There is something lonely about a city after a parade. The people are gone, but their smell, the echoes of their laughter remain, blowing around the empty streets along with torn paper streamers, a child’s straw hat and discarded bits of lunch.
The Gasparilla Parade began as usual this year when Tampa’s most influential men, dressed as pirates and already high on Voodoo Brew, stormed City Hall. As usual, the mayor gave up the keys to the city without a fight to this year’s pirate king who led his bawdy mates down the main street of town shooting pistols and tossing candy, cheap beads and fake coins to the cheering crowd.
My father always hated Gasparilla Day. He took us to the parade every year for a civics lesson. To him, Tampa’s city fathers didn’t have to dress up as pirates to pillage this town. He believed these bankers, lawyers and factory owners did their plundering every day of the year in board meetings and backroom deals. To my father, the charade was when they wore double-breasted business suits and sipped brandy from snifters behind closed doors. He never doubted that they were dangerous men. Ten years ago, he found out how dangerous.
Dad devoted his short life to workers’ rights. Words were his stock in trade. He used them the way a pirate uses a sword, with fury and swashbuckling confidence. He never let me catch the booty that the pirates tossed from their floats. No son of Ramon Corazon would scramble in the streets for cheap baubles, he said. In those days I couldn’t wait to grow up and go to the parade without him. Now it only makes me miss him more.
Uniformed cops keep the peace on the parade route, breaking up fights and dragging kids and drunks out from under the horses’ hooves. Plainclothes detectives and private dicks like me work the backs of the crowds, watching mostly for pickpockets and bootleg liquor. People seem to get drunker now than they ever did before Prohibition. Especially on Gasparilla Day when all of Tampa toasts the merry pirate Jose Gaspar, sacker of towns and ravager of captive women.
This year’s Gasparilla had an Egyptian motif, so King Quattlebaum brought in camels to draw the queen’s float. He discovered too late that camels are foul-tempered beasts, and unlike horses, will not work in teams. They bit and spat and squalled like angry demons. The queen plastered a smile over gritted teeth as the camels pulled in all directions and nearly tore the float apart. By the end of the parade, her Cleopatra wig was lopsided, and the tears had turned the kohl around her eyes to mud.
After the queen’s float came the mounted Rough Riders, prancing in their dress blues. Some of them had actually fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. The rest just like to dress up and play soldier on this one day of the year. I watched them lead their horses through military drills. It would all be over soon. Then I could write up my report and be done with Gasparilla for another year. I didn’t know then that my troubles with pirates were just beginning.
The evening was turning cool as I walked the nine blocks to my office. I passed the monstrous Tampa Bay Hotel with its silver minarets. Negro men drew rickshaws bearing white hotel guests on a sunset tour of the grounds. I drew up my collar against the wind coming off the Hillsborough River as I crossed the bridge into downtown. It was dark by the time I rounded the corner onto Zack Street. The light in my office window told me I had a visitor. It wasn’t a good sign. Decent men were already home hugging porcelain pots and renewing their pledges to obey Prohibition laws.
I took the back stairs in the dark and slipped up to the open door of my office. What I saw made me want to sneak back down the stairs and out into the night. But whatever else I am, I’m no coward. I stiffened my spine and went in.
She had made herself at home in my chair with her feet up on my desk. She was smoking one of my handmade Cuban Belvedere cigars and had even poured herself two fingers of the rum I keep in a drawer for medicinal purposes. She didn’t introduce herself—she didn’t have to. Everyone knew Nesta Edmunds was the daughter of one of the most prominent Tampa families, that she had been the Gasparilla Pirate Queen four years ago in 1924 and later that year she had married the infamous EQ Edmunds.
The happy couple had divorced and remarried, and generally kept society matrons fueled with enough gossip to drive their luncheons until about a year ago. That’s when Edmunds disappeared from an ocean liner bound for England. The official story was accidental death. The insurance company had made a great show of promptly paying off the million-dollar policy on his life.
“Drink?” asked Nesta Edmunds, like she owned the place.
I never agreed with my father’s politics, but I did inherit his mistrust of a whole class of people. This dame was definitely one of them.
“Parade’s over, lady. Your float left without you.”
“You always treat your clients so politely?”
I pointed to the chair on the other side of the desk. “My clients usually sit there.” She took her time, but she moved. I settled in behind my desk and surveyed the drawers to see what else she might have filched. Everything was there, but the mess told me she had gone through it without the slightest finesse.
“Now, am I to understand you’re looking for a private investigator?”
“Yes.” She crossed her legs and took out a compact. She inspected her face in the mirror and started to powder her nose. She wasn’t what you’d call a doll. Her unpainted features were large and horsey, but she was handsome and well-groomed in an unadorned navy blue tailored suit and hair pulled back into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. Her buffed, unpolished fingernails had never touched dishwater. Her one vanity was a pair of red high heels. “I want you to find my husband,” she said.
“You’re remarried?”
She stopped powdering and shot me a look that could have withered a water oak. “No. I want you to find Mr. Edmunds.”
I wondered why she would want to bring him back from the dead. By all accounts he had been a hard-drinking, womanizing little braggart and bully. “What makes you think he’s alive?”
Her mouth tightened and drew into a hard, straight line. “My husband is a con and a liar, Mr. Heart. This wouldn’t be the first time he tried to trick me.”
“Leaving you with a million dollars in life insurance money hardly seems like a dirty trick.”
The line of her mouth curled into a bitter smile. “Everyone assumes I was the beneficiary of that policy, but the truth is, I didn’t get a dime.”
“Who did?”
“My husband.”
“Kinda tough for a corpse to spend a million bucks.”
“Oh, he spent it long before he disappeared.”
She dangled it out there like bait on a hook. I wasn’t about to bite. I waited, stone-faced, for her to go on.
“It was a neat little sting, actually. Edward so loved the art of the sting.”
“That’s what land speculation is all about, isn’t it?” I ignored the look she shot me, cold and sharp as a shark’s tooth. “Please continue,” I said.
“When the bottom started falling out of the real estate market here, Edward sold Edmunds Island for one million dollars to a real estate syndicate called Liberty Limited. A tiny fraction of its value. He held the contract and title, and they made monthly payments to him. Liberty took out a one-million-dollar insurance policy on his life. The deal was if Edward died, I would inherit the contract and title. Liberty Limited would sign the insurance check over to me in exchange for the papers. They’d own Edmunds Island, and I’d be a rich widow.”
I took my time digesting that. I had to hand it to the Anglos. They knew how to work a buck. One thing I didn’t understand though. “So how did your husband end up with the money?”
“You can use a life insurance policy as collateral for bank loans up to the limit of the benefit. After Edward disappeared, we discovered that he had borrowed a million dollars against the policy. The benefit paid off his loan.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“The bank placed a lien on the policy. They had to be paid before anyone else.”
“So Edmunds got his million, the bank got its million and you and Liberty were left out in the cold.”
“Mostly me. It turned out Edward had also run up over five million dollars in debt claims against Edmunds Island. The property can’t be sold until the debtors are paid. When Liberty Limited found that out, they pointed to some fine print in their contract and bailed out of the purchase. I now own a development that’s over five million dollars in debt. I’m broke, Mr. Heart. Worse than broke. I’m personally liable for all those debts.”
I poured myself a stiff dose of island tonic and downed it. I didn’t have to ask who owned stock in Liberty Limited. The same handful of men owned everything in this town. This case would have me nosing around some pretty powerful closets, and I didn’t like the smell of it.
“Why don’t you talk to Meade and Barkin up on Franklin Street? This is more up their alley than mine.”
“I can’t. They won’t—” She stopped, and the look on her face told me I hadn’t been her first choice. Probably not her third or fourth either. It made sense that the uptown dicks would sit this one out. They wouldn’t want to uncover the dirty laundry of their best customers.
“I have no one else to turn to, Mr. Heart.” Something about a woman’s tears brings out the Corazon in me. No Corazon man could stand by while a woman cried. My father couldn’t, and neither could his. It’s one of the reasons women love us. Even though I didn’t much like her, Nesta Edmunds’ tears worked on me.
“Why don’t you tell me what you think happened to your husband.”
“I was in London at the time.” She dabbed at her nose with a monogrammed hankie. “Edward was supposed to meet me there, and we were going to go on to Italy. He wanted to look into doing some developments on the Riviera.”
“What was the date of Mr. Edmunds’ disappearance?”
“September 27, 1927. It was my twenty-seventh birthday. I think he picked that day on purpose.” That made her six months younger than me. She looked older than twenty-eight. Bitterness will do that to a person.
“How did you hear of his disappearance?”
“I got a wire from Saul Stone the next morning. It said that Edward had fallen overboard and that the ship had circled for five hours before giving up the search.”
“Saul Stone?”
“Saul was the business manager for Edmunds Enterprises. He was Edward’s right hand.”
“Was Stone on the ship with Edmunds?”
“No. The steamship company notified him at the Edmunds Island office.”
“I seem to remember reading that there was a witness who said he fell out a porthole.”
Dark petals of crimson bloomed on her face, and her mouth drew into a hard line. “Lola Flores.”
“And you don’t believe her?”
One side of Mrs. Edmunds’ mouth rose in a smirk. “Lola Flores is a prostitute, Mr. Heart. She could easily have been bribed to say what she did.”
“Your husband was traveling with other people, was he not?”
“Yes. His lawyer, Dominic Boudreaux, and Dom’s wife, Hedda.”
“And what do they have to say about the disappearance?”
“They seem to believe he fell.”
“Why don’t you think he fell, Mrs. Edmunds?”
“My husband was broke, Mr. Heart, and deeply in debt. He was being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service for tax evasion.”
“Maybe he committed suicide.”
“That’s not his style. This is just the kind of stunt Edward would pull to get out of a spot like that. The only one who saw him go overboard was a gold-digging harlot. And I happen to know he had at least fifty thousand dollars in cash on his person when he disappeared.”
“Where was the ship when he disappeared?”
“Just about midway between the States and Europe.”
“How does someone disappear off a ship in the middle of the Atlantic ocean?”
“That’s what I want you to find out.”
This case was about as inviting as a pond full of alligators. But I, like everyone else in this town, was curious about what really happened to EQ Edmunds. The papers and radio stations had been full of contradictory stories at first. Then the official report from the insurance investigator and steamship line had come out in the Tampa Chronicle, the favorite paper of Anglo Tampa.
Edmunds had accidentally fallen from a porthole and been lost at sea. Case closed.
The only problem was that the porthole was four feet off the floor and only three and a half feet in diameter. At just over five feet tall, Edmunds would had been hard pressed to simply fall out of it. The Chronicle article had suggested that Edmunds had been showing off when the incident occurred.
Coverage had stopped abruptly after that although people continued to gossip for some time, especially about the mysterious female witness. Some had suggested a hoax or publicity stunt at the time to boost sagging sales. Edmunds had often staged grandiose events to call attention to himself and his developments. But eventually, life had gone on for most of us, and the disappearance of EQ Edmunds had faded from our minds.
For Edmunds’ wife, however, the question still gnawed. “Please, Mr. Heart. You’re my only hope of finding the truth.” Her tears were beginning again.
I knew I should walk away from this one. The last time a Corazon had taken on the Anglos, he’d left a bereaved widow and an angry son behind. I felt the cycle beginning again.
“Twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses.” I usually get ten, but I figured she could afford the Meade and Barkin rate.
“All I can afford is fifteen, including expenses.”
“Is that what you offered Meade and Barkin? Or is fifteen just the Dago price?”
Her eyes grew wide under arched eyebrows. “I wasn’t lying when I told you I was broke. I’m selling my jewelry to pay you. It’s all I have left.” She began to sob.
We settled on twenty, including expenses. Twice my usual, but not much for the trouble I was about to stir up.
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