Duma Key: A Novel Read online

  “Of course. I’ve met his daughter. My friend Wireman takes care of her.”

  Mary lit a fresh cigarette. “Well, both Dave and John were as rich as Croesus—Dave with his land and building speculations, John with his mills—but Davis was a peacock and Eastlake was more of a plain brown wren. Just as well for him, because you know what happens to peacocks, don’t you?”

  “They get their tailfeathers chopped off?”

  She took a drag on her latest cigarette, then pointed the fingers holding it at me as she jetted smoke from her nostrils. “That would be correct, sir. In 1925, the Florida Land Bust hit this state like a brick on a soap bubble. Dave Davis had invested pretty much everything he had in what you see out there.” She waved at the zig-zaggy streets and pink buildings. “In 1926, Davis was owed four million bucks on various successful ventures and collected something like thirty thousand.”

  It had been awhile since I’d ridden on the tiger’s neck—which was what my father called over-extending your resources to the point where you had to start juggling your creditors and getting creative with your paperwork—and I’d never ridden that far up, even in The Freemantle Company’s early, desperate days. I felt for Dave Davis, long dead though he must be.

  “How much of his own debts could he cover? Any?”

  “He managed at first. Those were boom years in other parts of the country.”

  “You know a lot about this.”

  “Suncoast art is my passion, Edgar. Suncoast history is my hobby.”

  “I see. So Davis survived the Land Bust.”

  “For a short while. I imagine he sold his stocks on the bull market to cover his first round of losses. And friends helped him.”

  “Eastlake?”

  “John Eastlake was a major angel, and that’s aside from any of Dave’s bootleg hooch he may have stored out on the Key from time to time.”

  “Did he do that?” I asked.

  “Maybe, I said. That was another time and another Florida. You hear all sorts of colorful Prohibition-era booze-running stories if you live down here awhile. Booze or no booze, Davis would have been flat broke by Easter of ’26 without John Eastlake. John was no playboy, didn’t go nightclubbing and cathousing like Davis and some of Davis’s other friends, but he’d been a widower since 1923, and I’m guessing that old Dave might have helped a pal with a gal from time to time when his pal was feeling lonely. But by the summer of ’26, Dave’s debts were just too high. Not even his old pals could save him.”

  “So he disappeared one dark night.”

  “He disappeared, but not by the dark of the moon. That was not the Davis style. In October of 1926, less than a month after Hurricane Esther knocked the living hell out of his life’s work, he sailed for Europe with a bodyguard and his new gal-pal, who happened to be a Mack Sennett bathing beauty. The gal-pal and the bodyguard got to Gay Paree, but Dave Davis never did. He disappeared at sea, without a trace.”

  “This is a true story you’re telling me?”

  She raised her right hand in the Boy Scout salute—the image slightly marred by the cigarette smoldering between her first two fingers. “True blue. In November of ’26, there was a memorial service right over there.” She pointed toward where the Gulf twinkled between two bright pink art deco buildings. “At least four hundred people attended, many of them, I understand, the sort of women who were partial to ostrich feathers. One of the speakers was John Eastlake. He tossed a wreath of tropical flowers into the water.”

  She sighed, and I caught a waft of her breath. I had no doubt that the lady could hold her liquor; I also had no doubt that she was well on her way to squiffy if not outright drunk this afternoon.

  “Eastlake was undoubtedly sad about the passing of his friend,” she said, “but I bet he was congratulating himself on surviving Esther. I bet they all were. Little did he know he’d be throwing more wreaths into the water less than six months later. Not just one daughter gone but two. Three, I suppose, if you count the eldest. She eloped to Atlanta. With a foreman from one of Daddy’s mills, if memory serves. Although that’s hardly the same as losing two in the Gulf. God, that must have been hard.”

  “THEY ARE GONE,” I said, remembering the headline Wireman had quoted.

  She glanced at me sharply. “So you’ve done some research of your own.”

  “Not me, Wireman. He was curious about the woman he was working for. I don’t think he knows about the connection to this Dave Davis.”

  She looked thoughtful. “I wonder how much Elizabeth herself remembers?”

  “These days she doesn’t even remember her own name,” I said.

  Mary gave me another look, then turned from the window, got her ashtray, and put out her cigarette. “Alzheimer’s? I’d heard rumors.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m goddam sorry to hear it. I got the more lurid details of the Dave Davis story from her, you know. In better days. I used to see her all the time, on the circuit. And I interviewed most of the artists who stayed at Salmon Point. Only you call it something else, don’t you?”

  “Big Pink.”

  She smiled. “I knew it was something cute.”

  “How many artists stayed there?”

  “Lots. They came to lecture in Sarasota or Venice, and perhaps to paint for awhile—although those who stayed at Salmon Point did precious little of that. For most of Elizabeth’s guests, their time on Duma Key amounted to little more than a free vacation.”

  “She provided the place gratis?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling rather ironically. “The Sarasota Arts Council paid the honoraria for their lectures, and Elizabeth usually provided the lodging—Big Pink, née Salmon Point. But you didn’t get that deal, did you? Perhaps next time. Especially since you actually work there. I could name half a dozen artists who stayed in your house and never so much as wet a brush.” She marched to the sofa, lifted her glass, and had a sip. No—a swallow.

  “Elizabeth has a Dalí sketch that was done at Big Pink,” I said. “That I saw with my own eyes.”

  Mary’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yes, well. Dalí. Dalí loved it there, but not even he stayed long … although before he left, the son of a bitch goosed me. Do you know what Elizabeth told me after he left?”

  I shook my head. Of course I didn’t, but I wanted to hear.

  “He said it was ‘too rich.’ Does that strike a chord with you, Edgar?”

  I smiled. “Why do you suppose Elizabeth turned Big Pink into an artist’s retreat? Was she always a patron of the arts?”

  She looked surprised. “Your friend didn’t tell you? Perhaps he doesn’t know. According to local legend, Elizabeth was once an artist of some note herself.”

  “What do you mean, according to local legend?”

  “There’s a story—for all I know it’s pure myth—that she was a child prodigy. That she painted beautifully, while very young, and then just stopped.”

  “Did you ever ask her?”

  “Of course, silly man. Asking people things is what I do.” She was swaying a bit on her feet now, the Sophia Loren eyes noticeably bloodshot.

  “What did she say?”

  “That there was nothing to it. She said, ‘Those who can, do. And those who can’t support those who can. Like us, Mary.’ ”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “Yes, it did to me, too,” Mary said, taking another sip from her Waterford tumbler. “The only problem I had with it was I didn’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, I just didn’t. I had an old friend named Aggie Winterborn who used to do the advice-to-the-lovelorn column in the Tampa Trib, and I happened to mention the story once to her. This was around the time Dalí was favoring the Suncoast with his presence, maybe 1980. We were in a bar somewhere—in those days we were always in a bar somewhere—and the conversation had turned to how legends are built. I mentioned the story of how Elizabeth had supposedly been a baby Rembrandt as an example of that, an
d Aggie—long dead, God rest her—said she didn’t think that was a legend, she thought it was the truth, or a version of it. She said she’d seen a newspaper story about it.”

  “Did you ever check?” I asked.

  “Of course I did. I don’t write everything I know”—she tipped me a wink—“but I like to know everything.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. Not in the Tribune, not in the Sarasota or Venice papers, either. So maybe it was just a story. Hell, maybe all that stuff about her father storing Dave Davis’s whiskey on Duma Key was just a story, too. But … I’d’ve bet money on Aggie Winterborn’s memory. And Elizabeth had a look on her face when I asked her about it.”

  “What kind of look?”

  “An I’m-not-telling-you look. But all that’s a long time ago, much booze under the bridge since, and you can’t ask her about it now, can you? Not if she’s as bad as you say.”

  “No, but maybe she’ll come back. Wireman says she has before.”

  “We’ll hope,” Mary said. “She’s a rarity, you know. Florida’s full of old people—they don’t call it God’s waiting room for nothing—but precious few of em grew up here. The Suncoast Elizabeth remembers—remembered—really was another Florida. Not the hurry-scurry sprawl we have now, with the domed stadiums and the turnpikes going everywhere, and not the one I grew up in, either. Mine was the John D. MacDonald Florida, back when people in Sarasota still knew their neighbors and the Tamiami Trail was a honky-tonk. Back then people sometimes still came home from church to find alligators in their swimming pools and bobcats rooting in their trash.”

  She was actually very drunk, I realized … but that didn’t make her uninteresting.

  “The Florida Elizabeth and her sisters grew up in was the one that existed after the Indians were gone but before old Mr. White Man had fully conshol … consolidated his hold. Your little island would have looked very different to you. I’ve seen the pictures. It was cabbage palms covered in strangler fig and gumbo limbo and slash pine inland; it was liveoak and mangrove in the few places the ground was wet. There was Cherokee bean and inkberry low on the ground, but none of that jungle shit that’s growing out there now. The beaches are the only thing that’s the same, and the sea oats, of course … like the hem of a skirt. The drawbridge was there at the north end, but there was just one house.”

  “What caused all that growth?” I asked. “Do you have any idea? I mean three quarters of the island is buried in it.”

  She might not have heard. “Just the one house,” she repeated. “Sitting up there on the little rise of ground toward the south end and looking like something you’d see on the Gracious Homes Tour in Charleston or Mobile. Pillars and a crushed gravel drive. You had your grand view of the Gulf to the west; your grand view of the Florida coast looking east. Not that there was much to see; just Venice. Village of Venice. Sleepy li’l village.” She heard how she sounded and pulled herself together. “Excuse me, Edgar. Please. I don’t do this every day. Really, you should take my … my excitement … as a compliment.”

  “I do.”

  “Twenty years ago I would have tried to get you into bed instead of drinking myself stupid. Maybe even ten. As it is, I can only hope I haven’t scared you away for good.”

  “No such luck.”

  She laughed, a caw both barren and cheery. “Then I hope you’ll come back soon. I make a mean red gumbo. But right now …” She put an arm around me and led me to the door. Her body was thin and hot and rock-hard beneath her clothes. Her gait was just south of steady. “Right now I think it’s time for you to go and for me to take my afternoon siesta. I regret to say I need it.”

  I stepped out into the hall, then turned back. “Mary, did you ever hear Elizabeth speak of the deaths of her twin sisters? She would have been four or five. Old enough to remember something so traumatic.”

  “Never,” Mary said. “Never once.”

  ii

  There were a dozen or so chairs lined up outside the lobby doors, in what was a thin but comfortable band of shade at quarter past two in the afternoon. Half a dozen oldsters were sitting there, watching the traffic on Adalia Street. Jack was also there, but he was neither watching the traffic nor admiring the passing ladies. He was tipped back against the pink stucco and reading Mortuary Science for Dummies. He marked his place and got up as soon as he saw me.

  “Great choice for this state,” I said, nodding at the book with the trademark google-eyed nerd on the cover.

  “I’ve got to pick a career sometime,” he said, “and the way you’re moving lately, I don’t think this job is going to last much longer.”

  “Don’t hurry me,” I said, feeling in my pocket to make sure I had my little bottle of aspirin. I did.

  “Actually,” Jack said, “that’s just what I’m going to do.”

  “Have you got someplace you have to be?” I asked, limping down the cement walk beside him and into the sunshine. It was hot. There’s spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

  “No, but you’ve got a four o’clock appointment with Dr. Hadlock in Sarasota. I think we can just make it, if the traffic’s kind.”

  I stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Elizabeth’s doctor? What are you talking about?”

  “For a physical. Word on the street is you’ve been putting it off, boss.”

  “Wireman did this,” I muttered, and ran my hand through my hair. “Wireman the doctor-hater. I’ll never let him hear the end of it. You’re my witness, Jack, I will never—”

  “Nope, he said you’d say that,” Jack said. He tugged me back into motion. “Come on, come on, we’ll never beat the rush hour traffic if we don’t get rolling.”

  “Who? If Wireman didn’t make the appointment, then who?”

  “Your other friend. The big black dude. Man, I liked him, he was totally chilly.”

  We’d reached the Malibu and Jack opened the passenger door for me, but for a moment I just stood there looking at him, thunderstruck. “Kamen?”

  “Yep. Him and Dr. Hadlock got talking at your reception after the lecture, and Dr. Kamen just happened to mention that he was concerned because you still hadn’t had the checkup you’d been promising to get. Dr. Hadlock volunteered to give you one.”

  “Volunteered,” I said.

  Jack nodded, smiling in the bright Florida sunshine. Impossibly young, with a canary-yellow copy of Mortuary Science for Dummies tucked under his arm. “Hadlock told Dr. Kamen they couldn’t let anything happen to such an important newly-discovered talent. And just for the record, I agree.”

  “Thanks a pantload, Jack.”

  He laughed. “You’re a trip, Edgar.”

  “May I assume I’m also chilly?”

  “Yup, you’re a bad refrigerator. Get in, and let’s get back over the bridge while we still can.”

  iii

  As it happened, we got to Dr. Hadlock’s Beneva Road office on the dot. Freemantle’s Theorem of Office Waiting states that one must add thirty minutes to the time of one’s appointment to arrive at the time one is actually seen, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised. The receptionist called my name at only ten past the hour and ushered me into a cheerful examination room where a poster to my left depicted a heart drowning in fat and one to my right showed a lung that looked charbroiled. The eye-chart directly ahead was a relief, even though I wasn’t much good after the sixth line.

  A nurse came in, put a thermometer under my tongue, took my pulse, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm, inflated it, studied the readout. When I asked her how I was doing, she smiled noncommittally and said, “You pass.” Then she drew blood. After that I retired to the bathroom with a plastic cup, sending Kamen bitter vibes as I unzipped my fly. A one-armed man can provide a urine sample, but the potential for accidents is greatly magnified.

  When I returned to the exam room, the nurse was gone. She had left a folder with my name
on it. Beside the folder was a red pen. My stump gave a twinge. Without thinking about what I was doing, I took the pen and put it in my pants pocket. There was a blue Bic clipped to my shirt pocket. I took it out and put it where the red pen had been lying.

  And what are you going to say when she comes back? I asked myself. That the Pen Fairy came in and decided to make a swap?

  Before I could answer that question—or consider why I had stolen the red pen to begin with—Gene Hadlock came in and offered his hand. His left hand … which in my case was the right one. I found I liked him quite a lot better when he was divorced from Principe, the goateed neurologist. He was about sixty, a little on the pudgy side, with a white mustache of the toothbrush variety and a pleasant examining-table manner. He had me strip down to my shorts and examined my right leg and side at some length. He prodded me in several places, enquiring about the level of pain. He asked me what I was taking for painkillers and seemed surprised when I told him I was getting by on aspirin.

  “I’m going to examine your stump,” he said. “That all right?”

  “Yes. Just take it easy.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I sat with my left hand resting on my bare left thigh, looking at the eye-chart as he grasped my shoulder with one hand and cupped my stump in the other. The seventh line on the chart looked like AGODSED. A god said what? I wondered.

  From somewhere, very distant, I felt faint pressure. “Hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. No, don’t look down, just keep looking straight ahead. Do you feel my hand?”

  “Uh-huh. Way off. Pressure.” But no twinge. Why would there be? The arm that was no longer there had wanted the pen, and the pen was in my pocket, so now the arm was asleep again.

  “And how about this, Edgar? May I call you Edgar?”

  “Anything but late to dinner. The same. Pressure. Faint.”

  “Now you can look.”

  I looked. One hand was still on my shoulder, but the other was at his side. Nowhere near the stump. “Oops.”

  “Not at all, phantom sensations in the stump of a limb are normal. I’m just surprised at the rate of healing. And the lack of pain. I squeezed pretty darn hard to begin with. This is all good.” He cupped the stump again and pushed upward. “Does that give pain?”