OK, so I’m no oil painting. But despite a bit of a beer gut, I’m reasonably well-preserved for a man of my age and drinking habits. I’ve still got a fine head of hair, even if it is grey. And I may be a bit grizzled and rough-edged, but I’ve been told I’m not without a certain cuddly quality.
Anyway, in my humble opinion, Santa – in reality Bud Schiller, a retired real estate agent from Kingston, Ontario – was a total asshole. Most people only needed to spend a couple of minutes in his company before heading for the hills. But not these three. Oh, no. They laughed at all his jokes; they hung on his every word. Of course, Schiller bought most of the drinks, but I thought his company was a hell of a price to pay for the occasional free beer.
‘So, who do you think did it, then, Jack?’
Al French had slipped onto the empty stool beside me. Al was a cross between a loner and a social butterfly: he seemed to know everyone, but like a butterfly he never lit in any one place for long. He said he was a writer from Rochester, but I’ve never seen any of his books in the shops. If you ask him to be more specific, he just gets evasive.
Al tipped back his bottle and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He was a skinny little guy with a long nose, slicked back hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Today he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
‘It was an accident,’ I said.
‘Bullshit. And you know it.’ Al put his bottle down and whispered in my ear. He sounded as if he’d had a few already. ‘When a jerk like Bud Schiller dies, there has to be something more behind it than mere accident. Come on, buddy, you’re supposed to be the private eye.’
‘True. But I’m on vacation.’
‘A real gumshoe never rests until he discovers the truth and sees that justice is done.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Where d’you read that, Al? An old Black Mask magazine?’
Al looked hurt. ‘I didn’t read it anywhere. I wrote it.’
‘You write private eye stories?’
‘We were talking about Bud Schiller’s murder.’
See what I mean? Evasive. And persistent. I ordered another round of Michelob and offered Al a cigar.
‘Cuban?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh.’
Al shrugged and took the cigar. ‘What they gonna do, huh? Arrest me for smoking?’
I laughed. ‘Seriously, Al, the cop I talked to said it was an accident. She asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual, then she left.’
‘Had you?’
‘No.’
I wasn’t going to tell Al, but I’d spent the evening sitting out in the lanai smoking a cigar, reading Robertson Davies and working my way through a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I could hear the singalong in the distance, and I remember thinking there was something absurd about a bunch of adults singing ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘White Christmas’ under the palms, especially with an asshole like Bud Schiller dressed as Santa leading them along. About nine-thirty, when the singalong ended, the print in my book was too blurred to read any more, and by ten o’clock or thereabouts, like most people in the Whispering Palms Condominium Estate, I was sawing logs.
‘He’d been drinking,’ I went on. ‘Mary Pasquale, the girl in the office, she told me he was three sheets to the wind. He must have been carrying his piano away after the party when he tripped near the edge of the pool and pitched in, head first.’
Al just raised his eyebrows.
He had a point. Even as I repeated the official line, something nagged at the back of my mind. As an ex-cop turned PI, I’ve seen enough weird crime scenes in my time, like the guy they found dead on the subway tracks and couldn’t find his head. But in this case, I had to ask myself two questions: first, wouldn’t Schiller have dropped the piano as he flung his arms out to protect himself from the fall?
And second, perhaps more to the point, why on God’s earth was Santa’s electric piano still plugged in?
‘I’ve noticed you talking to Schiller’s cronies,’ I said to Al quietly, so they wouldn’t overhear. ‘Do you know any of them well enough to think one of them killed him?’
Al shook his head. ‘Not really. Just casting the nets, you know. Ed Brennan, the red-faced one, he’s into the ponies. We went to the dog track at Naples once. But he’s a sore loser. Too desperate. And I played golf with Schiller a couple of times a few years back. He cheats. Did you know that?’
I didn’t rate cheating at golf as high on my list of motives for murder, but you never knew. ‘What about the girl?’
Al raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah-hah! Cherchez la femme, is it? Her name’s Karen Lee. Kindergarten teacher, I think.’
‘I wish my kindergarten teacher had looked like that.’
‘You’d’ve been too young to appreciate it. Besides, if you’ve got any thoughts in that direction, Jack, forget them. I warn you, she’s strictly an ice queen.’
I looked at Karen Lee. She was running her finger around the rim of a tall, frosted glass – abstractedly, rather than in any deliberately erotic way, but it still looked sexy as hell. She sure didn’t look like an ice queen to me.
‘How long has Schiller been coming here?’ I asked.
‘Longer than me, and I’ve been a regular for, what, nine, ten years now.’
‘How did they all hook up with each other?’
‘I don’t know, except they’re all from Canada. Every year Schiller would manage to gather a few luckless characters around him, but, like me, they didn’t usually come back for more. Ed was the first one who did, about four years ago. The blonde was next, year after, I think, then Mama Cass showed up just last year.’
‘What’s her real name?’
‘Ginny Fraser. Three time loser from Smith’s Falls, far as I can gather. Single mother. Welfare.’
‘How can she afford to come here?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘What does Ed do?’
‘Retired. Used to be a school caretaker in Waterloo.’
Kindergarten teacher; welfare case; retired caretaker. Not exactly high-paying jobs. And all Canadian. Still, that didn’t mean much. Half of Canada rents condos in Florida in the winter – and Canada’s a big country. I looked at them again, trying to read their faces for signs of guilt. Nothing. Karen was still running her finger around her glass rim. Ed was attempting to tell a joke, the kind, he said loudly, that he ‘just knew old Bud would have appreciated’. Only Ginny was laughing, chins wobbling, tears in her eyes.
I finished my beer, said goodbye to Al and left. When I got back to the condo that evening with a bottle of Chilean wine and a pound of jumbo shrimp for the barbecue, I tried to put Al’s suggestion of murder out of my mind.
But it wouldn’t go away.
The problem was what, if anything, was I going to do about it? Back home, I’m a licensed private investigator, but down here I’m not even a citizen.
Still, that evening out on the lanai, after the wine and the shrimps, I decided to keep my bourbon intake down. A good night’s sleep and no hangover would be the best bet for whatever tomorrow might bring.
The grass pricked my feet as I walked towards the pool the next morning for my pre-breakfast swim. Already the temperature was in the low seventies and the sky was robin’s egg blue.
I stood for a moment on the bridge and looked down into the murky water for the huge turtles and catfish. Evenings, just before dark, I’d got in the habit of feeding them chunks of bread. But there was nobody around this morning.
A couple of hundred yards away, over the swathe of dry grass, the squat, brown condo units were strung out in a circle around the central island, connected to the mainland by a wooden bridge over the narrow moat. The pool, the office and the tennis courts were all on the island. And that was Whispering Palms. Someone had bought some land in Florida and got very rich.