Detective Fiction

by William Wells

  As in: Larry and Penny Networth are having breakfast in their Park Avenue townhouse in New York one morning. They decide it would be nice to have lunch by the pool at their Port Royal home. Larry makes a call to order the flight crew to spool up the Gulfstream. After a pleasant lunch in Naples, Penny says it might be nice to have a few friends over for a dinner party at their ski lodge in Aspen . . . Having such lavish homes mostly vacant seemed like a waste. Maybe the federal government would propose a program to house the nation’s homeless in properties like those. I’d vote for that.

  Back home, I showered and called Marisa. “Are you free for dinner Thursday?” I asked.

  “Let me think,” she said. “I’m scheduled to have dinner with George Clooney at his place on Lake Como in Italy . . .”

  Marisa would fit right in as a neighbor of the Networths.

  “Wouldn’t want to spoil that opportunity,” I told her.

  “Make me a counteroffer.”

  “Okay. Have you heard of pop-up dinner parties?”

  “Sure,” she said. “A chef prepares an elaborate meal in some unusual venue that you don’t learn about until the day before. They’re all the rage.”

  “I happen to know from a source that there will be one Thursday in the Robb & Miller furniture store, and we have a reservation.”

  “I love that store. Sounds yummy. I’ll cancel George. So what’s the deal with the pop-up?”

  “Vasily set it up for us. It’ll be a working dinner. He knows the chef, got the guest list, and discovered, as he suspected, that Christopher Knowland and his wife, Lucille, were on it. He thought maybe the other two gangsters were on it too, but it was just the Knowlands.”

  I told Marisa about the Ponzi scheme and that Vasily had arranged for us to be seated at the Knowlands’ table.

  “Should I wear a Kevlar vest beneath my dress?” Marisa asked.

  “That won’t be necessary. If a gunfight breaks out, I’ll cover you with my body.”

  “Let’s hope for a gunfight then.”

  I SPENT the time until Thursday doing my homework about the real estate development biz. When I was done, I had a master’s degree in the subject from Google University. I was at least reasonably conversant in the language of the game, including terms like triple net lease, ROI, agglomeration economies, income capitalization approach, and weighted average cost of capital. I imagined saying things to Christopher Knowland at dinner like, “Please pass the ketchup and, by the way, Chris my man, how’s your sales price point of indifference?”

  THURSDAY CAME. The pop-up dinner began at eight. I picked up Marisa at her house at seven. She looked ravishing in a simple black cocktail dress and black heels, sans Kevlar vest.

  On the way to the furniture store where the dinner would happen, we stopped at a liquor store for wine because the dinner was BYOB. Assuming that the menu would include fish, fowl, and various meats, Marisa selected a bottle of her favorite red, a Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon, and a white, a Lynmar Estate Russian River Valley Chardonnay.

  Robb & Miller was located on US Route 41, aka the Tamiami Trail, named when the road was the main artery between Tampa and Miami. I pulled into the driveway and gave the Shelby Cobra I was driving to the valet—by then, I knew that rich people never parked their own cars—and we went inside.

  A man in his thirties wearing a starched white chef’s tunic and toque was greeting arriving guests at the front door. The chef offered his hand to Marisa, and then to me, saying, “Welcome. I’m Gilbert Merchant. You’ll find our dining area right through the Henredon gallery, between the Oriental rugs and the bedroom furniture.”

  This must be the place where everyone bought their Oriental rugs to spread over their hardwood floors. Gilbert Merchant, I knew from Vasily, was one of the nation’s hot young chefs. He moved to Naples from San Francisco a few years ago to open a restaurant. I guess he thought the tips would be better here. These pop-up dinners were an adjunct to his catering business.

  We followed the chef’s directions and made our way through the furniture store to a candlelit dining room set up with eight tables with seating for six people each. Along the way, Marisa paused frequently to inspect the furniture, saying she needed a new breakfront, whatever that is. I asked if she had room for a Barcalounger, preferably with the massage option, for when I came over to watch sports on TV. She handled that question by ignoring it.

  The charge for the dinner was $325 a head, plus tip for the wait staff and valet, with Vasily picking up our tab. He told me that the profits were donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Collier County, a worthy cause, but not so worthy that I’d spend that much of my own money on the feed, no matter how tasty the tasting menu was.

  We were the first to arrive at our table. As promised, the place cards indicated that Vasily had arranged for Christopher and Lucille Knowland to be seated next to us, arranged boy-girl, boy-girl.

  Marisa sat next to me while we perused the menu left at each seat. I imagined that feasts like this were one of the prime causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as well as of the French and Russian revolutions. Somehow the British monarchy still survived, but then, the food on the island—overcooked prime rib with Yorkshire pudding with a heaping helping of bone marrow (yuk)—was apparently not as inflammatory to the peasantry.

  But this night’s menu clearly would, if made public, bring the masses to the furniture store bearing torches and pitchforks. It began:

  Passed Hors d’oeuvres

  Buffalo Mozzarella Spheres

  Tomato Water, Basil Oil, Aged Balsamic Caviar

  Smoked Duck, Candied Apple & Butternut Squash Tartlettes

  Toasted Pecans, Brown Butter, Fried Sage

  First Course Duet

  Porcini “Egg” Custard

  Lemon Sabayon, Caviar, Micro Chive

  Lobster Salad Cones

  Avocado Lime Mousse, Mango Cloud, Tarragon Pearls

  Second Course

  Heirloom Golden and Red Beet Salad

  Organic Frisée, Goat Cheese Semi Freda, Compressed Apples,

  Blood Orange Vinaigrette, Pistachio Crisp

  Third Course

  Black Truffle Vichyssoise

  Brioche Cloud, Crispy Purple Potato, Chervil,

  White Balsamic Drops

  Fourth Course

  Burled Figs & Foe

  Balsamic

  Cherries, Foie Gras Mousse, Melted Camembert

  Port Wine Gelée, Hazelnut-Lavender Thyme Ice Cream

  It went on for eight more courses. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I exclaimed. “A person could gain twenty pounds just by reading this menu.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be small portions,” Marisa said. “But still, it does seem a bit over the top.”

  “I’ll have to pass on the port wine gelée, the vodka shooter, and the bourbon jus. I don’t want to go back into rehab.”

  “I’ve never been to one of these pop-up dinners,” Marisa told me. “This is a real treat. Thanks for inviting me.”

  “I took an ancient civilization course at college,” I said. “The Roman nobility was able to eat and drink for days at a time during their bacchanals because they would take vomit breaks.”

  “Thus was born bulimia.”

  The Knowlands and the other couple at our table arrived together. Marisa and I stood as introductions were made all around. Then we took our seats, with Lucille Knowland to my right and a woman named Janet Crombie to my left.

  Lucille was an attractive woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and green eyes who appeared to be about her husband’s age. Janet was in that age range, too; she had short silver hair, smooth skin, and a warm smile. Marisa was seated between Christopher Knowland and a man who looked to be in his eighties. The courses came and went; Chef Merchant gave an informative little chat about each one, after which I still didn’t know a Tarragon Pearl from a Tomato-Horseradish Granita. By watching my tablemates, I mostly got the flatware thing right.

  I listene
d carefully when the chef got to an offering called “Forest Mushroom Dirt.” It didn’t sound promising. The sauce was something involving olive oil and shredded black truffles, which did resemble dirt but apparently was not. I bowed to peer pressure and took a bite. Quite tasty, actually.

  When we first added a fried orange roughy sandwich to the menu at The Drunken Parrot, the wholesaler told me that the fish’s original name was “slimehead.” Maybe the Slimehead Fishermen’s Association hired an advertising agency to rebrand the product. Imagine a waiter saying, “And our fish special this evening is slimehead with a nice lemon butter sauce.”

  Sell much?

  Eventually it was eleven p.m. and our three-hour excursion through the Land of Culinary Excess was complete. As Marisa had predicted, the courses were small, but they did add up to gluttony, with a raging case of gout not out of the question. Chef Merchant got a standing ovation from those of us who could still stand, and we all agreed that we’d had a marvelous time.

  Because of the seating arrangement, I hadn’t been able to interact with Christopher Knowland beyond our initial introduction, but that was okay. The purpose of the evening was to meet him in a proper venue, not to begin outlining my real estate deal with a Sharpie on my linen napkin. That would come later.

  As Marisa and I waited for the valet to bring back the Cobra, we turned on our cell phones. We both had voice mails.

  Hers was from a client who’d decided to make an offer on a house. Mine was from Naples Police Chief Wade Hansen informing me that someone else was dead.

  33.

  THE PERPETUAL PAR THREE

  Corpse number five was none other than Naples Mayor Charles Beaumont. A shocking development, and I’m hard to shock. It was up close and personal now.

  His wife, Helen, found him while Marisa and I were pigging out at the pop-up dinner party in the furniture store. Hizzoner was lying on the floor of the garage of their home in Royal Harbor. The garage door was closed and the engine of his 1953 MG TD was running. Charles told Helen he was going into the garage to do some work on the car, which was his baby.

  Helen told the two uniformed officers who responded to her 9-1-1 call that her husband would never kill himself, and she repeated that to a detective. He was looking forward to playing in the member-guest tournament at the Olde Naples Country Club that very weekend, she said. He and his former Yale roommate had won last year. Apparently that proved her point: Any true golfer would wait until after the tournament to do himself in, especially if he was the defending champ.

  Friday morning, I met with Hansen in his office at police headquarters. There didn’t seem to be a reason anymore to stay away from the building, now that we weren’t trying to hide my identity from Vasily. I’d not gotten the idea that he and Charles Beaumont were good friends, but he was clearly shaken. The murders had gotten too close for comfort and indicated that the bad guys had become bolder. Hansen told me that a man named Henry Thurgood, the deputy mayor and retired chairman of a Des Moines bank, would be acting mayor until the next election.

  Thurgood, who was in his late seventies, would be told that Mayor Beaumont had died of natural causes, and, of course, nothing about our murder investigation. He had accepted the deputy mayor’s job with the understanding that he’d have no official duties whatsoever. He obviously had no idea that events would place him in the mayor’s chair, and he was panicked by the thought that he’d actually have to show up every day and make decisions on issues he knew nothing about. Hansen told me he’d assured the new mayor not to worry because he could just rubber-stamp city council decisions and let department heads do the heavy lifting.

  Hansen would invent a reason that the police department needed funding for confidential projects from the mayor’s discretionary budget. Perhaps the police department had an antiterrorism task force, secret so as not to frighten the citizenry, and the late Charles Beaumont had signed off on the funding, he’d tell the new hizzoner. Something like that.

  After the meeting with Hansen, I called Vasily with the news. He, too, was shocked. Then he updated me about our real estate project.

  “My people are preparing all the documents needed to set up our venture,” Vasily said.

  “Who are your people?”

  “For this sort of business, I use a law and accounting firm in Brighton Beach. They will create false government filings and anything else we’ll need.”

  Great. I’d been on the right side of the law as a consultant to the former mayor and the police chief, but now I was about to become a party to an investment fraud using documents created by the Russian Mafia and its minions.

  That would only be an issue if we failed to solve the crimes, or if Christopher Knowland was not one of the murderers. If he wasn’t, he’d be very upset when he discovered that my investment project was as phony as my identity. He would make every effort to have Frank Chance put in prison for a very long time, or in the ground in perpetuity. And wherever Frank Chance went, Jack Starkey followed.

  CHARLES BEAUMONT’S obituary began on page one of the Naples Daily News Sunday edition. It reported that he was born in Indianapolis and educated at Yale and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. After serving as a naval officer aboard a destroyer in the North Atlantic, he went to work for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, starting as a salesman and ending up as chief executive officer. He and Helen bought a vacation home in Naples forty years ago, and became full-time residents ten years ago. They had two sons, a daughter, and seven grandchildren.

  Vasily and I attended Charles Beaumont’s memorial service at Trinity by the Cove, a little white Episcopal Church in Port Royal. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Every Sunday, in churches like Trinity by the Cove, wealthy parishioners gathered with the hope that Jesus was just kidding. Wouldn’t a large contribution to the church building fund allow their souls to slip through the eye of that needle on their way to the Magic Kingdom in the Sky?

  I entered the church, found Vasily seated in the back row, and slid in beside him. He nodded a greeting. I noticed a bulge under his suit coat indicating that he was packing heat. Maybe Serge was up in the belfry with a sniper rifle. If The Gang Of Three had ordered a hit on the mayor, maybe they knew we were after them.

  Helen Beaumont sat in the front row, dressed in widow’s weeds, as the minister and various family members and friends said kind words about the deceased. Kathi, his secretary, was there too. I wondered, if given a turn to speak, what Kathi would have to say about her dear departed boss. Would she talk about the good times they’d had bantering at the water cooler?

  Of course, I don’t know if there was anything improper about the relationship Kathi had with the late mayor; just because he was an old goat and she was a sexy young woman whom I never observed typing or filing when visiting the office didn’t prove that any hankypanky had occurred.

  We should always assume the best about people, Brother Timothy instructed us. Claire had said that also, and Marisa was doing her best to help me fit into the modern world of sexual equality, but I recognized that I still had a considerable distance to travel. Fortunately you don’t have to lead a perfect life to get into Heaven, the Jesuits assured me.

  There was no casket in the church because the guest of honor had been cremated. One of Beaumont’s sons told the assemblage that it was his father’s wish for his ashes to be scattered on the tee box of the fifth hole of the Olde Naples Country Club golf course. That was a 157-yard par three, he explained, where his father had once scored a hole in one using a seven iron.

  “That seems kind of creepy to me,” I whispered to Vasily. “The ashes on the golf course thing.”

  “It’s done all the time here,” he responded. “The zoning laws allow it.” Maybe the ghosts of deceased members roamed the golf courses of Naples at night, playing $2 Nassaus for all eternity.

  The church was packed. All the
members of The (still alleged, at that point) Gang Of Three were there with their wives. They were not sitting together. Christopher Knowland was with his wife, Lucille, in a middle row. Arthur Bradenton and his wife, Paige, were seated in the last row. Roland and Marcie Cox were three rows back from the front, on the left side of the sanctuary.

  After the service Vasily introduced me to the Knowlands as if he didn’t know we’d met at the pop-up dinner. The Coxes and Bradentons already had departed.

  “Arthur, this is Frank Chance,” Vasily said. “Frank is Ashley Howe’s nephew.”

  “We’ve met,” Knowland said. He turned to me. “Always a pleasure, Frank.”

  We shook hands and I gave Lucille air kisses on her cheeks, as all the right kind of people do.

  Vasily said to Knowland, “Frank has an extensive background in commercial real estate. He’s planning a project you might want to hear about before it’s made public.”

  Apparently no time or place was considered inappropriate to talk about a business deal. Vasily had been spreading the word about the project around town, always telling the person he was speaking with that the information was strictly confidential. So Knowland probably already knew about it. I could almost see dollar signs flashing in his eyes.

  “I’d like that,” Knowland told me. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, took out a silver card case, opened it, extracted a business card, and handed it to me. The card was made of cream-colored, thick paper stock, with black engraved lettering stating his name, address, and phone number. In comparison, my Chicago PD detective’s business card looked like it had been photocopied.

  “Give me a ring when you’ve got a moment,” he told me.

  Fish on.

  34.

  IF, IF, IF . . .

  I was now officially the managing partner of Gulf Development LLC, a company headquartered in the Cayman Islands. Of course there was no need to shelter profits from US taxes because there would be no profits. But I’d always wanted to visit that island nation, so maybe I’d go there for a board meeting with myself. My office wouldn’t need furniture because it was a mailbox in a postal center.