A Deep Deceit (36 page)

We arrived at Key West around midday. Mariette manoeuvred the car efficiently enough through the narrow streets of the island that forms the furthermost tip of America and even managed to find a parking space not far from the centrally positioned Artists House.

The man in charge, Jim, bade us welcome and showed us to a room, which I thought was stunningly beautiful. It had once been Eugene Otto's studio. The furniture was old and solid. I had never been in so beautiful a room. Mariette and I were both bowled over.

Even the house cat, Boots, was a stunner: big, black and sleek.

I mentioned Carl's name to Jim, his real name, Harry Mendleson.

Jim looked blank. ‘We've only had the house a couple of years,' he said, when I told him how Carl had been brought up in Key West and had spent many hours in the very studio room we were renting watching Gene Otto paint. ‘I'll ask around. There's sure to be somebody who knows.'

That evening we walked down to Mallory Dock in time for the sunset. We ordered margaritas out on the pier and sat on high stools gazing west. The waiters and waitresses wore big smiles that said ‘Please tip me', and kept wishing everyone a nice day. There was a carnival atmosphere. It was one of the perfect sunsets the island is famous for. The sun was a blazing amber ball when it sank into the sea and everybody cheered. I fell very silent. It was exactly the way Carl had described it to me and precisely how I had imagined it. Except for one thing. Carl was not there with me.

I drank in the atmosphere and made myself concentrate. Could he be here somewhere, drinking in a bar, walking along the beach, just a stone's throw away from me?

‘Birds come home to roost . . . people always want to go back, they can't stop themselves.' DC Carter's words haunted me. I knew by then that nobody much had a very high opinion of the man or his ability as a detective, but his theory was convincing and, as he had told me, based on long experience.

We walked back up Duval Street taking in the sights and found a rather good hamburger joint where we gorged ourselves on burgers and fries. On the way back to the Artists House we called at a couple of bars. Everywhere we went I asked after Harry Mendleson but drew a blank. I suppose it wasn't surprising. As far as I knew he had left Key West more than twenty years previously, had only rarely returned and had left America a good fifteen years ago. The Key is inclined to have a transient population. People come there to work in the tourist industry or just bum about for a time before relaunching themselves into real life – and nothing much about Key West was very real, I was already beginning to discover.

There must be some people in Key West who had lived there all their lives and maybe generations of their families before them, but on that first night we never came close to finding any. Maybe they had more sense than to hang out in the bars of Duval Street.

In the morning when we wandered into the kitchen at the Artists House where Jim was serving a casual buffet breakfast, he had encouraging news. ‘Frank Harvey,' he said. ‘That's who you want to speak to, apparently. He's a retired doctor. Lived here all his life and treated half the town. You'll find him in Ezra's bar out by the southernmost point almost every night, they say.'

‘Who told you? Was it someone who knew Carl . . . I mean Harry.'

‘I don't think so,' said Jim. ‘I was just told Frank Harvey is the man who definitely knew him, knew the family. There's a story . . .'

He paused.

‘Go on,' I coaxed.

Jim looked uncertain. ‘No,' he said eventually. ‘You should get it from the horse's mouth, I reckon.'

Frank Harvey looked more like a retired farmer than a doctor. And one who had led a pretty hard life at that. He was very tall and thin, and had a weathered, leathery brown face, framed by wisps of white hair, from which shone the brightest of blue eyes. It was difficult to guess his age but I thought he must be well over seventy.

He had not been difficult to find. The barman pointed him out at once. He was sitting on a bar stool with a bottle of beer and a newspaper in front of him.

I introduced myself as Suzanne Adams. He put down his bottle of beer and peered at me curiously.

‘Would you like another?' I enquired.

He nodded. ‘English?'

I confirmed that both Mariette and I were.

‘Where ya from?'

I told him St Ives. He asked where that was.

‘Cornwall.'

‘Anywhere near a place called Penzance?'

‘About seven miles.'

He nodded, removed the pair of heavy framed spectacles he was wearing. ‘Can't see to read without these danged things on but can't see beyond a yard when I got 'em on either.' He stopped abruptly. ‘I should have known it,' he murmured.

‘Known what?' I asked.

‘No, you first.'

‘I'm looking for someone,' I said. ‘His name's Harry Mendleson . . . I think you knew him once.'

Frank Harvey nodded, almost as if this was what he had expected to hear. ‘So you're Suzanne,' he murmured, still staring at me. ‘Why isn't he with you?'

I was startled. ‘What do you mean?' I asked.

Frank Harvey took a long pull at the neck of his beer bottle. ‘I had a letter from him a few weeks back, first thing I've heard in fifteen years. Said he wanted to get in touch again, maybe wanted to come back here. And there was someone he wanted to bring, someone he loved, someone called Suzanne . . .'

My heart lurched. I hadn't expected anything like this, not so soon, anyway, and with so little detective work. Thank you, DC Carter, I said to myself, you
were
right. Maybe, just maybe, Carl was actually here in Key West. ‘But you haven't seen him? Or have you? Have you seen him, Doctor Harvey? Please tell me.' I was falling over my words.

The old man was too slow for me. ‘Not in fifteen years.' he said. ‘Not since it all happened and he went away. He telephoned me then, from Miami airport, to say goodbye. Then I never heard a thing, not until this letter. I was fond of Harry . . .'

‘I have to find him,' I blurted out. ‘He's gone missing. I-I don't think he's well. Can you tell me anything that might help me find him.'

The doctor seemed to consider my words carefully. But he did not speak.

I realised I had no choice if I was going to get him to trust me, so I filled the silence by telling him, as briefly as I thought I could get away with, about how I had met Carl, about Robert's death, about how Carl came to be charged with abduction and how, finally, he had escaped from the court jail in Penzance.

Frank Harvey looked sad but not all that surprised. ‘Still running, then,' he murmured. He leaned closer to me. ‘The years you were together, were they good years?'

‘Well, yes, mostly, sort of . . .' I mumbled.

‘Mostly, sort of,' he repeated. ‘That sounds like Harry. Don't suppose he ever let you out of his sight, did he?'

I had to agree that was so, more or less. But I was somehow instantly defensive. ‘I know what happened in Key Largo. I know why he had to leave the States. We've been to Largo, talked to Claire and to the policeman, Theodore Grant, who investigated the case. But I am convinced there must be something more that they weren't telling me.'

‘Are you indeed? Well, you might be right, young lady. I don't suppose either of them told you that Claire Mendleson's affair was with Theodore Grant and that he was Harry's closest friend, did they?'

I turned to Mariette. ‘There, I knew there was more. No wonder Carl, I mean Harry, went off the rails.'

Mariette didn't look impressed. ‘If every man whose wife had an affair with his best friend started locking her up there'd be a lot fewer people walking the streets, that's for sure,' she said.

I frowned at her. But Frank Harvey had started to talk again. He sounded tired. ‘Claire once complained to me that Harry used to call up the stores when she went shopping to check she was where she was supposed to be. Couldn't have been easy for a woman like that. Maybe you can't blame her for turning against him.' He sighed deeply. ‘Harry was always off the rails, I guess, Suzanne. I was fond of him, still am. He's not a bad man, is Harry. Too much history, that's all . . .'

I waited expectantly.

Frank Harvey was staring into my eyes. ‘You don't know do you?'

‘Know what?'

What happened here in Key West when Harry was just a teenager, the baggage he's always had to carry with him?'

He started talking then about the old days, about Carl's father, Billy Mendleson and how he had never had the talent as a painter that he thought he had and how he had taken to drowning his sorrows in drink and drugs. ‘Bit like we're all inclined to do in Key West,' the doctor muttered ruefully, lifting his bottle again.

I was almost impatient at first because he talked so slowly and much of this I knew already. Not all of it, though. Not by a long way, as it turned out.

‘Billy took to knocking young Harry's mother around in the end,' he related. ‘She denied it for years, of course. Why do women always try to hide it?'

He shook his head sorrowfully. I didn't know the answer, but I knew he was right. I always used to try to hide what Robert Foster did to me. He had expected me to and I did my best to do so. I began to realise why Carl had been so exceptionally moved when he discovered how badly Robert had beaten me.

Frank Harvey was still speaking. ‘Harry had an awful childhood. His father ignored him most of the time, gave him the odd clout too, I shouldn't wonder, and his mother was too caught up with coping with his father to take much notice of him. They both took solace in drugs. Harry used to try and help his mother; from when he was a little lad, he did what he could. But I never thought she wanted helping.

‘Harry was a bright kid, though, and a much more talented artist than his father was ever going to be. Billy wouldn't admit it, of course. True, though. There was a schoolteacher who encouraged the boy and, right against the odds, Harry won a place at a top art school in Miami.

‘He did well there and he didn't come home for almost a year. Can't say I blamed him. Then he got a call from his mother begging him to come back and talk to his father. The beatings were getting worse, that was the truth of it, but she told Harry she wanted his help to get his father off the drugs, to get him to seek help.

‘Harry came home all right. But he took one look at his father and saw an even more hopeless case than he remembered. He told his mother she had to leave. Harry was still only eighteen, but he'd had to grow up fast. He wanted his mother to go back to Miami with him. He was selling paintings and he had a grant. He had a two-roomed flat and they'd manage, he told her. She'd always hung on to Billy like a limpet in spite of everything, but she agreed in the end. Harry wanted them to take off without telling anyone, but Jeana said she had to tell Billy. Couldn't just leave him. Couldn't live with herself if she did that.

‘She sent Harry out. Said she wanted to tackle Billy alone. Harry walked the streets, had a beer or two, stayed away like his mother asked him for two hours or more before he returned to their little house out the back of town.'

Frank Harvey paused and took an even longer drag of his beer. He might start off slowly, but he was a grand story-teller. If he was deliberately trying to build up dramatic effect then he succeeded admirably, and the finale to his tale was no anticlimax. ‘Everything was quiet. Harry assumed his father had taken off on a bar crawl, or had simply drugged himself to oblivion. The kitchen door was unlocked and he stepped inside. There were no lights on. He slid on something slippery. He fumbled for the light switch and turned it on.

‘His mother was lying on the floor at his feet in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut and her head very nearly severed from her body.

‘Behind her in the open doorway Harry could see a pair of feet and legs dangling. Later, much later, he said he knew what he was going to see before he got there. His father had hanged himself from the banisters.'

I don't know what I had expected. Nothing like this. I gripped the edge of the bar so tightly that my fingertips turned white.

I heard Mariette say, ‘Oh, my God!'

Frank Harvey was watching me closely. ‘Do you want me to go on?' he asked evenly.

I nodded. It was all I could manage.

He began to speak again. ‘At the time, Harry didn't have anything to say. I was the police doctor then, as well as being the family doctor. It was some crime scene, I can tell you. And young Harry just couldn't find any words.

‘In fact, the boy went into severe shock. He didn't speak for three months. He blamed himself, you see, always blamed himself for not making his mother run off with him.' Frank Harvey sighed deeply. ‘Way I see it, young Harry's been running from something or other ever since.'

Twenty

Carl had never told me any of it. I found that hard to take. In a peculiar way I felt a certain sense of guilt, too. I had always been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own past. Maybe it was because of this that Carl had never felt he could confide in me.

It was a truly horrific story and explained so much about Carl. I dreaded to think what he must have gone through when he found Robert lying in a pool of blood – exactly the way he had found his own mother. Then there was his daughter's horrific death, in an accident for which he was responsible.

I bought Frank Harvey another beer and he carried on with the story.

It seemed that Doctor Harvey was actually a qualified clinical psychiatrist but he just hadn't been cut out for a big-time specialisation. ‘Too much Key West in my blood,' he said with a chuckle rasping hoarse from the effects of years of cigarette smoking, I reckoned. He accepted a bourbon chaser, lit up another Marlboro, passed one to Mariette, coughed some more and carried on talking, telling us how something unfightable had drawn him back to practise general medicine in his home town.