Dead on the Island (18 page)

There was a Formica-topped counter to the
right of the door. An old wooden-bodied cash register sat on the
counter, and there was a chubby old man standing behind it. He had
thinning gray hair and wore a pair of half-glasses. He was wearing
a white apron that tied behind his back, a khaki-colored shirt, and
matching pants.

There was only one customer in the store, a
stooped old lady wearing a long skirt and a shawl. Her skirt was so
long that I couldn't see her feet. She was standing at one of the
shelves that lined the walls, looking very carefully at a can of
something or other. She held the can so close to her face that her
nose was nearly touching it. I wondered why the man in the apron
didn't get some better lighting, or at least let her borrow his
glasses.

I stood in the doorway for a second or two,
and then walked to the counter.

"Can I help you?" the man said. His voice
was firm and young; it didn't go with the gray hair and the
wrinkles that I could now see on his face.

"I'm looking for someone," I said. "I heard
he comes in here now and then."

"And who might that be?"

I described the man with whom I'd had the
fight. The old man listened politely, meanwhile keeping a sharp eye
on the old woman in the shawl.

"I think I've seen a man like that," he said
when I finished. "He hasn't been in for a few days, though."

"What does he buy?"

"A little of everything. He's been a good
customer. Buys a big bill every time he comes in. I hope he's not
in some kind of trouble."

"No," I said. "He just owes me money."

"Well, he ought to be able to pay you. Buys
a big bill, like I said, and he always pays in cash.

"Thanks," I said, and went back outside. If
the guy was shopping there, he must be staying close by. And if he
was buying a lot, he was probably buying for more people that just
himself. Not that he wasn't perfectly capable of eating quite a
bit, a man his size.

I strolled around the neighborhood of mostly
run-down houses. There were some beautiful old homes on the Island,
but there were a lot of the other kind, too. Unpainted frames,
dilapidated fences, yards beaten down to the bare dirt or choked
with weeds and brush. It didn't take long to find the one I was
looking for, the one with the sign in front that said ROOMS FOR
RENT.

I walked up on the sagging porch and rapped
on the door. In a minute or so it was opened by a woman wearing a
dress that sagged over her body like a limp tent. Her face was
brown and wrinkled, and her dark hair was streaked with gray.

"Joo wan' a room?" she said in a thick
Hispanic accent.

"Looking for a friend." I described the man
again.

She thought about it, but she decided that I
wasn't posing any kind of threat. "He stay here, si. But no
longer." She started to close the door.

"Wait!" I said. "When did he leave?"

She looked at me again. "A day. Two days."
She moved the door.

I grabbed the edge of the door and held it.
"Did he say where he was going?"

"No. Ees not my business. He pay, he go. Say
nothing."

I released the door and watched it close.
The woman was probably telling the truth. These weren't the kind of
fellows to leave a forwarding address with the landlady. I stood on
the porch and looked around. I was hardly more than six blocks from
Dino's house. They must have been watching him all the time.

I walked back to the grocery store. There
didn't seem to be much else I could do there, so I got in the car
and drove away.

~ * ~

It was a pleasant day, not sunny, but mild.
I drove on down to The Strand, where business still wasn't booming.
There were a few tourists about, but not the numbers that the
merchants really wanted to see. I parked the car and walked to the
shop where Vicky worked. I noticed that the place next door, where
Terry Shelton had been killed, was locked up. A blue-bordered sign
hanging on one of the glass doors read CLOSED.

Vicky was behind the counter of the soap
store, but she wasn't wearing her pink work-out suit. Today's was
blue. Her hair was caught up in a ponytail. I was surprised at how
glad I was to see her. I'd hardly thought of women in the year I'd
been looking for Jan.

She looked up when I walked in the door, and
if I was any judge of smiles she was glad to see me, too.

"When's lunch hour?" I said.

She looked at her watch, a white plastic
case on a white plastic band. "Any minute now. Why?"

"I thought we might go over to Hill's and
eat. Can you get away?"

"I haven't sold any soap all week. Sure I
can get away. But I really should wait until the official lunch
hour."

"So wait. I'll wait with you.” There was a
wicker chair in a front corner of the shop near the window. I went
and sat in it. "I'll be all right if I'm not overcome by the
perfume." The smell of all that soap was powerful. I wondered if
Vicky had ever gotten used to it.

"Well, it won't be long," she said. "You can
stand it."

"Yeah," I said. "I'm a tough guy."

She puttered around the shop for a while,
reaching in the counter to arrange soap that looked arranged
already. Then she said, "I've been thinking about your sister."

"In what way?" I said.

"Oh, I just wondered if she'd ever been in
the shop, if maybe I'd ever seen her." She walked around the
counter and came to stand by the window. "It must really hurt, not
knowing."

"Not as much now," I said. "It did at first.
A lot."

"You blamed yourself," she said. It was just
a statement, flat, unemotional. There wasn't any doubt in it.

"You could tell that?"

"I could tell. Just by the way you talked
about it." She looked down at me. "But you weren't to blame at
all."

"I know that," I said. "It just took me a
long time to admit it."

She smiled. "I'm glad you admitted it,
then."

"This other case helped."

"Terry?"

"Yeah."

A woman came in then and actually bought a
few bars of soap. When I heard Vicky tell her how much she owed, I
thought I knew why soap hadn't been selling so well.

Vicky rang up the sale, and then came back
over to stand by my chair. "The shop next door's been closed ever
since Terry was killed."

"I saw the sign," I said.

"Have you found out anything yet about who
did it?"

"No," I said. "I actually haven't found out
much of anything."

She didn't press me, which was just as well.
I couldn't have told her any more. After a few minutes we walked
over to Hill's to eat.

This Hill's wasn't the Original Hill's,
which had been on Seawall Boulevard. This one was located just
across a street and a parking lot from the shop, on Pier 19. The
shrimp fleet was anchored all around, and the air was heavy with a
powerful fishy smell. The mound of oyster shells around the
restaurant may have had something to do with it.

We both had a bowl of gumbo, to which I
added a dollop of Tabasco sauce. Vicky didn't. We made small talk,
and then I thought to ask if the man I'd been looking for had ever
been around Terry's shop.

"He sounds familiar," Vicky said. "Really
big? Wide shoulders."

"That's the one." I crumpled the cellophane
that I'd finally been able to remove from a package of four
crackers. It crackled in my fingers.

"I think I might have seen him more than
once," she said. "I think he went to the shop a couple of times, at
least. He was a hard man to miss."

"What about the day Terry was killed?"

"I don't think so, but then I didn't see
anyone go in. And somebody must have been there."

"It wasn't me. You know that."

"Yes," she said.

"It makes me wonder, though," I said, "how
the police investigation is coming along."

"They came back to the shop once. Yesterday.
They just asked me if anyone had been by looking for Terry, things
like that."

"You didn't mention me, I hope."

She smiled. "No. I didn't think you'd like
that."

She was right. It sounded as if the police
were just as much in the dark as I was. I wasn't going to help them
out any, not yet. Besides, I didn't know how much good the
description would be to them. It was interesting to know that the
man had been in the shop where Terry had died, but knowing it
didn't prove anything.

I explained my theory about the case to
Vicky as we walked back to the soap store.

"You mean you think she kidnapped herself?"
she said.

"Similar things have happened before. I'm
just trying to figure out how the big guy and Terry come into it."
I hadn't told her the rest of the story, about Dino's attempt to
deliver the money and about Ferguson's murder.

"Maybe they were helping her, giving her a
place to hide," Vicky said.

"That's what I thought, what I still think.
But why was Terry killed? That part of it doesn't fit."

Vicky couldn't figure it any better than I
could. I left her at the store and told her that I would call. I
thought that I'd come to a dead end, so I went to see Dino and tell
him.

"They've called again," Evelyn said when she
opened the door.

There are a few things I like to think I do
well, but waiting is not one of them. I didn't have much choice,
however, since the call had been very clear about the time. Once
again, the small hours of the morning had been chosen, but this
time the place was different. An abandoned warehouse near the
Southern Pacific tracks just off Port Industrial Boulevard, exactly
one mile from the Pelican Island Causeway, at 2:00 a.m.

"I hope you asked how you could trust them,"
I told Dino.

"Damn right, I did. They said they'd made a
mistake, weren't sure that it was really me in the car. One of
their guys got trigger-happy, they said. He won't be there this
time. They said." He was propped up on the bed with fresh white
bandages around him. He didn't really look fit enough to be
delivering a ransom.

"Did they know you'd been hit?" I said.

"They didn't say anything about it, so
neither did I. I'll be there."

"So will I," I said.

"And I will, too," Evelyn said. "I'm
driving."

I didn't try to argue.

That was about twelve hours from the time
the drop was to be made. I had plenty of time to do some planning.
"Are they going to have Sharon with them?"

"So they say," Dino told me. "I don't think
I believe it."

"Me neither," I said. "But then I'm not sure
what to believe about all this anymore. If you don't believe them,
why take the chance?"

"Because they might be telling the
truth."

I didn't say anything. It wasn't my
daughter, and I wasn't the one trying to make up for whatever it
was that I'd left undone, not this time I wasn't. But I knew the
feeling. Somehow, through all of this, I was still trying to make
up for Jan. I pushed that thought out of my head.

"I'm going to be there a long time before
you," I said. "You think they trust
you
?"

"I guess they do. Nothing was said about the
police this time. They must think I'm dumb enough to come alone
again."

"Well, you are. At least as far as they'll
ever find out from seeing the car. Evelyn can drive you. I'll be
arriving a little early."

"How early might that be?"

"As soon as I can get there," I said.

Evelyn went back into the living room, where
she made a bee-line for a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the
little TV set.

"I can't help it," she said, looking at me
as she lit up. Her dark eyes were sunken. "I tried."

I smiled. "I don't blame you. I almost want
one myself."

She held out the pack.

"No thanks." I glanced back at the bedroom.
"What do you think?"

"He can make it. He's tough. That's one
thing I've learned in the last couple of days. When I was trying to
get him in the car? He was bleeding, and I knew he was hurt. I
thought he might be dying. But he never said a thing, except 'Get
us out of here.'"

She didn't have to tell me that Dino was
tough. My knee could testify to that. So could plenty of other
people. Even in high school he was a terror. Everyone hated to
scrimmage against him because he couldn't seem to get the idea that
we were only practicing. He flattened everyone who came his way. No
exceptions. No one could hit him hard enough or often enough to
keep him down. Not for long.

"He's tough, all right," I said.

"I think the only thing that bothers him is
that I don't have a TV in the bedroom," Evelyn said, waving her
left hand at a plume of smoke that lingered in front of her face.
"He makes me watch the soaps and tell him what's going on."

"Move the TV," I said. "I'll help you."

"Maybe tomorrow."

I went to one of the platform rockers and
sat down. "Tell me more about Sharon," I said.

"More? Like what?"

"I don't know, really. Is she strong-minded?
Rebellious?"

Evelyn got an ashtray out of a cabinet in
the kitchen and sat down in the other rocker. "I don't know what
you mean. Or what you're really asking." She stubbed out her
cigarette.

"What I'm really asking is whether you think
your daughter would kidnap herself."

I give her credit. She didn't appear shocked
and didn't try to tell me that I was crazy. She actually thought
about it. "I don't think so," she said finally. "Why?"

"Resentment. I mean, she found out not just
that you were a prostitute"--somehow I couldn't bring myself to use
the word "whore" to her anymore--"but also Dino was her father. One
of the richest men on the Island, and he never said a word to her.
Never acknowledged that she was alive. Not that you were any help.
Your pride, or whatever it was that kept you from asking for
anything, didn't make things any easier."