Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  The “Miami” box contained several old newspaper articles about Mrs. Prieto, who must have been something of a socialite at the time. The house where Margaret’s employer had lived was shown in several pictures. It was a mansion of magnificent proportions. Eighteen-year-old Margaret the orphan must have felt she was in the middle of a real adventure when she arrived to take a job with the obviously wealthy Mrs. Prieto.

  I marveled again at the fortunes that were amassed in this country. Even in 1956 Miami, the gap between the poor and the wealthy was a vast chasm.

  The folders held stories from the society pages of parties at Mrs. Prieto’s house and even a few pictures of her. She was a childless widow, the same as Margaret is now. I wondered whether Margaret ever thought about that. About how our lives progress in repetitious patterns.

  One of the stories, dated 1956, had Margaret’s name in it. Someone had underlined her name with a blue pen, which was now faded and faint. I read the short piece. It said Margaret was Mrs. Prieto’s constant companion on frequent trips to Nassau, Bahamas, where Mrs. Prieto also had a home.

  It was somewhat surprising to me that travel between Nassau and Miami appeared to be easy in 1956. A short boat ride from Miami, Nassau was a paradise, complete with casinos, at a time when legalized gambling didn’t exist in Florida.

  Another article mentioning Margaret described her gown as “chic” and her dancing as “superb.” A picture of Margaret, in a gown that Jackie Onassis might have worn at about the same time, showed her dancing with a middle-aged man.

  Clearly, the orphan girl from Tampa had landed in a posh environment and seemed to be thriving there. If Mrs. Prieto had lived, I wondered whether Margaret would have ever returned to Tampa.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 5:15 p.m.

  March 4, 2001

  THERE WERE SEVERAL OTHER articles of this sort and I started to move through them more quickly until another faded blue underline caught my eye. The names caused me to read the small article completely. It said:

  Gilbert Kelley, Jr., son of the president of Tampa Bay Bank, and his friend, David Martin, of Coconut Grove, were among the many young professionals at Mrs. Prieto’s Gasparilla Bash, given in honor of her guests from Tampa, to coincide with Tampa’s annual Gasparilla Pirate Parade. More than one hundred members of Miami society attended the gala event, which was a charity ball held to support Young Mothers’ Second Chance, a national organization providing financial support to the young widows of the Korean conflict.

  Why did it never occur to me that Margaret might have been in contact with Gil Kelley in Miami? Just because they travel in different social circles now didn’t mean they always had.

  I looked over at Dad, who had the “High School” box.

  Asked, “Dad, do you have high school yearbooks there?”

  He pointed inside the box and I looked to find four high-school yearbooks for the years 1950 through 1954. I didn’t know how old Gil Kelley was, exactly, but he was older than Margaret. I picked up the 1950 yearbook first and turned to the index.

  Bingo, on the first try.

  Gilbert Allen Kelley, Junior, was listed several times. The first few pictures were group shots: Gil on the football team, the basketball team, the tennis team, the golf team. Gil on the homecoming court and being crowned “King,” just as I’d seen him crowned as Minaret Krewe King last night. Gil had been a senior that year, so he was four years older than Margaret. His senior class picture carried the title: Most Likely to Succeed.

  Gil Kelley was attractive, athletic and popular. Maybe his father’s owning the bank had something to do with his popularity, but he must have had some athletic skill, too. Margaret easily could have fallen in love with him. Probably every girl in her freshman class would have been swooning over the “dreamy” Gil Kelley, as he was described in one of the yearbook pictures.

  “Dad, when did Gil Kelley work at the bank in Miami?”

  He was still distracted by something he was reading from the “High School” box.

  He said, “1955, why?”

  I didn’t answer because I was looking for a piece of paper and a pen so that I could sketch out the dates.

  If Gil Kelley was a senior in high school in 1950, that meant he would have finished college in 1954, at the same time Margaret was graduating from high school.

  Gil would have returned to Tampa that summer to sow his wild oats, as Marilee Aymes had put it to us when she told the story.

  Margaret could have been one of those “wild oats,” or she just could have known Kelley or some of the girls he dated. Margaret could have known him, although he would have been ahead of her in school.

  It would have been only natural for them to hook up again in 1956 when they were both in Miami.

  Kelley could have been drafted into the armed services, but for some reason, he wasn’t.

  I considered that Gil Kelley could have been her first husband, but Margaret said she’d believed her first husband had died. Kelley had been living right here in Tampa for years and Margaret had to know it. Tampa Bay Bank was highly visible, as was its current and former president.

  So, Kelley must not have been the one.

  But this other guy mentioned in the faded newspaper article, David Martin, it could have been him.

  I looked through the four high school yearbooks just in case the first husband had been a high school sweetheart. I found no evidence of the young Margaret even having a social life at the time. There was one picture of her in each yearbook, the one taken with her class, and her senior picture in the 1954 book. Margaret was voted The Sweetest Girl.

  Maybe we never surpass where we were in high school. I wrinkled my nose at the thought. I’d been voted the most likely to grow taller.

  On my list, my doodles said something like this: 1950 Gil Kelley graduates h.s.; 1954 college; 1955 moves to Miami. 1954 Margaret graduates h.s.; 1956 moves to Miami.

  Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences, but I didn’t know what it meant, either.

  Then I wrote: David Martin, 1953 Miami. Margaret married, 1956? Husband died? Margaret’s baby born 1957?

  I turned my attention back to the “Miami” box and now felt I knew what I was looking for.

  I pulled out the folder labeled “Young Mothers’ Second Chance.”

  And there it was.

  The birth certificate. The adoption papers. The father’s name and “deceased” following it. Baby’s sex was listed as female. And at the very bottom of the folder was an obituary. For David Martin, who died in 1957 by accidental drowning.

  The obituary had a picture of Martin on the top. The picture was over forty years old, yellowed and grainy. The hair was darker and the eyes more vibrant.

  But I recognized him, and Margaret must have, too. The first time she laid eyes on him. The man who held the key to all her dreams and heartaches.

  David Martin, a/k/a Armstrong Otter.

  I’d taken the final folder, my coffee, and my cryptic notes back to the den to work it all through in my journal. An hour later, George and Dad both wandered in, with their most interesting pieces of the puzzle from Margaret’s boxes. I’d switched to gin half-way through my scribbles. George poured himself and Dad a Scotch. We sat and watched the fire for a while.

  “You were pretty engrossed in that ‘High School’ box. What did you find?” I asked Dad first.

  “What you’d think might interest me. Quite a bit about Tampa during Margaret’s high school years. She’s kept some old newspaper accounts of events going on here in the early fifties, including some stories about Gil Kelley, Senior, and the hijinks of Gil Kelley, Junior.”

  “Anything you can use in your bank fraud case?” George asked him.

  Dad said, “Maybe. Nothing conclusive, but it did seem the Kelleys lived pretty far above what I would think a 1950 banker’s means would have been.”

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  “Meaning Sandr
a Kelley may have been telling the truth. Maybe Senior did embezzle from the bank. And maybe that’s where Gil, Junior, learned it. Doesn’t excuse the thefts. Just gives me an explanation for them. One story was interesting, though. It was about Gil, Junior, being caught at an illegal poker game over in Ybor City on a Saturday night during his senior year. Charges were dropped because of who his parents were.”

  “I’d heard Kelley had a gambling problem. Being in Miami all those years must have made that worse,” George offered.

  “How so?” Dad asked.

  “Well, Miami is a short hop over to Nassau, where gambling has always been legal. Of course, the casinos are all owned by the Mafia, or they were then. A young fellow with ready cash could easily and quickly get himself into a lot of trouble. Especially if he had a wild streak already,” George told Dad, as another little piece of the puzzle clicked into place for me.

  “I wonder…” Dad said aloud, letting his voice trail off as he stared into space.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “George, when you were in banking, did you have any dealings with Caribbean offshore banks?” Dad asked, turning his attention to us.

  George replied, “We were leery of the whole process, so we kept away from it.”

  “What are you two talking about?” I asked.

  “Well,” George explained, “when a large and reputable American bank like ours was queried about accepting millions of dollars from what amounted to little more than a laptop computer on a Caribbean island, we were more than just a little curious about the origin of the money. So we wouldn’t take it.”

  “Not all of your competitors are so conscientious, though,” Dad replied. “Some bankers are so happy to have the deposits that they don’t question those accounts. They end up abetting money launderers. It’s been going on for years, but recently the Feds have been poking into the practice. The offshore banking process is under investigation right now in the Senate investigations subcommittee. It seems American banks have facilitated quite a bit of money laundering through their so-called correspondent accounts for high-risk foreign banks.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?” I asked.

  Dad said, “Well, I got an executive summary of the hearings the other day. The summary claimed a dozen offshore banks have moved billions of dollars through certain American banks in the last few years.”

  George whistled. “That’s a lot of motivation.”

  “What are you thinking?” My brain was too mushy at the moment to grasp Dad’s idea.

  “He’s suggesting that Gil Kelley may be embezzling even more than we first thought,” George responded.

  Dad, excited now, eyes twinkling, stood to pace and picked up the thread. “If Gil was laundering money from a Nassau rogue bank, he could have been taking even more than appeared on the legitimate books that I’ve looked at. He could be taking a cut off the top before the money is ever deposited.”

  “Which would give Kelley more than enough to share with Armstrong Otter. So why kill him?” I asked.

  “True.” Dad admitted, a bit deflated. “And the deals typically pay a finder’s fee on the front end, too. That kind of a fee would usually be paid off the books. There would be no way to trace it. But, if they’ve been dealing in offshore banking, the Kelleys should be extraordinarily wealthy by now.”

  The Kelleys should be “wealthier than God,” as the kids say.

  But they aren’t.

  Or at least, not obviously so. I filed away this piece of the puzzle in my weary brain. It fit somewhere.

  George stood at the fireplace, trying to warm up, if the chill I was feeling was any indication. I asked him to throw another log on the blaze. We were all lost in our individual thoughts for a while.

  Later, I looked down at my watch and noticed the rapidly fleeting time. “How about you, George, what did you learn? You looked pretty involved in your files, too.”

  “Clever of you to give me the box that you knew fit my interests, hmm?” he smiled. “Margaret’s tax returns from 1952, before she graduated from high school, until 1965, when she married Ron Wheaton, were full of the names of old Tampa lions. People whose names I’ve read and heard, but never met. Or friends of ours long before we met them.”

  Promising.

  Dad asked, “Like who?”

  “Well, Margaret worked at several law offices from the time she came back from that Miami business school. One of them was the CJ’s office, did you know that?” As I shook my head, George continued, “She’s also been on the board of Young Mothers’ Second Chance since 1958. She’s given them a bundle of money over the years.”

  And I knew why, if they didn’t yet.

  He said, “There’s also a gap in her work history for about six months. Even when she was in business school, she held down a few part-time jobs. But for six months in 1957, she had no income at all. I wonder how she lived? And why she didn’t work?”

  Of course, I already knew the answer to that one, too.

  We continued comparing notes and working out the back story, but I was convinced that Margaret had met, fallen in love with and married David Martin in 1955 or 1956. She’d become pregnant, which I doubt that he or anyone else knew. Martin and Gil Kelley were embezzling from the bank. They must have been having a wonderful time over at the Nassau casinos, where they had no doubt met Margaret while she was working as Mrs. Prieto’s companion there. I made a note to check the Miami marriage licenses, but I suspected we’d find the license, if at all, recorded in a Nassau, Bahamas, clerk’s office.

  When the bank examiners got close to uncovering Gil Kelley and David Martin’s early embezzlement, they must have come up with the suicide scheme to get the bonding company to pay back their debts. When David Martin “died,” Margaret gave birth to her daughter and gave her up for adoption. She had no support to raise a child. Margaret returned to Tampa heartbroken and didn’t marry again for nine years. Then, she married Ron Wheaton.

  Did Ron know? The whole story?

  It would have been like Margaret to tell him before she married him. And it would have been like Ron to have married her anyway.

  On the last day I saw him, Ron was as in love with Margaret as ever. I believed he would have done anything for her, always.

  How Kelley convinced Martin to go along with the suicide scheme, I still didn’t know. Whose body did they bury?

  There was only one person left alive to tell me that now, and I intended to ask him. I didn’t have the strength to do it tonight. I needed sleep. To work out a few of the loose ends first in my office in the morning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Tampa, Florida

  Monday 8:30 a.m.

  March 5, 2001

  THE U.S. V. AIELO case was begging for my attention. My clerks had read the briefs and prepared a three-page order for my review. I read it through quickly. I was about to sign the order transferring the case to Philadelphia for trial, when the short statement of relevant facts at the beginning caught my attention.

  Mr. Aielo reinvented himself in Miami. He opened a club in 1992 that was destroyed by fire, providing the insurance money to start his more trendy and lucrative clubs believed to be money-laundering operations.

  Something about the statement tickled my brain.

  I chased it around in my head for a while, but couldn’t catch it. I re-read the passage several times and finally put it aside, knowing that I’d remember if I thought about something else, and let the thought peek around the corner like a kitten.

  Only in this case, it was a lion.

  About thirty minutes later, it fairly pounced on my thinking with claws fully extended and a deafening roar.

  I checked the computer once again. In just a few minutes, I found the death certificate I was looking for.

  Death records for Miami going back fifty years had recently been updated in the Dade County database, but not integrated into the search service database.

  Which explained wh
y I didn’t find it when I had looked the first time.

  I pulled out the tattered article George had given me from the Tribune the Sunday after Gasparilla and read it one more time. The article related the story of a former IRS agent who had made a living in much the same way as Dad did, by pursuing white-collar criminals. The agent compiled the more legal methods of changing your life and wrote a book about it. The article reflected the agent’s advice about how to hide your assets and disappear.

  The most difficult aspects of changing one’s identity were not the initial strategies, such as acquiring foreign passports under assumed names. Instead, the hardest thing to do, the agent said, was to cut all ties to your old self. Most people can’t manage it and eventually return to their old lives in some fashion.

  The article talked about well known, admitted former Mafia criminals who became government informants, but have abandoned the federal Witness Protection Program. The fear of Mafia retribution has disappeared and was probably overstated anyway, the agent claimed.

  But the big problem is that once one creates a certain lifestyle, it’s nearly impossible to abandon all of the past.

  Friends, family and co-workers are our firmly tethered human anchors. They drag us back when we float too far away.

  Some secrets never leave us alone. Eastern mystics say that no karmic debt ever remains unpaid. Scientists claim the human body replaces itself once every seven years. The problem is, the new body is exactly like the old one. It’s got the same scars, the same colors and a few more aches and pains.

  We think the past is past, but it’s the foundation for all that comes after. The past seeps into our very sinews and remains in our cells, just like the genes we’re born with.

  It doesn’t mean that humans can’t change. But it does mean we don’t change much at the fundamental level.

  Those cells just keep reproducing themselves, over and over and over.