The Dollar-a-Year Detective Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by William Wells

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, unless explicitly noted, is entirely coincidental.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wells, William, author.

  The dollar-a-year detective / William Wells.

  Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, [2018]

  ISBN: 978-1-57962-527-6

  eISBN: 978-1-57962-562-7

  1. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction.

  3. Mystery fiction.

  PS3623.E4795 D48 2018

  813'.6—dc23

  2018019005

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Mary, as always.

  “How often have I said to you that when you have

  eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

  however improbable, must be the truth.”

  —SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’S SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Boarding Party

  A dead calm came over Pine Island Sound, causing the sailboat, a forty-two-foot Catalina sloop named Joie de Vivre, heeled over to port on a broad reach, to gradually slow, right itself, and begin to drift.

  It was a warm and humid March evening, and the vanishing of the wind that had billowed the boat’s white sails and propelled it forward was felt by the man and woman on deck, as if the temperature had suddenly increased by ten degrees.

  The man looked up at the starry nighttime sky, as if he might tell, using an ancient sailor’s instinct, if the wind would return anytime soon. He stroked his chin and said to his wife, “We can power back to Fort Myers, or wait here awhile longer and see if the wind comes back up.”

  As they were pondering that choice, the distinctive sound of an outboard motor was heard puttering across the water, heading toward them from the mainland. As the man and woman turned in that direction, the three-quarter moon, no clouds to dull its brightness, illuminated a white-hulled small boat, with red and green running lights, headed toward them.

  A Boston Whaler, with its distinctive silhouette and hull logo, the man thought as the boat came closer, its engine slowing, causing the bow to drop down off plane. A pair of dolphins that had been chasing the boat’s wake dove beneath the surface.

  “Ahoy there!” a male voice called out. “May I come alongside?”

  The man looked at his wife, shrugged, turned toward the approaching boat, and, cupping his hands around his mouth to form a megaphone, shouted, “Who are you?” Not that he could prevent the boat from coming alongside, whatever the answer.

  Changing the subject like a politician during a debate, the stranger called out, “Saw you drifting and wondered if you needed a tow.”

  Now the Whaler was about twenty feet off the sailboat’s starboard side, the skipper’s face clearly visible in the moonlight. He was in his late thirties or early forties, it appeared, and was wearing a black tee shirt and jeans.

  The man said to the Whaler skipper: “Thanks, but we’re fine.” No need to shout now, with the boat alongside, its outboard, a one-fifty horse Yamaha, sputtering in idle. “We’ve got a motor.”

  The offer of a tow was odd, the man reflected, given that sailboats as big as the Joie had engines, and, if in need of a tow, he’d have called the Coast Guard. Maybe the Whaler guy was a tourist in a rented boat and didn’t know any of that, he thought. Lots of them in Florida coastal waters. In their ignorance of all things nautical, they could be a real hazard. Only last year, the couple had rescued a family—husband, wife, teenage daughter, and black lab—who’d strayed out of the channel from Fort Myers Beach to Sanibel Island and run aground on a sandbar in their rented pontoon boat. Not rescued, really, because they were in no danger of sinking. Just being polite. The depth of coastal Gulf of Mexico waters was deceptive; if you didn’t stay in the channel, you could go from a safe depth to two feet or less without knowing it until too late. That kept the Coast Guard and Sea Tow busy.

  Plus, the man thought, there was the matter of how the guy in the Whaler had seen the sailboat in the distance, even with its running lights and white masthead light, at least enough to know it was drifting. Curious …

  “Okay,” the Whaler skipper said. “I’m out here fishing. Mind if I come aboard and use your head?” He was standing now, holding a coiled line, awaiting permission to toss it to the sailboat.

  Night fishing was not unusual. The couple were experienced boaters and knew well the tradition of courtesy on the sea. Of course the skipper simply could have stood and urinated over the side of his boat. Nonetheless, the man said, “Sure. That’d be fine.” No need to overthink the situation.

  The skipper tossed the line, which fell onto the sailboat’s deck near the man’s feet. He picked it up and looped a section around a cleat using a cleat hitch, tugging to secure it.

  “Thanks,” the skipper said. “Afraid I drank too much beer.”

  He stepped aboard the sailboat, a one-man boarding party, and walked toward the couple, who were standing in the cockpit. He stopped three feet from them, took a black pistol out of the belt on his jeans, jacked a shell into the chamber, leveled the pistol at the couple, and said, “Do you recognize me?”

  But even if one or both of them did, now that he was closer, all they could see was the gun.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the gunman said, smiling. “Let’s go below and have a little chat.”

  1.

  Livin’ the Dream

  In my experience, many cops share a common retirement dream involving living on a boat in the tropics, like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, maybe owning a bar with one of those thatched tiki huts on the beach (think wet-tee-shirt contests) and, if divorced, as many cops are (an occupational hazard of the job), dating a beautiful woman who tolerates his flaws and appreciates his good qualities, hidden as they may be.

  I’m talking about male cops here. I don’t know about the retirement dreams of female cops. If Freud was clueless about what women want, as he famously declared, then how could a guy like me have the faintest idea? The caveat is, sometimes a woman will tell you, with a high degree of specificity, what she wants, and you are well-advised to pay close attention if you want the relationship to continue beyond that conversation.

  My name is Jack Starkey and I am livin’ the dream. I reside on a houseboat named Phoenix in Fort Myers Beach, on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast, where I have lived since moving from Chicago a few years ago, following my retirement as a homicide detective. I own a bar called The Drunken Parrot, and I date a lovely Cuban-American woman named Marisa Fernandez de Lopez. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. He was wrong.

  For most of the year, the 16,300 year-round residents of Fort Myers Beach, plus the seasonal people and the tourists, coexist reasonably peacefully. But every March, flocks of Girls-Gone-Wild spring breakers descend upon the city like buzzards on a gut wagon.

  I’m into nostalgia, old movies and TV shows, including the 1960 movie, Where the Boys Are, starring Connie Francis and George Hamilton as college students fleeing snow-covered northern campuses for fun in the sun. Perhaps that role was where George’s perpetual tan originated. The mov
ie was about spring break in Fort Lauderdale, but it could just as well have been set in Fort Myers Beach.

  Spring break is one of those good news/bad news situations. Good, if you own a bar, restaurant, liquor store, tattoo parlor, budget-rate motel, or a shop that rents mopeds, bicycles, surfboards, paddleboards, or Jet skis. Bad, if you value serenity and easy parking and are uninterested in nonstop partying resembling the bacchanals of ancient Rome, but with beer and tequila shots instead of wine.

  I fall into both categories. My party-hearty days are long gone, but about 20 percent of my bar’s annual revenue comes in when all those young men and women arrive in search of suds, sand, sun, and casual sex. The Parrot has the suds. Sun and sand are right outside the door. For sex, they’re on their own—as long as they don’t do it in the Parrot’s restrooms (it’s happened; now we have a sign in there for patrons saying no tener sexo, right beside the one for employees saying lave las manos).

  It’s a Wednesday night during the second week in March. The Parrot is crowded with revelers whose IDs say they are at least twenty-one years old. Undoubtedly some of those IDs are fake, but my bartender, a Seminole named Sam Long Tree, is good at spotting the pretenders and offering them a nonalcoholic beverage or showing them to the door.

  Sam is well named. He’s as large as a giant sequoia; his suggestions to behave or depart are usually followed without objection. For those who don’t comply, Sam gets as physical as necessary. You’d be better off arguing with a speeding bus. He also keeps an aluminum baseball bat and a shotgun behind the bar in case … well, just in case.

  It’s ten P.M., and the cash register is singing a happy tune, accompanied by the blues guitar riffs of Buddy Guy playing loud on the sound system. Undoubtedly our young patrons would rather hear Jay Z, Rihanna, Adele, or Adam Levine, but I own the place. The music of old Chicago bluesmen is what I like, so the customers can either accept it, or take their business to another establishment.

  I’m in the kitchen, chatting with my short-order cook, a former Marine Corps mess sergeant named Alice Rosewater who’s learned to scale back her recipes to serve our customers instead of an infantry battalion. Once Alice caught one of our suppliers overcharging us and threatened to “cut off his head and shit down his neck” if he didn’t immediately give us a refund credit. He did. I was a marine, too, so that wasn’t the first time I’d heard that persuasively graphic phrase. Said it myself sometimes to underscore a point, back in the day.

  Sam finds me in the kitchen and tells me that Cubby Cullen has come in looking for me. Clarence “Cubby” Cullen is the Fort Myers Beach police chief. His nickname immediately called to mind my favorite baseball team. He is short and stocky as a fireplug, with a grey crew cut and a substantial beer belly.

  Cubby is a former deputy chief of the Toledo Police Department. When he retired, he and his wife, Millie, bought a cozy little bungalow on a golf course in Fort Myers. For the first year or so, Cubby spent his days fishing and playing golf while Millie tended her garden and played bridge with a regular group of lady friends. That was the retirement life they’d always imagined for themselves. Cubby kept his subscriptions to a number of law enforcement magazines. When he noticed an ad for the chief’s job in Fort Myers Beach, he realized how much he missed the cop life. With Millie’s blessing, he applied, got the job, and had been running the department for eight years when we met during a poker game at the VFW hall (Cubby had served as an army MP in his younger days).

  I find Cubby standing at one end of the bar, watching a young man with one of those three-day growths of beards and Oakley sunglasses perched atop his head, pouring beer from his glass onto the chest of a pretty blonde girl whose Iowa State tee shirt has become transparent, revealing that she must have left her bra back in Iowa.

  I think that wearing sunglasses on top of your head is a silly affectation which, for some reason, annoys me, especially when it’s nighttime, and sunglasses are clearly just a fashion accessory.

  Sam comes out from behind the bar, hands the girl a Drunken Parrot tee shirt, and offers her the option of changing or leaving. She heads to the ladies’ room while Sam guides the young man toward the door, his hand on the back of the fellow’s neck. I hear Sam ask the kid if he’s driving or needs a taxi (Uber hasn’t hit Fort Myers Beach yet). He says no, he can walk to his motel, and off he goes, most likely headed to another bar.

  Cubby is wearing a Toledo Mud Hens tee shirt (the Mud Hens are the Triple-A Farm team of the Detroit Tigers) and jeans, and not his police uniform, so his arrival has not caused underage drinkers to bolt for the door like undocumented aliens during an INS check.

  “Buy you a drink, Cubby?” I ask him.

  “No, tonight—I’m on duty,” he responds.

  His usual is a Blue Moon Ale with an orange slice. My drink these days is Berghoff diet root beer, made in Chicago. I’ve been sober for the past nine years. It was a gunshot to the left shoulder that caused me to retire from the Chicago Police Department; it was my drinking, plus the additional stress that the cop life brought to my marriage, that led to my divorce, a stay in a rehab center in Minnesota, and then my move to the Sunshine State in search of a new venue, which, I hoped, would start a new chapter in the life of Jack Starkey. So far, it has.

  “You’re on the late shift tonight,” I tell him.

  “I was home watching Blue Bloods on TV when I got a call from the duty officer at the station. The Coast Guard reported they’d found a sailboat drifting in Pine Island Sound with two bodies aboard, a man and a woman. Both shot in the head.”

  “Where’s the sailboat now?”

  “It was towed to the Coast Guard station on San Carlos Island.”

  “Have you been aboard?”

  “I’m on the way. I’d like you to take a look at the crime scene. No one in my department has the kind of experience with homicides that you do.”

  “Sure, glad to help if I can,” I tell him.

  I don’t know who coined the proverb, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But whoever it was got it right, in spades, as I was soon to find out.

  2.

  One Crime Scene Too Many

  We take Cubby’s white Ford police SUV north across the San Carlos Boulevard causeway to the US Coast Guard Station on San Carlos Island. The station is a three-acre compound surrounded by a sixteen-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. We pull up to a guard gate manned by a petty officer in a blue uniform, wearing a sidearm. The guard asks to see Cubby’s ID. He shows his badge; the guard looks at me and says, “And who are you, sir?” Cubby tells him I’m helping with a police matter and the guard waves us through the gate.

  We drive past a two-story cinder-block building with a flagpole out front; on it, an American flag is unfurled and illuminated by three spotlights set into the concrete around the pole, with a Coast Guard flag hanging beneath it. I know from my days in the Marine Corps that, after sunset, you either have to take down an American flag or light it up.

  Cubby parks in a lot near a long concrete pier. A Fort Myers Beach police squad car, an unmarked brown Crown Victoria, a crime scene van, and an EMS vehicle are also parked there. The Crown Vic belongs to one of Cubby’s detectives. I always wonder why police departments think that brown sedans with black walls and whip antennas can pass as civilian cars, but law-enforcement fleet management is above my pay grade. The FBI is partial to black Suburbans that shout, “Here come the Feds!” If a perp is dumb enough to be fooled by either kind of vehicle, he deserves to be caught.

  Cubby and I get out of the SUV and walk out onto the pier. When I arrived in Florida, I didn’t know the difference between a pier and a dock. Samuel Lewandowski, who owns Salty Sam’s Marina on Estero Bay, where I keep my houseboat, informed me that a pier is a dock big enough to allow vehicles to drive on it. If that question ever comes up in a trivia contest, I’ll be on it like Ernie Banks on a fastball down the middle.

  The eighty-seven-foot-long cutter Valiant is moored on one side of the pier.
By tradition, the Coast Guard calls its vessels “cutters.” On the other side, a big sailboat with a blue hull is tied up, and behind the sailboat is a Coast Guard SAFE boat—that’s a small aluminum craft with a cabin and twin 350-horsepower Mercury outboards. It probably was the SAFE boat that towed the sailboat to the station.

  The name painted on the stern of the sailboat is Joie de Vivre. How ironic that a vessel whose name translates as “joy of life” contains two dead bodies.

  A uniformed police officer and an EMT tech in white coveralls are standing on the pier beside the sailboat. They are both regulars in my bar. The uniform is a tall man with black hair and a chiseled jaw in his late twenties named Brad Jennings, and the EMT is Caroline Jackson, an African American woman in her thirties.

  I greet them by name. Cubby and I step aboard the sailboat. As we do, a man appears out of the companionway leading to the cabin: he is a veteran Fort Myers Beach detective named Harlan Boyd. Boyd is heavyset, in his fifties, with thinning brown hair, the bent nose and scar tissue under his eyes of a former boxer, which he is, and the florid complexion of a man who is not unacquainted with strong drink, which he frequently finds at my bar. We give discounts to law enforcement officers, as well as to military personnel, active duty and retired. One elderly gent who is a regular landed at Omaha Beach in WWII. He drinks for free.

  Boyd is wearing a suit and white rubber surgical gloves. He also is wearing a grim expression. I say: “Hey, Harlan.”

  He nods at me and says, “Jack.” Then he looks at Cubby, shakes his head and says, “This is a bad one, chief.”

  When a veteran detective says it’s a bad one, it’s a bad one.

  Boyd pulls a handkerchief from his pants pocket and mops sweat from his forehead. It’s a warm evening, but not warm enough at that hour to cause someone to perspire that much—unless he’s just seen something he’d like to un-see.

  On the way over, Cubby assured me he’d told Boyd I was coming, and that Boyd doesn’t mind if I check out his crime scene. Some detectives are very territorial, some less so. I was in the “very” category when I was a homicide detective in Chicago.