Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay

by Francis, Parker

  Quint couldn’t quite make out the pale form at Jillian’s feet. Perhaps his mind wouldn’t allow him to recognize what his thudding heart already knew. He ran faster, whipped by an icy fear. Ten feet away he skidded to a stop.

  He tried to convince himself those weren’t the purple baggy shorts his brother had worn when he last saw him. They couldn’t be, especially since they were pulled down, bunched up around the ankles. It couldn’t be Andrew.

  Jillian had stopped screaming, one hand to her mouth, one hand caressing the boy’s straw-colored hair. Quint attempted to move but his legs refused to go any farther. He stared at his brother with complete disbelief. A terrible taste flooded into his mouth and he thought he would vomit. He felt blood pulsing in his ears, a cruel drummer marching through his head.

  Bloody bands crisscrossed Andrew’s chest and abdomen. With a massive effort of will Quint forced himself to move closer. One step then another until he realized the curved bands of blood covering his brother were actually gaping wounds exposing muscles and organs as though Andrew had been caught in the blades of some giant blender. Perhaps his brother had been run over by a motorboat, he thought, but then he noticed the thin line of crimson beneath Andrew’s chin. His throat had been cut.

  Quint fell to his knees and grabbed his little brother in his arms. “No,” he mouthed to the boy. “No, you can’t be dead.”

  He didn’t know how long he sat clutching Andrew’s savaged body before Jillian shook his arm. “Quint, you have to put him down.” One of Jillian’s sisters was with the state attorney’s office and she knew a body shouldn’t be moved.

  “We need to call the police.”

  Quint looked at her as if she’d been speaking in tongues. He rocked back and forth with his brother’s body, trying to comprehend how such a thing had happened.

  “And,” she said, “we have to call your parents.”

  THIRTY

  Closing the photo album, I returned it to the nightstand drawer. Dudley purred and rubbed against me, trying to push me back into bed. But sleep was not an option for me now as my mind relived the awful telephone call to my father’s hotel room in New York City. To this day it was the single worst moment of my life, aside from finding Andrew’s body.

  My father never forgave me for my deception, blaming me for my brother’s death. At first he verbally flayed me with a fury I never thought possible. I accepted it as my rightful penance. I may not have wielded the weapon, but we both knew my deceit was responsible for the horrible things visited upon Andrew. His fury eventually cooled and solidified into an impenetrable stone wall keeping me at bay.

  I tried numerous times to break through my father’s seething anger and resentment, but the pain was too intense, his anguish too deep. I finally stopped trying. There was no going back for either of us, and in the past dozen years we’ve not spoken more than ten words to each other.

  Recently, my mother let me know that my father, now in his late seventies, would be open to reconciliation. She urged me to call him, but the twin obstacles of time and guilt prevented me from picking up the phone. The fact that Andrew’s murder remained unsolved only added fuel to the smoldering fires burning between us. As much as I wished it could be otherwise, the gap between us had grown too wide to bridge. Like acid leaking out of a battery, corroding vital contacts, all sparks of connectivity between us dissolved after Andrew’s death.

  ***

  At my office the next morning, I sorted the stack of mail, tossed the obvious garbage in the trash, put the bills aside to be paid later, and picked up the new edition of PI Magazine. When I lifted the magazine, I uncovered a small manila envelope with a St. Augustine postmark but no return address.

  Slitting it open, I pulled out a photocopy of a legal document. At the top were typed the words:

  CODICIL TO:

  Last Will and Testament

  OF

  CLAYTON F. HENDERSON

  I inspected the envelope again to see if I’d missed a cover letter, but saw only the legal document. The three pages contained a restatement of Article III of Henderson’s will declaring the distribution of his Tangible Personal Property along with his Residuary Estate. A list of real estate holdings, cash bequests, and assorted articles of art and furniture followed.

  My eyes returned to the top paragraph where I noted the execution date six months earlier on February 10th. Why, I wondered, would someone send me a copy of Henderson’s codicil unless it had something to do with his death?

  I sat down and read from the top.

  I, CLAYTON FORD HENDERSON, a resident of St. Johns County, Florida, and a citizen of the United States, make, publish and declare this codicil to my Last Will and Testament, executed by me on the 10th day of February 2006.

  I. I hereby restate Article III of my Last Will and Testament as follows:

  ARTICLE III

  Tangible Personal Property

  I give and devise certain items of my tangible personal items to the persons named in the last dated writing signed by me and in existence at the time of my death.

  The rest of the paragraph went on to list his personal representatives and how his remaining property should be divided. I quickly scanned through the list of property and cash bequests ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 to be given to various entities, including the St. Augustine Lighthouse Foundation and Flagler College.

  I turned the page and a couple of items jumped out at me. Tucked between bequests to the University of Florida English Department and a few area charities was the name Jarrod Watts. According to the codicil, Watts was to receive $75,000 upon Henderson’s death and allowed to live in the Martinez House for one year, although the house had been deeded to the St. Augustine Historical Association. Henderson liked and appreciated Watts, so I understood why he might want to reward him for his services.

  The next beneficiary was Erin Marrano. Henderson had willed her some real estate in the historic district along with the sum of one million dollars.

  Watts I could understand, but why Erin Marrano? Why gift her with a million dollars if they were only passing acquaintances? It didn’t make any sense to me. What was the connection between them?

  Lights flashed in my brain and pieces began to fall into place.

  According to Jack Fuller, Henderson turned his twins over to a crooked adoption attorney in Huntsville, Alabama. Erin told me she taught in Huntsville before moving to St. Augustine. Could she be the poet’s daughter? And what if Henderson followed her to St. Augustine to be close to her? It made a lot of sense. I could see a man of Henderson’s sensibilities stewing in his homemade gumbo of guilt and remorse. Seeing the end of his life approaching in the rearview mirror, I imagined the old man might try to set things right with the child he abandoned.

  Looking at the codicil, I wondered if he ever revealed their kinship to Erin. I doubted it, although Henderson seemed upbeat when I visited him before his death. Maybe he planned to tell her. I followed that assumption with another thought. What if he did tell her and she rebuffed him? Rejection has provided the motive for everything from murder to suicide, and it might have literally pushed him over the edge. If so, then Buck Marrano’s contention that Henderson committed suicide made even more sense.

  I was making some wild-ass guesses now, but I thought about father and daughter discovering each other after all these years. He must have followed her to St. Augustine. If the two of them were able to overcome the past then Henderson’s final years might have brought him peace and comfort. Too bad his remaining time had been cut short.

  ***

  One hour later, I pulled into Erin Marrano’s driveway and turned off the ignition. I had called from my office and she was expecting me. I trailed her to a sunny room looking out on a well-landscaped back yard. A long, narrow flowerbed bisected the yard with blooming rose bushes and hydrangeas. Flagstones led to a small pond with a terraced waterfall to the left of the bed, and to several smaller gardens on the right where doves, woodpeckers and jay
s swooped in to the bird feeders spotted throughout the gardens.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  When I said no she sat across from me at the round, glass-topped table. “You must be making progress, Mr. Mitchell. You said you had some new information.” Sunlight streaming through the windows danced across her blue eyes, which at the moment were staring hypnotically into my own. I looked at the manila envelope in my hands to break the spell.

  Erin followed my gaze to the envelope and pointed to it. “Does that have something to do with my husband’s murder?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She gave me one of those you’re not making any sense looks, so I jumped right in. “This came to my office today.” I placed the envelope on the table.

  She glanced at it then back to me. “Yes.”

  I pulled the codicil out of the envelope and showed it to her. “Have you seen this before?”

  Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head slowly. “No, why would you think I’ve seen it?”

  “I may have mentioned at one of our other meetings that Mr. Henderson had some baggage in his past. There was no reason to go into detail with you at the time.”

  “And now?”

  “If I’m right about this, it explains why you’re a beneficiary in Clayton Henderson’s will.”

  “He included me in his will?”

  I told her about Henderson’s marriage to the only child of a wealthy Mississippi industrialist. How his wife inherited a fortune after her parents were killed in a plane crash, and how she later drowned in the family swimming pool.

  Erin listened quietly to my tale of the sad family saga, how Henderson had been a suspect in his wife’s death, but later cleared for lack of evidence.

  “Shortly after his wife’s death he moved to Huntsville with his infant twins, a boy and a girl. He gave them up for adoption.”

  I could see her mind working behind those azure eyes. I picked up Henderson’s codicil and flipped to the second page. Pushing it toward her, I pointed to the section with her bequest. “This is why I thought you needed to know about Henderson’s children.”

  She lifted the codicil off the table and studied it for a full minute before looking at me and asking, “You think I’m his daughter?” Erin Marrano’s voice trembled with emotion and a shimmering film glazed her eyes.

  “You told me you were from Huntsville. A year after you moved to St. Augustine, Henderson retired from his position at the University of Florida and bought the Martinez House.”

  A single tear tumbled from her left eye and trickled down her cheek.

  I tapped the codicil with my forefinger. “I believe this was his mea culpa. I’m guessing he would have told you the truth if he hadn’t died.”

  Erin remained silent, the tears dripping from her face and onto the table.

  “You didn’t know?” I asked her.

  “How could I? We were acquaintances, but he never told me he was my father.”

  She stared at the document, and I tried to imagine her thoughts at the moment. Was she cursing Henderson for abandoning her? Or was she sorry for all the years they never had together? The shock of a million-dollar bequest would only add to the swirling emotions she must be feeling.

  Tears cut tracks through her make-up, and she sniffed loudly before asking, “My brother, what happened to him?”

  “He died of scarlet fever when he was eighteen months old. I’m sorry.”

  Erin pushed her chair back from the table and stood. For a second I thought she might bolt from the room, but she stared at the codicil then at me with wounded eyes, tears streaming down her face.

  Her anguish reached out to me. In the last forty-eight hours this woman’s world had collapsed. Her husband murdered, house burgled, and now she learned her father abandoned her along with a twin brother she never knew she had. Without thinking, I moved around the table behind her, and held her. Her shoulders sagged against my chest.

  If I tried to objectively analyze my actions at that moment I’d probably tell myself I was only offering solace to a person in need of human comfort. But when she turned to face me, it became more difficult to focus on anything but the intoxicating scent of her perfume and the heat of her body against mine.

  Objectivity flew out the window. Her eyes sought mine, our heads came together and my mouth found hers. For a long moment we lost ourselves in that kiss, tongues probing, the fullness of her breasts against my chest. I held my breath as we clung together until sanity at last returned, and we stepped away from each other.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped breathlessly. “That was inappropriate and unprofessional.”

  She shook her head and offered a wan smile I couldn’t decipher. “There’s no need to apologize, but you should probably go now.”

  “You’re right,” I said, and started for the door.

  The kiss had left me both excited and confused. I stopped at the front door, my head still buzzing. “You’ll probably hear from Henderson’s attorney about the will,” I said.

  “And where do we go from here?”

  Her words seemed so innocent, but left me groping for a deeper meaning. Was she referring to my investigation, her inheritance, or the kiss? How should I answer her? “I’ll keep plugging away,” I said. “Something will turn up.”

  She nodded, the enigmatic smile still on her face.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I hoped my visit with Erin would help clarify the murkiness surrounding this case, but as I drove away from her house I felt like I’d walked through a revolving door into a hall of mirrors.

  The impression of her lips on mine still tingled. Despite the confusion blurring my brain, I had a sneaky grin on my face like a teen-ager who copped his first feel. Grow up. She’d been carried away by the emotional news I’d brought her. Our kiss meant nothing more than one human reaching out to another. One moment of human weakness. That’s all it was.

  I returned the grin to its proper resting place and drove into the heart of historic St. Augustine. It occurred to me that the groundbreaking ceremony for the Matanzas Bay project was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Later, I’d visit Poe, and tell him about the death of his friend. Then, there was the little matter of the tall man with the floppy hat. I hated to bring more bad news to Poe, but decided he should hear it from me before the police heard about it.

  Instead of driving straight to Malaga Street, I detoured along Avenida Menendez, hooked a right on Bridge Street and a left on Marine. I had a morbid reason for this side trip and it involved an infamous piece of local history. About the same time I celebrated my 7h birthday in January of 1974, a former New York City model and actress had been hacked to death in St. Augustine.

  The grisly murder ranked as one of the most notorious crimes in the nation’s oldest city, and it happened in the victim’s front yard on Marine Street. I’d read a true crime paperback about the grisly murder, and I always wanted to see where it took place.

  All the evidence pointed to the victim’s next door neighbor, the county manager. For some reason, the woman had taken an instant dislike to the man. She berated him at county meetings for his lack of qualifications. Her letters calling for his replacement as county manager appeared frequently in the St. Augustine newspaper.

  After a long investigation, the manager was finally arrested and tried for her death. Despite all the incriminating evidence pointing to the defendant, including bloodstained clothing and a bloody machete, the jury only deliberated ninety minutes before returning a Not Guilty verdict. Maybe this was the kind of St. Johns County justice Erin Marrano was worried about.

  As I drove by the modest bungalow where the brutal murder happened, I thought about the obvious parallels between that case and Marrano’s death. Both involved well known, highly visible members of the community; one an elected official, the other appointed. In both cases a nasty public feud might have provided the motive for a murderous act. While the county manager had been acquitted, I feared if Jeffre
y Poe’s case went to trial he wouldn’t be so lucky.

  I parked near the San Sebastian Winery and walked to the construction site on Malaga Street. A chain link fence surrounded the entire 15 acres. A billboard with the architectural rendering of Matanzas Bay provided a vivid picture of what this site would look like 18 months from now. Currently, it resembled a giant’s sand box, complete with bulldozers, stacks of reinforced concrete pipes, and a mountain of fill dirt. I closed my eyes and attempted to match the artist’s rendering to the massive patch of ground, sketching in the red-tiled roof of the hotel, the balconied condos looking out on a marina filled with boats. The image sparked brightly for a moment before fading away.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw a crew of workers busily erecting a huge tent by the waterfront in preparation for Saturday’s groundbreaking festivities. The ramshackle warehouses had been razed, and the damp dirt seemed barren and cold. Still, the enormous potential in this piece of land was apparent. No doubt both Kurtis Laurance and Mayor Cameron would invoke Marrano’s name when they made their speeches in the morning. Marrano may have been a visionary as Laurance had said, but I couldn’t help thinking what a tremendous price he’d paid by crawling into bed with Laurance.

  That thought brought to mind Laurance’s strange comment suggesting I take a look at the parcels of land outside the Matanzas Bay property line. What the hell had he meant by that? Only one way to find out.