Stefan used his combat knife to cut the name tags off the golf bags, to delay identifying the missing golfers, and put them into his pants pocket. Serge ordered the men to get out of the carts and follow him.
I later asked Vasily what Stefan reported that the men had said as they were being abducted. Bradenton and Knowland were initially too stunned to speak, but Cox, ever the attorney, had demanded to know who they were and what the hell they were doing. That conversation ended with a hard backhand across Cox’s face by Serge. Cox toppled over backward, and his friends helped him to his feet. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth. They must have thought it was a kidnapping for ransom.
The three were led through the trees and off the golf course to a white Ford Econoline van with the name of the Springtime Air Heating and Cooling Company painted on the side. Springtime Air was as real a company as was Gulf Development. The van was parked in the driveway of a house that, Vasily somehow knew, was vacant because the owners were on a cruise. Any neighbor noticing the van would think it was there on a service call.
Stefan slid open the side door of the van, which had no rear seats, and pushed the three inside. Serge got into the driver’s seat as Stefan got into the rear with the men, slid the door closed, put strips of duct tape across their eyes and mouths, and bound their wrists and ankles with the tape. This was more from habit than necessity; imagine those used-to-bes taking on a pair of Russian commandos. Stefan climbed into the front passenger seat and they made the hourlong drive to Everglades City.
40.
DROWNED AND CONFUSED RATS
Vasily and I were waiting at the dock when Elena’s airboat arrived from the mainland. Now the sky was overhung with dark clouds, and a light drizzle had become a hard rain.
Elena was wearing a yellow rain slicker, and her long blonde hair was awash and wind blown; on her, wet and wild looked good. Her five passengers were unprotected and soaked. Vasily and I were wearing slickers like Elena’s, which he had in a closet in the cabin.
He also had shown me a complete array of fishing gear, and all manner of firearms: a virtual armory of pistols and rifles in a gun safe, some meant for hunting, and some more suitable for holding off a waterborne assault. One of the long guns was a Dragunov, the superb Russian sniper rifle chambered for a 7.62 mm cartridge. With that rifle in the right hands, which were Serge’s, a waterborne assault on Vasily’s cabin would not reach the dock.
As Elena powered down the fan and Stefan tied up the mooring lines, Serge removed the duct tape covering the three men’s eyes and mouths and gestured for them to stand up and get out of the boat. The tape already had been cut from their wrists and ankles.
Blinking in the sunlight, they stepped stiffly onto the dock, Stefan assisting them, and looked around. The term “drowned rats” came to mind. Correction: drowned and confused rats.
They spotted Vasily and me standing there. Bradenton angrily asked Vasily, “What the fuck is this all about?”
Knowland looked at me and said, “Does this mean our real estate deal is off, Frank?”
Points for grace under pressure.
Cox glared at us and said, “You’re both in a world of shit. I guaran-fucking-tee you that.”
Which might prove to be absolutely correct, depending upon what happened next.
“We’ll go into my cabin, gentlemen, and all your questions will be answered,” Vasily told them. “If you’re smart, you’ll answer ours as well.”
We walked in a line from the dock to a stairway leading up to the cabin’s front door and went inside. Each man was put into a separate bedroom. Before shutting them in, Vasily told them to strip off their wet clothing and to put on the tee shirts and sweatpants he’d laid out on the beds for the men when the rain began—good thing; naked was not a good look for those guys. Elena collected the wet clothing and put it in a dryer off the kitchen.
Vasily also said they could use the bathroom in the hallway, and they all did. It’s axiomatic in the life of an older man: never pass up the chance for a potty break, unless you are wearing an adult diaper.
The hurricane shutters were down over the outside of the bedroom windows so that the three men couldn’t try to break out. That was unnecessary, because an escape attempt was pointless; there was nowhere to go on the island, and no way to get off, because I’d seen Elena take the airboat key.
We let Arthur Bradenton, Roland Cox, and Christopher Knowland sit alone in their bedrooms for two hours. That was standard police interrogation technique. During that time, anger turned to confusion, and then to worry, and finally to despair. That was the time to begin the questioning.
While the most unlikely group of perps I’d ever come across marinated in their fear and loathing, Elena served Vasily, Serge, Stefan, and me a lunch of cold poached salmon, caviar, and a beet salad she’d brought in an Igloo cooler, and then joined us. Vasily had white wine with his lunch, and Serge and Stefan drank vodka, passing the bottle between them, as they might in a foxhole on a battlefield. Elena and I had Diet Cokes. I wondered if any other hunting and fishing cabin in the Everglades had a fully stocked wine cellar.
I thought again about the possibility that our captives had nothing to do with the murders of Eileen Stephenson, Lester Gandolf, Bob Appleby, Tess Johannsen, Charles Beaumont, and Gilbert Merton. If they were not involved, then the killer was still out there, and Vasily, Serge, Stefan, and I could be charged with kidnapping and assault. Elena could be charged as an accessory. That is, unless Vasily fed the fellows to the gators. Which, given the alternative, maybe wasn’t such a bad idea.
So a lot depended upon my interrogation skills. The cop I used to be was very good at it.
Confessions obtained under these circumstances would not hold up in court. But I hoped I could get them to admit to their crimes, and that the threat of publicly exposing them for the evil bastards that they were would prompt them to do as I asked. Which was to order their hired assassin to take me out. I’d be waiting at Ash’s house with my Russians. We’d attempt to take the hired gun alive. In my experience, men like that would inevitably give up their employer in return for a reduced sentence.
It was not a foolproof plan. Foolhardy was more like it. Way too many moving parts and unsubstantiated assumptions. But, at that point, it was all I had. So damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and hope the good guys don’t get sunk.
41.
THE 305 MAN
I decided to start with Christopher Knowland because I knew him from our almost real estate deal. I opened his bedroom door and went in carrying a folding chair. He was sitting on the side of the bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. I opened the chair, placed it opposite him, and sat, waiting for him to speak first.
Suspects usually find this disconcerting and sometimes offer information that they otherwise would not. Or sometimes they just sat there in silence too. In those cases, the interrogation turns into a Zen retreat until one of us has to use the bathroom.
Knowland sat up, looked at me, and asked, “Who the fuck are you, really?”
“Your worst nightmare,” I told him. That was overly melodramatic, but Jack Stoney had said it in one of the books, and it worked for him.
Then Knowland asked, “What the hell do you want from us?”
“I’ve already spoken with your buddies,” I said. “They told me all about what you three have been up to. The Gang Of Three. Isn’t that what you call yourselves?”
Standard technique for interrogating multiple suspects: Make them think their buddy or buddies have already ratted them out, so what have they got to lose by admitting their crimes?
“I don’t know anything about any kind of gang,” Knowland told me.
“We’re way past that, Christopher,” I said, trying to make him feel, by not calling him Chris, as if his mother were scolding him. “Horse has left the barn. Train has departed the station. Flight has pushed away from the gate. Ship has sailed. Cavalry has left the fort. I’ve got more of those sayings, but
you get the point.”
“I’m not admitting anything,” he said. “But if you let us go, we won’t tell the police about all this. It’s not too late to work something out in a businesslike way. Find a win-win, so to speak.”
I stared at him long enough to make him avert his eyes. “Okay, here’s the bottom line,” I said. Businessmen like us always got right to that. “I know for a fact you and your pals ordered the murders of Eileen Stephenson, Lester Gandolf, Bob Appleby, Charles Beaumont, and Gilbert Merton. A young woman named Tess Johannsen was collateral damage. One more victim and you make the serial killer top-ten list. What I don’t know is why, and who you hired to do the hits.”
Knowland stood up and faced me. So I stood up too. Couldn’t have him talking down to me.
“I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, poking me in the chest with his right index finger. I let that go; a guy I was questioning once did that and when he got the finger back, it was broken.
“I don’t know what Art or Rollie might have told you, but if they said we were involved in any murders, it’s not true. They were just telling you what you want to hear so you’ll let us go.”
Not bad. The man could think on his feet. I’ll bet he was good in negotiations. He’d recovered nicely and was clearly not ready to tap my shoulder to end the match. So I brought out the big gun. I jammed my index finger into his chest, hard, which backed him up a step, and told him, “Florida carries out its executions by lethal injection. Maybe you’ve heard that didn’t go so well the last few times. Something about a shortage of the right chemicals causing lingering, excruciating death.”
Which was true, in Florida and in several other states. Clearly Knowland did know about this because he finally lost his composure; his lower lip was quivering, his breathing became rapid and shallow, and his hands were shaking badly. I thought he might be having a heart attack. If he did, I’d have to start over with one of the other guys, and the gators could have a nice lunch. And if the gators didn’t get him, the Burmese pythons taking over the Everglades surely would.
He sat down on the bed and was silent. Finally he said, without looking at me, “We didn’t plan to kill anyone. We really didn’t.”
Fish in the boat.
As I was walking out of Knowland’s bedroom, I turned to him and had to ask: “Just between us, how’d I do as a Ponzi scheme real estate scam artist?”
He smiled. “You were good. I’d say you have a future as a felon.”
I left Knowland and used the same technique on Art Bradenton and then on Rollie Cox. Vasily was sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch of the cabin, sipping cognac and smoking a cigar. Elena cleaned up the kitchen and then sat on the couch doing something on her iPhone. Stefan and Serge were outside somewhere. I heard the occasional report of a firearm; maybe they were honing their sniper skills by shooting endangered species, or drug smugglers.
Bradenton held out the longest, but in the end I was able to cobble together the strange story of three men who had lost their power and influence in their worlds, and, in their dotage, had discovered that the ultimate power was the power over life and death.
This is a summary of the amazing tale they told me, the truth being stranger than any fictional tale Bill Stevens ever cooked up:
About two years ago, after a round of golf, the three men were in their country club bar, having drinks and playing high-stakes gin rummy. Cox told his pals about how the Naples Department of Public Works had started trimming the banyan trees lining the street his house was on in order to prevent their branches from interfering with overhead electrical power lines.
Cox sent a letter to city officials objecting to the trimming because he believed it was damaging the trees. His request to halt the trimming was denied. He said he was angry about “being pushed around by the city.”
Either Knowland or Cox, no one remembered which one, suggested that they take some action. Something not traceable to them, which would get back at the bastards. They all liked that idea. Two days later, during their next golf game, Bradenton said he’d been thinking about that and had an idea. The decision to go forward with it gained unanimous approval.
Late one night—they were rookies because it was not three a.m.—they broke in to the Naples Public Works Department garage, let the air out of all of the truck tires, used cans of spray paint to put slogans on a wall as teenagers might—NDPW Sucks! Bite Me Dickheads! Bigfoot Was Here—and broke the blades of a few of the offending tree-trimming saws.
It was, to them, nothing more than a schoolboy prank, akin to strewing toilet paper over a teacher’s tree. They knew that it would do nothing to prevent the trimming of the banyan trees on Pirates Cove Drive, or anywhere else in the city. But it felt good. It was fun. More fun than they could recall having in a long time.
In their prime, they could exert power and influence. Now they were toothless old lions, and no one heeded their roars. The break-in was to them a sign that they were still alive and kicking, still players, albeit on a smaller stage. But players nonetheless. Then they forgot about it.
Four months after the Department of Public Works break-in, Cox decided he wanted to buy a vacant lot adjacent to his house so he could build a tennis court. A man named Theodore “Teddy” Lundquist, a land speculator, owned the land. He refused to sell the lot, even though Cox kept upping his offer until it was about a third more than market value. There was a real estate boom in Naples, and Lundquist apparently wanted to hold the property until its value went even higher, Cox said. Or maybe he had his own plans for the land and didn’t want to sell at any price.
Cox said that he was tired of being jacked around. Recalling how good it felt to exact revenge upon the DPW, even if it was just a minor prank, they decided to hire a private detective to put Lundquist under surveillance, under the theory that everyone did something wrong sometime. In my experience, that was true.
After two weeks of surveillance, the detective reported that Lundquist, who was married, sometimes frequented a gay bar in Fort Myers. A messenger delivered an envelope to his house containing eight-by-ten color photographs of him entering and exiting the gay bar, with a neon sign in the window saying “Adonis’s Cave” clearly visible.
There was an anonymous note in the envelope telling Lundquist that if he didn’t immediately sell all of his vacant lots in Collier County—that way, Cox’s identity was protected—copies of the photos would be given to his wife and mailed to his friends.
Over the next three months, Lundquist sold all of his properties, including the vacant lot to Rollie Cox. That was the most fun you could have with your clothes on, one of them said. It went on like that for a while, the occasional dirty trick in order to gain a result they wanted. They felt they were maybe onto something that had possibilities beyond what they’d done so far.
In their opinion, men like themselves had once ruled America, and America was a better place for it. But now, the nation was changing, had changed, until it was hardly recognizable, at least to them and men like them. Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, Asians, women wanting to call the shots, gays wanting to get married . . . The Great American Melting Pot had become a cesspool of groups who no longer appreciated the fact that this great nation had been built by the likes of Arthur Bradenton, Christopher Knowland, and Roland Cox.
Bradenton’s granddaughter was majoring in women’s studies at an elite Eastern college; there also were majors in Asian studies, Hispanic studies, and black studies. No Muslim studies, but it was being considered “by the liberal pinko administration,” Bradenton told me, a look of utter disgust on his face. Of course there was no white male studies program. He said that his granddaughter had taken a course called LGBT Culture; he had to ask his wife what that meant, and was horrified when she explained it to him. His son and daughter-in-law were paying all that tuition to have their daughter brainwashed! The country was going to hell in a handbasket!
Rollie, Art, and Chris decided to organi
ze their activities by forming a club. In a town of exclusive clubs, theirs would be the most exclusive of all. They named it The Old White Men. That was Cox’s idea. That term was usually meant pejoratively; to them, it would be a badge of honor.
Later, even though I knew it would be like talking to monkeys at the Lincoln Park Zoo, I told them that old white men weren’t doing such a great job of running the country anymore, so it might be good to have some new blood in charge. None of them agreed with that, not even in extremis, as they were.
Now that they were an official strike force for their kind, fighting for the dignity and honor of old white men everywhere, they gained focus and confidence, and things began to escalate.
About six months before I entered the investigation, Bradenton found out that Eileen Stephenson was spreading nasty gossip about his wife, Paige. Something about Paige being “trailer trash” before she married Art. In fact, Paige came from a poor family in rural Minnesota, and the family did live in a double-wide for a time after her father lost his job at the grain silo. She met Art when they attended the University of Minnesota, she on a volleyball scholarship.
Something had to be done. It was decided that Eileen needed a good scaring. The private detective hired to trail Teddy Lundquist said he couldn’t do anything like that. He could lose his license. But he gave them a telephone number in Miami.
The Old White Men never met the man who answered the phone. They never knew his name. He asked who had referred them to him, and was satisfied with the answer. He said that his fee was $50,000, plus expenses, for what he termed “a routine assignment.” If “complications” or “unforeseen difficulties” developed, the fee would increase significantly.
Once an assignment had begun, the man told them, it could not be canceled. He said that if he accepted an assignment from them, and he heard that they had discussed his work, his very existence, with anyone, and he had ways of hearing, there would be “serious consequences.”
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