by Otto Penzler
The blue Buick was idling half way down the block near the curb. He had followed me around the block and was waiting for me now. I hoped I had given the impression of someone who had left something in the doctor’s office.
I had noticed the blue Buick when I picked up my rental car, but it hadn’t really registered. I hadn’t been looking for someone who might be following me. But I had spotted what I thought was the same car when I came out of the Cafe Kaldi. Now I was sure. I eased past the Buick, looking both ways at the intersection and catching a glimpse of the man behind the wheel. This guy was short, wore a blue short-sleeve shirt and looked, from the color of his hair and sag of his tough face, about fifty.
There must have been lots of reasons for someone to follow me, but I couldn’t think of any good ones other than that the guy in the Buick was hoping I would lead him to Miriam Sebastian. I could have been dead wrong, but I didn’t take chances.
He was a good driver, a very good driver, and he kept up with me as I headed for Tamiami Trail. I pulled into the carry-out lane at the McDonald’s across from the airport hoping he would follow me in line. I even timed it so a car would be behind me other than the Buick which was the way the guy who was following me would want it, too. My plan was to order a sandwich and pull away while the
Buick was stuck behind the car behind me. If I was lucky, there would also be a car behind him so he couldn’t back up.
He was too smart. He simply drove around and parked between a van and a pick-up truck in the parking lot.
Hell. I decided it was all-out now. He had almost certainly figured I had spotted him by now, and I didn’t have time to keep playing tag. Miriam Sebastian might be gone by the time I got to Harrington House which was still at least forty minutes from where I took my cheeseburger, put it on the seat next to me and peeled off fast to the right, away from the direction I wanted to go. In the rear-view, I watched the Buick back out as I sailed at sixty down Route 41. He was good, but there’s a definite advantage in being the one who is followed. It took me ten minutes to lose him. By then I guessed he knew I wasn’t going to lead him to Miriam Sebastian. I ate the burger while I drove.
I took the bridge across to St. Armand’s, the same bridge you could see from Raymond Sebastian’s apartment, and then drove straight up Longboat Key through the canyon of high-rise resorts and past streets that held some of the most expensive houses, mansions and estates in the county.
I went over the short bridge at the end of the Key and drove through the far less up-scale and often ramshackle hotels and rental houses along the water in Bradenton Beach. Ten minutes later, I spotted the sign for Harrington House and pulled into the shaded driveway. I parked on the white crushed shell and white pebble lot which held only two other cars.
Harrington House was a white three-floor 1920s stucco over cement block with green wooden shutters. There were flowers behind a low picket fence and a sign to the right of the house pointing toward the entrance. I walked up the brick path for about a dozen steps and came to a door. I found myself inside a very large lodge-style living room with a carpeted dark wooden stairway leading up to a small landing and, I assumed, rooms. There were book cases whose shelves were filled and a chess table with checkers lined up and ready to go. The big fireplace was probably original and used no more than a few days during the Central Florida winter.
I hit the bell on a desk by the corner next to a basket of wrapped bars of soap with a sketch of the house on the wrapper. I smelled a bar and was doing so when a blonde woman came bouncing in with a smile. She was about fifty and seemed to be full of an energy I didn’t feel. I put down the soap.
“Yes sir?” she said. “You have a reservation.”
“No,” I said. “I’m looking for Miriam Sebastian, a guest here.” Some of the bounce left the woman but there was still a smile when she said, “No guest by that name registered.”
I pulled out the photograph Raymond Sebastian had given me and showed it to her. She took it and looked long and hard.
“Are you a friend of hers?”
“I’m not an enemy.”
She looked hard at the photograph again.
“I suppose you’ll hang around even if I tell you I don’t know these people.”
“Beach is public,” I said. “And I like to look at birds and waves.” “That picture was taken three or four years ago, right out on the beach behind the house,” she said. “You’ll recognize some of the houses in the background if you go out there.”
I went out there. There was a small, clear-blue swimming pool behind the house and a chest-high picket fence just beyond it. The waves were coming in low on the beach about thirty yards away, but still moaned as they hit the white sand and brought in a new crop of broken shells and an occasional fossilized shark’s tooth or dead fish.
I went through the gate to the beach and looked around. A toddler was chasing gulls and not even coming close, which was in the kid’s best interest. A couple, probably the kid’s parents, sat on a brightly painted beach cloth watching the child and talking. Individuals, duos, trios and quartets of all ages walked along the shoreline in bare feet or floppy sandals. Miriam Sebastian was easy to find. There were five aluminum beach loungers covered in strips of white vinyl. Miriam Sebastian sat in the middle lounger. The others were empty.
She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, dark sunglasses and a two-piece solid white bathing suit. She glistened from the bottle of lotion that sat on the lounger next to her along with a fluffy towel. She was reading a book or acting as if she was knowing I was on the way. I stood in front of her.
“War and Peace,” she said holding up the heavy book. “Always wanted to read it, never did. I plan to read as many of the so-called
classics as I can. It’s my impression that few people have really read them though they claim to have. Please have a seat, Mr. Fonesca.”
I sat on the lounger to her right, the one that didn’t have lotion and a towel, and she moved a book mark and laid the book on her lap. She took off her sunglasses. She was definitely the woman in the picture, still beautiful, naturally beautiful though the woman looking at me seemed older than the one in the picture. I showed her the picture.
“Mr. Sebastian would like to talk to you,” I said.
She looked at the photograph and shook her head before handing it back.
“We spent two nights here after our honeymoon in Spain,” she said. ‘You would think Raymond might remember and at least call on the chance that I might return. But...”
“Will you talk to him?” I asked.
She sat for about thirty seconds and simply looked at me. I was decidedly uncomfortable and wished I had sunglasses. I looked at the kid still chasing gulls. He was getting no closer.
‘You’re not here to kill me,” she said conversationally.
“Kill you?”
“I think Raymond is planning to have me killed,” she said turning slightly toward me. “But I think you’re not the one.”
“Why does your husband want to kill you?” I asked.
“Money,” she said and then she smiled. “People thought I married Raymond for his money. I didn’t, Mr. Fonesca. I loved him. I would have gone on loving him. He was worth about one hundred thousand when we married, give or take a percentage or two in either direction. I, however, was worth close to eleven million dollars from an annuity, the sale of my father’s business when he died, and a very high yield insurance policy on both my parents.”
“It doesn’t make sense, Mrs. Sebastian,” I said.
“Miriam,” she said. “Call me Miriam. Your first name?”
“Lewis,” I said. “Lew.”
“It makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “I know that Raymond has been telling people that I am having an affair with Dr. Bermeis-ter. Lew, I’ve been faithful to my husband from the day we met. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about him. I have ample evidence, including almost interrupting a session between Raymond and Caroline Wilkerson in
the buff in our bed about five weeks ago.
It seems the man almost old enough to be my grandfather married me for my money. After I carefully closed the door without Raymond or Caroline seeing me, I went out, stayed in a hotel and returned the day I was supposed to.”
“Reason for divorce,” I said.
“My word against theirs,” she said. “He’d drag it on, hold up my assets. I haven’t the time, Lew.”
“So . . . ?”
“So,” she said, “I did a little digging and discovered that Caroline was far from the first. I don’t know if he is just an old man afraid of accepting his age or if he simply craves the chase and the sex. I know he had no great interest in me in that department for the past year.”
“You waited five weeks after you knew all this and then suddenly walked out?” I asked.
“It took me five weeks to convert all my stocks and my life insurance policy to cash and to withdraw every penny I have in bank accounts. I didn’t want a scene and I didn’t want Raymond to know what I was doing, but by now he knows.”
“And you think he wants to kill you?”
“Yes. I don’t think he knows the extent of what I’ve done, nor that I’ve cashed in the insurance policy,” she said. “Raymond claims to be a real estate dealer. He has averaged a little over twenty-thousand dollars on his real estate deals each of the years we’ve been married. As for his investments, he has consistently lost money. I’d say that at the moment my husband, who is nearing seventy, thinks he’ll have millions when, in fact, he has what’s left on his credit cards, ten thousand dollars in his own bank account and a 1995 paid-for Lincoln Town Car.”
“And he’s trying to kill you before you get rid of your money?” “Yes. But it’s too late. I’ve put all the money, but the thirty thousand I’ve kept with me in cash, into boxes and sent the boxes anonymously to various charities including the National Negro College Fund, the Salvation Army and many others.”
“Why don’t you just tell him?” I asked. “Or I can tell him.”
The toddler’s mother screamed at the boy who had wandered too far in pursuit of the gulls. The kid’s name was Harry.
“Then he wouldn’t try to have me killed,” she said.
“That’s the picture,” I said. “You know a short bulldog of a man, drives a blue Buick? He’s probably about ten years younger than your husband.”
“Zito,” she said. “Irving Zito.”
“He was following me today. I lost him.”
She shrugged.
“Irving is Raymond’s ‘personal’ assistant,” she said. “He has a record including a conviction for Murder Two. Don’t ask me how he and Raymond came together. The story I was told didn’t make much sense. So Irving Zito is the designated killer.”
“If you don’t tell your husband your money is gone and you just stay here, he’ll find you even if I don’t tell him.”
“And you don’t plan to tell him?” she asked.
“Not if you say ‘no,’” I said.
“Good. I say ‘no.’ Did he pay you by check?”
“Yes.”
“Cash it fast.”
“I did,” I said, “I thought it was too easy.”
“Too easy?”
“Finding you. Talk to Caroline Wilkerson at your husband’s suggestion. She sends me to Dr. Bermeister. He sends me to you and you wait for me. You wanted me to find you.”
“I wanted whoever was going to kill me to find me,” she said. “I’ll just have to wait till Zito and Raymond figure it out. If they don’t, Raymond will probably find another private detective with fewer scruples than you who will find me right here. I hope I have time to finish Tolstoy before he does.”
“You want to die?”
“I’ve left a letter with my lawyer, with documents, proving my husband’s infidelity, misuse of my money which I knew about but chose to ignore, and the statement that if I am found dead under suspicious circumstances, a full investigation of the likelihood of my husband’s being responsible is almost a certainty. Now that I know Irving Zito is involved, I’ll drive into Sarasota with a new letter including Zito’s name and add it to the statement I’ve given my lawyer.”
“You want to die,” I repeated though this time it wasn’t a question.
“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I’m going to within a few months even if Raymond doesn’t get the job done. I’m dying, Lew. Dr.
Bermeister knows it. I started seeing him as a therapist when I first learned about the tumor more than a year ago. I didn’t want my husband to know. I arranged for treatment and surgery in New York and told my husband I simply wanted six weeks or so with old school friends, one of whom was getting married. He had no objections. I caught him and Caroline in bed the day I returned. I had hurried home a day early Obviously I wasn’t expected. Treatment and surgery proved relatively ineffective. The tumor is in a vital part of my brain and getting bigger. Raymond has never even noticed that I was ill. I don’t wish to die slowly in the hospital.”
“So you set your husband up,” I said.
Harry the toddler was back with his mother who was standing and brushing sand from the boy who was trying to pull away There were gulls to chase and water to wade in.
‘Yes,” she said. ‘You disapprove?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s your life.”
JANICE LAW
Secrets
from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
My first and only failing grade in school came in sixth grade, when Miss Solway asked us to write a paragraph about a secret. Patty Tolliver set to work about a surprise birthday party for her dad. I could see “birthday party” and “hiding presents” and the rest of the story emerging in her big curling script. Eric Rodriguez printed something about fireworks in steeply angled lines. His letters grew smaller and messier as they approached the right edge of his paper, then swelled again into big, assertive words with each new line. Even Jon Hansem, the slowest kid in the class, was hard at work, but my mind refused to function. I sat sweating at my desk and turned in a blank page. At the end of the period Miss Solway called me up to her desk. She looked disappointed and asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine; I just didn’t have any secrets worth writing about. Miss Solway was unconvinced: I was considered a good, even an imaginative, student.
“I just couldn’t think of anything,” I wailed, and though Miss Solway was one of my favorite teachers, I added, “It was a dumb topic anyway.” I was almost twelve years old, and I already knew that there are some secrets too big to tell, like the one about my mother and Mr. Conklin and what happened the July that I was ten years old.
That summer was hot, dreadfully, dreadfully hot. We should have been used to it after three years in Hartford, but we weren’t. Days when the thermometer crept up into the eighties and then the nineties, my mother would wipe her face and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back in Ireland now. It was never imagined to be this hot in Ireland.”
Of course other days Mother “wouldn’t have had Ireland as a gift,” as she’d say, not with my dad dead. “Not an honest day’s work to be had. Nothing but pride, poetry, and ignorance. It’s bad times here, but worse there. You remember that and work hard in school, my girl.” I would promise, of course. I liked school and did well, even though I was in the public school and not with the sisters, who provided a really good education. But Catholic school was out of the question, an unimaginable luxury. Although Mother worked hard, cleaning at the motel and the restaurants, we still lived from week to week. Her pay was usually owed from the moment she got it, and we ate cereal or beans for supper most Wednesdays and Thursdays.
I don’t suppose we’d have managed at all if it weren’t for Mr. Conklin, our tyrant and savior, who was a distant relative of my late father. Mr. Conklin owned a triple-decker house near his “Irish pub.” He also owned a motel and a snack shop at the shabby end of Park Street where the Puerto Rican section stopped and the Portugue
se, new immigrants like ourselves, were moving in. Their children went to the big, frightening city schools — rough and full of black people, Mr. Conklin said — while we had the top apartment of his triple-decker just over the city line in an old Irish-Italian neighborhood. The schools in the suburb were much, much better Mr. Conklin said, as “they damn well should be, considering the taxes.” Both the apartment and my admission to the local elementary school were the direct result of Mr. Conklin’s intercession. It was understood that either could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.
Stout and redfaced with a pug nose and a loud, jovial voice, Joseph P. Conklin was a sentimental bully with unsettling moments of gaiety and kindness. He brought me a doll once — and occasionally chocolates for Mother — and he sang “Danny Boy” every St. Patrick’s Day as the restaurant was closing. But even in his best moments I was leery of him. I hated it when he wanted me to sit on his knee and tell him how I was doing in school. Fortunately his interest was usually focused on his property: the restaurants, his triple-decker, and his motel. He hiked his profits and kept his costs down by employing illegal immigrants like Mother, for whom he had originally gotten a visitor’s visa.
As relatives, Mother and I occupied a privileged position; we were given the apartment and protected from the school authorities. In exchange, Mr. Conklin paid Mother less than the minimum wage and visited every Saturday around five o’clock on his way to the restaurant. If it was nice weather, Mother would send me out on the big front porch of the triple-decker, where I would watch the traffic and try to spit on the drooping heads of the hydrangeas that flanked the front steps far below. If it was bad weather, Mother would tell me to go down and see Annie on the first floor. Annie was a stooped, arthritic old lady with a close and cluttered apartment and a fat gray neutered cat. She was lonely for company and never minded my visits. We would sit companionably, watching her old black and white TV or crocheting, until I heard Mr. Conklin’s smart patent leather loafers descending the stairs. Then I would tell Annie I had to go to dinner.