The Dollar-a-Year Detective

by William Wells

  We continue the Q&A for another fifteen minutes. I get nothing useful, nor do I from the other two guys, Robert Kerr and Henry Allen. In fact, the answers of all three men are very similar. Rehearsed? Or the truth? No way to know at this point.

  I leave the bank without a clue, clock radio, or stadium blanket. Sometimes in detective work, you come up dry. Maybe the audit will find evidence of drug-money laundering or the funding of terrorist groups. Or maybe, while I was at the bank, someone walked into the Fort Myers Beach Police Department and confessed.

  10.

  Solid Citizens,

  One and All

  Next up on my interview list is Larry Henderson’s brother, Tom. The funeral he and his wife, Liz, had to arrange for his brother and sister-in-law was only three days ago. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult it was for him and Liz to go through that, with his brother’s children, Nathan and Elise, now living with them. People need varying amounts of time to grieve, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to do whatever he or she could to help catch the person who murdered a loved one.

  I arranged to meet Tom Henderson for lunch at Mary’s Kitchen, a café I like on South Cleveland Avenue in Fort Myers. When I enter the café, I spot a man sitting alone in a booth. He is tanned and rugged-looking, like a man who works outside, and he is wearing a green work shirt. Every other customer is with someone, so that must be Tom Henderson. Additionally there is a name patch on his shirt that says “Tom.” The ace detective at work.

  He nods at me when we make eye contact and stands when I get to the booth. “Detective Starkey?”

  “In person. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  As I slide into the booth, he says, “This is a difficult time for us, but I want to do anything I can to help you catch the bastard who killed my brother and his wife.”

  Arlene, a waitress I know, brings ice water, fills our coffee cups, and takes our order. It is meat loaf day, so I go for it. Tom orders a burger. Another food quirk I have: some people, when ordering at a restaurant, ask the waitress, “Can I have the meat loaf?” As if the waitress might say “No, you can’t. I don’t like your looks.” Mostly I keep things like that to myself lest people think I’m odd.

  As we wait for our food, I decide to get right to it: “Do you know of anyone who’d want to kill your brother and his wife?”

  “Of course I’ve thought about that. As far as I know, Larry and Marion have no enemies. Had no enemies. Maybe it was a robbery. Or mistaken identity.”

  “It didn’t appear that anything was taken from the boat. His wallet was there, with three hundred in cash and credit cards. He was wearing a gold Rolex. Her wallet also was there, with cash and credit cards, and some expensive jewelry was left behind. What about your brother’s activities beyond the bank?”

  “Larry liked to play golf, fish, and sail and he served on the boards of several charitable organizations. He was a solid citizen.”

  Larry Henderson didn’t seem like a man who would launder money through his bank for a drug cartel or embezzle the bank’s funds or be involved in any other nefarious activity. But I arrested many people during my career in Chicago who didn’t seem like the type to commit the crimes they did: top corporate executives, a Boy Scout leader, two college professors, and an Episcopal priest, among others.

  I ask Tom about Marion. He describes a loving wife and ideal mother with many friends who volunteered at the church the family attended and at their children’s school. He told me that Marion had been serving as the president of an environmental group whose name he could not recall. He said they put up barriers around sea turtle nests during hatching season, erected osprey nests on top of poles, campaigned to save the mangroves and the manatees, things like that.

  Both Hendersons certainly seemed to be solid citizens. Pillars of the community.

  “I can’t imagine that anyone had a reason to murder my brother and sister-in-law,” Tom Henderson says as our food arrives.

  But someone had, and it was my job to figure out who, and why.

  11.

  Mr. Livingstone, I Presume?

  I’m preparing my usual breakfast aboard Phoenix when my cell phone rings. My ringtone this week is Buddy Guy doing “Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues.” Love the riffs on his Stratocaster. I insert a strawberry Pop-Tart into the toaster and answer. Joe already ate his tuna and is off somewhere sleeping. Even on a houseboat, cats have their secret places.

  “Jack, it’s Sarah Caldwell.”

  “You Feds start your workday early. Maybe you need a union.”

  “It’s nine thirty. Reveille was three-and-a-half hours ago, marine. I’m on my way to Fort Myers. We fast-tracked the bank audit, working with their accounting firm without notifying anyone at Manatee National. The accounting firm resisted that at first, but a court order persuaded them to keep it confidential.”

  “And the audit found enough for you to be driving to the bank.”

  “Someone has been embezzling. Big bucks. Has to be an insider with access, I’d say. Just south of nine hundred thousand over the past three years.”

  “Wowzer. I’d say the bank’s accounting firm deserves a good scolding for missing that.”

  “The partner in charge of the bank’s account went to lunch when he heard an FBI audit team was coming—and he took his passport. We’re looking for him now.”

  “Any idea who’s involved at the bank?”

  “Not yet. Meet me there in an hour. You interviewed their top execs …”

  “I neglected to ask if anyone had his hand in the cookie jar.”

  “So this time we will. I told a secretary that we need to talk to them about irregularities revealed by an audit of the bank’s financial statements.”

  “We don’t know that the embezzling is connected to the murders.”

  “Right. If it was Henderson, and someone discovered it, you’d think they’d just drop a dime on him, not murder him and his wife. So probably not Henderson, if there’s a connection.”

  “If it’s someone else, and Henderson found out, he could have been killed to keep him from reporting it to the police,” I add. “That seems unlikely. How could the killer know that Henderson hadn’t already reported it?”

  “But confronting the three top guys, and gauging their reaction, is a good place to start.”

  “Ten Four,” I respond, a phrase I’ve only heard cops on TV use.

  I arrive at the bank at ten thirty and wait for Sarah in the parking lot. She pulls in at ten forty, having made the drive from Tampa in record time. Maybe she used her lights and siren.

  She pulls in beside me, gets out of her car and into mine, nearly sitting on my bag of Dunkin’ Donuts I’d picked up on the way. I snatch them away at the last possible moment and wonder if she thinks I was trying to grab her ass. If so, she doesn’t say anything about it or reach for her pepper spray.

  We enter the bank building and ride the elevator to the top floor. Sarah IDs us to the receptionist. A moment later, a well-put-together woman in her late fifties or early sixties comes through a door leading to the inner offices. She is dressed in a tan linen suit. I notice the reflection of the overhead lights on a very large diamond wedding ring on her finger. Her grey hair is done up in a hairdo involving braids. Either she makes a very good salary at the bank, or she is the one who took the nine hundred thou.

  She smiles and says, “Hello, I’m Dorothy Marcus. Agent Caldwell and Detective Starkey, I presume?”

  I wonder if Dorothy knows she’s making reference to the famous quotation of Henry Morton Stanley who, upon locating David Livingstone in Africa, famously greeted him by saying, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Or maybe she is just confirming our identity and I should get my head back into the game.

  Sarah assures Dorothy that we are in fact those people.

  “I have Mr. Kerr and Mr. Allen waiting for you in the conference room,” she tells us. “If you will please follow me.”

  “And Reynold Livingstone?”
Sarah asks.

  “He was called away on urgent business.”

  “When was that?” I ask her.

  “I believe it was just after I told him that an FBI agent and detective were coming to the bank to speak with him and Mr. Kerr and Mr. Allen about an audit.”

  “Did he say what that urgent business was?” Sarah inquires.

  Dorothy raises her perfectly manicured eyebrows and says, “Oh, he would not share something like that with me.”

  As if that was beyond obvious to anyone who understands corporate protocol.

  Sarah gives me that cop-to-cop, something’s-rotten-in-the-State-of-Denmark look.

  “We’ll need Mr. Livingstone’s home address,” I tell Dorothy.

  She looks completely nonplussed, which is an old-timey way of saying she looks like she might soil her undies.

  “I don’t know,” she finally answers.

  “You don’t know his home address?” Sarah asks her.

  “It’s not that. I don’t know if I’m allowed to give it out without his permission.”

  “We’d rather not have to sweat it out of you down at the station,” I say, in my best noir-detective voice.

  “Or we could get a warrant,” Sarah tells her. “We’re investigating two murders. But time is of the essence. We need to move fast. Mr. Livingstone could be in danger.”

  Dorothy looks startled by the mention of the murders, if not by my noir detective.

  “Let me call him first. Please wait here.”

  She goes through the door to the inner offices and reappears a few minutes later.

  “Mrs. Livingstone says he is not at home and he didn’t answer his cell phone. But Mrs. Livingstone said it is all right to give you their home address.”

  She hands Sarah a piece of bank notepaper with the address written on it.

  “Now I’ll show you to the conference room for Mr. Kerr and Mr. Allen,” she says.

  I look at Sarah, who nods, knowing what I’m about to say.

  “Not necessary,” I tell her. “Thanks for your assistance.”

  From the Detecting for Dummies handbook: when trying to sort out suspects, always go first for the one on the run.

  On the way down in the elevator, I say to Sarah, “Perhaps Livingstone’s urgent business is in Mexico.”

  “At the current exchange rate, nine hundred thousand dollars is sixteen million, two-hundred and seventy-two thousand pesos,” she says. “That’ll buy a lot of margaritas and tacos.”

  Proving that Special Agent Sarah Caldwell would be a formidable opponent in Trivial Pursuit.

  12.

  Hanging Around at Home

  I follow Sarah’s car to the front gate of a golf course community called Royal Palm Estates, located ten miles east of downtown Fort Myers. She’d entered RL III’s address into her GPS. She shows the guard her badge and nods in my direction. The gate swings open.

  Guards at gated communities don’t wear sidearms, but help is a phone call away if a peasant mob bearing farm implements tries to storm the barricades, seeking revenge upon the upper one-percenters who are (allegedly) oppressing them. In Naples, I never heard anyone say, “Let them eat cake.” But you could get that impression from the lavish lifestyle on display. Not visible is the high level of charitable giving and other good works, but optics are everything.

  We roll past Spanish- and Italianate-style mini mansions. Sarah parks in front of a two-story, tan-stucco house with a red tile roof and four-car garage. A Fort Myers PD cruiser, a brown Crown Vic, and a Royal Palm Estates security force SUV are parked in the driveway. That kind of vehicular lineup usually means something is amiss, or that free doughnuts are on offer.

  Sarah and I get out of our cars and walk toward the house. A uniformed officer is standing beside the cruiser, chatting with the security guy. We show the officer our badges and he says, “They’re in the garage.”

  The garage doors are open. I see three cars inside: a white Mercedes SUV, a black Porsche turbo convertible, and a powder-blue Bentley sedan. A golf cart occupies the fourth space. A man in a brown suit is standing beside the Bentley. The suit matches the Crown Vic, so that must be the Fort Myers detective. He is an African American man in his fifties, wearing Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. He has a powerful build, bald head, and a diamond stud in his left earlobe.

  Sarah shows her badge and says, “I’m Special Agent Caldwell and this is Detective Starkey from Fort Myers Beach.”

  He looks at her, then me, and says, “Detective Don Morgan. Why are you here?”

  “Mr. Livingstone is part of an ongoing investigation,” Sarah tells him. “We’re here to speak with him. Is he here?”

  “It’ll be a one-way conversation,” Morgan says. “He’s dead.”

  “The cause of death?” Sarah asks.

  I’m letting her take the lead. The FBI has more clout in a situation like this than a dollar-a-year detective out of his jurisdiction.

  “We’re waiting for the crime scene people and the coroner,” Morgan tells her. He explains that his wife found him hanging from a rafter with a rope around his neck and a footstool tipped over on the floor. He’s still like that, we can see now, dangling beside the Mercedes SUV. I’m a car guy so I notice, even with a corpse hanging there, that it’s a Mercedes GL550 AMG model. Premium ride. A senior bank exec could afford the car, even without stealing. But for some people, enough is never enough.

  “Mind if we take a look?” I ask Morgan.

  “Just don’t touch anything,” he answers.

  Which is something of an insult, as if an FBI agent and a veteran detective would contaminate a crime scene.

  Reynold Livingstone the Last (the background said that the couple have two daughters, but no sons).

  I’ve been to the autopsies of people who died that way. They were all ruled suicides, except for one man who was a homicide. In that case, a typed suicide note matched to the victim’s printer contained many grammatical errors such as, “I ain’t got no more reason to live.” The victim had graduated with honors in English lit from Northwestern. His wife’s boyfriend was a carpenter, hired to remodel the couple’s kitchen, who had dropped out of high school. As my father used to say, “If someone is merely misinformed, you can work with that person, but there ain’t no workin’ with stupid.”

  The widow and the carpenter are probably still making license plates for the State of Illinois.

  After we have a good look, I say to Morgan, “You said his wife discovered the body?”

  “Mrs. Livingstone, who is inside with one of our officers, called 911 and said there was a medical emergency at her house involving her husband,” Morgan says. “When our uniform arrived, he found Livingstone hanging from the rope.”

  “Okay if we go inside and talk to Mrs. Livingstone?” Sarah asks him.

  “First tell me more about why the FBI and Fort Myers Beach police are interested in her hubby,” Morgan says.

  Sarah does because it’s Morgan’s crime scene. Of course he’d heard about the Henderson murders, but not about the embezzlement.

  “So I got the suicide and you got the alleged embezzlement and any other bank stuff,” Morgan tells us.

  “Right,” Sarah assures him.

  “Good to go then,” he says.

  An EMS van pulls up as we enter the house through a door from the garage. An attractive middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a pink tee shirt and black yoga pants, is seated on a living room couch, with a female police officer in a chair beside her. The woman’s eyes are red and she has a stricken look on her face. Mrs. Livingstone, I presume.

  “I’m Special Agent Caldwell and this is Detective Starkey,” Sarah says to both of them. She looks at the woman. “I’m sorry about your loss, Mrs. Livingstone. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “She hasn’t given us a statement yet,” the officer says, a bit testily. Her nameplate says “Ramirez.”

  “Detective Morgan said it’d be all right,
” I tell her.

  She spreads her hands.

  “In that case, be my guest.”

  “Do you know of any reason why your husband would want to take his life?” Sarah asks.

  Her eyes tear up.

  “No. We were very happy.”

  “How did you discover the body?” I ask her.

  “I was on the treadmill, listening to an audiobook through headphones. It was ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr. When I finished my workout I went into the kitchen and saw Ray’s car parked in the driveway. Which was odd because he didn’t tell me he was coming home. I looked for him in the house and then went into the garage …”

  She began sobbing.

  “Thank you,” Sarah says. “We might have more questions for you later.”

  Sarah nods at Officer Ramirez and we go back into the garage. I thank Morgan for his cooperation and tell him that, if he wants to hear some good music, jazz and blues, he should stop in at The Drunken Parrot in Fort Myers Beach.

  “Just might do that,” he says.

  “Discount for cops,” I tell him.

  He winks and says, “You’re on.”

  Three days later, Sarah calls me while I’m at the bar to say that an examination of Livingstone’s bank and brokerage accounts shows that he was nearly broke until large deposits began appearing about a year ago, adding up to the amount embezzled from his bank. A call from Detective Morgan told her why: Livingstone had a gambling problem, according to his wife, visiting Las Vegas often as well as the Arrowhead Casino in Immokalee, an agricultural town an hour’s drive southeast of Fort Myers.

  “Livingstone was the head of the bank’s audit committee,” Sarah reports, “so it was easy for him to cover up his crime.”

  “So it’s possible Larry Henderson found out about the embezzling, confronted Livingstone, and, before he could report it, Livingstone hired a hit man, given that it’s unlikely he would do the wet work himself,” I say.