Hurricane Willie and the Swingers
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I moved my GMC several blocks from the police station to avoid some mope inflicting a little vandalism. Willie, stuffed in Bell’s back seat stank like the landfill, necessitating open windows. Fast-food restaurants had better sense than to do business in Daylight. Bell drove us to a little mom and pop convenience store back out on Highway 97. Willie ate twelve bucks’ worth of hotdogs and two cherry Cokes.
“Where’s Harriet, Willie?” I inquired about his woman.
“Back in room two of the Blue Mama Marina where them cops found them dead folks in my boat. Them murders was in cabin one. Guess they didn’t arrest her, too, ’cuz she stood around and kept quiet, and they was too dumb to make the connection.”
Killed in the same cabin... number one. I’d guessed correctly. “How many cabins?”
“Blue Mama gots five. Number one was where the folks was murdered. Me’n Harriet was in number two, three and four was vacant, and some snotty lawyer was in five. Owner, Cecil Stencil, lives in the office building. I gotta go find Harriet to pay you, Mr. Kratrzert.”
So, Willie had slipped Harriet his cash before his arrest. How much cash?
* * *
Bell swung the Dodge onto the parking lot of the Blue Mama Marina, which, if Daylight had a building code, would have been the now-condemned former Blue Mama. The parking lot, like most parking areas open to vehicle traffic along the coast, was paved with shredded rubber tires. I supposed but never gave enough of a good damn to ask, whether gravel spread in the spongy soil would sink and disappear. Apparently old tires did not.
Harriet knocked us off when we turned in, coming on a screaming run across the spongy surface. She shrieked, loud enough to be heard in downtown Houston, “My God, Kratzert, save us!” Twenty years younger than Willie and twice as butt-ugly, Harriet wore her hair in a Bride of Frankenstein knock-off augmented with enough makeup to grow a crop.
Not fat, exactly, it was more like she was just built too low to the ground, and her whole carcass was slowly settling like gravel on a parking lot of the area. She said she was Willie’s wife, but I doubted a preacher had been involved in the genesis of the coupling. Another situation to leave alone. Ask and learn she might have been his daughter would alter hell out of the situation.
Willie, after passionate embraces along the lines of mating snakes and some slobbery kissing which would made a normal person vomit, whispered in Harriet’s ear. She opened her shoulder bag and flashed a fist full of twenties and hundreds. Hundred-dollar bills were called “Ben Franklins” in much of the hip crowd because Franklin’s image was on it. Willie whispered again, and she counted out twenty of those hundred-dollar gems. I stuffed the roll in my pocket, conscious of Bell’s expression of approval. I didn’t tell him it was the biggest haul I’d ever landed in a single handful in the PI “bidness.”
When Willie operated his joint up in Houston, he didn’t need a bouncer. One close look from Harriet would have scared the barf out of Adolf Hitler. Willie smelled bad enough. Putting Harriet in the back seat was more than I could handle. Bell and I walked toward cabin number two. Willie and Harriet followed like fresh caught trout on a new line.
The only man-made thing around designed to float was a battered cigarette-boat knockoff which had been dragged up onto the marshy shore. I didn’t know squat about boats, but Willie couldn’t afford the half-million dollar hit to buy the genuine item, which would easily do seventy miles per hour. This imitation version would go fast enough to outrun anything the Coast Guard had along the Gulf coast. Willie had definitely been hauling a cargo he didn’t want the law to see.
“Your boat, Willie?” I thought I recalled the rig from my visit to Willie’s marina the summer before.
“Yessir.” Me’n Harriet was jes’ takin’ a little spin around the area when we pulled in here for a day or two. Then stuff went all to hell, and I ended up in jail.”
Chances were, he’d taken on a load of drugs from a ship laying to out in the Gulf and managed to get it offloaded on shore before somebody filled it with corpses, which were still wedged inside the hull.
Although someone had pulled a tarp over the carnage, the heat had already caused massive swelling and deterioration. The deck was smeared with sun-darkened blood, and the stench was overpowering. Bell pointed out numerous fingerprints on the hull. Many would be residual from emergency handling, but a good chance existed that the killers may have left a mistake behind. Due to the condition of the bodies, we would have to rely on limited photographs to examine the victims.
Bell punched his cellular and ordered a DPS evidence crew to the scenes ASAP.
A portly man of fifty or so hurried out the office door. “I’m Cedric Stancil, owner of the Blue Mama Marina.” His red face mimicked a blowfish about to explode. He had “smuggling thug” written in invisible ink on his pudgy forehead.
I introduced Bell and myself. “We’ll need your occupancy records for the past week, Mr. Stancil.”
“Well...?”
Bell said, “Just hand over the file and remain nearby until we have time to talk a bit. Run, and when we find you, it’s my foot in your ass. Stay, understand! Matter of fact, we’ll have those records now.”
Bell followed the perspiring marina owner back to the office. Willie, Harriet and I stepped inside cabin number two. The cool air was welcome, despite the place smelling like dead fish.
“Willie, tell me about last night,” I asked. “Did you mingle with the murder victims.”
“Mingle?”
“Talk, visit, have a beer, dammit.”
“Folks was sittin’ on the patio. Me’n Harriet hadda a couple beers with ’em. Then we went out on the lake and, when we come back, they’d gone inside cabin one.
“Jes’ before midnight, heard the screamin’. Looked out and saw it was the owner standin’ on the dock next to my boat. Then couple others come out, then Chief of police Fat Boy. Went out, saw them dead folks was all messed up, then that fat po-liceman arrested me. I asked him, why the hell would I leave dead people in my boat when all I hadda do was dump ’em in the middle of Sabine Lake. Then he slapped on the cuffs.”
“You said folks. Who else was around before you left in your boat?”
“Well, Mr. Kratzert, they was some folks in Cabin five... And the couple from New Orleans stayin’ over to the next marina that walked over. I never talked to them New Orleans people,” he added quickly.
“Any idea who they are?”
“Naw,” he studied his feet.
“What car was the dead couple driving?”
He gestured. “White Honda parked at the other end.”
If he really left during the murders, he’d probably delivered his smuggled cargo. “Okay, Willie, gonna leave you here. I swear we’ll find you, understand?”
“Ain’t goin’ no place, Mr. Kratzert.” He gestured. “Boat’s grounded, ain’t got no wheels.”
I walked out.
* * *
Bell walked up with a stack of computer printouts. “Blue Mama records,” he grinned.
“Don, did your DPS evidence crew give any idea when they’d get here?”
“This afternoon is their best guess.”
We opted for a brief preliminary examination of the cabin one crime scene.
Several items of clothing were strewn about. Had, somehow, a swingers’ party gone south? We found rubber janitor’s gloves in Willie’s supply closet and lightly examined cabin two. A blood-splattered bullet hole in the bathroom cabinet beneath the sink, showed where Jason had hunkered when a round blew off half his head. A second bullet had missed, the slug wedged in the bathroom door frame.
“Party went badly sideways,” Bell remarked.
The doors of the sink cabinet were open and blood-splattered.
“Jason tried to hide.”
I nodded.
Beneath the sink, blood and brain tissue were mixed with the spilled contents of a plastic bottle. I carefully turned the bottle. Danger, Lye: sodium hydroxide was clearly legible on the label.
“That explains the disfiguring on Jason’s face and head.” I stood back up. “He collapsed in it.” From the darkened area beneath the cabinet, I retrieved a cellular phone. Daylight cops apparently didn’t have flashlights.
The blood-saturated bed was mute evidence of where Michelle Jenkins had met her end. With a napkin insulator, I pocketed a cellular phone from beneath the bed. If crime scene techs ever showed up, I could hand it over, but first I wanted to dump its contents.
We backed out of the cabin to avoid contamination of the scene and tossed our borrowed gloves beside the door. Blood-splatter droplets trailed from the door of number one in the direction of where Willie’s boat would have been docked. We followed the trail to find that about halfway, the drag marks began.
As I’d suspected, he or they dropped Jason Jenkins. We could rule out Superman as a suspect.
Hardened to a mindset of never being surprised, I was amazed that the occupants of cabin five had not only hung around, but they were also buzzed when we interviewed them at 10 a.m. I figured that meant they were smoking something like the linoleum combined with a toddy or two.
They produced ID that said they were Sherman and Ann Phillips from Houston. The names matched the record Bell had extricated from Blue Mama Marina records. Sherman said he was a criminal defense lawyer and Ann a nurse.
I thought I knew every criminal defense lawyer in Houston. Some, I guessed, stayed in dark corners or sewers, and I’d missed them. A tall, thirtyish, studious-appearing man with thick glasses, a pasty face and a head too big for his body, Sherman quickly volunteered neither he, nor his wife had heard any sign of struggle the evening before, including a pair of gunshots.
Ann Phillips, voluptuous and in her mid-twenties, wore shorts and a halter top, both about a size too small. A tattoo, LOVE OF MONEY, was prominent across her upper back. The back of her left hand sported a tattoo of a bouquet of red roses. Her cold blue eyes sent out a “come see me” vibe. Phillips was laid up with a chick who formerly was available for rent by the half-hour.
Phillips, sitting with arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits in what appeared to be lawyer-defiance, explained, “The Jenkins’ been out on the patio the two nights we’d stayed in Cabin five. Drank lots of beer and made too much noise during what little time we were around. Last night we drove up to Port Arthur for dinner and some drinks... Got back before ten. Last night, they were sittin’ out and we joined them. Had a couple of beers went to bed in cabin five right after ten.”
I’d spent a lot of time questioning toads who were either half in the bag or stone sober. This guy was such a pathological liar he wouldn’t have known the truth if he worked off a teleprompter. “Who did you see?”
“Nobody. Except the couple who walked over from next door. We went to bed and slept until we heard the owner’s wife screaming. Came outside and saw bodies in the boat which was still in the water tied to the boat slip. I helped Willie and the owner pull it ashore.”
“Who is the third couple who sat with you drinking and smoking? Were they from next door?”
“Damned if I know. We were sitting with the Jenkins and they just walked over from the It’l Do, the Marina next door, and joined us. Brought a fifth of scotch. Prolly jes’ lookin’ for company.”
Maybe a swingers’ get-together? I wondered. But how would they have known without an invitation?
Bell asked, “Besides those two couples, did you see or hear anything at all? Strangers, noise, anything?”
“Naw, not a sound.”
As they say, somehow, I didn’t like the way he held his mouth when he made that comment.
Phillips said, “I’ll give you gentlemen my numbers so, if you need us further, you can call. But client business requires I get back to Houston sometime today. “
Way too much of my life had involved dealing with defense lawyers. Generally, the best attorneys do not practice criminal law. He was also the first lawyer I ever saw who gave a damn about someone else’s time schedule.
I said, “Phillips, you and your wife will hang around until we tell you otherwise.”
His expression of contempt was right out of Bogart in Casablanca, but something said he’d stay. Odd, when all he had to do was pack up his woman and split.
We stepped outside. To preserve fingerprints and other evidence, I laid the cellular from cabin one on the hood of Bell’s car and, with the rubber of a pencil eraser, went through the contents. It was Jason Jenkin’s phone. Several photos had been taken in and around Willie’s, including several of the female victim.
Flashing like a Houston topless joint florescent sign were five nude shots of Michelle Jenkins, all very lewd, apparently taken inside cabin one, all while she was very alive. One was of her alone, standing suggestively in the bathroom where her husband’s brains were blown out not long after the photo was snapped.
Three others showed Michelle in less pornographic but nonetheless brazen poses. Identifiable in two, she was wearing a silver ring with twisted snake heads on her left hand. A small green stone was visible in both shots. I had just examined the death photos of her in Willie’s boat. The ring was not on her finger.
The fifth shot was taken as she lay face up on a carpeted floor with a man atop her face down. The shot had been taken to show as much of Michelle as possible and had cut off most of the man’s head, making him difficult to identify. But across his back in letters three inches tall was an amateur tattoo: “Born to Kill.” He’d be hard pressed to lose that little clue.
I said, “Been in the joint and sat for an inmate tattooist?”
Bell nodded.
As we walked back toward Willie’s cabin two, I noticed the door to cabin four was slightly ajar. Snooper or burglar? I pushed the door open only to find the marina owner Cedric Stencil was on the bed atop the ugliest woman I’d ever seen naked. She bolted off in a horrifying nude countenance of a rabid English bulldog, protruding under-jaw and all, and charged. I pulled the door closed. It shuddered when she collided but held. That might be a situation to explore a bit later.
We pulled Willie out of cabin two. Harriet was asleep on the bed. Out on the road, the Daylight police car with the partial decal “and Serve” on a rear quarter panel crept by. Was Fat Chester coming to the circus? The car didn’t stop.
“Find anything, Mr. Kratzert?”
I showed Willie the death photos from his boat and those from Jason Jenkin’s cellular.
“Mah God, they nekked.”
“Ever see anyone around with this tattoo, ‘Born to Kill’?”
“Nope.”
I pointed to the dead woman’s hand in the nude photo. “How about this twisted snakehead ring?”
“Uh... yessir, I was sneakin’ a closer glim of her ass, and she was wearing a ring like that.”
“Willie, the ring was on her finger during whatever happened in cabin one, but not there when she ended up dead in your boat.”
“Ah ain’t took it and got no idea—”
“Who and how exactly did the Jenkins associate with?”
“Jes’ the couple in cabin five. Dunno the names. Me ’n Harriet had a few beers while they both couples was on the patio, but we wasn’t friends, or nuthin’. Then they was with this dude and his woman walked over from next door.”
“Would you know that couple if you saw them again?”
“Yeah, big ol’ boy with Mafia written all over him. His woman was a flashy, big-titted blonde wearin’ pink shorts that glowed in the dark.”
“He have any tattoos you recall?”
“Somethin’ on his back mostly covered by one o’ them muscle shirts. Couldn’t really see it. Had some tats on his arms. Don’t remember whut.”
Willie was probably describing the “Born to Kill” tattoo image visible through a thin shirt. The pair had probably split. I figured the real police would have to locate them. Bell stayed behind to continue working on Willie. I waded through the marsh to the dump next door.
The “Mafia type” was sitting, shirtless in a low back beach chair next to the boat slip of the It’ll Do, smoking a joint. The blonde sat next to him, topless in the sultry sun in a bikini bottom which would have fit into a thimble. “Born to Kill” tattooed across his pudgy back matched the photo from Michelle’s camera. If he was dirty, he was certainly a dumbass for hanging around.
“Yeah?” he tough-guyed.
“I’m Dave Kratzert, Houston Homicide.” What the hell, impersonating a cop didn’t count in Daylight, Texas. They had a whole police department doing the same thing.
“We don’t talk to no damned cops.” The blonde took a drag from her filter tip.
Copyright © 2025 by Gary Clifton
