Detective

by Arthur Hailey

“Would have been, except we don’t allow that stuff here. I sent the other guy back to work, then told Doil unless he cooled down he’d get his walking papers pronto. For a minute I was sure he was gonna hit me, then he thought better. But the guy could be dangerous, all right, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Thanks,” Bowe said. “You saved me the question.”

  A burly, rough-tongued Superfine driver, Mick Lebo, confirmed most of Swayze’s words, adding, “The guy’s a louse. I wouldn’t trust him for one goddam second.”

  Was there anyone among the other drivers, Bowe asked, whom Doil talked to a lot, or might have confided in? It was a standard question, because many murderers were caught after talking about their crimes to supposed friends who later informed or testified against them.

  “The bastard never talks!” Lebo scoffed. “Not a word to nobody. If you stood beside him to piss, he wouldn’t give you the time o’ day—’course, he might piss on your foot.” Lebo roared at his own joke, knocking Ruby’s arm with his elbow.

  As at Overland Trucking, Detective Bowe left Superfine Transport with copies of Elroy Doil’s journey records covering the previous two years, and promises from each of her informants that their conversation would remain confidential.

  Unlike the other companies on the list, Suarez Motors & Equipment was not in the trucking business, but repaired automobiles and small trucks, and sold automotive parts. Elroy Doil had been employed there from time to time as a mechanic. However, about a month before, he had quit suddenly and not come back, even to collect his last paycheck from the young owner, Pedro Suarez. When he showed Bowe the check, she asked for a copy.

  “Is he a good mechanic?” she asked Suarez.

  “Pretty good, and works fast, but what a troublemaker! Picks fights all the time. I was planning to fire him when he quit.”

  “Would you say Elroy Doil is smart?”

  “Yeah. He’s smart because he’s a quick learner. Explain something or show him how to do it, and he’s got it. But he can’t control himself.”

  Suarez went on to explain that the business operated a local delivery service as a sideline. Some of the automotive parts trade was handled that way, and Suarez Motors used two panel trucks to make deliveries for several retail stores in the area with no transport of their own.

  “Did Doil ever do those deliveries?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure. Sometimes when one of the regulars was off.”

  “Do you have a record of when that was and where he went?”

  Suarez grimaced. “Afraid you’d ask that. I guess we do, but it’ll take some digging.”

  He led Bowe to a small, dusty room at the rear of the building, with overflowing shelves, a half-dozen file cabinets, and a copying machine. Suarez pointed to two of the cabinets. “You want to cover two years? It’ll all be in there. ’Fraid you’ll have to search through yourself.”

  “That’s fine. If it’s okay, I’d like to use the copier.”

  “Be my guest.” Suarez grinned. “If Doil drops by for his check, shall I bring him in?”

  “No, please!” Bowe quickly repeated the need for confidentiality.

  The search, which involved checking and relating invoices, delivery records, vehicle service schedules, and payroll sheets, took her most of a day. But she left with a complete history of Elroy Doil’s work at Suarez Motors.

  Prieto Fast Delivery and Porky’s Trucking were similarly cooperative, and the four combined visits revealed other facets of Doil’s character, including the fact that he disliked regular work. When he felt like working, probably because he needed money, he would phone one of the companies, and if work was available, he was taken on temporarily. He was obviously smart enough not to cheat or steal at any of those places, but he clearly could not control his turbulent, aggressive nature.

  For Ruby Bowe, the next step was to compare the information with dates of the various killings.

  Back at her desk at Homicide, Bowe dealt with the out-of-Miami murders first. On March 12, Hal and Mabel Larsen were murdered in Clearwater, 260 miles northwest of Miami. On that same day, while working for Overland Trucking, Elroy Doil drove a tractor-trailer load of furniture from Miami to Clearwater, where, according to a driving log and expense record, he arrived during mid-afternoon and stayed overnight at the Home Away From Home Motel. Bowe, her excitement growing, phoned the motel and learned that it was four blocks from the address of the murder victims. Doil returned to Miami the following day with a load of coiled steel and plastic pipe.

  Also, Doil had made a previous trip to Clearwater for Overland only two weeks before and had stayed at the same motel. The first trip, Bowe reasoned, could have allowed him to pinpoint his victims, the second to murder them.

  Next were the Fort Lauderdale killings of Irving and Rachel Hennenfeld, reported on May 23, though it was estimated the victims had died four days earlier, on May 19.

  During May, Doil had made two trips to Fort Lauderdale, this time for Porky’s Trucking, the first on May 2, and again on the nineteenth. A log for the second date showed he had left Miami at 3:30 P.M., made three deliveries in Fort Lauderdale, and returned a few minutes before midnight. Since the distance between the two cities was only twenty-five miles, eight and a half hours seemed a long time to be away. However, the earlier trip, on May 2, which included four deliveries in Fort Lauderdale, had taken only five hours. Again Bowe reasoned that finding the right victims probably took less time than the gory business of slaying them.

  While the three Miami serial killings did not have quite the same close connections, each one displayed linkages too apposite to be dismissed as coincidence.

  During the morning that preceded the killings of Homer and Blanche Frost in the Royal Colonial Hotel, Doil had made eight deliveries and four pickups in Coral Gables while working for Prieto Fast Delivery. Two of the deliveries were to businesses on Southwest 27th Avenue, the same location as the First Union Bank branch where the Frosts had gone that same morning to cash eight hundred dollars in traveler’s checks.

  It was entirely possible, Bowe thought—indeed probable—that Elroy Doil saw the elderly couple, perhaps even in the bank, and followed them back to their hotel. It would then be a simple matter to ride with the Frosts in an elevator to their floor and, while appearing to be just another hotel guest, note the number of their room, then return late that night. All conjecture, of course, but combined with the previous crimes and linkages, it was too credible to ignore.

  Then there were the additional Miami killings—of Lazaro and Luisa Urbina at Pine Terrace Condominiums, and of Commissioner Gustav Ernst and his wife, Eleanor, at Bay Point. In both cases the records for both Prieto Fast Delivery and Suarez Motors & Equipment showed that Doil made deliveries near the victims’ homes.

  The Prieto records copied by Detective Bowe noted two Doil deliveries close to the Urbinas’—on separate days and within the three weeks preceding the Urbina murders. As for the walled-in, security-guarded Bay Point subdivision, Doil had made two small deliveries there for Suarez Motors—not to the Ernsts, but to other houses. The last occasion was more than a month before the Ernst killings, but that, Bowe reminded herself, could be because Suarez employed Doil as a mechanic and only occasionally used him as a driver. The two trips he had made into Bay Point, however, would have familiarized him with the security setup and probably enabled him to talk his way in again with phony delivery papers.

  Something else caught Bowe’s attention. Her copy of the Suarez Motors paycheck that Elroy Doil had not collected indicated that he had abruptly quit work the day after the murders of Gustav and Eleanor Ernst.

  Did Doil quit, Bowe wondered, because he thought he might be a suspect in the serial killings by now and therefore wanted to disappear?

  At the end of her research and analysis, an eager Detective Bowe communicated what she had learned to Sergeant Ainslie. He was buoyed by her news and, while holding a few details back, passed along most of the information to the special t
ask force members, telling them, “Doil’s our guy, no doubt of it, so be patient and stay alert despite this lousy weather. Sooner or later he’ll slip up and we’ll be there to grab him.”

  Ainslie also kept the assistant state attorney, Curzon Knowles, informed. Knowles’s reaction, though, was unenthusiastic.

  “Sure, Ruby’s been resourceful in getting all that stuff. And, yes, it tells us that Doil had the opportunity to knock off all those people and probably did. But proving it is something else, and among the whole schmeer there’s not one scrap of solid evidence. You don’t even have enough for an arrest warrant.”

  “I know that, counselor, but I simply wanted to keep you in the picture. There is a positive side, though. We’re sure enough about Doil not to waste time on anyone else.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “So we’ll keep working at it,” Ainslie said. “There’ll be a break somewhere, soon. I truly believe it.”

  The attorney chuckled. “I perceive, Malcolm, that you are, after all, still in the faith business.”

  12

  Along with the miserable weather accompanying the more than three-week surveillance of Elroy Doil, an intestinal flu epidemic swept through Miami. Many in the Police Department were affected, including two detectives from the special task force, José Garcia and Seth Wightman. Both men were sent home, with instructions to stay in bed, creating even more problems for the surveillance process.

  As a result, Malcolm Ainslie and Dan Zagaki were now working a double shift. They had been on duty for nine hours; another fifteen lay ahead. It was 4:20 P.M. and they were parked in a Burdines Department Store delivery van on Northeast 35th Terrace, half a block from Elroy Doil’s two-room wooden shack.

  Again, it had been raining throughout most of the day. Now, accompanying the rain, the sky was darkening.

  Earlier in the day, beginning at 7:00 A.M., Doil had driven an Overland Trucking tractor-trailer rig from Miami to West Palm Beach, then to Boca Raton, returning to Miami at 3:00 P.M. after an approximately 140-mile haul in difficult weather. A trio of surveillance teams, including Ainslie and Zagaki, had monitored Doil’s journey. Apart from continuous rain, nothing out of the ordinary happened except for one observation Zagaki made during the drive: “There’s something different about Doil today, Sergeant. Not sure what it is …”

  “He’s tense,” Ainslie agreed. “You can see it in his driving, and every time he stops he seems restless, like he has to keep his body moving.”

  “Does it mean anything, Sergeant?”

  Ainslie shrugged. “Could be drugs, though he has no history of drugs. Maybe he’s nervous. Only he knows why.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out.”

  “Maybe.” Ainslie left it there, but was aware of his own tension, a familiar sense that events were somehow moving toward a climax.

  Now, having followed Doil from Overland Trucking’s Miami depot to his home, Ainslie and Zagaki were waiting for whatever happened next.

  “Mind if I doze off for a while, Sergeant?” Zagaki asked.

  “No. Go ahead.” It made sense to take some rest if possible on a long double shift, particularly since Doil, after his eight-hour truck journey, was inside and probably sleeping.

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” Zagaki said as he leaned back and closed his eyes.

  Ainslie, though, had no intention of sleeping. He was still not totally confident of the young detective, and the reason he had paired himself with Zagaki was to keep an eye on him throughout the surveillance. To be fair, though, Ainslie reminded himself, Zagaki’s performance so far could not be faulted. He had done everything required of him, including long spells of driving. Just the same …

  It was Zagaki’s manner that made him uneasy, and while it was difficult to point to anything specific, Ainslie’s finely honed instincts told him that Zagaki’s studied respectfulness, which he overdid by saying “Sergeant” a few times too often, was wafer-thin and bordering on fawning.

  Or was he himself, Ainslie wondered, being excessively critical?

  “Thirteen hundred to thirteen-ten.” The call came crisply through his portable police radio.

  It was Lieutenant Leo Newbold.

  Ainslie answered, “Thirteen-ten. QSK.”

  To help out during the task force personnel shortage, Newbold had filled in on several shifts, pairing with Dion Jacobo. The two served as backup to Ainslie and Zagaki, and were now positioned a few blocks away in an eight-year-old Ford sedan with dented fenders, peeling paint, and a supercharged engine that enabled it to keep up with anything on the road.

  Newbold’s voice came back, “Is anything happening?”

  “Negative,” Ainslie said. “Subject is—” He stopped abruptly. “Hold on! He’s just come out of the house, heading for his pickup.” He reached over and shook Zagaki, who opened his eyes and sat up straight, then started the van’s motor.

  Outside, Doil lumbered across the yard, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans, his eyes downcast.

  After a few moments Ainslie continued, “Subject now in pickup, pulling away, moving fast. We’re following.”

  Doil’s departure was unexpected. But Zagaki already had the Burdines delivery van in gear and was pulling out into the road, keeping the battered pickup truck in sight.

  “We’re rolling,” Newbold responded. “Will be behind you. Advise direction of travel.”

  Ainslie transmitted, “Subject has reached North Miami Avenue, now turning south.” And soon after, “He is crossing Twenty-ninth Street.”

  From Newbold: “We are on Second Avenue, parallel with you. Continue advising cross streets. Ready to cross and take over when you want.”

  Two surveillance vehicles traveling on parallel streets and switching periodically was a regular, though sometimes tricky, surveillance technique.

  The rain was heavier now and the wind rising.

  Newbold again: “This is your show, Malcolm. But do you think we should call in a third team?”

  Ainslie answered, “Not yet. Don’t believe he’ll go out of town again … He is now crossing Eleventh Street; we are a block behind. Let’s switch at Flagler.”

  “QSL.”

  Ainslie again: “Approaching Flagler Street. Subject continuing south. You take him, Lieutenant. We’ll drop off.”

  Newbold: “We are on Flagler facing west, making a left turn onto South Miami Avenue … Yes, we see him. He’s behind us … has now passed us … two vehicles between us; we’ll keep it that way.” A few minutes later: “Subject crossing Tamiami Trail, seems to know where he’s going, probably west. Suggest we switch again at Bayshore.”

  “QSL. Closing on you now.”

  Thus it happened that Ainslie and Zagaki were in the lead car when Elroy Doil’s pickup truck, after driving briefly west on the heavily traveled Bayshore Drive, slowed near Mercy Hospital, then turned right into the wealthy residential area of Bay Heights.

  Ainslie reported, “Subject has left Bayshore Drive, entered Halissee Street, driving north, very little traffic.” He told Zagaki, “Stay well back, but be sure not to lose him.” It was becoming harder to see, though. While the rain had eased, the light was going, and it would soon be night.

  Halissee, like most of Bay Heights, was a street of large, elegant residences, the whole area thickly wooded. A two-way cross street appeared ahead; Ainslie knew it was Tigertail Avenue, with similar style homes. But before reaching Tigertail, the pickup pulled over to the right and stopped under a large, overhanging ficus tree fronting one of the spacious houses. The pickup’s headlights went out as Zagaki stopped the Burdines van and switched off his headlights, too. They were about five hundred feet behind, with several parked cars between, but were high enough to see over their roofs and observe the head and shoulders of Doil in the pickup, outlined by a streetlight.

  “Subject has stopped on Halissee near Tigertail,” Ainslie reported. “He is still in pickup cab. No sign of moving out.”

  Newbold responded, �
��We are a block behind you. Have stopped, too.”

  They waited.

  Ten minutes passed and Doil had not moved.

  “He doesn’t seem so restless anymore, Sergeant,” Zagaki said.

  After a few more minutes the police radio came alive and Newbold asked, “Anything going on?”

  “Negative. Pickup still stopped, subject in cab.”

  “I’ve received a message, Malcolm. I need to talk to you. Can you walk back? If anything happens, we can get you back fast.”

  Ainslie hesitated. He was not happy about leaving Zagaki alone to watch Doil, and his inclination was to stay. But he knew the lieutenant would have good reason for wanting him.

  “I’m coming now,” he transmitted, then said to Zagaki, “I’ll be as fast as I can. Don’t take your eyes off Doil, and use your radio to call me if he gets out or drives on, or if anything else at all happens. If he does move, follow him closely and above all keep in touch.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant,” Zagaki said brightly. “My mind will be on nothing else.”

  Ainslie left the van, noticing as he stepped down that the rain had stopped. In near darkness he walked briskly back the way they had come.

  Watching him go, Dan Zagaki thought, Christ, what a fucking bore you are, Sergeant, don’t hurry back!

  From the start, Zagaki had wished he was paired with someone more with-it and exciting. Ainslie, in Zagaki’s opinion, was an overly cautious plodder, and not very smart. If he were, he’d be a lieutenant by now, maybe captain—ranks that Zagaki had his eye on. He knew he had the smarts to go right to the top—hadn’t he made it quickly out of uniform to become a Homicide detective? The main thing in any kind of force, police or military, was to think promotion, promotion, promotion, remembering that advancement didn’t just happen; you had to make it happen! Coupled with that, it was essential to be noticed, frequently and favorably, by the brass above you.

  Dan Zagaki had absorbed those rules and tactics by watching his father get promotion after promotion in the U.S. Army, and then his big brother Cedric move up similarly in the Marines. Cedric, like their father, was going to be a general someday—he made no secret of it. Cedric had also been contemptuous of young Dan’s choice when he joined the Miami Police—a “pissant outfit,” he had called it. The general hadn’t been quite so blunt, but Dan sensed he was disappointed in his younger son’s decision. Well, he would show them both.