The Now-And-Then Detective Read online

  The final leg of the journey was on the Overseas Highway, as US 1 was called as it island-hopped along causeways from Miami to Key West, where you ran out of continent. With the green, frothy Atlantic on one side and the calm blue Gulf of Mexico on the other, it was one of the most scenic roadways in the country. Along the way, I passed Islamorada, a village where Ted Williams, an avid sport fisherman, had a home. I got my first sailfish off Islamorada, trophy-size, the boat captain told me, but I released it; I didn’t want it staring at me accusingly from a wall.

  Reaching Key West, I drove to the Southernmost Point Buoy, a red, black, and yellow bullet-shaped concrete structure sitting on a square black marble pad at the corner of South and Whitehead Streets, and called Lucy Gates to confirm our appointment for lunch at Sloppy Joe’s, the famous Duval Street bar where Hemingway hung out. I had yet to find a bar in Key West where Hemingway did not hang out.

  The Buoy was a font of information. Its lettering said, reading from top to bottom: “The Conch Republic,” “90 Miles to Cuba,” “Southernmost Point Continental USA,” “Key West, FL,” and “Home of the Sunset.”

  As I stood there thinking about how Marisa’s father had made the perilous journey from Cuba to Miami during the Mariel boatlift in 1980, a man asked if I would take a picture of him and his wife and two young children standing in front of the Buoy, which I did. The man thanked me and said they lived in Des Moines. He gazed out at the ocean and said, “You go any farther and you need a boat.”

  Presumably a more seaworthy craft than Marisa’s father had floated in to Florida and freedom.

  Lucy Gates was a young woman who helped me on my last Florida murder investigation. She was a world-class computer hacker who served three years in the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee for transferring funds from someone else’s bank account into her own in order to pay off her college loans. She intended to pay it back when she was able. The account owner was so wealthy that Lucy thought he wouldn’t notice the unauthorized withdrawal, but his accounting firm did.

  I got permission from a friend in the FBI to work with Lucy while she was still incarcerated to penetrate the dark web in search of someone killing people in Florida in a complex case involving offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, corrupt state politicians, a Russian oligarch, and a father whose son was not getting enough playing time on his Little League team.

  I needed Lucy’s help again. Google for Dummies had taken me as far as it could. Lucy served her time and moved to Key West, where she operated a legit computer consulting business helping companies and government and private institutions with cybersecurity.

  I found her at Sloppy Joe’s seated in a booth with her laptop, probably working on a client project. Lucy was a pretty woman in her late twenties, with shoulder-length brown hair, an infectious smile, and wire-rimmed glasses. She was wearing a white tee shirt with the #MeToo logo symbolizing the anti-sexual-harassment movement, and jeans. We’d gotten to be friends during my last case, and I might have given her a greeting kiss on the cheek, but her tee shirt gave me pause. Probably needlessly, but a lot of men were on edge these days about their interactions with women, some justifiably so, some not. Movements are blunt instruments, not scalpels. So it goes.

  I slid into her booth and said, “Last time I saw you, Lucy, you were wearing an orange jumpsuit. I like this outfit better.”

  She smiled and said, “Plus, the food’s better on the outside. We gonna have some fun again, Jack?”

  I’d given her an overview of my case when I called her, and now I began to fill in the details when a waitress arrived. Or it may have been a waiter. Key West was like that. I ordered one of the bar’s famous Original Sloppy Joe sandwiches, with a side of onion rings and a diet root beer.

  “I’ll have what he’s having,” Lucy told the waitperson. “But make mine a diet Dr Pepper.”

  I finished the briefing and said, “So, for starters, I need to know everything you can find out about that niece and her husband in Washington, June and Alan Dumont. A power couple. At this point, they’re at the top of my suspect list.”

  I told her everything I knew about the Dumonts. She thought about that and said, “Not a problem. Easier than hacking a presidential election. Which, as I might add, was a fine piece of work by the boys at the FSB.”

  The FSB was the unit of the Russian government responsible for cyber warfare.

  When we finished lunch, I said, “So, Lucy, how goes your new life here?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” she answered. “I’ve got more clients than I can handle, I love the outdoor life, and I’m in a relationship with a woman who captains a stone-crab fishing boat.”

  “Second chances,” I said. “Eventually, if we’re lucky, we get it right.”

  Lucy went home to begin her research and I drove back to Fort Myers Beach, beating my time on the way down by six minutes.

  That night I went to The Drunken Parrot, wondering if we should have a Hemingway Look-Alike contest like Sloppy Joe’s did each July to celebrate Papa’s birthday and put up a brass plaque saying that Ernest drank at my bar whenever in town, even though I had no evidence that he ever was in Fort Myers Beach. I tried those ideas out on Sam. His response: “Let’s not put lipstick on a pig.”

  I spent the next three days catching up on bar business and other chores and doing more book editing. I stopped by Tom Sullivan’s office in Naples for an update and to hand in an expense report, which he signed without reading. I should have had the market-price lobster. I took Marisa to dinner at her favorite French restaurant and updated her on my investigation; she seemed more interested in her coq au vin.

  The morning of the third day after my Key West trip, I was making a pot of coffee when my cell phone began playing the “Marines’ Hymn.” The caller ID told me it was Lucy Gates.

  “That was fast,” I said.

  “Like shit through a Strasbourg goose,” she replied.

  Lucy was not your average female person.

  “You find out anything useful?” I asked her.

  “Only if you think learning that Alan Dumont seems to have a very big problem with the New England Mafia is useful.”

  “Wow. Tell me.”

  “Alan has a client, a shipbuilding company in Maine called Dirigo Steelworks. Dirigo being the state motto of Maine. It’s Latin for ‘I Lead,’ referring to the time when Maine was the only state to hold elections in September. But I digress. Any-hoo, Dirigo was bidding on a navy contract to build a new class of destroyer. You can imagine what that contract would be worth. A lobbyist friend of Alan’s told him that a man who lived in Providence, Rhode Island, could, for the right price, help grease the skids. How wasn’t made clear. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Dirigo approved the payment, that kind of thing happens all the time in the defense contracting game, and the sum of six million dollars was wire transferred from one offshore bank account to another.”

  “Did Alan know the identity of the Providence skid-greaser?”

  “Apparently not. The lobbyist, whose name is Sheldon Sharkey, believe it or not, was the middleman. Turned out that Dirigo didn’t get the contract. And even though the fee was paid in full, the Providence guy said he was going to keep the money. Also turned out that the Providence guy, Tony ‘Butterfingers’ Russo, was a top lieutenant of one Larry ‘Lucky Boy’ Infante. Heard of him?”

  I had. Infante was head of the New England Mafia. Coincidentally, another Larry Infante had been a minor league baseball player. Unless the Providence guy was originally from Venezuela, the two weren’t related.

  I loved Mob nicknames: Bobby “Buzzsaw” Marinara. Tommy “Icepick” Puttanesca. Louie “Joey Tire Iron” Langoustine. Sammy “Storm Drain” Alfredo. From their nicknames, you could imagine their weapons of choice, or where to look for a body. Jack “Hammer of Thor” Starkey would do quite nicely pour moi. I especially liked the name of The Sopranos character, Paulie Walnuts. You could envision him cracking walnuts with his bare hands
to intimidate someone. You wouldn’t want to send a guy called Alfonse “Bambi” Mostaccioli to collect your debts. What’s that you say, Bambi? Pay up or else? Yeah, right, kiss my ass and go back to yo’ mama in the forest. I knew a vice detective named Ed Lapidus. His nickname was Beano, which referred to his chronic flatulence. He was a good cop, but you didn’t want to ride with him.

  “Infante is the godfather of the New England Mob,” I told Lucy.

  “Right. Well, as you can imagine, Dirigo was pissed about not getting the destroyer contract and they wanted their six mil back.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Right. Rule Number One is never ask the Mob for a refund. That lobbyist I mentioned, Sheldon Sharkey, is among the missing, as is a guy named Daniel Danko, vice president of government relations for Dirigo. Both are probably taking a dirt nap with Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “Wowzer. How’d you find all that out?” I asked her.

  “Like the CIA, I never reveal sources and methods,” she told me. “Let’s just say that if I wanted to read all of your texts and e-mails, hack into your bank records, get all your Marine Corps fitness reports, and know what restaurants you’ve dined at recently using your credit card, I could.”

  “Scary.”

  “By the way, did you really get busted from captain to lieutenant in the marines for trashing a bar in Subic Bay?” she asked me.

  “I didn’t like being a captain anyway,” I said. “Too much responsibility. So where does that leave Alan Dumont?”

  “Infante wants him to find another one of his clients willing to hire his Mob family as a fixer for a big fee,” Lucy said. “And more after that, most likely.”

  “Assuming that’s true, I wonder how it could relate to the murder of Henry Wilberforce,” I said. “Why would Dumont and his wife need Uncle Henry’s money?”

  “Now that’s a conundrum,” Lucy said. “As a partner in his law firm, he makes north of three million a year in salary, plus big bonuses. And the Dumonts have a twenty-million-dollar investment account being managed by one of the big investment banks in New York. The portfolio is doing very well. It’s my opinion that, even if Alan would want to help June get a nice inheritance from her uncle, they don’t need the money enough to have Henry killed, and Alan has his hands full dealing with the Mafia thing.”

  “That’s a lot to think about, Lucy,” I said. “Send me your bill and I’ll see it’s paid promptly.”

  I had to agree with her conclusion, which meant that Stewart and Libby Leverton, the Boston socialites, were now at the top of my suspect list.

  13.

  My Usual Life

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to my bar. Bill Stevens was reminding me that the deadline for finishing my editing of Stoney’s Downfall was approaching. I was certain that Marisa was feeling neglected. Joe too. And I was tired of going from city to city, living out of a suitcase, without much to show for it, investigative-wise.

  I’d been eating very well while traveling on my Naples PD expense account and exercising only sporadically. Life on the road was like that.

  After breakfast aboard Phoenix, I drove to a nearby beach and did a three-mile run. A pair of dolphins frolicked alongside my route. Then I dropped to the sand and did fifty push-ups and sit-ups. Passersby could see that I was still in my Marine Corps fighting form—for all they knew.

  I drove back to my boat, changed into jeans and my Cubs tee shirt, and went to The Drunken Parrot. It was midmorning. A few regulars who always knew it was five o’clock somewhere were getting an early start on their buzz, which would build through the afternoon and into the evening, until they resided in a world where they were kings, adored by their subjects, and their kingdoms dominated the known world. Dean Martin said he felt sorry for people who didn’t drink because, when they woke up in the morning, that was as good as they were going to feel all day. Before rehab, I thought that too.

  I found a ladder in the storeroom, carried it outside, and climbed up to check out the new roof. It looked like a roof. The first heavy rain would tell me if the money it cost was well spent.

  Then I went into the office and paid bills. Sam was behind the bar polishing glasses, and Alice was in the kitchen, getting ready for the lunch crowd. When I’d worked my way through the bills, I drove to Café Provence to meet Marisa for lunch. She liked French food more than I did, but I discovered that a croque monsieur was a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, so I was covered.

  I found her seated at an outside table on a deck overlooking Estero Bay. I took a seat at her table and asked, “Are you alone, sweet cheeks, or is your boyfriend coming?”

  “You better leave because, even though he’s not the man he used to be, he carries a gun,” she replied.

  “As it happens, so do I, so I’ll take my chances.”

  She smiled. “Maybe his gun is bigger than yours.”

  A waiter wearing a long white apron came outside to take our orders. He spoke with a heavy French accent. I suspected he was from New Jersey and was faking it.

  “So, about your case,” Marisa said. “Did the butler do it in the library with the candlestick?”

  “Would that it were so.”

  “Any suspects other than the butler?” she asked.

  I gave her an update and told her that, through the process of elimination, Stewart and Libby Leverton in Boston were now my prime persons of interest.

  “It would be nice to see a woman of Libby’s high social status brought low,” Marisa commented. “I’m just sayin’.”

  “I go where the evidence leads me,” I replied.

  “Wherever it leads, it’s amusing to imagine how she would fare among the general population of a state penitentiary.”

  “I hear you. But she’s not there yet.”

  Our food arrived. We spent the rest of the time chatting about Marisa’s real estate business, about the sad state of national politics, which had always been a downer, but currently seemed to have hit a new low in the history of the republic, and about the upcoming Major League Baseball season. Actually we didn’t talk about baseball, I did, and I’m not certain Marisa was fully paying attention, unless she was taking notes on her cell phone, and not texting someone about another subject.

  Back at my bar, I took a mug of coffee to my usual booth and went back to editing Stoney’s Downfall.

  Twenty minutes later, I looked up from the manuscript to see a man I didn’t know standing beside my booth. He was late middle-aged, pink-faced, shaped like an eggplant, with a thin comb-over, and was wearing a tan shirt with a black embroidered name tag that told the world, or the small portion of it that paid attention to him, that his name was Harvey. Dennis Miller said if you wore a name tag to work, you’d made “a serious vocational error.” When I was a patrolman, I wore a nameplate, proving that Dennis Miller was right. Being a plainclothes detective was better.

  Harvey was holding a clipboard. “Mr. Starkey?” he asked.

  “Guilty as charged. What’s up, Harv?”

  “I’m with the Fort Myers Beach Public Health Department,” he said, in the high-pitched voice of a castrato. “I’m here for a periodic inspection of the premises.”

  He meant surprise inspection, which is how they also did it in the marines.

  “I wish you’d have let me know you were coming,” I told him. “We’d have mopped up the raw sewage from the kitchen floor and disposed of the rat carcasses.”

  Harvey didn’t react to my little joke. He looked at his clipboard and said, “When we were here three months ago, the grease trap in the kitchen needed cleaning, the walk-in cooler was four degrees too warm, and a dead cockroach was found in the storeroom.”

  I wasn’t willing to give up on my comedy routine and told him: “The last person who said that didn’t leave here alive, Harvey, my man.”

  “Excuse me?” he said, looking alarmed.

  “Feel free to look around, at your own risk,” I said.

  I was confident that Sam had taken care of th
ose items, if they were even real, and that Harvey would find new infractions. Singers had to sing, dancers had to dance, street cops had to give out tickets, and city inspectors had to find violations, or they might have to work for a living.

  14.

  Be Careful Out There

  “Maybe you should give it a rest for a while, Jack,” Tom Sullivan said after I updated him on my investigation as we sat in his office in Naples police headquarters. I couldn’t blame him. My performance so far had not been Hall of Fame quality.

  “What’s with the full-dress uniform?” I asked him.

  “Funeral of a retired sergeant who died of a heart attack,” he told me. “Twelve years ago, he got the department’s Medal of Valor for running into a burning house to save an entire family. So it’s a funeral with full honors.”

  Just like my brother, Joe, but the sergeant survived.

  Sullivan spread his hands and said, “I’m serious about you taking a step back from the case, Jack. If you get killed while on my payroll, there’ll be a lot of paperwork, and I really hate paperwork.”

  But it was too soon to quit. A good rule is, it’s always too soon to quit. When I was a boy, discouraged about something or other, my father read a quotation to me by Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy said that it was better to try and fail than to be one of “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” This wouldn’t be the first time I’d tested that maxim.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon keep after it,” I said. “I don’t plan on dying.”

  “Who does?” he asked.

  “Not Henry Wilberforce.”

  He stroked his chin for a moment and said, “True enough.”

  “I need to have another run at the Levertons in Boston,” I told him, having explained why Scooter Lowry and June Dumont now seemed less likely suspects.