The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  I looked hard at Bobby. “Don’t say it that way.”

  “Say what?”

  “‘He got killed,’ as if some nameless, faceless force beyond anyone’s control reached down from the heavens and for reasons none of us will ever understand snatched his life away.”

  He stared at me. He didn’t get it. The fact that he never would just served to get me more cranked up.

  “People who get struck by lightning, Bobby, are killed. People who drown in rivers or have houses fall on them in tornadoes are killed. But that’s not what happened here. John was murdered. Jimmy Zacharias took a knife that was nine inches long and stuck it into his throat. He just about cut his head off, and when he thought John was dead, he tossed him into a dumpster. But he wasn’t dead. When they found him, his arm was hanging over one side. He’d tried to climb out, Bobby. He was fighting for his life right up to the end. He wanted to live.” People a few tables over were beginning to take notice of our conversation. I lowered my voice. “Don’t ever say again that John McTavish was killed. Don’t even think it. When you think about John, think about the fact that you’re the reason he was down here. You’re the reason he’s dead.”

  He stared down at his beer, and then he found something out on the brown river to stare at. Nothing I had said was going to change anything, but it made me feel better. It helped purge some of the emotional toxins that had been building up in my heart like plaque. I wanted to be finished with Bobby before I felt the need to purge again. I picked up my notebook and looked at the timeline. “What happened after Jimmy made his threats? Why did he kill him if John was going home?”

  “I didn’t say Jimmy threatened him.”

  “You just did.”

  “I said I gave Jimmy the information. It was his idea, but I never said he was the one who did it. He got that little FBI prick to do it.”

  Jack put down his coffee cup. “Who, Bobby? Give me a name.”

  “Damon Hollander.”

  Neither one of us had an immediate response. At least not a verbal one. Bobby looked at our faces. “You didn’t know about him? Why do you think I’m talking to you, and not the Feds? Jimmy’s got that little prick in his pocket.”

  Everything about Bobby seemed to come into sharper focus. It was as if I had adjusted my zoom lens and I could see the tiniest details—the little scar on his jaw where his beard stubble didn’t grow, a few nose hairs poking out, the way the perspiration pooled in the cleft of his upper lip. I tried to see inside his head, to figure out if he was lying and if he was, if he was smart enough to have a good reason for it. I thought no on both counts.

  “Jimmy sent Damon Hollander to meet with McTavish the night of the murder.” I said it just to see how it sounded. “Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “That’s the only way it would work. I knew it would never work to just threaten him flat out. Jimmy thought if Hollander looked him up at the hotel, flashed his badge, and suggested he go home for his own good, he would. So that’s what he did. Hollander picked up Johnny at the hotel and took him for a ride. He told him he had me under surveillance and some shit about a wiretap and how he’d heard me giving all this personal information to some bad guys. Like maybe we were planning to get to him through Mae and the kids. He told him all the personal stuff and said he’d got it from the wiretap.”

  “What does Jimmy have on Damon?” Jack asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jimmy is a criminal. Damon Hollander is a federal agent.” Jack was speaking slowly in short, simple sentences, presumably so Bobby could follow along. “Why would Damon do something that Jimmy asked him to do?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew. Jimmy just is always saying how he can do whatever he wants, that he has protection. No one is going to touch him. Then when you two came around and said he was a rat for the government, I thought that had to be it. This prick Hollander was protecting his source. I figured if a little of that protection rubbed off on me, so be it. Good for me.”

  I looked at Jack. “Damon tries to warn John off. He picks him up and takes him on the ride. But Jimmy has second thoughts about the plan. He decides no risk is better than low risk. So he swings by the hotel after Damon has dropped him off. He grabs John, takes him out and kills him.”

  “It could have happened that way,” Bobby said, “but I don’t think it did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jimmy called me the next day and asked me if Johnny had gone back to Boston.”

  I could never remember to crack the windows open when I parked in the sun. When we got back to the car, it must have been pushing one hundred and fifty degrees inside. The seat belt tongue was so hot it singed my fingers. But I couldn’t wait to get away from the curb, and out of the odor radius of the fish factory. I closed the door and took off.

  All my thoughts and ideas were beginning to fuse together into a hardened, impenetrable lump. I couldn’t pull the threads out anymore and follow them.

  “If Jimmy didn’t do it,” I said, “who did?”

  “I’m not convinced he didn’t. He could have been covering his ass with that phone call.” Jack had dropped his head back and squeezed his eyes closed. I didn’t, since I was driving. “But if he didn’t kill him, I bet he knows who did.”

  I’d already made two passes trying to figure out on my own how to get back up to the interstate, but I had somehow gotten caught up in an endless loop of oneway streets. It felt the way this case was going. “A little help here, Jack?”

  He sat up straight and checked our position. “I thought maybe driving around in circles was one of your concentration techniques. Turn left up there. We have to go out of our way a couple of blocks to get back on the other side.”

  I made the left as he’d instructed, and was immediately buoyed by the fact that we were no longer trapped in the shadows beneath the interstate.

  Jack pulled out his phone. “Let’s check in with Felix,” he said. “That kid always cheers me up. We’ll see if he’s figured out yet who Vanessa is.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  Felix must have been standing at the check-in desk watching for us because when we walked into the lobby at The Suites, he was there, wearing his wide-armed polyester suit and brown striped tie. Something about seeing him back on duty, back in his normal job, gave me comfort.

  “Wait until you see what I found on Miss Cray,” he said. “You are going to be so psyched.”

  Jack leaned against the front desk. “Did you figure out who she is?”

  “No. Better. Well maybe not better because that would be good to know too but what I found is awesome. It is so cool. I think you’re going to really like it.”

  As we walked to the elevator, he called to someone at the counter to say he was taking a short break. They could reach him in 484. All the way up in the elevator, he was bobbing up and down, rocking back on his heels and forward on his toes. He was like a little kid that had to go to the bathroom.

  He had straightened up the room since our marathon session had ended, and I wondered when or if this kid ever laid his head down to sleep.

  He went to the place he was most comfortable, to the seat on the couch in front of his laptop. “So, like, when you asked me, Mr. Dolan, to find out about Miss Cray, I thought and thought and I finally decided to try something totally off the wall and I did and it worked and I got in.”

  I sat down next to him. “What did you get into?”

  “Miss Cray’s private files.”

  “How did you do that, son?”

  “It wasn’t easy because there are no references or links or anything in the accountant’s files. But then I remembered all those orchid societies she belongs to and I called them up and asked them how I could buy their membership lists, how that would work technically for me to get that data, file formats and all that, and they told me enough that I figured out how to bust in and grab all the enrollment data myself and what I got was all kinds of information about what orchid
s she likes and… and anyway, I got her e-mail address. I got Miss Cray’s private e-mail address, and then I just sent her a message from one of the societies. It wasn’t about anything, but that’s how I got in. Through her e-mail. I did a Trojan horse and accessed her hard drive from there.”

  “You got in because she loves orchids?” I found a certain amount of satisfaction in that.

  “It took me a long time and I got lots of help, but we found this little quirk in her system and I was able to slide through. All you need is to find a portal and I did. And I went in and looked around and found what I needed. What you need.”

  Jack pulled one of the desk chairs over, turned it around, and sat in it backwards. “What did you find?”

  “First of all, she is definitely in the money laundering business. And she makes a lot of money doing it. I couldn’t believe it. She’s got seventeen different clients.” He started tapping the keys and I heard his external CD drive start to whir on the table at my knee. A spreadsheet appeared with seventeen rows and a bunch of columns.

  “See?”

  I did see, but it didn’t mean much. They were in some kind of code, identified only by a series of numbers, maybe account numbers. “Can you tell who they are?”

  “No. But she has one that’s really, really big, a lot bigger than the others, and it’s the one that channels cash to Mr. Speath’s place.” He paged down and zoomed in on one of the accounts. As he moved across the screen, I could see it was bigger than the others by at least a factor of ten.

  “That’s Ottavio,” Jack said. “He’s the biggest fish in whatever sea he’s in.”

  “Okay,” Felix said. “Here’s the good part. So I’m in there and I’m cruising around and looking at the entries and seeing how she does it and all and I find this second set of numbers for Ottavio’s account.”

  I leaned in to see the screen. “Two sets of books?”

  “Yeah.” He went down and clicked on another tab that brought up a separate analysis. “It turns out,” he said, “she’s stealing from him.”

  “Vanessa is skimming?” I leaned in closer. “From Ottavio Quevedo?”

  “She’s either very smart,” Jack said, “or very stupid. Either way, she’s got nerves of steel.”

  I pointed to one of the totals. “What’s this number? Is that…” I counted the zeroes. “Is that fifty million dollars?”

  “That’s what she stole from him. She’s got it stashed away in offshore accounts. I couldn’t believe it, but I added it up and that’s what it is and I wondered how someone doesn’t figure out they had fifty million dollars swiped from them but then I looked at how much money she moves around just for Ottavio and it’s a drop in the bucket and she’s been doing it for a couple of years and—”

  “Felix.” He was getting more and more wound up, and I thought if I didn’t step in he might twist himself into the couch. I was beginning to see what sleep deprivation did to Felix. “This is important. You need to calm down and think about this. Are you sure Vanessa can’t tell you’ve been in her files?”

  He was almost insulted. “No way, Miss Shan—”

  “Think about it,” Jack said. “Just sit there with that question for a few minutes and think it through.”

  That was asking a lot from the kid. He might have exploded if Jack hadn’t given him the nod. “What I’m saying, I’m saying she had two different burglar alarms on and I found them both and disarmed them. They were pretty good, too. I learned a few things from her.”

  The CD drive whirred again. “Where are you keeping this data, Felix?”

  “I burned two CDs.”

  “Take this one out,” I said, nodding to the one he was using, “and give them both to us.”

  He did. He had already selected the jewel boxes for transport, one that used to hold a CD by Rage Against the Machine, and another by Matchbox 20. He handed them over to me and I turned them over to Jack.

  “I put them in there to disguise them. A CD, you know, can hold up to 650 megabytes of data and—”

  “Did you leave anything on your hard drive?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Jack returned the chair to the desk. “Do you live with someone?”

  “I have a roommate but he’s in school and he’s never home.”

  “Stay here at the hotel, then. Stay around people. Don’t go out. Order room service. I’m very serious about this. You stay holed up in here until I give you the high sign. Is that clear?”

  Felix looked at him with a mixture of excitement and concern and nodded. I knew he understood what Jack was saying. I did, too, and it scared me.

  “Let’s go, Alex.” Jack held up the CDs. “We just found our leverage.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  ​It was hot in Jack’s truck, which inexplicably had no air conditioner. It wasn’t that the AC was broken. He had purchased a truck to drive around in Florida with no cooling device whatsoever beyond the open windows.

  “That’s the place,” he said. We were on Collins Avenue in front of the Delano, one of the old Art Deco hotels in South Beach that had been gutted and redone. It had a big circle drive in front filled with exotic cars, but the entrance was mostly hidden by tall shrubs. We made two passes and I managed to get a glimpse behind the green barrier. It had a spacious, covered porch, which was a good plan because their patio furniture seemed to be covered with chintz and silk. Not your standard deck chairs.

  “We have half an hour.” Jack turned to make the block again. “You should go in and look around. I want to find a place, too, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  We’d decided I would meet Vanessa, since she and I seemed to have a rapport, of sorts. We also thought it best if she didn’t have us both in her line of sight at the same time.

  “Tell her what we want,” he reminded me, not for the first time.

  “I will.”

  “Give her one disc and tell her we have the other one.”

  “What if she says no?”

  “We’ll think about that when the time comes. But she’s smart. She’ll do what she needs to do, but she probably won’t say yes right away. She’ll tell you she wants to think about it so she can come up with her own plan. Give her the deadline, and try to set up the next contact in advance. Two hours. That’s it. That’s what I told Jimmy.”

  “What else did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t give him too many details. I told him generally what we were up to. He said he didn’t kill anyone and to go fuck myself.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him he’s killed too many people, but if he didn’t kill John McTavish, he should lay low for a couple of days. He said to go fuck myself.”

  He’d pulled into a pay lot and parked, so now we didn’t even have the breeze from the open windows to keep us cool. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and sticky. I was sticking to everything—the car seat, my clothes, my leather backpack. Jack was low on quarters, but between the two of us, we managed scrape up enough silver to buy two hours on the meter.

  We found a spot in the shade and stood there long enough for him to go over everything again. He seemed to be getting more and more anxious, pushing his hands into the pockets of his chinos, pulling them out again. It was starting to make me jumpy, too.

  “Jack, I’ve got it. It will be fine.”

  “Maybe this is not such a good idea,” he said. “Maybe I should go. Maybe—”

  I pulled him down and shut him up with a long, deep, soul-scraping kiss. “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Judging from the lobby, when they’d gutted the Delano, they had dragged out a whole lot more than they had brought in. To call it sparsely furnished would have been generous.

  I had entered through the front door into a vast open space with planetarium-height ceilings. Instead of walls, they had huge columns to separate the check-in desk, sushi bar, lounge, lobby, and pool
table, and long, delicate white curtains that tended to drift back and forth with the breeze every time a door opened. It was a capsule of cool on a broiling strip of Florida oceanfront, and I was glad for Jack’s suggestion to come early and check it out. Otherwise I would have been too distracted to pay attention when Vanessa arrived.

  Of the furniture that was there, every single piece was different from the next. Leather and velvet and fur were a predominant theme. The floors were wide cherry or mahogany planks, covered here and there with pieces that looked like Mark Rothko paintings that had been dragged down off the wall and turned into area rugs. There were tall vases filled with even taller stems of exotic flowers, and lots of candles, including floor candelabras. They needed candlelight because the electric version was either so indirect or so high up in the ceiling as to have not been there at all.

  My very favorite feature was the unusually narrow interior doorways along the perimeter walk, including those that led to the bathrooms. They reminded me of the templates we used at the airport to catch oversized carry-on bags. “If your bag doesn’t fit in here, it’s too big. You have to check it.” Only the message here was “If you’re not thin enough to fit through this narrow door, you don’t belong here. Turn around and check out.”

  It felt forbidding, but that was the whole point. It was an Ian Schrager hotel, designed with the in-your-face, you-don’t-belong-here-no-matter-who-you-are veneer that he had helped create at Studio 54. He had somehow managed to import the attitude intact to his hotels, and I was surprised there hadn’t been a bouncer out front to usher in Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli, or at least their new millenium successors, and keep out riffraff, like me.

  Vanessa was not riffraff. When she slipped through the front door, she fit right into the airy atmosphere. She had on bright green linen Capri pants, a black sleeveless top with a high collar, and little black sandals. Her blonde hair was plaited and wrapped on top of her head. She could have been wearing cutoffs and a bra top and still have looked right at home in this place. It was all in the attitude.