing the royal “we,” she also issued proclamations about proper club attire. I suspected Bea engineered the club’s ouster of Dr. Bride. Of course, if she’d actually written the letter, it wouldn’t have been so lucid. Her verbs and nouns fought like cats and dogs. Remedial English would have been a better investment than her boob job.

  As we pulled our chairs into the table, Janie introduced me to the only stranger, Woodrow—Woody—Nickel, the company’s new real estate sales manager.

  “Nice to meet you.” His killer smile sported enough white enamel to coat a soup kettle. Yet there was no warmth in his dental grimace.

  Janie said he was a fraternity brother of Gator’s brought on board to prepare for the Beach West sales push. My friend already despised him. She’d called secretaries at his former workplace to check him out. They described Woody as a macho cad who believed all women had pea brains. Janie figured it would be interesting to watch Sally demolish him.

  In fairness, Woody was handsome in a male-model, gel-haired vein. But even without prior coaching, his name-dropping chatter would have left me cold. It was “I-this” and “I-that.” His buttering of Gator made me want to toss my cookies. However, since Nickel didn’t bother to converse with me, there was no need to make nice.

  Throughout dinner, the agents talked ad nauseam about real estate. They were giddy at the thought of pent-up demand for Beach West lots—sorry, homesites. Janie reminded me regularly that “homesites” sold for double the money of “lots.”

  A map of the new development, displayed by the podium, showed 160 parcels in Beach West’s Phase One. The new homesites were about one-third the size of lots on the “mature” side of the island where my house sat. Yet asking prices were double those for resale lots. Go figure.

  Across the table, Bea recounted her victory of the day. She’d ordered the starter at the golf course to eject the Cuthbert twins for wearing Tshirts. Horror of horrors.

  “Everyone knows we require collared shirts,” she sniffed.

  Gator squirmed. It’s seldom politic to enforce dress codes for kids when you depend on their heiress mom to write million-dollar checks.

  The developer deliberately snubbed his wife and turned the conversational tide back to Stew. The agents sang the victim’s praises. “Nice guy.” “Honest.” “Easy to work with.”

  Gradually, the tributes meandered into a discussion of the “accident’s” potential sales impact. “It was so unseemly,” Bea piped up. “Stewart being disrobed. That’s not the upscale image we want. We’re just starting to attract class peoples.”

  Janie nudged my elbow and whispered, “Wonder if Bea thinks we’re ‘class peoples’?”

  For an instant, I pitied Bea. I could imagine her as a flat-chested, gum-smacking teen. A poor Alabama cracker who longed for a prom invite from the bank president’s son and instead sulked on a date with a gas-station greaser.

  My sympathy evaporated when she launched into a diatribe about her maid’s incompetence. From Janie, I knew the Dear Company’s resort wing constantly rotated housekeepers through the Caldwell household. Any sane maid would quit if forced to endure the assignment longer than a week.

  Given that most Dear maids were black, being tagged to work in the Caldwell household meant a double whammy. Bea and Gator were low-rent rednecks who had no compunction about telling racist jokes within earshot of black employees.

  By the time our crème brûlée arrived, table conversation had boomeranged to the group’s hope for strong spring sales. Bea, who knew zilch about the market, lifted a spoon and twirled it backward to check her reflection in the makeshift convex mirror.

  “I can’t look forward to spring,” she sniffed. “Though flowers inspire my profession.”

  Bea pulled down fifty thou a year as the resort’s “stylist.” To earn her salaried skim, she flipped through magazines and consulted an expert in feng shui. Her pronunciation made it rhyme with chop suey.

  The trophy wife prattled on, making googly eyes at Nickel. “Here I am blessed with the name Bea, and bees scare me silly. I’ve been telling Gator we need to defecate all the bees on Dear—right along with those nasty red fire ants. I’m allergic to them, too.”

  Janie kicked my shin when my giggles bubbled to the surface. I assumed the woman wanted to decimate the bee population.

  “I told our new chef not to use any peanuts. If a food even touches peanut oil, I could die. It’s a curse, havin’ my delicate constitution.” Bea batted her eyelids with a fervor that stirred more air than the room’s ceiling fans.

  “Unless we find a new pollination scheme, bees and flowers go hand-in-hand,” I said, trying to filter my sarcasm. “But I’m no fan of fire ants. I didn’t realize a single ant could sting repeatedly until I stumbled on a mound.”

  Janie shuddered. “Yeah, fire ants set anchors in your skin so they can swivel their stingers and inject venom again and again. Hurts like hell. That’s one reason I don’t go tramping around Beach West. I saw one fire ant hill that looked like an elephant took a dump. It had to be three feet high.”

  I nudged my tablemate. “A great image to help digestion.”

  Conversation faded as the tuxedoed wait staff cleared dessert dishes and refilled coffee cups. Then Sally resumed her emcee duties. Gator always ceded public speaking to the pixyish blonde. A natural orator, she wasn’t bad to look at either. Just a smidgen over five foot two, Sally had an hourglass figure and dressed to emphasize it. She wore stilettos and, though her silk suits were tasteful, their plunging necklines showcased ample décolletage. Her snug skirts hugged buns of steel.

  “On behalf of our agents, I’m delighted to present bouquets to the ‘flowers’ of our operation—our delightful secretaries. These ladies put the bloom on the rose of Dear sales,” Sally cooed and clapped daintily to initiate a round of applause. “Come on up, ladies.”

  “Good thing Sally’s not diabetic,” I muttered to Janie.

  Sally air-kissed the admin trio as they crushed oversized arrangements of orchids, roses and baby’s breath to their bosoms.

  “It’s worse than you think,” my friend whispered back. “See beaming Bonnie? She gets the axe Monday.”

  “You’re kidding. Isn’t there some rule against cruel and unusual termination?”

  Janie shrugged. “Not the way Gator and Sally see it. The firing’s not personal. Besides, it’ll be my job to let Bonnie go. If Gator sees Bonnie a month from now he’ll act as if she’s his long lost friend. What’s amazing is he’ll truly be hurt if she doesn’t reciprocate.”

  “So what award are you getting? Do you have crib notes for your acceptance speech?”

  “Hell, no,” Janie replied. “I threatened bodily harm if anyone called me to the stage.”

  With no interest in Sally’s pat-on-the-back poppycock, I let my mind and my gaze roam. Grace Cuthbert and boyfriend Hugh were seated two tables away. Grace was not yet fifty—a couple years younger than me. Her placid cow eyes gave me the willies. They were bloodshot and blank. The wrinkled flesh on her neck and arms looked like a chicken’s gullet, basted in sun, tobacco fumes and liquor.

  Having heard about the couple’s odd relationship, I wasn’t surprised to watch Grace slurp wine from a glass her helpmate kept filled to the brim. An indiscriminate sommelier, Hugh poured from whatever bottle was
handy. Red one time, white the next. While the jewelry-encrusted Hugh was only ten years younger than Grace, the worn-out lady looked like his mother.

  “And what can we say about Grace Cuthbert’s vision and generosity…” Sally said.

  When Grace missed her cue for a queenly wave, Hugh nudged the heiress to start her bobblehead nodding. Unfortunately the nudge undid her queasy equilibrium. With all eyes fixed on her, she slithered off her chair and under the table. Hugh’s efforts to halt the slide proved ineffective. He was left holding one of her arms like a ref awarding victory to a dazed prizefighter.

  The floor show ended in minutes. The help bundled the inebriated heiress outside with a minimum of fuss. Watching, I felt a surge of pity for her hoodlum sons—a mother missing in action and a smarmy sycophant calling the shots. What a home life.

  “I’m sure it was the excitement,” Sally said, attempting to recover momentum. She then proceeded to present multimillion-dollar-sales awards and laud Gator’s bulldozing talents. Next she noted Nickel’s addition to the team.

  “Woody Nickel comes from the Keys, where he sold out a classy development in less than nine months. ’Course we don’t expect him to be ’round here for long either. At least we hope not—cause that’ll mean we’ve sold out. Next week we’ll be selling homesites faster than pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. We’re counting on Woody to take Dear Island to the next level.

  “Now for tonight’s final surprise.” She upped the wattage of her smile. “What could possibly make a real estate agent happier—or richer—than an opportunity to sell Beach West? How about a sister development on Emerald Cay?”

  What the hell is Emerald Cay? My tablemates appeared equally baffled, with three smug exceptions—Woody, Gator and Bea.

  With a flourish, Sally plucked the oversized artist’s rendering of Beach West from its easel to expose another plat hiding in its shadow.

  “We bought Hogsback Island,” she announced proudly, “and rechristened it Emerald Cay. As y’all know, Hogsback—I mean Emerald Cay—sits diagonally across the channel from our marina. This unspoiled paradise is less than three minutes by boat. Ferry service will connect our islands. Emerald Cay homesites and amenities will be spectacular—an equestrian center, one-acre lots, palatial homes. But the icing on the cake will be the island’s green appeal. We’re harnessing wind, ocean tides and sun to provide all of Emerald’s power.”