Murder on Tiki Island: A Noir Paranormal Mystery In The Florida Keys (Detective Bill Riggins Mysteries)

by Christopher Pinto

  “How is Eliot?” I finally asked.

  “Up and about and in good spirits,” she answered. “Strangely, I think last night must have been very liberating for him. He seems more like his old self now.”

  “What about Jessica? Anyone check on her yet?”

  “No,” she said, and changed the subject. “Tomorrow is Halloween. We’ve got a boatload of decorations coming in today. I’m going to have the staff decorate the entire Hotel. Plus we’ll have lots of candy for the kids. I thought maybe you’d help with organizing the decorating.”

  “Decorating? Me? I don’t know the first thing about decorating.”

  “Well, I don’t mean actually putting up streamers and pumpkins. I mean organizing the crew. There will be thirteen people working on it. I thought that was an appropriate number.”

  “So you want me to manage thirteen people for the afternoon, is that it?”

  “Yes. See how you like it.”

  I didn’t say a word and my silence gave away my thoughts.

  “Of course, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, William. I just thought it would be a nice way to see how you like…you know…”

  “The hotel biz,” I said and smiled. “Sure, I’ll try it on for size.”

  She lit up. “Good! Meet me at the aft docks at eleven. I’ve got to go see to some other things now.”

  “Eleven? Hey, you got me up early. What am I supposed to do until eleven?”

  “Go check on Jessica, I suppose. If she’s up to it, put her to work on the decorating crew. Least she could do for putting her up for free,” she added, then winked and took off.

  As I left the dining room a strange feeling came over me, the kind of feeling you get when you go into a haunted house ride on the Wildwood Boardwalk, just before some big, paper maché spider jumps out at you and makes you scream like a little kid. It wasn’t a feeling of fear. It was a feeling of dread. The sort of dread that makes people quit in the middle of the night and take off to another town for a crack at another life.

  I shouldn’t have felt like that. There was no reason to.

  I decided to take Melinda’s idea and check on Jessica. As I passed the second floor rooms I thought about the people staying in them. Families. Couples. A few singles. Some retirees. And in at least one room stayed a murderer.

  I shivered a little, even though it was well into the seventies.

  I reached the glass elevator and took it up to the third floor, looking down at the people in the lobby. From up here everything looked like a big piece of carved bamboo with a bunch of heads floating around on top of it. One of those heads might be a killer.

  I just couldn’t get that out of my mind. A man was murdered just a day ago, and I’m going to be hanging orange crepe streamers and helping carve Jack O’Lanterns. Something just didn’t jive.

  Before I knew it I had reached Jessica’s room and was ready to knock. That oddball feeling came over me again, and I hesitated. My brain started running circles with all sorts of crazy ideas. What if I found her drunk? Or worse, stoned?

  Or worse…

  I shook it off and knocked. Nothing. I knocked again and still no stirring from within. I decided I was being a fool; it wasn’t even ten yet and no doubt Jessica was still sleeping off the sedative. I took out the passkey that Melinda had slid me at breakfast and opened the door.

  Jessica was gone.

  The bed was unmade, and her suitcase lay open on the floor. It just looked like she got up and went for breakfast. “Well, she’s a big girl. I’m sure wherever she is, she’s fine,” I said to the room and shut the door. Then I got that weird feeling again, and shook it off.

  I didn’t feel like tracking her down so figured I’d kill an hour sitting on the beach, or at least at the beach bar. I wandered out to the South Side of the Island, ordered an orange juice and took up a chair next to the cabana, facing Key West. The morning sun was warm but not too hot, and an easy breeze sashayed across the beach like a burlesque dancer. I closed my eyes and started to think, think about the events of the last few days, about the craziness of the seaweed in Hawthorn’s room, about the oddball things I’d seen. My mind wandered to the Safe Room, and then to the safe.

  And finally, after being in vacationland for a week, my brain woke up and snapped into cop mode.

  “It’s the wrong safe!” I said out loud, and a couple of kids walking by stopped and looked at me like I was a goofball. “Not you, kid,” I said, and got up from the chair.

  I damn near jogged back to Melinda’s office hoping to find her there. She wasn’t. I telephoned her apartment, then Hawthorn’s. Nothing.

  But while I had old man Hawthorn on the horn, I asked him the one question I should have asked yesterday. “By the way, Mr. Hawthorn, do you have a private safe somewhere on the Island, someplace you might keep valuable papers?”

  “Why yes, as a matter of fact I do. It’s will hidden in the depths of the building.”

  Bingo.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know if Mr. Bachman also had a safe somewhere, would you?”

  Hawthorn was quiet as a mouse. All I could hear was labored breathing. After a few seconds he said, “Not to my knowledge, but then again Mr. Bachman may have installed one without my knowing.”

  “Thanks Mr. Hawthorn,” I said and hung up. Without a word he told me more than he thought. So that was that. The safe we found in the Safe Room was Hawthorn’s safe. No wonder the combination didn’t work. And Bachman had his own set-up, God knows where on the Island, if it even was on the Island.

  The wheels were turning. It was twenty minutes to eleven and the last thing I wanted to do was play babysitter for a bunch of goofs hanging paper skeletons and crepe witches. The cop department in my mind was working at full tilt and I wanted to search for answers. I had the clues…the combination, where I found it, the fact that Bachman probably had the safe installed without Hawthorn’s knowing. That meant it had to be someplace where Hawthorn would never go. That pretty much ruled out the Safe Room, or his office or apartment. So what was left?

  Back of the house.

  The storeroom where I first found the combination. That was my best guess. I checked it once but that was with little light and no idea what I was doing. Now would be different.

  I looked at my watch. Ten ’til eleven. I didn’t want to let Melinda down but I sure as hell wanted to search that room. Then I got an idea.

  I headed back to the loading dock where Melinda said to meet her. She was there already with her thirteen workers, all ready to decorate. She made the introductions and gave me the general plan of the décor and candy stations. She wished me luck and took off for a brunch she had booked, and I was alone with six women and seven men.

  “Ok, you six ladies and five of you men,” I pointed to each of the men I wanted, “Take this plan, load up the boxes you need on dollies and start at the back of the lobby and move forward. You two, come with me.”

  “Where are you going, Señor?” One of he women asked in a heavy Cuban accent.

  “To get some Tikis out of storage. I’ll meet you kids in the lobby. And don’t screw around or no bonus.”

  “Bonus?” she yelled smiling, “Aye!”

  We reached the storeroom and I opened it up. Ah, cheap labor. Maybe I could get used to this.

  “I need those two big Tikis moved out. Just get them out into the hallway, and if they’re too heavy to lift you can go get a dolly,” I said to the two big men. Without a word they obeyed. The Tikis were heavy, but no match for these two goons. They had them both out in the hallway in a few minutes.

  “Ok guys, carry them up to the lobby please. I’d like them in the front entrance.”

  “That’s not on the plan, Señor,” one said. The other hit him in the arm.

  “It’s ok guys, I want to have a little fun with the decorating too. Go ahead and bring them up for me, ok?”

  They nodded and hefted the larger of the two, and were off. As soon as they were out of sig
ht I zipped back into the room and checked the floor below where the Tikis stood.

  Dammit. Nothing.

  I took the room apart. I moved every box, every piece of furniture. I even tapped the walls looking for hollow spots. Not a damned thing.

  It occurred to me I had gotten no further than I had before, and that I now had the added task of decorating two rather large and heavy Moai with Halloween garb. Dammit.

  I made my way down to the lobby and found that the decorating had progressed very nicely. The two Tikis where placed perfectly in the front, just in front of a small fountain. I instructed the ladies to decorate them with black crepe and skull masks, then used the house phone to call Jessica’s room. No answer. I tried Melinda’s office and got no answer there too. Finally I decided to let the workers finish the decorating job on their own, and went looking for Jessica.

  Forty-five minutes later I’d circled the entire Island and found hide nor hair of her. I told security to be on the lookout for her, and they in turn alerted the staff. It was after one o’clock, and for the first time I started to worry a little about Jessica.

  Ok, worry a lot.

  More than I should have.

  Just as I was ready to start the search all over again, a security guard came up to me in the lobby. He was sweating and out of breath.

  “Mr. Riggins, we’ve found her,” he said. Dark eyes twitched in his pale face, just a little as he spoke.

  Dammit.

  Melinda

  As if nothing ever happened. That’s the phrase that floated over Melinda’s mind as she went through her daily checklist. Fresh foods arrived on time. Check. All bars fully stocked. Check. Lifeguards on duty. Check. Housekeeping running at full capacity. Check.

  As if nothing ever happened.

  No one said a word to her about their (previous) boss, the late Rutger Bachman, the man who had run the Resort in the fashion of a five-star European Hotel for more than three years, the man responsible for bringing in some of the most well-to-do and influential people to visit the Island, the man murdered in his sleep in his second-floor apartment not more than 48 hours earlier.

  Melinda sank to a stone bench in the garden and put her face in her hands, trying hard to hold back the tears. She failed, and the tears came freely.

  “Why?” she asked softly to the birds and the trees. “Why?”

  She gently wiped the tears from her streaked face, remembering the good times with Bachman as people do when they’re confronted with a sudden death. For Melinda never hated Bachman; sure, she disliked him most off the time, and was appalled by his lack of character when it came to women. And she certainly detested the way he ran the ‘underground’ operations of the Resort. But there were good times too, and she remembered those now that he was gone. There was the first year he worked at the Resort, when he treated Melinda more like a sister than an employee. There was the time he organized a giant surprise birthday party for her, bringing in friends she hadn’t seen since high school. And there were the times when he dropped the egotistical façade of the uppity General Manager and actually taught Melinda some of the tricks of the trade, management skills he’d learned in the top schools and at the top hotels around the world.

  Yes, she thought as she sat there in the late October sun, there was a lot of good in Bachman. He was just too focused on making Tiki Island his own.

  Melinda left the bench and strolled the garden, her clipboard and checklist in hand. She smelled the sweetness of the hibiscus and ran her hand along the trunk of a twenty-year old palm tree, one she watched grow from a few feet to over thirty. The sounds of a live steel drum band came across the warm morning breeze. The sun glistened on the Gulf of Mexico and the waves exploded into a million tiny diamonds. Children ran along the beach and laughed. Legionnaires in red fezzes swallowed aspirin and drank Bloody Marys at the beach bar as they swapped stories about the girls they talked into going back to their rooms the night before. The Resort went on, the guests went on, life went on.

  As if nothing ever happened.

  Jessica

  The last thing she remembered was the cool water washing over her face. It was dark; the moon had been obliterated by the remaining clouds and that side of the Island was never lit at night. Sand, darkness, water, nothing.

  By the time I got to her the Island’s doctor already had her cleaned up and resting under crisp, white linen sheets on a cot in the infirmary. More white linen billowed from the windows as the afternoon breeze came in cool and sweet. A small, gray metal radio in the corner played orchestral music. The doctor sat on a black swivel-stool smoking cherry tobacco from a worn-out old pipe.

  “What happened to her?” I asked as I walked into the small room. He swiveled around and took the pipe out of his mouth.

  “Nearly drowned. They found her washing around in the surf early this morning. We had no idea who she was until the porter came in with the news a girl was missing.”

  I was a little confused and a little sad and a little angry but managed to hold it all in without popping a cork. Jessica was a wreck. Her eyes were puffy and a purple bruise took up most of her left cheek. Her lip was split and there were bandages on her neck and shoulder. The sheet covered most of her but it was thin, and I could tell there were more bandages up and down her body. My heart thumped hard. I hated seeing her like this.

  “Why didn’t you report this to management or something?”

  “I did,” the doctor said. “I left a message with Ms. Hawthorn’s secretary. Apparently she’s been MIA all day.”

  True, I thought.

  “Who did this to her?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was a who, so much as a what. I think she got herself a little tipsy, then went for an early morning stroll after the storm, and zonked out on the beach. Tied came in, tossed her around a little, maybe hit some of the rocks out there, but she was lucky enough to keep her head above water. She only swallowed a small amount of seawater.”

  “So how is she? She’s just sleeping, right?”

  “Not sure,” the doctor said, “I don’t think she’s in a coma or anything like that. I think she’s…well, I think she had a little help getting to sleep, if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean drugs,” I said straight out.

  “Possibly. Possibly dosed up with something, possibly a sedative or maybe something a little stronger.”

  “Like heroin?”

  “Possibly. Or morphine.”

  “Can you wake her up?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Doc, do you know who I am?”

  “No sir, can’t say I do. I imagine you’re a friend of hers, or perhaps a boyfriend,” he said without malice.

  “I’m a cop,” I said and flashed my badge. “Jessica’s been a naughty girl. She’s got a problem with heroin and she’s been put under my supervision until we can get her to a rehabilitation hospital on the mainland. If she shot up, I need to know.”

  “I could do a blood test if you like, officer.”

  “Not necessary. She’s a user but not a liar. When she wakes up, make sure you call me, please. I’m in the Kona Kai suite. If I’m not there leave word with Ms. Hawthorn’s office. And don’t let her leave here.”

  “Will do officer.”

  I left that disgustingly ugly white room with it’s Gaddamned billowy curtains and crisp sheets with the beat up body of Jessica resting in it, and knew I couldn’t kid myself about my feelings for that chick another second. Seeing her like that brought all the stomach-wrenching, head-spinning, heart-pumping feelings from last week back to me, and I was caught again in the middle between two of the most incredible, beautiful women I’d ever laid eyes on. I came down here to get away from the drama, to get some R-and-R, and I let myself get trapped between a smart, rich, beautiful charmer who wanted me to turn my life upside-down to go into the Hotel business and a sexy, intriguingly brain-damaged prostitute who made me feel more like a man than any other dame I’d ever known. Between the t
wo of them I wind up killing two thugs, sending a crooked cop to the clink and getting myself mixed up as a murder suspect. I was dressing funny, hadn’t seen a live jazz band or a beatnik in so long I almost forgot how to talk jive and couldn’t remember the last time I strapped my .45 automatic under my shoulder.

  October thirtieth. In New York, right now, the weather is cold and rainy, that bone-chilling cold that gets down into your muscles and freezes you from the inside-out. The sun probably hasn’t come out in a week, and everything is gray and wet. Kids are getting ready for Halloween, making masks, decorating their windows with paper pumpkins and cornstalks and stuff like that. Junkies are shooting up in alleys, staying warm under piles of old newspapers. Hookers are swinging it on the side streets. Dock workers are huffing in the cold air, trying to make a buck. Fast Freddy is motoring that hotrod cab of hers down Park Avenue and Captain Waters is reading the riot act to someone else for a change. And here I am, sitting on a bench made of coral rock and bamboo under a hot sun on an eighty-five degree Florida day, wearing a blue and white flower-print shirt with white linen pants and the soft-soled shoes Melinda gave me, sporting no hardware except my snub-nosed .38 tucked neatly away, and sipping a fruity tropical drink.

  Tropical drink? Where the hell did this come from? Aw, Christ. Now I’m losing my memory.

  It was at that point I made up my mind.

  It was time to leave Tiki Island, for good.

  Screw Melinda, screw Jessica, screw old man Hawthorn and his plans of snagging someone to watch over his daughter, screw their ghost stories and their hidden rooms and their vintage Cadillacs and their murders and their damned tropical foo-foo drinks. I needed to get home. I needed to feel the cold concrete under the soles of my cop shoes again, feel the bite of the hammer of my .45 as it digs into my ribs, feel the heat a shot of Jack Daniels can give, feel the pain of the city and hear the screams of the night as I move around the shadows. That was me, a city boy, a night owl. A diner-burger eatin’ Village bar-drinkin’ jazz-lovin’ city gumshoe with a thing for shady friends and a knack for finding the dregs of the dark and throwing the book at them, with hopes that a couple might turn themselves around and end up a little better off in the end. That was me. Not the guy with the white pants and Panama hat. That was just a costume, a Halloween costume at that, a fun make-believe outfit for vacation time and with the help of a couple of hot chicks I started to fall for my own joke. But my head was on straight now. I was far enough away from both dames that I could think with my brain instead of my driller for once and my head was telling me to get the hell out of Dodge.