The Dollar-a-Year Detective Page 4

  “If we do work together, Sarah will act as your liaison,” Morrissey tells me, which more than makes up for the lack of doughnuts.

  “That’s fine,” I say, smiling at Agent Caldwell. What you want most in a partner is competence, but nice legs don’t hurt.

  Morrissey continues: “Based on what I’ve learned from Chief Cullen, I’m calling in a forensic accounting team from Miami to audit the Manatee National Bank’s books.”

  I wonder how Morrissey can already have obtained enough evidence to get a judge to issue a search warrant to allow the audit. What I have so far about a possible connection between the murders and Morrissey’s bank is … nothing. Usually you have to say more to a judge than, “I really want a search warrant, Your Honor.”

  Then I realize that, in this post-911 world, the FBI can do just about anything it wants.

  “That’ll be very helpful,” I tell him. There is nobody better than I am at stating the obvious.

  Morrissey looks at his watch. “Unless you’ve got something else, why don’t you and Agent Caldwell grab some lunch and get acquainted.”

  “Works for me,” I tell him.

  I volunteer to drive. Agent Caldwell follows me to my Vette, checks it out, gives a low whistle, and says, “Bitchin’ ride, Detective.”

  “Thanks. Call me Jack.”

  “And I’m Sarah.”

  Progress is being made in our relationship.

  I don’t open her car door because that kind of chivalry is ancient history to modern women, especially those who are trained in armed and unarmed combat, and packing. Try to be a gentleman and you might get your ass handed to you.

  Sarah strokes the leather upholstery. “This’d be a ’63, I’d guess, with the 340 horsepower V8.”

  And this could be the start of a beautiful friendship, to paraphrase Rick in Casablanca. Maybe I should whistle “As Time Goes By.”

  As we pass through the guard gate, I ask her, “What do you drive?”

  “For work, a government-issue black Suburban. For pleasure, a Porsche 911 and a Ducati 1200 Enduro.”

  Too cool for school. I might have to chat with Marisa about having an open relationship.

  Just kidding.

  I think.

  I exit the parking lot, swing right onto West Gray Street and say, “Your town—where should we eat?”

  “You like Cuban food?”

  Not the time to tell her I’m dating a woman who can cook that cuisine well enough to make Fidel weep, so I just say, “Sure do.”

  “There’s a place I like on West Columbus called La Terisita. Arroz con pollo to die for.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I also don’t mention that the last time I was in a Cuban restaurant I almost did die. My daughter was meeting with one of the clients of her law firm in Miami about two years ago. I took her to Amador’s Café Cubano on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. During the meal, a man entered the café, approached a table where another man and a woman were dining, shot the man dead, and then shot himself. A love triangle gone bad. Do they ever not go bad?

  Sarah directs me on surface streets to a two-story pink stucco building with a green awning. I turn into an adjoining gravel lot. Inside a young man wearing a white cotton shirt called a guayabera, calls out from behind the bar: “Hey, Sarah. Your usual table?”

  “Hey, Mateo. That’ll be good.”

  I follow her to a table at the back wall of the dining room. Good tradecraft: always have your back to the wall and a good view of the door. A waitress whose nameplate says she’s Nell brings menus. I scan mine, then say, “Why don’t you order for both of us?”

  Nell returns after a few minutes. Without looking at her menu, Sarah orders a nice selection of Cuban food: arroz con pollo, carne con papas, camarones fritos, and flan de queso for dessert, accompanied by café Cubano.

  The meal order reinforces my impression that there is, in fact, something special about Special Agent Sarah Caldwell. She is lovely, and, in addition to her career and her excellent choice of vehicles, she is a gourmand. Many women will tell a waiter, “I’ll have a small salad with light vinaigrette on the side.” To which the waiter will reply, “And for your entrée, madam?” And she will answer: “Oh, that is my entrée.” Or she might ask another woman at the table if she’d like to split the salmon entrée with her. My reaction to that always is: Why bother to suit up and take the field if you’re not going to play the game? People can eat whatever they want, but there are certain kinds of people I choose not to dine with.

  “Bitchin’ order,” I comment.

  “My last posting was the Miami field office. Another agent was from a Cuban family. He introduced me to the cuisine.”

  “And before Miami?”

  “I’m from Minneapolis. I graduated from the University of Minnesota, then did a stint in the marines and went to the FBI Academy in Quantico.”

  A fellow marine. This was getting to be a serious test of my mutual understanding with my main squeeze.

  “Semper fi,” I say.

  “You too?”

  “Before you were born. We used mules to pull the artillery.”

  She laughs. “What are your marching orders for my case?” I ask her.

  “To aid your investigation in any way I can. If it’s determined that we have standing, of course. So let’s see where the bank audit leads and go from there.”

  “Deal.”

  Our food arrives. It’s delicious and there’s a lot of it. Thankfully no active shooters interrupt us because I eat myself into a semi-stupor. I’m glad I already did my morning run along the beach. Staying awake during the drive home will be challenge enough.

  8.

  Shoe Leather

  “So your FBI liaison’s a babe,” Cubby says when I walk into his office and drop onto the couch, putting the coffee and doughnut I picked up in the break room on the side table. Sometime during the drive from Tampa, the effect of the large lunch partially wore off, leaving just enough room for a light snack.

  Cubby joins me in a club chair near the couch.

  “I’m surprised straight-arrow Morrissey told you that,” I say.

  “He didn’t. He just said you’d be working with Special Agent Sarah Caldwell. Her photo’s on the FBI website.”

  “My interest in Agent Caldwell is purely professional, Cubby.”

  “So you won’t mind if I share her photo with Marisa.”

  “Let’s not bother her with shop talk.”

  “So next up is Manatee National Bank?”

  I take a bite of doughnut. Strawberry jelly, my favorite. A dollop of jelly falls onto my shirtfront. An occupational hazard.

  “After the doughnut, I mean,” he adds. “And changing your shirt.”

  “I want to talk to the senior people at the bank, and after that to the Hendersons’ family and friends. At some point, I want to go into the Henderson house and look around. Never know what you might find.”

  “I’ll arrange for you to enter the house. Do you want help with the interviewing?”

  “I’ll do it myself.”

  Many cases are solved using confidential informants. But an ace investigator like me has to at least look busy interviewing people and poking around for clues until a snitch comes forward and tells me who did it.

  After my meeting with Cubby, I drive to The Drunken Parrot to check in with Sam Long Tree. Sam is more than just my bartender. He is a friend I can trust to manage the bar while I’m off detecting. He doesn’t need the bartender job. As a member of the Seminole tribe, which controls the casino business in Florida, he gets a share of the tribe’s multibillion-dollar gambling revenue. When I asked him why he wants to be a bartender, he just shrugged and said, “It’s good to stay busy.” I guess when you are six foot six, a chiseled two hundred seventy pounds, and rich, you can do whatever the hell you want. He did tell me once that if I ever want to sell the bar, he’d be interested.

  “Hi, boss,” Sam says when I come into the bar through the b
ack entrance.

  I tell him about my assignment with the Fort Myers Beach PD. “I don’t know how much time this case will take,” I say.

  “No problem. I’ll take care of the bar. Just catch that stone-cold killer and make the world a better place.”

  9.

  No Clue, Clock Radio, or Stadium Blanket

  The Manatee National Bank is located in an eighteen-story glass tower on First Street in downtown Fort Myers, the tallest structure in the city, except for a new condo building just north of the bank on the Caloosahatchee River.

  Fort Myers never developed into a major center of commerce in the way that other Florida coastal cities like Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville did. Marisa said that’s because the city has no deep-water shipping port and few major corporate employers. And there are not the kind of gulf-front beaches that attract resort hotels. Over the years, the city government and various business committees announced grand plans for a downtown revitalization, but they always petered out short of their goals. The bank building and a few other shorter office towers, a new marina, and a few riverfront condos are the greatest visible successes; for some urbanites, Starbucks finally opening a downtown store at the corner of Broadway and First Street was even more important.

  The Boston Red Sox have a spring training stadium, City of Palms Park, in the city; it got old, there was not enough parking or other amenities, and the team threatened to move to Sarasota. Rather than lose the team, Lee County ponied up enough money for a new stadium, JetBlue Park, a miniature replica of Fenway Park. The Minnesota Twins hold spring training at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, which was recently remodeled.

  I don’t care about Starbucks, not a fan of their overpriced brown water with Italian names, but having two Major League spring training stadiums nearby, where I can scarf down hot dogs and see the teams close up, makes Fort Myers okay in my book, even though they are American League teams. The Cubs flirted with City of Naples a few years ago, but Mesa, Arizona, their spring training headquarters, finally agreed to build a replica of Wrigley Field for the team and they stayed put. Naples came that close to truly being paradise.

  There are some nice residential neighborhoods in Fort Myers, but also some not-so-nice ones with a gang problem and a resultant high crime rate. Cubby Cullen was offered the Fort Myers police chief’s job, with a substantial salary increase, a few years ago. He turned it down. He told me he’d rather issue citations to college kids for underage drinking, and chase boat thieves, than dodge gangbangers’ gunfire. However, Cubby now has a major murder investigation on his hands. Violent crime has found him, even in his tranquil little town.

  I TURN into the bank parking lot, locate a visitor’s space, and enter the lobby. There is a Manatee retail banking office on the first floor. That’s where I have my business and personal accounts. The executive offices are on eighteen. The rest of the building is filled with law, accounting, and investment firms, a commercial real estate brokerage office, and other companies that are successful enough to afford the high rent.

  In my younger days, there were small community banks that knew you and felt an obligation to support the local economy. They sponsored Little League teams and contributed to local charities. People had checking and passbook savings accounts. You got the choice of a clock radio or stadium blanket when you opened an account, and if you wrote a check on insufficient funds, you got a phone call from your personal banker giving you the opportunity to make it good.

  Then things changed. Banks grew and consolidated into giant financial service institutions whose main concerns are profit for the shareholders, high stock prices, and generous executive compensation packages. Individual customers are seen as a necessary nuisance served only to appease the regulators. When banks got into trouble for helping to create the subprime mortgage collapse, we—you and me—via our tax money, bailed them out.

  Cubby set up meetings for me with three of the bank’s top surviving officers: an executive vice president and two senior VPs. An officer in his department prepared background on each man for me. Cubby called the men and explained that I was the detective in charge of investigating the Henderson murders; he didn’t add the fact that I was also investigating the bank, looking for any sign of illegal activity that could have gotten Lawrence Henderson and his wife killed. The FBI would position its audit as a routine check by bank examiners.

  The elevator opens directly into the bank’s executive offices. There is a reception desk manned by an attractive young woman. My first meeting is with the executive VP, Reynold Livingstone III. Guys with names like that don’t work in the mail room, or wear name tags on their shirts. Livingstone and the two other men I’m seeing are all shareholders in Manatee Holdings, the privately held company that owns the bank. The late Lawrence Henderson was the majority shareholder.

  The receptionist informs me that Mr. Livingstone is expecting me and leads me to his office. The background says he got his undergraduate degree from Yale and an MBA from Wharton. His grandfather, the first Reynold Livingstone, owned orange groves in Lee County, and the second RL had developed those into golf course communities and shopping malls. Fortunately for Reynold, his grandfather hadn’t decided to attend the police academy.

  In my previous life as a detective, before moving to Florida, I had a battered, government-issue metal desk facing my partner’s desk in an open squad room with peeling grey paint on the walls, dirty windows that blocked the sunlight, and an acrid aroma of perspiration and burned coffee held in place by the substandard HVAC system that was probably installed by some pol’s unlicensed nephew. There was constant background noise of buzzing fluorescent lights, ringing telephones, and loud conversations salted and peppered with curse words. Rather than describe Livingstone’s office I’ll just say, imagine the polar opposite of my old homicide squad room.

  Livingstone comes from behind a desk the size of a Ping-Pong table and greets me with a smile and a firm handshake. He is in his forties, I guess. He has a deep tan, from golf, I imagine, not yard work. He wears the standard-issue bankers uniform: navy pin-striped suit, starched white shirt, blue tie with little crossed golf clubs on it, and black loafers. Not unlike the FBI uniform, but made of better fabrics. As we shake hands, I notice a monogram, RL III, on his right shirt cuff. “Hello, Detective Starkey,” he says. “I’m Reynold Livingstone.”

  I guess that, when you have a Roman numeral after your name, it’s considered pretentious to pronounce it, as in: “I’m Reynold Livingstone the Third.” That would be like me saying, “I’m Jack Starkey the First.”

  RL III gestures toward two club chairs near the windows. When we’re seated, he says, “I’ll help your investigation in any way I can.”

  I begin with the obvious question: “Do you have any idea who’d want to kill Lawrence Henderson and his wife?”

  “None at all. Larry was a terrific fellow. He had no enemies I ever knew about.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might be angry with the bank? Someone denied a loan, foreclosed upon, recommended a bad investment to, anything like that?”

  “All of those things happen, so that’s certainly a possibility. But no customer has ever expressed dissatisfaction deep enough to threaten murder, as far as I know.”

  He is silent for a moment, strokes his chin, then adds, “Actually, there was an incident involving a repossession of a commercial fishing boat a few years ago. The owner told his loan officer that they’d take the boat away over his dead body. Unfortunately, that’s what happened. When the repo guy and a sheriff’s deputy showed up at the marina, there was a gunfight and the boat owner was killed. His son told a newspaper reporter that our bank would come to regret killing his father. So there’s that.”

  Note to self: if the bank decides to repossess Phoenix, let ’em have the tub.

  “How did you come to work at the bank?” I ask him. Maybe he squandered his trust fund on fast cars and faster women and had to earn a paycheck, like the rest of us working stiffs. />
  “I knew Larry from our country club. We occasionally golfed together. I was managing my family’s real estate development business. Eight years ago, there was a slowdown, so I put new development on hold and was looking for something else to do. I heard that Larry was seeking investors to start a bank. We talked about that, and I decided to be part of the group. He asked me to join the management team and I accepted. You can only play so much golf, you know.”

  “What did Mr. Henderson do before that?”

  “He was president of a regional banking company, with no ownership.”

  I already knew that from Cubby’s background report. I also knew that Henderson’s father, Matthew, had owned a dry-cleaning store in Fort Myers, that his mother, Jeanette, was a homemaker, and that his older brother, Tom, worked as a supervisor for the Lee County Highway Department. Cubby’s departmental researcher, a young woman working on her master’s degree in library science at Florida Gulf Coast University, is that good.

  So Larry was the only Henderson who wore a white collar to work. He’d been a star wide receiver for North Fort Myers High School and attended the University of South Florida on a full football scholarship. Considered too small for the pros, he’d entered the Sunshine State National Bank’s training program and rose from assistant loan officer to president. A real Horatio Alger story.

  “How is Manatee National doing these days?”

  “Very well. We consistently perform at or near the top of our peer group.”

  “What will you do now that you’ve lost your president?”

  “There’s a board meeting in three days to figure that out. I don’t want the job. I don’t know about Bob or Henry. I expect we’ll hire a search firm.”

  Maybe he thinks the extra pay isn’t worth the added responsibility, or maybe he’s decided to go back into real estate development now that the market is hot again. If it’s true that RL III doesn’t want the top job, I can probably cross him off my list of suspects, unless he had some other reason for committing the murders that isn’t apparent. Maybe Henderson cheated him on a golf bet.