Licensed to Thrill: Volume 2

by Diane Capri

  “Cheer up,” George mumbled, his back to me as he moved slowly to sit on the edge of his side of the bed. “Maybe a pirate will steal you away from all of this.”

  Had I the energy, I’d have thrown a pillow at him.

  The aroma of fresh coffee sidled into the bedroom then like the scent of a hot meal finding the nose of a starving hobo. A divine bouquet strong enough to lift me to my feet.

  I shuffled into the kitchen, belting my robe, then rubbing sleep from my heavy, tired eyes. It was impossible not to notice her—Suzanne Harper. My father’s new wife. I’m pretty sure I groaned out loud.

  “Morning, Willa,” she chirped, in her sweet, high-pitched voice. She prattled on, barely stopping to breathe. “Fresh coffee in the pot. I found eggs and cheese in your refrigerator, so we should have a baked omelet in a few minutes. I hope you don’t mind that I brought in the paper. I’m so excited about my first Gasparilla parade! I couldn’t sleep! This is all just so fabulous!”

  The last exclamation point was too much, too early, too nice.

  My mind clicked off and refused to register her chatter after that.

  I reached into the cabinet for my favorite “I hate mornings” mug and filled it with black coffee. Sitting at the end of the kitchen table, I watched Suzanne as she babbled on, her stream of words tumbling over my sullen resistance, wearing me down like water on a stone.

  Incredibly, Suzanne was as beautiful this morning as she had been last night. Her long, artfully-streaked blonde hair was softly curled. It fell attractively around narrow shoulders wrapped in a lavender warm-up suit sporting a designer logo on the breast pocket. The white tee-shirt under her silk jacket had the same logo in the center, and molded to her slender but full-breasted frame. She wore lavender sneakers to match. Her eyes fairly sparkled with a level of excitement usually exhibited by children under the age of six.

  I, on the other hand, sat with my short auburn hair matted to my head and green eyes barely open, feeling older and even less attractive than I surely appeared.

  My negative comparisons didn’t stop there.

  I barely had my skin on at this outrageous hour, while Suzanne’s makeup was perfectly applied to her flawless complexion. Except for the glossy lavender lipstick inside the deep purple lip liner on her full mouth. There should be a law against such foolish lipstick being worn by a grown woman.

  That was the problem, I realized again, as soon as the uncharitable thought entered my mind. She was twenty-three years old, but in no other way did she remotely resemble a grown woman.

  No, Suzanne was a sweet, engaging, loveable, child-like waif. Did that make my situation better? Or was it worse? Definitely worse, I decided immediately.

  If only I could’ve hated her on the spot.

  I dropped my head back into my hands.

  My father, Jim Harper, was a cliché. He’d married a woman less than half his age. Hell, she wasn’t much more than half my age.

  Everything about her screamed trophy wife.

  The prospect of introducing the two of them to all of our friends today made me nauseous again. My inner adolescent was alive and well, wailing, “How could you do this to me?” while my adult self had the grace to be ashamed of such thoughts. I was on edge and exhausted. The very idea of the long celebration ahead felt overwhelming.

  George entered the kitchen then, followed by both dogs. He grinned crookedly in response to Suzanne’s incessant drivel. When he sat down next to me with his coffee, he nodded in my direction and I flashed him a weak smile in return.

  Dad came in shortly afterward and kissed me on the cheek. “Morning, Jim,” George said, his nose buried in the newspaper, when Dad clapped him on the shoulder before approaching Suzanne.

  Dad’s precious one managed to silence her lips to receive his long and soulful kiss, a kiss that seemed to go on forever. The sight of their total immersion in the greeting caused my hands to shake as I drew the coffee cup to my mouth and looked away.

  Beads of sweat broke out on my brow. Our tiny kitchen became so crowded all of a sudden that I struggled to stand, mumbled a lame excuse and escaped, confident that no one noticed my departure.

  Gasparilla month, continued downhill from there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 9:30 a.m.

  January 27, 2001

  AN HOUR LATER, I’D forced myself downstairs to George’s restaurant, not quite ready to join the party in progress. I knew the day would be a lengthy one, but I was physically and emotionally drained by my father’s unexpected appearance, with a new child-bride, no less. As I went about the business of playing hostess, I didn’t fully comprehend the import of what seemed to be mundane, unrelated events.

  My gaze roamed the crowd. Members and guests of the social and service club George had founded, called “Minaret Krewe,” were gathered everywhere, practically standing on top of each other.

  Minaret Krewe is one of the more than thirty social clubs, or “krewes,” that participate in Gasparilla month events. Older krewes, with membership rosters as diverse as the Tampa population, had been doing so for a hundred years. At least two krewes consist entirely of women members while others celebrate the area’s Latin history or its African-American traditions. Because of Tampa’s connection to President Teddy Roosevelt, there’s even a krewe of Rough Riders.

  Minaret Krewe is one of the newer ones. They named themselves after our historic home, called Minaret because of the large, steel onion dome on the top. Today, several hundred members and their guests would filter through the restaurant, beginning with breakfast and continuing until after midnight snacks.

  Professional makeup artists, hired by the Krewe to transform its members into ferocious sea robbers and tawdry wenches for today’s parade, were hard at work near the staircase.

  A few guests had already begun the day’s heavy drinking with mimosas, bloody Marys and several varieties of frozen coladas. Long before midnight, our home and all of Tampa would be filled with drunken revelers. There was nothing to be done except to join them.

  With weary resignation, I bowed my head and asked quickly for an event way too busy for quiet chats with my father or his new bride. And for a while, my entreaty was granted.

  Mid-morning, about seven hundred members of Ye Mystic Krewe stacked onto their barge made over to look like a pirate ship. José Gasparilla landed at the Tampa Convention Center and took over the city while the party at our house continued unabated. I managed to avoid Dad and Suzanne, although I caught a glimpse of them from time to time and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  George provided traditional Gasparilla fare, non-stop food and refreshments appeared throughout the day. Cuban sandwiches and Ybor Gold beer, brewed locally in Ybor City, were available. For those seeking a full meal, there were black beans and yellow rice, George’s version of the famous 1905 Salad, and several other Cuban dishes.

  Café con leche, the rich, Cuban coffee heavily laced with heated milk, flowed as freely as the beer. My caffeine of choice, I’d had a cup of that coffee in my hand the entire morning.

  I glimpsed only portions of the Parade of Pirates on the television in the Sunset Bar. Parade floats populated by pirates, wenches, beauty queens, Rotary, Lions and Kiwanis members, politicians and sports figures passed slowly by the television camera. High school marching bands filled the gaps between the krewes.

  The local news anchor had dressed like a crusty buccaneer and joined the parade. From time to time, he interviewed a few of the half-million or so spectators lining the sidewalks along Bayshore Boulevard.

  Most parade watchers were dressed in heavy coats, hats and gloves. Mother Nature, apparently out of sorts, had decided the high today would be forty-three degrees. What warmth the sun provided was overcome by the gusty, cold wind. I shivered in sympathy, hands folded at the elbows, providing my own warmth and glad to be inside.

  When I turned away from the television, two of my favorite people in the world w
ere standing next to me. “I’m so glad you could come,” I said to Margaret Wheaton as I hugged first her and then her husband. “I haven’t seen you in weeks, Ron. How are you feeling?”

  Margaret, my secretary and good friend, looked tired and older than her sixty-something years. She is a kind person, always helping, never asking much for herself. At work, Margaret seemed to be handling her husband’s terminal illness with compassion and very little fuss. Only someone who knew her as well as I did would have noticed the toll on her.

  “As well as can be expected,” Ron replied to my question. He held my hand, with little strength. “Thank you for inviting us today. I don’t go to many parties.” He said this without self-pity, but it made me sad just the same. “Who knows how many Gasparillas I have left?” Anyone could see the answer to that question was “not many.”

  Ron was dying of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, abbreviated ALS. Often called Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a progressive wasting away of certain nerve cells of the brain and spinal column called motor neurons. The motor neurons control the voluntary muscles, which are the muscles that control movement.

  The disease would eventually kill Ron when the muscles that allowed him to breathe ceased to function. In the meantime, since Ron continued to be fully aware of himself and his condition, Margaret had told me his mental depression was overwhelming them both. I could barely force myself to think about Ron’s illness, and I wasn’t living the nightmare twenty-four hours a day like the Wheatons were. Had I been in Ron Wheaton’s shoes, I’d have been investigating euthanasia.

  “He’s doing much better lately, thank you,” Margaret put in. “If he gets his rest, he can still square dance with the best of them.” I saw the grief she tried to conceal behind the false cheer as Margaret put her arm through her husband’s and he patted her hand.

  Ron was a tall man, once robust but now thin and frail. Leaning against a bar stool for support, he smiled down on his diminutive wife with a deep level of love that was almost painful to watch.

  “Sure, honey, as long as I do it in my chair.” He nodded to a wheelchair sitting in a corner not far from where we stood. “I get tired quickly,” he said to me, by way of explanation.

  My sorrow for him and for Margaret coursed through my body and caused me to shiver involuntarily. There was nothing I could do for Ron. Nothing anyone could do. I felt every bit as helpless as I really was.

  We talked a few minutes longer, until another guest demanded my attention and I was forced to return to my hostess role, when I’d have preferred to stay with Ron and Margaret. I made a silent vow to spend more time with them both as I made my way over to help another elderly guest find a comfortable chair. But I never got the chance.

  Later, I stopped into the Sunset Bar and glanced up to see the television reporter interviewing Gil Kelley, the current King of the Minaret Krewe, outside on the street along the parade route.

  “What do you think of our parade, King Kelley?” the reporter asked him. Gil’s answer was drowned out by an upsurge of laughter inside the Sunset Bar.

  Gil’s makeup, created here this morning, was particularly good. He had a wicked looking slash wound down the left side of his face with fake blood oozing out of it, and one of his front teeth was blacked out, giving him a snaggle-toothed appearance. Gil’s black hat, colorful yellow silk blouse, tight black pants and long sword were realistic enough. His all-too-real shaggy grey hair and paunch completed the expensive, if stylized, version of pirate wear. In his costume, he looked nothing like the president and majority shareholder of Tampa Bay Bank, which he actually was.

  “Isn’t he dashing?” his wife, Sandra Kelley, said when she saw me watching Gil on television. Sandra herself was dressed in the twenty-first century version of a promiscuous wench’s costume, an off-the-shoulder red blouse and a full yellow skirt that matched her husband’s blouse. She wore several strands of cheap red and purple and green Gasparilla beads around her neck.

  “Yes,” I smiled down at her, “he certainly does.” I nodded emphatically. “Or were you talking about Gil?” We both laughed.

  “You and George are so good to have the Krewe here,” she said.

  The comment seemed genuinely pleasant and thus unlike Sandra Kelly. “Are you having a good time?”

  Sandra frowned daintily, a slight downward bend to her plucked black eyebrows over the bridge of her pert nose. The snide Sandra we all knew well resurfaced. “I was. Until he came in.” She inclined her head toward a man I didn’t recognize talking with Ron Wheaton, who seemed more exhausted. He was leaning against a wall and appeared to need the support.

  “Who is that?” I asked Sandra.

  “It’s Armstrong Otter. The one and only.” The disdainful tone conveyed her opinion precisely. There were two famous jewelers from the small beach community of Pass-a-Grille across the bay. One was the highly regarded Evander Preston. Armstrong Otter was the other.

  Not wanting to encourage Sandra Kelly’s brand of vicious gossip, I said, “I don’t know Mr. Otter.”

  “So much the better,” she snapped. “If Otter crawled back under whatever rock he slithered out from, all of Tampa would be better off.”

  Sandra’s ire encouraged me to examine Otter more closely. He and Ron Wheaton appeared to be engaged in a serious conversation, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Of course, Ron was one of the kindest souls on the planet. He would have been pleasant to Jack the Ripper.

  The same could not be said of Sandra Kelley. At least, no one who knew her said so. I’d never liked Sandra and every time I saw her, she reinforced by initial distrust. I took her venom with a side order of antidote as I excused myself to attend to our other guests.

  Or so I told Sandra Kelley. What I really did was to escape in the opposite direction when I saw my newly-minted stepmother headed my way. The absurdity of having a stepmother more than ten years younger than me struck me again.

  The onslaught of guests, my lack of sleep and exercise today, and the stress of seeing Dad cozying up to Suzanne finally overcame me. It was only early afternoon but I was exhausted. I figured no one would notice if I ducked out, so I trudged up the stairs to our flat, dodging people seated and standing everywhere, until I reached our bedroom. Thankfully, even though there is a television in our room, no one had camped out there. I locked the door and collapsed on top of the damask comforter, in the mistaken certainty that nothing more serious than my father’s new wife could possibly happen for the rest of the day.

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  CAST OF PRIMARY CHARACTERS

  Judge Wilhelmina Carson

  The Six Bills

  William Harris Steam, III (Trey)

  Willetta Johnson Steam (Billie Jo)

  William Walter Westfield (Walter)

  William Richard Gutierrez (Ricky)

  William Lincoln (Linc)

  John William Tyson (Johnny)

  William Harris Steam, IV (Harris)

  Eva Raines Steam

  Willetta Steam (Billie)

  Wilhelmina Steam (Willie)

  William Steam, Jr. (Bill)

  Mary Steam

  Prescott Roberts

  Ursula Westfield

  Janet Gutierrez

  Court Personnel

  Chief Ben Hathaway

  Chief Ozgood Livingston Richardson (Oz or CJ)

  Augustus Ralph

  Wilhelmina Carson’s Family

  George Carson

  Kate Austin Colombo

  Leo Colombo

  Jason Austin

  PROLOGUE

  Tampa, Florida

  August 1972

  SHE WASN’T QUITE SLEEPING when she heard him arguing with someone outside. He slammed the front door and came into the small rented house on South Packwood Avenue they’d lived in since their child was born. He was drunk. And angry. He stumbled around in the living room and fell a couple of times. She heard him curse under his breath; loud enough to penetrate th
e old plaster walls. She withdrew into her thin sleep shirt and burrowed down deeper under the covers, as if she were the child instead of her two-year-old son in the next room.

  The third time her husband fell down, he knocked an old ceramic lamp off the end table closest to the kitchen. She heard the lamp crash to the floor and shatter. The light bulb must have been turned on because it gave the little “poof” of an explosion they sometimes make when they break. He let out a stream of curses as he rose to his feet and shuffled loudly into the kitchen. He was swearing at the pain, so he must have hurt himself in that last fall, the one that broke the lamp.

  She heard him open the refrigerator and heard the beer bottles clank as he took one out, and then set it down, hard, on the counter. He stumbled again and knocked over one of the chrome kitchen chairs with the red vinyl seats. They’d bought those chairs at a yard sale from one of the neighbors when they’d first moved here from the college dorm where they’d met and fallen in love. She remembered the day vividly because it was one of the earlier, happier times.

  When the chair crashed to the floor, he bellowed aloud in fresh outrage, jerking her back to the moment. She shook, involuntarily, with fear. She heard him pick up the chair and set it down heavily, leaning on it, maybe, so that it scooted away from him, scraping along the floor. She could hear his constant stream of angry words, but tried not to listen to them. She prayed he’d be quiet, that he’d stop cursing, pass out or something.

  He stayed in the kitchen for a good long time. She heard him get another beer from the refrigerator and her heart sank. She knew what was coming. Soon, he’d stumble his way into the bedroom where she lay shivering in the cool morning air and the darkness. He would reek of booze and pot. He’d want to have sex and she wouldn’t be able to keep him off her.

  Unless she could get away. Trying to leave while he was in the house would mean she’d have to be quick. If he saw her, he’d never let her go. Absently, she rubbed the fresh bruise on her wrist where he’d grabbed her and held her too tightly before.