“Good. Nice climate, holiday atmosphere, a little murder…”
I heard a feminine snort. “Those lab results came through. But getting them out of me is going to cost you dinner.”
“I thought the results were going to take a week?”
“Seems the lab's not too busy. It's coming up on New Year's… Maybe all the local killers are on vacation.”
“So where do you want to meet for this dinner I owe you?”
“You know The Funkster, the place I told you about in Destin?”
“Yeah. Friendly tourist crowd.”
“There's a restaurant two doors down called Salty's.”
“Sounds bad for the arteries.”
“Actually, for seafood it's the pick of the bunch around here. They do these amazing soft-shelled crabs. Just do me one favor?”
“Name it, Colonel.”
“For Christ's sake, lose the shirt.”
TWENTY-TWO
The restaurant was jammed. Fortunately Colonel Selwyn had left a reservation with a guy at the front desk who could have been Mr. Salty himself — beard, squint, tattoos. Popeye the Sailor had a doppelgänger. I was ten minutes early, the colonel was twenty minutes late. I ate my roll. Then I ate hers.
“Hey, sorry I'm late,” said the voice behind me.
I felt a light hand on my shoulder as Clare Selwyn surfed past on a wave of French perfume and took the seat opposite. Her blond hair was loose. She wore a green top tied at the waist over a white T-shirt, a swishy white skirt that ended below her brown knees, and leather sandals. Her toenails were painted red. Selwyn's makeup was minimal, the way I liked it, and she glowed with life.
“No problem. I passed the time with your roll.”
“That's OK — I don't do carbs,” she said.
An old woman arrived and poured glasses of water. She might have been Salty's wife, or maybe his twin sister. The beard gave it away. “Get you folks drinks?” she asked.
“Thanks,” said Selwyn, looking up at her. Candlelight danced in her eyes. I cleared my throat.
Mrs. Salty placed menus for food and alcohol on our table and walked off to baby-sit a rowdy table nearby.
“You've changed your shirt,” said Selwyn as she picked up her napkin and smoothed it across her legs.
“It was about time. The girls were starting to play their ukuleles.”
“I like the one you're wearing better.”
“This old rag?” Actually it was new, bought from the BX. It was fitted and vaguely khaki.
Selwyn smiled approval, then said, “I know what's good here. Should I just order for us?”
“You're a colonel. I'm a major. I'm not arguing.”
“Good,” she said.
The bearded lady returned to get our order. Selwyn chose a Napa Valley Chardonnay. I had a glass, for the sake of politeness, then switched to Moosehead. The food came fast — a couple of clam chowders followed by soft-shelled crabs, plus scallops and prawns. Selwyn ate her fair share. Nice to know her trim figure didn't come from eating with a calculator, counting calories. Nice also to have dinner out with a woman, any woman, even one who outranked me. It had been a while. Months, in fact, not including the surprise take out with Anna in my apartment. Suddenly, thinking about Anna made me feel uneasy. Why? This was just dinner, wasn't it? And Anna and I were … well, what were we? On the rocks, foundering, a hole in the keel, great whites thrashing about for the pickings, our relationship's blood in the water? I snapped out of it. The colonel was talking.
“…Selwyn's my maiden name, by the way. As I was saying, Manny stays with his grandparents, my parents. He goes there every second Thursday night — overnight. They moved to Panama City from Seattle when Dad retired. They said they always intended to settle down there, but I'd never heard them mention the place — ever — and then suddenly they're living there.”
“Any other grandparents helping out?”
She hesitated. I sensed that if not for the wine, Selwyn would have left it at that. “You really want to know?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
She took a breath and let it out. The flames on the candles twitched and swayed, shifting the shadows across her face.
“Getting married was the one truly dumb thing I've done in my life. Now I realize it was just an attack on my parents. They resented the fact that I took my medical degree and joined the Air Force. My dad was a thoracic surgeon, and pushy about me following in his footsteps.”
She took a sip of her wine.
“Anyway, the guy I married was a developer. My folks had visions of me marrying a doctor, of course, or at least a dentist. I met him on vacation in the Caribbean. We flew to Vegas at the end of it and tied the knot. Three months later I was pregnant. We both knew it wasn't going to last forever. We weren't talking much toward the end, but he loved Manny. We were pretty much done when he was killed in the plane crash. His parents were divorced and remarried and didn't want to know about their grandchild.” Selwyn lifted the glass to her lips again. “What about you — I notice you're not wearing a ring. You single, or just traveling in disguise?”
“Divorced six months ago. We just ran out of steam.” I was happy to skip the details.
“What about a girlfriend?”
“I'm not sure. We've been bouncing around. She's in Germany.”
“Oh, right, one of those relationships.”
“Meaning?”
“Long distance. It's a killer.”
I was anxious to move on and I was unlikely to get a better opportunity. “Which reminds me, you had a toxicology report for me?”
“Yeah, that pill. I can tell you what it is and what it's for — but I can't tell you whether it was medication Ruben Wright was taking. Unfortunately his remains have been cremated and we don't have the appropriate tissue samples. As for the dead roaches, they weren't significant. The sugar coating on the pill wouldn't have killed them. They might have recently checked out of a nearby roach motel and come to die where it was nice and warm. And, like I said, an earlier tenant could have dropped it.”
“I get you. There are caveats. What is it?”
“A four-milligram serving of Tizanidine hydrochloride.”
“Taken for…?”
“It's used to relieve spasticity in the muscles.”
“Who takes it?”
“Someone who's had a stroke or a spinal injury…”
“So it wasn't Wright's medication. He couldn't have jumped with—”
“It's also taken by people with MS — multiple sclerosis,” she said.
Multiple sclerosis? That could put a spin on a couple of calls Wright had made to certain numbers in Pensacola. “I'm not exactly sure what MS is,” I said.
“It's bad.”
“That much I know.”
Mrs. Salty cleared our plates as Selwyn poured the last of the wine into her glass. Those big brown eyes of hers weren't quite so big now, I noticed, but her speech was still sharp and without any hint of a slur. “It's a degenerative disease of the central nervous system, where the nerve pathways are gradually destroyed. The symptoms, which get progressively worse, are vertigo, muscle spasms and weakness, loss of coordination, numbness, loss of memory. Speech is affected, as is vision. There's no cure, but drugs like Tizanidine can ease the symptoms. MS attacks its victims in different ways, but it's often debilitating and can be fatal. There are better ways to die.”
“Like cutting yourself out of your parachute harness?” I wondered how Wrong Way would have taken the news that he was going to take a long, slow journey into a pine box, most of it either on crutches or in a wheelchair. I also wondered, if he did have MS, where he kept his drugs. None were found in the house after his death.
“If Sergeant Wright was suicidal because he had MS, and he'd decided to jump to his death, as I said when you first arrived, why wouldn't he just pass on pulling his rip cord? Why go to all the trouble of cutting through the harness?”