The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  My arms fell away as he stepped back—I thought to kiss me again—but he kept moving back, out of my embrace. Out of my range. He caught my hands in his on the way back and kissed them, once in each palm. “Let’s not… do this. This is not… it’s not good…”

  The expression in his eyes when he looked at me made me feel that I’d done something very wrong. “I’m sorry, Jack. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s not you. I’m not any good at this, especially now. For me it would be for all the wrong reasons. I like you and it’s hard for me not to mess things up.” He pushed a strand of hair that had fallen into my face and wrapped it behind my ear. “Do you understand?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” I let him go and we had this awkward moment where he didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know what to say and I was sitting in the middle of his laundry. When I jumped down from the table, I felt the pinch again in my ankle. It hurt.

  I didn’t stay long after that. Jack stood on the sidewalk in front of the Coin Op and reminded me not to park too far away from the elevator in the Dolphin Garage. I walked up the street toward the restaurant and my car, and knew that he was watching me all the way there. That felt good. Having him in my arms had felt better.

  Perricones looked like a tree house the way it nestled under the leafy canopy. It was going full blast by then. Some of the tables were on the open-air deck, and dinner was being served to a lively New Orleans jazz accompaniment. The bawdy, brassy rhythm spilled out and rolled down the streets of the quiet neighborhood like coins tossed from the open doors and windows.

  The smoke haze was not so bad, so I opened my windows to breathe unprocessed, non-air-conditioned air for a change. I could still hear the faint strains of the jazz band as I passed by the Miramar Coin Op and saw Jack, the only patron, sitting inside on one of the washing machines, hands on his knees, staring at the wall.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ira Leemer turned and greeted me with a yellow-toothed grin that was surprisingly engaging. “Hello, missy. Want a bag of peanuts?” He offered me a small red-and-white-striped paper bag lumpy with what must have been peanuts in the shell. It was a surreal moment. Ira cocked his head. “Fresh off the roaster and on the house.”

  I hesitated. I always liked those peanuts. But so much fat content. What the hell. “Thank you, Ira.” I accepted his offering, which seemed to make him happy. The bag still felt warm.

  This time Jack and I had gone to find Ira at his sometime place of work—Ft. Lauderdale Stadium—where he was a peanut vendor and a spring training game was in progress. The Baltimore Orioles and the Mets. The three of us were in the cement-cooled shadows underneath the stands, but not too far from a ramp that led to the bleachers. I could see the bright square of sunshine at the top and hear the communal muttering of the crowd that always accompanies a game in progress.

  “You work out here, Ira?”

  “Since I been out. Yessirree. Only thing is they won’t let me sell beer on account of I been in jail. That’s where the real money is as far as the concession business goes. Anyhow”—he held up one of the bags—“these are the only parts I’m selling these days.”

  Jack was pacing, clearly not interested in peanuts. “Why didn’t you tell me what we were walking into out at that hangar, Ira?”

  “Hold on a minute, Bobo. Just let’s all calm down and let me get myself situated.” He set his peanut tray on an unmanned snack bar counter, which freed his hands to dig out his cigarette paper and tobacco pouch. “I didn’t know myself,” he said as he started to roll one. “I just found out.” He looked at me. “Saw them parts with your own eyes, did you?”

  “Up close and personal.”

  “What was it like?”

  Even if I could have described what I’d seen, what I’d felt, what I’d smelled and touched, I didn’t get the chance. Jack was getting up close and personal with Ira, getting right into his face. “How did Jimmy get those parts? And don’t give me any bullshit. I’m not in the mood.”

  Ira had to take a step back to look up into the taller man’s face. “Went down and got ’em hisself, is what I heard.”

  “C’mon, Ira. How did he get them off the mountain? Where did he get the manpower and equipment? How did he get those huge units and assemblies into the country?” He articulated each question, as if his being clear might inspire from Ira a like response. “You know what I’m asking you.”

  “Hooked up with someone who was down there, I suspect, someone with some presence, who got in there, took what they wanted, and got out.”

  Jack looked as though he might take a swipe at Ira, so I gave it a try. “How did the bad guys get in there before the authorities? How did they even know there was a crash to go and scavenge?”

  Something good happened on the field for the home team. A languid cheer drifted up from the crowd. It was, after all, spring training. By the time it petered out, Ira was rolled and ready. He fired up the cigarette and took a long pull. Then he spit out a piece of tobacco.

  “I can’t tell you what happened on account of I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I can tell you the story I’ve put together based on some of the things I’ve been hearing.”

  Jack took a step back and crossed his arms. It must have convinced Ira that he was in no eminent danger of being leveled, because he started to talk.

  “As far as how they knew about it and the approximate location, they was monitoring radio frequencies. That was the easy part. Finding it and getting to it that fast, that was… that must have been the hard part. But once they got there… you know everybody’s always talking about that airplane like it flew into the side of a mountain, but it didn’t. It was a belly landing. Not much fire, so there was lots to take. But as far as getting there first, you are talking Ecuador here, missy.”

  “They have authorities in Ecuador.”

  “What they don’t have is an NTSB Go-Team ready to show up on a remote mountaintop at the drop of a hat in the middle of the night. And who are the authorities down there anyway? You got your federales, your local authorities, your guerrilla armies—left and right wing. Who the hell is in charge? Probably whoever gets there first and whoever’s got the biggest gun.”

  “Who got there first in this case?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t know, Bobo. That’s what I keep on trying to tell you. But whoever it was had resources, because they took it all. You saw that. Every last thing that wasn’t burning or bleeding, and some”—he narrowed his eyes and looked left and right, just as he had done at his trailer—“some that was bleeding, is what I hear.”

  I hesitated, but went ahead with it anyway. “What does that mean?”

  “They was in such a hurry, them boys didn’t even bother to dump out all the body parts. Just lifted the whole kit and caboodle the way it was. Lock, stock, and barrel. Whatever fell out, fell out. That’s what I heard. Looted the bodies, too. Got it all before the peasants climbed up there and picked over what was left. By the time the airline got up there, you could gather up what was left and carry it down in baskets.”

  More casual cheering from the crowd above, and though I was trying as hard as I could not to, all I could think of was climbing around in those parts, lying on the ground in the grease and other unknown matter. I remembered the smell—aviation fuel and something rotten. I thought I had imagined the something rotten. And the rats. Jimmy had said the place was crawling with rats. It all made me feel sick, and I wanted to give the peanuts back. Instead, I tried to focus on the task at hand.

  “Ira, do you think it would be possible for someone to find a ring, a diamond ring, and the logbook in the wreckage that came up here?”

  “Oh, sure, missy. You’d be surprised at the things that survive a plane crash. An aircraft goes nose down at full speed and turns into a burning hole in the ground. But around the crater, you might still find a pair of eyeglasses that ain’t broke, or a fifty-dollar bill stuck in the mud. I didn’t hear about the logbook, but sure, someone could hav
e pulled it out of that mess. No telling what you might could have found tucked away in all the nooks and crannies.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any firsthand knowledge of that?” Jack asked.

  “Like what, Bobo? You mean was I down there in Ecuador? Hell, no. What do I keep trying to tell you? I’m telling you all that I know.”

  “I’m asking if you were one of the dirty mechanics working out at that hangar for Jimmy. Maybe doing a little strip-and-dip. You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “That’s ’cause you told me to find out. No sir. I didn’t want nothing to do with them parts. I ain’t going back to jail. Besides, you know what they say. Even touching dead parts like that is bad luck. You remember that seven-two that went down around here back in the late seventies, don’t you, Bobo? Went down in a bad storm.”

  “I remember. It went down in the Everglades.”

  “That’s the one.” He turned and directed his story at me. “The airline salvaged some of them parts and tried to reuse them, mostly galley parts. The company mechanics, of course, knew about all this and refused to even lay hands on equipment from a dead airplane, so they hired contractors. I tell you what”—there was that whuu-uut again—“one of them contractors was electrocuted on the job. Another one’s wife delivered a stillborn baby, and once them parts were in the air, the stews started seeing ghosts in the galley.”

  “What happened?”

  “The company hired one of them exorcists, but that didn’t work. Finally they ripped the parts all out, took ’em to the smelter, and destroyed them once and for all. That’s when the ghosts left and not before. They went belly-up anyway, but not because of no ghosts.”

  It was a good thing Jack had plenty of room to roam because he’d started moving and couldn’t seem to stop. “What’s the point of your ghost story, Ira?”

  “I’m just telling why I didn’t want nothing to do with them parts out in that hangar. It’s bad luck. That’s all there is to that. Bad luck. Whoever did disturb that crash is going to pay the price. It’s like grave robbing is what it is. I don’t want no part of it.”

  I reached back and lifted my ponytail off my neck. It was making my sunburn itch. I remembered how the big diamond ring had felt on my finger, and how the logbook had felt in my hands. Bad luck. That was the best way to describe the uneasy feeling. I had taken the ring off and Damon Hollander now had the logbook. But the feeling had never gone away.

  “How much would you figure Jimmy could get for what’s in that hangar?” Jack asked. “He had the landing gear, both engines, which looked to be in decent shape, probably avionics—”

  “The tail,” I said, “intact and in good shape.”

  Ira leaned back against the snack counter and ran that one through his computer while he smoked. “New Triple Seven. Depending on whether they go domestic or overseas, piecemeal it, or find one buyer and move the whole load. Maybe three to four million.”

  “Plenty of motive for murder,” Jack said.

  “And a good way to tie Bobby to the whole operation,” I said, “if we can tie him to the book.”

  Ira was staring up the ramp. “It’s probably getting toward the seventh-inning stretch. That’s when I do some good business, Bobo. Let me get out there. I’ll keep nosing around for you.”

  Jack didn’t even seem to hear him. “The Bureau has taken down Jimmy’s operation out there. He’s locked out of his own hangar, but he’s still on the street. What do your sources tell you about that?”

  “Is that what happened? ’Cause they were going great guns when all of a sudden everything just stopped. I’ll be damned. How did he get hisself out of that one? You know Jimmy always said he’d never done one day in jail and never would. That’s a puzzle, yes sir, that is.”

  “Tell me what you think of this idea.” Jack had stopped moving and now leaned against the snack counter next to his snitch. The two of them looked as if they could have been discussing gardening tips, or the game outside. “Jimmy is a confidential informant working for the Bureau in an operation targeting Ottavio Quevedo. Do you know who that is?”

  “Everybody knows him, Bobo.”

  “Jimmy’s got something on Ottavio the Bureau wants and they’re protecting him.”

  “I don’t know what that could be.”

  “Let’s think about this logically. What I saw in that hangar, to get it down off a mountain, you said it yourself, Jimmy would have had to have had access to cranes, probably crane helicopters, trucks, extraction equipment, earthmoving equipment. Plenty of manpower. Right?”

  Ira cackled. “It weren’t no donkeys carried them jet engines down off that hill.”

  “Who would have resources like that sitting around? Or access to them?”

  “Bobo, I couldn’t say. It would have to be the military, I guess. Maybe it was an inside job. Is that what you’re getting at? Maybe them Ecuadors did it themselves, the army or what have you, ’cause they’re the ones that would have all that stuff.”

  “I was looking at a map. That airplane went down not too far from the Colombian border.” Jack was talking to me as much as to Ira now, maybe even to himself, and it was getting very interesting. “What you were saying about whoever gets there first, I think you’re right. Who got there first in this case could have been one of the guerrilla armies from Colombia. Or the militias. They’re better armed and better equipped than the real thing, and that’s because they’re funded with drug money.”

  “Drug money. Drug armies from Colombia. I think I see where you might be going with this, Bobo. That might explain the C130, too.”

  “A C130? A U.S. military aircraft?”

  “Yes sir, an old one, but it can still carry plenty. They loaded it up and flew the whole mess up here. Don’t ask me how they got hold of one or how they got into the States because I don’t know.”

  A Colombian drug army. A Colombian drug lord. We were right back where we always ended up. I looked at Jack. “Does Ottavio have a C130?”

  He shrugged. “He shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean much.”

  “You’re saying… I get what you’re saying now, Bobo, without really saying. Maybe this Ottavio fella is the one Jimmy hooked up with down there. Maybe that’s what Jimmy is snitching about.” His eyes lit up and burned almost as bright as the tip of his cigarette. “Whooooeeee! Can you feature what would happen to old Jimbo if word got around that he’s a stoolie for the Feds?”

  Jack put his hand on Ira’s shoulder, just the way he had on the porch of his trailer when he wanted to make a point. “That’s exactly what I want to happen. I want to put Jimmy under pressure. Funny things happen to people when they’re under pressure. All I want you to do is start floating the word that Jimmy is working for the government. Discreetly, Ira.”

  “That’s all, huh?” Ira pooched his lips out and shook his head. He dropped his cigarette butt to the cement and stepped on it. “That’s like saying you’re gonna blow up his house, discreetly. That’s like putting my head into the mouth of an alligator, discreetly. Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t. “Why wouldn’t we, Ira?”

  “Because he’s going to know right where it’s coming from.” He turned and looked at Jack. “He’s going to know it’s you, Bobo. He knows you’re out here asking questions and making trouble for him. He’s already put the word out for anyone who can to let you know to come ahead and come on. ‘Get it over with’ is what he says.” He lifted his peanut cart off the counter, slung the strap around his neck, and shrugged. “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen I guess.”

  Ira the philosopher. He was obviously a determinist. I tended to come down more on the side of free will. I liked to think that we had input into how our lives turned out. That outcomes were shaped by the decisions we made rather than predetermined by the finger of fate. Jack was busy peeling twenties out of his wallet. I looked at him and wondered which philosophy he subscribed to. He handed Ira
a few of the bills and nodded in the direction of the red-and-white-striped bag of peanuts that was still in my hand. “That’s for the peanuts.”

  Ira took the money, leaned over, and stuffed it into his sock. The peanut tray bounced up and down as he adjusted it on his shoulders. “I’ll see what I can do about putting the pressure on your old buddy Jimmy, if that’s what you really want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  Ira made his way up the ramp and disappeared into the light. I couldn’t be that close and not go up and take a look myself. Jack waited for me while I walked up the dim underground tunnel and into the sunshine. It was like walking out of a long dark winter devoid of box scores and Baseball Tonight, and into the bright spring of a brand new season. I loved baseball, and it hadn’t occurred to me once since I’d been down here that spring training was in full swing.

  The stadium was small—about eight thousand seats. It felt even smaller because of how close the seats crept to the field. The ballplayers seemed oversized at that distance, and even from several sections up I could hear sounds from the field I’d never heard before—the pop of the first baseman’s bubble gum, and the scratching of the pitcher’s spikes on the rubber. What truly struck me was the casual feeling in the stands. The people in this crowd hadn’t paid sixty-five dollars for their seats. They lounged around with newspapers and suntan oil. They sipped beer and lemonade as they kept one eye on the game and chatted in the warm breeze. It was like going to a baseball game at the beach.