Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  His father was bewitched by her and married her, believing that her gratitude for the marriage and everything it would bring her—the sprawling ranch house, the yacht club, the garden club—would be a guarantee of her love.

  “But is it ever?” Dr. Harcourt said. He sat forward suddenly in his chair, and Eva, startled, leaned away. She remembered the way he would lecture, pacing the room, his Converse sneakers squeaking on the wood floors.

  “For some women it might be,” Eva said.

  He smiled and took a sip of his beer. “She met someone else and had an affair. My father heard rumors and hired a private detective who took photos of her at a motel with the man. Then he confronted her. I was ten or so. My brother was twelve.”

  His father spoke to his lawyer about divorce, and his mother knew it was coming: the loss of everything she loved—the clothes, the jewelry. “According to our father, she never worried about losing us,” Dr. Harcourt said. “She worried about her Cadillac.”

  Eva felt her apprehension beneath the effects of the beer. She wondered if she should offer some sympathetic comment, but she could not speak, waiting for the end of the story.

  “Not many people acknowledge the other side of this grim tale,” Dr. Harcourt said.

  “Her side,” Eva said, her voice an underwater sound. The barista steamed milk and roasted beans. Customers came in, and maybe they were Eva’s neighbors, or not.

  “What she endured from him—this pillar of society, this much-loved man. Those nights he berated her, accused her of things she had yet to do, ripped her clothing from the closet and drove it in the car to Goodwill. Deprived her access to the bank account so we had no money for food. These things happened—I remember them happening. And still, she stayed.”

  “Like Griselda?” Eva said, confused.

  “I’m not sure what the breaking point was,” he responded, drumming his fingers on the table.

  “Maybe the man she met was kind. Maybe she wanted a bit of happiness for herself.”

  Dr. Harcourt drank his beer in one long swallow. Eva saw his throat move. His hands cradled the empty glass. “She hired some thug to kill him. He came into the house and waited for my father to return from work one evening and he bludgeoned him to death.”

  Eva felt the cold of the glass move through her arm, down the length of her torso. “Is this all true, Dr. Harcourt?”

  “It’s a notorious local story,” he said. “And please, call me James.”

  He’d asked her to do that before, and she had, to please him. But to do so now would take her back to that time with him—the closeness they’d forged driving the grid of streets, having sex in the empty day-lit parks where at night students gathered, negotiating with their money and their fake IDs and pharmaceuticals. She knew it would not take much to close the gap the years had formed between them.

  “I really couldn’t do that,” she said.

  “It’s my name.” He set one empty glass inside the other. “Why would it be a problem?”

  “It’s not who you are to me anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “What if I called you Mrs. Kinsey? How would that feel?”

  She turned in her chair, crossed her legs. “I don’t care how it feels. Call me whatever you want.”

  “Whore,” he said, his face darkening, his voice low. “There’s something.”

  She recoiled, the way you might if someone’s injury had bloomed with blood. Her limbs felt hung with weights. Still, she managed to stand. Another woman who might have been her neighbor waited at the counter for her coffee order as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  Eva left the coffee bar, the door’s bells jangling behind her, and began to walk toward her house. Other people were out walking, in groups or alone, with dogs on leashes or pushing strollers. The air blew, hot and thick, lifting her skirt. Oak trees swayed overhead, sending acorns down onto rooftops, onto car hoods. Dry leaves skittered across the sidewalk. The wind in the oaks was a sound like a hiss, a faucet left on, a leak in a gas line. She easily blended in—a resident out for a walk, not someone fleeing a man in a coffee bar.

  She approached her house, its 1950s facade so benign, so unremarkable. When she’d been a college student seeing Dr. Harcourt she met another student and began to see him too. The boy knew about her affair with Dr. Harcourt, she told him everything—where they had sex, the positions Dr. Harcourt liked, the things he told her to say. The boy loved hearing the stories, and then he must have repeated them, and it was a small college and somehow Dr. Harcourt found out. He hadn’t retaliated overtly, but now Eva surmised he must have been instrumental in her failure at school, the reputation she’d acquired, the accusations, the meeting with the dean who asked about her drug use, her poor grades, and who would not entertain her confession.

  “Jim Harcourt?” he had said, twinkly-eyed and paternal, his expression bemused. He didn’t need to say more. She would not be believed.

  The Prius was there at the curb, and Dr. Harcourt waited at the gate to the front courtyard. She had cared for him in college. She’d had every intention of staying with him, assured his love for her was greater than that for his wife and it was only a matter of time before he divorced her. The other boy was just a boy, and she regretted ever spending time with him.

  Eva edged past Dr. Harcourt, his coat’s corduroy fabric brushing her arm. She opened the door with her key and stepped into the house, moved down the terrazzo hall to the living room and the wall of glass that offered its view of the patio and lawn, the wind-scalloped canal. She heard Dr. Harcourt enter behind her. He stepped alongside her and took her hand, gently.

  “Let’s not do this,” he said.

  “You should leave,” she told him.

  “You haven’t gotten the tour yet. I promised you that, and I won’t renege.” He walked to the center of the room, his hands on his hips. “The scene of countless drunken escapades. Parties, dancing.” He swiveled his hips, his hands holding invisible things: a cigarette, a drink. “Glass dish of peanuts.” He mimed taking a handful, popping them into his mouth.

  He took her hands and tried to get her to dance. He sang part of an old Barry White song. She felt the sharp press of the glass in her finger, and she tugged her hands away. He had told her the story to remind her of their time together, but he told her to frighten her too, knowing that what they’d done together would get mixed up in the story, that she needed to hear it, wanted it, much as the college boy wanted her stories of sex with a professor. Eva knew they all needed the stories for something.

  “He came in here,” Dr. Harcourt said, gesturing to the sliding glass doors. “It was wall-to-wall carpeting then. My mother favored white.” He crossed the room to a door that led into what Eva and her husband had designated as an office. “He hid in here, so when my father came in,” he walked down the hall to the foyer, “and set his keys down, he was in direct view.”

  “Were they caught?” she asked.

  “The body was found here,” Dr. Harcourt said, his mapping of the room ending, the foyer the X.

  “Who found him?” Eva said, her voice small and soft. “Was it you?”

  He stared at the spot on the floor. “We made a mess of things back then, didn’t we?” he said.

  He stepped around the imaginary body and approached her, the soles of his Converse squeaking. He put his hand on her shoulder and slid it down her arm. They had a history together, he said. “There’s something really powerful in that.”

  D.P. Davis, the developer of the Islands, had died mysteriously in 1926. He’d fallen from a porthole on a sea voyage to Paris with his mistress—a former Hollywood actress. There’d been questions about the night he died, Dr. Harcourt had said. The man was a drinker, but he was also in debt. “Did he fall, or did he leap?” he had said. “Or was he pushed?”

  She imagined the dead man in the foyer, the white carpet stained with blood, these same tree shadows moving along the walls, the quiet of the neighborhood its o
wn sound. And then a rattling of keys in the door and the door opening on the scene. It might be this scene, she and Dr. Harcourt together, and it might be her husband coming into the house, calling her name. Was it always clear? Victim or criminal?

  The tree shadows rubbed the walls, a delicate, inaudible friction. Dr. Harcourt dipped his face toward hers. Eva thought she might cry out, though from fear or desire she could not ever say.

  TRIGGERFISH LANE

  by Tim Dorsey

  Palma Ceia

  They keep coming to Florida.

  People who maintain such records report that every single day, a thousand new residents move into the state. The reasons are varied. Retirement, beaches, affordable housing, growing job base, tax relief, witness protection, fugitive warrants, forfeiture laws that shelter your house if you’re a Heisman Trophy winner who loses a civil suit in the stabbing death of your wife, and year-round golf.

  On a typical spring morning, five of those thousand new people piled into a cobalt-blue Ford Aerostar in Logansport, Indiana. The Davenports—Jim, Martha, and their three children. They watched the moving van pull out of their driveway and followed it south.

  A merging driver on the interstate ramp gave Jim the bird. He would have given Jim two birds, but he was on the phone. Jim grinned and waved and let the man pass.

  Jim Davenport was like many of the other thousand people heading to Florida this day, except for one crucial difference. Of all of them, Jim was hands down the most nonconfrontational.

  Jim avoided all disagreement and didn’t have the heart to say no. He loved his family and fellow man, never raised his voice or fists, and was rewarded with a lifelong, routine digestion of small doses of humiliation. The belligerent, boorish, and bombastic latched onto him like strangler figs.

  He was utterly content.

  Then Jim moved to Florida and something quite unnatural happened: he made strange new friends, got in disputes, and someone ended up dead.

  But none of this was on the horizon as the Davenports entered the second day of their southern interstate migration. The road tar at the bottom of Georgia began to soften and smell in the afternoon sun. It was a Saturday, the traffic on I-75 thick and anxious. Hondas, Mercurys, Subarus, Chevy Blazers. A blue Aerostar with Indiana tags passed the exit for the town of Tifton, “Sod Capital of the USA,” and a billboard: Jesus Is Lord . . . at Buddy’s Catfish Emporium.

  A sign marking the Florida state line stood in the distance, along with the sudden appearance of palm trees growing in a precise grid. The official state welcome center rose like a mirage through heat waves off the highway. Cars accelerated for the oasis with the runaway anticipation of traffic approaching a Kuwaiti checkpoint on the border with Iraq.

  They pulled into the hospitality center’s angled parking slots; doors opened and children jumped out and ran around the grass in the aimless, energetic circles for which they are known. Parents stretched and rounded up staggering amounts of trash and headed for garbage bins. A large Wisconsin family in tank tops sat at a picnic table eating bologna sandwiches and generic cheese doodles so they could afford a thousand-dollar day at Disney. A crack team of state workers arrived at the curb in an unmarked van and began pressure-washing some kind of human fluid off the sidewalk. A stray ribbon of police tape blew across the pavement.

  The Aerostar parked near the vending machines, in front of the No Nighttime Security sign.

  “Who needs to go to the bathroom?” asked Jim.

  Eight-year-old Melvin put down his mutant action figures and raised a hand.

  Sitting next to him with folded arms and a dour outlook was Debbie Davenport, a month shy of sweet sixteen, totally disgusted to be in a minivan. She was also disgusted with the name Debbie. Prior to the trip she had informed her parents that from now on she would only go by “Drusilla.”

  “Debbie, you need to use the restroom?”

  No reply.

  Martha got out a bottle for one-year-old Nicole, cooing in her safety seat, and Jim and little Melvin headed for the building.

  Outside the restrooms, a restless crowd gathered in front of an eight-foot laminated map of Florida, unable to accept that they were still hundreds of miles from the nearest theme park. They would become even more bitter when they pulled away from the welcome center and the artificial grove of palms gave way to hours of scrubland and billboards for topless donut shops.

  Jim bought newspapers and coffee. Martha took over the driving and pulled back on I-75. Jim unfolded one of the papers and read aloud: “Authorities have discovered a tourist from Finland who lost his luggage, passport, all his money and ID, and was stranded for eight weeks at Miami International Airport.”

  “Eight weeks?” said Martha. “How did he take baths?”

  “Wet paper towels in the restrooms.”

  “Where did he sleep?”

  “Chairs at different gates each night.”

  “What did he eat?”

  “Bagels from the American Airlines Admirals Club.”

  “How did he get in the Admirals Club if he didn’t have ID?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “If he went to all that trouble, he probably could have gotten some kind of help from the airline. I can’t believe nobody noticed him.”

  “I think that’s the point of the story.”

  “What happened?”

  “Kicked him out. He was last seen living at Fort Lauderdale International.”

  The Aerostar passed a group of police officers on the side of the highway, slowly walking eight abreast looking for something in the weeds. Jim turned the page. “They’ve cleared the comedian Gallagher in the Tamiami Strangler case.”

  “Is that a real newspaper?”

  Jim turned back to the front page and pointed at the top. Tampa Tribune.

  Martha rolled her eyes.

  “Says they released an artist’s sketch. Bald with mustache and long hair on the sides. Police got hundreds of calls that it looked like Gallagher. But they checked his tour schedule—he was out of state the nights of the murders.”

  “They actually checked him out?”

  “They also checked out Gallagher’s brother.”

  Martha looked at Jim, then back at the road.

  “After clearing Gallagher, they got a tip that he has a brother who looks just like him and smashes watermelons on a circuit of low-grade comedy clubs under the name Gallagher II. But he was out of town as well.”

  “I hope I don’t regret this move,” said Martha.

  Jim put his hand on hers. “You’re going to love Tampa.”

  Jim Davenport had never planned on moving to Tampa, or even Florida for that matter. Everything he knew about the state came from the Best Places to Live in America magazine that now sat on the Aerostar’s dashboard. Right there on page seventeen, across from the feature on the joy of Vermont’s covered bridges, was the now famous annual ranking of the finest cities in the US of A to raise a family. And coming in at number three with a bullet—just below Seattle and San Francisco—was the shocker on the list. Rocketing up from last year’s 497th position: Tampa, Florida. When the magazine hit the stands, champagne corks flew in the Chamber of Commerce. The mayor called a press conference, and the city quickly threw together a band and fireworks show at the riverfront park; the news was so big it even caused some people to get laid.

  Nobody knew it was all a mistake. The magazine had recently been acquired by a German media conglomerate, which purchased the latest spelling and grammar–check software and dismissed its editors and writers, replacing them with distracted high school students listening to music on headphones. The tabular charts on the new software had baffled a student with green hair, who inadvertently moved all of Tampa’s crime statistics a decimal point to the left.

  * * *

  The Davenports got off the expressway and Jim threw a quarter in the automatic toll booth, but the red light didn’t change. He drove through. A wino scurried from the underbrush and pulled a q
uarter out of the plastic basket, where he’d stuffed a rag in the coin hole.

  The family van headed into south Tampa. None of them had seen their new home yet, except in pictures. The deal was prearranged and underwritten by Jim’s company, an expanding Indiana consulting firm that had asked for volunteers to move to new branch offices in Phoenix, San Antonio, and Tampa. Long lines formed for Arizona and Texas. Jim wondered why he was all alone at the Florida desk.

  Jim checked street signs as the van rolled down Dale Mabry Highway. “I think we’re getting close.”

  Anticipation built. Everyone’s faces were at the windows. Antique malls, dry cleaners, Little League fields, 7-Elevens. Just like neighborhoods everywhere, but with lots of palm trees and azaleas.

  Jim made a right. Almost there. Martha liked the sound of the street names. Barracuda Trail, Man O’War Terrace, Coral Circle. When they got to Triggerfish Lane, Jim made a left. Their mouths fell open.

  Paradise.

  The sun was high, the sky clear, and children played catch and rode bikes in the street. And the colors! Lush gardens and hedges, bright but tasteful pastel paint schemes. Teal, turquoise, pink, peach. The houses started at the bayfront and unfolded chronologically as development had pushed inland. Clapboard bungalows from the twenties, Mediterranean stuccos from the thirties and forties, classic ranch houses of the fifties and sixties. It used to be a consistent architectural flow, but real estate in south Tampa had become so white-hot that anything under two thousand square feet was bulldozed to make way for three-story trophy homes that now towered outside both windows of the Aerostar. Half the places had decorative silk flags hanging over the brass mailboxes. Florida Gators flags and FSU Seminole flags. Flags with sunflowers and golf clubs and sailfish and horses. Jim pointed ahead at a light-ochre bungalow with white trim. A restoration award flag hung from the wraparound porch.