by Robert Lane
I returned to Sally’s, parked a block away, and walked around the one-story building. Sun Coast Cleaners anchored one end, and a one-man insurance office, “Earl Whitney, for Your Life, Your Home, Your Family,” took the north end. A sun-faded picture of a smiling Earl faced the street. For all I knew, either or both establishments were in Dangelo’s hand but under a different name. It was doubtful, but what if he held two dozen properties under a dozen names? Second-guessing crept into my plan, and Morgan and Garrett hadn’t even cleared the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
I didn’t see any low windows or sidewalk doors indicating a basement, nor did that surprise me. Basements in Florida are as common as skyscrapers in Montana. I went inside and had the first anything served that day. A blonde with red streaks in her hair wearing a tight black Sally’s polo shirt pushed the iced tea across the clean bar. She looked as if she might have closed the joint last night. I hit the head and ducked into the kitchen. Nothing. A wide staircase anchored the middle of the first floor. I took the steps two at a time. They led to an open area with high-top tables that overlooked the first floor. In the back was a door with an office sign on it. It was locked. Dangelo’s digs.
I returned to my stool. Streak asked me if I enjoyed my trip. I asked her when Dangelo came in. She said, “Whenever.” We chatted for a few minutes while she wiped the bar, but nothing useful emerged. She dropped her towel and headed to the lady’s room. I dropped a ten and headed to the Winking Lizard. I couldn’t recall whether it had a backroom or basement. I rehearsed my lines in my head.
I circled once to get a look at the building. Thick frosted-glass windows with bars stared out at the sidewalk. The place had a basement. So much for my powers of observation and memory. I parked Kathleen’s sparkling car a few spots down from a bus stop. I paused at the front door and momentarily shut my eyes to prepare them for the shock of entering the dungeon. I swung open the door and strode to the bar. I wanted to surprise Special. If he knew anything, he’d be the one to reveal it. Captain Tony might see through my ploy.
Special was behind the bar. I didn’t see Captain Tony or Cue Stick. Luck was on my side. I always run well with her. Special kept his eyes on me as I approached and claimed a stool across from him.
“I met with Dangelo,” I started right in. “He wants me to talk with the girl. See if I can get information from her.” I’d decided that I didn’t care if Dangelo knew I was pounding on his doors. It was time to squeeze the toothpaste. If Special camped out behind the bar every day, nothing would go down that he wouldn’t know about. The problem, of course, with squeezing the toothpaste, is that once it’s out of the tube, it’s a little hard to put it back in.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Special said.
That was close, but not the confirmation I wanted. I darted my eyes around and tapped my hand on the bar. I shifted my weight. “Look,” I said. “Is Tony in? You can check with him.”
“His name is Eugene.”
“Dangelo wants me to talk to the girl. Said to just come down here and have a few words with her.” I stopped tapping with one hand and started in with the other. “Now.”
Special gave that a moment.
“I got to talk to Eugene.” He took a step back and withdrew a phone from his pocket. His reply indicated to me that even if he didn’t know where Jenny was, he was aware that they had her.
“Give him a call,” I said. I strode away as I was still talking. “I’m hitting the head.” I passed two guys shooting pool and took a corner toward a narrow hall. The women’s lavatory was a spacious room that included a partitioned toilet with a barn-door entry, almost like a room within a room. Newer wallpaper. Not my style, but not bad. The men’s room had a bathtub to piss in and a small stall with a plunger in the corner. I left and tracked around the corner and into the kitchen. A man from south of Florida glanced up from a fryer that he was stuffing white grease into.
“Health inspector, amigo,” I said.
He shrugged and returned to his task. An interior door faced back into the building. It was padlocked. A closet? I doubted it. My bet was that it led to the basement. The kitchen door swung open, and Special marched in. He ducked when he passed through the door. He held a gun in his right hand; his thick paw engulfed the butt so that the barrel appeared to come out of his fleshy fingers.
“Eugene said that Mr. Dangelo gave you no such permission,” he said, the gun leveled at my chest. “And this isn’t the head.”
Barge through the basement door now? I’d have to take Special first. I didn’t think that would be an issue, but as a rule, I don’t attack a person holding a gun on me unless I believe it’s absolutely necessary. It doesn’t take much of a shot to screw up your day. I hesitated then said, “Sorry. I’m going back to see Mr. Dangelo right now. He can’t be sending me out to talk to her without letting his minions know.”
“His what?”
I ignored his question, he hadn’t lowered the gun, and I didn’t trust my lips, slipped out the back door, and hustled around to my—Kathleen’s—car. Just as I hit the opposite curb, a city bus pulled out of the stop and left a plume of gray-black smoke that covered the Lexus like a crop duster. My phone rang; I hit the button.
“What do you got?” I asked.
“Nada,” PC said. “We went in like you told us and said we were looking for a job. You should have seen this guy’s face when he glanced up at Boyd popping his tarts.”
“What did you see?”
“The glare of condescension reserved for those who you feel—”
“The place, man.” I knew he was playing with me.
“Zippo, Jake-o. Single-story, doors open, trucks in and out. A real mercantile mart of activity. No way they’re hiding anyone there.”
I thanked him. He was disappointed when I told him I didn’t have anything else for him at the moment. Kathleen texted me and said it was fine if I wanted to take her car. I texted her a thumbs-up symbol.
I camped out at Sally’s. Dangelo exited late in the afternoon. He must have entered when I was at the Winking Lizard. I trailed him to a condo two blocks from Kathleen’s, where he disappeared into an underground parking garage. He lived a football toss from her. I didn’t see that coming. What if he or one of his cousins recognized her? Was he even related to the group that had gone after Kathleen after her husband’s death, or was I being paranoid? I thought of my earlier comment to Garrett about not creating problems for Kathleen, and here I was stirring the pot. I told myself to relax. The chances of his being tied to her deceased husband’s affairs and of him recognizing her were remote. But I knew I was rationalizing that fine line, the razor’s edge. I parked in the shade of a building, put the top down, and reached for my phone just as it rang.
“Where are you?” I asked Garrett.
“On the bridge. You?”
“Downtown. What did you find?”
“Organized crime is stressing the ‘organized’ part. Nice establishments. No basements. A yellowtail sandwich at one place, and a redhead waitress at another who nearly knocked Morgan out of the game. Nothing to lead us to believe that any of the buildings and businesses we saw might be holding Jenny.”
“The third?”
“Deserted. We busted in. Nothing. You?” He came at me for the second time.
I recapped my day. I told him the Winking Lizard had a basement with a locked door.
“You didn’t take it?”
“No. I considered it. Had a lock on the door. Would have been messy. That, plus Special was pointing a gun at me.” I’d considered not telling him that last part. He had no interest in pansy excuses.
He paused. “Tonight?”
“I’m thinking three a.m.” We discussed our plan.
I decided to let Rutledge in on the play. I was also eager to see whether he had talked to any of the occupants of the apartment building across from where Billy Ray’s car had been found. I wondered whether McGlashan had even passed the request on to him.
Rutl
edge picked up on the first ring. He said he hadn’t had time to check out the apartments. At least I knew McGlashan had passed along the request and followed through on his end.
I went after Rutledge. “I think the occupants of that apartment should—”
“What’s with you and this girl?” he interrupted me. “Give it up; she skipped off to another island. Tanning on some b—”
“I don’t think so.”
“Once they run, they always run.”
“I found the man the Colemans were doing business with. I believe he has her.” A black two-door with tinted windows cruised by, blaring a primitive beat.
“Who is he?”
I gave Rutledge a brief description of Dangelo and his operation. He was oddly quiet and noninterruptive.
“And this man…half the money belongs to him?”
“Correct. But he wants the whole two eighty-four. Doesn’t want a bad mark for letting the dough slip through his fingers in the first place. Doubling his take earns a lot of gold stars. I think he hopes to—”
“Has he talked to her?”
“If he did, he certainly wouldn’t divulge that.”
“How do you know him…this Dee-angelo?”
“Dangelo. No apostrophe.” Rutledge seemed more interested in Dangelo than Jenny. “The Colemans led us to him. I’ve got a connection at the bureau, and she identified him.”
“The FBI?”
“Pardon?”
“You said you had—”
“Yeah, the FBI. And—”
“The hell you doing talking to the FBI?”
“I used my source to—”
“Who the hell are you?”
“A concerned citizen, Detective Rutledge.”
“What did they have to say?”
“The FBI or Dan—”
“Either.”
“Rutledge?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought the only thing you gave a shit about was launching a missile and fondling the tooth fairy.”
“I—we—just need to be covered down here in case the feds get involved, you know? After all, your girl Jenny did a number on a guy, and we let her skate. Well, we didn’t let her, but we’re not exactly chasing her down. So you think you know where she is?”
“I do.”
“Some warehouse or something?”
“Dive called the Winking Lizard. Few blocks off downtown St. Pete. It’s open till two. We plan to reopen it around three.”
“Call me either way. The Winking Lizard—that’s really the name? Not the Forgetful Elephant?”
“You got it.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Check the apartments.” But I spoke into dead airwaves.
I was suddenly tired of the whole deal. Too much time trying to get Rutledge and McGlashan to help. Too much phone tag with Binelli. Too much outsourcing. A half-ass operation at best.
No more.
I called PC and said I’d changed my mind. I told him to hustle down to Fort Myers Beach. I gave him the address of the apartments across from where Billy Ray’s car had been found. He said it would be close to 10:00 p.m. before he got there.
“If someone’s lights are on,” I said, “knock on the door. If not, knock anyway. Hit them as they emerge in the morning. It’s an eight-plex. There aren’t that many tenants.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything they recall seeing in that small beach parking lot across the street before the police arrived…and PC?”
“Still here, man.”
“Someone was there before the police. Walkers, joggers—engage them all. Maybe a guy two streets down sweats that road every morning, and he lumbered by at the right moment. Maybe someone’s doing his neighbor’s wife, and he saw something when he was sneaking out of a house, but he doesn’t want to come forward. I couldn’t care less. Someone saw something. Always. Find that person. Split up. Hit everyone. It’s an island.”
“Running up a big note, Jake-o.”
I had no formal arrangement with PC. After he’d helped me secure the missing Cold War letter, I’d paid him two grand in fifties. What he split with Boyd was up to him, but I was pretty sure he cut it evenly. PC was nineteen years old and operated on an IQ, in all likelihood, well north of 140. He instinctively knew that formal education was a ruse. He saw more moves ahead than anyone I’d ever played chess with. You don’t find those people on East Coast–college cafeteria-recruitment days. But that’s not what drew me to him.
He was on the fringe of society and could go either way. When I tripped over him, he and Boyd had just walked out of juvenile detention for computer hacking. PC had programmed the county’s 911 line so that a lady with a crisp English accent came on and congratulated the caller for being selected and said to please stay on the line and take a brief survey. Despite his raw intelligence, he didn’t grasp the potentially heinous consequences of his crime. A few years older, and he would have been in the slammer for years. He divulged that it hadn’t been their first trip to the juvie residence.
PC and Boyd were on the edge. The more time I spent with them, the heavier my responsibility grew—to them and to me. I didn’t want to fail.
“Find my person,” I said to his comment and hung up.
I’d been too absorbed in my conversation to see them approach, and now it was too late. Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood on each side of Kathleen’s car. Tweedledum, the nut brain with glasses, peeled back his jacket to reveal a revolver the size of a miniature cannon tucked into his pants. What was he going to do? Unload it right there on the street? I might have overestimated his mental capacity.
“Mr. Dangelo would like to see you,” he said.
“And if I refuse, what are you going to do with that thing? Contribute to a live performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture?”
Tweedledum took his time with that, as if it were a serious question, then announced, “I don’t think so. It’s a common misconception that cannons are always used. Tchaikovsky opened Carnegie Hall in 1891 with his overture, and even though he wrote sixteen cannons into the score, I’m pretty sure there weren’t any guns on the stage that night. Now haul your ass out of the car.”
Okay, so I’d misjudged his brain. But I’m telling you, the guy had a dick the size of a baby carrot. I had no idea that Russian composer Pyotr Liyich Tchaikosvky, born in a different St. Petersburg, had ever conducted at Carnegie—I would have bet money the other way—nor did I appreciate learning it from this clown.
“Lead the way,” I said.
I put the top on the Lexus up just as it started to rain. It was a light drizzle that mixed with the dust from the city bus. As we walked away, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Kathleen’s car morph into a dirtier shade of clean than it had been when I’d driven it out of her garage.
CHAPTER 32
We paraded a block south to Dangelo’s condo and rode to the tenth floor. Like Kathleen’s, it had its own entrance off the elevator. The Tweedle twins didn’t enter the room—nor did my gun, which they confiscated at the door. I assumed they’d been instructed to make camp outside Dangelo’s door. Perhaps Tweedledum had brought along his music history textbook to study.
Dangelo sat at a desk that made him look big. He didn’t stir when I entered. I took a seat on a white leather couch and flipped through a magazine that told me about ten fantastic Caribbean restaurants I had to dine at before I jumped off the bus. I didn’t look at the article. I did look at the pictures of tan girls in white bikinis. The classics never go out of style. I helped myself to some salted cashews in a cut-glass bowl that rested on top of a glass-topped coffee table with a coral-reef base.
“Jacob.” It came out as he swiveled around in his chair so he could face me. “Have you found my missing funds?”
I finished my chew. “Working on it, Joe.”
“How? By going into one of my bars and informing the staff that I instructed you to talk to this missing girl whom you think I have? Such a
childish game.”
“Staff?”
“Yes?”
“I just don’t see Special as staff.”
Dangelo stood. “Our arrangement, in the event that you’ve suffered short-term memory loss, is that you find my missing funds, then I do what I can to help you locate the missing girl, whom you erroneously think I possess.”
“That arrangement didn’t hold my interest. I find Jenny Spencer, and your money won’t be far behind.”
“You think?” He took a step toward me. “Then you are not thinking at all—for if that were the case, and I, as you have accused, am harboring the girl, why are we having this conversation?”
“I said, ‘far behind,’ not ‘with her.’ You didn’t bring me here for this.” I got up and dropped the magazine onto the glass table. “I’ll keep you posted.” I headed for the door.
“I did a little research.” His voice came from behind me. “You served for five years, but your trail gets cold the day you left the army.” I pivoted. He picked up the magazine from the coffee table and glanced at it. “I don’t think I even pay for this anymore. They just keep sending it.” He brought his head up. “Tell me—how does one get involved in your line of work?”
“A strange question from a man like you.”
“I’m curious…” He tossed the magazine, reached into the bowl, and grabbed a handful of cashews. “What chances did my two men have if you decided not to comply with my request for a visit?”
“None.”
Dangelo nodded as if I’d given him the answer he’d wanted, but it was the wrong answer for me to give. I saw it too late. Arrogance is the first step toward self-destruction.
“No,” he said with a tone of resignation, “I suppose not. You know”—he popped a few cashews into his mouth—“we had an incident not far from here about a year ago. We lost four employees, and the locals expressed alarming disinterest in the situation—not, of course, that we pressed them. You understand?”
“Not a clue what you’re talking about.” I started to circle the room.
“Sort of like me, when you bring up your missing Ms. Spencer.” Another cashew met its fate. “It did occur to us, however, that even if we had pressed our cause, the law just didn’t care. As if someone had hushed up the whole scene. ‘Bad for tourism,’ I believe the line was.”