Dear Killer (Marley Clark Mysteries) (5 page)

It was unfair to label me as anti-pooch. I reserved my ire
for owners who let their petite Fidos or jumbo Plutos poop on sand dunes, stick
wet noses in my crotch, or make a growling charge at me with teeth bared. Twice
canines sank teeth into my ankles while I ran on the beach.

“If only people would keep dogs on leashes at the beach.
Maybe we should advertise that alligators sometimes lurk in the surf.”

My first sighting of an alligator out for an ocean dip
shocked me. I’d thought the prehistoric reptiles confined themselves to fresh
water. I even asked a ranger at Wilderness Point Park if I’d hallucinated. He
said alligators aren’t crazy about saltwater and have no salt glands for
prolonged stays, but will take the plunge to shed parasites, heal wounds, or
simply travel from point A to point B.

“Great, Marley, spread tales about surfing gators and I’ll
never retire. This is paradise. We don’t mention alligators, flesh-eating
no-see-ums or palmetto bugs big enough to saddle.”

“Don’t lecture me, friend. You started this with your crack
about a gator floor show.”

“Okay, we’re here. I’ll behave if you will.”

Here
was the entrance to the Dear Club, a thirty-year-old
edifice. The latest island developer had spent four hundred thousand dollars on
a facelift, but the major surgery yielded disappointing results. The cosmetic
tucks and stitches remained obvious. Rain wept through ill-fitting windows and
pooled in carpeted sinkholes, breeding oases for mold spores. However, if you
kept your eyes on the intricate crown moldings, starched white linens and
swanky delicacies served at soirées, the Dear Club made a passing stab at
elegance.

I spied Jack Bride’s golf cart blocking the entrance. With
shoulders hunched, the avid gardener busily shoveled material from a wooden
cargo bed fastened in the space typically reserved for ferrying golf clubs.

“Oh crap,” I muttered, knowing I’d precisely summed up the
problem. “Let me out. I’ll try to cajole Dr. Bride into going home before
someone calls security.”

I approached the angry septuagenarian with faked
nonchalance. The retired professor of etymology and his wife, Claire, moved to
the island when deer outnumbered people. Six months ago, he’d buried Claire, a
lovely lady who succumbed to Alzheimer’s. A lot of people dismissed Bride as a
nutter, but I admired him. He insisted on caring for his wife at home, even
though his devotion took a heavy toll.

His white-hot hatred of Dear’s developer stemmed from a
letter he received a year ago revoking the couple’s club membership. To
maintain a semblance of normal life, Dr. Bride occasionally took his wife out
for supper. One night, she hallucinated the waiters were armed gunmen and
briefly freaked. The club’s tactless response earned an ardent enemy.

The manure in the back of Dr. Bride’s buggy heavily scented
the air. As he inserted his shovel in the steamy pile, I placed a hand on his
shoulder. He spun toward me, his shovel raised like a club. For a moment, I
feared he’d bonk me. His greasy gray hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in
days. His bloodshot eyes darted wildly as if searching for unseen demons.

“Jack, please don’t do this. If they call the sheriff, he’ll
cart you to jail.”

Dr. Bride lowered his smelly load. “Oh, it’s you.” His gaze
bored into mine.

He looked me up and down, taking in my purple pantsuit,
considerably uptown from my usual T-shirt and shorts attire. “You’re not
joining them, are you? I heard they were having some fancy banquet. Celebrating
their butchery of our island. Gathering to shovel more crapola. So I decided to
do likewise. Let the bastards step in it. Let ’em reek.”

I touched the hand gripping the shovel. “You’re angry. But,
Jack, if you go to jail, who’s left to apply pressure? Try to keep them honest?
There are better ways to protest. Sic DHEC on them. Get the university
involved.”

I squeezed his hand.

“It’s Claire’s birthday,” he said softly. A tear rolled down
his cheek.

“Think what Claire would have wanted. Go home, Jack.”

He nodded, head down, shoulders stooped. Slowly he got in
his cart and slipped away, leaving only a few shovels’ worth of manure to
decorate the marble-tiled portico.

“You’re a wonder.” Janie grinned. “What did you say to the
old coot?”

“Hey, how about a little compassion?” I snapped. “He’s not
an old coot, just distraught. His crusade’s a way to deal with his grief.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be flip. Let’s find someone to hose
off the tile.”

Figuring we might nab some kitchen workers taking a smoke
break, we meandered around to the side entrance. We hadn’t walked far when
Janie grabbed my arm.

“Look over there. What in hell has gotten into everyone? It
looks like Sally may take off one of her stilettos and hammer it through Gator’s
head.”

A spotlight used to accent the club’s frou-frou landscaping
spilled light on Sally’s rage-reddened face. Often she played the Southern
belle, shamelessly flattering her senior partner. Tonight, though, she was
giving Gator what-for, poking a red-lacquered fingernail in his chest and
adopting his curse-laced lexicon. The “Goddammit” and “Summabitch” seasonings
rang clear across the yard, but not the conversational meat.

Janie collared an unlucky club employee and sent him to
scoop the poop.

“Let’s get to the banquet room,” she muttered. “This better
not be a preview. I didn’t work my fanny off organizing this shindig for them
to pull this crap.”

We entered the lounge adjacent to the banquet room. Though
things seemed peaceful, Janie stiffened and moaned. “Oh great, Gator brought
his wife. Bea was supposed to be out of town. Wait till Sally sees her. If you
thought she was mad before…”

“Don’t you like Sally? I thought you two got along.”

“We do,” Janie answered. “For a while, Bea carped at Gator
to fire me. Didn’t want him to spend so much time with
another woman
.
Said a male assistant lent more prestige. Sally stood up for me. Hell, if a
catfight does break out, I’ll dive right in and claw on Sally’s behalf.”

Janie snagged two caviar-smeared crackers from a wandering
server before she continued. “Bea is none too keen about Sally being a company
officer. But Gator’s explained the facts of life—he doesn’t have the money to
buy Sally out. Plus I think Little-Miss-Trophy-Wife finally decided Sally and I
were too decrepit to be competition. As if either of us would share a bed with
Gator. Yuck.”

Bea accepted a tall pink drink from the bartender. While the
bottle redhead was young—late twenties—I suspected her rebuilt chassis had
high-mileage. According to the island rumor mill, a steamy extramarital affair
had allowed the former masseuse to trade up the husband ladder from the roofer
she’d left behind. That was three years ago.

Bea, like the clubhouse, had been treated to a makeover.
Women who’d met Bea in her former life swear the woman once sported a nose like
Cyrano and had difficulty filling a “B” cup. Now her nose was bobbed so short I
wondered how she kept on sunglasses. Conversely her boobs had ballooned to the
size of blue-ribbon eggplants.

The overhaul hadn’t improved the woman’s disposition. I’d
never seen a spontaneous smile. Maybe Botox injections made her lips incapable
of one.

Janie leaned close and whispered in my ear. “The last time
Sally dropped by, she asked if I knew why Bea didn’t wear underpants. When I
shook my head, she provided the answer—‘To get a better grip on her broom.’”

Janie chortled so hard she choked on her canapé.

As we walked toward the bar, Gator and Sally arrived, smiles
plastered on their faces. However, Sally’s complexion remained mottled by
anger. The minute Gator came into grabbing range, Bea snagged his arm and clung
to him like kudzu.

Sally spied us and strode purposely our way. The woman was
an enigma. Bright, decisive, articulate, funny. Yet when men gathered round,
she regressed into a simpering belle routine. Janie labeled it camouflage: the
good old boys paid her less attention if she conformed to stereotype. The
strategy let her siphon information she could put to good use.

“Hey, Janie, Marley,” she said. “I want y’all to do me a
tiny favor. Don’t make a fuss when you see I shuffled the place cards. I put
you two at the table with Bea and Gator and switched me ’cross the room. Now I
could have fun sittin’ by Bea and taking potshots, but most whiz over her
pointy little head, and I promised I’d lay off Princess Titsy tonight.”

“Okay, but that’s no tiny favor,” Janie replied. “Remind my
boss that I’m worth twice my salary.”

“You got it.” Sally winked and snagged a glass of wine from
a waiter.

For the next half hour, we milled. Janie chatted; I
eavesdropped. As a known quantity with no stake in the island’s real estate
games, I functioned as sound-absorbing wallpaper. But, while everyone talked
about Stew, not a soul speculated on enemies or motives. His colleagues seemed
as puzzled as the cops.

When Sally finally strode to the podium, I was quite ready
to heed her request that everyone take a seat. Janie and I slid into chairs at
a round, eight-person table. Gator and Bea sat directly across from us.

Gator had prematurely gray hair, a florid face, and jagged
teeth yellowed from nicotine. According to Janie, he had the attention span of
a gerbil, a host of nervous tics, and was pure good ol’ boy, though his
friendship code required no sanctions for backstabbing.

Watching Bea pet him was enough to make a grown woman gag.
You’d have thought Gator was a matinee idol. Apparently Bea wasn’t about to let
another young hussy steal her prize. Having massaged Gator’s tired muscles—all
of them—when he was wed to the first Mrs. Caldwell, the lady knew how easy it
was to tempt her man to stray.

Bea was famous for verbally abusing the help and loudly
criticizing anyone who didn’t show her deference. Employing the royal “we,” she
also issued proclamations about proper club attire. I suspected Bea engineered
the club’s ouster of Dr. Bride. Of course, if she’d actually written the
letter, it wouldn’t have been so lucid. Her verbs and nouns fought like cats
and dogs. Remedial English would have been a better investment than her boob
job.

As we pulled our chairs into the table, Janie introduced me
to the only stranger, Woodrow—Woody—Nickel, the company’s new real estate sales
manager.

“Nice to meet you.” His killer smile sported enough white
enamel to coat a soup kettle. Yet there was no warmth in his dental grimace.

Janie said he was a fraternity brother of Gator’s brought on
board to prepare for the Beach West sales push. My friend already despised him.
She’d called secretaries at his former workplace to check him out. They
described Woody as a macho cad who believed all women had pea brains. Janie
figured it would be interesting to watch Sally demolish him.

In fairness, Woody was handsome in a male-model, gel-haired
vein. But even without prior coaching, his name-dropping chatter would have left
me cold. It was “I-this” and “I-that.” His buttering of Gator made me want to
toss my cookies. However, since Nickel didn’t bother to converse with me, there
was no need to make nice.

Throughout dinner, the agents talked ad nauseam about real
estate. They were giddy at the thought of pent-up demand for Beach West
lots—sorry,
homesites
. Janie reminded me regularly that “homesites” sold
for double the money of “lots.”

A map of the new development, displayed by the podium,
showed 160 parcels in Beach West’s Phase One. The new homesites were about
one-third the size of lots on the “mature” side of the island where my house
sat. Yet asking prices were double those for resale lots. Go figure.

Across the table, Bea recounted her victory of the day.
She’d ordered the starter at the golf course to eject the Cuthbert twins for
wearing T-shirts. Horror of horrors.

“Everyone knows we require collared shirts,” she sniffed.

Gator squirmed. It’s seldom politic to enforce dress codes
for kids when you depend on their heiress mom to write million-dollar checks.

The developer deliberately snubbed his wife and turned the
conversational tide back to Stew. The agents sang the victim’s praises. “Nice
guy.” “Honest.” “Easy to work with.”

Gradually, the tributes meandered into a discussion of the
“accident’s” potential sales impact. “It was so unseemly,” Bea piped up.
“Stewart being disrobed. That’s not the upscale image we want. We’re just
starting to attract class peoples.”

Janie nudged my elbow and whispered, “Wonder if Bea thinks
we’re ‘class peoples’?”

For an instant, I pitied Bea. I could imagine her as a
flat-chested, gum-smacking teen. A poor Alabama cracker who longed for a prom
invite from the bank president’s son and instead sulked on a date with a
gas-station greaser.

My sympathy evaporated when she launched into a diatribe
about her maid’s incompetence. From Janie, I knew the Dear Company’s resort
wing constantly rotated housekeepers through the Caldwell household. Any sane
maid would quit if forced to endure the assignment longer than a week.

Given that most Dear maids were black, being tagged to work
in the Caldwell household meant a double whammy. Bea and Gator were low-rent
rednecks who had no compunction about telling racist jokes within earshot of
black employees.

By the time our crème brûlée arrived, table conversation had
boomeranged to the group’s hope for strong spring sales. Bea, who knew zilch
about the market, lifted a spoon and twirled it backward to check her
reflection in the makeshift convex mirror.

“I can’t look forward to spring,” she sniffed. “Though
flowers inspire my profession.”

Bea pulled down fifty thou a year as the resort’s “stylist.”
To earn her salaried skim, she flipped through magazines and consulted an
expert in feng shui. Her pronunciation made it rhyme with chop suey.