Brett Halliday - Mermaid on the Rocks

Now, lowering her glass, Kitty met his eyes. “You’ll really let me tell you about it, Mike? If I put it into words, I may be able to decide if I’m getting skittery about nothing.”

“Poisoning the air in an aqualung,” the redhead said dryly, “isn’t my idea of nothing. Who’s trying to kill you, Kitty?”

The simple tuck she had taken in the towel was beginning to slip. She put her drink on the deck and used both hands to tuck it back in.

“I thought I knew,” she said. “But killing a cat and switching tanks on an aqualung are two such different things. Never mind. There are only a few possibilities.”

“If you want to know my candidate,” Natalie put in, “it’s Brad Tuttle. What a repulsive character. Ugh!”

“He was my candidate, too, till this happened,” Kitty said. “The point is, Mike, under the terms of Cal’s will five of us were left the Key in common, the Key and everything on it. I don’t know if you can see the main house from here. Part of it, anyway.”

Shayne looked the way she was pointing. They were lying a half mile offshore. Near the southernmost end of the Key, facing a protected cove and partially screened by a tangle of mangroves and gumbo-limbo trees, he saw a low stucco belltower. Gaspar was one of the Middle Keys, halfway down the curving chain between the Straits of Florida and the Gulf. It was shaped like an hourglass, so narrow at the waist that higher-than-usual tides, Shayne thought, would probably wash all the way through. A ramshackle quarter-mile trestle connected it to Smuttynose Key and the highway to Key West.

“He was a funny mixture, Cal,” Kitty said. “Most people never saw his sentimental side. He just wasn’t open to argument on the subject of Key Gaspar. Toward the end he told me a lot about what it was like back in the twenties. Whatever it was for most people, that was a glamorous period in Cal’s life. His boats were faster than anything the revenue people had. That was before the causeways, and he knew every inlet and shoal and passage. He could nip in and out on the blackest night without lights. He made tons of money. He spent most of it. You could tell by the way he described those days that he had a perfectly gorgeous time. Something slipped finally and he ended up in prison. His lawyer wanted him to sell the Key, but he wouldn’t. He wanted it to stay the way he’d always known it, wild and unspoiled. That’s why he tied it up the way he did in his will.”

“Did he have any children?” Shayne said.

“Only one, Barbara. She went to college and married a boy she met there. Naturally she didn’t boast about having a father who was in jail for killing a government man in a gunfight. After Cal got out she didn’t have anything to do with him for years. They finally made up after her husband died, and she came here to live. She didn’t especially care for the Key, though, and Cal knew she’d sell it like a shot if he left it to her outright. So he set up a Joint Tenancy. You’ve probably heard about that kind of arrangement, Mike. It was new to me.”

“Yeah,” Shayne growled, “and it’s always a hell of a way to leave property.”

“He had a problem, you see,” she said. “He didn’t want the Key to be bulldozed and landscaped and covered with a clutter of those horrid little shacks on stilts. From his point of view, the more complications the better. There are only four of us left now. His brother Ev died in a fire last summer.” She ticked off the survivors on her fingers. “Barbara. Me. Brad, another brother. Frank Shanahan, Cal’s lawyer. We all have lifetime rights. The one who lives longest inherits the whole thing. Theoretically we could all move into the main house, but nobody wanted to do that. Cal left a letter explaining why he did it this way. He had to give us all equal rights in everything or it wouldn’t be legal, but he wanted Barbara to have the house. The rest of us could build if we wanted to, and he suggested where. I’m the only one who did. Brad has an old secondhand trailer on the other side. He brings a girl down most weekends and gets drunk and goes diving. I think he’s hoping to find a sunken treasure ship-there’s an old story about a wreck between here and Smuttynose.”

Shayne looked at Rourke. “Brad Tuttle?”

“Yeah,” Rourke. said. “It rang a bell with me, too. I got all the Tuttle envelopes out of the morgue yesterday, and I talked to a couple of cops who know him. He’s Grade B bad news. Nothing like his brother. He never made any real dough, and whenever somebody wants some muscle, he has to be available. He collects bad debts for a couple of loan sharks on the Beach.”

“And he could have butchered my lovely Siamese,” Kitty said bitterly, “and sat down to dinner afterwards without washing his hands. I loathe that man.”

Natalie exclaimed, “Kit, you’d better move in with me and stop coming down for weekends. This is definitely not healthy.”

“Don’t I know it! Mike, what do you think?”

“First, what about the brother who died in the fire?”

“Ev. He was younger than the others, and nothing like either of them. He was drunk most of the time. Cal had to keep bailing him out of the drunk-tank, and he sent him three dollars in the mail every day. That was one of my jobs. A weekly allowance didn’t work-it vanished the first day. He fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and set his mattress on fire. That had happened before, but somebody always smelled the smoke and put it out in time. I liked Ev, but I didn’t know why Cal included him in the Key. He never came down here even for an afternoon. He said he had a superstition about it. He talked about taking legal action to resign his share, but he never stayed sober long enough to make the first move.”

“Now about Shanahan. Is that the Frank Shanahan who’s a Civil Court judge?”

“Yes. He was Cal’s lawyer all through. He’s engaged to Barbara.”

“I know him,” Shayne said, “and I doubt if he’s ever cut a cat’s throat in his life.” He lifted his paper cup thoughtfully. “Were you Cal’s mistress, Kitty?”

“Hey,” Rourke protested.

“No, it does seem to stand to reason,” Kitty said, coloring. “I was his secretary for four years. A one-fifth interest in his estate is a big bequest to a secretary. Of course, everybody assumed there had to be more to it, my husband, for one.”

“That goon,” Natalie said.

“Hank has his points,” Kitty said. “I admit I went through a stage where I didn’t think so, but I can be more objective now, if I force myself. Real-estate people get a very strong attachment to private property, and I was one of Hank’s possessions, like a toothbrush. You wouldn’t want to share your toothbrush with somebody else, would you? Of course not. I got along well with Cal, but that’s as far as it went, Mike. It never occurred to me that he was leaving me anything. I know why he did it-he knew how I felt about this place. With me in on the tenancy he could be sure it wouldn’t be sold. But Hank wouldn’t listen. After Cal’s funeral I opened the registered letter and clang! The fight began. It hadn’t gone far before I started throwing his clothes out in the hall. If that was the way his mind worked-”

Natalie said, “What about the theory that that’s what Cal expected to happen?”

“That was Ev’s notion, in one of his lucid moments. It’s that Cal never liked Hank. They were in some kind of deal together, and Hank made the mistake of trying to slip something past him. Cal was always offering to stake me to a divorce. He’d seen a couple of examples of Hank’s jealousy, and I suppose he knew precisely what would happen when Hank heard about the will. Ev had surprising insights at times. He said Cal liked to be the one who pulled the strings, and the chief quality he learned in jail was patience. He didn’t succeed in breaking up my marriage while he was alive. Very well, he’d do it after he died. This is Ev talking, you understand. It’s not the whole story, by any means. Hank said I could prove I hadn’t been sleeping with Cal by selling my one-fifth, but I wasn’t about to do that. So farewell, Hank.”