Partly to kill time until I knew whether I’d need round two with Derek Evers, but also on the slight chance that I had a better shot at Shayna than Laura had, I drove the short distance to Cracker’s Café.
Sebastian, Vero Beach’s lower-middle-class neighbor, nestled unapologetically, almost with a smirk, beside the wealthier enclave. This area was more of the Florida Keys flavor, waterfront restaurants with names like Squid Lips, and ice-cream parlors housed in crumbling cottages, their strawberry aroma blending in the humid air with the smell of the fish house next door.
Cracker’s Café was on the main drag. Like the rest of the town it expressed a reverse snobbism. A sign outside said FOR FINE DINING, GO ELSEWHERE. A Ford pickup, more rust than red, was parked outside in a lot with faded parking stripes. Maybe an early eighties model, it could have rated as a classic if it got the respect it deserved. Cracker’s was the kind of place that has several kinds of pie made on the premises and stacked on a stand under a clear plastic dome. Oh, and a counter with vinyl-topped aluminum stools.
The way you could tell the place wasn’t just your generic diner was the decorations. At least a dozen whips hung on the walls, some looped and some extended almost to their limits. Dark leather on dark walls.
The lunch rush must have been over. Only one booth taken, a middle-aged man and woman who munched in relative silence. At the counter a tall scruffy guy argued mildly with a shorter scruffy guy on the other side. The taller one looked youngish or middle-aged, depending on how old you are. The shorter guy was definitely a geezer. The argument was over money, but it sounded like one they had often, and both already knew the outcome.
Instead of a booth I chose a table where I could view the entire place as well as the front door. Covering the table was a plastic cloth with sunflowers and roosters on it. I rested my elbows on it and then drew them away because the tablecloth had that sticky feel and smell of one that’s been washed recently with a stinky dishrag.
The couple watched me with interest as if I was the floor show. The two guys arguing, which included the words “mahi” and “yahoo” at intervals, ignored me.
I waved at the couple. They quickly looked down at their sandwiches.
The waitress approached, and I got my first look at the woman who destroyed Marcus Creighton.
Shayna (as her name tag said) was petite to the point of being elfin in both form and feature. She was the sort of woman who you suspect might be attractive to certain men who’ve denied something taboo deep in their subconscious. Was Marcus Creighton one of these men?
“Coffee?” she asked, lifting the carafe she carried.
“Lovely,” I said. “What kind of pie do you recommend?”
“The cherry is good.”
“What else?”
She looked at the stand on the counter, squinted to see better. “Peach and pecan.”
“Is it fresh peaches or canned?”
She looked at me like I had a smudge on my nose. “Fresh. Straight from Georgia.”
I bobbed my head in a quick nod. She wrote that down and went back to the counter, not bothering the geezer for the order but getting one of those thick white plates out, lifting the plastic cover from the pie stand, and easing a piece of peach out of the top tier. She brought it back to me by the time I had added cream and a little packet of fake sugar to my coffee.
“What’s with the whips?” I asked, waving my hand across the walls. “I haven’t seen anything like this since 50 Shades.”
She snickered at that, apparently accustomed to satisfying tourists spilling over from the more popular attractions several hours west to Orlando. “It goes with the name of the place, Cracker’s. That was what they called the herders in Florida because of the sound their whips made. That was in the early twentieth century when most of Florida was agricultural. Sam has quite a collection.”
“Ah, thanks.” While she was talking, I observed more than listened. The premature stoop of her shoulders matched by the sag in her face suggested that she was still weighed down by the burden of Creighton’s conviction, not to mention the fact that she was the killer’s mistress, the woman who had seduced him to violence, the destroyer of a family.
And one of the victims.
It would have been a big load for anyone to carry, but for this tiny creature it seemed especially hard. She had wanted to be an artist; maybe she even thought her involvement with Creighton would give her some level of celebrity. But in the end her bad decision on a boyfriend had made her nothing but a waitress in a backwater café. Whatever her motivation at the time, she couldn’t have foreseen what it would be like to live maybe another half century with drudgery, remorse, and guilt. Life is so much longer than it seems when you’re twenty-nine.
I had been ready to see an opportunistic parasite. Instead I felt bad for the little thing. I pushed on her anyway because that’s what I do.
“By the way, Shayna. I heard Marcus Creighton will be executed in four days. How do you feel about that?”
It had been a long time since I’d felt this much tension associated with a piece of pie. The rest of the people in the room caught the feeling, too, as if they were like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a single organism with identical reactions, or something creepy like that. I exaggerate; it was just that everyone in a town this size knew each other and their history.
Shayna didn’t respond, only shot a look that looked like a warning toward the counter. When I looked in that direction, too, I saw both the scruffy guys looking at me. Without saying anything, Shayna disappeared down a hall with a sign over it that said REST ROOMS, where I assumed she was going to try to pull herself together and process the news I’d given her.
While I waited, the older woman in the booth across the way looked at me with a sour little smirk that said I was in for it now. The two men who had been arguing at the counter arrived at my table and pulled out chairs on either side of me. Looked like we were going small-town noir.
My phone rang, but I gestured to the chairs, letting the gentlemen know they were welcome to join me though they had not asked. Attentive to them, I snapped the phone open without looking at the caller. Let everyone here wonder if this call was about Creighton.
“Derek!” I said.
But it was Laura, with news.
“They sent the cell phone records to Will’s office, Brigid. There weren’t that many.”
Those days people didn’t spend all their time checking weather or Facebook, and I bet Creighton’s phone didn’t even have texting capability. “So tell me.”
“It was easy. Shayna Murry testified that he called her and said ‘If anyone asks, tell them I was with you.’ There’s no call from Marcus to Shayna on that date. Okay, so maybe he used a different phone. But here’s the thing: There is a record of him calling his home number like he said he did. It’s linked to a cell tower in Sebastian. Incredibly lucky that they even had a cell tower in Sebastian then.”
“So she lied,” I said. I took some pleasure in realizing that no one in the café knew who she was, except maybe someone who had lied. I wondered if she was leaning against the wall in the hallway that led to the bathrooms. Listening. Maybe now she would talk to me.
“She lied,” Laura said. I got the feeling she would have liked to squeal but was keeping her voice controlled after my warning about her feelings showing.
My heart thumped on Laura’s behalf with the excitement of that moment when you’ve followed a hunch and now you’re damn sure. I looked to my right at the shorter of the two scruffy men watching me as I said, “This is hopeful. I say we try to get this guy out.”
Professional or not, I heard Laura whoop spontaneously. “Did you get the hair dryer from Evers?”
I told her I was sorry I hadn’t yet accomplished my part of the job, but needed to get off the phone because I was sure a call was coming soon.
I left the phone out on the table and put out my hand to each of the scruffy guys in turn. It seemed impolite to keep calling them that. “Hi, I’m Brigid,” I said, and waited for the polite return of names. Which did not come. “Who might you be?” I prodded gently, getting into cracker-speak.
The taller of the two was leaning back in his chair, balancing on the two back legs while his hands held the table. He had lit a cigarette while I was on the phone with Laura and would keep one hand out for balance when he took a puff with the other. He put the cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “Erroll,” he said, after a time. “This here’s Sam.”
“This your place, Sam?” I asked. I took an appreciative bite of my pie. The aroma of the peaches had under-notes of fried meat and menthol. “The pie’s terrific.”
“It’s been better,” Sam said, trying to maintain what I guessed was a threatening demeanor while conflicted by the pride he took in his pie. He swiped his hand through the air, either in a gesture of disdain for my poor taste in pie, or trying to clear the air of Erroll’s smoke so as not to ruin my dining experience.
Erroll said, “I’m here because I sell fish to Sam.”
This reminded Sam of their argument. “Can’t put yahoo on the menu. Tourists don’t know what it is. They think it’s the Internet. Nobody’ll order it.”
“Call it something else, then,” Erroll snapped, and then ignored him and said to me, “Which way you headed?”
The words were southern good ol’ boy, but the tone was more like Get yer ass outta here. They were looking for the way to get the old broad gone without hurting her.
“Nice place,” I said after taking another lip-smacking bite of pie. “This whole area is nice. I grew up in Southeast Florida, but I went to school in Tallahassee. I remember tubing down the Ichetucknee with a case of beer. Hell, I remember what it was like before Disney World. You?”
Sam said, “I wouldn’t mind having the days back again when I could take a line down to the lagoon, catch a bigmouth bass, and cook it up right there on the bank with some swamp cabbage.”
Erroll shifted irritably in his chair and let the front legs bang to the floor while I nodded my agreement.
“I know,” I said. “Once Orlando took hold you got developers coming in, so the coast from Miami to Palm Beach is now creeping all the way to Jacksonville. Just in the past twenty, thirty years. Every little spit of land, every island—”
I looked to Erroll to include him in the conversation, but he was looking at Sam like Sam was an idiot. I had to agree with Erroll, if any of us were going to make any progress, someone was going to have to be more direct. I asked, “Is Shayna coming back?”
“Shayna,” Erroll said.
“The woman Marcus Creighton killed his family for. I wanted to talk to her about him.”
“She went home,” Sam said, back with the program. “She’s sick.”
“Uh, yeah, we really want you to leave her alone about that Creighton,” Erroll said. “It’s bullshit.” His voice stayed neutral, but I could sense the muscles in his shoulders tensing. Mine tensed in response. I made my right hand into a fist and let it hang beside the chair. If he spreads his knees to stand up and come for me, I’ve got good leverage to bring my right fist up between his legs. Nothing fancy.
“I just wanted to ask her a few questions,” I said.
Erroll said, “But you know, we did that for years. After a while this whole town got real tired of news people, and those true crime television shows—”
“But I’m not—”
“I don’t give a shit what you are. It’s about time they fried that cocksucker who took advantage of our girl. You come to this town, you deal with everybody here. Understand?”
Then my phone rang again. Sam jumped a little, and Erroll’s muscles got harder. I unballed my fist and flipped the phone open, but not without looking at the caller this time.
I said, “Derek! You found it. Listen, I don’t want to get near it. I want you to follow proper chain of custody and send it to…” I got out my pad and gave him the address of the independent fingerprint examiner that Will had retained. “Repeat that back. What? Clothes, a shovel, what kind of crap is that? I don’t care about the other stuff, I want the fucking hair dryer. You don’t find it and I’m coming over there and starting a shitstorm the like of which hasn’t been seen since the great turd tornado of ’63. You’ll be sharing a cell at Raiford with someone who knows what you’ve done. I’ll make sure of it. You got that? Good.”
I hung up my phone and looked up at the two men, who were looking at the old broad with different eyes now.
I said, “What?”