Not Safe After Dark (28 page)

‘True. But I’m on vacation.’

‘A real gumshoe never rests until he discovers the truth and sees that justice is done.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Where d’you read that, Al? An old
Black Mask
magazine?’

Al looked hurt. ‘I didn’t read it anywhere. I wrote it.’

‘You write private eye stories?’

‘We were talking about Bud Schiller’s murder.’

See what I mean? Evasive. And persistent. I ordered another round of Michelob and offered Al a cigar.

‘Cuban?’ he asked.

‘Uh-huh.’

Al shrugged and took the cigar. ‘What they gonna do, huh? Arrest me for smoking?’

I laughed. ‘Seriously, Al, the cop I talked to said it was an accident. She asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual, then she left.’

‘Had you?’

‘No.’

I wasn’t going to tell Al, but I’d spent the evening sitting out in the lanai smoking a cigar, reading Robertson Davies and working my way through a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I
could hear the singalong in the distance, and I remember thinking there was something absurd about a bunch of adults singing ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘White Christmas’ under the
palms, especially with an asshole like Bud Schiller dressed as Santa leading them along. About nine-thirty, when the singalong ended, the print in my book was too blurred to read any more, and by
ten o’clock or thereabouts, like most people in the Whispering Palms Condominium Estate, I was sawing logs.

‘He’d been drinking,’ I went on. ‘Mary Pasquale, the girl in the office, she told me he was three sheets to the wind. He must have been carrying his piano away after the
party when he tripped near the edge of the pool and pitched in, head first.’

Al just raised his eyebrows.

He had a point. Even as I repeated the official line, something nagged at the back of my mind. As an ex-cop turned PI, I’ve seen enough weird crime scenes in my time, like the guy they
found dead on the subway tracks and couldn’t find his head. But in this case, I had to ask myself two questions: first, wouldn’t Schiller have dropped the piano as he flung his arms out
to protect himself from the fall?

And second, perhaps more to the point, why on God’s earth was Santa’s electric piano
still plugged in
?

‘I’ve noticed you talking to Schiller’s cronies,’ I said to Al quietly, so they wouldn’t overhear. ‘Do you know any of them well enough to think one of them
killed him?’

Al shook his head. ‘Not really. Just casting the nets, you know. Ed Brennan, the red-faced one, he’s into the ponies. We went to the dog track at Naples once. But he’s a sore
loser. Too desperate. And I played golf with Schiller a couple of times a few years back. He cheats. Did you know that?’

I didn’t rate cheating at golf as high on my list of motives for murder, but you never knew. ‘What about the girl?’

Al raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah-hah!
Cherchez la femme
, is it? Her name’s Karen Lee. Kindergarten teacher, I think.’

‘I wish my kindergarten teacher had looked like that.’

‘You’d’ve been too young to appreciate it. Besides, if you’ve got any thoughts in that direction, Jack, forget them. I warn you, she’s strictly an ice
queen.’

I looked at Karen Lee. She was running her finger around the rim of a tall, frosted glass – abstractedly, rather than in any deliberately erotic way, but it still looked sexy as hell. She
sure didn’t look like an ice queen to me.

‘How long has Schiller been coming here?’ I asked.

‘Longer than me, and I’ve been a regular for, what, nine, ten years now.’

‘How did they all hook up with each other?’

‘I don’t know, except they’re all from Canada. Every year Schiller would manage to gather a few luckless characters around him, but, like me, they didn’t usually come
back for more. Ed was the first one who did, about four years ago. The blonde was next, year after, I think, then Mama Cass showed up just last year.’

‘What’s her real name?’

‘Ginny Fraser. Three time loser from Smith’s Falls, far as I can gather. Single mother. Welfare.’

‘How can she afford to come here?’

‘Don’t ask me.’

‘What does Ed do?’

‘Retired. Used to be a school caretaker in Waterloo.’

Kindergarten teacher; welfare case; retired caretaker. Not exactly high-paying jobs. And all Canadian. Still, that didn’t mean much. Half of Canada rents condos in Florida in the winter
– and Canada’s a big country. I looked at them again, trying to read their faces for signs of guilt. Nothing. Karen was still running her finger around her glass rim. Ed was attempting
to tell a joke, the kind, he said loudly, that he ‘just knew old Bud would have appreciated’. Only Ginny was laughing, chins wobbling, tears in her eyes.

I finished my beer, said goodbye to Al and left. When I got back to the condo that evening with a bottle of Chilean wine and a pound of jumbo shrimp for the barbecue, I tried to put Al’s
suggestion of murder out of my mind.

But it wouldn’t go away.

The problem was what, if anything, was I going to do about it? Back home, I’m a licensed private investigator, but down here I’m not even a citizen.

Still, that evening out on the lanai, after the wine and the shrimps, I decided to keep my bourbon intake down. A good night’s sleep and no hangover would be the best bet for whatever
tomorrow might bring.

•

The grass pricked my feet as I walked towards the pool the next morning for my pre-breakfast swim. Already the temperature was in the low seventies and the sky was robin’s
egg blue.

I stood for a moment on the bridge and looked down into the murky water for the huge turtles and catfish. Evenings, just before dark, I’d got in the habit of feeding them chunks of bread.
But there was nobody around this morning.

A couple of hundred yards away, over the swathe of dry grass, the squat, brown condo units were strung out in a circle around the central island, connected to the mainland by a wooden bridge
over the narrow moat. The pool, the office and the tennis courts were all on the island. And that was Whispering Palms. Someone had bought some land in Florida and got very rich.

An old man, fuzz of white body hair against leathery skin, was lying out on a lounge chair catching the early rays. The scent of coconut sun screen mingled with the whiff of chlorine. The pool
was still marked off by yellow police tape.

I noticed that the office door was ajar, and when I popped my head inside, I saw Mary sitting at her desk, staring into space. I like Mary. She’s about twenty-five, an athletic sort of
girl with a swimmer’s upper body and a runner’s thighs. She has a shiny black pony tail and one of those open, friendly faces, the kind you trust on sight.

‘Oh, Mr Erwin. You startled me. You weren’t wanting to use the pool, were you?’

‘I was. But I see it’s still off-limits.’

A frown wrinkled Mary’s smooth, tanned brow. ‘Well, I mean, it’s not on account of the cops or anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . well, I didn’t
think the residents would like it, you know, swimming in a dead man’s water.’ She turned her nose up. ‘So I’ve called maintenance and they’re gonna clean it out and
refill it all fresh. Should be ready by this afternoon. Sorry.’

‘No, you’re right. It’s a good idea,’ I said.

Most people probably
would
be put off by swimming in the same water where an electrocuted Santa Claus had floated around all night alone in the dark, but it didn’t bother me much. I
had seen death close up more times than I cared to remember. Besides, people swam in the ocean all the time and thousands have died there over the centuries.

‘Mary,’ I asked, ‘do you happen to know who the last people to see Mr Schiller alive were?’

‘His friends. Mr Brennan, Miss Lee and Miss Fraser. They said he was fine when they left.’

Of course. The ubiquitous trio.

Mary shook her head. ‘Never could understand what Miss Lee saw in that group, pretty girl like her.’

So I was vindicated for thinking exactly the same thing yesterday. And if a young woman like Mary could think it too, it couldn’t be either ageist or sexist, could it?

‘Mind if I ask
you
something?’ Mary said with a frown.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Mr Schiller was a Canadian citizen, right?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘Well, I was worried, you know, like his relatives might come down and make some sort of lawsuit. What do you think?’

Aha, the great American paranoia raises its ugly head: lawsuits. ‘I’m no legal expert,’ I said.

‘You hear about things like that all the time, don’t you? I mean, they could sue for millions. I could be liable. It would ruin me.’ She laughed. ‘Even if they sued for
hundreds it would bankrupt me. I could lose my job. I need this job, Mr Erwin. I need the money to go back to school.’

I smiled as reassuringly as I could and told her I didn’t think that would happen. We didn’t even know if Schiller had any next of kin, for a start. And she couldn’t be
responsible for his behaviour when he was drunk.

‘But the cops said he must have tripped over that crack in the tiles.’

‘What crack?’

‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

We went outside. The old guy in the lounge chair was still working on his skin cancer. Near the side of the pool, Mary pointed out the crack. It didn’t look like much to me. I put my foot
in front of it and slid forward slowly. My big toe slipped right over the crack and the rest of my foot followed. I could hardly even feel the rough edge of the tile. ‘It’s hardly
enough to trip over,’ I said to Mary.

‘He was wearing flip-flops.’

‘Santa Claus was wearing flip-flops?’

She nodded.

‘I suppose that might make a difference. Even so . . . It’s still a long way from the water. Maybe six feet. Schiller was a little guy, only around five-four, wasn’t
he?’

‘Yeah. I thought about that, too. But he must have been walking fast, or running, then he tripped and skidded in. Those tiles can get pretty slippery, especially if they’re
wet.’

‘But wouldn’t the piano just rip out of the socket?’

Mary shrugged. ‘It was one of those ultra-light things,’ she said. ‘And it had a long cord.’

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why the hell Santa Claus should be running
towards
the swimming pool in the dark with a live electric piano in his arms, no matter how tight he was
or how light the piano.

A heron landed by the side of the moat. Just for a moment, I felt a slight shiver run up my spine to the hairs at the back of my neck. It was a sign I recognized. I was being watched. And not by
the heron or the sunbather.

Mary turned and walked back to the office, sandals clip-clopping against the tiles. I followed her, admiring the way her thigh muscles rippled with each step. I felt strangely detached, though;
I could admire the sculpted, athletic beauty of her body, but I didn’t feel attracted to her sexually. But, then, it had been a long time since I
had
been attracted to anyone sexually,
except maybe Karen Lee.

Mary sat down at her desk again.

‘Look,’ I said, leaning forward and resting my hands on the warm wood, ‘I know this might sound strange to you, but I’d like you to do me a favour without telling anyone
or asking too many questions. Do you think you could do that?’

Mary nodded slowly, tentatively. ‘Depends,’ she said, ‘on what it is.’

•

When I got back to the condo, it was time for breakfast, but without the swim, my appetite wasn’t up to much. I put on a pot of coffee, drank a glass of orange juice and
ate a bowl of high-fibre bran. The healthy life.

Usually I took my second cup out to the lanai and worked on one of the cryptics from the
Sunday Times
book of crosswords. That was one thing always annoyed me about American newspapers:
you couldn’t find a cryptic in any of them I’d seen. This morning, though, I took the two sheets of paper that Mary had printed out for me.

OK, so Schiller was alone at the pool after the sing-along, or so Ed, Karen and Ginny said. Anyone could have gone there in the dark, killed him and tried to make it look like an accident. And
at least three people knew he was there: Ed, Karen and Ginny. Were they telling the truth?

There was some risk – there always is with murder – but it was minimal. Most of the residents are elderly and they’re usually in bed by ten. This isn’t like some of the
places where you get kids drinking all night and skinny-dipping; there are no kids at Whispering Palms.

First, I looked over the list of condo owners I had persuaded Mary to print for me.

Schiller’s unit was owned on paper by Gardiner Holdings, registered in Grand Cayman Island. If that didn’t set alarm bells ringing in an old gumshoe’s mind, what would? But I
couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant.

Ginny Fraser’s unit was a timeshare, though Ginny herself wasn’t listed as owning any time.

Ed Brennan’s unit was registered to a Dr Joseph Brady in Waterloo, Canada, and Karen Lee’s to a travel agency called
EscapeItAll
, based in Sarasota.

One way or another, these four had all ended up at Whispering Palms, Fort Myers, Florida, and I was damned if I could see any reason other than pure chance.

So which one of them did it? And why? Or was it someone else?

I pushed my glasses back up the bridge of my nose and reached for the telephone. Being a private investigator from Toronto has
some
advantages in Florida.

•

When I’d finished on the phone I felt the need to go out for a drive. Not far. Maybe over the skyway to Sanibel and Captiva. Lunch at the Mucky Duck. Seafood and Harp
lager. After all, I was on vacation, whatever Al said about gumshoes and the search for truth and justice.

But when I walked out to the car, I saw Karen Lee bent over the front tyre of her red Honda rental just a few parking spots down, white cotton shorts stretched taut over her ass.

I stood and admired the view for a while then walked towards her and asked if she could use any help. Why not? She could only tell me to get lost, that she was perfectly capable of fixing the
tyre herself. Or she could accept my offer graciously.