Ron Base - Tree Callister 03 - Another Sanibel Sunset Detective

by Ron Base

  He went back to the living room and sat at the laptop. The cat leapt onto the desk and settled nearby, rubbing the side of its head against the edge of the computer screen. Cailie said that she had a confession linking Chris to the murder of his wife that she had recorded. She would have turned the recording over to the police, but he was willing to bet she had kept a copy for herself. He did not want to know, but at the same time he had to. He had to understand for himself what his son had said, and finally know for certain his guilt or innocence.

  As he expected, access to the laptop was password encrypted. He thought of something and got Cailie’s set of keys out of his pocket. Attached to the chain was a miniature metal license plate, Kopper1, stamped into its surface.

  He typed Kopper1 into the password box, hit return, and—

  That wasn’t the password.

  Then a sound—someone attempting to insert a key into the lock of the front door. Tree froze, fingers poised over the keyboard.

  Whoever was at the door tried again, and this time succeeded. Tree heard the door open and then close. The cat jumped down from the desk and padded across the carpet. Tree had just time enough to duck beneath the desk before he heard footsteps coming uncertainly toward him.

  From his vantage point, he could see a man’s legs move into view. The cat appeared, rubbing against the intruder’s legs a moment before he fell heavily against a wall, swearing. Then he called out, “Cailie? Are you here? Cailie?”

  The slurred voice of Sanibel Detective Owen Markfield.

  Tree tensed beneath the desk. All Markfield had to do was turn on a light, and that would be it.

  But Markfield didn’t turn on any lights. Instead, he straightened himself, and Tree could make out a cell phone being pulled from the pocket of his jeans with some difficulty. Sharp little electronic alerts filled the room—Markfield poking out a number. The ensuing silence was broken by Markfield’s labored breathing. Finally, he said, “It’s me. I’m in your apartment. The cat is here, incidentally. Vienna? Is that its name? Vienna and me, we’re waiting. Where are you?”

  He would learn the answer soon enough, Tree mused. But he would never hear it from Cailie Fisk.

  Markfield dropped the cell phone a few feet from where Tree crouched against the desk. He bent to pick it up. He only had to glance over, and he would see Tree. But as he bent forward, the cat swished against him, and the detective nearly lost his balance. He swore again, kicking at the cat

  “Get out of here!” he yelled, before lurching over to an armchair. Tree heard him fall heavily into it. He groaned loudly, followed by more silence. Tree remained in place, hardly daring to breathe. He peered around the desk, straining to see where Markfield was.

  A loud, honking made Tree jump. He rose from behind the desk for a view of Markfield through the dimness, slumped in the chair, head thrown back, mouth hanging open, Sanibel’s most officious representative of law and order at drunken rest, snoring loudly.

  Tree slowly let out his breath, before turning back to the laptop. He leaned over the keyboard and typed VIENNA.

  A moment later, he was on Cailie’s home screen. A photograph of Kendra Dean smiled at him, luminous, caught in sunlight, the way Cailie undoubtedly preferred to remember her.

  An audio file was on the desk top. He stared at the screen. Kendra smiled back from the grave, daring him to play that file.

  He shut down the computer and closed the screen before disconnecting the power cord. He picked up the laptop and started out of the apartment. Vienna had returned to her perch atop the desk, taking silent note of Tree’s departure.

  36

  The sun was already hot, and the humidity had crept across the beautifully manicured lawn running up to the Dayton house, making it hard for Tree to breathe as he approached the front door.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the humidity.

  He rang the doorbell twice before Vera Dayton answered. She wore a white caftan, her hair pulled back from a surprised face without makeup.

  “Tree,” she said. She touched the edges of her jaw, as if aware she wasn’t wearing her mask this morning.

  “I need to talk to you,” Tree said.

  She stood there, her mouth opening, nothing coming out.

  “Can I come in?”

  She rallied enough to say, “Is Fredericka with you?”

  “No, I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  She nodded and stepped back to allow him entry. She led him along a hallway into a brilliant living room as white as an elephant’s graveyard.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, fighting to maintain her composure, “I wasn’t expecting company.” As if she would have been different if she was. “Please, sit down.”

  He settled on white easy chair while she occupied a white sofa facing him.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” she said.

  “No, of course not.”

  She reached into a silver box on the glass-topped end table beside the sofa. It was a type he hadn’t seen since he watched his parents smoking in the 1950s. She withdrew a cigarette and then lifted up the silver lighter beside the silver box. He got to his feet, took the lighter from her, flicked the wheel, and was rewarded with a tongue of blue flame. He held the flame to her cigarette until it was successfully lit. He could not remember the last time he had lighted anyone’s cigarette—or how long it had been since he saw someone send gray puffs of smoke into the air.

  “I hadn’t smoked for years, but after Ray’s death and all this confusion about the business…” She allowed her voice to trail off.

  “Yes, after Ray’s death I imagine things can’t have been easy,” Tree said.

  She took another puff and said, “Why are you here, Tree?”

  “It’s about Ray,” Tree said.

  “He never liked you, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t think we liked each other. I don’t think you liked him, either, Vera.”

  She gave him a hard look through a veil of smoke. “How could you say that?”

  “Because it helps explain why you murdered him.”

  She stared at him. The hard look softened. The cigarette did not move. Gray smoke curled into the air. “That’s ridiculous,” she said in a small voice.

  “When you found out Ray was having an affair with my son’s wife, you went down to the house in Naples, and you shot him and then made it look like suicide—or did your best to make it look that way, which given the state of Ray’s life at the time, wasn’t hard to do.”

  Her face had gone as white as the room. “This is preposterous,” she said.

  “That’s why you came to see me at the office. You were worried that if the police thought Chris killed Kendra, it might refocus attention on Ray. If he didn’t kill her, then why would he commit suicide?”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  “What I can’t figure out, Vera, is why you told Cailie Dean. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything,” she said, not very convincingly.

  “Vera, I’ve got Cailie’s laptop.”

  “How do you have that?” Vera sounded surprised—and alarmed.

  “Never mind how, but I have it. On the way over here, I listened to Cailie’s conversation with you that she secretly recorded. She lied to me. She suggested she had recorded a conversation with Chris, but it’s with you.”

  “I want you to get out of here, Tree. I want you to leave this house.”

  “If I walk out, I go to the police.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Then we talk this out. Ray is dead. So is Cailie.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Cailie is dead?”

  Tree nodded. “You’ll hear more about it later. It doesn’t matter how I know, but I do. What’s done is done. Right now, I’m only interested in protecting my son and making sure he doesn’t spend the rest of his life in jail.”

  Vera rose to fetch a cut-glass ashtray and spent some time mashing the half-smoked cigarette
into it.

  “That’s what brought Callie to me in the first place,” Vera said. She carried the ashtray back to the sofa. “She had questions about her sister’s murder, and she wasn’t satisfied with the answers she was getting.”

  Reseated, Vera placed the ashtray on the sofa beside her and then leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “She didn’t believe Ray murdered Kendra. I told her he didn’t do it.”

  Tree felt his stomach twist into a knot. “Except that we know he did.”

  “Before he died, Ray swore to me he didn’t kill her.”

  “I know. That’s what you told Cailie. That’s what made her start to think that maybe Ray wasn’t the killer and Chris was.”

  “He didn’t want me to shoot him.” Vera said this in a way that suggested the idea of shooting husbands wasn’t so unusual.

  “But it didn’t work,” Tree said.

  She reached over to the silver box for another cigarette. “I hated Ray, hated what he did to our marriage, the way he betrayed me.”

  “Ray would have said anything at that point,” Tree said. “Told any lie in order to save his life.”

  Vera held the cigarette between her fingers. “But what he said was, he didn’t kill Kendra.”

  This time Vera lit the cigarette herself. She drew deeply on it and then raised her head to let more smoke into the air. By now the room had filled with a pungent tobacco smell.

  “That wouldn’t have been enough to go to the police with,” Tree said. “But it was enough to convince Cailie that she could lie, say that Chris confessed to her, and if you had a detective who was infatuated, and an assistant district attorney out for blood, it might be enough to get Chris indicted for his wife’s murder. Not a great case, maybe, but a case.”

  “You’re supposing Cailie was lying,” Vera said.

  “She was lying,” Tree said with a lot more conviction than he was feeling.

  Vera said, “So we both have a dirty little secret, Tree. You don’t want the world to know your son killed his wife. I would prefer that everyone continued to think Ray committed suicide.”

  “What makes you so certain I wouldn’t turn my son in if I knew he had killed his wife?”

  “You won’t allow yourself to believe that. If you accuse me of killing my husband, however, then the rest of it will come out. Neither of us wants that, so we keep each other’s secrets.”

  Tree rose to his feet. Vera said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What’s that, Vera?”

  “The recording Cailie made.”

  Tree looked at her. “What are you going to do about the Dayton supermarkets?”

  She flicked ash into the ashtray.

  “Are you going to sell them to Freddie and her group?”

  “Will that make it easier for me to get hold of that recording?”

  “I have Cailie’s laptop,” Tree said.

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “And that’s the only copy?”

  Tree nodded. “I don’t imagine she would have given it to the police. Otherwise, you would have heard from them by now.”

  Vera reached for another cigarette before she said, “Why don’t you go out to your car and get it?”

  37

  The Key West police found the bodies of Elizabeth Traven, Cailie Dean, and Joseph Trembath, as well as the five hundred thousand dollars in cash it appeared they had just dug up with a Glock entrenching tool on the grounds of the Hemingway Estate before a fight broke out, and they all ended up dead.

  The assistant district attorney said he had little choice but to drop the murder charges against Chris Callister, since the prosecution’s main witness was dead. The ADA intimated he was not convinced of Chris’s innocence. There was, as Tree suspected, no talk of any recorded confession.

  Chris decided to go back to Chicago. Sanibel Island was too small and too much had happened to him here. Sticking around, he said, would only encourage the police to find something else with which to charge him. Chicago would give him some distance from an unfriendly island and allow him to start over. There were no ghosts in Chicago—or at least not so many.

  Tree drove Chris out to the Fort Myers International Airport. Chris wanted his dad to drop him off at the curb, but Chris was wrestling with three bags so Tree insisted on parking the car and accompanying his son into the airport, carrying one of the bags.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon the main concourse was all but empty. Tree stood awkwardly with Chris outside the security area. Every time he looked at him, Tree tried hard not to see a killer looking back.

  Sometimes he succeeded.

  “Would you tell Freddie I’m really happy for her,” Chris said. “If anyone can run a chain of supermarkets down here, it’s Freddie.”

  “I’ll tell her that,” Tree said.

  “It’s going to be a big change in your life, I guess.”

  “I’m not sure,” Tree said. “The deal is supposed to go through in the next week or so. We’ll see.”

  “Look, Dad,” Chris said, “I know I haven’t said much, and I know I haven’t always sounded as though I do, but I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  “I’m not sure how much I’ve done,” Tree said. Knowing that was nowhere near the truth.

  “If it wasn’t for you, if you didn’t believe in me, I’d still be sitting in a jail cell.”

  Did he believe in his son? Yes, yes, he did, he silently insisted. He told himself that over and over again. Chris was innocent. Cailie was deceitful and untrustworthy. Ray Dayton had been fighting for his life when he swore to his wife he didn’t murder Kendra.

  As if he had been reading Tree’s mind, Chris embraced his father with tears in his eyes. Tree could hardly believe it; a son being emotional about his father.

  “Call me,” Tree said. “Let me know how you’re doing.”

  “I will.” Chris quickly wiped the tears away and grabbed at his luggage. Then he paused and Tree was struck with the wild notion Chris was about to confess. The moment passed. Chris cast one more glance at Tree and then hurried away.

  Tree watched until Chris had made his way through the security gauntlet, feeling at once relieved and sad, uncertain if he had regained a son or lost him for good.

  Choking back surprising tears, he started across the concourse, almost running into Owen Markfield.

  “I thought I’d come to witness the touching father-son farewell for myself,” Markfield said.

  Tree didn’t say anything.

  “I still think he murdered his wife.”

  Tree remained silent. “What’s more,” Markfield continued, “I think you lied and cheated and you may have even murdered in order to cover up for him.”

  “It’s always good to see you, Detective,” Tree said.

  He went to go past, but Markfield blocked his path. “Also there is the matter of the missing nine million, five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The government of Tajikistan is making a lot of noise about an American cabal led by Henry Dearlove that ripped it off to the tune of ten million dollars for services that were never rendered. The Key West police have been working with the FBI and the State Department on the investigation. The thinking is that your friend Elizabeth Traven was in cahoots with Cailie Fisk or Cailie Dean, and they conspired with Joseph Trembath to kill off Dearlove and other members of the cabal and keep the money themselves. They were in the process of digging up the loot when some sort of falling out occurred that ended with the three of them dead. About five hundred thousand dollars was recovered at the scene. The question is, where is the rest of the money?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be too quick to believe the government of Taji—whatever it’s called,” Tree said.

  “The Key West police suspect there was a fourth person at the scene,” Markfield continued. “The Fort Myers Beach police have found a ca
r registered to Joseph Trembath parked in a lot at a marina over there. The speculation is that a fourth man got away from the Hemingway house with the money, drove back to Fort Myers and dumped the car.”

  “This is all very interesting,” Tree said. “But I don’t know what it’s got to do with me.”

  “Cailie Dean, of course, turned out to be the sister of your son’s murdered wife. She went undercover using an assumed name to get close to Chris. She extracted a confession from him, and was to be our main witness.

  “You’ve been mixed up with Elizabeth Traven in the past. Incidentally, I forgot to mention the yacht leased by Elizabeth that was found moored dockside at Key West.”

  “I didn’t even know Elizabeth was interested in yachts,” Tree said.

  “Also, Joseph Trembath was working for Miram Shah who was a client of yours, was he not?”

  “That’s right,” Tree said. “I knew Elizabeth obviously, and my son, not knowing who she was, got mixed up with Cailie, but I don’t believe he confessed anything to her.”

  “I think you are that fourth man, Callister. You were involved with all of them. You killed Cailie because she had evidence against your son. You murdered the other two to cover up Cailie’s murder and then you took the missing money for yourself.”

  “Sure, it’s in the trunk of my car,” Tree said. “Do you want me to get it for you?”

  “Where were you the night all this went down?”

  “I wasn’t in Key West, that’s for sure.”

  “Then where were you, Callister? Your wife was in New York so she can’t provide you with an alibi,”

  “I’ll tell you what, Detective. Why don’t you phone Edith Goldman? She’s my lawyer. If you want to formally question me, let’s do it with her present.”

  “Maybe I will do just that. You are going down for this, I swear you are.”

  “This is all a lot of crap, Markfield, and you know it. I would have to be a whole lot smarter than I am to pull off what you’re describing.”

  “I think you specialize in making people believe you’re less than what you are, Callister. I’ve seen you pull that stunt before. It works for others, maybe, but it doesn’t work for me.”