Dead on the Island

by Bill Crider

  "Thanks, Harry," I said.

  I walked back to the Subaru and took out the six-pack of Old Milwaukee I'd bought earlier. I carried it back to the dumpster and set it down where Harry would be sure to find it. I'd tried giving him money a time or two, but he was always insulted by the offer. He was self-sufficient and proud of it. He'd once complained, though, that he never found any beer in the dumpsters. Since then I'd left a few six-packs lying around. He was amazed at the turn in his fortunes.

  I never asked him how beer went with cat food.

  I didn't really want to know.

  14

  "I haven't smoked at all since Dino got here," Evelyn Matthews told me when I noted the absence of ashtrays in her living room. "It bothers Dino, and I've wanted to quit for years."

  "I guess Dino's as good an excuse as any to get started on a health kick," I said.

  "Better than no excuse at all." She walked me back to the room where Dino was propped up on the bed. He didn't look any better than he had the last time I'd seen him, but then he didn't look any worse. He smiled when he saw Evelyn.

  "I take it you don't have any complaints about the nursing," I said.

  "Not a one," he said. "Tell me what you found out."

  I told him. It didn't amount to much.

  "I didn't figure Hargis to be in on something like this," he said. "There's no reason for him to be trying to get rid of me. Besides, the money is just small potatoes to him. Where's this Corea's place you mentioned?"

  "It's a little Mom and Pop grocery just off Broadway," I said. "Outside Harry knows alleys behind all the places like that, and sometimes he knows who goes in and out the fronts."

  Dino's forehead wrinkled. "That little place not too far from my house? Some kinda stucco on the outside, painted beige?"

  "That's the place."

  "Puts the guy kinda close to home," he said. "Think he was watching my house?"

  "Who knows? I thought I'd check around the neighborhood tomorrow and see if I could find out anything."

  "I guess it's worth a try. You talk to Ray today?"

  I was surprised that he'd asked. "'What Ray don't know, Ray can't tell,'" I said.

  "Yeah, well, I expect he's pretty worried by now. I think you better go by and check on him. Make sure he hasn't called the cops in on this, not that he would. Let him know what's going on."

  "OK."

  "And for God's sake, Tru, try to make some sense of this, will you?"

  "Sure," I said. I was willing to try. I just didn't know how.

  ~ * ~

  The lights were on in Dino's house, and Ray came to the door. He didn't seem especially surprised to see me.

  "What's happening, Tru?" he said.

  "Not much," I said.

  We went into the living room. The huge television set was blaring away, but it wasn't tuned to any station I'd seen Dino watching. As best I could make out, three men wearing space helmets and gauzy white outfits were chasing a girl wearing a stainless steel bikini through a huge swamp of mangrove trees and shallow water. An alligator rested on a log that pushed its way out of the thick mist rising from the water.

  "MTV," Ray said. He walked over to the couch, located the remote, and clicked the set off. There was a drink sitting on the coffee table, and he picked it up. "Big Red?" he said.

  "No thanks. I just wanted to stop by and see how the pay-off went last night."

  "I don't know," Ray said. He swirled the ice cubes around in his drink. "Dino hasn't been back since he sent me away."

  "Does that worry you?"

  He took a nip from his drink. "Not a bit. Dino knows how to take care of himself. He's been doing it for a long time. He'll turn up."

  "I thought you took care of him."

  Ray smiled. "Man, all I do is bring the drinks."

  "Any more calls?"

  "No more. I guess they got what they wanted."

  "I guess so," I said, but of course I knew they hadn't.

  ~ * ~

  I didn't feel a bit bad about not letting Ray in on the whole story. If he wasn't worried, there was no need to tell him anything. Dino's first thought had been right. If he didn't know, he couldn't tell.

  When I got home I sat down and went over what I knew. I thought at first about calling Vicky, but I was too tired, not having slept much the night before and having had a pretty busy day up to that point.

  I still believed that Sharon Matthews had in some way engineered her own disappearance, possibly with the help of Chuck Ferguson. I thought that she'd stayed at Terry Shelton's place for at least part of the time she'd been gone. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out why Ferguson and Shelton were dead, much less who had killed them.

  Unless.

  Unless Ferguson had hired the three goons, and they had decided to cut him and Shelton out and get all the money for themselves. It made a crazy kind of sense. If they killed Dino, then all they had to do was pick up the money and run. No one would come after them. With Dino dead, Ferguson wouldn't dare put the finger on them because of his own involvement.

  That scenario didn't bode too well for Sharon. They could have killed her already if it was accurate. Maybe it wasn't, though. I just didn't know.

  I fed Nameless, who had a notion that he wanted to stay inside for a while. I suppose that I'd been neglecting him for the past few days, but I tossed him out anyway. I was hoping to get some sleep, and I didn't need him jumping up in the bed with me and demanding to be put out after I dozed off. He refused even to look back at me as he stalked off into the darkness.

  I slept, but not well. I dreamed of Jan when we were kids. There was a swing in our back yard, and I was pushing her. She was wearing a blue dress. Soon I was pushing her so high that when I looked at her she was framed against the sky. Because of the blue dress and the blue sky, I could hardly see her. I could see only her face, arms, and legs. Then she fell out of the swing. I ran under her to catch her, but I couldn't see her at all now. She had disappeared into the blueness. I could hear her screaming, but I couldn't see her. And then the dream would start all over again. It repeated itself like a tape loop.

  I dreamed of Dino, too, and Ray. Dino was sitting on the porch of his large white plantation house in a white wicker chair. He was dressed like Rhett Butler, and Ray was serving him a mint julep on a crystal tray. "Yas suh," Ray said. "Ah jus' brangs the dranks."

  When I finally woke up, I felt like I'd run the Boston Marathon. Maybe I was better off on the nights I didn't sleep at all. I thought about going to the seawall for a run, but the knee was still tender. No need to push it. The fight the day before hadn't helped it any.

  It was still too early to do much of anything else, though, so I read a few pages in the Faulkner book and then went down and let Nameless in. He ate a whole package of Tender Vittles and whined for more, but I wouldn't give in. He gave me a look that indicated how much our relationship had deteriorated and marched upstairs, tail held high.

  I followed him up, read a few more pages, and got dressed. By that time, Nameless had made himself comfortable in the middle of my bed, and I had to roust him out to make it up. He dug his claws into the bedspread, pulling it halfway off the bed before he let go.

  "You can be replaced, you know," I said, but he ignored me. As I carried him downstairs, I found myself wondering if Vicky liked cats. Some people were allergic to them. I'd have to ask her.

  By the time I'd eaten an Egg McMuffin at my favorite restaurant, it was eight-thirty, not too early to visit Corea's Market. I drove over and went in. It wasn't exactly Apple Tree. The stock was scanty and the light was bad. As far as I could tell, though, it was clean.

  There was a Formica-topped counter to the right of the door. An old wooden-bodied cash register sat on the counter, and there was a chubby old man standing behind it. He had thinning gray hair and wore a pair of half-glasses. He was wearing a white apron that tied behind his back, a khaki-colored shirt, and matching pants.

  There was only one cu
stomer in the store, a stooped old lady wearing a long skirt and a shawl. Her skirt was so long that I couldn't see her feet. She was standing at one of the shelves that lined the walls, looking very carefully at a can of something or other. She held the can so close to her face that her nose was nearly touching it. I wondered why the man in the apron didn't get some better lighting, or at least let her borrow his glasses.

  I stood in the doorway for a second or two, and then walked to the counter.

  "Can I help you?" the man said. His voice was firm and young; it didn't go with the gray hair and the wrinkles that I could now see on his face.

  "I'm looking for someone," I said. "I heard he comes in here now and then."

  "And who might that be?"

  I described the man with whom I'd had the fight. The old man listened politely, meanwhile keeping a sharp eye on the old woman in the shawl.

  "I think I've seen a man like that," he said when I finished. "He hasn't been in for a few days, though."

  "What does he buy?"

  "A little of everything. He's been a good customer. Buys a big bill every time he comes in. I hope he's not in some kind of trouble."

  "No," I said. "He just owes me money."

  "Well, he ought to be able to pay you. Buys a big bill, like I said, and he always pays in cash.

  "Thanks," I said, and went back outside. If the guy was shopping there, he must be staying close by. And if he was buying a lot, he was probably buying for more people that just himself. Not that he wasn't perfectly capable of eating quite a bit, a man his size.

  I strolled around the neighborhood of mostly run-down houses. There were some beautiful old homes on the Island, but there were a lot of the other kind, too. Unpainted frames, dilapidated fences, yards beaten down to the bare dirt or choked with weeds and brush. It didn't take long to find the one I was looking for, the one with the sign in front that said ROOMS FOR RENT.

  I walked up on the sagging porch and rapped on the door. In a minute or so it was opened by a woman wearing a dress that sagged over her body like a limp tent. Her face was brown and wrinkled, and her dark hair was streaked with gray.

  "Joo wan' a room?" she said in a thick Hispanic accent.

  "Looking for a friend." I described the man again.

  She thought about it, but she decided that I wasn't posing any kind of threat. "He stay here, si. But no longer." She started to close the door.

  "Wait!" I said. "When did he leave?"

  She looked at me again. "A day. Two days." She moved the door.

  I grabbed the edge of the door and held it. "Did he say where he was going?"

  "No. Ees not my business. He pay, he go. Say nothing."

  I released the door and watched it close. The woman was probably telling the truth. These weren't the kind of fellows to leave a forwarding address with the landlady. I stood on the porch and looked around. I was hardly more than six blocks from Dino's house. They must have been watching him all the time.

  I walked back to the grocery store. There didn't seem to be much else I could do there, so I got in the car and drove away.

  ~ * ~

  It was a pleasant day, not sunny, but mild. I drove on down to The Strand, where business still wasn't booming. There were a few tourists about, but not the numbers that the merchants really wanted to see. I parked the car and walked to the shop where Vicky worked. I noticed that the place next door, where Terry Shelton had been killed, was locked up. A blue-bordered sign hanging on one of the glass doors read CLOSED.

  Vicky was behind the counter of the soap store, but she wasn't wearing her pink work-out suit. Today's was blue. Her hair was caught up in a ponytail. I was surprised at how glad I was to see her. I'd hardly thought of women in the year I'd been looking for Jan.

  She looked up when I walked in the door, and if I was any judge of smiles she was glad to see me, too.

  "When's lunch hour?" I said.

  She looked at her watch, a white plastic case on a white plastic band. "Any minute now. Why?"

  "I thought we might go over to Hill's and eat. Can you get away?"

  "I haven't sold any soap all week. Sure I can get away. But I really should wait until the official lunch hour."

  "So wait. I'll wait with you.” There was a wicker chair in a front corner of the shop near the window. I went and sat in it. "I'll be all right if I'm not overcome by the perfume." The smell of all that soap was powerful. I wondered if Vicky had ever gotten used to it.

  "Well, it won't be long," she said. "You can stand it."

  "Yeah," I said. "I'm a tough guy."

  She puttered around the shop for a while, reaching in the counter to arrange soap that looked arranged already. Then she said, "I've been thinking about your sister."

  "In what way?" I said.

  "Oh, I just wondered if she'd ever been in the shop, if maybe I'd ever seen her." She walked around the counter and came to stand by the window. "It must really hurt, not knowing."

  "Not as much now," I said. "It did at first. A lot."

  "You blamed yourself," she said. It was just a statement, flat, unemotional. There wasn't any doubt in it.

  "You could tell that?"

  "I could tell. Just by the way you talked about it." She looked down at me. "But you weren't to blame at all."

  "I know that," I said. "It just took me a long time to admit it."

  She smiled. "I'm glad you admitted it, then."

  "This other case helped."

  "Terry?"

  "Yeah."

  A woman came in then and actually bought a few bars of soap. When I heard Vicky tell her how much she owed, I thought I knew why soap hadn't been selling so well.

  Vicky rang up the sale, and then came back over to stand by my chair. "The shop next door's been closed ever since Terry was killed."

  "I saw the sign," I said.

  "Have you found out anything yet about who did it?"

  "No," I said. "I actually haven't found out much of anything."

  She didn't press me, which was just as well. I couldn't have told her any more. After a few minutes we walked over to Hill's to eat.

  This Hill's wasn't the Original Hill's, which had been on Seawall Boulevard. This one was located just across a street and a parking lot from the shop, on Pier 19. The shrimp fleet was anchored all around, and the air was heavy with a powerful fishy smell. The mound of oyster shells around the restaurant may have had something to do with it.

  We both had a bowl of gumbo, to which I added a dollop of Tabasco sauce. Vicky didn't. We made small talk, and then I thought to ask if the man I'd been looking for had ever been around Terry's shop.

  "He sounds familiar," Vicky said. "Really big? Wide shoulders."

  "That's the one." I crumpled the cellophane that I'd finally been able to remove from a package of four crackers. It crackled in my fingers.

  "I think I might have seen him more than once," she said. "I think he went to the shop a couple of times, at least. He was a hard man to miss."

  "What about the day Terry was killed?"

  "I don't think so, but then I didn't see anyone go in. And somebody must have been there."

  "It wasn't me. You know that."

  "Yes," she said.

  "It makes me wonder, though," I said, "how the police investigation is coming along."

  "They came back to the shop once. Yesterday. They just asked me if anyone had been by looking for Terry, things like that."

  "You didn't mention me, I hope."

  She smiled. "No. I didn't think you'd like that."

  She was right. It sounded as if the police were just as much in the dark as I was. I wasn't going to help them out any, not yet. Besides, I didn't know how much good the description would be to them. It was interesting to know that the man had been in the shop where Terry had died, but knowing it didn't prove anything.

  I explained my theory about the case to Vicky as we walked back to the soap store.

  "You mean you think she kidnapped h
erself?" she said.

  "Similar things have happened before. I'm just trying to figure out how the big guy and Terry come into it." I hadn't told her the rest of the story, about Dino's attempt to deliver the money and about Ferguson's murder.

  "Maybe they were helping her, giving her a place to hide," Vicky said.

  "That's what I thought, what I still think. But why was Terry killed? That part of it doesn't fit."

  Vicky couldn't figure it any better than I could. I left her at the store and told her that I would call. I thought that I'd come to a dead end, so I went to see Dino and tell him.

  "They've called again," Evelyn said when she opened the door.

  15

  There are a few things I like to think I do well, but waiting is not one of them. I didn't have much choice, however, since the call had been very clear about the time. Once again, the small hours of the morning had been chosen, but this time the place was different. An abandoned warehouse near the Southern Pacific tracks just off Port Industrial Boulevard, exactly one mile from the Pelican Island Causeway, at 2:00 a.m.

  "I hope you asked how you could trust them," I told Dino.

  "Damn right, I did. They said they'd made a mistake, weren't sure that it was really me in the car. One of their guys got trigger-happy, they said. He won't be there this time. They said." He was propped up on the bed with fresh white bandages around him. He didn't really look fit enough to be delivering a ransom.

  "Did they know you'd been hit?" I said.

  "They didn't say anything about it, so neither did I. I'll be there."

  "So will I," I said.

  "And I will, too," Evelyn said. "I'm driving."

  I didn't try to argue.

  That was about twelve hours from the time the drop was to be made. I had plenty of time to do some planning. "Are they going to have Sharon with them?"

  "So they say," Dino told me. "I don't think I believe it."

  "Me neither," I said. "But then I'm not sure what to believe about all this anymore. If you don't believe them, why take the chance?"