It was then he got a visitor.
“Roberts? I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Hawthorn said, looking up from his java. Roberts was a wreck; his face was black and blue, blood stained his tan sheriff shirt and his arm was in a sling.
“I barely made it out of Largo, Mr. Hawthorn. Was runnin’ a truck fulla people up here, wiped out on the long stretch at Card Sound. I got a broke arm. A few others wasn’t so lucky.”
“Good to see you made it ok, Roberts. Sit with me, have some coffee.”
“Don’t mind if I do, suhr. See’n as I have a little somethin’ I’m needin’ to discuss with y’all.”
“Oh? What is it?”
Roberts situated himself painfully on the wooden bench next to Hawthorn and leaned in close. “Suhr, you an’ me, we been workin’ together for many a year now. I’ve always turned a blind eye to…well, some of the goin’s on concernin’ y’all.”
“And you’ve been paid well for it. What are you getting at, Roberts?”
“Well suhr, it’s like this. I know you had that young lady from Key West with y’all on the Island last night.”
Hawthorn froze. His mind spun. How could that be? He’d been so careful, so specifically cautious every step of the way. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Roberts.”
“Well now, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that ya do.” Roberts took out a cigarette and lit it. He didn’t offer one to Hawthorn. “Let’s just say I know a lot of things about what y’all been doin’ up on that island, Mr. Hawthorn, more than I let on I knew on account’a y’all bein’ as powerful as y’all are. See, I ain’t no dummy. I may sound like a redneck, but I been around the block a few times, and I know the score, see what I mean?”
“No.”
Roberts took a long drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke out away from Hawthorn. “I mean, Mr. Hawthorn, that I know why you took that girl along with you.”
Hawthorn didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. “What do you want, Roberts?”
He didn’t answer right away. He looked around the room at the moaning, aching survivors, the nurses in their bright white uniforms, the locals wet and dirty. He looked at the cots of bloody people, the children, the old men. The smell of sweat, urine and blood was getting to him. “Take a look around, Mr. Hawthorn. These people…they’s my friends, my family. Now, I don’t care none what y’all do with some two-bit whores from Cuba. But Rose…she was one of us. Whore or not, she was part of the Keys, and part of our little community. My family…they known her family for fifty years, Mr. Hawthorn.” He took another drag of the butt and put it out on the floor. “You know she had a daughter?”
“No,” Hawthorn said cautiously, “I wasn’t aware.”
“She did. A darlin’ lil girl. No daddy. Gone long ago. That little girl’s mommy is gone too, now, Mr. Hawthorn. I ’spect her grandparents are gonna have to bring her up now. A real hardship though. They ain’t exactly flush with money. Catch my meanin’, sir?”
“I think so.”
Roberts turned deadly serious and looked at Hawthorn with such contempt that Eliot was actually afraid. “Now, y’all listen to what I’m tellin’ ya,” Roberts said in a low, dark voice. “You may be powerful an’ all that, but I’m still the law around here. Now, I know there ain’t no way I could ever pin Rose’s disappearance on ya. But I know it was you. And I know why. So here’s what y’all are gonna do. Yo gonna put a nice bundle of money in the bank for that child. Enough to get her and her remainin’ family through the next twelve years or so, see? I figure that will just about be the least y’all can do for her. You’ll do it anonymously, of course, to save face. Then yo gonna pack up and leave F-L-A for a while, I think.
“Am I?”
“Yessuh, y’all are. I’d say, at least a year or two. Let things settle down a bit. An’ when ya’ll come back, there won’t be no mo’ parties, no mo’ hookers from Cuba, no mo’ cocaine and heroin ’less I give the say so, OK?”
“So you’re running the show now, is that it Roberts?”
“Yessuh. That’s about it. An’ they won’t be no mo’ killin’, no Cuban whores or nuthin’, clear? Otherwise I’ll see to it that you become right intimate with a couple of rounds from a thurty-eight.”
Hawthorn squirmed in his chair. His coffee grew cold. “So you’re judge and jury, ruling on something that you can’t even prove.”
Roberts laughed quietly. “Oh, suhr, I said I can’t nail you on that po’ girl’s death. I ain’t never said I didn’t have no proof of your other…endeavors. Matter of fact, I’ve got a few nice little photographs, some of which you took yo’ self. Mighty nasty stuff, suhr. Twisted, sick. Even in black and white, very nasty stuff. Now, ya’ll wouldn’t want any of that getting around, would ya suhr?”
Hawthorn ground his teeth together in disgust and hatred. How could he be so foolish? How could he let this…this peon get the better of him? “I suppose I have no choice,” he finally said.
“I suppose not.”
“Well, Roberts, it just so happens I was planning to leave for the west coast after all this. Can’t you see I’m in mourning? My wife is dead, lost in the storm. The last place I want to be is the Keys.”
Roberts shuddered. “Sounds like a good enough story to me, suh.”
Hawthorn shook. He held back real tears, and swallowed hard. “To be honest with you, Roberts, these deviations have caught up with me. I’m through.” He couldn’t hold back the emotion then, as if confessing to Roberts had released the pent-up anguish he had hidden for so long.
“Good to hear, suhr. Good to hear.” Roberts gazed across the room at a little girl clutching her mother’s hand, and he nearly came to tears himself. “Ya know, your island is gone.”
Surprised, Hawthorn exclaimed, “Gone?”
“Well, the limestone is still there, and a few tree trunks. But the house is destroyed. Leveled.”
“Any bodies found there?”
“Not as yet. No one’s been out to survey there yet. But I expect they’ll find at least one, or two.”
“Two,” Hawthorn said, hanging his head low. “And another in the sawgrass, probably.”
Roberts excused himself. He left Hawthorn sitting there, alone, and walked through the makeshift hospital, past the broken souls, the crying children, the people who had lost everything and had no home to return to. He continued walking out through the rear doors to a path in the woods and kept going for a hundred yards or so. Then he found the largest branch he could find on the ground, and beat it against a large tree over and over again, smashing it, pulverizing it, screaming and crying and beating the tree until his hands were bloody and his muscles sore, allowing his anger and disgust and hatred to flow out of him until he had none left.
+++
Thunder crashed so loudly we thought the roof had been torn off the Safe Room. Those dark, hideous shadows grew in size and began to encircle us, trap us. Hawthorn stopped screaming and began muttering something…maybe prayers, maybe nonsense. The four of us huddled together, having no idea what to do. I was tempted to reach for my .38, but what good would bullets do against shadows?
In the eerie light of the Safe Room, the shadows began to take on the shapes of men, and women…and even a few children. It was sickening. As their features became clearer, it was evident they’d been dead for a very long time, entombed in the deep, cold waters of the Gulf and the Atlantic, rotting away slowly, painfully. Melinda screamed at the sight. Jessica just looked on in terror. Then, slowly, one rotting figure of a women came right up to us. Her flesh sloughed off the bone as she moved. Small green crabs darted across her skeletal face. I damn near lost it, especially when she spoke.
With a voice like a hundred nails tearing across a teacher’s slate, the phantom spoke. “Eliot, you bastard,” it said, and greenish mud slopped from its mouth. “I told you, you would pay.”
Hawthorn shivered. “I know, Rose,” he answered calmly. He looked at Melinda, who w
as white with fear. “I have to go now,” he said to her. “Goodbye, my darling.”
“Not yet, Eliot,” the entity screeched with an unearthly fury, “First, they must see what you really are.”
“Oh, no! God no, please!” He screamed, “Don’t! You mustn’t! I’ll go with you, take me to your ocean grave but please don’t retell my secrets!”
“What the hell is going on?” I said quietly, to no one in particular.
Jessica answered, “It’s my mother.” Her voice was strange, her eyes glazed over, staring at the rotting thing in front of us. “And I think I know why she’s been coming to see me all these years now.”
“You must tell them, Eliot,” the thing said again with that hideous sound that conjured images of a thousand violins screeching against each other, “You must Pay For Your Sins.”
Then, as if that were their cue, the other entities began chanting “pay for your sins” in similarly disturbing voices, filling the room with their tortuous sounds. Some came forward…a woman, or the remains of one, with no hands or feet, another with her head split in two. Another with rope burns on her wrists and neck. A man with his head caved in. Then, from the back, the woman with the large hat, the one I’d seen in the garden by the unmarked grave. She wasn’t like the others…she was all in white, and floated a little higher than the rest. She came up to Hawthorn and he gasped.
“Hello, Eliot,” she said almost lovingly. “It’s time. Confess your sins, and come with us where you belong.”
“I can’t bear it, I tell you! I just can’t!”
“TELL THEM!”
“No, I’ve changed, for twenty years I’ve been a changed man.”
Suddenly the woman in white grew dark and hideous, a rotted corpse with the tattered remains of a dress clinging to her bones, her face smashed in. “Then we’ll tell your story for you!” she screeched, and the room swirled with red and black light, and the phantoms swirled with it, and we were transported in time and space to Hawthorn’s past.
April, 1931
The party had been in full swing for hours when Senator Grady approached Eliot in a somewhat inebriated, buoyant state. “Hawthorn, old boy!” he shouted, clapping a meaty hand on Eliot’s back. “What a fantst..fastasss…what great party you’re havin’. I can only think of one thing to make it better.”
Halwthorn knew immediately what he wanted. “A young lady, would that do?”
Grady shook with laughter. “Yes, my boy. One of those cute little Latinas from down south.” He smiled, then his demeanor changed; he grew more serious, darker, quieter. “I think tonight I’d like something a little…different.”
“Different how? Would you like two women to escort you upstairs?” Eliot asked innocently.
Grady leaned his two-hundred-eighty pounds in close to Eliot. “No, Hawthorn. I need something…different. I hear some of these girls…they have no families, no one to care if they…uh…go missing.”
Eliot thought a moment, the alcohol confusing him, clouding his mind just enough to let him know something wasn’t right, but he wasn’t sure just what that something was. “I don’t follow you.”
“Roberts. He confided in me that some of these women are…expendable.”
“He did?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I know nothing of it, Senator. These ladies are all hired for the evening’s entertainment. Tomorrow they all go on a boat back to Havana.”
“Hmm…maybe not…quite…all.”
Grady looked around the room until he spotted a tanned-skinned girl in a pink dress. “Her, the one with the dark hair and the pink outfit. Roberts said I could have her, to do with what I please.”
Hawthorn still wasn’t sure what the Senator was implying. His head swam with expensive Gin and Vermouth. “Ok, I suppose Senator, if Mr. Roberts said so.”
“Is there a place where she and I can be alone, Hawthorn? And I don’t mean upstairs…I mean, alone…where no one can hear or interrupt us. Someplace secluded…someplace that, you know, can be maintenanced easily?”
Hawthorn was so confused now all he could think of was trying to accommodate the Senator, a very important guest that he needed to help close a deal on a land grab in the panhandle. “I, uh…There’s the boat house.”
“Too public. Anyone could come by.”
Eliot thought. “The basement.”
“You have a basement on this island?”
“Yes, it’s cut into the limestone. It’s a Safe Room in the event of a storm. Water tight, sound proof. Somewhat small and not very comfortable, I’m afraid, but there is a cot.”
“Take me there, Hawthorn. Let’s grab that hot little firecracker whore on the way.”
“Whatever you say, Senator.”
They picked up the girl and Eliot led them out of the ballroom to the rear of the mansion where they came upon a locked door. The whole way Grady and the girl were laughing, joking, stopping now and then to kiss or grope. “Down here,” Hawthorn said as he unlocked the heavy door. A pull-string lit a bulb that cast a sickly yellow glow over a set of wooden steps. “Go ahead down, Senator, it’s all yours.”
“You come too, Hawthorn, let’s make it a real party.”
“I’m afraid not Senator, my wife wouldn’t approve.”
“Don’t be a goddamned prude, Hawthorn. If you want that land deal to go through you’ll come down and have a drink with us.”
Eliot pondered the request; he needed that deal to come to pass, so he said, “One drink.”
“That’s the spirit!” Grady shouted, and they all descended the stairwell to the Safe Room. Once there Grady pulled out a bottle of Sherry, poured three glasses, handed two to his guests and said, “Cheers!” The three drank the toast, then Grady smashed the bottle across the face of the no longer pretty Latina from Havana.
+++
“Please, stop!” Eliot screamed as the phantoms whipped around the room. Melinda tried to shield him, but to her horror was ripped away from his side and thrown to the floor. “No more, I’ll go with you, please just don’t show her…”
+++
“Jesus Christ Grady, what are you doing?” Eliot shouted over the screams of the poor girl. “Are you out of you mind?”
“I told you, Hawthorn, she’s expendable. Roberts says so. She’s bought and paid for. She’s mine,” he continued as he ripped the bloody dress from her shaking body. “Help me get her up on the cot!”
“I’ll do no such thing!” Eliot shouted, backing toward the stairs.
“You’ll do it and you’ll shut up about it Hawthorn, or I’ll ruin you, understand me? I have plenty of friends in the Treasury that would shut down your operation and put you in the poorhouse with a single phone call. Now help me.”
Dazed, Eliot lifted the girl’s feet as the Senator lifted her arms to the cot. Grady finished stripping her naked while the girl’s screams and strength weakened. “You want a turn, Hawthorn?”
“No, not at all.”
Grady unbuttoned his trousers and forced his way into the girl as Eliot stood aghast, too drunk to stop him, too frightened to leave. The girl moaned and cried. Grady punched her full on in the face, bloodying her further. He grabbed and twisted her breasts demonically as drool spilled out of his mouth into her eyes. With every plunge the girl seemed to become weaker; Grady seemed to grow darker. His breaths came faster and as they did he picked up the neck of the broken bottle and thrust it into the girl’s body, twisting it and tearing it out with chunks of flesh and rivulets of blood. The girl screamed in agony as he came inside her, and with his final thrust he ripped her throat open with the jagged glass, drenching himself in her blood. With horrible, disgusting gurgling sounds, she clawed at her throat and took her final breath.
Eliot, dumbfounded, slid down the wall to the floor, staring at the dead body that once was a vibrant young woman laying in a pool of blood on the old cot. Grady dismounted with a grunt, and buttoning his fly said, “Tell Roberts to clean this up. Whew!” He wiped th
e girl’s blood off his face with a linen handkerchief. “Excellent party, Hawthorn. That land is yours. I’ll be back for next month’s party. Tell Roberts I wand a blonde this time.” He took a deep breath, and ascended the stairs.
+++
Eliot screamed as loud as he could, “Melinda, my darling, please don’t watch, they’re lies, all lies!” Eliot screamed, but the phantoms muffled his plea.
“Not lies, the truth!” the ghostly woman screeched as the phantoms swirled. “The truth! THE TRUTH!”
July 4th, 1932
It was after two in the morning when Eliot’s wife finally passed out from too much gin. The guests had either paired off and gone to their rooms, or had gathered in the music room for a rather decadent preoccupation. Eliot made his way to the music room, finding no less than twelve men and twenty women on the floor, undressed and indulging in every deviant sexual act possible. Eliot, once very shy but now very accustomed to this custom, joined the array where two young women seemed to be not working hard enough for their pay. He spent a great deal of time with them both, enjoying them as much as biology would allow, but grew bored of the ritual, bored of the decadence that had become so ordinary. He yearned for something more, though he knew not what it was.
He stood as the two ladies knelt in front of him, orally pleasing him. He was in arm’s reach of a bottle of full-strength Canadian whiskey, and took a long shot from the bottle. Neither the alcohol nor the women gave him much satisfaction. Then, from nowhere, an idea invaded his mind, an idea that he desperately tried to suppress, an idea that had started a year before. He looked down at the two heads bobbing before him, and realized one of the girls was from Robert’s house in the keys, while the other was a Cuban girl, one who had been to his parties before. She was a runaway, a girl with no past…and no future. Harshly, impulsively, he stopped the two girls and dismissed the blonde. “You, vamos,” he said to the Cuban, and led her to the Safe Room.
Murder on Tiki Island: A Noir Paranormal Mystery In The Florida Keys (Detective Bill Riggins Mysteries) Page 45