by John Pearce
Arturo paused and glanced at his wife. “I think there must have been because I heard someone running away. But I didn’t see them.”
“Did you tell Detective Anderson about that? It might be important.”
“No, sir, I didn’t.” Arturo’s tone had changed. He was no longer confident.
Lil interrupted. “You need to tell Mr. Grant everything you know. It’s not fair to let those men get away if you can help catch them.”
Arturo turned to Eddie. “She’s right, but I can’t take chances with my job. They’re hard to get this year — I was out of work for three months and we got into debt. Lil did need money for the phone bill, but when Mr. Castor was killed I was making a payment to a man we owe. He was looking the other way over my shoulder and saw the whole thing.”
“Why didn’t he wait for the police?”
“He don’t talk to the police if he can help it. He’s been known to sell some things that aren’t completely legal, know what I mean? But he’s not really a bad guy. I think he’ll talk to you if you explain things to him the way you did to me.”
He gave Eddie the name Deus Lewis. “We call him D because nobody on the street knows what Deus means. He’s about 25, nearly as tall as you are, but skinny, and really black. He has short hair but he usually wears a cap, and in weather like this he’ll be wearing a muscle shirt to show off. He’s a strong guy and wants everyone to know it.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Not far. Go down to MLK and Osprey. There’s a grocery store there where he usually hangs out. He should be there this time of day.”
“OK. Why don’t you let me tell Detective Anderson what you saw? I’m sure he’ll have to talk to you again, but it might help if I approach him first, particularly if I can get some information from Deus.” Arturo nodded as Eddie left.
The GPS told him MLK and Osprey was only three or four blocks away, so he slowed down to get a feel for the neighborhood. Everywhere he looked there were black men sitting on benches and standing on the street corners. Some of them were clustered in the timeless tradition of old men everywhere.
The others were young and stood in groups. As he turned the corner two of them broke apart and ran down an alley. Eddie figured he’d done his duty by breaking up a drug deal, which would certainly regroup and get completed in a few minutes. So goes the war on drugs, he told himself wryly.
He spotted the grocery store and pulled into its parking lot. A knot of four young men, all wearing baseball caps with the bills turned in different directions, looked at him with mild interest but no real hostility. He got out, locked his jacket in the back seat, and walked over to them.
“I’m looking for D — Deus Lewis — and I’m told he might be around here this afternoon,” he said to none of them in particular.
“Lemme see yo’ badge, man,” said one, who appeared to be the oldest.
“I’m not a cop. I’m looking for information about a traffic accident D saw. Not for the police, but for me. The man who was killed was a good friend of mine.
“You,” he said, pointing at a tall man leaning against a light pole wearing the telltale muscle shirt. “Are you D? I think you are. I’d like to talk to you.”
“What’s in it for me, man?” D retorted.
“You get to do a good deed and maybe earn a merit badge for it. Also, you won’t have nearly as much trouble with the cops if you talk to me as you will if they send a bunch of cruisers down here to talk to you about the drugs you sell.”
“We don’t know nothin’ ‘bout drugs,” the oldest one said. He appeared to be about 30, old for a druggie, but he wasn’t much of a physical specimen, more like a car driven hard for a lot of miles. The other two shifted around, unable to decide whether to fight or run.
“Look, guys, I’m not here to make trouble for you or get into a fight. That wouldn’t be smart for any of us. You might win, but three of you would get hurt bad in the process and then you’d really be involved with the police. All I’m looking for is some information that will help me solve the murder of a friend. It will come out whether you tell me or not, but it’ll be easier for all of us if you tell me.”
D thought for a few seconds about his choices and decided going with this guy was better than risking the police. “OK, man. I’ll talk to you a little bit.”
“That’s the right choice. Now let’s get in the car and go talk about it.”
“I ain’t goin’ out of the ‘hood,” D responded.
“I tell you what,” Eddie said. “I made a U-turn at a big grocery store a few blocks up. We’ll go there, your friends will know where you are, and if you decide not to come back with me, you won’t be so far away you can’t walk back here. How about that?”
“I guess that’s OK.” D went to the right side of Eddie’s car and waited for the door to unlock. Eddie let him in and locked the door, then turned and said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, D, but please put both your hands on the dashboard.” Eddie frisked him quickly. Nothing.
They drove north to the Winn Dixie store on the right. Eddie parked in the lot as far from the building as he could.
“Let me tell you what’s up. My name is Eddie Grant, and my friend Roy Castor was killed a couple of weeks ago. You saw it, and I think you can tell me something about who was involved. It’ll be better if you don’t lie to me. I questioned a lot of tougher guys than you when I was in charge of a Special Forces company during the first Gulf War, and I understand pretty well when a man is lying or when he’s telling the truth. And if you have any thoughts at all of getting physical with me, I learned a lot about that at the same time, so I don’t recommend it.”
“Shit, man. I was just trying to make a living. I was collecting some money from one of my good customers when two guys came out from a parking lot on Osprey and grabbed that old man. He really fought with them, for an old guy, because he obviously recognized them.”
“How do you know that?”
“When the first one grabbed him, he said real loud, ‘You!’. Then he said something else. It sounded like, ‘You bastard! You’re no better than your father.’”
“And then what happened?”
“I thought he was going to get away. He wiggled out of their grip and he ran, but he ran right in front of the car. The car came along and hit him, and that’s when I left.”
“You don’t think they pushed him in front of the car?”
“No way, man. They was holding him tight and the car was slowing down. They were going to take him with them.”
Eddie asked, “But you think he might have escaped from them?”
“Maybe so, if he’d run the other way. But the guy holding him was really big — almost your size. It would have been tough to get away from him.”
“And how about the other guy. What did he look like?”
“He was almost as tall, but skinny. Dressed sort of the same. They were both 40, 45 years old.”
“What were they wearing?”
“Man, it happened awful fast. But it looked they were wearing brown leather jackets, the kind with elastic around the bottom. God knows why. It was hot.”
“Would you recognize them if you saw them again?”
“Maybe the biggest one. He had something wrong with one of his ears, like part was missing.” He reached up to touch first his left ear then his right. “It was his right ear.”
“Was it the bottom or top of his ear?”
“Definitely the bottom,” Deus responded. It was sort of like a big bite was taken out of it. I could see it when the light was behind it.”
Eddie asked, “Did you see the driver?”
“He speeded up after he hit the man and I lit out. I hadn’t gone twenty steps when he came squealing around the corner and passed me. He didn’t even slow down.”
“Did you see where he went after that?”
“He turned right at the next corner. I figured he was going to stop and pick up the other two. They lit out down a litt
le alley that leads to a vacant lot and could have met him the next street over. I’ve walked through it a lot of times.”
“How did you come to be in that block right then? It’s a long way from home.”
“I had some business to do, that’s all”
“What kind of business? I heard you were collecting on a past-due loan.”
D chuckled. “You might say that. I was selling that bro some weed and he hadn’t paid me yet for last week’s. That’s all.”
“Just ganja?”
“Far as I know that’s all he’s ever done, and not much of it at that.”
Eddie thought back over the conversation and decided he had about as much as he could expect to get, maybe all D knew. He said, “D, you’ve done me a great favor. I’m ready to take you home now if you want.”
“This is just as good as down there. I’ll walk from here. I’d buy a few groceries for my mom if I had any money.”
“I can help a little with that.” Eddie reached into a pocket and took out a $50 bill he had put there earlier, clipped to a small slip of paper on which he’d written his name and U.S. cell phone number. “You’ve helped me understand what happened.”
Deus walked toward the front door of the supermarket. He touched the pocket of his jeans occasionally, to remind himself the money was still there. When he reached the door he paused, turned and raised his right hand in a signal that was half thanks and half goodbye. Eddie put his left hand out the window of the Taurus and returned the wave, then took his telephone from his pocket and dialed the cell number Thom Anderson had written on the back of his business card that morning.
Thom’s voice mail answered. He dictated a summary of his day, including finding Deus, and ended by asking Thom to meet with him before going to see either of the witnesses.
Eddie waited briefly while a large white sedan passed behind him. Somebody looking for a parking place, he thought briefly, then wondered why they were so far from the store when there were many free places closer. The car was almost as large as the one that killed Roy, which made Eddie puzzle, not for the first time, about the strange affinity of Americans for their very large cars. Must be something like supersized fast food, he thought before turning onto the oddly named Tamiami Trail in the direction of Albert Sommers’s country home. Jen had called it his “ranchette.” She did not mean it as a compliment.
The GPS led him under the Interstate on Bee Ridge Road, then down a series of two-lane paved roads. The homes along them were widely spaced, and some appeared to be the original farmhouses that dated back a hundred years to Sarasota’s beginning as an agricultural community. The last turn took him into a nameless narrow track that had once been paved.
He stopped in front of a heavy gate made of welded steel pipe. Behind it, a winding gravel lane led to a ranch-style house a hundred yards away. A two-story barn stood behind the house, the caretakers’ bungalow to its left. Eddie pressed the button marked “talk” on the intercom mounted next to the gate, then waited as it hummed gently. As he was about to press the button a second time, a voice scratched through the speaker. It was the voice of a younger man, not one in his eighties, and it did not sound friendly.
“… help you?” it asked.
Eddie told him quickly that he would like to ask the colonel about his friend Roy Castor and wouldn’t take too long. “Wait a minute,” the voice said again, more curt than before.
Another long wait, then the speaker said “he’s not feeling too well today but he’ll see you for a few minutes. Drive down the lane to the house and park on the side. The gate’ll close itself behind you.” Eddie tried to place the voice. It was definitely southern, but there was no magnolia in it — more of a twang, like a bad country music song. The southwest, he thought.
Two horses ignored him as they grazed slowly in the burgeoning rain-fed grass at the edge of a pond. He parked next to a sidewalk that led to the front door through a small garden of thick-stemmed Florida plants crowding around a fountain that gurgled merrily in the shade. As he entered the garden the front door opened.
“The colonel feels kind of bad today,” said the face behind the voice, a tall, thin man with a prominent Adam’s apple dressed more for golf than — Eddie thought with an private grin — ranchetting. “He was really sorry about Roy’s death and wants to help all he can but I know he’ll run out of energy in just a few minutes. Follow me.”
Eddie followed him through a small dining room whose walls were lined with paintings. He saw the outline of an automatic pistol tucked into his belt at the small of his back and wondered why a retired banker needed an armed bodyguard. In the living room, a very old man in a wheelchair watched a large TV mounted on the wall. A panel of heavily made-up young people dressed in similar blue suits, serious expressions on their faces, appeared to be trying to decide if the leading Democratic presidential candidate was a “real American” or some sort of Muslim secret agent. Below it, an electric fireplace flickered helplessly. The old man muted the TV with his remote and turned his wheelchair to face Eddie. A beam of sunlight escaped from the window’s dark shades and flashed across his clouded and watery blue eyes and the corona of his thin gray hair.
“I’m Al Sommers,” he said, in a voice that sounded much stronger than he looked, extending his hand. “I understand you’re asking about Roy Castor. Tell me what’s your interest in him?”
Eddie told him briefly about his father’s relation with Roy, which Sommers cut off. “I know about that. They both worked for me in Munich. But Roy hadn’t mentioned Artie in years. They were off on some wild-goose chase for a painting that disappeared at the end of the war. I thought they’d decided the Russians got it or it was destroyed.”
“I don’t know much about the painting, colonel, and it doesn’t really interest me much. Roy left a letter for my father, which Jen brought to me. It may be that the whole affair is dead, but the police have decided Roy was murdered so I think we — all of his friends — need to help solve that if we can.”
“Murdered! I thought it was a hit-and-run.” Eddie sensed the attendant moving closer to Sommers and glanced at him in time to see a flash of surprise cross his face, then turn quickly back to the practiced blank gaze of an underling unsure his boss is going to say the right thing and fearing he won’t. The Adam’s apple bobbed vigorously.
“That’s what they first thought, but they found the car. It was stolen and returned in a really devious way, and if the grille hadn’t been damaged it probably never would have been found.”
“That sure changes the picture, don’t it?” Sommers said.
“By the way, this here is Mark Perry — Sonny to his friends. He comes up the coast from Naples to give my caretakers a day off now and then. They’re Germans and nice folks, but I’ll take a Texan any day. Sonny’s father knew Artie and Roy.” He turned to Sonny. “Remind me to find out what Woody knows.”
To Eddie, “You said Jen brought you the letter, not Artie?”
“Artie was killed several years ago in a car wreck. He ran off a road at night into a tree and the car caught fire.”
“I am damned sorry to hear that. He was a good officer and a brave man, to have spent all the time he did behind the lines. Finding paintings wasn’t really his first choice for a job, but he pitched in and did some good work. He left a little before I did. I think he came back to get married.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right. He married a woman from Connecticut but it didn’t last, then he moved back to Paris and married my mother. She is the daughter of a Resistance leader who went into politics with De Gaulle.”
“So which are you, American or French?”
“Both. I grew up in France but went to college in the States, then joined the Army. I was in Desert Storm, then moved back to Paris. That’s where I’ll stay.”
Eddie could tell Sommers didn’t approve, but said nothing more about it. He knew he had only a short time to find out if Sommers had any useful information about Roy’s background that
might help crack the murder, so he asked if they had been in touch after the war.
“Not that I was ever able to recall. I met him again almost by accident ten years ago, after I sold my business in Midland and retired to Sarasota. We ran into each other at a veterans’ ceremony. Pretty soon he asked me to join his Wednesday afternoon discussion group, which I did when I could, but I was also starting up and then running my bank. When I retired from that last year I started going more often. Once in a while we’d tell each other war stories, me about my days as a fighter jock, him about his time in Signals and then chasing Nazi art. Never understood that myself, since it was mainly for the benefit of the Jews, but it wasn’t my call.” His index finger wagged in disapproval.
“You were a fighter pilot?”
“Good one, too. I flew P-51s toward the end of the war and had a lot of kills, which is why I was a lieutenant colonel at 28. They sent me to Munich to run administration after I was shot down and hurt. Shot off my cock and balls, nothing else much damaged. They wouldn’t send me home.”
“Tough injury.”
“Like anything else you learn to live with it. Anyway, I became a paper pusher. I looked for a chance to send some of this artwork home for my retirement fund, but it was guarded real well so I never got anything of real value. I think Sonny’s dad may have done a little better.”
Eddie turned to Sonny. “Your father worked with Roy and Artie?”
“He was an MP in Nuremberg. He was the guard when they did interviews with some of the prisoners, trying to find out more about where all the missing artwork went. He was lucky, too. He was able to send quite a few nice pieces home. He worked for the colonel here for a lot of years after the war.” They spoke of their thefts like a trip to the supermarket.
Eddie turned back to the colonel. “It doesn’t sound like Roy told you anything that might lead to his killers. If this painting is gone, or in Russia, I wonder why he was killed now?”