"I remember it well, you know, Paul. You've had cases like that, I bet. Just can't let it go. I can still get wrapped up in this one, even after 10 years, and since you called, my mind's been in overdrive. It was the strangest case I've ever had, bar none. First thing you figure is she just had enough of the guy and bailed out on him while he was gone. That's what I thought at first, but she didn't touch any of the money in their joint accounts, and they had a good bit. I guess they didn't spend a lot of money compared to what they made. Anyhow, she didn't touch the bank accounts. Didn't use the credit cards. No calls on her cell phone after Reilly left for the Bahamas. Not a stitch of clothing left behind, nor anything else of hers. 'Course, we mostly had to rely on Reilly about the belongings. They were apparently kind of an odd pair. Both orphans, no family for either of them. Didn't socialize outside of work, either." Funk paused for a sip of iced tea.
"Sounds strange all right. What about Reilly?" Paul asked.
"Yeah, definitely the next thing you think of. He did her for some reason, right, Paul? We checked him seven ways from Sunday, and couldn't find a thing. Most important of all, no motive that we could find. No money issues -- told you they were solvent -- and no life insurance, or anything like that. Everybody that worked with either one of' 'em said they were sweet on one another; no outside love interests on either side that we could find. No drugs, no drinking problem, nada. Zip."
"So, what does your gut say, Don?" Paul asked, nibbling at his cold kosher dill pickle.
"Well, I don't buy into alien abduction, and that only leaves me one place to go, Paul."
"He killed her," Paul said.
"Yeah. I'd bet my badge on it, after 30 years in this game. I just can't figure out how or where."
"The newspaper article said that she often went on deliveries with him as a cook; the landlord figured that's where she was, from what I read," Paul said.
"Yes, that's right. We looked hard at that. He was delivering that boat from Nassau with a friend of his, so he had the guy to provide an alibi for him, except Reilly got to Nassau two days before his friend. Flew on Chalk's Airline. Remember them, with the little seaplanes? Cash for a ticket, no real records back then. He could have taken her with him; dumped her somewhere before his friend showed up. We couldn't find a trace, so what're you gonna do?" Funk asked, shaking his head. "You got anything on the guy for your missing girl?"
"Not yet, but we're still working on it," Paul said, as they got in his car. On the way back to town, he gave Funk a thorough briefing on everything he had to date.
"I'd be glad to make you a copy of what I have, Don," Paul said, as he stopped in front of the police department.
"That's all right. You're retired. You got time to chase this guy, and it sounds like the gal's old man's got the money and connections to keep looking. You know what my life is like. This one is a serious cold case; not even any evidence that a crime was committed, period. I'm allowed to have an ulcer over it on my own time, but that's about all. If I spent any time on it, the chief would have my head. We got more hot cases than we got people to work 'em," Funk said. "Speaking of which, I enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for lunch, but I gotta get back to it. Hope you pin something on Reilly and put him down. Call me if you need something I got. Deep down, I know he's dirty," Funk said, as he closed the car door.
Chapter 18
Paul was drenched in perspiration by the time he reached his rental car. Savannah was one hot, humid place. The short walk from the terminal building had been like stepping into a sauna; he was amazed at the difference in the humidity here and in his native Miami. He had to wonder whether anyone ever got used to it. He got into the car and started the engine, immediately cranking the air-conditioning to its highest setting. He sat with the driver's door open and lowered the windows all around, hoping that the car would cool down a bit while he studied his map. His efforts to learn about Mike Reilly's childhood had been markedly less successful than his inquiries into Mike's time in Fort Lauderdale. The records from Mike's time in foster care were sealed, so Paul had used online searches to learn that Mike was a graduate of Savannah High School, and had been a member of a class of over 700 people. Paul wanted a look at his high school yearbooks, which he expected to find in either the school library or the public library. If Reilly had participated in any organized activities, he could start building a list of his high school acquaintances. Perhaps some of them would still be around town. Savannah seemed like that kind of place.
He also wanted a look at the neighborhood where Mike had lived up until the time of the fire. He had done some research based on the street address given in the newspaper article about the fire. The house appeared to have been a rental at the time Mike's family had lived in it, and the owner had rebuilt it and sold it after the fire, so there was probably not much to be learned there. The houses on either side of Mike's were still owned by the same people. Both were occupied by their owners, and had been since before the fire. There was a chance that one of those neighbors might remember the Reillys.
Paul had checked to see if there were any official records from the investigation of the fire, but that had been a disappointment. He learned that it almost certainly would have been investigated for the possibility of arson, but that all of the records from that period had been shipped off to some document storage facility. The friendly but less than helpful woman he had spoken with on the phone had told him that for all practical purposes, those records were unavailable. None of the folks who had worked as arson investigators back then were still around, and Paul figured that if arson had been seriously suspected, there would probably have been some follow-up articles in the newspaper.
By the time he had worked out a route to the house, the air in the car was cool enough so that he could close the door and windows without fear of roasting himself. He folded the map and drove into the city. As he drove, he was struck by the beauty of his surroundings. Savannah was a new place for him, and he found it quite appealing. It reminded him of the best parts of New Orleans, but it didn't seem as crowded and bustling. He was headed for an area that was well inside the city limits. As he got closer to the address, he recognized that there was a sharp transition from small but gracious houses that evoked the old South. The neighborhood changed to one of small, neat, but obviously post-World War II houses. This was Reilly's old neighborhood. He realized that in the period of Mike's childhood, this would probably have been considered the outskirts of town, but it clearly wasn't nowadays. He drove slowly past the house where Mike had grown up, noticing that there was an old lady weeding her flowerbed in the yard next door. When he reached the end of the dead-end street, he turned around, drove back up the street, and parked at the curb across the street from Mike's old house.
He reluctantly shut the car off and opened the door, imagining how hot it would be when he got out. His imagination was not even close to the reality. At least, he could leave the windows down, so the car wouldn't be an oven when he returned. He walked in the direction of the woman who was weeding, calling a cheerful, "Good morning, Ma'am," to announce his presence, not wanting to startle her. She looked over her shoulder at him, obviously sizing him up, and rose to her feet with the effortless grace of a big cat. Paul took 20 years off his assessment of her age, based on her agility. When she took off the fireman's helmet and wiped her brow with the back of her hand, he saw the thinning, stringy, yellow-white hair, and he added 40 years. Based on the helmet, he wondered if she was all there. The look in her eyes disabused him of that notion, as he watched her carefully studying him.
"If you're one of them damn Christians, I got no time for you. I know you ain't a Mormon, 'cause they don't never travel alone. Too scared, I reckon," she paused to tuck the helmet under her arm. She pulled a pipe and a tobacco pouch out of the pocket of her baggy blue jeans, and began to fill the pipe with practiced fingers, glaring at him the whole time. "You a Jehovah's Witness, boy?" she asked, before clamping the pipe in her strong, even teeth and
striking a match.
"No, Ma'am, none of those," Paul answered, hiding a smile as she lit the pipe.
"You sellin' inshore-ance, boy? I ain't buyin' any, whatever you're sellin'," she spoke through jaws clamped around the pipe, emitting clouds of fragrant smoke that reminded Paul of his father's Rum and Maple blend.
"Not selling anything, either," he said, unable to control the smile creeping over his face. "Were you a fireman?" He couldn't help asking.
"Naw, boy, my husband was a fireman. Died of 'old age' when he was 60. Damn sissy. I just like the hat to keep the sun off. I was a rigger at the shipyard. Durin' the first part of the war, I was a longshoreman, but they finally brought in a bunch of fellas from down in the islands to do that kind of heavy work. Now what is it that you want?" she asked, finally.
"I'm looking for some gossip about your old neighbors, the Reillys," Paul said, figuring that might just get her attention.
"The Reillys," she repeated. "They been dead a long time, 'cept that shit-head young 'un they had. Reckon he must still be around, somewhere. What do you want with them?"
"You didn't much care for Mike, then?" Paul asked.
She twisted to the side and balanced the fireman's helmet carefully on top of one of the bushes beside the porch. Looking at him with interest for the first time, she said, "I reckon if you ain't sellin' nothin', we might as well go on inside and have a glass of tea. This is prob'ly gonna take a while, and it's too damn hot to stand out here jawin' at one another. Come on in. I ain't gonna hurt you, boy." She grinned wickedly. "You're cute, but you ain't old enough. I'd get in some trouble, messin' with the likes of you."
Paul couldn't help laughing as he followed her into the cool, air-conditioned house. She took him into the kitchen and seated him at her breakfast table. She opened the antique refrigerator and took out a one-quart returnable glass milk jug, filled with a viscous black fluid. She set the jug on the table and turned to get two glasses from the drain board by the sink. She opened the freezer compartment of the grumbling refrigerator and filled the glasses with ice.
"Annette's Dairy," he read aloud from the glass jug, as she set the glasses down and poured the syrup-like sweet tea over the ice.
"Yep. They used to deliver door to door. Every mornin', in a horse-drawn wagon. They quit, but I still got a bunch of them bottles. You ain't from around here, are you, boy?"
"No Ma'am, not me," Paul admitted.
"You some kinda cracker, though, ain't you. North Florida, right?" she raised her eyebrows.
"Yes'm, Palatka, but I mostly grew up in Miami," Paul confessed.
"That's all right. You still don't talk funny, like the folks from up north. I'm Millie, by the way. Didn't get your name."
"I'm Paul. Pleased to meet you."
"You're a nice boy, Paul. You got chirrun?"
"No, Ma'am. I was a cop. Never had time to get married. Now I reckon I'm too old," Paul said.
"Pshaw. You ain't old. I'm 98, boy, and if I live long enough, I'm gonna get old one day. Not yet, though. Too much to do. Me and Herbie didn't have chirrun, either. Chirrun are okay, I reckon, but every so often, you get one like that little shit, Mikey Reilly.
"He was the pure devil, that young 'un. Bad to the bone, and his mama knew it. She was a worthless thing, though. Pretty. Thought she was a Southern Belle. From some rich family in Alabama, I guess, but she was crazy as a fly in a bass drum. She ruined that little boy. I figure chirrun are like a blank sheet of paper, and what you write on it is what you get when they grow up. She wrote him so full of badness that he was pure hell by the time he could walk. She whupped him every time he turned around, and kept him penned up like an animal. She made that young 'un mean; I tell you that. Her husband up and died on her from a weak heart. No tellin' what she did to him, 'cause he didn't look like he ought to have no weak heart. Anyhow, wasn't too long after he died that the house burnt down, and her with it. The cops couldn't find nothin', but I figured all along that Mikey set that fire. He was forever doin' shit like that, time he was about 12 or so. He was about too big for her to whup by then, and you could see she was scared of him. She should've been, too, way she'd treated him when he was little.
"He would walk down the street and fight anybody that looked at him, that boy would. Didn't matter how big they was, he'd light into 'em, for any reason or no reason at all. Folks kept their pets inside after that boy got to be five or six years old. They kept disappearin', all over the neighborhood. When them new folks next door bought that house, they pulled out the old bamboo hedge around the back yard. That bamboo was there from before the Reillys moved in, and that boy used to hide in it and play. Never saw him out of the house, 'cept he was in the bamboo or comin' and goin' from school. Anyhow, when them people pulled the bamboo out, they found a pile of animal bones back in the corner where he always hid. I mean, a pile. Reckon that's where all them missin' pets went. I figured that, all along, but nobody would believe me, 'cept Herbie, the damn sissy. That boy took our cat when he weren't more that five years old. We missed her for a couple of days, and I had seen him teasin' her. I asked him about her, and he said he didn't know nothin'. Little shit. Butter wouldn't have melted in his mouth; he was so cool, tellin' me he didn't do nothin' to her. Next mornin' she was on my front porch, what was left of her. Skinned her, he did, but in strips 'bout an inch wide. Left a little strip of fur, and then peeled him another strip.
"So what do you want with the little bastard, Paul," Millie asked, finally pausing for a sip of tea.
Paul's glass was empty, and he was wired from the caffeine and sugar. That stuff was as potent as the Cuban coffee that he drank with Mario and his friends. There must be some special way to make it so strong and sweet, he thought. "Well, Millie, some friends of mine asked me to do a little checking on Mike. Since I retired, I do a little private investigating for people I know, but I don't usually want to know why they ask." Paul ad-libbed, thinking that he didn't want to give Millie any fresh grist for the gossip mill. "That keeps me from accidentally telling them what I think they want to hear. So I was just looking for a little background on Mike Reilly. I'm not sure why they wanted it, honestly. You've been helpful, and I sure appreciate it. Thanks for the tea, too," Paul said, getting to his feet. "I hate to run, but I've got some more stops to make, and I've got a flight out this afternoon."
"Well, you're most welcome, boy; I've enjoyed your company. If you were forty years older, I wouldn't let you get away so quick. Old Millie could show you a thing or two, but I draw the line at robbin' the cradle," she winked suggestively, a gleam in her clear, grey eyes.
****
Paul noticed that the house on the other side of the Reilly's old place was vacant, with a "For Sale" sign in the yard. He reached in through the window of his car and started the engine, thinking he'd let the air-conditioning run while he called the realtor whose name and number were on the sign. He quickly learned that the old man who lived there had died a few weeks ago, and there were no close relatives. A great-nephew in Alabama had inherited the house. He drove over to the high school, only a few blocks away, and found a shaded parking spot. He went into the school office and explained to the secretary what he needed. She walked him down the hall to the library. The librarian handed him the yearbooks from the four years that Mike would have been there, and then she settled him at a graffiti-scarred table. As he paged through the books, finding nothing more than a single head shot of a younger Mike Reilly in each one, she pulled out a chair and sat down with him.
"Looking for anybody in particular?" she asked, idly.
"Yes, Ma'am. I was looking to see if this fellow I'm checking on was in any clubs, hoping I could find a classmate or two that might remember him," he explained.
"I see," she said. "Find anything?"
"No, I didn't. Looks like my guy was a loner," Paul said.
"Who was it you were looking for? My sister and I were both here for part of that time. She's two years older than I am," the woman said.
Paul recognized boredom when he saw it, but he had nothing to lose. "Michael Reilly," he told her.
"Oh! Has he done something awful? You're a cop, right?" she asked, her boredom gone.
"Private investigator. I'm just checking him out for some guys who may want to do business with him. You sound like you remember him."
"Yes. He was a dead-end kid. Always in trouble, never did his homework. I'm not sure how he managed to finish school. I don't think he had a friend in the world. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him, except that he was so mean. Everybody went out of the way to avoid him, and that seemed to suit him just fine. What's he up to now, anyhow?"
"Well, that's part of why I'm checking him out," Paul said, as he closed the last yearbook and stood up. "Thanks for your help, Ma'am. I have to catch a flight."
****
The gray light coming through the foredeck hatch awakened Phillip. He took a moment to savor the quiet of the early morning, broken by the plaintive cry of a solitary seagull looking for breakfast. There was nothing as peaceful as a quiet night at anchor, and nothing as good as the first cup of coffee in the cockpit to accompany the sunrise, he thought. He put a pot of coffee on and washed the sleep from his eyes, shaving while the coffee perked. Wide-awake now, he took his coffee up on deck to greet the day. The cockpit seats were damp, their crust of salt drawing the moisture from the humid air. He put his cup down and wiped a spot dry with a chamois, kept for the purpose in a small locker behind the port seating area. He settled back and took a sip of the strong, black Haitian brew as he watched the orange glow of the rising sun, its light diffused by the mist coming off the damp earth of the island.
After he finished his coffee, he would launch his dinghy and go ashore to clear in. He thought that he might as well have breakfast at the marina. Maybe he would find an early riser to share his table, and he could start asking about Dani and Sea Serpent. He swallowed the last of his coffee and went below. After rinsing his cup, he assembled the paperwork he would need for Customs, putting prints of the pictures of Sea Serpent, Dani, and Mike Reilly in the waterproof plastic envelope with his ship's papers.
Bluewater Killer: A Serial Murder Mystery Set In Florida and the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 1) Page 11