Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  The woman looked amused. She leaned out the window of the stand and pointed toward the outfield, where a lone woman was sitting on a red folding stadium chair.

  “That’s Rae out there.”

  * * *

  The detective had her eyes glued to the field. She had a scorebook open on her lap, and as promised, she was wearing a Red Wings jersey and a white baseball cap with her dark hair in a ponytail sticking out of the back.

  “Detective Hernandez?” Drue said, as she walked up.

  “That’s me,” Hernandez said. She handed Drue another folding chair. “You can sit here, ’til my husband gets here. He’s still at work.”

  “Thanks for seeing me—” Drue started.

  “Hang on.” The detective cupped her hands around her mouth as a makeshift megaphone.

  “Choke up on the bat, Dez,” she yelled. “Come on now. Swing from your hips.”

  Drue turned and watched as the boy squared himself in front of home plate. He looked smaller than the other players, whom she judged to be maybe ten or eleven. His white pants drooped over the tops of his red-and-white-striped socks, and the batting helmet seemed comically oversized for his head.

  The pitcher was a tall, lanky black kid who rifled a fast ball at the batter. The kid whiffed at the first pitch.

  “That’s okay,” Rae called. “Wait on it. Just keep your eye on the ball.”

  The kid whiffed a second time, and his mother groaned. “He’s swinging too early,” she muttered. “We’ve told him and told him…”

  On the third pitch the kid connected, hitting the ball with a resounding thwack, sending it spinning toward left field.

  “Whoo-hoo!” Rae Hernandez jumped to her feet, pumping her fists in the air. “Way to connect, Dez!” She was, as advertised, short and stocky, her muscled legs tan in contrast to the white shorts and tennis shoes she was wearing.

  “Great hit,” Drue said. “Your son looks like a real ballplayer.”

  The detective took her seat again. “That idiot coach keeps messing with his swing. It’s making us crazy.” She turned to Drue, sliding her sunglasses down her nose. “Okay. Talk. You’ve got twenty minutes before the game begins.”

  “I really appreciate your seeing me,” Drue started.

  “You can thank Yvonne. I talked to her today after you called. She seems to think you can help her case against the hotel. Plus you were kind to Aliyah. That’s the only reason you’re here. That and the fact that you claim to have new information. But before we get started, let me ask you something. Are you like Jimmy Zee’s assistant or something?”

  “You know Zee?”

  “Every cop in town knows him,” Hernandez said. “My husband worked with him at the St. Pete PD, before Zee retired.”

  Drue chose her words carefully. “We work together. He’s training me to do investigative work.”

  She made a sour face. “Just be sure you don’t take any ethics lessons from him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Drue asked.

  “Zee has a fast and loose relationship with the finer points of the law,” Hernandez said. “But he knows people, so he gets away with stuff.”

  “I talked to Lutrisha Smallwood,” Drue said eagerly.

  “The gal who found the body? Not exactly the most helpful witness.”

  “She was afraid of repercussions from hotel management, I think. She still is. Did you know she’d gone back to work there?”

  “That’s news,” Rae said. “I thought she was working in the bakery at Publix.”

  “She told me she couldn’t get enough hours there,” Drue said. “She also said that the hotel manager called all the housekeepers into a meeting not long after Jazmin’s murder, to tell them that Yvonne’s lawsuit against the hotel could force the hotel into bankruptcy. Which spooked everybody more than they already were.”

  “Those bastards,” Rae said. “They stonewalled our investigation every way they could. I can’t prove they destroyed crime scene evidence before we got there, but I’ve always believed somebody did. What else did Lutrisha tell you?”

  “For starters, she admitted that she and Jazmin were closer than she originally let on when she was interviewed by the police.”

  “Big surprise,” Rae said.

  “She told me that she’d sometimes cover for Jazmin, when she was going on a date. Instead of going home to shower, she’d shower and change in a vacant room at the hotel, which was a firing offense. She said Jazmin’s boyfriend had once worked at the hotel, but left to take a job at another motel. Have you talked to him?”

  “Jorge? Yeah. But he had an alibi for the night of the murder. He works at the front desk at the Silver Sands.”

  “The big motel on St. Pete Beach?”

  “Yeah. It’s a good twenty minutes south of Sunset Beach. His manager vouched for him, said he’s a good guy. And he’s got no police record. I interviewed him myself. He was really torn up about his girlfriend’s death.”

  “Does he still work at the Silver Sands?” Drue asked.

  “As far as I know, but remember, it’s going on two years now since all this happened.”

  “Did Jorge know anything about a coworker sexually harassing Jazmin?”

  Rae shook her head, but her eyes were fixed on the baseball diamond, where her son was now shagging balls in left field.

  “No. If some dude was bothering her, she didn’t tell him. And before you ask, Gulf Vista’s HR woman denied that Jazmin filed any kind of a complaint. But I got the impression that nobody at that hotel filed any complaints. It wasn’t that kind of corporate culture, if you get my drift.”

  “Lutrisha told me that another employee, a guy named Larry Boone, was coming on to her, grabbing her and making lewd comments. She said it ended after she sprayed him in the face with Windex. Did you guys happen to check him out?”

  Rae was focused on the baseball field again. “Come on, Dez,” she yelled. “Let’s see some hustle out there.” She turned to Drue. “This is his first game with his new travel team. He needs to make an impression on the coach or else spend the season riding the bench.

  “Larry Boone?” she asked, turning back to the subject at hand. “The engineering guy? Yeah, we talked to him. We talked to all the male employees. If I remember right, Boone got off work at eleven that night.”

  “The same time Jazmin was supposed to get off,” Drue said. “What did Boone tell you?”

  “He lives way up in Hernando County, so he had about an hour commute to get home.”

  “Did anybody confirm his whereabouts?”

  “At the time, he was separated from his wife, living alone in a double-wide trailer on his brother’s property on the river up there.”

  Drue felt a blip of excitement. “So he didn’t have any proof that he was home. He could have been at the hotel.”

  “But he’d clocked out. And at the time we didn’t have a witness who could place him there.” A half-smile played across her lips. “That’s good info about Boone. We’ll definitely take another look at him.”

  “Lutrisha said the housekeepers all called him Scary Larry,” Drue said. “I looked him up online. He works at an Ace Hardware store up in Brooksville.”

  Hernandez scribbled something in pencil on the margins of her scorebook.

  “You said you talked to all the male employees who were working that night,” Drue said. “Did you also interview hotel guests?”

  “We interviewed as many as we could round up,” Rae said. “It was a real shit show. There’d been a convention of Shriners. Half of ’em were hungover, the other half just wanted to check out and get back to Peoria or wherever the hell they were from. But we never really believed this was a stranger-to-stranger killing anyway.”

  “Why’s that?” Drue asked.

  “The nature of the crime,” Rae said. “Jazmin wasn’t sexually assaulted, but she was badly beaten around the head and face. That’s not typically a stranger-to-stranger crime. Somebody had some kind of
anger issues with her. And remember, she was strangled. We figure the assailant was a man because there aren’t a lot of women who have the strength, or the stomach, to do something that violent.”

  Drue thought that over. “I read Zee’s reports. I thought it was interesting that so many of the employees who worked directly with Jazmin left the hotel not long after she was killed.”

  “Lot of turnover there,” Rae agreed. “Head of housekeeping, engineering, the security guard who was first on scene and called the cops. When I asked the hotel manager about it, he said that’s the nature of the hospitality industry.”

  “And the manager was never a suspect?” Drue asked.

  “Gene Wardlaw? No. He wasn’t even in town. Ironically enough, it turns out he was interviewing for another job at a hotel in Daytona Beach. Which he subsequently took.”

  Drue let out a long sigh.

  “Yeah. It’s frustrating as hell, not being able to find the guy who did this. Yvonne calls me every Sunday night, like clockwork, asking for updates. I tell you, it haunts me sometimes.”

  “It’s haunting me, and I haven’t been working it for the past two years,” Drue admitted. She glanced at the detective, trying to gauge just how sympathetic she might be to her cause.

  “I even went over to the hotel and checked out the laundry room where she was killed,” she added.

  Rae Hernandez raised a dubious eyebrow. “How’d you get in? Nothing like closing the barn door after the cow got out, but I know they really ramped up security after the murder.”

  “A friend went with me and we told the security guard at the gate that we were considering the hotel as our wedding venue.”

  “Ballsy move, but I wouldn’t recommend trying that again,” Hernandez said. “Technically, they could probably have you arrested for criminal trespass.”

  “One thing I noticed in that laundry room,” Drue continued. “There were mounting brackets on the wall, over the doorway. So, at one time there was a video camera there? Did you guys look into that?”

  “We did. Brian Shelnutt, the head of security, said the camera had been broken for ‘a while.’ He couldn’t tell us how long that was. He said it had been removed and another one ordered.”

  “Convenient,” Drue said. “Did you believe him?”

  Hernandez removed her sunglasses and polished them on the hem of her shirt before donning them. “I rarely believe anybody. It’s an occupational hazard.”

  “Something I’ve been wondering about,” Drue said, finally getting to the matter she’d wanted to raise since the beginning of this meeting.

  “What’s that?”

  “Wondering if you’d let me see the video from the hotel.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Hernandez started.

  Drue plowed ahead. “It’s been nearly two years, and you’ve admitted you don’t have any real suspects. What could it hurt, letting me look at the video? Remember, I want the same thing you want—to solve this thing and get a settlement for Yvonne and Aliyah.”

  Hernandez gazed at her for a moment, her face dispassionate. “You won’t like what you see. The video shows Jazmin Mayes was working, way past the time Yvonne insists she wasn’t.”

  “I don’t care,” Drue said. “I’d really like to see the video.”

  “I don’t want you coming in to the station,” Hernandez said, choosing her words carefully. “I’ll put it on a flash drive. Where do you live?”

  “Sunset Beach. Pine Street, I’m just a few blocks away from the Gulf Vista.”

  “That’s convenient. My husband’s working tomorrow. Text me the address and I’ll have him drop it off to you in the morning on his way to work. But I warn you, there’s not much to see. I should know. I’ve been staring at that damn video for two years.”

  “Thank you!” Drue said, touching Rae’s arm. “I mean it. Thanks.”

  The detective looked over her shoulder and waved at an approaching man, who wore dress slacks and shoes and a short-sleeved dress shirt. “Here’s my husband now. The game’s about to begin, so your time is up.”

  Drue stood and looked toward the field. The stands were filled now, and the opposing team, kids in green jerseys with a yellow Phillies logo across the front, had taken the field for their batting practice.

  “Hey, can I ask you one more question?”

  Hernandez looked annoyed. “Last one.”

  “Why are you sitting way out here for your son’s ball game? Why aren’t you up in the bleachers with the other parents?”

  Hernandez shrugged. “I had a run-in with one of the umps last season, after he called Dez out at home. My boy was safe by a mile. The ump had it in for me all season, and Dez, just because I had the nerve to question his strike zone. So I got banned from the stands! Totally unfair. Now I watch the games out here. Which is fine, because I don’t have to put up with all those bitchy baseball moms griping about how their precious angel isn’t in the starting lineup.”

  On the way home, Drue replayed her conversation with Rae Hernandez, elated at the possibility that she’d actually get to view the video from the hotel. She pondered something Hernandez had said, as an aside.

  “I rarely believe anybody,” the detective had told her. Drue wondered what that was like, to never trust anybody. Earlier in the day, she’d admitted to Ben Fentress that she didn’t even trust her own father. The question was, who did she trust?

  34

  July 1976

  Jimmy Zee and Brice were walking out to the parking lot at Munch’s, their favorite breakfast spot on the south side, when a pale yellow Mustang whipped into the spot beside Brice’s cruiser. The teenage driver opened his door, banging it into the side of Brice’s unit.

  Without missing a beat, Brice reached into the car, grabbed the kid by the neck of his T-shirt and hauled him to the pavement. “Hey, asshole, look what you did!” He pointed at the fresh ding in the cruiser’s paint job.

  The kid, with long, greasy hair touching his shoulders, squirmed to try to escape. “Fuck off. That was already there.”

  Brice tightened his chokehold, nearly lifting the kid, who weighed maybe ninety pounds, off the ground. “You just damaged police property, you little turd.” He glanced over at Zee. “You saw that too, right, Officer?”

  Zee dropped his cigarette butt to the asphalt, crushing it with his heel. “Yeah, man.” He glared at the kid. “Don’t ever do that again. You understand?”

  The kid’s face was alarmingly red.

  “Come on, Brice,” Zee said, putting a hand on Brice’s shoulder. “Let him go. We gotta get back to work.”

  In reply, Brice put his hand on the back of the kid’s head and shoved him facedown against the hood of his car. “Hey!” the kid squawked. “Police brutality!”

  Brice grabbed a handful of hair and smashed the kid’s face down again, hard.

  “Come on,” Zee said, tugging urgently at Brice’s arm. Two women stood just outside the doorway of the restaurant, staring in horror at the unfolding scene. “We gotta roll.”

  * * *

  They met up again, by mutual agreement, at the end of their shift, in a back booth at Mastry’s.

  Zee sipped his beer and studied his oldest friend. “You look like shit,” he said.

  It was true. Brice’s usually immaculate uniform was rumpled. He was pale, with dark circles under his eyes, and he was already on his second scotch and water.

  “Fuck you very much,” Brice replied, draining his glass and helping himself to one of Zee’s Salems.

  “What’s going on?” Zee asked. “You lost your cool with that kid at Munch’s today. You’re smoking again and drinking scotch on a weeknight. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  Brice blew a long plume of smoke from his nostrils. “Now you sound like my wife. I’m fine, okay?”

  “Come on,” Zee said. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  Brice rubbed his hand across his face and stubbed out the cigarette.

  “I’m screwed,” he said wearily.
“Got myself into some deep shit, and I don’t know how to get out. I’m not sleeping and my gut’s on fire.” He shook his head. “Christ, what a mess.”

  “Talk to me,” Zee replied.

  “Remember that domestic disturbance call we got to the Dreamland back in December?”

  The waitress appeared beside their booth and Zee raised his empty beer mug to signal for a refill. “Yeah. What about it?”

  “The wife? Her name is Colleen. We went to high school together. After you got the husband out of there that night, I started talking to her, trying to convince her she should leave the guy. She was really rattled, afraid to go home, so I brought her here and we had a few drinks. We kind of connected, you know?”

  Zee rolled his eyes. “I think I know where this is going.”

  “I wish I’d known then where it was going, I’d have minded my own business and gone on home.”

  Zee gave him a cynical smile. “Not really your style, bro. The husband beat the crap out of her that night. We both know that type. He might have killed her if we hadn’t broken it up.”

  “Allen Hicks is a piece of shit. Violent, controlling and a bad drunk.”

  “I remember that chick. We ran into her right here, a few months after the thing at the motel. She’s good-looking. So what’s she doing with a loser like that?”

  “The usual. Met him in college, he romanced her and she fell hard. After they’d been married a few months, he began drinking more. Slapping her around.”

  “Why doesn’t she divorce his ass?”

  “According to Colleen, the husband controls all the money. She doesn’t have the money to hire a lawyer, and even if she did, Hicks’s father is a big deal in St. Pete. He’s a doctor. Chief of staff at Bayfront. Hell, he’s the commodore at the yacht club.”

  “You’re shitting me. That’s a real thing?”

  Brice propped his elbow on the table. “His picture was in the St. Pete Times just this week. Dr. Hicks drinks with every judge in town. She wouldn’t get a dime for a divorce settlement.”

  “Okay, tell her to get a restraining order against Hicks. I mean, we could swear we saw him beat her that night. I’d do it.”