The Turtle Mound Murder (11 page)

“And ...” I prodded.

“I guess Attila had had a few drinks. He
leaned over to kiss my hand, but licked my breast instead.” She
giggled. “That man was a real trendsetter. Before the night was
over men were licking women’s boobs left and right. One of the best
parties I ever went to.”

“Which reminds me, I’ve got to call Party
Hearty to see if they have the invitations. Shirley was going to
have a high school student take them around to our neighbors. They
need to get them out. Two days isn’t much notice for a party,
though this is only cocktails. It’s not like a Jim Williams do.”
She turned to go into the house.

The party. I’d forgotten all about it.
“Wait,” I called after her. “What are you going to wear to the
party?”

She replied over her shoulder, wiggling her
fanny. “Something low cut.”

* * *

Every ocean resort has to have a few seafood
restaurants. New Smyrna Beach is no exception. On beachside (the
narrow strip of barrier island sandwiched between the ocean and
Intracoastal Waterway) there are two longstanding favorites:
Norwood’s Fine Seafood and JB’s Fish Camp. The names say it
all.

The first thing visitors see when they hit
the island from the South Causeway Bridge is Norwood’s, a sprawling
stucco and stone structure with a tin roof nestled in a stand of
pines, palms, and oaks. Known for its extensive menu and 1,400
varieties of wine, Norwood’s is almost ways packed with patrons who
drive Buicks, Continentals, Mercedes and SUV’s. Further down
Highway A1A in Bethune Beach, JB’s Fish Camp is perched on Mosquito
Lagoon. It, too, is a sprawling building with a tin roof, though it
is known for its ample selection of beer. The parking lot is
littered with oyster shells (whole) and typically full of
motorcycles, pickup trucks, boat trailers and utility vans.

We decided on JB’s for dinner. Penny Sue
wanted to go back to The Riverview (wonder why?), but Ruthie and I
convinced her it would look like she was chasing Lyndon and
desperate to boot. Desperate was the word that finally won her
over. Thank goodness. I, for one, had enjoyed about all the rich
food I could stand for a while. Plain, simple fare; that’s what my
system needed.

And I got it. JB’s decor was old time,
fish-camp rustic. We sat at a picnic table covered in Kraft paper
with a roll of paper towels in lieu of napkins. Tartar sauce,
ketchup, and cocktail sauce in plastic squirt bottles rounded out
the traditional setup of salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Our wine was
served in plastic cups. Greasy fingerprints dotted the menus.

“Food must be good,” Penny Sue observed.

“How can you tell?”

She held up her menu that was mottled with
thumb prints and streaks of a brown substance, probably cocktail
sauce. “The person who had this was really chowing down. Wonder
what they had.”

“Probably seafood,” I said dryly. Penny Sue
curled her lip in a mock sneer.

The meal would have been perfect except for
two inebriated rednecks at the next table who kept trying to flirt.
One had dark curly hair pulled back in a pony tail, the other had
stringy blonde hair, brown teeth and needed a bath in the worst
way.

“Whew, that boy is stinky,” Ruthie said
under her breathe as she scooted as far away from him as
possible.

“The catfish is the best thing on the menu,”
Stinky declared loudly. We all pointedly ordered something
else.

“Where are you girls from? There’s a good
band down at the Breakers. How long y’all staying? Wanna take a
ride on my motorcycle?” There was an endless stream of inane
remarks. We started out responding with clipped, polite statements.
Then, “You look like a girl who loves hush puppies,” that said to
Penny Sue. I was glad she didn’t have her gun. She shot Stinky a
look that would have killed a sober person. That’s when we started
ignoring them all together. But it was hard.

The food was greasy and good. I pressed my
thumb on the Kraft paper when I finished. It left an oily spot in
spite of the fact that I’d already gone through a half dozen paper
towels.

We finished eating and called for the check.
Penny Sue disgustedly counted out two twenties and a ten. “I think
you’d better cut them off,” she whispered to the waitress as we
pushed past.

We made a quick stop in the ladies’ room
(Ruthie absolutely could not pass one without going in) then headed
out the door. The parking lot was packed. Rows had appeared where
none existed before and we paused to get our bearings. Clearly none
of us had had past lives as Indian scouts, because it took a fair
amount of wandering around for us to find the bright yellow
car.

Penny Sue hung a left on A1A/Turtlemound
Road and headed back toward the condo. We were chattering happily
when Penny Sue broke in with a “Crap!”

“I’ve got two motorcycles right on my
bumper,” she said angrily. “People talk about cars following
motorcycles too closely, half of them are just as bad. Idiots. If I
were to suddenly stop those guys wouldn’t have a chance.”

Ruthie was sitting in the front seat and
turned around to look. “One’s pulling out. I think they’re going to
pass.”

“Good,” Penny Sue said. The motorcycle
pulled alongside and stayed there. Penny Sue slowed down, but
rather than dart ahead, the bike held back. “What the—” She glanced
at the bike from the corner of her eye. “Darn. It’s the redneck
with the pony tail from JB’s.”

“The restaurant must have taken your advice
and cut them off,” I said.

“And now they’re ticked off,” Ruthie
added.

Penny Sue tightened her grip on the steering
wheel and set her jaw. The motorcycle traveling abreast of us had
started to drift toward the car. Penny Sue edged over. The cycle
moved closer still. “He’s trying to run us off the road,” Penny Sue
said and floored it. The Mercedes lurched ahead, yet the bike kept
pace. Stinky, on our bumper, pulled alongside, too. They were
hooting and hollering and acting like drunken fools. Our
speedometer crept up to sixty-five.

Then, four bright lights appeared from
gods-knows-where, illuminating the back of the car. I turned around
and squinted to see. It was a pickup truck with spotlights mounted
on the bumper. And, the truck was red! “Oh no, that red truck is
behind us,” I exclaimed.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Ruthie cried nervously.
Then, “Om-m-m. Om-m-m.” The sound bounced around the interior of
the car. Ruthie was chanting.

“What the heck are you doing?” Penny Sue
demanded.

“Setting up a protection field.”

“Tone it down, will you? I need to
think.”

“Let her think, Ruthie. Let her think.” My
heart was racing, pounding in my throat. Turtlemound was a two-lane
road with numerous cross streets. At any moment a car could pull
out and at our velocity—the speedometer was approaching
seventy—we’d all be goners.

Stinky must have thought the same thing. He
pulled in front of us and started to slow down. Pony Tail was still
beside us, and the truck was on our bumper. We were hemmed in; we
had to slow down. “They’re making their move,” Penny Sue said
through gritted teeth. “Hold on.” She pulled the steering wheel
right. I braced for a crash.

“OM-M-M,” Ruthie screeched.

The car skidded across a side street and
into the unpaved lot of a bait shop. Caught off guard, the
motorcycles and truck flew by. A wave of relief swept through me,
then my eyes grew wide. We were headed for the front door of the
store! Spewing a rooster tail of sand, the car pulsed spastically
as the antilock brakes battled to halt our forward progress. I
braced myself for the second time—the glass storefront was coming
up fast. But Penny Sue drove like a stock car pro. She took her
foot off the brake pedal and jerked the steering wheel hard left.
The car did a three-hundred-sixty twirl and stopped dead. Ruthie
squealed.

Before I’d even caught my breath, Penny Sue
had punched the emergency button on the cell phone and was heading
the car back to JB’s. The emergency operator would have the police
meet us there. We parked close to the front door and waited. A few
minutes later, a Volusia County Sheriff’s car showed up. A stocky
officer in his forties ambled over to the Mercedes. Thankfully, he
was not one we’d met before.

Deputy Ted Moore took our statement and
seemed genuinely concerned. “Let me get this straight. The driver
of the red pickup had a fight with the man found murdered one the
day before the body was discovered?”

We nodded.

“You think that same truck was following you
a couple of days ago, and you reported it to Mr. Woodhead.” I
thought I detected a suppressed sneer when he mentioned Woody’s
name, which told me that Woody wasn’t one of his favorites, either.
“The men riding the motorcycles had dinner here tonight and
harassed you. Did you see the driver of the truck in the
restaurant?”

“He may have been there, though we didn’t
see him,” Penny Sue responded. “The place was packed.”

Deputy Moore made a notation, then called
the station to request a back-up. “I’m going to interview the staff
here at JB’s to see if I can get a make on those bikers. They sound
like locals, so there’s a good chance someone knew them. In any
event, they might have paid their bill with a credit card. I’ll
have the other car escort you ladies home, since the guy in the
pickup knows where you live.”

The blood drained from my face. That
possibility had never entered my mind. Judging by Ruthie’s slack
jaw, she hadn’t thought of it either. Penny Sue was stoic, showing
no emotion at all.

Our escort arrived a few minutes later, and
we pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot for the second time.
“So, what do you think?” I asked Penny Sue.

She stared straight ahead. “Deputy Moore’s
kinda cute, and he isn’t wearing a wedding band.”

* * *

We had just
stepped out on the deck
with our morning coffee when the old woman screamed. Penny Sue
almost swallowed the cigarette she was about to light. “Magod,
someone’s hurt.”

There was a moment of indecision where the
three of us stared at one another like wide-eyed fools, each trying
to calculate the danger quotient and decide whether we should
scurry inside and pretend we hadn’t heard anything, or go to
investigate. There was also the problem that each of us knew the
other had heard the scream. While we might get away with feigning
ignorance to outsiders, we couldn’t fake it with ourselves. It was
one of those crazy situations where each knew the others knew, and
the others knew we knew they knew ... So there we stood, stuck in
fear and circular reasoning.

The second howl jolted us into action. We
raced down to the beach where four members of the Turtle Patrol
stood forlorn. The sand was littered with dozens of leathery orbs,
pinkish-tan in color and slightly larger than ping pong balls. The
wreath the group had placed in Rick’s honor the previous day lay
twenty feet away; battered, waterlogged, and half buried in the
sand.

Gerty, the little old lady who’d told us
about the Hate Mongers, was the one doing the wailing. I said a
silent prayer she wouldn’t say anything about the Hussy taking pot
shots.

“They killed Rick, and now this. I told you
they were evil—” Gerty said something else that was garbled by a
sob “—call the media.”

“That’ll only make matters worse, Gerty,”
the older gentleman we’d met the previous day responded. “We’ve
discussed this before. It will alienate the authorities, make them
look bad.”

She swept her hand at the scattered remains
of the turtle nest. A seagull had grasped an egg in its beak and
was shaking it violently, trying to get at the precious little
critter inside. “Make them look bad? What about my babies,
Robert?”

“Some nests simply never make it,” the man
said. “We all know that. This is just one of them.”

Fists clenched, the old woman backed away.
“Look the other way, turn the other cheek, again? Those hoodlums
are slaughtering the turtles, wiping them off the face of the
Earth. Now, they’re coming after us ...”

I held my breath, fearing her next statement
would be about the Gun Moll.

“We’ve got to take a stand. If we don’t,
where will it end?” Gerty planted her feet defiantly.

I exhaled. Safe. For now.

Robert shrugged. He had the presence of a
man who’d been a mid-level executive, who’d seen his share of
conflict and strife, which he’d hoped to escape by coming to
Florida and ministering to turtles. Exercise, sun, doing a good
deed; idyllic, he’d probably thought. Now Gerty was throwing a
wrench in the works. “The news media blows things out of
proportion, we’ve talked about that. We’ve finally found some
allies in government, but they won’t be allies long if we sic
reporters on them. No, Gerty, we’ve got to take the long view,
follow the path of least resistance.”

They glared at each other; two stubborn
septuagenarians, each intent on running the show. I imagined this
wasn’t the first time Gerty and Robert had squared off. The fact
that no one else in the group uttered a word spoke volumes: they
knew better than to get caught between these two.

Ruthie broke the impasse. She dropped to her
knees and scooped up a handful of sand with an egg on top. “Can’t
we put them back?”

“They will never hatch now. The nest was
already moved once, they’ve been exposed too long,” Gerty
replied.

Robert followed Ruthie’s cue. “Maybe not. At
least they’ll have a chance.”

I could tell Gerty was annoyed by Robert’s
opposition, yet couldn’t argue with his logic. She reluctantly
agreed. “Don’t touch them if you can help it.”

We all went into action scooping up the
leathery spheres. I was crawling around on my hands and knees,
shooing birds and gathering eggs, when a big foot appeared out of
nowhere. A big foot, just like Rick’s. To say I almost fainted is
an understatement. My heart did a triple flip followed by a belly
flop.