Duma Key(116)

"He dredged the whole thing from swampland at the mouth of the Hillsborough River. Talked the Tampa city fathers into moving both the hospital and the radio station here, back when radio was a bigger deal than health care. He built strange and beautiful apartment complexes in a time when the concept of an apartment complex was unknown. He put up hotels and swank nightclubs. He threw the dough around, married a beauty contest winner, divorced her, married her again. He was worth millions when a million dollars was worth what twelve million is today. And one of his best friends lived just down the coast on Duma Key. John Eastlake. Familiar with that name?"

"Of course. I've met his daughter. My friend Wireman takes care of her."

Mary lit a fresh cigarette. "Well, both Dave and John were as rich as Croesus Dave with his land and building speculations, John with his mills but Davis was a peacock and Eastlake was more of a plain brown wren. Just as well for him, because you know what happens to peacocks, don't you?"

"They get their tailfeathers chopped off?"

She took a drag on her latest cigarette, then pointed the fingers holding it at me as she jetted smoke from her nostrils. "That would be correct, sir. In 1925, the Florida Land Bust hit this state like a brick on a soap bubble. Dave Davis had invested pretty much everything he had in what you see out there." She waved at the zig-zaggy streets and pink buildings. "In 1926, Davis was owed four million bucks on various successful ventures and collected something like thirty thousand."

It had been awhile since I'd ridden on the tiger's neck which was what my father called over-extending your resources to the point where you had to start juggling your creditors and getting creative with your paperwork and I'd never ridden that far up, even in The Freemantle Company's early, desperate days. I felt for Dave Davis, long dead though he must be.

"How much of his own debts could he cover? Any?"

"He managed at first. Those were boom years in other parts of the country."

"You know a lot about this."

"Suncoast art is my passion, Edgar. Suncoast history is my hobby."

"I see. So Davis survived the Land Bust."

"For a short while. I imagine he sold his stocks on the bull market to cover his first round of losses. And friends helped him."

"Eastlake?"

"John Eastlake was a major angel, and that's aside from any of Dave's bootleg hooch he may have stored out on the Key from time to time."

"Did he do that?" I asked.

" Maybe, I said. That was another time and another Florida. You hear all sorts of colorful Prohibition-era booze-running stories if you live down here awhile. Booze or no booze, Davis would have been flat broke by Easter of '26 without John Eastlake. John was no playboy, didn't go nightclubbing and cathousing like Davis and some of Davis's other friends, but he'd been a widower since 1923, and I'm guessing that old Dave might have helped a pal with a gal from time to time when his pal was feeling lonely. But by the summer of '26, Dave's debts were just too high. Not even his old pals could save him."

"So he disappeared one dark night."

"He disappeared, but not by the dark of the moon. That was not the Davis style. In October of 1926, less than a month after Hurricane Esther knocked the living hell out of his life's work, he sailed for Europe with a bodyguard and his new gal-pal, who happened to be a Mack Sennett bathing beauty. The gal-pal and the bodyguard got to Gay Paree, but Dave Davis never did. He disappeared at sea, without a trace."

"This is a true story you're telling me?"

She raised her right hand in the Boy Scout salute the image slightly marred by the cigarette smoldering between her first two fingers. "True blue. In November of '26, there was a memorial service right over there." She pointed toward where the Gulf twinkled between two bright pink art deco buildings. "At least four hundred people attended, many of them, I understand, the sort of women who were partial to ostrich feathers. One of the speakers was John Eastlake. He tossed a wreath of tropical flowers into the water."

She sighed, and I caught a waft of her breath. I had no doubt that the lady could hold her liquor; I also had no doubt that she was well on her way to squiffy if not outright drunk this afternoon.

"Eastlake was undoubtedly sad about the passing of his friend," she said, "but I bet he was congratulating himself on surviving Esther. I bet they all were. Little did he know he'd be throwing more wreaths into the water less than six months later. Not just one daughter gone but two. Three, I suppose, if you count the eldest. She eloped to Atlanta. With a foreman from one of Daddy's mills, if memory serves. Although that's hardly the same as losing two in the Gulf. God, that must have been hard."

"THEY ARE GONE," I said, remembering the headline Wireman had quoted.

She glanced at me sharply. "So you've done some research of your own."

"Not me, Wireman. He was curious about the woman he was working for. I don't think he knows about the connection to this Dave Davis."

She looked thoughtful. "I wonder how much Elizabeth herself remembers?"

"These days she doesn't even remember her own name," I said.

Mary gave me another look, then turned from the window, got her ashtray, and put out her cigarette. "Alzheimer's? I'd heard rumors."