The Fitzgerald Ruse

by Mark de Castrique

  “Enlighten me,” Efird said.

  “Shift change at the police station. Our man’s got a gun, cash, and a getaway car. It wasn’t locked, was it?”

  Efird checked his notes. “Good guess. Even though it was a keyless remote, the doors were unlocked.”

  Calvin grinned with satisfaction. “No guess. If he’s there to take somebody out, then every second counts for getting away. And he probably had an accomplice holding his ID in case he was taken. He stays mum and buys his partners a little more time to blow town.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Then somebody cleaned down the motel room because they knew Lucas had been killed and the police would find it sooner or later.”

  Efird smiled. “And to follow your logic, if he was there for a hit, then who was the likely target?”

  Nakayla, Calvin, and I didn’t say anything. The target had to be Calvin or me, and Efird wasn’t going to take responsibility for a trap if the primary goal of our quarry was to kill me.

  Efird closed the file. “Sorry. Your plan’s too risky. We’re sending the photo of Hernandez to the media and all law enforcement agencies. Don’t worry. We’ll get him.”

  I made one final pitch. “At least run it by Detective Newland.”

  Efird stood. “Newland’s got his hands full this morning. So to speak. If I talk to him, I’ll mention your idea. Maybe if our way doesn’t net results, we’ll reconsider.”

  The judgment had come down. I knew there would be no reconsideration.

  “Have you got your Kimber?” Efird asked.

  I patted the pistol under my jacket. “You want that ballistic check?”

  “Yes.” He turned to Nakayla. “And I called in a sketch artist. I want you to work with him on the man with the beard. Maybe someone will recognize him.”

  Calvin took a step forward. “What about me?”

  “When we’ve got the sketch, you run it through your military channels. I’ll also send it to Blackwater. If he’s part of your Ali Baba gang, then he must have crossed paths with Lucas and Hernandez.”

  Calvin nodded, but he didn’t look happy. I knew he was disappointed that Efird had squelched our plan. If Detective Newland had been there, the outcome might have been different.

  “There’s a restaurant a couple blocks down Biltmore Avenue,” I told him. “City Bakery Café. I’ll be there as soon as we fire the Kimber.”

  Calvin smiled. “Right, Chief.” He read my mind.

  To hell with the Asheville Police Department. We didn’t need them. We’d set our plan in motion without them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “It’s you and me, Chief. That’s the way this started and that’s the way we’ll end it.” Calvin made the pronouncement hunched over the small café table, his large black hands wrapped around a cup of steaming coffee and his eyes darting between the door and me. “We’re the last of the team.”

  I held a glass of fresh orange juice. My circuitry didn’t need a jolt of caffeine. “It’s more than us. Ethel Barkley and Amanda Whitfield deserve justice as well. We’ll need help watching all the loose ends.”

  Calvin took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “I don’t know. Efird’s right about keeping the number of players as small as possible, especially since we’re bucking the police.”

  “I’m not bucking the police, I’m looking for the lockbox stolen from our office. That’s a legitimate case Nakayla and I are working. I’m free to hire Nathan and his company, and I’m asking you to help me as a friend.”

  “So we do everything as planned, except no police?”

  “Yes. Including putting security on Hewitt Donaldson and Ethel Barkley’s son.”

  “You really think they’re in danger?”

  I finished my juice and ran my finger around the rim of the glass. A low hum vibrated through the air. “I’ve been thinking about something Nakayla said.”

  “Yeah, she mentioned to Efird she thought Donaldson was a possible target.”

  “This was earlier, just to me.”

  Calvin’s eyes narrowed and he leaned closer. “What?”

  “She said when she yelled for Lucas to stop, he looked up and smiled.”

  “Maybe because he thought she wouldn’t shoot.”

  “Maybe. But it could have been one of those fateful moments when he saw his target and knew he couldn’t do anything. It could have struck him as funny.”

  “He’d already seen Nakayla and me in the lobby.”

  “I’m talking about Hewitt Donaldson. He was on the steps right behind you.”

  Calvin looked past me, staring back to those seconds in the Vanderbilt Atrium right before the shooting began.

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “He might not have known Donaldson by sight till he saw him drinking a beer with you.”

  “How would he have known we were meeting?”

  “Did you talk to Donaldson on the phone?”

  “Damn. I left a message from my cell.”

  Calvin opened his broad palms. “There you go. They’ve probably got an intercept on your cell. I just don’t understand why they care about the lawyer.”

  “Here’s something I haven’t told anybody, not even Nakayla. And I don’t want you saying a word in case it’s a chip we have to play.”

  Calvin nodded quickly. “Hey, man, it ain’t never getting past these lips.”

  I lowered my voice. “After we fired the ballistic test, I asked Efird to take me to the evidence room. He wouldn’t let me remove anything, but I wanted to re-examine Ethel Barkley’s copy of The Great Gatsby. There’s an underlined passage she showed me when she explained why a swastika was on her lockbox.”

  “We’ve been through that,” Calvin said.

  “Yes, but this time I noticed more. In addition to being circled, the first letter of the underlined section had a faint number one penciled over it.”

  “What had you told Efird?”

  “Just that I wanted to look at the book. I checked the inscription in the front and flipped through the pages searching for more underlined passages.”

  “Did you find any?”

  “No. But on the page after the swastika paragraph I found an equation lightly written in the margin: Z=Z.”

  “I almost didn’t get my high school diploma because of math, but even I can see that’s nuts. Of course, Z equals itself.”

  “Unless it doesn’t.” I moved my glass to the side and traced a Z on the table in front of me. “What if Z being Z was unusual because other letters didn’t equal themselves?”

  I saw understanding flicker in Calvin’s eyes.

  “A key to a code,” he said. “For some reason one of the letters remained the same.”

  “Yes. I didn’t have time to work it out with Efird watching me.”

  “You couldn’t talk him into loaning you the book?”

  I shook my head. “And break his chain of custody? Hardly. But I don’t need it. Any bookstore should have a copy.”

  “Do you want me to get it?”

  “That’s down the priority list. I’ll pick it up before tomorrow. It’s only a prop till we recover the lockbox.”

  “A prop?” Then Calvin grinned. “I get it. You have it with you when you’re digging at Beaver Lake, like the location is hidden in the book.”

  “We know it was published in 1925, way before the events in question, but I doubt Hernandez is a connoisseur of the Jazz Age.”

  “A mug like his fits better in the Stone Age.” Calvin laughed. “So, what next?”

  I glanced at my watch. A few minutes after ten. “I need to brief Hewitt Donaldson and his cousin on why I want them in protective custody, and I need to bring in Nathan Armitage to go over the plan.”

  “You want me there?”

  “No. It looks better if we part ways. Remember I’m supposed to be doing this behind your back. You should go to police headquarters and check on the artist’s sketch Nakayla’s compiling. I agree with Efird. You should run it through Baghdad.”
<
br />   “Okay.” He checked the café’s entry door for the umpteenth time. “But I hate just waiting.”

  “That’s about all I’m going to do until I dig up the decoy box tomorrow. I’ll return some calls to the press and stress that I think the man I shot killed Amanda Whitfield and Ethel Barkley. It goes against the official police theory, but it sets me up as thinking I’m out of danger.”

  “How are we going to stay in touch?”

  “You may as well reactivate your cell phone. They know you’re here. I’ll text okay when everything’s in place. You do the same when you’re at the back of my apartment building, and I’ll let you in. Those simple words won’t give anything away. We’ll wait together for Nathan’s signal that something’s going down.”

  Calvin looked unhappy. “Man, this Nathan friend of yours, what’s he got? A bunch of fat ex-cops walking through office buildings or driving through shopping center parking lots? Blackwater swill are first-rate mercenaries. They’d give Special Forces a run for their money.”

  “Nathan’s an ex-Marine who served in the First Gulf War. He’ll be straight with what he can provide. If he doesn’t have the resources, then we’ll think of something else.”

  Calvin’s hands balled into fists. “The something else should be you and me within striking distance. It’s payback time and I don’t want some rent-a-cop screwing it up.”

  Calvin and I split at the corner of Pack Square. He walked down the block to the police station, and I crossed Biltmore Avenue to my office. I regretted not calling Hewitt Donaldson earlier in the morning, because he was probably now in court for the day. Maybe Cory, his paralegal, or Shirley from Night of the Living Dead could get a message to him. He’d said his cousin Terry wanted to talk to me, so there was a chance he’d call.

  When I got off the elevator, I walked past our office, relieved that no reporters stood poised to pounce. I opened Donaldson’s door without knocking and discovered Shirley sitting behind her desk with her head tilted back parallel to the floor. She held a bottle of eye drops in one hand and pressed a tissue to her cheek with the other. My sudden entry startled her and she squeezed the soft plastic container, shooting a stream of its contents into her right eye.

  She snapped straight up, dabbing furiously as the overflow cut furrows in her chalk-white makeup. “You scared me to death.”

  “Sorry. You okay?”

  At the sound of my voice, both eyes opened and, as the old song goes, her face turned a whiter shade of pale. “Mr. Blackman. Someone tried to kill you.”

  “No kidding.” I looked myself over. “Seems like they failed.”

  “Mr. Donaldson said it was like a Wild West shootout.”

  “More like western North Carolina. Is the lord of the manor in?”

  Before Shirley could answer, a voice bellowed from somewhere around the corner. “God damn it! He’s got no right to go through my mother’s things. I don’t care what she told him to do.”

  “Family reunion?” I whispered. “I thought your boss would be in court.”

  “Cory’s there. He came back after the judge instructed the jury. A verdict won’t come till after lunch. Jurors never pass up a free meal.”

  “You dumb ass!” Donaldson’s voice rose even louder. “Someone’s willing to kill for what’s in the lockbox and you want to stop Blackman from finding out who?”

  “I love client testimonials,” I said.

  Somewhere behind Shirley a door opened. “And I heard he’s a one-legged hotdog trying to prove how tough he is. I want Blackman out of it, and if I have to get my own lawyer to remove you as executor, I will.”

  The speaker barreled into the reception area, his head still turned as he shouted his final words. Shirley looked at me. A blush rose in her cheeks, the first sign she had blood in her veins.

  The man wore a dark blue suit, and his gray hair had been plastered into a comb-over with the part below his right ear. A strong wind would have raised it like a kite. When he saw me, he froze.

  Donaldson rounded the corner and stopped behind his cousin. He winced.

  “That’s all right, Hewitt. We can’t choose our relatives.” I stepped up to Terry Barkley. He had to be in his late sixties, and he stood a few inches taller with a good fifty pounds on me. “You know, in the land of the no-legged hotdogs, the one-legged hotdog is king.”

  The big man turned so red I thought he’d go incandescent. “We’ll see about that.” He brushed past me and headed for the door.

  “You’d better take my gun,” I said. “Then maybe you’ll make it to your car.”

  He hesitated.

  “Come on, Terry,” Donaldson said. “Let’s go back to the conference room. You should at least hear what Sam has to say.”

  Barkley pivoted and took a deep breath. “He can talk all he wants, but there’s nothing wrong with that money.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” I said. “But if you’re dead, what I care about doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Donaldson’s conference room contained a single round table surrounded by six chairs equidistant from each other. Shelves of law books and framed degrees were conspicuously absent from the walls. Instead, classic album covers hung mounted behind Plexiglas panels. Bob Dylan, The Stones, The Beatles, Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, and others whose names I didn’t recognize provided Hewitt Donaldson’s credentials as a 1960s throwback.

  The three of us took chairs leaving empty ones between us. Donaldson didn’t whip out a legal pad. He leaned back and asked, “What’s the latest?”

  I kept my eyes on Barkley. He folded his arms across his chest and glared.

  “The dead man’s been identified as Evan Lucas, although he was using a fake name. He’s a former Blackwater employee, fired for reasons the company has kept secret, and a leading suspect in a case I was investigating that involved smuggling gold, ancient artifacts, and other booty out of Iraq. We believe he’s part of a team of at least three who came to Asheville in search of me, believing that I’d been a thief of thieves who absconded with one of their richest caches.”

  “Who’s we?” Barkley asked.

  “A military colleague of mine who tipped me off to their mission. He’s suggested that an ambush that killed two of our buddies and turned me into your one-legged hotdog was masterminded by this group we dubbed Ali Baba.”

  This time my reference to Barkley’s demeaning characterization of my injury forced him to look away.

  “Your mother hired me to retrieve her lockbox and return something to the heirs of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A very odd request that has led to my learning about William Dudley Pelley and The Silver Shirts.”

  Barkley leaned closer to his cousin. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. He learned it himself. He’s a detective, you idiot.”

  Barkley turned to me. “So who killed my mother?”

  “One of Lucas’ partners, a man named Manny Hernandez.”

  “And they stole my mother’s safe-deposit box?”

  “Yes. I think that happened because they saw me take it out of the bank. After they had the lockbox, they followed me to your mother’s apartment. Something had sparked their interest.”

  Barkley looked astonished. “You’re saying this is a coincidence?”

  “Not exactly. Your mother hired me because I’d solved a case with high publicity. I wasn’t a random choice, and I had to pass her palm test.”

  “My mother wasn’t mentally stable.”

  I shook my head. “But she was sharp in her own way. Very clever and very determined. The only coincidence I see is the timing of your mother’s request, that it came when I was being stalked. But then timing’s not a coincidence when the same event generates two courses of action.”

  Donaldson held up his hand. “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “I mean I don’t like coincidences. In detective work, a coincidence leads you nowhere. But I think the common event that led to the intersection of your mother and Manny
Hernandez goes back to the earlier case this summer. My name and face were in the national news. I’m sure the story played over the Internet and in the International Herald Tribune, which would be read by Americans in Iraq. They found where I was and came after me.”

  “Did you steal from them?” Barkley asked.

  “No. But the important thing is they think I did. So everything I do is viewed as confirmation of my guilt. My job is helping people learn or find things without police involvement. My actions involve snooping, spying, research, interrogating, all the things that make me look like I’m sneaking around. Hell, I am sneaking around. Toss in the fact that your mother’s lockbox has a shadowy past of its own–”

  “Wait,” objected Barkley.

  “Shut up,” Donaldson said. “Our family history’s made to order for Sam’s theory.” He signaled me to continue.

  “At first I wasn’t sure if I was dealing with two separate groups—someone after me and someone after the lockbox. But that would be a real coincidence, having two cases involving two murders. And after yesterday, I think the people after me have targeted Hewitt.”

  “Me?” Donaldson’s voice squeaked with surprise.

  “This is just conjecture, but Nakayla said Lucas smiled when he saw you on the stairs, as if he’d been looking for you.”

  “I have no idea what these people would want from me.” He pointed at his cousin. “What are you into?”

  Barkley threw up his hands. “Nothing. I just think our family’s business is nobody else’s business.”

  “Somebody’s made it their business,” I said. “And I can’t guarantee they’ll back off just because I killed one of them. I think both of you need protection, at least for a day or two while the police follow their leads.”

  “What kind of protection?” Barkley eyed me with suspicion, but the bluster behind his words had disappeared.

  “I want Armitage Security Services to give you bodyguards.”

  “Bodyguards!” Barkley shot a glance at Donaldson. “This is absurd. I’m not going to waste my money when I’ve got a double-barrel Marlin 12-gauge in the truck.”

  “I’m paying,” I said. “These are very bad people. Two of my buddies came home in body bags, and I walk on the reminder of their ruthlessness every day.”