Dead on the Island

by Bill Crider

  "I hate to interrupt your program."

  "That's OK. Hasn't been worth a damn in years, not since Doug and Julie left. Julie's back now, but it's not the same. Amanda left too. She's on that Newhart show. You ever catch that one?"

  I shook my head. "Afraid not."

  "Well, it's too late anyway. It's off the air now. But it was pretty good. The last show was a classic."

  I said I was sorry I'd missed it.

  "Yeah, you should've seen it, all right. You remember how they had this thing on Dallas a few years back, about how Bobby's death was all just a dream? It was a take-off on that."

  I had to admit that I didn't even know who Bobby was.

  "I guess you didn't come here to talk about TV shows, did you?" Dino glanced back over at his set, where the soap opera had resumed. He didn't turn the sound up, though. "Sit down. Ray'll bring us something to drink. I guess you want a Big Red."

  "That'll be fine."

  Ray took his cue and disappeared. I went over and sat in the same chair I'd occupied the day before.

  "Don't tell me you found the girl already," Dino said.

  "Don't worry. I won't."

  Dino sneaked a look at the TV screen. "What, then? It must be something, or you wouldn't be back so soon. You haven't spent that thousand already, have you?"

  "No," I said. "Not yet."

  "So? Gimme a clue. You're the detective, not me."

  I told him that I'd talked to Evelyn Matthews, found out about Sharon's friends, and visited Julie Gregg. By then Ray had come back with the drinks. I took a swallow of Big Red.

  "I went to see another friend of Sharon's today," I said. “He worked down on The Strand. Name was Terry Shelton."

  I was watching Dino closely, but he didn't seem to notice the use of the past tense. Ray had retired back out of my line of sight, so I couldn't see how he'd reacted, if he'd reacted at all.

  "So what did this Shelton have to say?" Dino asked.

  "Very little. He was dead when I got there."

  Dino carefully set his glass on the curved-leg coffee table. "Dead?"

  "That's right. Dead."

  "The police know about this?"

  "They know. There was a witness with me when I found the body, though, so I'm not in any trouble."

  "Who's this witness?" He picked up the glass again and took a drink.

  "No one important. The girl who works in a shop next door to where I found Shelton."

  "What did you tell the cops?"

  "Nothing much. I didn't mention Sharon Matthews. I gave them a line about bill collecting. I wasn't sure how much you wanted them to know."

  "There was a time when we could trust the cops on the Island," Dino said. "But not now."

  I took that to mean that his family pretty much had the cops in their pockets back in the 1930s and '40s. Well, it was true, or so everyone said. But times had changed. Dino had the money, but not the power.

  "The problem," I said, "is that this isn't just about some little girl who's run away from home, not anymore. This is a whole lot worse, and I'm not sure I want to have anything to do with it."

  Dino looked hurt. "You trying to jack up your price, Tru?"

  "You know me better than that."

  "Yeah, I guess I do. How's the knee today?"

  "Enough with the knee. It's not the knee."

  "I know that. I know that. It's just that this bothers me. Even in the old days, I never heard my uncles talk about murder."

  He was telling the truth, I was sure. His uncles might have controlled the Island, and they might have been heavily into enterprises that some people might narrow-mindedly have called criminal, but murder was a different story. The uncles were never mixed up in murder.

  Dino sighed, touched a button on his remote, and caused the TV screen to darken. He was going to have to deal with real life, whether he liked it or not. He looked over my shoulder. "What d'you think, Ray?"

  "Sounds like maybe someone else is looking for the kid," he said. "How'd this Shelton guy die?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I didn't see any marks on him. No blood. His head was at a pretty funny angle. Looked as if maybe his neck was broken."

  "Damn," Dino said. "So where does this leave us?"

  "There are a couple of people I could talk to again," I said. "And there's one other thing. But the real question is, am I going on with this?"

  "Why not?" Dino said.

  "I told you," I said. "It's not a missing person thing now. It's murder."

  "You want out, huh? You wanta quit?"

  "I'm not sure what I want. I think about Jan, and I know that murder wouldn't stop me in that case. I guess what I want is for you to say you didn't have anything to do with this Shelton mess. That you had no idea there was anything like that involved."

  "How long have we known each other?" Dino said. "Forever, right?"

  "I guess," I said.

  "No guessing. Ball High? Knocking heads in football practice? Chasing the same girls? Forever."

  "OK," I said. "Forever."

  "Ray too."

  Ray hadn't been in high school with us, though the Island would have integrated fairly willingly. He'd been around, though. Even then he and Dino were close.

  "Yeah," I said. "Ray too."

  "So I'm telling you we didn't know. No shit, now. Right, Ray?"

  "Right," Ray said.

  "We don't know any more about murder than you do," Dino said. "Think how Evelyn's gonna feel when she finds out about this. Did you tell her yet?"

  "No," I said. "I thought I'd better leave that to you."

  "Right. I'll call her. You gonna stick with this?"

  "All right," I said. I had a feeling I was making a big mistake, but I didn't have anything better to do. The house painting business was lousy. And I'd known Dino forever. If I couldn't trust him, who could I trust?

  "Great. You need anything, you let me know. But don't get in trouble with the cops. I know a few of them, but I can't help you very much there."

  "There's one thing you can help me with. The other thing I mentioned." I took out the cigarette pack and slipped out the matchbook. "You can tell me about this place." I handed the matchbook to him.

  He looked at it for a minute, not saying anything, and then tossed it across the room to Ray. "See what you can find out," he said.

  Ray went out with the matchbook. "I still have a few contacts for that kind of stuff," Dino said. He drained his glass and set it on the table. I still had half of my Big Red left.

  "Where'd you get the matchbook?" he said.

  "From Terry Shelton, I think. Before the cops came."

  Dino grinned. He had big, square teeth, like tombstones. "He wanted you to have it, right?"

  "Something like that," I said.

  "I hope the cops don't find out you lifted it."

  "I hope you're not planning to tell them."

  He grinned again but didn't say anything. He and his uncles would have gotten along pretty well, I think, had their business still been thriving and had he been a part of it. As far as I knew, he was a clean, upright citizen, but he had the makings of a first-rate criminal.

  Ray came back into the room on little cat feet. I felt that he was there, but I didn't hear him return. I turned to look, and there he was.

  "You saw the address on the matchbook?" he said.

  "Somewhere on Telephone Road. I don't remember the number."

  "You been down Telephone lately?" Dino said.

  I turned back to him. "Not lately. It's part of Highway 35, isn't? Comes into Houston from Pearland and runs under the Gulf Freeway?"

  "That's right," Dino said. "From the numbers on that matchbook, I'd guess The Sidepocket isn't in one of the classier areas of town. What about it, Ray?"

  "You'd be guessing right."

  Although I hadn't been in that part of Houston recently, I recalled that there were parts of Telephone Road, after you passed Hobby Airport and got closer to the part of Interstate 45 t
hat Houstonians call the Gulf Freeway, where there were some fairly sleazy areas. Motels that hadn't been painted in years, with gravel drives and signs offering rooms by the hour, and probably a few clubs like The Sidepocket.

  "Who owns it?" Dino said.

  "Somebody named Ferguson runs the place," Ray said. "I wouldn't say for sure that he owns it. It's one of those places that have a lot of struggling local bands playing there because they're cheap. Goes for the chains and leather crowd. I took the liberty of asking the friend I called to tip the word to Ferguson that Tru might be dropping in this afternoon late for a chat. I didn't say why, but I made it out to be a favor to us."

  "You going up there?" Dino said.

  "I might as well," I said.

  There were other things I would rather have done, but if Terry Shelton was tied to Sharon Matthews, The Sidepocket was as good a place as any to start. Maybe Sharon had been there with Terry, and maybe someone had seen her. You never knew where something might lead you in one of these cases.

  I had put my glass down on the floor, and I bent down to pick it up and drink what was left of the Big Red. "Are you interested at all in who killed this Shelton, if his murder doesn't have anything to do with Sharon?"

  I didn't think that Dino was going in for humanitarianism these days, and I was right. "No," he said. "Unless it involves Sharon, stay out of it completely. If you can find out something about her at the club, fine. If you can't, drop it."

  "Suits me," I said. I wasn't going in for humanitarianism, either. I hoped that I could just forget all about Shelton and that his death was just a side issue, but I wasn't counting on it. "How about my matchbook?"

  Ray tossed it to me, and I grabbed it out of the air. I slipped it back in my pocket with the package of cigarettes. Then I stood up. "I guess I'll be going."

  "You going to be doing any dancing at this club?" Dino said, glancing at my knee.

  "Depends on the band," I said.

  "OK," he said. "Ray'll let you out."

  By the time I was out of the room, I heard the TV set come to life again.

  6

  I wanted to go by the house to check on Nameless and have a quick sandwich before my trip into Houston, and as I drove I thought about Dino. It was hard to believe that his whole life now was bounded by a television screen, but I supposed it was possible. He had all the money he would ever need, and he could keep up his old contacts by telephone. It seemed that he had no desire to enter the world his uncles had been so fond of and found so profitable.

  Of course, at the end of things, his uncles hadn't found their world to be such an ideal one. Hundreds, if not thousands, of slot machines littered the bottom of Galveston Bay, the big clubs were closed forever, and the Hollywood stars didn't come to the Island anymore. Neither, for that matter, did the Houston highrollers, and many BOIs traced the decline of the Island's economy to that ill-fated day when a certain Texas Attorney General thought he might get elected Governor if he could clean up the most notable den of iniquity. That he was completely and absolutely wrong, that most people both on the Island and elsewhere actually resented what he did, came as a huge surprise to him, though not to anyone else in the state.

  Galveston had tried recently to vote gambling's legal return to the Island, but the referendum had failed. The churches, of course, were strongly opposed, and some of the rich and powerful, such of them as were left, thought that gambling would be bad for the city's newly-created image of historical browsing ground. There were, however, two cruise ships that took happy gamblers out beyond the twelve-mile limit every weekend to relieve them of some of their money at the blackjack tables, the poker tables, and the slots.

  I didn't know what Dino thought about all of this. He'd been a roistering youth, but apparently all that kind of thing was behind him now.

  And Ray seemed quite content to pass his time sticking by Dino in a weird sort of Old Family Retainer way. Maybe it was his way of repaying the uncles, who'd after all pulled him literally out of the whorehouse. It's possible that for the merest second a suspicion of the nature of Ray's relationship with Dino may have crossed my mind, but if it did I dismissed it instantly. I'd known both of them too well and too long to think that they were gay; they certainly hadn't been when they were younger.

  I pulled up in back of the house and just managed to get out of the car before Nameless zipped up to the steps in an orange streak. I guess he wanted another package of cat food, which I promptly doled out to him. He began purring as soon as he stuck his nose in the bowl. I wasn't sure how it was possible for a cat to purr and eat at the same time, but it was a trick that Nameless managed with easy regularity.

  I went on up to the second floor, leaving the door open in case Nameless wanted to pay me a visit. It was up to him.

  It was time for me to outfit myself for the trip to The Sidepocket. I'm not a member of the Heavy Metal crowd, or any crowd at all for that matter. I have several different outfits that I once wore to visit various kinds of night spots, but I didn't think any of them would be appropriate for The Sidepocket.

  For a C&W club, I could have worn my kicker outfit, complete with boots, starched blue Levi's, and white shirt. For a singles bar, I had a very nice natural fiber double-breasted suit in which, if I'd had a haircut lately, which I hadn't, I could pass for a rising executive. Not a young executive, but an executive nevertheless. But for the Heavy Metal crew, I'd just have to get by with my usual sweatshirt and faded jeans. At my age, I was going to look out of place anyway.

  While I was eating cold bread spread with cold peanut butter, Nameless deigned to come up and poke his head in the door. What he saw was of so little interest to him that he turned almost immediately and went back down, his tail held high. It was a fairly attractive tail, if you liked cats’ tails, with dark orange rings around the lighter orange fur that covered it. He was too polite to sit at the downstairs door and howl, so I went to let him out.

  After the sandwich I had a couple of swallows of nearly flat Big Red from the two liter bottle and left the rest, probably another two swallows, for when I came home. I watched the news on one of the Houston channels, and the anchorwoman told me that times were steadily getting better for the Gulf Coast Area. The media had been saying that at least once a month for the last two years, though I hadn't noticed any real improvement. I don't know why they kept repeating it unless they hoped that saying it would make it so.

  After the news report I went downstairs, got in the Subaru, and headed for the Gulf Freeway.

  ~ * ~

  Broadway actually runs right into the Freeway, or becomes the Freeway, whichever you prefer. By the time you pass the Island's only shopping mall, you're pretty well aware that you aren't on a city street any longer. Cars are speeding along in three or four lanes, and you're headed for the tall bridge with its truly superfluous "MINIMUM SPEED 40 MPH" sign. Anyone driving 40 mph on a Texas highway is taking his life in his hands. In spite of the fact that 55 is the maximum you can drive on that part of the Interstate, most drivers figure that they can get by with 65, which can easily be upped to 75 if they think no one is watching. And most of the drivers on the Gulf Freeway seem thoroughly convinced that no one is watching.

  All of this makes life pretty tough if you're the driver of a 1979 Subaru. I mashed the accelerator to the floor and tried to keep up with the traffic flow, hoping that no one in a monstrous old Pontiac or Buick from the early '80s would flatten me without noticing.

  At the top of the bridge I glanced over to my right, as I almost always do, at the dark hulk of the old drawbridge. I can recall having waited for what seemed like hours for it to be lowered when I was coming back home from some trip with my family when I was a kid.

  It was full dark by now, and farther off to the right the oil refineries and petro-chemical plants of Texas City lit up the night like the set of the most expensive science fiction movie ever filmed. The industry wasn't what it had once been, however. It had not been so very long ago that a
lot of Texas were driving cars with bumper stickers that said, "DRIVE 75, FREEZE A YANKEE," but now you were more likely to see something like, "JUST GIVE US ONE MORE OIL BOOM, LORD. WE PROMISE WE WON'T PISS IT AWAY THIS TIME."

  The Gulf Freeway, perennially under construction in one part of it or another, runs straight as an arrow from Galveston into Houston. Past La Marque, past Texas City, past Dickinson (a place that was once as wide-open as Galveston had been), past League City. You can see their lights if you watch and don't drive too fast. At night the lanes of the Freeway seem to be a solid streak of red in front of you, with a solid streak of white headlights coming at you from the other direction. I've often wondered where all those people are going, and it's the same at any hour of the day or night. Maybe they were all heading to one version or another of The Sidepocket. Or maybe they were all just going home. I suppose anything is possible.

  I'd traveled the Freeway a lot, stopping in all the little towns along the way, when I was looking for Jan. I hadn't found a trace of her in any of them.

  When I started seeing the first shopping malls, the traffic increased, if that was possible, but I was still a long way from downtown. After I passed the turn-off to NASA at Webster, I counted four malls before I came to the Telephone Road exit.

  I slowed for the exit, turned back to the left under the Freeway, and started looking for addresses. Hardly any were posted, but The Sidepocket turned out to be easy to find. It was practically next door to one of the ten-dollar-an-hour motels with "FREE IN-ROOM MOVIES." The sign did not add my favorite line from the ads I'd read in the men's magazines when I was a kid: "The kind men like!" They might as well have added it, though. I had a feeling they wouldn't be showing Bambi.

  The Sidepocket was a rambling building with about a fifty-foot front. Half of it was one story, but on the other half there was an additional level with what might have been an office, or living quarters, or both. The building was painted a medium pink, and the roof was green. Or at least that's the way it looked in the light from the parking lot, what little light there was. Near the only entrance there was an enormous 8-ball painted on the wall. Peering over the ball was a strange-looking individual who appeared to be gripping the ball and hanging his nose over the top like Kilroy. Only his hands, eyes, nose, and spiky black hair were visible. The eyes were wide and staring.