The Biscuit was crowded as always on Mondays, when they featured their all-you-can-eat ribs. We’d been lucky to get a small table in the corner near the entrance to the kitchen. I didn’t mind the wait staff hustling back and forth past our table. What I did mind was the smoky, spicy, yummy smells emanating from the kitchen each time the door swung open, and the wait. I hated the wait.
“So now you’ve had two toxic doses of Blake Reed. I told you there was history between the two of us, but I never got to finish the story.” David moved his water glass around in circles, leaving a trail of moisture on the table top.
I was surprised that after being interviewed by the authorities for over an hour, he chose to discuss his feud with Blake Reed. I wondered if he was trying to avoid talking about the murder of his client, or the fact that it was his gun found at the scene.
Madeleine looked distraught. Her usual open expression and sunny smile were gone, replaced by a pinched look. The skin around her thumbnail was red and bleeding. I handed her a napkin and began searching the depths of my purse for a Band-Aid.
“You think Reed is behind this murder, don’t you?” asked Alex.
“Of course. He’s been trying to buy my place since he came here. The man doesn’t like me on top of his land. And I think sportsmen should come here to hunt what Florida has to offer. I’m not setting up the African plains in Sabal Bay.”
The waitress arrived with our drinks and took orders for dinner. I ordered a rack of ribs.
“A whole rack?” she asked.
“I’m starving. It’s after seven at night and I only had a small sandwich for lunch. That was hours ago.”
She took a look at my long, lean figure and shrugged. “Well, whatever you can’t eat, you can take home in a doggie bag.”
I shook my head. “There will be no need for a doggie bag.”
“If I didn’t know better,” Alex said, “I’d say you were eating for two.” He held up two fingers, signaling the waitress that he too wanted a full rack.
I looked at him, seemingly terrified.
“What? I can eat as much as you,” he said.
“No. The other.”
“I’m right, aren’t I? You don’t have a tapeworm, do you?”
Alex and I were trying too hard to make funny. Our antics didn’t help erase the looks of anguish on David and Madeleine’s faces.
I reached out and gave David’s hand a pat. “Tell us about Reed. What’s he done so far?”
“That waterhole today? That’s not junk I dumped there. That had to be him. And he runs his Jeeps through my fields when I’m not around, scaring off the quail and disturbing nesting birds and water fowl, as well as other animals. Just the other day, I found that about ten of the palms in my field to the north had been cut down. My client numbers have gone down in the past two months. When I contacted some of my regulars, they said Reed was giving them a better deal and offering the possibility for gator hunting too.”
“It’s illegal to take gators,” said Alex.
“The man doesn’t care about legal or illegal,” David said.
“I’d sic Frida on him. I think she’s just looking for a reason to arrest him. If she can’t pin this murder on him, then maybe she can get him for these other violations.” I tapped my spoon on the table in frustration.
David leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It really doesn’t matter. I’m going to sell the place anyway.”
“You’re letting him run you off?”
“Not everyone is as eager to take on the bad guys as you, Eve,” David said.
Madeleine had been silent until now. “It’s not Reed. Although he’s making the decision easier.”
“You knew about this and didn’t tell me?” I thought Madeleine and I had a pact. Gal pals told each other everything.
“I asked her to keep quiet about it,” David said. “In fact, I’m not going public with putting it up for sale. I know who would buy it. Blake Reed. I’d rather keep it and close it down than have him own it.”
The waitress slapped the platters of ribs down. “Getcha anything else?”
David held up his glass. “Another of these.”
“Go slow, honey,” said Madeleine.
I was hungry and wanted to tuck into the ribs, but food took a back seat to my curiosity. “Why are you selling a place that’s been in your family for years?”
“Because I hate guns. I haven’t picked one up for two years.”
“So, you see, there’s no way David could have killed that man,” Madeleine said.
“He hates guns? Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. He had to have been born with a rifle in his hand. Who’s going to believe him?” I was going over the events of the evening with Alex as he drove me back to my house.
“I believed him.”
“It was pretty clear Madeleine did too, but why this sudden dislike of a sport he was raised to love? Something had to have happened to create his abhorrence of guns.”
Alex pulled up in front of my house and gave me one of his let’s-get-friendly looks. “How about it, hon?”
“ ‘How about it?’ Isn’t that romantic.”
“Okay, how about, ‘I love you and will for all time. You are my moon, my stars, my ….’ ”
There was a rap on the car window before he could finish.
My ex-husband, Jerry, stood beside the car. Alex rolled down the window.
“Hi, kids. What’s up?” Jerry smiled one of his cheesy smiles, so I knew his presence tonight meant he was up to no good and likely wanted something. Jerry was a great looking guy, but I was immune. Having an ex who cheats will do that to you.
“Whatever you want from me, Jerry, you can’t have it. Go away. Alex was trying out some wooing, and I’d like him to finish.”
Alex didn’t look too happy to see Jerry either, but I figured that was due to Jerry’s poor timing and not because he disliked the guy. For reasons I didn’t understand, the two of them got along well. Like most women, I didn’t understand male bonding, other than that it involved a lot of burping, watching ball games on TV, and slapping each other on the butt.
“Uh, Mr. Napolitani wanted me to handle a sale for him in West Palm, and here I am.”
“This is not West Palm. It’s Sabal Bay. You know that, so why are you here and not there?” Why did I bother to ask? I knew I wouldn’t like the answer.
Jerry worked for Mr. Napolitani, running errands, doing odd jobs, nothing illegal. Before we divorced, Jerry had had a relationship with one of Nappi’s daughters. It had ended badly, so badly that, instead of roughing him up, Nappi made him a kind of indentured servant. Jerry seemed happy to have gotten off so easily.
“I came over here to go to the casino and play a little Texas hold ’em,” Jerry said.
“And you lost.” I couldn’t help myself. He was so predictable.
“Yep, and then—”
“You decided to try to recover your losses by getting into a private game with the good ol’ boys who took your money off you and you lost again. And now you have no money. Right?”
Jerry looked insulted. It’s a look he must have perfected in front of the mirror when he shaved in the mornings, along with the I’m-so-innocent look, the I-didn’t-do-it smile, and the who-me grin. Jerry had a repertoire of faces he could put on when he was caught at something he shouldn’t have been doing. None of what anybody saw there was the true Jerry. Underneath, there was no underneath.
Not that Jerry didn’t have his appeal. He was close to six feet tall with brown hair, thinning a bit on top. He dressed well and might be considered a catch if a gal could overlook his inability to commit in a relationship and his propensity for making bad life decisions. After overlooking these negatives for ten years, I’d finally become convinced he’d never change and divorced him. Since going our separate ways as husband and wife, we’d been thrown together more often than before the divorce. I seemed to always be bailing him out of sticky situations.
“That’s not how it went.” He paused and looked at his feet. “Uh, it wasn’t a bunch of good old boys. It was a gang of four women, all around fifty or so. I figured it had to be blind luck for them to win at the tables, so when they took pity on me …. I mean, Eve, one of them looked like your grandmother, Grandy. I thought to myself, I can get my money back with just a few hands, so we took the game to one of their houses. They fed me apple pie and milk. They were so friendly. And so naïve, I thought. And that’s when I lost the car.”
“You bet your car?” I had misjudged him. He was even more of an idiot than I thought.
“I got no transportation. And there’s a bass tournament in town, so there are no rooms. And I have to be at the real estate office by nine tomorrow.” He hung his head like a naughty little boy, another ploy to play on my sympathies, but I wasn’t having any.
Male bonding to the rescue. Alex, riding in on his white horse, said, “Eve—”
“Do you understand what he’s asking?” I asked.
Alex nodded.
“Right. Then you let him stay at your place and you give him a ride to West Palm bright and early tomorrow. I’m going to bed.” I got out of the car, slammed the door with as much force as I could, and stalked to my front door.
“Did I ruin your night?” I heard Jerry say to Alex as he opened the passenger door.
Alex rolled down his window. “If I had finished my romantic appeal, would it have done any good?”
I didn’t hesitate. “No.”
“Then, no, you did not ruin my night, old chum,” he said to Jerry.
I met Madeleine at the only retail space available that we could afford Tuesday morning, early, around seven. I’d had only one cup of coffee, and I wasn’t in a hopeful mood. I never was when Jerry showed up. You’d think the man would have the decency to leave me alone once I’d divorced him, but he was always popping up, usually at the worst times.
The building housing the space for rent was too far out of town, but we had no other choice. If we could sign a six-month lease, maybe something else would come up closer in, and we could move. The store was in a small strip mall that yelled shabby with no chic. The mall housed only two businesses. The other one was a bar called T ’n A. There were no T’s or A’s in sight this morning, but there were two motorcycles in the parking area in front of the bar and the lights were on inside.
“Kind of early for beer, isn’t it?” I asked the landlord, who stood in front of the rental flipping a set of keys back and forth in his hand.
“Not if they serve bacon and eggs with it.” He was a big-bellied man wearing motorcycle boots. He inserted a key into the front lock and stood to one side, gesturing us into the room. “Take a look around, ladies. I’ll be with you in a second.” He let the door slam shut, and we turned and watched him walk next door to the bar.
“Probably his bacon and eggs were getting cold,” said Madeleine.
“And his beer warm.” I flipped the light switch by the door and nothing happened.
“Well, there’s enough sunlight coming in through the windows. We can see all right, I guess.” Madeleine walked slowly through the space and headed toward the backroom.
I looked around at the walls. Some kind of beige. Probably “ick beige,” I thought, one of your less popular decorating colors. Well, we could change that, and there was more square footage here than in our present space.
I thought of a new advertising campaign. Come to Big Lake Country to shop and you can share the dressing room with a biker.
“Eeeeech!” yelled Madeleine.
I rushed into the backroom. “What’s wrong?”
“Look.” She pointed at a table in the corner of the room. Large golden-colored bugs crawled among the crumbs there, joined by small black ants whose backpacking buddies carried food down one of the table legs across the floor, disappearing under the woodwork.
“Roaches.” She gave a shudder of disgust.
“Actually, I think they’re palmetto bugs.”
“I really don’t need a lecture on entomology, Eve. They’re bugs. Let’s get out of here.”
I glanced around the room. Aside from the table and a pile of rags in the far corner, the place was empty. It had potential.
“We can call a fumigator and paint. The space is more than adequate. What else can we do?”
“You can pipe down and get the hell out of here. I’m trying to sleep.” Madeleine and I both jumped. The voice came from behind us, out of the rags, which began to quiver and move. A hand emerged from the pile, followed by a head of greasy hair.
Madeleine would have sprinted across the room if I hadn’t grabbed her.
“Who the hell are you? And what are you doing here? We were considering renting this place, but—” I was interrupted by the landlord, who strode into the room.
He stopped and put his fists on his hips. “Get up, ya bum. You’ve got work to do. You can’t take all day to sleep it off.”
“You know this guy?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’s my cook next door. I let him sleep here sometimes when he’s had a few too many. Don’t want him to take his bike out on the road and kill himself.”
“Or someone else,” I said.
“Huh? Oh, right. Well, I take care of my people. He’s a damn good cook. Now, get up and skedaddle over there. I keep breaking the yolks of the eggs. Folks are getting pissed.”
The rag man Madeleine and I had taken for a vagrant crawled out of what turned out to be an old khaki-green and purple sleeping bag. Once he got to his feet, he staggered a moment, got his balance, and walked from the room in less than a straight line toward the front door. The landlord, Madeleine, and I followed. I stopped a moment. Now the front room smelled like bacon, eggs, coffee … and beer. It made me kind of hungry.
“You gals are welcome to come next door. Breakfast’s on me.” The landlord smiled, flashing several gold teeth. “He don’t look like much, but Donnie’s the best short-order cook in the county.”
“Would we be expected to provide him accommodations next door on those nights he overindulged?” I asked.
“Up to you. I could consider a break in the rent if you did.”
“Uh, we’ll have to give this some thought.” I gave him my best businesslike smile.
“Don’t wait too long. Somebody will snap this up. It’s a prime location.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Madeleine as we drove back to our shop to open. “There’s nothing in town we can afford.”
“Buy a lot of paint, hire a fumigator, and find Donnie a better sleeping bag.” And, I added silently, change our advertising campaign to read, Come to the Big Lake Country to shop. We sell used sleeping bags.
Madeleine stared at me for several minutes, then turned her attention to the herds of cattle outside the window. “I’d rather wrestle an alligator than rent that place.”
“Be careful what you wish for. I understand the Miccosukee tribe is looking for a girl gator wrestler. I heard it from my friend Sammy Egret. Maybe I can get you an interview.”