Island of Bones (19 page)

“He couldn’t swim.”

Vince
Carissimi looked up at Louis but then the medical examiner just shrugged and went back to weighing Frank Woods’s heart. Louis was staring at Frank’s body lying on the stainless steel table.

“Louis, he committed suicide. He wanted to die
,” Vince said. “You didn’t kill him, for crissake.”

“I didn’t save him either.” Louis shook his head slowly. “How in hell does a person drown himself?”

“Easy,” Vince said. “You just take a deep breath and give up. It’s more common than you think. People drown themselves all the time —- bathtubs, lakes, pools. Hart Crane jumped off a steamship. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. Tchaikovsky, Ophelia, Jerry Baskin.”

“Who’s Jerry Baskin?”

“The bum in that movie ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills.’ Tried to off himself in Richard Dreyfuss’s pool.”

“This isn’t funny, Vince.”

“It rarely is.
Nemo ante mortem beatus
.”

Louis just stared at him, waiting.

“Nobody is happy before his death,” Vince translated. He put his earphones back on and returned to his work. Louis was close enough to Vince to hear Janis Joplin singing “Summertime.” He moved away, going up to stand at the head of the table.

It struck him again how different Frank looked from the first time he had seen him in the library. Then, with his salt- and-pepper beard, bad haircut, pale skin, and stooped posture, Frank Woods had looked every inch the hermit bookworm he had been. But the three weeks he had spent as a murder suspect and then a hunted man had changed him. His hair was longer, his skin made leathery by the sun. His body looked almost sinewy, and even in death his face wore an odd expression of what
-—puzzlement? Confusion over what had happened to his life?

Why had he done it? Guilt over killing those women? Fear of facing his daughter? Nobody is happy before his death. That was certainly true of Frank.

Louis glanced down at Frank’s left hand, at his gold wedding band. For the life of him, he just couldn’t see this man killing six women. But why had he confessed?

And those strange foreign words Frank had said in the restaurant. What was that all about?

Shit, what had he said? Something about hicks loot... hicks looties?

Louis was thinking about all the books in Frank’s house, all those language books, but he couldn’t recall seeing books on any one particular language. Linguistics, language origins, that kind of stuff.

Hicks looty ... was it Latin?

“Hey, Vince,” Louis called out.

Vince’s head was bobbing rhythmically. Louis picked up a towel and tossed it across the table, hitting Vince in the chest.

Vince snatched off the earphones. “What?”

“Vince, Frank Woods said something to me in a foreign language. It might have been Latin. What does this sound like to you —- hicks looty?”

Vince grimaced. “You sure you heard him right?”

“I don’t know, man. It sounded like hicks and then looty.” Louis paused. “No, it was lootio. And then es, like the letter S.”

Vince repeated the phrase several times under his breath, then shook his head. "
Lapsus linguae
, Louis. You must have heard him wrong.”

The
sound of a door made Louis turn. It was Octavius, the diener.

“Vince, the guy’s daughter is outside,” he said.

“His daughter? What does she want?”

“Says the cops told her to come over and identify her father.”

“Identify him?” Vince said. “I thought they already did that.” He glanced at Louis. “Don’t tell me somebody screwed this up.”

Louis glanced at the door
. “I don’t know, Vince. I tried to call her at her school but they told me she wasn’t available. I don’t know who told her to come here.”

“Damn it
,” Vince said. He went over and glanced at a clipboard, holding his bloody-gloved hands aloft. “This says he has already been ID’d and released.”

He came back to stand by the body. “If I had known this, I wouldn’t have cut him. How does this shit happen?”

Louis didn’t respond. He wondered if Landeta had screwed up somehow. Or had he done an end-around and contacted Diane Woods after Horton had told him to let Louis handle it?

“Octo, get him covered up,” Vince said, snapping off his gloves and tossing them in the trash. “I’ll go out and talk to her.”

“Let me do it,” Louis said.

“Why?”

“I need to.”

“Be my guest. Give me five and then you can bring her
in.”

Louis went out into the hallway. Diane was standing by the receptionist’s desk. She was dressed like she had just come from school. She was biting her nails. She stiffened when she saw him.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Diane, I have to talk to you.”

Her eyes went to the double doors. “Is he in there?”

“Yes, but
—-”

She started to go by him and Louis caught her arm. “Wait, Diane
.”

She pulled away, glaring at him. “Stay away from me.”

She hurried through the doors. Louis followed, catching up to her before she got to the autopsy room. He caught her by both arms and spun her away from the door’s window.

“Diane, listen to me.”

“Let go of me,” she said. It came out as a whimper and Louis realized she was shaking. She bowed her head, her body growing heavy in his hands. He backed her up and gently lowered her onto a bench. She covered her face with her hands.

He thought she was going to cry, but when she lowered her hands, her face was dry, her eyes empty.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“It’s all right,” Louis said. “He looks...asleep.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like to get the calls from the parents, the school board. Or to go in there every day and hear them whispering, knowing they are talking about it, and then you walk into the lounge and they shut up.” She looked up at Louis. “My car, when I went out to the parking lot today, my car, there was red paint on the windshield. I think one of the kids...”

Her voice trailed off and she shook her head. “I can’t do it. I just can’t...do...it.”

Louis leaned back against the cold tile wall, looking down at Diane Woods. Any pity he had felt for her was fading fast. Her father —- her only living relative —- was lying in there dead and the only thing she could mourn was her own reputation.

“They need an ID,” he said.

She looked up at him and then the door. She rose, smoothed her hair and followed Louis into the autopsy room.

She stopped when she saw the body, her eyes going up to Vince and then back to the table. Vince had taken off his bloodied apron and was standing at the top of the stainless steel table. A plastic sheet had been draped over the gaping Y-shaped incision in the chest. Louis was relieved to see that Frank Woods did, in fact, look asleep.

Diane hadn’t moved. She was just standing there, maybe five feet away from the table, her eyes locked on Frank’s face.

“Yes, it’s him,” she whispered. She looked at Vince. “Can I go now?”

Vince came forward and held out his hand. “I thought you might want his wedding ring back,” he said.

Diane looked down at the gold band and then took it from Vince. She looked at it blankly for a moment, putting it on the tip of her right ring finger, just above her mother’s wedding band. Then she slipped off Frank’s ring and balled it up in her fist. She turned quickly and pushed open the doors, almost running down the hallway.

Louis followed, catching up with her in the lobby. She was fumbling in her purse. She pulled out her keys with shaking hands, dropping them and the wedding band. The ring rolled away on the tile. Louis bent to retrieve it.

Diane had picked up her keys and was just standing there,
a hand over her eyes. She took in several deep breaths and looked at Louis.

“You dropped this,” he said, holding out the ring.

She took it and put it in her purse. “Is there anything else?” she asked. “Do I have to sign something, do anything else?”

Louis shook his head.

“I guess I have to call a funeral home,” she said. It came out almost like a question.

“Diane,” Louis began. “I’m not convinced your father killed anybody.”

She just stared at him.

“Maybe it’s just a feeling, I don’t know,” Louis went on. “But I’m going to try to keep this case open and find out who did kill those women.”

Louis could tell from the look in her eyes that Diane Woods didn’t share his feeling. She had already accepted the fact that her father was a murderer and all she wanted to do was to bury him and find a way to live with his ghost.

“Help me clear his name, Diane.”

Her eyes flicked to the hallway. “The other day,” she said quietly, “when you came to my school and you said that thing, you know, about my father not having a past before I was born?”

Louis waited.
When she looked back at him there was something in her expression that he had never seen before. It was as if the principal, the professional woman, the careful daughter who drank her gin from crystal goblets suddenly didn’t have the faintest idea who she was.

“You have something you want to tell me?” Louis asked.

She hesitated. “I found my birth certificate,” she said. “There was no hospital listed. It said I was born at home.”

“So?”

“That’s strange, don’t you think? Like...primitive.”

Louis didn’t tell her what he was thinking
—- that he had been born at home. But home was a shack in Black Pool, Mississippi, something Diane surely would have no empathy for.

“Lots of people are bo
rn at home,” he said. “Did your birth certificate list your mother’s name?”

When she didn’t answer, Louis went on. “Look, Diane. If you know the name, give it to me. If I can track down something about your father’s past, maybe I can clear him.” He paused. “And you.”

She pulled in a deep breath. “Sophie Reardon. I think she was from St. James City.”

She quickly dug in her purse, pull
ed out sunglasses and put them on. “I have to get back to school,” she said tightly and started to the door.

“Thanks,” Louis said.

She didn’t answer him or look back as she hurried out into the sunlight.

Louis paused on the porch of Frank’s house. He looked back out at the empty street then reached up into the planter for the key. He unlocked the front door and slipped inside.

The house was hot and smelled bad. It had been closed up since Horton’s men had finished and Louis doubted Diane had been here since her father’s death.

He switched on a lamp and the room came to gloomy life. He stood, hands on hips, looking around but not at all sure what he was looking for.

Some sign of Sophie Reardon maybe? Diane had told him her mother had died when she was seven. Maybe that was why this place had the feeling that no woman
—- no wife —- had ever cared for it.

He went to the bedroom, switching on the overhead light
. The place was such a mess he wasn’t even sure where to start.

At the dresser, he opened the top drawer. That is where he kept his own cache of personal stuff
—- the pictures of his brother and sister he hadn’t seen since he was seven, and the blurry snapshot of the man who had abandoned them. But there was nothing in Frank’s drawer but a tangle of socks and underwear.

The other three drawers were the same
—- faded pajamas, T-shirts, and shorts, a couple of old cardigans. Louis closed the bottom drawer and stood up, surveying the room.

He went over to the bookcase. It was a cheap, assemble-it-yourself job, and its particleboard shelves were sagging under
the weight of all the books. But as messy as it was, there seemed to be a logic to the arrangement of the books.

The top shelf was all books on language origins
and etymology, along with
a huge two-volume set of the Compact Edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary.

Louis’s eyes paused on the second shelf.
New Latin Grammar, Wheelock’s Latin, Grote’s Study Guide to Latin, Aeneas
to Augustus: A Beginning Latin Reader for College Students
. There were more than twenty textbooks and dictionaries, some of them with little flags of colored paper sticking out, marking certain pages.

Louis extracted a well-worn paperback called
Teach Yourself Latin
and flipped through the pages. He put it back with a sigh.

He could barely read college French. What in the hell did he expect to find here? A word-for-word translation of what Frank had said back in the restaurant?

He bent to look at the third shelf. Copies of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey. The Early History of Rome by Titus Livy. Our Roman Roots: A Student’s Guide to Latin Grammar and Civilization.
He pulled out one well-worn paperback. It was another copy of
The Iliad
, this one a Latin translation.

Diane had said her father hadn’t gone to college. Landeta hadn’t even been able to find a high school record for the man. So what in the hell was all this? Louis thought of his partner Jesse up in Michigan. Jesse had prided himself on being an autodidact. Well, reading
The Great Gatsby
was one thing, but teaching yourself to read classics in Latin was another.

Louis spotted a copy of
Bullfinch’s Mythology
. He remembered having to buy a copy of it back at the University of Michigan for a freshman literature course. There was a yellow bookmark sticking out of it. He pulled the book out and opened it to the marked page.

The Legend of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. There was a picture accompanying the chapter. It was a bronze sculpture of a wolf nursing two baby boys. The caption said
: ROMULUS AND REMUS WITH THEIR WOLF FOSTER-MOTHER, BRONZE SCULPTURE, C. 500-480 B.C. IN THE CAPITOLINE MUSEUMS, ROME, ITALY.

Louis stared at the photograph
for a moment then closed the book and set it aside. He turned his attention to the bottom shelf. It held only four books, stacked on their sides. Louis pulled them out, scanning the titles.

Of Wolves and Men
by Barry Lopez.
Mother Was a Lovely Beast
by Philip Jose.
The Wolf Children: Fact or Fiction?
by Charles MacLean.
Man Into Wolf: An Anthropological Study of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy
by Robert Eisler. 

Louis stood slowly, holding the four books. He wiped a sleeve over his sweating face.

Jesus...What in the hell was this?

Wolf mothers? Werewolves? Had Frank Woods been some sadistic animal who hunted down women and killed them? Is that why he had bookmarked that photograph of the weird wolf statue? Was that what he had been trying to
say with the Latin?

Louis went to the bedside table. There was a single book there and he picked it up.
The Myths and Customs of the Asturian People.
There was something sticking out of the book that didn’t look like one of Frank’s color-coded bookmarks. Louis slipped it out.

It was a picture of Frank and Diane. Diane was smiling and had her arm linked through Frank’s, her head lying on his shoulder. Louis stared at the picture, trying to reconcile
the affection he saw in the picture with the reality he had seen between Diane and Frank. He turned it over. Someone had written in pen -- Sophie, October, 1952.

Of course it wasn’t Diane. She had probably never felt close enough to her father to touch him like that. Louis slipped the picture into his pocket. At least
now when he went to St. James City, he would have
a picture of Sophie Reardon to show. And if he found Sophie’s past, maybe he could find the real Frank Woods.

Louis added a Latin dictionary and the
Bullfinch’s Mythology
to his pile of books and left the stifling bedroom.

It was past four by the time he reached Pine Island. At Stringfellow Road, Louis turned south, heading in the opposite direction of Bessie Levy’s home up in Bokeelia. The sun was sinking in a pale orange sky when he pulled into St. James City.

It was more a village than a city, a pleasant collection of small homes clinging to the edges of canals like some Florida cracker version of Venice.

Louis had found a James Reardon listed on Carombola Lane. He pulled up in front of the neat white house and got out. Lights were on inside, a car parked in the drive. Louis went up to the open front door and rang the bell.

A white-haired woman came to the screen door, wiping her hands on a towel. She stiffened slightly seeing Louis. He had his private investigator ID ready.

“Yes?” she asked warily.

“I’m looking for James Reardon,” Louis said, holding the ID against the screen so she could see it. “I’m working with the Fort Myers Police Department.”

“Oh...dear. Is there something wrong?”

A man was coming up to the door. He was tall, white- haired, using a cane. “Who is it, Nan?”

“The police, Jim.”

James Reardon stared at Louis and then his ID through the screen. “That doesn’t look like a real badge,” he said. His hand moved to the latch on the screen. Louis heard it lock.

“It’s not a badge, sir. It’s an ID. I’m a private investigator. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“Your daughter Sophie.”

“Sophie?” He waved his hand, like he was dismissing the name and memory. “She left here more than thirty years ago. Why you coming around now?”

“Mr. Reardon, if I could just come in for —-”

“You here to see if I’m dead yet?” Reardon asked, leaning into the screen. “Tell her I ain’t
, and even if I was, I have nothing to leave her.”

Mrs. Reardon was hovering behind her husband, her eyes wide.

“Mr. Reardon, please. This is important. Maybe if I could talk to Sophie’s mother,” Louis said gently.

“Sophie’s mother is dead,” the old man said quickly.

The woman behind him stepped forward. “I’m Jim’s second wife,” she said, taking her husband’s arm. “I think you should go. Please.”

Jim Reardon hadn’t budged. He didn’t seem so quick to stop talking. “You tell her I got nothing to offer her. No money and no time.”

Louis took a breath. “Mr. Reardon, Sophie’s dead. She died in 1959.”

Reardon’s eyes went liquid
. The sagging skin along his jaw quivered a little as he lifted a hand to the door frame. His wife stepped forward and took his arm.

“You have a granddaughter,” Louis said. “Her name is Diane.”

“Granddaughter? I never heard about no granddaughter,” Reardon said. “No one ever told me about it. I don’t believe it. It’s probably just some scam, someone trying to take advantage of an old man —- ”

“Jim, please,” his wife interrupted, pulling his arm.

He shrugged out of her grasp. No one moved. Louis could feel the sweat trickling down his ribs. He ran a hand across his brow.

“So is that spic dead too?” Reardon asked bitterly.

“Who?” Louis asked.

“That damn boy she ran off with.”

“What boy, Mr. Reardon?” Louis pressed.

“That damn Mexican boy who used to come in the store. The one that took her away.”

Mexican?

Louis reached into his pocket. He held the picture of Frank and Sophie up to the screen.

“Is this the boy, Mr. Reardon?” he asked.

James Reardon peered at the picture. “Yeah. That’s the damn spic who hung around my store.” His face hardened. “I knew he was no good. Damn Mexicans...like heathens they are.”

“Jim, please ...” His wife glanced quickly at Louis. “I’m sorry, he’s —- ”

Louis ignored her. “Mr. Reardon, what makes you think the boy was Mexican?”

“All that black hair and that spic name and talking those words I didn’t understand just to gall me.”

Louis pressed the photograph of Frank and Sophie back on the screen. “Mr. Reardon, you’re sure this is the boy?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m old but I still got my mind, young man.” Reardon wagged a finger at the picture. “He came in my drugstore every month. I was back there filling his damn prescription and he was always out at the counter, talking to my Sophie.”

“What was his name, Mr. Reardon?” Louis pressed. “Do you remember the boy’s name?”

“I don’t know. It was like Mexican or Puerto Rican. Probably one of those damn migrant workers. So is he dead or not?”

Louis nodded. “Yes, he is.”

“Good.” Reardon turned from the door and disappeared back into the shadows of the house.

His wife glanced after him. Louis wiped his brow again, slipping the picture back in his pocket. “I’m sorry if I upset him,” Louis said. He pause
d. “Does he still have the drugstore? Maybe there are records —- ”

“Oh, no, he closed it years ago.”

Back in the living room, Louis could see Reardon slump down in a chair, tossing his cane to the floor.

Mrs. Reardon opened the screen, speaking quietly. “I was a friend of Sophie’s mother, see, and I don’t think Sophie ever fo
rgave me for marrying her father. You know, the wicked stepmother and all that.”

She tried to smile but it came out as a sad tremble. “But Sophie was a good girl, I do know that. After her mother died, Jim kind of closed down, like he didn’t want anyone to touch him. It was hard on Sophie. Too hard. All the girl wanted was someone to love her. Jim had a hard time showing that.”

“I understand,” Louis said.

Mrs. Reardon leaned closer. “What did you say the granddaughter’s name was?”

“Diane.”

“Are you going to tell her about Jim? Maybe I could convince him to see her.”

Louis tried to picture Diane Woods in this place, on this porch, giving James Reardon an embrace. Or him giving her a grandfatherly one back. But he knew there were no bridges that could be built between them.

“I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I don’t think she’d come.”

“He’s dying,” she said softly.

Louis drew in a small breath, his chest tightening. “I still don’t think she would come, but I’ll ask her.”

Nan Reardon glanced back at her husband sitting in the shadows and then looked back at Louis. “He never talks about Sophie. I don’t think he ever forgave her for leaving. Or himself for pushing her away.”

Louis noticed she was looking at the photograph in his hand.

“Jim got rid of all her pictures when she left,” Nan Reardon said. “I don’t suppose I could have that one?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Louis said.

“Nan!”

She turned to look back at her husband.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” she said softly. She shut the door.

Louis stood there on the porch, gathering his thoughts. He held the picture up to the porch light, studying Frank’s face. Frank’s hair was thick and dark, his facer thinner, almost pale. He didn’t look Mexican, at least not like the brown-skinned people Louis had seen in Immokalee.

But Reardon had been sure that Frank spoke in a foreign language and had a Spanish name.