Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective

by Ron Base

  Dayton’s Supermarkets had been part of the Fort Myers-Naples-Tampa area since Ray Dayton took over the company after he came back from Vietnam in 1974. Ray’s grandfather had started the business on Sanibel in the 1940s. Ray looked more like his granddad every day .

  Mr. Ray, as he liked to be called, had served his country fighting in Vietnam. Everyone knew that. A sentence containing Mr. Ray’s name invariably also carried the information that he was a brave veteran who had been to Nam. That’s what everyone said. He had not been to Vietnam. He had been to Nam.

  Mr. Ray was talking to Sam Mercer as Tree drove into the parking lot. Sam owned a small resort on Tarpon Bay. He was also president of the Kiwanis Club. Sam and Mr. Ray watched Tree park the Volkswagen. Conversation ceased as he got out of the car and started toward them. Sam removed his sunglasses to get a better look at the interloper. Mr. Ray’s short-cropped white hair glistened in the sunlight. His face was like a slab of stone carved out of a windstorm.

  “Hey, Tree.”

  “How are you, Ray?”

  Sam said, “How’s the detective business, Tree?”

  “Busy, busy,” Tree said with a smile.

  Neither man smiled back. Ray Dayton said, “Freddie’s inside, Tree.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should drop around to Kiwanis, Tree.” Sam Mercer spoke slowly, as though addressing someone with learning disabilities. “We could use a detective. Might be good for your business.”

  “Thanks Sam, I appreciate that.”

  He could feel their eyes on him as he headed toward Dayton’s: the guy’s an idiot.

  Tree stepped into the supermarket’s air conditioned coolness. Freddie appeared in a blur of summer linen hurrying along aisle one (pretzels, chips, beer). Tree tried to imagine her with a pretzel or a beer and couldn’t do it. She was on her Blackberry.

  “Yes, but Terry any way you look at it, our shrink is too high. We’ve got to do better. I want a meeting with him. How about tomorrow? Ten o’clock. See you then, Terry.”

  She got off her phone and her smile brightened. “There you are.”

  She kissed him quickly on the mouth, a wifely peck, acceptable in public. Tree liked the way she did it. He liked everything about Fredericka Stayner, known to everyone as Freddie—the way she walked, the sweep of her honey-colored hair, the deep green of her eyes, her elegance, the effortless intelligence. Every time he thought of her, it made him smile. After ten years of marriage, he was still smiling.

  “The Mercedes isn’t going to be ready until tomorrow.”

  “Then it looks like I’m going to have to drive you home.”

  “I hate driving in that car,” she said. “I wish you’d let me buy a new one.”

  “It’s my pride and joy,” Tree said. “The only thing I have in this world.”

  “You have me,” Freddie said.

  “Better even than the Beetle,” he said, taking her hand.

  “I don’t rattle, and I’m not constantly blaring old rock and roll tunes.”

  “I don’t listen to old rock all the time,” Tree maintained.

  “Yes, you do. The next thing you’ll try to make me watch The Guns of Navarone again.”

  “What a lovely way to spend an evening,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes and squeezed his hand.

  Freddie was Tree’s fourth wife. He could hardly believe it. Four wives? Impossible. Movie stars married four times. Rock musicians. Not Tree Callister. Years ago, a callow young Chicago reporter, he had interviewed Henry Fonda. As afternoon shadows lengthened across Fonda’s still youthfully iconic face, the face of Tom Joad in autumn, the actor expressed anguish over his four marriages. He was ashamed of the divorces. Tree wondered how it was possible to deal with all the emotional and financial complications that many breakups must have entailed.

  Now he knew.

  He married the first time in his early twenties. What the hell had he been thinking, marrying that young? He wanted the hard-drinking Hemingwayesque newspaper reporter, not a happily married family man. His first wife, Judy, young, dutiful, naïve, desiring all the traditional trappings of marriage, including a husband who came home at night. They produced two children, Raymond and Christopher, before everything fell apart—the bad husband exiting the bad marriage, leaving behind crying children and an angry wife.

  Rex Baxter had introduced him to his second wife, Kelly Fleming, a Chicago newscaster who lit up any room she entered. Tree was mesmerized. He remained mesmerized; Kelly less so. A recipe for disaster that ended after three years. Then came Patricia Laine, the entertainment editor at the Sun-Times. She threw him out a little over a year after they married and went off with the editor of the paper, an upgrade.

  After Patricia, he was more or less single for the next five years, except for the live-in law student twenty years his junior. The less said about that, the better.

  His marriages, he decided, were rites of passage, necessary journeys on the way to destiny in the form of Fredericka Stayner. Not that he believed in destiny—except where Freddie was concerned. That had to be destiny. It could be nothing else.

  Friends introduced them at a Gold Coast dinner party. She was a high-powered, hard-driving, department store executive, stunning in Ralph Lauren. As soon as Tree laid eyes on her, he wanted to marry her. That, Freddie said later, was part of his problem. Tree saw a car he liked, he wanted to marry it.

  They chatted over pompano and crunchy asparagus. She hadn’t seen the Matisse exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Had he? No, hadn’t had a chance. Was he even intending to go? he thought to himself. No, but what difference did that make? He suggested they meet the next afternoon. They could look at it together. She delivered what was to be one of many cool, green-eyed appraisals. Green is the rarest eye color, he thought inanely. Where had he read that? He held his breath. She nodded. Two o’clock? Two o’clock would be fine.

  He counted the moments until he met her on the steps of the Art Institute. They wandered together through the exhibit, not saying much. Matisse must have been in a particularly slap-dash and simple mood in the period following his return from Morocco but before heading off to the South of France, all the while bemoaning the work that went into his painting. Not only was comedy hard, but according to the never-happy Matisse, so was painting.

  Tree marveled at how self-contained Matisse was. His art was all, nothing else existed, not even the world war in progress down the road from his Paris studio. It never seemed to occur to Matisse that the public might not care for his images. What difference did that make? No focus groups in Matisse’s world, Tree observed. Freddie laughed and said she didn’t much care for this part of Matisse.

  They wandered down to American Art Before 1900. Unlike the Matisse exhibit, which was so crowded people jostled for position in front of the paintings, here they were alone except for a bored-looking guard, and even he disappeared after a few minutes.

  Nobody gave a hoot about American art before 1900, Tree supposed. Not even for Frederic Remington’s stuff which Tree loved because Remington evoked the John Ford westerns he grew up with. Westerns? Freddie groaned. She hated westerns. Who even thought about westerns these days? Tree was willing to forgive her that particular shortcoming. He was willing to forgive her anything. They kissed in front of Remington’s “End of the Trail” bronze. Tree kept an eye on the lone Indian warrior astride his horse, head bowed in defeat. Today, he was the warrior victorious, if only briefly. After that, they couldn’t stop kissing. They had been kissing ever since.

  Freddie had been married twice before. The starter marriage was packaged with all the traditional trimmings: the bride in white, the bridesmaids in pink; the groom and best man in baby-blue tuxedos; the band at the Palmer House reception with featured accordions playing “Welcome to My World.” The new husband got too drunk on the wedding night to do anything but throw up in the bridal suite.

  The second marriage, as second marriages tend to be, was more serious bu
siness. The guy was ten years older, well-to-do, with boutique hotels in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. They had a daughter together, Emma. Glenn—that was number two’s name—was a controlling drunk who, when things didn’t go his way, threatened to kill his wife. Freddie could never be sure if he was serious, but she wasn’t taking any chances and got out of the marriage, taking Emma with her.

  Tree had to work on Freddie, behave himself in ways he had never before behaved, court her properly, show up when he said he would. None of that was a problem. All the things he could never achieve in his other relationships, were achieved effortlessly with Freddie.

  She finally agreed to marry him, commenting that the last thing she expected was to marry some guy who had been married three times before. Not that the two strikes against her were anything to be proud of.

  If it was any consolation, Tree said, he never expected to be that guy.

  ____

  Freddie waved at Mr. Ray as they headed toward the car. “I’m meeting Terry at ten tomorrow morning.”

  “The shrink rate is fine,” he called back.

  “No it’s not,” she said. Mr. Ray gave the dead-eyed stare usually reserved for Tree. “Honestly,” she said in a low voice, “There are days when I could murder that man.”

  “Most days I think the Ray Man wants to kill me.”

  “He continues to believe that all you have to do is pull the trucks up to the back door and unload them.”

  “But he hired you,” Tree said. “And he’s been in Nam.”

  “In his head he knows that. In his heart, I am the irritating city broad who has never unloaded a truck.”

  “Or served in Vietnam,” Tree said.

  On the way home he told Freddie about his first client. “Wonderful,” she said in the flat voice she employed when she wasn’t paying attention to him. Not that he blamed her. Freddie had not discouraged his move into detecting, as she would not discourage anything her husband decided to undertake, but she didn’t encourage it, either.

  “Unfortunately, he was only twelve years old.”

  That got her attention. “You’re kidding. He was twelve?”

  “Actually, he may not even have been twelve.”

  “What did he want you to do?”

  “Find his mother.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him he should go to the police.”

  “You didn’t take him to the police yourself?” A hint of disapproval.

  “I should have, shouldn’t I?”

  “A little boy so desperate to find his mom he goes to a detective. Kind of sad.”

  The observation came without judgmental inflection. Except he knew damn well he was being judged, and not positively.

  “I should have handled it better.”

  “Well, hopefully he’s all right. What’s his name?”

  “Marcello.”

  “That’s it, Marcello?”

  “After the Italian actor.”

  “He’s named after Marcello Mastroianni?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But you didn’t get his last name.”

  “That’s all he said,” Tree said, kicking himself for not getting the kid’s last name. “Like I said, I didn’t handle it so well.”

  They crossed Blind Pass onto Captiva Island. Their house on Andy Rosse Lane like most of the newer houses in the area, was built above the garage so that in the event of a hurricane—Charley in 2004 remained fresh in everyone’s mind—flood damage would be minimal. Such were the concessions you made to life in the tropics, Tree reflected. You lived in air, floating, not tethered to anything.

  The house was lost in a profusion of palm trees and hedges. A sitting room with big windows showing a view of the sea dominated. A good-sized kitchen had been recently updated with de rigueur granite counters and stainless steel appliances. When they moved in, they had redone the place in bright Mediterranean tones and hung the paintings they’d collected—the oversized poster for the bad French movie Tree had written in Paris was consigned to a wall in the laundry room.

  Freddie cooked turkey burgers on their Weber barbecue using real charcoal. Gas barbecues were nothing but outdoor stoves, she said. Not really barbecues at all. She had a glass of chardonnay.

  After dinner they sat on the terrace overlooking the pool they never used, watching one of the spectacular sunsets tourists came from all over the world to see. Tree watched that sun in all its dying glory and decided life was not so bad.

  He thought no further of twelve-year-old boys looking for their mothers.

  3

  A tall man with dark hair in a white linen suit waited for Tree when he arrived at the office the next morning. Tree couldn’t take his eyes off the linen suit. It fell gracefully along the contours of his visitor’s slim torso. Linen wrinkled so easily, thought Tree, who did not own a lot of linen—he didn’t own any. How could this guy’s suit not wrinkle?

  The tall man smiled when he saw Tree. The smile was as effortless as the way he wore that linen suit. The smile could not hide the threatening air that hung around him like a shroud on a coffin.

  “Did you know,” he said in a polite voice tinged with the luck of the Irish, “that the osprey used to be known as a fish hawk.”

  Tree removed his glasses. “I read that somewhere.”

  “Fish hawk,” the man in the linen suit said. “I like that better than osprey. Fish hawk sounds tougher somehow, more primal. Don’t you think?”

  “I’m sorry,” Tree said. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “They mate for life, you know. The fish hawks.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Tree said.

  “They build nests of sticks, and then they go back to it each year, always adding sticks. Some of these nests, as you might imagine, grow quite large.”

  “What can I do for you?” Tree said.

  The man’s smile tightened. “Pretty busy, son?”

  “I have a number of clients to deal with this morning,” Tree said in the formal voice he adopted when lying through his teeth.

  “Here’s something else that’s interesting about the fish hawk or the osprey, if that’s what you want to call it. Once the male and female have courted and come together, the male devotes himself to providing the female with fresh fish. Romantic don’t you think? Making sure his wife is fed properly. Nice.”

  “I’ve learned a great deal about the osprey this morning,” Tree said. “Fascinating. But maybe we should get down to business.”

  “Down to business,” the man said. “Interesting choice of words. Yes, I suppose we should get right down to business. You and me we’ve got something in common, you know.”

  “A love of osprey?”

  “Chicago, son. The second city.”

  “You’re from Chicago?”

  “As I understand you are. Where from exactly?“

  “Around and about. Lincoln Park, mostly.“

  “Small world. I lived on Clark, a block away from the garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Of course, it’s a parking lot now. But I learned a lot in Chicago, I did. The Windy City. Indeed. Well, that‘s pleasant enough. Old pals and all.”

  “You spend a lot of time here looking for people from Chicago?”

  The tall man laughed. “I don‘t spend any time at all. I got out of that town a long time ago. A young lady broke my heart. But isn’t it the way of the world?”

  Tree just looked at him. He didn’t like the way this was going. He put his glasses on again, hoping they would give him a better view of his visitor. The view did not improve.

  “Okay, this is the business I want to deal with this morning,” the tall man said. “I require your help.”

  “Something to do with fish hawks?”

  “With locating a certain person.”

  “A person. What kind of person?”

  “The kind of person who makes me very ang
ry running away like that.”

  “Another heartbreaker?”

  “A man can only take one of those in a lifetime.”

  “You want me to find this person for you?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “It would help to know your name,” Tree said.

  “My name? I didn’t tell you my name?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He laughed out loud. “Isn’t that damnedest thing? All this talk about Chicago, I forgot. Reno, son. Reno O’Hara.”

  “Tree Callister.”

  “Yes, I know that. Mr. Tree Callister from Chicago. Tree. A funny name for a man. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first person who has commented on it over the years.”

  Reno O’Hara glanced around the room as though looking for an item he had mislaid. “Tell me something, Tree.”

  “What’s that, Reno?”

  “When is the last time anyone hit you?”

  Tree looked at him.

  “I suspect it was in a schoolyard, right? Something like that. Or maybe at a bar when you were a young man. You know, pushing and shoving after too many drinks. Maybe over a girl. Youthful fights, they are almost always over a girl, don’t you think?”

  Tree did not respond.

  “But I’m not talking about things like that, minor scuffles. I’m talking about really getting hit—a fist in the mouth, for example. Or someone who knows how to do it, punching you in the stomach. You really get hit, and you feel it. None of this stuff like in the movies where the hero shakes it off and then comes back and lands the punches that defeat his opponent. I’m talking about getting hit like it’s a freight train running into you, like you go to the hospital, and they have to rewire your jaw or tape your ribs. Recovery takes weeks accompanied by such tremendous hurt, the doctor must prescribe powerful painkillers. You are on, like workman’s compensation, although maybe a guy like you, a guy named for a tree, who is a loser and doesn’t earn shit, there is no workman’s compensation.”