6 Martini Regrets

by Phyllis Smallman

  He lifted his nearly empty glass.

  I drew his second beer slowly, watching him as I asked, “What brings you to Jacaranda?”

  “You.”

  I stared at him, hoping my face gave nothing away, and then, when the silence was becoming uncomfortable, I set the fresh drink in front of him. “That’s a line I’ve heard before,” I said, but I knew this wasn’t a casual attempt at a pickup. This man had an agenda. I tried to grin, carrying on with the joke, but I didn’t like where this conversation was heading. “I can quote you all the variations on that theme.” I dumped the dregs of his first beer and upended the dirty glass in the rack. My night of horror wasn’t over. I stood facing him, both hands on the bar, and waited.

  “My name is Ethan Bricklin. My brother was Ben Bricklin.”

  So that was why of all the beach bars in Florida he’d walked into this particular one.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, faking confusion. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Ben was an orchid grower over east, near Homestead.”

  “That doesn’t help.” I turned away and got a bag of lemons out of the bar fridge. “I still don’t know him.” I started slicing lemons.

  “No, but you know the man who may have killed him.”

  The knife slipped and sliced my finger. “Damn.” I wrapped a bar towel around my hand and pressed down hard, buying time. “You really know how to get a girl’s attention.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  When I had myself and the bleeding under control, I said, “Maybe you should start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

  “My brother, Ben, died in a fire, a fire that was deliberately set. A young man who worked for him, Tito Martinez, was suspected of the crime. The police think Tito killed Ben.”

  It wasn’t hard to show shock. I’d only thought of Tito as a victim. Why hadn’t I considered that Tito might have killed Ben? I concentrated hard on remembering what Tito had said. Hadn’t he seen Ben Bricklin killed? Wasn’t that why he was running away? And surely Tito had been with me when the fire was set, which made me his alibi for that crime.

  I realized Ethan Bricklin had gone silent, waiting for me to respond. I looked at him with genuine confusion and said, “I’m sorry about your brother. Have the police arrested . . . Tito, was that his name?”

  He nodded. “Tito. No, he hasn’t been arrested.” Bricklin was considering me like an eagle watching a mouse in the grass. “Because Martinez has been murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  He nodded. “When the police found him he had your name and address in his wallet.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “Because the police told me. Your name was the only unusual thing on him.”

  That and eight thousand dollars, I thought, but I kept that observation to myself. “Okay.” I nodded in agreement. “Now I know what you’re talking about. The police came and asked me about someone who died with my business card in his pocket.” I rubbed my forehead, searching for words. “I have no idea why he had my name, unless he was going to come here looking for work. I get a lot of people like that; a friend gives them my name.” I turned away, unwrapping the towel and throwing it in the sink. I turned on the tap and let cold water splash over my finger and the towel below it. When the pink water draining away ran clear, I said, “We hire a lot of seasonal help. Someone who worked here last winter maybe told him it was a good place to work. Beyond that . . .” I shrugged any involvement on my part away and said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “So am I. Real sorry.” He tried a smile. “Regrets . . .” He looked away from me, his eyes searching the room as if he’d forgotten why he was in the Sunset. “You can’t get back time. So sometimes all we are left with are regrets. Take my advice: don’t leave things too long.”

  I nodded. “It’s exactly what I’ve been telling myself lately.” I dug a bandage out of the drawer and pointed down the bar to three newcomers who were pulling out stools. “I have to serve those guys.”

  “Sure.” With one word, he made it clear he was in no hurry, had no plan to go anywhere and wasn’t done with me yet. This man wanted answers he thought I might have.

  When I came back down the bar again he leaned forward and said, “So it was just a freak thing he had your name?”

  “That’s the only way I can explain it.”

  He watched me with eyes the coldest shade of gray-blue I’d ever seen. This man really wanted to know what had happened to his brother, might even be looking for revenge. I was even more determined to stay silent and keep out of it.

  “I can see why he had your card.” His head was nodding, but his eyes, locked on mine, were searching for the lie. “I can see how it would work; he was looking for a job.” He worried the inside of his cheek before he added, “But this Tito never came to talk to you, right?”

  “Nope. As far as I know, he was never in Jacaranda.” I couldn’t help asking one question. “Why do you think your brother was killed?”

  “Robbery—money for drugs probably.”

  I nodded. “It seems that most of the crime in Florida has something to do with drugs.” I grabbed paper napkins and a bowl of nuts and went off to check on people at the bar whose glasses were still full.

  Lunchtime was over and the customers had thinned out to a few diehards and latecomers, but Ethan Bricklin stayed on. Just seeing him, I would have bet he wasn’t the kind of guy who would waste an afternoon hanging out in a bar, but there he was, chatting with Mathew Fine, a local lawyer who’d come in for a late lunch after a meeting in Sarasota.

  I was giving them lots of space, but Ethan raised a hand, motioning me back, and then he pushed his half-finished beer towards me and ordered a coffee.

  “Obsessions are dangerous things,” he was telling Mathew when I brought him the extra cream he asked for. “They take us beyond reason, decency and even the law.” He looked up at me and said, “Thanks, Sherri. I was just telling Mathew about the people who make orchids their lives.”

  Mathew grinned at me. “In here we’re mostly passionate about booze, right, Sherri?” His words cut too close to the bone for both of us.

  “And thank god for that, or I’d have to find myself a new occupation.” I cleared away Mathew’s empty plate.

  Mathew smiled and turned back to Ethan to ask, “So what made you get into orchids?”

  “It wasn’t just me.” Ethan stirred his coffee. “My brother and I were both fixated on orchids, collecting them and breeding them. We came by it honestly. Our mother shared our enthusiasm and taught us well. She had a large assortment of native orchids she collected in the wild, from the swamps around where we grew up.” He frowned. “She gave her plants to Ben before she died . . . every one of them. I felt . . . well, she could have shared them between us, but it was always Ben.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding in understanding. “The ‘Mom always liked you best’ sort of thing?”

  His grin was sheepish. “Silly.”

  “Still hurts?”

  He ducked his head and then looked up at me and smiled, the kind of roguish beam that brought out the sun.

  I returned his smile and turned away, still listening to the conversation as I stacked fresh wine glasses on a glass shelf.

  “To compensate for Mom liking Ben best, I drive the only Cadillac my father ever bought. I’ve owned lots of Caddies since, but it’s the only one I ever kept.”

  Mathew said, “So did getting rich balance out not getting the orchids?”

  “Who says I’m rich?”

  “The Cadillacs that came after your father’s . . . ?”

  Ethan gave a soft humph of a laugh and said, “No flies on you.” He tilted his head to the side, considering the question. “Ben built his first orchid business from my mother’s stock. It was a pretty ext
ensive collection and it gave him a strong start, so he was first out of the gate in business. He began when he was just out of agricultural college.”

  Mathew caught my eye and pointed at his empty cup as Ethan said, “He was the largest exporter of orchids in Florida, with thirty acres of shade houses for bromeliads and orchids, but Hurricane Andrew wiped him out in 1992. He was massively in debt and had no hurricane insurance. He started over, but then he was taken out a second time by DuPont’s Benlate, a fungicide that destroyed the last of his stock in the nineties.”

  “Jesus,” Mathew said. “The poor guy.”

  “Ben had one piece of good fortune. His wife’s grandparents left them a little bit of land over along the east side of Alligator Alley. Osceola Nursery was his last attempt to stay alive.” Ethan’s hands were clenched in fists on the bar, but his voice showed no emotion—just the facts, ma’am. Pity the guy who’d killed his brother when Ethan got his hands on him, and I was betting that he intended to find Ben’s killer.

  I poured Mathew more coffee, asking, “Were her grandparents Seminole?” I held out the coffee carafe to Ethan.

  Ethan put a hand over his cup. “How did you know?”

  “Not magic. Osceola is the most common Seminole surname in Florida, like Smith or Jones for us, and very confusing if you’re trying to sort out the lineage of a Seminole. Do you know the Seminoles never signed a peace treaty with the United States government?” I set the coffeepot back on the element. “An old friend of my dad’s told me that.” Just thinking about Sammy, a wild man who survived out in the Fakahatchee swamp by hunting and guiding, had me smiling. “Sammy claims the Seminoles are still at war with the United States Army.”

  Mathew said, “Them and everyone else these days if you listen to the news.”

  Ethan pushed his coffee cup away from him. “Susan’s mother was a Seminole, but her father was white. A real bastard.”

  “Well, none of us has a lock on those.” I picked up the cup. “There’ve been a few bastards in my own family.”

  “Not like him. He beat Susan’s mother something awful. She died in her fifties, and I always figured the old man was to blame for that too. It was supposed to be an accident.”

  Ethan wiped his hand across his mouth. “Anyway, she left Susan and Ben the land, and they started over for the third time.”

  “That sounds like the history of Florida—getting wiped out and starting over.” Mathew downed the last of his coffee and pushed back from the bar. “I’d better get started or I’ll get wiped out.” He raised his hand in farewell. “See you later.” He’d be back in a few hours, just like he was every night.

  Ethan hardly noticed he was gone.

  I added Mathew’s cup and saucer to the rest of the dirty dishes. “Mathew’s right about Florida. My daddy’s family moved down to Florida in the thirties. If everything is timing, my family has none. Losers ’til the end.” I dug a couple of jars out of the bar fridge and began to load a garnish tray with pickled onions and olives. “Turns out things were as bad here in Florida as they were back in the coal mines up north they were trying to get away from. When they got down here they survived by fishing, crabbing and hunting wild hogs, eating anything they could catch, just like Sammy is still doing.”

  The spoon I was digging out olives with stilled. I could almost see Grandma Jenkins standing at the stove, one hand planted on her jutted hip, madly stirring something cooking on the burner and telling the family history. Recounting how for years no one in the family had a new piece of clothing. “In those days sugar came in cotton sacks,” she would say. “Empty sacks became pillowcases, towels and our clothing.” When she got to the clothing, we always waited for the best story of all, how at a revival meeting a woman got the power and started rolling around on the ground. Her dress worked up her legs until the congregation could see, written across her cotton-covered backside, the slogan Sweeten with Redpath. No matter how many times she told that story, Grandma would laugh ’til she cried and we’d howl right along with her.

  “Funny, all that no-account poor-folk food we ate when I was a kid, things like fried gator, is now the most expensive thing on my menu.”

  I raised a hand and waved to Paul Clarke and his real-estate partner as they left. “All except coon. Not much call for that.”

  Ethan grinned. “You never know, it might catch on. It’s out of the ordinary and original, just like you.”

  “Oh, I’m not all that original. Down here, pretty much all of us have the same stories about the struggle to survive.”

  He pointed a finger at me and then at himself. “That’s why I think you and I have a connection: a common background.”

  “What? I thought you were one of the lucky ones, born rich. Your daddy drove a Cadillac; mine was lucky to have a ten-year-old used pickup.”

  “Ben and I were raised on a ranch not that far from here.” He lifted his hand and pointed in an easterly direction. “We were expected to work right alongside our parents, with no special concessions for our age. Later, I stayed on the ranch while Ben went to agricultural school over in Miami. It was a hardscrabble life, barely staying alive by working like hell, but then we started mining the land for phosphates.” He rubbed his palms together, and his face twisted in an emotion I couldn’t get. “Ben was younger than me and idealistic, wanted no part of phosphates. We fell out. It destroyed us. Only saw him once in twenty years, and that was at his daughter Val’s funeral.”

  He went silent, staring down and away as he gazed into the past. “Ben never had any luck . . . except for Susan.” He said her name like it was sweet toffee on his tongue. “I suppose she was enough luck for any one man.” He flinched and then a wry grin lit his face. “Ben got Susan and I got rich.”

  “Rich sounds good to me.”

  “Hell, it’s not so bad.” A bark of laughter. “Do you hanker after money, Sherri?”

  He watched me closely; there seemed to be a subtext to what he was asking.

  “It would be a lie to say no. Like everyone, I want enough to be protected. Beyond that . . .” I shrugged. “Hell, I’m too lazy to be rich. I’d have to go out and spend it. You have to do things when you have money, join things and take part. I’m not a take-part sort of person, so I’ll settle for safe.”

  He wasn’t leaving it alone. “How much would it take to make you feel safe?”

  “I don’t even have to think about it. No mortgage, that’s my happy place.”

  Both of his palms were flat on the mahogany and he leaned towards me. “So what would you do to be there . . . steal . . . kill even?”

  “No.” It came out way too loud and too emphatic. I was denying a bad memory of being willing to cross a line, to kill to protect myself, but that was a secret I shared with no one. Guilt turned me away from him and set me fussing and tidying.

  “Ah, but sometimes,” he said, his voice deep and soothing, like he was practicing seduction, “temptation is too strong to deny.”

  “Yeah, like having that last dirty martini.”

  “It led to something bad?”

  I nodded. “Not a Hallmark moment.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “What’s a dirty martini anyway?”

  “About five ounces of vodka, or gin if you’re a heathen, and the brine from a jar of olives.” He’d hit my obsession now, and my hands were busy describing the process as I drifted towards him. “You take a martini glass out of the freezer, coat the inside with a little vermouth and then shake up the vodka and the brine and pour it in. Pop in a few olives, olives that are stuffed with jalapeños, and sail straight to heaven.”

  “Your favorite drink?”

  “Nope, not anymore. I’ve given them up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not good with temptation.”

  “Few of us are.”

  “Talking from experience?”
r />   “Oh, yeah.”

  “But we learn from our mistakes, right?”

  “Yup, and we probably have lots more to learn.”

  We laughed together, knowing we’d each met a fellow sinner.

  CHAPTER 15

  Back in the thirties, the building housing the Sunset Bar and Grill was a hotel. Now, the Sunset takes up the entire second floor, giving diners a clear view of the sun going down out over the Gulf of Mexico.

  There are three commercial properties on the ground floor and one of them houses Clay’s real-estate company. It means we can see each other during the day, for coffee, lunch or just because, and he never goes out to show a property without coming up to tell me where he is going.

  Clay is old Florida. His kin have been here since the Civil War. They served in the legislature early on and led movements to pass laws designed to generally make Florida a better place. Coming from a family of Florida landowners and people who counted, his mind is an encyclopedia of who, what, where and when. I count on him to recite the social register when questions arise. So later, after Ethan had left and before things started to buzz in the bar, I asked Clay if he knew Ethan Bricklin. Clay had come in for an early meal before showing a property and now sat at the bar, eating scallops.

  He carefully put down his knife and fork in the five o’clock position and raised his head. “Who?”

  “Ethan Bricklin. Ever heard of him?”

  “Sherri, he’s one of the richest men in all of Florida. Everyone knows him.”

  “You mean everyone who reads the financial pages. Tell me about him.”

  He didn’t even have to think about it; he just reeled the information off like he was reading a stock report. “He struck gold, or rather phosphates, on the family ranch and turned it into a multimillion-dollar industry. He used that to grow more wealth, diversifying into land and other industries, but phosphate mining is still his main business. There are big issues over phosphates now, but back then everyone wanted to get into the act.” He grinned. “I remember my father asking everyone how you could tell if there were phosphates on our ranch.” He picked up his utensils again. “He rode his whole thousand-acre spread on horseback, looking for a sign of them.”