Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective (28 page)

“What’s wrong?”

Tommy glanced at Tree. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Tommy.”

“Why does anything have to be wrong?”

“You’re being too nice. You’re not asking questions. You’re not tweeting. You’re not on Facebook. You haven’t videoed me. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been downsized, okay?” His Adam’s Apple moved faster.

“Downsized?”

“Yeah, downsized. Let go. Whatever you want to call it. I’m out of a job.”

“Why? What happened?”

“They’re ‘restructuring,’ they said. They’ve got to make cuts. Necessary to keep the business viable. I’m the last man in so I’m first out.”

“But you’ve done such a good job for them.”

“They don’t care. What do they care?”

Tommy lowered his head. Tree didn’t know what to do except wrap his arm around him. He sank against Tree’s shoulder, knocking off his Ray-Bans. Tree was conscious of sitting in a parking lot adjacent to Lighthouse Beach holding an unemployed newspaper reporter. He reached down and picked the sunglasses off the floor. “You’ve got two eyes.”

Tommy looked at him. “What?”

“You said you wear sunglasses because you’ve only got one eye. You’ve got two.”

“Oh.”

Tree handed him the Ray-Bans. Tommy said, “I’ve got a funny eye.”

“What’s funny about it?”

“It wanders. I look straight at you, I’m not actually looking straight at you.”

Tommy demonstrated. Tree said, “You look all right to me.”

“It’s not right.”

“I think you’re going to do fine, Tommy.”

Tommy cleared his throat and replaced the Ray-Bans. “You better get out of here, Mr. Callister. You’ll be late.”

“What are your plans?”

“Stay with my folks in Tampa till I get back on my feet. That’ll be okay, I guess. My father and I, we don’t get along so that makes things kind of tense. But it’ll be all right. It’ll be fine.”

“Listen, keep in touch. I’m not sure I can do anything, but I’ll make a couple of phone calls, see what’s around.”

“That would be great, Mr. Callister. I sure will stay in touch, don’t you worry about that.”

Tree groaned inwardly.

____

A beach sky, blue and cloudless, brought out the tourists. Tree marveled at the numbers of people baking beneath the unrelenting sun. That lucky old sun could kill you, could it not? But then so could pump-action shotguns and women with Beretta Tomcats.

Marcello, on his knees, maneuvered a big yellow sand shovel near the lapping surf. Freddie, spectacular in her orange one-piece, sat not far away, reading the one love letter Tree ever received. The duck’s beak of a baseball cap shaded her face. The sunglasses made her look like Jackie Onassis. He knelt and kissed her mouth. Marcello beamed happily at him and then went back to his sand shovel.

“How did it go?” Freddie folded the letter, and removed her glasses.

“It went fine,” he said.

She handed him the letter. “Written by a woman in love.”

“I don’t think so,” Tree said.

“I do. Women know about these things. She was in love with you.”

“No, Freddie, you’re in love with me. That comes out in a hundred different small but telling ways every single day. We’re in love with each other. We don’t write letters and then go off with other people. It’s straight and true and simple. This—” He waved the letter. “This is so many words on paper. They don’t mean anything unless you back them up, and Savannah didn’t do that. You know what? She didn’t even remember writing it.”

“Marcello says he would like to go to Savannah’s funeral or whatever kind of service they’re holding for her.”

“I’ve talked to the police,” Tree said. “They’ve been in touch with Savannah’s parents in Chicago. They’re going to let me know what they decide. I suspect FBI agent Sean Lazenby will want to be there, too.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Pretty broken up, and in trouble with his bosses for taking unauthorized leave so he could come here with Savannah. Crazy, but he was in love with her, like everyone else.”

“You included?”

“Whatever it was with her was a long time ago. Lost to the mists of time.”

“Lost to the mists of time? Good grief.”

“The best I can do on short notice.”

Marcello came over. Tree said, “Mrs. Traven can’t believe you want to help her niece. She’s thrilled and very thankful.”

“What’s her name?”

“The niece? Hillary. Her name is Hillary. She’s about the same age as you.”

“As long as they don’t hurt me,” he said.

“They won’t hurt you. No one’s ever going to hurt you again.” The sentence came out with a lot more emotion than he intended.

Freddie laid her hand on his arm gently. “We said we’d meet them at two thirty.”

“Can’t we stay here a little longer?” A pleading note in Marcello’s voice.

“We’ll do this again very soon,” Freddie said. “But right now we want you to meet the people who are going to take care of you.”

“All right,” Marcello said.

“Incidentally,” Tree said to Freddie. “The Ray Man wants me to go fishing with him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He was in the parking lot at the office.”

“He’s crazy.”

“He also wants you back at work.”

“You’re not going fishing with him, are you?”

“He wasn’t in Vietnam.”

“He wasn’t?”

“He ran a supply chain in the Philippines.”

“He fed people?”

“They couldn’t have fought the war without him.”

They collected towels and sunscreen and flip-flops and Marcello’s sun hat and his sand shovel, packed everything up and started off the beach.

“Are you going back to work?” Tree asked.

“Are you going fishing?”

They looked at each other and laughed. Marcello reached up and took Tree’s hand. Tree found himself swallowing hard. Freddie slipped beside him and leaned against him as they walked, squeezing his arm.

“The detective from Sanibel Sunset Detective,” she murmured.

“What about him?”

“He’s a cry-baby.”

“What a thing to say to a hardbitten hombre like myself. I’ve been shot, you know.”

“Why do I suspect I’m never going to hear the end of this,” she said.

____

They drove across the causeway off the island, along Summerlin Road to McGregor Boulevard until they turned onto Cypress Lake Drive and found the address they were looking for—a pleasant one-story stucco house with a red tile roof. It was occupied by an equally pleasant-looking couple, Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Lake, a forty-something black man and his wife with a shy daughter, Carmine, age eleven. She hugged against her mother until ordered to take Marcello inside and show him his bedroom.

Immediately, she darted forward and grabbed Marcello’s hand, grinning broadly. “Come on,” she said, pulling him toward the house.

They got as far as the stoop. Marcello stopped and broke free of Carmine’s hand and ran back to embrace Tree with all his might. The tears rolled freely down Tree’s cheeks as he hugged Marcello. Freddie brushed away her own tears.

Then Marcello was gone, following Carmine into the house. Tree clumsily cleared his throat. Freddie extracted more promises from the Lakes. They had spent their lives raising foster children, they said. They weren’t perfect but they were pretty darned good. They knew what Marcello had been through.

Tree and Freddie walked hand in hand back to their car. They got inside, Freddie behind the wheel, and they sat there until the Lakes disappeared inside and their world altered perceptibly because it no longer contained Marcello. He was, finally, safe.

Neither of them spoke on the drive home, enjoying the silence and the closeness of each other. They were back on the causeway, its sweep captured in the afternoon sunlight glinting on the choppy tips of the waves in San Carlos Pass.

“It’s funny,” Tree finally said. “I see the island and I feel like we’re going home.”

“We are going home,” she said. “This is home.”

She glanced over at him. “You okay?”

“Of course I’m okay. I’m a hero or haven’t you read the newspapers?”

“Oh, Lord,” she said.

“I don’t know whether I mentioned it. Did I tell you I’ve been shot?”

A rogue tear tumbled down his cheek.

“What is it, my love?”

“Just now. I was overwhelmed by this terrible feeling of sadness,” he said.

“Because you have to put up with me for the next fifty years?”

“No, because we have passed things that we will never come back to again,” he said. “Because we are closer to the end than we are to the beginning.”

“But we go on anyway,” Freddie said. “On and on together.”

He reached for her hand and she reached for his, and they drove along like that, holding hands, the Florida sun shining over their island, going home.

Acknowledgements

In the late 70s, working as a magazine writer, I went down to Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina, to interview the mystery writer Mickey Spillane. Spillane had created private detective Mike Hammer in the 1950s, setting off something of a firestorm with such hardboiled classics as
I, the Jury
,
My Gun Is Quick
, and
Vengeance is Mine
.

The novels were full of sex and violence, or so my parents thought. I could not be exposed to such things—so, of course, I secretly devoured the paperbacks, reading under the covers by flashlight late at night, enthralled.

I had met Spillane a few years before in Toronto and we got along, so he insisted I stay in his rambling oceanfront house. He was single at the time and had plenty of room. Mickey introduced me to two things that have stuck with me my entire life. He was the first person I knew who had CNN, the new twenty-four hour cable news network, and he kept it on all the time. I thought that was pretty nifty—TV news any time you wanted it.

He also introduced me to catfish at a local restaurant. When he initially suggested it, I was horrified. “Just try it,” he ordered. “I swear you’ll love it.” He was right, and I’ve eaten catfish ever since. Every time I do, I think of Mickey.

After dinner that night, he showed me to the guest bedroom which, as I recall, doubled as the office where he continued to pound out manuscripts—rather incongruously he had just written an adventure novel for young people.

On the desk beside the bed stood the battered typewriter he used to write the original Hammer novels—a single draft written in days, never reread. The walls were filled with blowups of the lurid pocketbook covers that beguiled me almost as much as the books. Hung over the back of the chair beside the bed was a shoulder holster containing a .45 automatic, the same gun Mike Hammer used in the books to pump lead into the broads and hoods who offended his sense of justice. The original Signet paperbacks lined the shelves adjacent to the bed.

I grabbed
I, The Jury
, the first Hammer novel, tucked myself into bed, pulled the covers over my head and began to read, the same way I had as a kid. Here I was in Mickey Spillane’s house, a .45 nearby, cocooned under the covers, once again lost in the rough, tough world of the private detective—childhood fantasy bumping into adult reality to create a certain kind of late night bliss.

I thought about that time with Mickey Spillane a lot as I wrote
The Sanibel Sunset Detective
. Mickey Spillane would not have thought much of Tree Callister, although when you got to know him, Mickey was such a disconcertingly kind and gentle man I doubt he would have said anything. Still, the vibrant memory of my long-ago infatuation with the pulp novels, not only of Spillane, but also of such practitioners of the craft as Richard S. Prather, who wrote the Shell Scott novels, and Brett Halliday, who wrote the Mike Shayne mysteries, were sources of inspiration.

I did not even try to reproduce the sort of hardbitten hero those authors created (inspired, of course, by the much more literary work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler). However, I did want to emulate their no-nonsense storytelling. They got to work each day churning out words, keeping the story moving, working overtime to ensure the reader had no distractions beyond turning the next page.

If I was fortunate enough to come even close to what these masters seemed to achieve with such effortlessness, I have editors Ray Bennett and Alexandra Lenhoff to thank. They saved me from myself any number of times. My wife, Kathy Lenhoff, read the manuscript in its earliest incarnations and again just before it went to press. She inspires me in so many, many ways far beyond these meager literary efforts. Also, my son, Joel Ruddy, John D. MacDonald fan extraordinare, blessed the manuscript, thereby encouraging me to keep going.

In Florida, I received help from everyone I encountered on Sanibel and Captiva Islands, two of the most gloriously beautiful and unusual Florida paradises. Particularly helpful, as always, was my brother, Ric, who not only provided insights into life on the islands, but also corrected the manuscript if my characters veered left when they should have turned right. Any lingering mistakes, however, are mine alone.