by C I Dennis
Tanzi’s Heat
C.I. Dennis
Copyright 2012 C.I. Dennis
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
Acknowledgements
About the Author
TUESDAY
The Florida sun in late August can make you sizzle like a chicken-fried steak if you forget to close the blinds and accidentally doze off in your study chair. The phone woke me up before I was completely cooked, and I let the call go to the message machine.
“Vince Tanzi, leave a message,” the machine said.
“Mr. Tanzi,” the caller said, “this is Barbara Butler. I know this is short notice, but I need to meet with you as soon as possible. I need your help. You don’t know me, but I knew your wife from the club.”
I’m not working at the moment. I haven’t taken a job since I got out. Chasing after deadbeats, runaways, and philanderers didn’t appeal to me, and so I had just been pissing away the insurance money—the blood money. The sooner it was gone the sooner I might feel like a human being again and venture outside my house for something other than a thirty-pack. But she’d known Glory. I picked up the phone.
“This is Vince.” My voice cracked like I hadn’t used it, which I hadn’t.
“Oh I’m so glad you’re there. Can I see you today? It’s important.” I heard the voice of a woman who was trying her best to keep control but was on the verge of losing it.
“We can meet, but I may not take the job,” I said.
“Treasure Coast Club at noon?”
“OK. I charge a thousand a day.” At least, I used to. I wondered if I was still worth it.
“That’s not a problem.”
“All right. Do you know what I look like?”
“Yes,” she said.
Dumb question. All of Indian River County knew what I looked like. I’d had plenty of free press coverage after Glory died.
It was eleven in the morning, and the club was only a few minutes away, so I had some time. I stripped off my T-shirt and shorts and headed for the shower, avoiding the mirror. Chicken-fried steak wasn’t my best look.
*
The café at the Treasure Coast Club was separated by a glass wall from the workout room. I nursed a glass of ice water while I waited and watched the middle-aged clients in brightly-colored workout clothes sweating and grinding away on their machines, plugged into iPods or watching CNBC on the flat screen TV above. It was a somewhat unappetizing tableau, and so was the menu; avocado-and-watercress sandwiches, dainty little salads with seeds, and tofu-burgers. I’m more of a grouper-and-onion-rings type. Actually, I was in the mood for a Swamp Ape IPA in a chilled mug. Mrs. Butler was twenty minutes late. I called the waiter over to order one.
She came through the door the moment my beer arrived. Fortyish, salon-blonde, spray tan, fake boobs and real diamonds. Anywhere else it would be a bimbo alert, but in Florida it was just protective coloration.
“Sorry,” she said, sitting down.
“No problem. I was watching the spandex flamingos next door.”
“You get to a certain age, you have to work at it to look good.”
“I won’t have that problem,” I said. “I didn’t look that good in the first place.” I’m on the tall side, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a face that shows some mileage.
A young man in a polo shirt and apron came to the table and we ordered. There was a grouper sandwich special, not on the menu. Perfect. She had the avocado-watercress sandwich and a Perrier. She poured some in her glass and the bottle rattled against the rim.
“I don’t know where to start.” She put the bottle down and began shredding a napkin into tiny pieces. Something had scared the hell out of her.
“Start wherever you want to.”
“A person took a shot at me. This morning. I was coming out of the bakery by the Publix. A car pulled up, and someone pointed a gun out the window and shot at me. It hit my purse and I fell over. The car took off. I guess they thought they hit me, but they didn’t, it just knocked the purse out of my hand and it was all over the place. I got into my car, locked the doors and cried for ten minutes. Then I drove home and called you.”
“By ‘they’, do you mean you saw more than one person?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t really see. The windows were tinted, and it happened so fast.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No, my husband would freak out.”
“If someone is taking shots at you in a parking lot, you need to call the cops.”
“We are very...private,” she said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning my husband makes a lot of money, and I don’t ask questions.”
“So he’s a crook?”
“He’s a citrus broker. He buys and sells fruit. He’s on the road half of the week.”
“Did you get a look at the guy? The shooter?”
“No.” She looked away. That sounded like the first lie.
The food came and neither of us ate.
“There’s more, right?” I said.
“Yes. It happened before.”
“Someone took a shot at you?”
“Yes. A week ago. I was in my car, and a bullet went through the windshield. I was turning into our road, off A-1-A by the Quail Valley Club. It scared the hell out of me. I drove home...and threw up. But I figured it was just somebody’s stray bullet. I got the windshield fixed. I didn’t tell my husband.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she said. That sounded like lie number two.
“Where is your husband?”
“Today is his beach walk. He walks like, eight or ten miles, it takes all afternoon. He always does it before he goes on the road.”
“So did you see the guy that time? The one who shot out the windshield?”
“Not really.”
“If you keep bullshitting me, I won’t help you.” I took a big bite of the grouper sandwich, and waited.
“I really didn’t see the guy, either time. But I did see the car, this morning at the Publix. It was my husband’s other car. Not the one he drives around here. I’m not supposed to know about it, but I do. He keeps it somewhere else. It’s a red Lexus sedan, the biggest one they make.”
“There are a lot of those cars in Vero,” I said.
“Not like this one,” she said. “You’d know it if you saw it. It was his.”
Back when I was a cop we didn’t always assume it was the husband; statistically it’s true for only about four percent of all murders. But today, it seemed like a good place to start.
*
We stopped briefly at her house to pack a bag and to leave a note for C.J., the beach-walking and possibly homicidal spouse. It was on a shady street in Riomar, an old-Florida community, not gated but still classy. I’m partial to the older neighborhoods in Vero Beach; they have mature trees and some personality. I live in a newer, cookie-cutter development where you don’t dare go home drunk because you’d never be able to tell which house was yours. It was not my first choice, but Glory had liked it and it was affordable on a cop’s salary.
We left her SUV in the lot at the Treasure Coast Club; the place was open all night so nobody would notice it. I drove her to the Fresh Market on the way and pushed the cart while she shopped for food and supplies. Next, I got her a Tracfone at Radio Shack; there would be no using her regular cell, and she would need to stay off of the computer. She asked me to stop at the Vero Beach Book Center and came out with a load of paperbacks. On top of the pile was Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Garcia Marquez. So much for the bimbo alert; if she read books like that, then there was a light on upstairs, above the splendid front porch.
I helped her move her bags into the hotel room. It was modern and pleasant, had a kitchenette, and was completely anonymous. I told her to stay put, to call me from the Tracfone if she needed anything, but not to go out. She said she was looking forward to getting some reading done and not getting shot at.
Barbara unpacked her bag and stuffed panties, socks and bras into the hotel bureau drawers while we chatted. I hadn’t been this close to a woman—an attractive one, complete with all the womanly underthings—since Glory. I realized I had stopped thinking about my dead wife for the last couple of hours. I felt guilty and stepped back into my emotional cold shower. It was time for me to go.
“When does your husband get home from his walk?” I asked.
“Five on the dot. He keeps to a strict schedule.”
“I’ll check in with you later,” I said.
“You think it’s C.J., don’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Do you?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Call me when you do,” I said.
*
I left the hotel and drove to their house. If C.J. was on the beach until five, there would be time to spare. I thought about Barbara’s refusal to speculate on whether her husband was trying to kill her, but she had a large helping of shock on her plate, with a side order of denial.
I let myself in with her house key and looked for their computer. The only one in the house was an old Compaq on a desk in the corner of a downstairs room alongside a row of exercise machines and free weights. I booted it up and began the forensic routine I’d learned from Roberto, my 14-year-old Cuban American neighbor who had taught me the basics of cyber-snooping. The Compaq revealed nothing: no business records, no secret email accounts, no hidden files, zero. From the look of it Barbara used it casually and C.J. not at all.
I tossed all the rooms, trying to be neat and again finding nothing of interest, not even a bedside gun, which was unusual in Florida, where breaking and entering was a sport and alarm salesmen got rich.
The place was as tidy and sterile as the Spring Hill Suites.
A nearly new white Chrysler Town & Country sat in the garage. The registration said “Charles J. Butler” and had just been renewed. I took a GPS unit from the back of my car and crawled under the minivan to wire it in. You can get one for $200 at Best Buy and keep track of anyone, just like James Bond; I didn’t have the beeping display in my Aston Martin because I didn’t have an Aston Martin. I had a ‘92 Ford Taurus SHO with a noisy muffler, and a MacBook Pro laptop with a software program that could connect to the unit. Roberto had kitted me out; he was my Latino version of “Q”.
It took half an hour to wire in the tracker—the Chrysler’s electronics were confusing even though I am handy at that sort of thing. C.J. would be back soon. I decided to go home and regroup and pick up a six-pack of Swamp Ape IPA on the way back. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d just spend an evening without getting blotto for once. I had taken on a job, and I don’t drink when I’m working; it’s dangerous to get sloppy. Someone could get shot, including me.
*
I spent the evening in front of the computer with the windows of my study open to let in the night sounds. “C.J. Butler”, “Charles Johnston Butler”, “C.J. Butler, Florida”, “C.J. Butler, Citrus Broker”, not a damn thing in Google, not any way I tried. Barbara was in there, but just barely. I found a group photo from a half-marathon she had run three years ago, and she was smiling and pretty in her T-shirt and shorts. C.J. was absent—he was a cyber-cypher. Search engines had spoiled me in recent years; they did half of my job for me if I used them properly. People weren’t supposed to exist outside of the web anymore, we had all been trapped in it, our identities and lives neatly wrapped in spider’s silk, but C.J. was an outlier and it looked like I was going to have to do this the hard way, like a dime-novel gumshoe.
*
Barbara said C.J. had an office in Lake Wales, but she never went there because he was usually out in the groves. She had long since given up contact with him on his Wednesday-to-Friday trip; he seemed to want that and she acquiesced, for whatever reason. She had called me just before midnight on the Tracfone; she confessed she’d picked up a bottle of chardonnay at the Fresh Market and was about half way through it, but her nerves were still on edge. She began to spill about C.J. They’d been married twenty years, the same as Glory and I had. He was the most neat and tidy person she’d ever known, very respectful, and a model husband. He was built like an athlete: tall, broad-shouldered, and graceful. Money was never a problem. He wasn’t exactly the passionate-type, but she’d accepted her life with him. She was content, if not “happy”. She said happiness was just a form of temporary insanity.
“Amen,” I muttered.
She had no clue why he’d shoot at her. She said she’d never cheated on him, although I took that with a grain of salt; Barbara was very attractive, and if her husband was a dud in bed that usually meant trouble. She said they seldom argued. She didn’t pry. She had been curious once and followed him to Lake Wales and waited in her car outside his office. C.J. passed by her in the big red Lexus and looked directly at her, the tinted window down, not stopping. She would never forget the look. It cured her of any further curiosity and she drove straight home to Vero.
“So do you still love him?” I asked. “Or are you afraid of him?”
She was quiet on the other end of the phone. “Maybe both,” she said.
Before we hung up she said he would leave the house the next morning at seven AM, sharp. I caught a few hours of sleep, packed some tools and an overnight bag, and was parked down the street from his house by six with my lights off, waiting.
WEDNESDAY
My laptop beeped at me and I knew I’d fallen asleep in the car. It was ten minutes after seven and C.J. was already gone. Fortunately, the computer pinned him to the map like a bug in a science exhibit. He was driving west on Highway 60, about halfway out to where it meets I-95. No problem, I could catch up; the early morning traffic was light, just a few golfers, early risers, and tradesmen. The Taurus SHO was old and modest-looking, but it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and would go like hell if I needed it to.
I caught up with him in Yeehaw Junction, thirty miles west of Vero where the road meets Florida’s Turnpike. There’s not much there except for a Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppe and the Desert Inn, an ancient hotel that the old-timers used to frequent back when the Vero bars were closed on Sundays. C.J. was puttering along at the speed limit. I was still doing eighty and came up on him too fast—I almost had to hit the brakes to not rear-end him. I was annoyed at myself; I know how to tail somebody, and this was a bad start.
It was already hot, and very humid. The road was wet in places from overnight thundershowers, and I had to occasionally slalom around road kills, mostly skunks and armadillos. There was nothing on the radio except talk show nut-jobs and preachers. I contented myself with the rhythmic beeping of the GPS tra
cker as I followed C.J.’s progress with the laptop and stayed back, out of sight.
The road to Lake Wales is flanked by ranches, groves, and long stretches of open land. The town itself is at the epicenter of the orange juice business, and also happens to be the exact geographical center of the state. A big co-op is the largest employer, and there are several smaller juice producers from as far away as Brazil. It’s a pretty, old-Florida town and would be a sleepy backwater except for the bustling citrus business. There isn’t much for tourists there except the Bok Tower, a carillon outside the village set in a spectacular garden designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead. Mr. Bok was the publisher of the Ladies Home Journal in the 1890s, and he erected the 200-foot-tall pink marble tribute to himself that some locals called the “Viagra Tower”.
I caught up with C.J.’s minivan as he entered town. He turned down a slight hill toward the old section that had been restored in the 1990s in a burst of civic pride. It never really took hold since a Wal-Mart Supercenter went in on the main highway at about the same time and sucked the life out of the historic district. There were a few lingering banks, shops, and restaurants. C.J. turned onto East Stuart Avenue and slowed to park in front of a one story building. I fell back, looking for a shady spot for my gumshoe stake-out. All I needed was a Racing Form, a fedora and the stub of a cigar.
There wasn’t a shade tree in sight, so I parked in a bank lot with a clear view of where he had parked, and prepared to fry. The air conditioning in the Taurus was on its last legs, but I’d rather lose some sweat than part with the car; we had too much history. C.J. got out of the van, holding a briefcase. He was tall and broad-shouldered as Barbara had described, but she’d left out that he was handsome. I could tell, even from across the street. Some people just carry themselves that way. He was in good shape, probably from all the beach walking. He wore a tan suit with an open white shirt and no tie; overdressed for the heat, but that fit with Barbara’s neat-and-tidy description. He walked up to the squat, white stucco building and entered from a side door.
He was in there for a total of two hours and fifteen minutes while I microwaved in the Taurus. I played Scrabble on the laptop, checked my email, read Google News and the Miami Herald online and listened to an Emmylou Harris cassette. Finally, C.J. reappeared and walked over to the van. He started it and drove off. I decided I’d let him run free for a while because I wanted a look around—I could pin him down on the laptop later.