Death of the Innocent

Death of the Innocent

  by

  Karl Tutt

  Copyright Karl Tutt 2013

  All rights reserved without limiting the copyright reserved above. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, brands, characters, places, media and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction which might have been used without permission. The publication use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Chapter 1

  You’ll see us if you come far enough south. Anemic bankrolls, but fat appetites for a good sea story and a touch of juicy gossip. Oh . . . you’ll hear us, too, at Land’s End Marina in Key West. We’ll be the ones laughing.

  We jokingly refer to ourselves as Buffett’s Roundtable. No membership lists, no officers. We meet on no particular schedule. No cell phones or voice mail. You don’t get a formal invitation and there are no place cards. Someone waves at you across the dock, points landward and hollers “four o’clock.”

  One of the dock rats had convened a convocation. I was ready. I’d been in the dinghy most of the day waxing KAMALA’s hull. I was sure I’d lost ten pounds of pure sweat. I smelled like a musk ox with a hangover. But I could cure that one with a bar of soap and a hose on the dock.

  I was sitting at the scarred wooden table at the Green Parrot fondling a cold can of Ice House. It was a little early. A dozen tourists and a few locals. The roundtable hadn’t assembled yet. Sunny was next to me, her arm curled around my waist. We’d decided to meet for a cold one before she went on duty behind the bar.

  Sunny was maybe 5’6, long brown legs, hair like lush corn silk, and blue eyes that honestly glowed in the dark. Small waist, but ample breasts that predated implants completed the package. She was a drunken sailor’s dream. Her full name was Samantha Marie Elgar, but Sunny worked for me and everyone else. Not many people knew it, but she had a master’s degree in psychology from UVA, another drop-out that dropped into The Conch Republic for reasons she didn’t like to talk about. She collected more tips than any bartender on the island. I guess it was the smile and the thinly veiled compassion. She just cared.

  Sunny says my features are getting craggy. I’m not sure what she means by that, but I’m still a solid 6’ 2”, maybe 195. Wavy brown hair, probably a little too long and a bit of gray, but at least I’ve got it. Plenty of sun and exercise keeps me from looking 56 and I don’t tell it unless someone asks. But I confess I don’t understand what she wants with a retired professor of literature turned boat bum, but it’s more than okay. I’m a drop-out, too, but for reasons I don’t like to discuss. They won’t go away, but like the man said, “that’s another story.”

  I was watching Island Jake intently. He was perched on a yellow pine stool on the makeshift stage, fingers caressing the strings on his old Martin. A sweet, mournful version of John Prine’s “Hello in There” wafted down the street. Kind of sad, but he knows I love it. Always does it when I come in.

  I saw Captain Sal lumbering toward us. She grabbed a chair and flipped it around. Then she dropped all two hundred pounds of herself on the hard seat. She propped her red, meaty hands on the back of it. Her hair hung below the grimy fisherman’s cap like a yellow string mop. She tugged at the long bill and hid her eyes. Then she spit out the words.

  “The kid’s dead.”

  Chapter 2

  The muscles in her jaw looked like a stone relief on a medieval cathedral. She stared at Sunny’s half empty mug of Harp. I’d known Sal for about a year, ever since I’d docked my O’Day 31 at Land’s End. She was one of the best charter captains in the Keys. Tough, smart. Always came back smiling with a boatload of the big ones. I never really thought of Sal as a woman. She was more of an androgynous force of nature. It never occurred to me that she could cry, but that had changed. Sunny’s arm dropped from my waist.

  “What are you talking about, Sal? What kid?” Sunny asked

  Sally looked at us with disgust and shook her head.

  “You know . . . the kid. Billy’s kid. She’s dead.”

  “The kid” was what we always called Alexis. She was the 11 year old daughter of Billy and Monique. Ebony hair flowing like a black river over her shoulders and eyes to match. Her face was like burnished ivory punctuated by a graceful mouth tinged with raspberry. There was always music in her voice and more than a bit of mischief in her smile.

  Billy was the first mate on Sal’s 37 foot Bertram, THE TOUGH BROAD. I didn’t know him that well, but I knew that Sal trusted and depended on him. I’d seen his dark frame bouncing over the deck of the BROAD plenty of times. He was quick and sure handed with a rod or a dock line. The paying customers loved his easy smile, not to mention the way he handled a rig when the big ones were running. Sal had often bragged that she had the best first mate in Florida.

  While the rest of us hung around the docks in the afternoon or walked over to Schooner’s, Billy left to help Monique at the small t-shirt shop she managed over on Duval St.

  I did know Alexis. Everyone on the dock did. She called me “Uncle K.” She’d graced the decks of KAMALA at least three or four times a week for the past year. She loved to thumb through the books of poetry I kept on board. Sometimes she’d ask me to read to her. Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee” was her favorite. I’d get all somber and put on my phony British accent. Her black eyes would spark like two lumps of anthracite coal. She’d give her head a sultry shake just to remind me that the boys would be panting and drooling over her in a couple of years. Then she’d brush the ebony bangs off of her forehead, hug my neck, and move off down the dock to exact tribute from the next willing sucker. She was the best 11 year old audience I ever had.

  Sunny had pulled her chair over next to Sal. She put her arm around the huge woman’s shoulders and patted her. Sal’s mounds of flesh quivered like a child trapped in a snowdrift. Sunny whispered something to her and she began to calm a bit. Sunny can do that.

  “What happened, Sal?”

  She looked across the table with eyes that could usually stare down a pit viper, now full of tears.

  “It’s so damned freaky. Billy called me last night. The kid didn’t come home. They looked for her everywhere. Found her this morning in an empty house over on Thomas Street in the Bahama Village. I got there not too long after the police. I stood there with Billy. They were trying to keep everyone away from the scene, but I got a damned good look. I wish I hadn’t. There was blood everywhere. At first I though it was all hers. She was just laying there, a sheet pulled up to her chest. Her face had some kind of powder all over it, like a damned zombie or something. There was a chicken beside her and a bowl full of red shit. The chicken’s head was gone like somebody had cut it off. I thought maybe that’s where the blood was from. Anyway the kid was dead. Couldn’t tell how at first, but there was a gash. I didn’t want to see, but somebody had sliced her throat. Our baby. Monique’s gone to her parents' place. I haven’t seen Billy since.”

  Sunny walked over to the bar and spoke quietly to Jack, the owner of the Green Parrot. I heard him say “Sure, Sunny, no problem.” Then he tried to smile. Sunny came back to the table and covered Sal’s leathery hand with her own.

  “Come with me, Honey. We’ll go to my place, maybe do some talking, maybe just shut up. I got a bottle of tequila. We’ll kill it and have ourselves a goo
d cry.”

  She nodded at me and they were gone.

  Chapter 3

  I was nauseous. I knew the word would get around quickly and I didn’t want to be the one to share it with the other members of the roundtable. I left a five on the table, waved at Jack, and left. I really didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t go back to KAMALA immediately. I was afraid that the ghost of that beautiful child might be waiting on the dock for another reading of “Annabel Lee.” I knew Sunny and Sal would be way past gone by now. Maybe it was a good time to see Fritz.

  I met him at Lake Norman in North Carolina years ago, but we’d become close when I ran into him at Salty Mike’s, a little dockside bar in Charleston’s municipal marina. That was in his drinking days. He was inhaling cold Bud nonstop and trying to sweet talk the bar maid into a midnight boat tour. Sometimes it worked. Neither of us had any destination except south. We traveled together for weeks, me on KAMALA and him on his ancient Grampian 30, NO DECISIONS. In those days I never saw him without some form of alcohol in his hand. He usually started the morning with beer, moved on to Scotch when the sun got low and killed off the darkness with jugs of cheap wine. He would lock himself onto the mast below with his plastic cup and a Marlboro until he tumbled into the v-berth in a boozy coma. Now he spent every evening at one of the AA meetings that populated the town. He seemed to live on Marlboros and diet Coke.

  Fritz wasn’t tall, maybe 5’7, but he looked more like a bear than a man. Full salt and pepper beard, huge freckled biceps and hands like knots of gnarled cypress. He was ex-Navy, a retired computer expert who still did some consulting now that he was sober enough to hit the right keys.

  I knocked on the hull and a hedge of dark hair flecked with gray appeared from below.

  “Come on aboard, Cap. I got fresh coffee,” he growled.

  I stepped down into a blue haze and the smell of stale ashtrays strafed my nostrils. I tried to find a spot to sit. There were wires and keypads and monitors in every flat surface. I used to kid him about it, thinking maybe he’d throw out some of that old equipment. But I finally came to realize they were his friends. They were loyal and didn’t ask much. Besides, he’d told me a hundred times how crucial it was to have two of everything in case something malfunctioned.

  I quickly told him about the murder, filling him in on the gruesome details I’d gotten from Sal. I watched the sadness well up in his eyes. Alexis had been a frequent guest on NO DECISION. Fritz could be gruff, even a little scary at times. But in truth, he was shy and gentle and even more insecure than the rest of us. I often thought that’s why the booze got to him.

  Alexis was smart and had that uncanny instinct borne of a child’s innocence. It whispered that Fritz was just a big teddy bear dressed up like a grizzly. And for her, he was.

  The bear was quiet for a moment. He knew what it was like to lose a daughter. He’d lost his own. He flexed fingers like huge sausages as though he were trying to grasp the death of the child.

  “Sonovabitch. What bastard would do that to my saucy little princess? Sounds like a grade B horror movie. Jesus, T.K.”

  He shook his shaggy head slowly and lit a Marlboro.

  “Isn’t Billy Haitian or something like that?”

  “I don’t know for sure, Fritz. Sal’s always called him Billy, but I think his given name is Guillaume Lavalier. French, I guess. Martinique, Haiti . . . somewhere in the Caribbean. Actually Alexis is Monique’s child by some white man. I don’t know, one of the locals, a tourist maybe. Anyway he never acknowledged Alexis. Billy was the only father she ever knew and he loved her as if she were his own.”

  “So maybe it’s some voodoo thing, Cap. John Carradine in “Revenge of the Zombies,” back from the dead and all that shit. I mean headless chickens, the sheet, some kind of powder all over the face. Cult?”

  “I haven’t heard of any thing like that in Key West.”

  He shook his head.

  “Believe me, Cap. There are lots of thing going on in Key West we don’t want to know about.”

  “I’m sure you’re right about that, Fritz. Anyway, the police are on it. Sounds like a cornucopia of physical evidence. Somebody had to see something. They’ll probably turn something up pretty quick.”

  Fritz took a long drag, the veins in his neck still throbbing. He nodded his head, but I knew he didn’t believe it. There were no more words. I sat for a moment, then left him with his cold companions.

  The tourists were out in full force. I could hear their laughter pouring out of Turtle Crawls and the Raw Bar. It was hollow and distorted, like the distant wailing of demons, but I knew the demons were in me. The candles on the tables flickered and the band was tuning up. It was hot and still, no words for the living. I went back to KAMALA. I popped the cap off of a beer, but the bottle was too cold for my lips. I just wanted to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  I heard the wooden clicking as she came down the dock. I looked out of the companionway and had a flash of Faye Dunaway in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” She wore a midnight blue suit cut discreetly at the knee. The three inch heels matched. A muted scarf was knotted loosely at her neck. Her hair was up and swept off of her forehead in a light wave. It was Sunny and it was all class.

  I had donned my only white dress shirt with my only tie and my only sport coat, brown corduroy a bit fatigued at the lapels and the elbows. Steve McQueen was nowhere in sight. It was a beauty and the beast scenario. I’ll let you guess who the beast was. We squeezed into Sonny’s old Saab convertible and wound our way down to the Haitian Village. She pulled up in front of a white cinderblock building with a makeshift steeple and a cross hung a bit crooked. The sand parking lot was bleached and barren. A couple of stray dogs sniffed around a plastic container filled with trash and the odd chicken pecked nervously at the dry ground.

  I don’t usually do funerals. They depress me and they exist much more to placate the living than honor the dead. I prefer to make my peace with those that count in a more intimate setting. Alexis counted. I’d been to the funeral home alone in the quiet of the evening and whispered to her, hoping she knew, but afraid she didn’t.

  The day was gorgeous, low 80’s, brilliant sun, a warm breeze blowing lightly from the southeast. Somehow it seemed blasphemous to be burying a child in this kind of weather. But in Key West, it all happens in the sunshine or sometimes in the pit of darkness.

  It was a good-sized crowd, maybe forty or so. The service was conducted by Brother Anton Frances. He was a dark meaty giant with a voice that could invoke thunder or take the tone of a mother with a baby at her breast. He pressed a black book to his massive chest and tried to look hopeful. There were several wreaths and a steady undercurrent of staccato sighs interrupted by now and then by a breathless sob.

  Sunny was holding tightly to my arm. Fritz was there standing next to Sal. Also my long time buddy Chris Foster; Whipsaw, Key West’s own prince of the harmonica and blues man extraodinaire, his psychic lady friend Miss Julianne; Louis Moulet, a bartender at the Raw Bar and Captain Harry with his first mate, Cy Watts from over at the Galleon Marina.

  There were others that I didn’t recognize. Some were obviously family and friends, but others seemed slightly out of place. After the funeral I collared Whipsaw. He knew everyone and everything that happened in Key West.

  We were toward the end of the receiving line. Billy looked oddly uncomfortable in a black suit and tie. The grief was etched into his face, but he seemed to be holding up okay. Despite her waxen complexion, Monique was beautiful in a black flowing dress with bits of lace tucked discreetly at the neck and the wrists. Her dark eyes, usually glistening with warmth, had gone ashen and her lips were bloodless even through the colored gloss. Still it was easy to see why Alexis would have grown up to be a real stunner.

  Monique stood like an iron rod, but I felt if Billy removed his arm she would collapse like a marionette whose strings had been severed. She wasn’t crying, pumped full of valium, I guessed.<
br />
  I took Billy’s hand. It was moist, but warm, and his grip was firm. He pulled me close, “I come see you,” he whispered. I nodded, but I didn’t know why. I hugged Monique. She was limp and silent. Sal was at their side. I’d never seen her in a dress, but she looked vaguely feminine. Sunny embraced Monique and spoke quietly into her ear. I thought I heard Monique mumble, “At least she at peace.” They thanked us for coming. Sunny stopped for a moment with Sal. There were tears.

  Whipsaw and Miss Julianne were standing off to the side. He was wearing his customary black fedora tilted jauntily over one brow. Despite the heat, a dark brown cape was slung over his shoulders partially covering an immaculately tailored camel silk suit and a tie with colors I wouldn’t attempt to describe. He carried a cane with a gold monkey fist for a handle and, as always, the sunglasses. I can’t remember ever seeing his eyes. He was sweating profusely, but he always did regardless of the time of day or the temperature.

  Miss Julianne was resplendent, a long, willowy dress the equal of any peacock I’d ever seen. She wore a pillbox hat of claret and costume jewelry hung from every appendage. They both smiled as I approached.

  “Hello Whip, Miss Julianne. Sad day.”

  “That’s what’s shakin’, Perfessor. Little girls ought to grow up to be big one. Makes the world copacetic. Bad vibes, a thing like this. Makes the hell. Upsets the harmony.”

  I signaled agreement, then said quietly, “Nice tribute, nice crowd.”

  “Nice and strange,” Miss Julianne added.

  “I didn’t recognize everybody.”

  “You ain’t been aroun’ long enough, Perfessor. May I have the honor of suplementin’ your already ample education?”

  I nodded. He bowed slightly and went on.

  “Ya’ notice that dude in the gray suit kinda standin’ behind ‘em all? One of Key West’s finest. Detective Frank Beamon. Quiet, you might even think he’s a little dumb, but he’s cagey, that one. Watchin’ everybody. Checkin’ their expressions, reactions. That boy’s sniffin’ aroun’. Huntin’, I ‘spect. The older black gentleman in the white brocade shirt” Miss Julianne’s had some dealin’ with him. Ain’t you, Honey?"