Alice Orr - Key West Heat

Des saw one of the policemen approach Jethro and Taylor. The magnifying lens showed the policeman talking to them, and her answering. The conversation continued for a few moments, during which she grew increasingly agitated. Jethro was merely listening to the exchange. One of the two cops who had entered the guesthouse came out on the porch and called the other officers to him.

Taylor watched the cop walk away. She had one hand clamped over her mouth, as if to hold back a scream or a sob. Jethro was looking very nervous. He moved toward her and gestured as if he might take her by the shoulders, perhaps to comfort her. Instead, he dropped his arms and began to drum his fingers against the sides of his thighs. Meanwhile, she had started walking slowly toward the guesthouse. Her back was toward Des again, but he could see the tension in her shoulders.

One of the officers had gone down the walk at the side of the guesthouse toward the back of the building. The other officer stationed outside had returned to his patrol car and was speaking into the two-way radio. She climbed the steps, getting close enough to look through the front door into the foyer before one of the policemen from inside came out and backed her off. Des thought he saw her stagger against the cop, but the glasses still didn’t give a good view of her face.

The policeman moved her away from the door and let her sit down on the top step. She put her head in her hands, and could have been crying. Des couldn’t tell. Jethro had kept his distance. Now the policeman beckoned him toward the porch. Jethro hesitated, then shrugged and trudged forward. Des stayed out of sight in the Jeep, despite his sudden impulse to help Taylor. He’d given in to that same impulse twenty-some years ago and lived to regret it. Besides, he wasn’t quite ready to become part of the scene he’d been watching through his field glasses, especially not before he knew exactly what was going on.

He continued watching. Eventually, an ambulance arrived, then the medical examiner’s car. A while later, a stretcher was carried out of the house. The figure on the stretcher was encased in a black bag, completely covered from head to toe.

Des sighed and lowered the field glasses to the passenger seat of the Jeep. “What is it about you, Taylor Bissett?” he asked out loud. “Whenever you’re around, people have a habit of dying.”

* * *

APRIL JANE COONEY had been robbed and murdered. According to one of the uniformed officers who knew her, she never kept much currency in the cashbox. She was too savvy for that. Her assailant had taken whatever little there was, anyway. The metal box had been pried open and left near the body. April Jane must have put up a fight. What was left of the lamp from the registration desk lay in pieces on the floor near the opposite wall. The lamp’s base was shattered, as if it had been thrown very hard. A small dent at about head height on the white wall supported that theory.

One of the policemen had taken Taylor into a sitting room off the guest-house entryway. He had left the lace-curtained double glass doors ajar, so she could hear them discussing what might have happened to April Jane. Taylor heard the words and even put them together into sentences in her mind. Still, they weren’t entirely understandable to her. She guessed that she wasn’t letting herself fully comprehend what she was hearing, because then she would have to believe it. She would have to absorb the very scary fact that a woman she had spoken with less than two hours ago was now on her way to the city morgue, the victim of a senseless, violent crime.

What if Taylor had been here when the thief came in? She felt guilty thinking such a self-centered thought, but she couldn’t help it. What if her uneasiness about walking the trellis path behind the guesthouse had actually been some instinct telling her there was a would-be murderer lurking in the shrubbery? She shuddered at the thought and wished someone would turn off the ceiling fan. The sitting room had turned suddenly chilly.

Taylor had overheard the police saying there was only one guest in the house when the attack happened, an older man on the third floor in the back. He had stayed in tonight and taken a pill to help him sleep off a sunburn. He hadn’t heard a thing. The other guests were out on the town, like most Key West tourists at this time of night. Consequently, there were no witnesses. A neighbor across the street had heard glass shattering and saw the vestibule light go out suddenly. She didn’t see anybody run out of the house, but she suspected something might be wrong and called the police. By the time they arrived, April Jane was dead. Her killer had fled, probably out the back way. The police had already begun canvassing the neighborhood, both on Amelia Street and one block north on Virginia Street, to find out if anyone had seen anything.

Taylor had heard Jethro’s voice out in the entryway shortly after the policeman brought her into this room. Her knees had gone weak, and she had asked to sit down. She couldn’t make out what Jethro was saying. Then she didn’t hear him anymore. Next, she heard a policeman talking to a guest who had returned to the Key Westian and was demanding to know what had happened here. The policeman said that everyone would have to be questioned. He added that the guest-house residents would not be allowed to sleep here tonight because it was a major crime scene and had to be sealed off to all but official visitors.

Taylor was suddenly very tired. A series of adrenaline charges had kept her nerves tingling, through her arrival on this exotic island, her near escape from being run down and her unsettling encounter with Des Maxwell. This most recent jolt—the discovery of a dead body in her hotel—had sapped her final reserves of even that nervous energy. Now, all she wanted was to sleep. The police weren’t about to let her go to her room and lie down there. They might think it bizarre of her to curl up here on this settee, but she was too tired to care much what they thought. She was almost too tired to care where in the devil she might sleep tonight.

“Miss Bissett is a personal acquaintance of mine, and I would like to talk with her.”

The voice from the entryway had obviously been raised for emphasis. That was why Taylor could hear the words so clearly. But it wasn’t the loudness or even the demanding tone, that cut through her head-nodding stupor and snapped her to full attention. She had met very few people on Key West in her few hours here. Yet, she was certain she knew the owner of that deep, resonating voice. One glance at the opening between the double doors confirmed this certainty.

Taylor had no idea why Des Maxwell was here. Nonetheless, the sight of his brown, muscled arm flexing impatiently as he backed the policeman gradually toward the half-open doorway, told Taylor that she was no longer stranded and alone. A wave of relief swept over her, as deep as it was probably irrational. Taylor reminded herself that Des Maxwell was not a likely candidate for friend in need where she was concerned. Still, he was a familiar face in what felt at the moment like very alien territory. She couldn’t help being grateful to him for that.

There was something else about that face besides familiarity, something that struck her with a blow that took her breath away. It had happened when she had first laid eyes on him earlier in the Beachcomber barroom. It happened again now, with even greater force because he didn’t know she was looking at him and she didn’t have to be so careful to hide her reaction. She tried to tell herself she was only tired, otherwise his handsomeness wouldn’t have this effect on her. Still, she couldn’t keep the thought from crossing her mind that the word “manly” had been invented with someone like Des Maxwell in mind. Meanwhile, Des and the officer had walked out of the foyer and through the lace-curtained doors into the sitting room. The two of them appeared to know each other.