by Ron Base
________
By the time Ferne dropped Tree at the Acacia Road mall, it was almost two in the morning. There was no sign of Sasha or young women in tight party dresses. Tree’s ribs were hurting and he was dead tired. He was also afraid Ferne might try to kiss him again.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.
“No thanks necessary,” Ferne said. “I’ll follow you back to Fort Myers, just in case.”
“I appreciate this, Ferne.”
“I’m around if you need me. Sort of like your guardian angel.”
“Ferne, I don’t need a guardian angel.”
“Not to argue the point, Tree, but I’ve never met anyone who needs a guardian angel more than you do. Has anyone ever suggested that you might not be cut out for this line of work?”
“A number of people,” Tree said.
“Maybe you should listen to them.”
The air in the car felt warm and close. She leaned toward him. He lurched back. “Don’t kiss me,” he blurted, sounding like a kid on a bad prom night date.
She gave him a sad, hollow smile. “Don’t worry, Tree. I’m not going to kiss you. You’re a married man, after all.”
Now he felt embarrassed. “Listen, Ferne. You’ve got to be more careful about being around me.”
“Why is that?”
“The police are looking for you.”
Ferne managed to sound both hurt and angry as she said: “The police have been looking for me my whole life.”
She handed him a slip of paper. “What’s this?” he asked.
“My telephone number. If you ever want me around, for whatever reason, just give me a call, and I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Ferne. I mean it. For everything.”
“Get out of the car, Tree. Go home to your wife. And never mind me. I know how to take care of myself. You don’t. You be careful.”
24
Dawn broke over San Carlos Bay as Tree finally reached the causeway leading to the island. Only then did Ferne’s headlights disappear from his rear view mirror. He felt a palpable sense of relief when he turned the Beetle into his own driveway on Andy Rosse Lane. He was not so certain he was safe here, but at least he was home.
Hunched and bent against the hurt in his body, he slumped toward the house. Even the act of turning the key in the lock hurt. He opened the door and stepped inside and it was as though someone stuck a red-hot knife in his side. He cried out and the next thing found himself down on all fours. He looked up and saw Freddie standing over him, wearing an oversized T-shirt and a frown.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“What makes you so sure anything’s wrong?”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning. You’re lying on the floor, dressed in what I suppose is your chauffeur’s uniform.”
“You’re very intuitive,” Tree said. “Can you help me up?”
“I think so,” Freddie said.
“Be careful. I may have broken a couple of ribs.”
“Oh, great. How did that happen?”
“A couple of thugs jumped me.”
“Tree,” she said with a mixture of exasperation and concern. “What are you doing to yourself?”
“You should see the other guys,” Tree said.
With Freddie steadying him, he managed to get shakily to his feet. He leaned against her. “You haven’t heard from Chris, have you?”
“Not a word. Is this normal behavior? Your son and his wife come for a visit, and then they disappear?”
“I’m not sure normal is a word that applies to Chris and Kendra,” Tree said.
“Of course, Chris is a member of a family with a father who comes home at five in the morning with cracked ribs.”
“It’s a very curious family,” Tree agreed. “I tried to warn you.”
“I should have listened,” Freddie said.
Freddie helped him into the bedroom and sat him on the edge of the bed. She began to strip off his clothes.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“It usually is these days,” she said.
As briefly as he could, he told her about the two thugs who came looking for Kendra. He told her about following Brand Traven to Coleman where he picked up Tony Dodge, the trip back to Fort Myers Beach, finding the address in the motel waste basket and then ending up in Sarasota behind the wheel of a limo driving young women to Aksel Baldur’s oceanfront estate.
“So these thugs work for Aksel Baldur?”
“No question about it.”
“And Aksel is the guy who wants Kendra back.”
Tree nodded. “It looks like there is something going on involving supplying young women for Baldur’s parties.”
“Chris and Kendra are part of this?”
“I don’t like to think that’s what it is,” Tree said.
“But it could be.”
“Yes.”
“Which may account for why they disappeared.”
“I’m hoping it isn’t,” Tree said. “I hope I’ve got this all wrong.”
“What a mess,” Freddie said.
Tree moved and winced in pain.
Freddie said, “We should get you to a doctor.”
“But then I would have to answer a lot of questions. And right now I don’t want to answer any questions. I just want to get some sleep.”
“My wounded knight in tarnished armor.” The way she said it was not complimentary.
“More like the Cowardly Lion, I’m afraid.”
“Good. I’m all for cowardly lions. That way you keep out of trouble and stay alive.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I know you do.”
He waited. Freddie finished getting him undressed. “This is when you’re supposed to say, ‘I love you, too, darling.’”
She smiled. “I just thought of something.”
“You don’t love me?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping Elizabeth Traven prove her innocence?”
“Supposedly, yes.”
“How does any of this help her?”
“I’m not sure it does.”
“If this Dodge is an ex-con, which, since you picked him up at Coleman, that’s what he probably is, then maybe Brand Traven hired him to kill his wife.”
Tree looked at her.
“Elizabeth somehow found out about it, and stabbed her husband with the scissors before he could have her killed.”
“That’s not much of a defense.”
“It’s better than anything she’s got right now.”
“Except how do Axel Baldur and the women fit into it—not to mention Chris and Kendra?”
“That’s where you come in. You’re the detective. You figure it out.”
Tree couldn’t think any more. He was too tired. He lay on his back getting himself as comfortable as possible while Freddie pulled covers over him.
The last words he heard before drifting into deep sleep were, “Remember, you’ve got to be in court at ten o’clock this morning.”
25
Why are you walking so funny?” asked Edith Goldman. It was a few minutes after she appeared before Judge Edgar Beckman and got Tree’s case put over for another month.
“I hurt my ribs,” Tree said.
“How did you do that?”
“Better you don’t ask,” Tree said.
Edith looked at him as though she already was seeing him in shackles on his way to prison. “You look like hell, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“That’s because I haven’t had much sleep.”
“A man your age you should get a proper night’s sleep,” Edith said.
“A man my age probably shouldn’t be standing around the Lee County Justice Center charged with various felonies,” Tree said.
“Incidentally, speaking of going to jail, I talked to your friend Lee Bixby, the assistant district attorney, earlier this morning.”
“What did he have to say?”
�
�They are still willing to drop the charges. All they want is some co-operation on the Brand Traven murder.”
“They want me to testify against Elizabeth Traven,” Tree corrected.
“Okay. Whatever. Why do you have a problem testifying against her?”
“They think I was sleeping with her and then conspired with her to knock off her husband. None of that is true. I can’t testify to something that never happened.”
Edith responded by stepping closer so that he could not miss her you’ve-got-a-detention-young-man sternness.
“Mr. Callister, let me put this to you as clearly as I can. The police and the assistant district attorney will have no trouble sending you to jail for a long time unless you co-operate a little more than you are currently.”
“I thought you were supposed to be on my side, Edith.”
“It’s not a question of sides. It’s a question of realities—of what is going to happen unless you come to your senses quickly.” Edith jerked her head back as if she had detected an unpleasant odor around him. “Think it over.”
She turned on an expensive heel and marched off. Tree hobbled away in the opposite direction.
He didn’t get very far.
“Mr. Callister, there you are.” The honeyed voice of T. Emmett Hawkins.
“Mr. Hawkins,” Tree said.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you, sir.” He guided Tree into a corner. Today, he wore an orange bow tie. It was not every man who could pull off an orange bow tie, Tree thought.
“Why are you walking so funny?”
“I hurt my ribs,” Tree said.
“In the pursuit of proving Mrs. Traven’s innocence, I hope.”
“In pursuit, yes,” Tree said. “However, I have yet to catch up to her innocence.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Callister.”
“In fact, I would say she’s looking a little guiltier than she did before.”
Hawkins looked disappointed. “Why is that, Mr. Callister?”
“An ex-convict named Tony Dodge.”
Hawkins looked at him blankly. “I have no idea who that is.”
“Well, I think we had better find out more about him.”
Hawkins moved back a few paces as though he too had caught a bad smell around Tree. “How much have you told the police?”
“I haven’t told the police anything, but as you can imagine, Mr. Hawkins, I’m under quite a bit of pressure to tell them something. In fact my lawyer tells me I’m on my way to jail if I don’t.”
“To be frank, Mr. Callister, it will be very difficult to ask my client anything along those lines.”
“Why is that?”
“Because any conversations that take place inside the Lee County jail are liable to be recorded.”
“Even with attorneys?”
“I don’t want to take the chance. Please don’t worry about this Dodge character. Just continue on. She’s counting on you, Mr. Callister. You’re all she’s got.”
“I’m all she’s got? That’s not much of anything,” Tree said.
“No, it certainly isn’t.” It was Hawkins’ turn to march off. Everyone was walking away from him this morning after delivering a well-honed insult or threat.
There was no justice.
26
I watched Rio Bravo last night,” Rex Baxter said after Tree raised his shirt so Rex could inspect his bruised ribs.
“I still don’t know what to make of it. Is it one of the greatest westerns ever made? Howard Hawks’ signature work? Or is it this goofily entertaining hodgepodge that, among other unlikely things, asks us to buy Ricky Nelson as a tough-as-nails gunslinger?”
“What do you think?” Tree said.
Rex poked at Tree’s rib cage. Tree let out a yelp. “To be honest, Rio Bravo is a little bit of both. I mean, you can’t help but be entertained by it. Certainly the byplay between the Duke and Angie Dickinson as the saloon girl, Feathers, is wondrous, right up there with Bogart and Bacall in Hawks’ To Have and Have Not.”
“I’m not talking about Rio Bravo,” Tree said. “I’m talking about my ribs. Do they look broken or not?”
Rex peered more closely, as if he had X-ray vision. “The thing I wonder about Rio Bravo, you know, the Duke and Walter Brennan and Dean Martin as the drunk, they’ve got Claude Akins in jail and they’re holding him, waiting for the arrival of the U.S. marshal who’s presumably going to take Claude Akins away, right?”
“Quit poking at my ribs,” Tree said. “It hurts.”
Rex straightened. “John Russell plays the evil rancher who wants to spring his brother from the Duke’s jail. What I can’t quite figure, why doesn’t John Russell just wait until the marshal leaves town with Claude Akins, and then jump him? It would be a whole lot easier than going up against the Duke in a fortified sheriff’s office.”
“Do you think my ribs are broken or not, Rex?” Tree sounded exasperated.
“How would I know, Tree? There’s bruising there. It doesn’t look good, I can tell you that much. What does Freddie say?”
“She thinks I should go to the doctor.”
“That’s sound advice. Why don’t you do that?”
“Because if I listen to sound advice right now, I’m in trouble.”
“You’re already in trouble,” Rex said.
“Also, a doctor might ask too many questions.”
“Just don’t come across any more dead bodies,” Rex said. “It’s not good for tourism.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tree said.
“I hate to be critical, Tree. We’ve known each other a long time, after all. But in general you have not been good for tourism on the island.”
“Boy, I can always count on you for support, Rex.”
“In Rio Bravo John Wayne doesn’t want anyone’s help. He’s got a problem, he fixes it himself. He can’t stand the fact that Dean Martin’s a drunk. He thinks Dino should quit whining and stand on his own two feet.”
“Maybe you’re watching too many John Wayne movies,” Tree said.
“Stand on your own two feet,” Rex said. “That’s what John Wayne would do.”
“John Wayne doesn’t have broken ribs,” Tree said.
“Possible broken ribs,” Rex amended.
_________
After Rex finally departed in mid grumble for a meeting to discuss final preparations for the upcoming Kiwanis spaghetti dinner, Tree turned to his computer and Googled Aksel Baldur. According to Wikipedia, Axel was born in Turku, Finland, a town on the southwest coast at the mouth of the Aura River.
His parents emigrated to the U.S. when he was two years old. He grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, dreaming of better things. Graduating from the University of Minnesota at Duluth with a business degree, he somehow scraped together enough money to buy a floundering Duluth clothing company.
Over the next ten years, Baldur moved his company to Chicago where it specialized in inexpensive women’s clothes. Its success made him a multi-millionaire. The money fueled an outrageous lifestyle that provided the notoriety his fashion sense never could. The abundance of available women and drugs inevitably brought trouble.
Six former employees had launched sexual harassment suits against him. Two models accused him in civil suits of fathering their children. Most serious of all were the allegations that he had sex with underage prostitutes.
Three fifteen-year-old Jamaican girls claimed Aksel had lured them to his Negril Beach house, plied them with alcohol and drugs, and then raped them. Baldur denied the charges, and then quickly settled out of court with the girls’ families. The criminal cases against him went away.
His appetites, he said, grew out of his terrible childhood. Victimized by a monster father, he told the Los Angeles Times that he and his sister were always hungry as children, sometimes existing on little more than the boiled potatoes.
Aksel claimed in an Esquire magazine interview that he was eight years old when he watched his father kill his mother.
He told Esquire his father had strangled her and then ordered Aksel into the basement to watch her die. His mother was buried in the garden behind the house. His father forced him to help with the burial.
Aksel’s father died in 1989. The mother, according to the magazine, was never reported missing. “My life has not been easy,” Aksel said. “I work hard and I play hard in order to keep the monsters away.”
Tree wondered if, in trying so hard to push the monsters away, Aksel Baldur had become one of the monsters. You would hide from the monster if he came after you, would you not? Maybe that’s what Chris and Kendra were doing.
Hiding.
But where?
27
The house Ray Dayton owned in Naples backed onto the beach off Gulf Shore Boulevard. It was a rambling one story structure with a red tile roof, surrounded by a wall. Tree parked on the street in front of the house.
He eased himself gingerly out of the Beetle so as not to ignite the sleeping pain inside his rib cage. Despite his best efforts, the pain reawakened as he hobbled across the drive to the lacquered entrance door and rang the bell.
From inside, a cacophony of chimes rose to announce the visitor. No one heeded the call. Tree went around the side of the house and through a gate that opened onto a wide terrace intersected by a pool the size of a lake. Beyond the pool, the Gulf of Mexico came into sharp focus. From this vantage point, Tree could see a lone figure on the beach propped in an Adirondack chair.
He circled around the pool until he found a short flight of stone stairs leading down to the beach.
Chris, wearing sunglasses and bright paisley bathing trunks, sat in the chair with his back to Tree. Two empty beer cans lay in the sand beside his chair. Chris was working on the third as Tree positioned himself in front of his son.
It took Chris a moment to register his father’s presence. He removed the glasses and then used his hand to shade his eyes so he could get a better look.
“How come you’re standing so funny?” he said in a lazy slur.
“I broke some ribs.”
“You should go to a hospital.”
“I wanted to find you first.”
“Is that so?” Chris did not appear surprised that his father might be looking for him. “How did you find me?”