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. Tha
t 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 next 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.”
“You don’t have to explain any—”
“It’s important to me,” she interrupted. “There’s an amazing man in the living room waiting to tell you his story. He’s my Uncle Walter, my father’s brother.”
She went on to tell me both her father and uncle had grown up in St. Augustine, but they moved after her uncle suffered a terrible experience. I tried to get more details, but she put me off, saying, “You’ll hear it all from him in a minute. But I wanted you to know the background. After what happened to Uncle Walter, my father left St. Augustine and moved up north.”
Eight years younger than his brother, Serena’s father moved to Chicago while still in his early twenties. He joined the army and later met Helen Nilsen. He’d been smitten by the lithe blond who seemed like a door into another world to the young man from the segregated South. Her parents had been very much in love, but she said the marriage was doomed from the start. They brought with them a clash of cultures that seemed dangerously romantic at first, but quickly moved into a dark stalemate of quiet bitterness.
Serena grew up not fully accepted by either world. “As a girl, I felt caught in the grip of a cultural tornado. Things were a lot different back then. You have to remember that this was before Tiger Woods and Barak Obama shifted America’s view of African-Americans. I tried to cope with attitudes and judgments shaped by something beyond my control.”
I pondered that as she pulled a tea bag from a ceramic bowl with a cork stopper, put it in the coffee mug, and poured steaming water over it. I finally said, “It’s easy to forget what happened below the Mason-Dixon Line when you grow up in the white bread world of the Connecticut suburbs like I did.”
She didn’t respond, instead dribbled a long stream of honey into the mug from a plastic container shaped like a bear.
“That’s pretty much it for the family history,” she told me. “Dad and I moved back to St. Augustine, and shortly after that I went off to college. I returned to St. Augustine after graduating, but it took some time to grow up and accept myself.”
We walked into her living room, an open area with a creamy leather couch, a matching wing back chair, and a low coffee table. On the wall over t
he couch was a triptych painting alive with swirling colors and long-necked birds that never flew anywhere except in the artist’s imagination. Sunlight from a pair of sliding glass doors filled the room. An elderly man stood silhouetted in front of the doors, one hand resting on the leather chair. Although his back was to me, judging by his small frame and stooped shoulders, I’d guess he was in his mid- eighties.
She placed the tea on the coffee table before moving behind the old man and tapping him on the shoulder. “Uncle Walter,” Serena said, raising her voice and bending close to his ear. “This is Quint Mitchell. The man I told you about.”
He turned slowly, pivoting from the waist as though his neck was fused. He smiled shyly at Serena before turning his attention to me through thick lenses and cloudy dark eyes that held mine for a full thirty seconds. The old man’s skin had the texture and color of an over-ripe eggplant. A strange discoloring covered the left side of his creased and crinkled face. Pale yellow patches, like bleach dribbled onto a dark towel, spattered his cheek, trickled along his neck, and disappeared under his collar.
I held out my hand, and Walter Howard grasped it tentatively. His hand had the feel of ancient parchment.
“Let’s sit down, please.” She helped her uncle who hobbled slowly, one hand gripping the chair, the other on Serena’s arm. After he sat down and Serena and I were seated on the couch, she turned toward me.
“Quint, I wanted you to hear my uncle’s story. He doesn’t like to talk about the things he endured while fighting for our people’s freedom, but he’s doing it as a favor for me.” She reached across and laid a reassuring hand on his knee.
Howard’s left hand trembled as he lifted it from the arm of the chair and placed it atop his niece’s. He licked his lips before speaking. “My name is Walter Howard,” he began in a quiet, dignified voice. “I fought for my country in Korea before coming home and teaching school.”
Behind the thick glasses, Howard’s eyes blazed with the vision of distant memories. “I was young and filled with a hunger for justice. We would gather together in our homes and in our churches to listen to Dr. King telling us change was coming. Dr. King knew our suffering, and we listened when he said our people had been imprisoned for too long. That freedom would wash over us like a giant wave.”
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