Last Island South
by John C. Boland
© 2008 by John C. Boland
John Boland returns to EQMM this issue after a long hiatus. The Baltimore author has had a number of stories in our sister publication, AHMM, since his last tale for us in 1989. He also authored half a dozen financial mysteries in the 1990s, novels Publishers Weekly called “wry and intelligent” and “suspenseful... and satisfying.”
Don’t tell me about sunny Key West. I was painting a small, bad beach scene — just the ticket for some tourist who didn’t know yet that he wanted it — working in the cabin of my father’s boat, my feet freezing under two pairs of socks, chugging down my second pot of green tea, listening to the pinkety-pink of the leak in the head, when Hubbard Bennell hauled his 250 pounds aboard. In his yellow rain slicker, he pretty much filled the galley. “Have you got a job right now, Meggie?” he asked.
His tone implied he knew the question was impolite. Any half-competent investigator could find all the work she wanted in rowdy Key Wasted, couldn’t she?
I halfway liked him. He was a middle-aged Conch with sun scabs on the nose and the thickened hands of someone who had done real work before becoming a politico. He’d spent seven or eight years on the city commission without getting indicted, which was close to a local record. After the last municipal scandal over hack licenses, Hub had told a TV reporter that he was sure he wasn’t all that honest, no more so than the two commissioners who’d been arrested, so he guessed he was just slower to spot an opportunity. He said it with a melancholy, up-from-under grin. Dang if it ain’t sad what goes on here. A town where city fathers used to import marijuana loves winks and nods.
A job meant money, which I desperately needed.
“Nothing right now,” I said.
“Good, you can stake out my flight club. Somebody broke into the office last night.”
His flight club was actually an air-charter business, named by some long-ago eccentric who had flown rum over from Cuba. Hub’s business, so far as I knew, consisted of hauling tourists seventy miles out into the Gulf of Mexico for snorkeling trips among the Dry Tortugas.
We worked out the terms — that is, Hub told me what the gig was worth and I said okay. Then I called my sometime helper Babe McKenzie, who always needs a few bucks to feed her cats and her boyfriends.
Before dark, I hunkered down in Hub Bennell’s office, and Babe hid herself in the converted boathouse that served as a hangar for two island-hopping Cessna 185s. While we were doing that, somebody came ashore at my client’s stilt house two miles up the island and shot Hub deader than a crab leg.
I spent a lot of the night talking to the police.
Barry Irvington was my favorite cop when he was looking after me in a paternal way — not so favorite when he felt lonely and thought he needed a girlfriend thirty years younger than himself. Tonight he was red-eyed and rumpled, in a tan suit that belonged in a ’forties movie (one where the emotionally damaged hero washes ashore in the Tropics), his hair damp and finger-combed forward, his breath redolent of cigarettes. He wasn’t pretty and he was all business. Bennell had been a successful Key West businessman. He’d also been part of the political establishment. Right there, two strikes against me.
“He said he was worried about theft,” I repeated.
“Tell me again. Neither you nor the McKenzie woman saw anything?”
“There was a raccoon about eleven o’clock,” I reminded him. “But nobody out to steal an airplane.”
He was my friend, but he was also a cop. Five minutes into the interview, he’d checked my gun to see if it had been fired. It hadn’t been, not since I’d taken it out to the range two months ago, to satisfy myself I hadn’t forgotten everything Dad taught me about shooting. If you’re going to do security gigs in Florida, where everyone who isn’t officially a criminal or insane can get a carry permit, it’s stupid to work unarmed. I was carrying a Beretta .380 autoloader, which was a little too big for my hand.
Barry and I had already gone through the stuff about how Hub had acted: not like he expected someone to shoot him. Babe was getting the third degree, or at least a cup of coffee, in another detective’s car.
There was a tap at the window, and the deputy chief of police climbed into the backseat. Curtis LeMoye gave me a sour look. He hadn’t liked my father, and he saw no reason to like me.
“Why don’t you have her in handcuffs?” he grumbled.
Barry replied, “If she tries to escape, we can shoot her.”
LeMoye looked away from me. “We’re going to wrap this up, Irvington. I’ll leave a couple of guys on the scene. Zelda’s done with the body. Thinks he took two straight in the ticker, two in the head.”
He got back out into the rain. Barry gave Babe and me a ride back to her pickup truck at the flying club. As she cranked up the engine, she said, “Meggie, did Bennell pay you anything on account?” I had promised her a hundred dollars for the evening.
“No, sorry.”
“You’re not much of a businesswoman. Always get something on account.” She was in her mid forties, chesty as a sailing ship, blond as a swamp fire, opinionated as anyone’s mother. In upstate New York, she had been a sheriff’s deputy or a hooker, depending on how she felt when she told her story.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I said.
“I don’t see how,” Babe responded, and drove off.
Barry took me farther down the Atlantic side of the island to Hawkes’ Marina, where the masts of my father’s ten-meter fiberglass sailboat slashed the smudgy predawn. Boats can’t have premonitions, but this one looked as if it knew it had reached its last berth. Everything about it leaked. My father had been a serious drinker who hadn’t had time for boat maintenance. If the bilge pump ever died, the decks would be awash in twenty-four hours.
Dad hadn’t been great at family upkeep, either. My mother and I had been living in Connecticut when a cop called and asked if we were related to the Daniel Trevor who had been lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Sailing alone, sixty-eight years old, probably with a celebratory glass of something in hand, toasting the windy sunset, toasting the frigate birds, stumbling on a coiled rope — something like that, dying stupid. A fisherman who came across the drifting boat towed it back to Key West. He refused a salvage claim because he thought Danny Trevor had been a hero. If you hit the right bars in the Lower Keys, CIA pensioners lean on their elbows recalling glory days on the Mosquito Coast. Or they try to remember the name of the guard who wired them up at Isla de Pinos. Like high school jocks reliving the big game of ’68.
Mom wasn’t interested in a half-sunk boat. I was four months out of college with no job in sight, so I came down to clear up the estate. Initially I thought there was nothing but the old ketch, which he called KeyHole, thinking it was funny painting a secret code word on the transom. Later I found the compartment in the ceiling, where he had stowed two handguns, one Ithaca side-by-side with jammed works, a couple of gray blocks of something that I knew, having never seen it before, was plastic explosive, and a fully automatic rifle without serial numbers. Altogether, enough to get me twenty years just for being an heir. What had he been planning?