Detective Fiction

by William Wells

  I pointed out a street cutting through the middle of the buildings and said, “There will be a four-block, brick-paved main street lined with fourteen buildings, palm trees, and gaslights. Strada Place will be the first of its kind in Collier County.”

  “What’s the projected cost?” he asked.

  I took my seat at the table, ready for that key question. With the background Vasily’s people had provided, it was like a slow-pitch softball coming right into the strike zone.

  “We haven’t dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s yet, I answered, “but we hope to bring it in at approximately $120 mill.”

  More business lingo. I was playing Christopher Knowland like B.B. King’s Gibson, Lucille.

  “Well now,” Knowland said, rubbing his chin, “that’s pretty aggressive. Higher than the usual per-square-foot cost around here.”

  Ready for that, too, thanks to Vasily’s tutorial.

  “It’ll be higher quality than any other development in the region,” I said. “We think this market will support it.”

  “Do you have the land?”

  “Not yet. I need to get our financing in place before we make an offer. But the parcel I want has been for sale for two years. I’m confident I can buy it right.”

  I pushed a stack of documents and bound reports toward him. “Here’s everything you need for your due diligence. The minimum investment is $500 K for one unit.”

  We big-time businessmen always said “mill” for million and “K” for thousand. I didn’t know what we said for hundred, but then, that was chump change to guys like us.

  I continued: “We have four units still unsubscribed. If you’re not interested, the partners will buy them. Think it over and let me know. We’d love to have a pro like you on our team.”

  Just to set the hook, I added, “Time is of the essence.”

  In any important business transaction, time is always of the essence. If you snooze, you lose. Frank Chance, super salesman. After this, I might switch to aluminum siding or used cars, maybe win salesman of the month and get a set of steak knives. Or demo juicers at Costco.

  Knowland stood, picked up the materials, and said, “I’ll have my people look over these documents. I’ll get back to you by next week at the latest.”

  It seemed that everyone had people to do their bidding except me. No, that was not entirely correct. For as long as I rented space in the Executive Suites, I had Leila. I also had Sam Longtree with his shotgun; Martin, the butler; and Suzette, the cook. And there was Joe, the cat who always had my back. Maybe I should have a staff meeting so that everyone was on the same page about my daily needs.

  37.

  GREEN IS GOOD

  The next several days passed uneventfully. I drove to Fort Myers Beach to check on the bar and my houseboat, went for runs on the beach, washed and waxed my car, had dinner with Marisa, met with Vasily, and briefed Hansen on recent developments with the investigation.

  It was time for Joe’s annual exam and shots at his veterinarian’s office in Fort Myers Beach. He must have heard me calling for the appointment because, when it was time to leave Ash’s house, he hid. It took me twenty minutes to locate him lying on a shelf in the kitchen pantry.

  I picked him up and said, “Let’s go, buddy. We do this every year. We’ll stop at Dairy Queen on the way home and I’ll get you a vanilla cone.”

  He looked at me and meowed. Did that mean he wanted sprinkles on it?

  KNOWLAND CALLED and said, “Count me in for the last four units.”

  He was trusting me, basically a stranger, with two million smackeroos. What a great country this is.

  Then Vasily called to say that Knowland’s $2 million had been wired to Gulf Development’s account at Cayman Islands National Bank.

  “How does it feel to be a new multimillionaire?” he asked.

  “Frank Chance is one already,” I reminded him.

  “Ah, but this is real money, and you have access to it. Are you tempted, even a little bit?”

  “I spent my career in law enforcement chasing people who yielded to temptation.”

  “My Uncle Vasily, I took his name for my new identity, used to say that there is no one more dangerous than an honest man. Of course, that was from his perspective as head of our family business in Brighton Beach.”

  “A Russian godfather.”

  “He loved those movies,” Vasily said. “As you know, there are plenty of dishonest policemen. No offense. We had some on the payroll in New York. Still do, I suppose. I’m not in that anymore.”

  “I knew some cops like that in Chicago. Not many. Nothing compared to the politicians.”

  “My family once considered moving into Chicago to take on the Italians. In the end, we didn’t because, as you said, the politicians were already stealing most everything.”

  “You have access to that Cayman Islands account too.”

  He laughed.

  “We want more from Christopher Knowland than his money. We want his freedom. Or his life. With or without the criminal justice system.”

  You can take the boy out of the Russian Mafia but . . .

  I NOW was ready to twist the screws on Christopher Knowland, who was, of course, the only investor in my Strada Place project.

  As a first step, I called him to say I’d approached the owner of the land, and we’d agreed on a price I could make work and still get the ROI I needed. ROI. Return on investment. I was showing off. I said it was time for my project manager to file an application with the city zoning board for initial approval of our development. I’d keep him informed.

  “I like that you’re moving forward quickly,” he told me. “Time is money.”

  I thought time was of the essence. Live and learn.

  As A second step, Vasily soon instructed me to call Knowland again, this time to report that the project had hit a snag.

  “One of the zoning board members has expressed a concern about the environmental impact of Strada Place,” I said. “This guy seems like he’ll oppose it, whether or not the project is in compliance with all the rules and regs.”

  “Another one of those green-is-good tree huggers,” Knowland said with disgust. “I ran into them all the time in my business.”

  I remembered that Vasily had told me Knowland had allegedly bribed a Naples city councilman to get his marina project approved. This was a different guy who, Vasily said, was a straight arrow who could not be bribed. I would pretend to try, then tell Knowland I’d been turned down, so the project was stalled. A short time later, Vasily would make certain Knowland knew that I was running a Ponzi scheme and he’d lost his investment. Then I’d wait for the assassin.

  Knowland thought for a moment, then asked, “What’s the guy’s name?”

  As Vasily had also instructed, I said, “Gilbert Merton.”

  “Maybe you can reason with him,” Knowland said. By which I knew he meant bribe. That part of the scam was working.

  “I’ll try, and let you know how it goes.”

  But before I could pretend to bribe Gilbert Merton, he turned up dead.

  38.

  HIT AND RUN

  “You and Count Dickbrain could be charged as accessories to murder,” Hansen told me when I went to his office in police headquarters to talk about the death of Gilbert Merton. I’d briefed him earlier about our bribery scheme.

  Although he didn’t reveal it to me, Knowland must have known that Merton was an honest man and decided that, because the zoning board member couldn’t be bribed to allow our project to go forward, he needed to be dead.

  Hansen was justifiably very angry. Vasily and I had cost a man his life. He was right about the possible criminal charge, but I knew he wouldn’t follow up on that because everything we’d been working on together would be made public.

  Merton was hit by some kind of vehicle while riding his bicycle at seven a.m. on Orange Blossom Road, near his house in a gated community. His wife said he was an avid cyclist who rode every morn
ing at that time. The force of the impact broke his neck and multiple other bones and did severe internal damage. The driver did not stop.

  Naples has many bicyclists on the roads. There aren’t many bike paths, mainly narrow lanes beside some roadways, and none on others. That, combined with the many older drivers who don’t see or hear well and sometimes hit the accelerator instead of the brake pedal, causes many car-bike collisions every year. And the cars always win.

  Sometimes the motorists panic and don’t stop, or don’t even realize they’ve hit someone. A woman driving an SUV hit a pedestrian a year or so ago, I’d read in the newspaper, and dragged him a quarter mile without realizing it until she stopped for a red light and other drivers began honking at her and pointing beneath her car.

  “Sure, it could have been an accident,” Hansen told me as he sat behind his desk, clicking a cigar lighter in the shape of a pistol on and off repeatedly. At least he wasn’t pointing it at me as I sat in a side chair.

  “But I don’t think so. He rode his bike at the same time every day on the same route. Someone watching him would know that. I’m convinced that you and Vasily set him up for murder.”

  “I have no excuse, chief,” I told him. “I thought Knowland would go with the bribery story, and, when that didn’t work, he’d come after me, not Merton.”

  “I think we’ve gotta call in the FBI,” Hansen said. “This whole thing’s way out of control . . .”

  “You can do that. But there’s not enough evidence for a conviction. There’s no way these old goats are doing the hits themselves. But, with Merton, I’m now 100 percent certain that these are the bad guys. And that they’ve hired a pro for the wet work.”

  “I agree, I guess,” Hansen said.

  “But if FBI agents parachute in and run around town in those blue crime scene jackets with those big yellow FBI letters on the back, The Gang Of Three will simply shut down their operation. Their hit man will disappear. Give me a few more days.”

  Hansen stared at me, opened a bottom desk drawer, took out a bottle of Jameson and a shot glass, tossed back a drink, and said, “Okay. Then I’m calling in the feds.”

  As I drove back to Ash’s house, I reviewed the situation. So far, the scoreboard read: bad guys 6, used-to-be homicide detective 0.

  Maybe Ash could be counted as collateral damage, if the excitement of being peripherally involved in my investigation had brought on her heart attack. No way to know.

  There was no time to continue with my elaborate real estate scam with Christopher Knowland, sweet as it was. No time to lounge around town as Frank Chance, waiting for the next thing to happen. No time to find out what Detective Jack Stoney would do. It was time for some old-fashioned, Chicago-style, kickass-police work.

  I wasn’t carrying a badge, so annoying restrictions like the Constitution of the United States and the State of Florida criminal code didn’t hamper me. No evidence I gathered without following proper procedures would be admissible in court, but maybe I could get the three men to incriminate themselves in some kosher way. And, if not, maybe Vasily had his own backup plan for bringing the men to justice, Russian Mafia style. I wouldn’t agree to that, but Vasily might not ask for my vote.

  VASILY AND I met at his house and worked out a revised plan. I called Hansen and told him we were going to take a new approach, and this time he really didn’t want to know what it was, despite what he’d said earlier about wanting to know everything.

  If the revised plan worked, he would be called in to arrest the killers, I told Hansen. If it didn’t, he’d be insulated from whatever Vasily and I had done. Put that way, Hansen reluctantly agreed.

  To pull it off, I needed a team of my own. Serge Chuikov, Vasily’s driver, and Stefan Arsov, a member of Vasily’s boat crew who had once fended off Caribbean pirates with a .50-caliber machine gun, had served together in the same Russian army unit. Serge was a sniper, and Stefan was his spotter. Targets who thought they were safe because they were 1,200 yards away found out that they were wrong. Head shots every time, according to Vasily.

  After their army service, Dmitri Ivanovich, Vasily’s father, recruited them as enforcers for the family business in Brighton Beach. They were hard men who’d done bad things and were fully prepared to do so again. When Vasily set himself up in Naples, they went to work for him, just in case muscle was needed.

  Now they reported to me.

  39.

  A LONG PAR FOUR

  My commando team and I were gathered poolside at Vasily’s house to plan the kidnappings.

  Elena had ferried the three of us to the island from the mainland. I got the feeling from their body language that Elena and Serge were very good friends, and that it would be a very bad idea for anyone to attempt to cut in on that relationship. Serge and Elena, Stefan and Lena. Colleagues with benefits, fishing from the company dock. Maybe that was part of the Atocha Securities employee benefits package. It sure would beat dental insurance.

  Vasily was a member of the Olde Naples Country Club. He told me that Bradenton, Knowland, and Cox played golf there together three days a week, with an eight a.m. tee time. Various members sometimes joined them as a fourth.

  Vasily booked himself into their next tee time because there was no group before or immediately after them. No witnesses. With rain threatening, the course was not crowded, but that would not deter avid golfers like our boys unless the rain became a downpour, with lightning in the area, Vasily told me. He’d never played with them before, but it would not be considered unusual to have the pro shop find a member a game. The morning of the game, just before the tee time, Vasily would call the pro shop, make an excuse, and drop out, leaving the three of them alone on the course.

  The fifteenth hole was a long par four, with a stand of pine trees and flowering bushes blocking the view from the houses that lined the course. That’s where they’d be taken. The par three fifth hole, where Charles Beaumont’s ashes were scattered, would have been a fitting place to bring down his killers, but it was not secluded enough.

  AT SEVEN fifty-five, Vasily called the pro shop to drop out. He made the call from his cabin in the Everglades, where he and I were waiting. He used the cabin for hunting and fishing.

  At zero dark thirty that morning, he had picked me up at Ash’s house and we had driven in his silver Range Rover to Everglades City, an hour south of Naples. His driver was otherwise engaged that morning.

  Everglades City is a small fishing village eighty miles west of Miami with a colorful history. The remoteness of the city and the labyrinthine maze of mangrove swamps in the area known as the Ten Thousand Islands have always been perfect for smuggling operations between South Florida and the Caribbean and Central and South America: endangered animal species in the early 1900s, rum running during Prohibition, and a flood of drugs coming into South Florida in the 1970s and ’80s, when marijuana smuggling became the mainstay of the local economy. In two raids in 1983 and ’84, DEA agents arrested 80 percent of the male population of Everglades City. I learned all that from a Miami DEA agent who dated a friend of Marisa’s.

  Elena had been waiting for us at a small wooden dock in an airboat, which was the only way to traverse the marsh grass and open water to the small island where Vasily’s cabin was located. She was perched on a raised platform in front of a large fan that powered the boat, a flat-bottomed aluminum skiff. Fan-Tastic would have been a good name for the boat.

  When Vasily and I stepped aboard, Elena handed us headsets to cover our ears against the loud noise the fan would make. We sat in molded fiberglass chairs bolted to the deck in front of Elena’s platform. She flipped a switch that powered up the fan, Vasily untied the mooring lines, pushed us away from the dock, and we were off, skimming over the surface of the vast River of Grass, as the Everglades is called.

  The morning sun was burning off an early fog; as the curtain of mist rose from the landscape, all kinds of flora and fauna came into sharp focus as if I were watching the scene in a snow globe.
The eyeballs of partially submerged gators watched us pass.

  I’d never been on an airboat before. It was a lot of fun and almost made me forget our serious mission. After a fifteen-minute ride, Elena pulled us up to a wooden dock on Vasily’s small island, which was mostly a mangrove swamp with a central mound of solid ground.

  The cabin was a one-story, cedar-sided structure, with a green tin roof, mounted on tall wooden pilings. There were a number of these cabins in the Everglades, some more than 100 years old. They were grandfathered in. New construction was prohibited. From the outside, the cabin looked like a modest hunting-and-fishing retreat, but the interior was tastefully decorated and furnished in rod-and-gun-club style.

  The place was so remote that it would be a perfect place to kill someone and feed the body to the gators. Had Vasily’s people, on his orders, ever done that? It was not unimaginable. He was, after all, born into a family who presumably solved personnel problems that way. I wondered again whether Vasily considered that to be an option for The Gang Of Three, if our new plan didn’t work out. And what if I proved to be a problem for him?

  WHEN THE Gang Of Three teed off on the fifteenth hole in a light drizzle, Serge and Stefan, dressed in black tee shirts and black commando pants and boots, were waiting in the trees. Stefan gave Vasily regular reports on a cell phone throughout the operation, and Vasily told me what was happening.

  When the three men were on the fairway, ready to hit their second shots, the Russians walked up to them, holding pistols at their sides. The pistols were for shock-and-awe value only. The Russians certainly didn’t need weapons to handle their targets.

  Serge ordered the three men to drive their carts toward the trees. He hopped onto the back of one of the carts, where the golf bags were strapped on, and Stefan got onto the other. Serge told Cox, who was driving one of the carts with Bradenton riding shotgun, and Knowland, alone in the other, to drive off the fairway and into the woods, where the carts would be hidden from view.