Finally, he turned to me, still holding the glasses in his hand. “I thought you’d want to know your buddy Poe tried to commit suicide this afternoon.”
His statement stunned me. He said the words with little inflection, no emotion. I sagged against the car remembering Wannaker’s warning.
“Is he … did he?”
“Nah, he’s not dead, if that’s what you’re trying to say. Tried to strangle himself, but screwed it up. He tied one of his pant legs around his neck and the other to the top of his bunk. One of the guards heard him thrashing around and got him down before much damage was done.”
“Where’s he now?”
“They took him to the emergency room to be checked out, but he’s back in his cell on suicide watch.”
“I’d like to see him.”
“You know the rules. No visitors until seven tonight.”
I slammed my palm against the car’s fender. “Damn it, Marrano, Jeffrey’s in bad shape. He needs to see a friendly face.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Poe’s a gutless murderer. Are we supposed to change the rules because your friend couldn’t live with himself? Too bad he didn’t finish the job.”
Marrano put on his sunglasses and said, “Guess my job is done. You can take it from here, hoss.” After flicking me a mock salute, he turned and walked away.
I sucked in several deep breaths of humid air. Banal thoughts of suicide being a permanent solution to a temporary problem flashed through my head. I closed my eyes for a moment picturing Jeffrey Poe struggling against the knot tightening around his neck. I couldn’t imagine the desperation he must have felt, the feeling of total isolation and abandonment. Fortunately he failed, but I knew I had to do something before he tried again.
TWENTY
While waiting for the light to turn green at the corner of San Carlos and San Marcos Avenues, I spotted a black Buick LaCrosse swing out from the electronics shop across the street. It pulled into line two cars behind me. I turned away, my mind still rehashing Marrano’s revelation about Poe’s suicide attempt.
I wanted to reach out and assure Poe he still had the confidence of his friends. That he shouldn’t give up. Easy for me to say, but I wasn’t the one wearing the orange jumpsuit or sleeping in a jail cell.
I couldn’t even imagine a solution to his problems, so I decided to check in with my client. I called Erin Marrano as I drove slowly along Castillo Drive, passing the new Pirate & Treasure Museum. Her phone rang eight or ten times before her recorded voice asked me to leave a message. I didn’t want to break the news of Poe’s attempted suicide on the phone, so I said I wanted to talk with her and would check back later.
By now I’d passed the statue of Ponce de Leon and turned right onto King Street. Checking my rearview mirror, I noticed the same Buick still behind me. Coincidence? Possibly.
I crept along Charlotte Street hoping to find a parking place close to Henderson’s house. St. Augustine’s parking situation could cause a nun to swear, but I did my best to concentrate on avoiding exchanging paint with the lines of cars parked on both sides of the narrow street. I passed Henderson’s restored home, turned on Bravo Lane and eased into an open parking place in front of a small frame house badly in need of a coat of paint. As I climbed out of my car, the black Buick slid by me so close I saw the driver clearly through the tinted glass. He turned his head away from me as if looking for an address across the street, but I’d have to be blind not to recognize Lem Tallabois.
The man may have been a former New Orleans Police officer, but he knew diddly-squat about moving surveillance. I watched him drive to the end of the street and turn onto Aviles without signaling. Had Laurance sent his boy to keep an eye on me after our conversation in his office?
Suppressing my growing aggravation with the heavy-handed Tallabois, I walked to Henderson’s house. Henderson answered the door himself, greeting me enthusiastically, grabbing my arm, and pulling me inside. “Just when I feel like I’ve been abandoned, what with Jarrod going off, I open my door and find my own gentleman caller. Do you bring me truth in the guise of illusion?”
I looked at him wondering how many of those Anastasia Island Teas he’d sampled. We walked through the hallway arch past a formal dining room with a massive table replete with twelve place settings as if I’d arrived for a dinner party. Although he still used the cane, he didn’t seem to have any problems walking.
A small alcove with a fireplace framed the other side of the dining room. Several of Henderson’s books of poetry were stacked on the mantle. He gestured for me to sit in one of two vintage chairs covered in gold brocade. A small pedestal table perched between us.
“I’d offer you something to drink, but Jarrod’s taken a few days off to visit his uncle in Destin, and I’m shamblin’ along as best I can on my own.”
“You seem to be doing better.”
“It’s been a good day. But what brings you back? Have you learned anything that will help Jeffrey?”
He wore a short sleeve, linen guayabera the color of oatmeal and leaned forward on the table as though expecting a kiss.
“Afraid I’m the bearer of bad news.”
“What could be worse than finding Bill Marrano’s legs and a bloody hacksaw in Jeffrey’s shed?”
Hacksaw? I hadn’t heard that tidbit before. Henderson could teach the CIA a thing or two about uncovering secrets. I answered Henderson’s question simply by saying, “I just learned Jeffrey tried to commit suicide.”
His face twisted into a mask of pain, and he hung his head for a moment. “Oh, God. That poor, poor man. He must be utterly crushed to try to end his life. Is he going to be all right?”
“Physically. They got to him before he hurt himself, but knowing Jeffrey, I’m sure he’s slipped into a pretty deep funk. It would help if you visited him this week.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Anything I can do.” Henderson pulled at the patch of hair below his lip before pushing himself out of his chair. “I need a drink. Can I get you something?”
“No, thanks.”
He shuffled around the corner without his cane, and returned a few minutes later with two cognac glasses containing a generous amount of liquor. He placed one of the glasses in front of me, but I ignored it.
“I also wanted you to know I visited Kurtis Laurance as you suggested,” I told him after he’d settled.
“And were you as taken with him as he is with himself?”
“He’s quite a chameleon, full of charm and personality one minute, cold and arrogant the next. But he denied any knowledge of Marrano’s death.”
“Of course.”
“And he seemed to find the idea that Marrano had changed his mind about the project somewhat preposterous.”
“You’re the detective here, Quint, but would you expect him to say anything else?”
“Funny thing though, Erin, Mrs. Marrano, didn’t say anything about her husband changing his mind when I interviewed her yesterday. Said he and Laurance were tight and worked closely together on the project.”
Henderson paused, his glass halfway to his lips, and I thought I saw uncertainty creep over his features. He recovered quickly and said, “Guess Bill kept things from the missus. I understand the two of them were sleeping in separate beds.” He offered me a droll smile.
“Mrs. Marrano seemed to think her husband didn’t care for you very much. Why is that?”
“You’re familiar with Hans Christian Andersen?”
“Fairy tales?”
“The Emperor’s New Clothes. Marrano may have fooled everyone else, but he came from trash and it clung to him like stink on a hound dog.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” I said. “Marrano was a successful businessman and popular enough to be elected to the city commission.”
Henderson stared at me, a patronizing smile pasted on his wrinkled face.
“You can be excused for not knowing the man’s family history,” Henderson said.
“So, enlighten
me.”
“I take it you’ve met Brother Buck?”
I nodded.
“I’d say the Marrano family offers ample proof man evolved from apes, but such a statement would be disrespectful of that noble primate species. The Marrano gene pool is rather shallow, and both Buck and Bill took after their grandfather, the infamous Bat Marrano.”
“I’ve heard of Bat Marrano.”
Henderson took another sip of the cognac, and smacked his lips before continuing. “Our fair city has a storied past, as you know. I’m not talking about the Spanish in the fifteen-hundreds, but our own civil rights’ struggles in the nineteen-sixties.”
Serena’s uncle recently gave me a blow-by-blow account of how those struggles nearly crippled him.
“Unfortunately, St. Augustine became a battleground between blacks and whites,” Henderson said. “One side fighting to hold on to an ignominious way of life, the other trying to pull themselves out of the pit of oppression.”
“Didn’t Martin Luther King come here in nineteen sixty-four?”
“Yes, the summer of St. Augustine’s discontent. A time of demonstrations and violence. Not St. Augustine’s finest hour, I’m afraid. I wasn’t here then, of course, but I understand there were citizens of a more progressive attitude working to cool things down, to give the demonstrators their rights. Unfortunately, other voices were louder. Bigots from far and near were taking a stand for our dear southern values.”
“It happened all over the South,” I added. “Selma, Birmingham, Atlanta.”
“It did. And St. Augustine had more than enough home-grown trouble-makers to roil the waters. Bat Marrano was the worst.”
Henderson shifted in his chair and eyed the untouched glass sitting in front of me. I pushed it toward him.
“Do you know how he got his nickname?”
I shook my head indicating I didn’t.
“Seems he played semi-pro baseball for a summer or two. Later, as a sheriff’s deputy he carved a club from the branch of a water oak, sanded it down to look like a miniature baseball bat. Used it to break heads.”
“Charming.”
“That’s not the half of it. Bat and the other red-neck deputies agitated the citizenry during the sit-ins, the swim-ins, and the Freedom Marches.”
“Anything else?”
“He was also a Klan member, and they held rallies at his hunting camp in Palatka. I’ve been told he was such a good family man he’d bring his grandsons to the rallies. During that summer of nineteen sixty-four, he and his gang of thugs hunted for quarry of the two-legged variety.”
While he drained his glass, my mind darted back to Serena and her uncle. Last week, a few days after our disastrous lunch at Stuff of Dreams, she invited me to her apartment and introduced me to her uncle. Walter Howard told me a wrenching story of his involvement in the civil rights struggle of the sixties, how the Klan almost killed him. Henderson’s tale of Bat Marrano and his grandsons shed more light on that tragic episode.
“Do you think Erin knew any of this when she married Marrano?”
Henderson’s lined face appraised mine for a moment before glancing away. His voice had a brittle edge to it when he answered. “All I know is she married into a family of trailer trash and her husband was murdered. She’s better off without him.”
I recalled the article I read implicating Henderson for the death of his wife. This might be a good time to rattle his cage and see what fell out. “I guess if we look hard and search deep enough, we can find skeletons in most of our closets.”
Understanding sparked in his gray eyes. “Skeletons are natural, aren’t they? We all have them,” he said. “I would hope that as God’s creatures we can forgive an errant sin, but there is no redemption for the violently ignorant and intolerant among us. What was it Doctor King said? ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity?’”
I didn’t think I’d get much more from him and stood. “Thank you for your time, Clayton. I have a few more stops to make before I visit Jeffrey tonight.”
Henderson scraped his chair back, reaching up to the fireplace mantle to steady himself. As he did, he knocked one of the poetry books to the floor.
“Let me.” I bent over to pick up A Flash of Silence. When I handed it to him he opened it to the page with the title poem. “Have you read any of my poetry, Quint?”
“I have. That one” I pointed to the one where his finger rested.
“I’m afraid I was in a somber mood when I wrote this one.” Henderson began to read the second stanza of A Flash of Silence.
Now your parting look crowds
this room. I hear
the click of a lock
and the hollow tick of a clock,
long sounds chilling my limbs,
freezing my breath.
He laughed suddenly and gripped my arm. “This could have been titled Old Man Contemplating Sobriety. Here, let me offer you a gift.” Henderson pulled a pen from his shirt pocket, signed the title page, and handed it to me.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Nonsense. I appreciate what you’re doing to assist Mrs. Marrano. And Jeffrey, too, of course,” he added, as we ambled toward the front door. He paused in the large anteroom and gestured toward a painting of the St. Augustine Lighthouse.
“Have you visited our wonderful lighthouse yet?”
“It’s been a while.”
“Oh, you really must see what they’ve done lately. I’d love to give you a personal tour.”
I examined the painting closely and noticed the small plaque at the bottom with the inscription To Clayton Ford Henderson in grateful appreciation of his generous support.
He watched me read the inscription and laughed. “I’m utterly shameless. I gave the Lighthouse Foundation an obscene amount of money and they practically made me the lighthouse keeper. Gave me my own key.” He patted his pocket and I heard the jingle of keys and coins.
“I’d enjoy a tour.”
“You’d make an old man very happy.” He smiled broadly, dazzling me with yellowed teeth and pink gums.
I thought of something and asked him, “What do you know about Denny Grimes? I heard that Bill Marrano had him fired from his city job.”
“Do you think he had something to do with the murder?’
“Anything’s a possibility at this point, but I’m just looking for answers.”
Henderson shifted his weight onto his good leg, leaning against the doorjamb. “Here’s what I know. Grimes supervised the IT department for the City of St. Augustine. Not much of a department really, four or five people. But he must have rubbed the vice mayor the wrong way because he convinced the rest of the city commission that some of the department heads were overpaid and unnecessary. Of course, he meant Grimes, and when they asked him to take a salary cut, Grimes refused and they let him go.”
“Huh. And you know the vice mayor was behind this?”
“Everyone knew, especially Grimes.”
“Did he do or say anything,” I asked.
“There was talk that he made a few threats, but Grimes is a nasty drunk, as you might have guessed, and he tends to talk bigger than he is.”
I thanked Henderson for his help and said goodbye.
Pausing outside Henderson’s front door, I checked the street in both directions. Sure enough, I spotted my tail. Tallabois had backed into a driveway across the street about three houses away. The driver’s window was down and he had his face in a magazine. I slipped around the corner of Henderson’s house and cut through a hedge, circled behind his neighbor’s house onto Marine Street, and walked quickly around the block.
Tallabois still had his nose buried in the magazine when I edged along the side of the old house. From my angle at the corner of a wraparound porch, I watched him flip through the pages of a Penthouse magazine, peering past it at Henderson’s house before turning the magazine sideways to get a good look at the pin-up. When he did, I slipped ne
xt to the open window.
“Quite a view you have there.” I snatched the magazine from his hand and tossed it on to the passenger seat.
“Hey,” Tallabois sputtered as he reached for the magazine. I stuck my arm through the window and pulled the keys out of the ignition.
“You make a piss-poor spy, Lem.” I held the keys up while he pushed against the door, but I leaned all my weight on it and listened to him curse.
“You sonnuvabitch.”
Tallabois’ swarthy face reddened and he reared back and threw his shoulder against the door. I stepped aside as he hit the door full force. The door flew open followed by his bulky body. He rolled out of the car awkwardly, his shoulder hitting the paved driveway before he slid forward onto his hands and forearms.
He raised his head to look at me while I dangled the keys above him. “You might need these when you drive back and tell your boss how you screwed up the assignment.”
I threw the keys into a clump of azalea bushes in the next yard and ran to my car. At the corner, I turned to see Tallabois searching through the bushes for his keys.
TWENTY-ONE
Serena surprised me with her call last week. After she ran out of the restaurant leaving me confused and angry, I tried vainly to talk with her. She wouldn’t return my calls, and she even closed the door in my face when I showed up at her office. Over a beer one night—okay, maybe more than a single beer—I accepted the fact that we’d had some good times, but it was over.
Then came her call inviting me to her apartment the next morning. I arrived ten minutes early. She greeted me at the door with a shy smile, barefoot, dressed in a pale blue blouse and black jeans.
“Thanks for coming, Quint.”
She shepherded me into the kitchen where a kettle whistled on the stove, and a glazed navy blue coffee mug sat on the counter. “Would you like some tea?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
I knew she didn’t invite me over for tea, and waited for her to get to the point. After a moment, she reached out and touched my arm. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. But first let me tell you a little about my family background. It might help you understand why I reacted the way I did at the restaurant.”
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