The Quick Adios (Times Six) (Alex Rutledge Mystery Series)

by Tom Corcoran

  “Does anything else feel scary to you?”

  “No, I’m just afraid that someone will hurt my dad.”

  Beth drove me to Dredgers Lane so I could change my shirt and grab my camera bag. Her white Audi A5 coupe is a stunning car. I had a ball driving it to Orlando to visit my brother before Christmas. Even Corvette drivers stared at it, and pedestrians would stop to let it pass so they could grab a second look. I wasn’t sure it was the car we needed for a low-key clandestine run.

  Stuck at the light at White and Virginia, in front of Sandy’s Café where we started our day, Beth’s phone rang.

  “Another brunch,” I said.

  She handed her phone to me. The call was from PRIVATE NUMBER. I gave my name and explained that Detective Watkins was driving and couldn’t talk just then.

  “This is Max Saunders, Rutledge. We’ve got a puzzler on our end. We can’t find the woman, but my squad is on the move. You two will know the minute we see her.”

  “Agent Saunders, we’ve pulled together some fragments of information since we saw you. We think a man named Robert Fonteneau is mixed up with Ocilla Ramirez. His nickname in a Canadian prison was Bobby Fuck No.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rutledge. Where would the FBI be without citizens like you?” The call went silent.

  Screw you, too, I thought.

  I explained Max’s message as we rolled east on Flagler, in style.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Keep going and take a left just past Grace Lutheran.”

  “The fundamental premise of this idea?”

  “We’ll take Dubbie Tanner’s car instead of yours.”

  “I get it,” she said. “My car stands out in certain neighborhoods.”

  “We might also need supporting actors.”

  We found The Aristocrats doing yard work. I wanted to whip out my camera to gather evidence of their labors, but I knew they were embarrassed to be found with hedge clippers and a push-it-your-damned-self lawnmower. We chose to ignore their chore and they chose to help us out.

  “You have made a wise decision,” said Fecko.

  Wiley Fecko dug into their wardrobe archive to find us suitable camouflage for cruising. Dubbie Tanner had to remove four cardboard boxes, a few stained towels, many empty soft drink cans, and a bulging black plastic garbage bag from the back seat of his Caprice. He spent most of five minutes in there with a wet/dry Shop-Vac, paper towels and a squirt bottle of Windex.

  From that point onward the game got dirty.

  24.

  We rolled west on Flagler for four blocks, turned left onto Government Road, then passed the entrance marker for KEY WEST SALT PONDS - LITTLE HAMACA CITY PARK.

  “We get complaints from back in here,” said Beth Watkins. “Homeless dudes in drunken fights, and they use sharp objects. Ironically, all the 911 calls come from cell phones.”

  “Blood brothers at noon,” said Wiley Fecko. “Broken bottles and mortal enemies by midnight. I lived the booze opera too long.”

  “There was one brawl at the paintball field,” said Beth. “A man was tagged during a war scenario, but he refused to vacate the field. The war turned into fists and rocks. One of the brawlers was an Eastern European already on probation for a bar scuffle. He was deported.”

  “Does that make me feel safer?” I said.

  “Wasn’t my decision, Alex.”

  “Sorry about this heat in the car,” said Dubbie Tanner. “I’ve got the A/C on four-thirty.”

  Beth turned up her palms. I explained about four windows down and thirty miles-per-hour.

  A blue bandanna was wrapped around my head and Beth wore a backward flat-brim ball cap. We hunkered down in the back seat of Tanner’s four-door Caprice, and tried to look as deadbeat as possible. Every time we hit a bump, a cloud of dust mites escaped from under the front seats. The open windows were life-savers. We passed the Cubana passenger plane, an Antonov An-24 that Dubbie said had been hijacked in March, 2003.

  Somehow I missed that event. I must have been ass-deep in somebody else’s problems. Or off taking promo photos on a breeze-swept Caribbean island.

  Fecko turned to check on us. “I’m going to play Phil Collins for a short time. It sets our roll tone, if you follow my reasoning. If it’s too loud, tell me.”

  I was their guest, so I held my tongue.

  A quarter-mile along and just beyond a barbed wire-topped fence on our right, we saw ponds and water weeds—enough to make entry to the airport a pain in the ass or worse. Only two hundred yards farther down we could see dry-looking silt clear to the runway, beyond which was the line of parked single- and twin-engine small planes where, thirty hours earlier, Rodney Sherwin and I had boarded the King Air 90.

  “Along here, in my humble estimation,” said Wiley, turning down the CD player, “this is your best access point.”

  Dubbie, at the wheel, spoke over his shoulder: “My able partner sounds far too desperate to prove that you need us.”

  “We need you,” I said.

  Airport security also believed that this stretch offered the easiest access. Every fifty yards they had posted signs: NO PARKING WITHIN FIVE FEET OF FENCE. The shrubbery in a couple of areas might help with cover, but not much, and it might not matter at night.

  “That’s cheesy barbed wire,” said Wiley. “One twin mattress, a step ladder, and it’s up and over. You pull the mattress over behind you so it’s available for escape. Your only risks would be tripping an infrared alarm or being spotted by someone with night vision goggles. If security caught something on their monitors, they could flip on the runway lights, illuminate the entire area. You would turn into a cue ball on black velvet.”

  “Were you in Iraq?” I said.

  “Kuwait,” said Wiley. “Four-point-six months, civilian tech advisor. Okay, right along here, if you got over the fence, you would run for that windsock because they wouldn’t place sensors near an object that moves around as much as it does. This spot gets eight points on a scale of ten.”

  “Another risk,” said Dubbie, “would occur if a weed sleeper like the former Wiley Fecko figured a way to liberate the mattress.”

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” said Beth.

  I turned my head to look through the windshield. “Now I am.”

  We were witnessing a pizza delivery to a homeless camp.

  “Homeless doesn’t mean broke,” said Wiley. “They garnish Social Security only for child support and back taxes. Not for alimony, thank God.”

  “What’s up around the corner?” I said. “The defunct missile site?”

  “First we’ll pass the entrance to Little Hamaca, the indigenous hammock. It’s a city park. This road goes all the way back to the old radar towers and the paintball field. Do you want me to chat up these boys during their lunch?”

  “Not yet,” said Beth. “Let’s keep going.”

  Wiley turned up the music, waved to someone gathered around the pizza, then waited until we had followed the road northward to finally turn off the music .

  “Tell you what we’ll see,” said Tanner. “Out by the paintball area there’s ponds of water like we just saw back there. Too much water for a sneak intruder to navigate.”

  We drove into an alternative twilight zone. Twenty-foot fences, earthen and poured cement bunkers, grass gone to seed, weed shrubs gone to hell, radar dishes, five tall communications towers, and rundown buildings covered with graffiti. It was also a dumping ground for old city recyclables as evidenced by park benches, stacks of barricades and lumber, and a SIDEWALK CLOSED sign. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror, mouth agape like a rube staring up at tall buildings in a big city.

  “Welcome to the mean streets of Key West,” said Beth. “Or street, singular.”

  The slum scenery changed only slightly as we drove along. Two grocery buggies, one without wheels, toppled onto a spindly bush. A scattering of concrete blocks—enough to build a missile shelter. Two junked vehicles under a flimsy carport.

 
“Holy shit, there’s your white van, Alex,” said Beth. One of the vehicles was the Ford Econoline covered with dried slush. Not junk, just dumped.

  “It’s lost its Canadian license plate,” I said.

  “Please stop right here, Mr. Tanner,” she said. “Don’t go any closer to it.”

  The car next to the van tripped a memory switch. “Didn’t Max Saunders say that Emerson Caldwell was driving a Toyota Corolla rental when he ditched the agents that were tailing him?”

  “So much for hunting down an aircraft saboteur’s access point,” said Beth. “Our scouting mission has taken a fresh direction.”

  Fecko reached over to the ignition key and turned off the car’s engine. “Do you hear what I hear?”

  We all looked more closely at the van. Blow flies swarmed the half-inch opening of the driver’s-door window.

  I said, “Oh, no, could that…”

  “Don’t even start to speculate,” said Beth. She swung open the car door. “We’ll find out soon enough. I’m staying here and I will wait ten minutes before calling in the forensic team. I want you three to drive back to the pizza party to ask questions.”

  “It might require token bribery to secure cooperation,” said Wiley.

  Beth didn’t approve, but understood. She said, “What works best?”

  “Pre-packaged sushi from Fausto’s or Publix, either one, doesn’t matter to these fellows.”

  “They’re already eating and we don’t have time…”

  Wiley stopped her. “I’ll need all the one-dollar bills we can pool together.”

  Fecko left Dubbie and me in the car and ambled toward his former brethren. Our first hope was that no one had noticed Beth in the back seat, that none of them would ask why we had left her back by the paintball. Our second hope was that a slice or two of pizza remained so that Wiley could pay far too much for them. After the deal was complete, his questions would appear as mere afterthoughts.

  The ploy worked—up to a point. Wiley bought two skinny slices for the price of the whole pizza, brought them to us in the car, then returned to speak with the four gentlemen of the sidewalk who slouched around a liberated picnic table. Dubbie and I watched the conversation, animated and punctuated by hacks and coughs, pointed fingers, waving arms. Finally Fecko walked slowly back to the Caprice, smiling slyly as he neared the car. Grinning smugly as he told us what he’d learned. He repeated it to Beth a minute later when we returned to the carport.

  The crew figured that we had found the van that smelled of death, and speculated that the woman we had left behind was a detective. But only after Fecko promised to speak to the detective, to do his best to shield the vagrants from being hauled off to the county lockup, did they give him the information we wanted.

  Two of them saw the Toyota arrive, at four in the morning a week ago, followed by a darker car, a new four-door. The Corolla smelled so new, they took it for “bait,” a GPS-equipped car dropped by the cops to catch thieves. The van came in three or four nights later, also followed by the darker car. Again, the hobos kept their distance and told newcomers to do the same. When the stink began to waft from the van, they all knew to stay away.

  “Did you pose the bonus question?” I said. “Did anyone use a mattress to go over the barbed wire?”

  “Almost got that right,” said Wiley. “They showed me the chaise lounge cushion, rips and all. Whoever it was didn’t come back out the same way. Good thing, because the cushion was already someone’s bunk.”

  “Did they steal his step ladder, too?”

  “He didn’t use one. He jumped from the roof of a light-colored SUV.”

  Dubbie turned to face me. “Like a silver RAV4?”

  “I was thinking a silver BMW X3,” I said. “I saw Fonteneau riding in one that belongs to the attorney, E. Carlton Gamble.”

  “They’re not experts in current model years,” said Wiley, “and it was night. All they could say was it wasn’t white and it wasn’t black or a dark color like navy or maroon. It was in-between.”

  Beth gave Wiley a soft jab on the chest. “You’re a fine investigator. Keep at it.”

  Wiley turned to me. “One last thing. Do you think maybe the darker car was that Hyundai we’ve been seeing? The one leased to R. Fonteneau of St. Petersburg?”

  After the scene techs arrived and opened the unlocked van, Beth was the first to look. Holding firm on her cop demeanor, she peered into it but refused to react to the body. She turned away and walked straight to me.

  “Ocilla Ramirez,” she said, “with a hole in her forehead just above her left eye. She looks absolutely peaceful, power-napping on the van’s sheet metal floor.”

  Another quick adiós, and I wondered if Ocilla’s battered daughter, Angel Baby Dobbins, might have wished for a match to her childhood, an uglier, more drawn-out ending.

  Beth said, “Alex, please call Agent Max Saunders for me?”

  “Please tell me I don’t have to take pictures.”

  “You don’t. For all we know, you might be on a witness list. Why did you mention a silver RAV4?”

  “Justin Beeson’s girlfriend drives one, so it popped into my mind. The last time I saw it, on Caroline Street, one of Beeson’s car mechanics was driving it. Beeson, of course, like Robert Fonteneau, knew I’d be flying with Rodney Sherwin.”

  “That gives us two possible conspiracies,” said Beth. “I’m going to have a busy afternoon.”

  “Do we keep Sheriff Liska up-to-date starting now?” I said.

  Beth looked at me. “Any idea why he’s been cut out of the loop?”

  “Yes, and we should think of it as ninety percent voluntary,” I said.

  “Let’s do him the favor of keeping it that way, for now.”

  “There’s a problem with that. Someone will call him in the next hour or so, even if it isn’t Max or one of us.”

  “Probably, but that chain link fence is the borderline. The airport is his territory, and this road is inside the city.”

  “If he hears it first from us, at least he can decide not to answer the phone until tomorrow.”

  “Good point, my lover with a brain,” she said. “I’ll call him.”

  “What’s Max’s number?”

  “Use my phone. I’ll call Chicken Neck when you’re done.”

  I told FBI Agent Saunders about Ocilla’s death. He said, “Oh,” as if having just been told why his newspaper hadn’t been delivered that morning. He didn’t offer me a sarcastic thank you, as he had done when I told him about Bobby Fuck No. He did, however, confirm the Vehicle Identification Number of the Toyota Corolla—the rental car that Caldwell had used to outrun the agents on his tail.

  I closed the call and handed off the phone to Beth. Before calling Fred Liska, she phoned her office, spoke for a half-minute and clicked off.

  “Two things,” she said to the three of us. “The autopsy results were on my desk. Emerson Caldwell had a heart attack, but it might have been drug-induced. Outside Auto Parts Corporation, a Canadian company, is the van’s registered owner.”

  “That’s Fonteneau’s chain of repair shops,” said Fecko. “Its name probably refers to outside of prison.”

  Beth let us know that it was time for us to leave. She needed to stay with the city cops to wait for Ocilla’s body to be removed and the tow trucks to arrive. She said, “I will spend the rest of my afternoon tracking down and speaking with E. Carlton Gamble, attorney for the dead and suspicious.”

  “And driver of nice cars,” I said. “Fonteneau was riding in Gamble’s BMW X3 when I saw them at Azur on Thursday. That’s two silver SUVs in the game.”

  I rode in the Caprice back to Wiley and Dubbie’s home, to finally retrieve my motorcycle. None of the pizza gang was in sight when we took the bend in the road just past Little Hamaca Park. They were taking no chances on being questioned or implicated.

  “Which of you two can explain the missile battery to me?” I said.

  Wiley threw up his hands, but Dubbie sat up
straighter in the driver’s seat. “The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962,” he said. “It lasted exactly two weeks, and it could have ended our world as we know it.”

  “Let’s go hardware instead of drama,” I said.

  “Our Hawk Missiles were sent from the mainland, immediately installed and, as I’ve heard it, fully operational the day after the crisis ended. They remained in place from 1962 until sometime in the late-1970s.”

  “I never knew,” I said.

  When we arrived on Staples and parked behind Beth’s Audi, I asked Wiley if, by chance, he had come across the middle or maiden name of Beeson’s first wife, the murder victim from twenty years ago.

  “I saw it once and… damn… I’ll go look inside.”

  He came back out holding a sheet of paper. “A Latina. Maria Rodriguez.”

  “Oh, man. That’s a name like Mary Johnson or Linda Jones. She didn’t have a middle name?”

  Wiley checked the paper. “She did. Maria Torres Rodriguez.”

  I had him spell the middle name to make sure. But I knew.

  Glenn Steffey took my call on the second ring. “What?”

  “Sorry for blowing out of Fort Myers in a hurry. My ride was leaving.”

  “I owe you an apology, too, Rutledge, my crack about gruesome photos.”

  “That wasn’t out of line,” I said. “I wonder about myself, too. What questions did you have for me?”

  “Do you remember what Beeson said to you when he asked you to fly up for the meeting yesterday, the meeting that never happened?”

  “He said he wanted to convince everyone that he wasn’t involved in the crime. I was the only non-family member that could confirm his timeline and state of mind. He said my being there could make a difference.”

  “How did you feel about that?” said Steffey. “I mean, you agreed to come up here. Did he offer to pay you?”

  “He offered to pay for my time, and I didn’t have a schedule conflict. I was being asked to tell the truth, not to tell lies or make assumptions.”

  “I’ll accept that,” said the detective. “You may have answered all of my questions.”

  “Can I ask if you’ve turned up any solid leads?” I said.