Authors: H. Terrell Griffin
The loneliest people in the world are the old folks, widows and widowers, who frequent the piano bars of the Gulf coast, looking for friendship. They must wax a little nostalgic at the sight of older couples who have escaped the grim reaper, having a good time in the same bars. They all sing along with the piano player, and she knows most of them because they are the regulars. Sometimes, one of the oldsters will get up and sing a solo. Some of them are surprisingly good; professional entertainers in their other lives in Chicago or Indianapolis or Cincinnati.
I was sitting alone at a table in a bar in a restaurant on Anna Maria Island. The chairs arranged around the piano bar were full of senior citizens, year round residents who were coming out now that the snowbirds had gone home. I knew some of them from previous encounters, and they would nod or wave in my direction as one left and another took the place at the piano bar. Most of them lived off their social security checks in the trailer parks that lined Cortez Road just across the bridge on the mainland. Pearl, the still sexy fifty year old piano player, who could belt out a tune equal to any chanteuse in the world, would call a name and gently tease the oldster who had just arrived, and then break into the favorite song of the new arrival. They ate it up. This was a connection, however tenuous, to other people. Someone knew their names, and cared enough to remember the songs they always requested. The song took them to a happier time, maybe to a young lover when they were all young and had a future.
I was feeling a little sorry for myself, as I do from time to time. For most of my life the present was the greatest time in which to live, but the future always held something better. I had recently come to realize that the best times in my life were past, and while the present is good, it will not change a whole lot. The future was the present, and it would slowly get worse, until I was one of these lonely seniors looking for companionship. Not a happy thought. Maybe this early retirement was not all it was cracked up to be. Can one actually get tired of fishing?
I was mostly concerned about Logan’s future. I had been more positive with him than I actually felt. The very fact that Connie’s body was found in his condo would make Logan a prime suspect. I didn’t think Logan did it. He was by nature a gentle man who had seen all the killing he needed in Viet Nam.
Logan had slept all day, while I sat and read James Lee Burke’s latest novel and rigged a new fishing rod. He awoke about six, and we went to Oma’s on Anna Maria for pizza and beer. He was still tired and depressed and wanted to go back to bed. I dropped him at my condo and drove back across the Longboat bridge through Bradenton Beach and into Holmes Beach to a restaurant which seemed to change names every year. The food was spotty in quality, but the beer was cold and Pearl was always magnificent. Besides, she always played my favorite song when I walked in.
I was concerned about Logan’s request that I represent him. I had vowed so many times never to get back into the rat race that was the practice of law. I had sat in too many deposition rooms, and listened to too many lawyers drone on incessantly with questions that even they didn’t think were important. There had been too many sleepless nights worrying about this point or the other that might or might not come up in a case. Trial lawyers seldom sleep soundly.
On the other hand, if I handled only one case, it would not be like the old days of juggling more cases that one lawyer should. I was certainly capable of handling a first degree murder case. I had done it several times in my career and had never lost one. But Logan was a friend, and I was of the opinion that lawyers should no more represent friends and family than surgeons should operate on their friends and family. Yet, if Logan was charged, he would need someone who really believed in him. Did I? I thought so, but I had seen too many clients who first appeared to be something they weren’t, and I was always surprised at my naivete when I learned the truth. Clients, like all people, wanted you to think the best of them, and they were not above lying to their lawyer if they thought that was in their best interest.
I really did not know a lot about Logan. He had come to the island about a year before I did. I was aware that he had been a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam, but he didn’t talk about it much. I knew that he came from a wealthy Massachusetts family and that his parents were still alive. They had apparently despaired of him in his youth, but a tour in Viet Nam straightened him out, and he went back to college and earned a degree in business from the University of Florida. He had lived in various places in Florida since his graduation, finally settling on the key. He traveled extensively with his company, and it did not matter much where he lived.
I was not really surprised by his revelation that he and Connie had had an affair. Many of us on the key suspected it, and we had gossiped some about it, but never mentioned it to either Logan or Connie. That would have broken the code of the key; the one that tolerated every idiosyncracy, as long as it did not cause problems for anyone else. It was a live and let live philosophy.
The affair would be known to Banion by now. He would have heard the gossip, and he was probably already honing in on Logan as the chief suspect. But then, I had gotten the impression that morning that Banion had already decided that Logan was the guilty party.
“You don’t like the entertainment?”
I looked up into the face and bosom of Pearl. She was tall, blonde, buxom and sheathed in a white sequined dress designed to accentuate her positive attributes. Bets had been taken on whether those magnificent mammaries were the result of good genes or a surgeon’s skill.
“Hey kid. Sorry, I was about a thousand miles away. Sit down.”
She sat. “Isn’t it terrible about Connie? God, she must have gotten killed right after she left here. I may have been the last one to see her alive. Well, other than the killer.”
“Connie was in here last night?” I asked, stupidly.
“Yeah, until about 11:00. She only stayed maybe an hour.”
“Have you talked to the cops yet?”
“Sure. I called Bill Lester as soon as I heard about it. Told him she had been here last night. Some goofball from the county came by and took a recorded statement before I came to work this evening.”
“Banion?”
“Yeah. That’s his name. A real sourpuss.”
“Was Connie with anybody last night?”
“No. She came in alone and sat up at the bar. Asked me to play a couple of old songs, had a couple of drinks and left. I don’t think she even talked to anybody.”
“Are you sure about the time she left?”
“Pretty sure. I take a break at 11:00, and she left just before that. I was surprised because we usually sit and talk during my breaks when she’s in.”
“Are you sure about the time she came in?”
“I play for fifty minutes and then take a ten minute break on the hour. I stick to the schedule, because you know what a hardass the owner is. I had already started back from my 10:00 break, so it had to be after 10:10. But not much. I think I was on my first song.”
“You’re sure she didn’t talk to anyone at the bar?”
“Pretty sure. It was quiet last night, and there were only two or three other people here while she was at the bar. Some of the trailer park crowd, but I don’t think Connie knew them. They were sitting on the bass end and Connie was all the way around at the treble end. She was real quiet, sorta depressed, if you know what I mean. She usually sings along and talks to everybody. But not last night.”
“Did she say anything about where she was going when she left here?”
“No. She just waved and walked out. Unusual for Connie, you know? She’s usually real friendly.”
“Look, Pearl, if you hear anything about where Connie went after she left here or if anyone saw her, let me know, will you?”
“Sure, Matt, but what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, but a friend of mine could be in trouble over this.”
“Logan?”
“Yeah. Logan.”
“That’s ridiculous, Matt. Logan wouldn’t hurt a flea. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have hurt Connie. I think they had something going, you know?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. You could just tell. They would come in here together sometimes, and they, I don’t know, just looked like they had something going. My ten minutes are up Matt. Time to get back. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”
“Play ‘Misty’ for me,” I said.
“Right, cowboy. See you later.”
She played “Y’all Come Back Saloon.” My favorite song.
I was up early the next morning, sitting on my balcony drinking coffee. High clouds ambled slowly across the bay. Bright orange streaks splashed their puffy faces, a promise of the arrival of the sun. The air was cool, cooler than the water, and a mist hovered around the mangrove islands, giving them a surreal look, as if they were rising from the bay to meet the day. As the first bright arc of the morning sun crested the horizon, Logan belched. He was standing just inside the open doors to the living room, a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It was until you ruined the mood,” I said.
“Sorry about that. Pizza always gives me gas.”
“You want to go down to Izzy’s for breakfast?”
“Nah. Half the people I know will be there, and I really don’t want to face anybody yet.”
“What’s on the agenda today?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’d like to get back into my condo.”
“My guess is that they’re going to keep you out for another few days. They’ll go over it with a fine tooth comb.”
“We could go fishing.”
“That we could, my friend, that we could.”
We loaded the gear into my boat, stopped by Annie’s for bait, and headed to Palma Sola Bay. We spent the whole day there, with a short trip to a waterfront restaurant for lunch, and more beer for the cooler. We didn’t catch any fish, but Logan began to relax a little.
Two days later I heard from Chief Lester. He called to say that the medical examiner had finished with Connie, but there didn’t seem to be any relatives to claim the body. They had found a small life insurance policy among her effects, and that would about pay for a funeral. The body was at Sand’s Funeral Home on Manatee Avenue.
We buried her the next day in a small cemetery near the Manatee River, all the way out near I-75. There were no headstones, just those ground level plaques that the lawn mowers can clear when they cut the perpetual care grass. The cemetery promised to place one on her grave as soon as it came in. It had been ordered from their headquarters in Kansas City. A full service burial corporation, I guess.
There were about twenty people there to see Connie off. The sound of trucks traveling the interstate wafted toward us on the easterly breeze. I could hear the gentle shuffling of feet on the grass as the friends gathered near the open grave. Otherwise, there was quietness there on the flat land of the cemetery; the sun getting hotter now, as Florida’s short Spring eased into Summer.
Death had come creeping into our little group on the sun swept island, and plucked one of us, seemingly without reason. None of us understood why it was Connie, but each of us was glad it was not he. I thought about a time, in winter, when I was on the Metroliner between Washington and New York, back in that other life when I was the quintessential lawyer. I was gazing out the window as the partially snow covered landscape rushed by under a low and cloudy sky. We came upon a cemetery, sitting on rolling ground, with large white tombstones marking the graves. Some were overturned, lying flat on the ground as if years of guarding the dead had finally tired them. We were probably somewhere in Maryland or maybe Delaware. The graveyard was empty, except for a solitary couple in overcoats, arm in arm, standing at a grave. I wondered then if the grave was perhaps that of their child, or a parent, and what tragedy brought them there on that day. I knew I would always remember them, and they did not even know I existed. They were gone in an instant, as the train hurried north carrying me on some long forgotten errand. But that image came to me now, and I wondered if there were people on the interstate, rushing by, wondering at our grief, and we didn’t even know they existed.
The minister from the chapel on the island had agreed to say a few words, even though he did not know Connie. He was a quiet and gentle man who cared for his flock and their friends. I knew that old Chief Bishop was a longtime member of the church, and I guessed that he had asked the preacher to come. It was a dignified end for a lady who had regained her dignity on Longboat Key.
We drove back in on highway 64, turning south on highway 41, to Cortez Road and drove straight out past the Coast Guard station and onto Anna Maria Island. Logan and Dick Bellenger were in the Explorer with me. We stopped at a bar overlooking Anna Maria Sound and spent the afternoon holding our own little wake, getting drunk and remembering Connie.
The dead haunt me. I’m not so freaked by death itself, but by my thoughts of the last day of those who die. The accident cases never know when they get out of bed in the morning and eat their oatmeal that it will be their last sunrise, their last bowl of mush. Is there any vision of what lies in store that day? Do they have any inkling, even a twinge?