“Surely your mother doesn’t call you Miami.”
“No,” I said. “Never.” I kept to myself the fact that my mother had never lived to see me recruited to a college.
“And after the delivery, how did you get out of town?” I asked.
“We drove.”
“To where?”
“Charlotte. We still have a home there.”
“You drove to Charlotte?”
“Angela Jean drove, yes. Dale wanted to send the plane back, but I wasn’t happy about the hurricane. It was getting quite wild out.”
“You have a plane?”
“Yes, we just upgraded from a single prop to a Learjet 31A.”
“I’m in the wrong business.”
“A private jet doesn’t maketh the man, Mr. Jones.”
Neither did having to take your shoes off at airport security. “Where does it come in? PBI?”
“No, we have hangars at North Palm Beach County Airport.”
I gave my impressed face. This NASCAR lark looked like a good business to be in.
“So I assume you want to chat with Angela Jean. Her office is at the other end of the house, next to the server room. I’ll show you.”
As we walked out of the kitchen, I asked, “Why would Angie handle the delivery of the F-88?”
“She handles all of Dale’s affairs. She’s going to be taking over the running of the company.”
“When?”
“Someday soon. Here we are.”
Missy knocked on the door with a resounding thud that spoke of expensive old-growth hardwood and then opened the door.
“Angela Jean, Mr. Jones is here to see you.”
Angie was seated at a desk that was plain white and utilitarian. It looked like an Ikea piece. She was frowning at a computer monitor like she needed to drop in on an optometrist, and she looked up as if she had been a million miles away.
“Oh, Mr. Jones.”
“I’ll leave you kids to it,” said Missy, closing the door. It had been some time since I had been referred to as a kid, and Angie was no yearling.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jones, I wasn’t expecting you.”
“It’s Miami,” I said once again. Mr. Jones didn’t roll off her tongue the same way as it had with her mother. She was not the product of a Southern upbringing. No doubt she had been raised a little further south than the Deep South.
“Miami, of course. How can I help?”
“I was hoping to get a look at the security video from the garage.”
“I showed it to Detective Ronzoni. There wasn’t much to see.”
“Still. If I could have a look all the same.”
She glanced at her screen and then back at me. “Of course. It’s just in the next room.”
Angie tapped a button on her keyboard and then stood and strode out of the room. The next door along was built of similar heft. She pushed it open and we stepped inside. It was a small space, like a child’s bedroom. There was another utilitarian desk with a couple computer monitors on it. A rack of computer servers hummed loudly and pushed considerable heat into the room.
Angie sat at a desk and took hold of a mouse and clicked her way to a screen that opened up as a picture of the faux-English pub in the garage building.
“Take a seat, Miami.”
I did that and directed my attention to the screen.
“This is the video from that morning. There are three cameras: one on the front of the garage looking at the driveway, one in the pub and one in the main garage.”
“Nothing in the secret garage?”
“No, sir. There’s no way to get in there except through the main garage anyhow.”
“Okay. Let’s see.”
Angie clicked a button and the picture flickered. The video camera was mounted on the far end of the pub, looking back toward the television on the wall beside the door from the deck. Nothing was happening. The space was dark. The lights were off and storm clouds had driven the daylight away, but I guessed the camera had some kind of infrared capability, so we could make out the booths and the bar and even some of the posters with surprising clarity.
Then the picture changed to a view of the driveway. The rain was coming down, heavy but nowhere near as heavy as it was going to get.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The video rotates automatically through the three cameras. Twenty seconds each shot. It saves on DVR space, I guess.”
I said nothing. I was watching something slink its way up the driveway toward the garage. It looked like the backend of a trailer. Then the picture changed again to a view of the darkened garage. The shot was from above the bank of windows into the pub, looking back at the roller door at the end. I could make out the shapes of cars parked at angles, display style. In the darkness the white walls glowed. Then the video went back to the pub.
I waited for the shot to go back outside. A semitrailer was backing up to the roller door of the garage. It was an enclosed trailer, not one of those open ones I saw moving new cars covered in plastic up and down I-95. The rain bounced off the top of the trailer and red circles glowed from the rear. Then we were back inside the garage. The roller door began moving up. There was no sound with the video but I heard the noise in my head. The door opened a third of the way and someone stepped under wearing a rain slicker. The rain was already forming puddles on the gravel outside. Then the lights burst on.
Angie Beadman flipped the hood off her head in the video and looked across the garage. There were ten cars. They were all gleaming in the lights. I saw the black Model T, next to a blue sedan that looked like a seventies muscle car. On the other side, my eye was drawn to a red sports car that could be nothing but the work of Enzo Ferrari.
“Ferrari,” I said.
“250 Testa Rossa.”
“Testa Rossa. Wasn’t that what Magnum PI drove? It doesn’t look like his car.”
Angie gave me a sideways glance. “Yes, but no. Magnum’s car was a Testarossa, all one word. That was a large production model for Ferrari in the 1980s. Probably their most popular model ever. This is Testa Rossa, two words. It’s a race car from the late fifties. Only thirty-four were ever built.”
“You know a lot about cars.”
“Occupational hazard.”
The video went back to the bar, which was now bathed in light from the garage. Then back outside, where all I could see was the top of the truck trailer. We waited for the garage shot again. The back of the trailer was opening like a whale’s mouth, creating a ramp down onto the pristine concrete. Water cascaded off it onto the floor. Then I saw another person appear at the rear of the truck, dripping wet. It was a man. He wore a cap rather than a hood, and the cap looked drenched. Then the video flicked to the outside view and we sat back to wait.
“What’s the collection worth?” I asked.
“It’s insured for thirty million.”
I nearly fell off my chair, literally. I caught the back as I tipped and pulled myself up.
“You okay?” Angie asked.
“That’s a lot of money.”
“It’s insurance value. What they’d sell for is anyone’s guess. Values go up and down.”
“And the F-88 is the most valuable?”
“No, not by a long shot.”
“Really? So why is it so special?”
“It’s the latest baby?” Angie shrugged. “My dad has a thing for domestic cars.”
The video came back into the garage. The man in the cap stepped up onto the ramp and walked up into the guts of the trailer. It was too dark in there to see anything.
“Who’s the guy?”
“Rex Jennings. He’s one of Dad’s truck drivers.”
“So this is your dad’s truck?”
“That’s right. We have three. Two are for the main cars, 29 and 09. This one is used for the development engineers in Charlotte, and as backup in case one of the others breaks down.”
The video switched again.
“So
about the F-88—it’s not the most expensive?”
“No. If it were insured, it would be covered for maybe four or five million.”
“But it’s not insured.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Hence wanting it back so badly.”
“It’s not really the money. The insurance on the others would cover that loss, too, easily.”
“Who insures the cars?”
“Great Southeast Permanent.”
I knew the name. The same grandiosely titled outfit that covered my house, which was worth considerably less than Beadman’s car collection.
“So which one is the most valuable?”
“You spotted it. The Testa Rossa. Dad found it in a dusty shed in Italy. Got it for eight hundred thousand, years ago. They restored it at his workshop.”
“What’s it worth?”
“Last one I heard about sold at auction for sixteen million.”
I was holding on to my chair this time. I’m rarely fooled twice.
“That’s a tidy sum.”
Angie nodded and the video returned to the garage.
The driver, Rex, strode down the ramp and across to the shelves on the wall. He pulled them apart to reveal the hidden room. Then he marched back up into the truck. We waited for the video to rotate and then saw Rex pushing a car down the ramp and into the garage. He had the driver’s door cracked open and was using one hand to steer the vehicle down the middle of the space between the rows of cars on either side. There were six on the right wall as we looked at it and four on the left. The space on the left remained to access the hidden room, which was where Rex pushed the car. The video rotated again.
“That’s the F-88?”
“Yes.”
“It’s covered up. How do you know?”
“Rex took the cover off once it was in place.”
“But how did he verify it was the right car in the first place?”
“He didn’t. Simon did that.”
“Simon?”
“Simon Lees. Head engineer at the team workshop. He went to Lansing to handle the pick up and verify it all.”
The video came back and Rex strode out of the hidden room with a large sheet rolled up under his arm. I assumed it was the car cover. He walked back out to the trailer and reappeared with a mop. The video rotated, and when it returned, Rex was mopping the residual water off the shiny floor. It was truly A-grade service. He worked his way back to the base of the ramp, where Angie stood waiting. They spoke. Then the video moved on.
“What did you discuss?”
“Nothing much. I told him to drive safe on the roads. It was raining and it was going to get worse. He said to say hi to Mom, and to make sure we got out of town ASAP.”
We watched the video switch back. The driver, Rex, was working a control panel at the rear side of the truck to make the ramp lift back up. Angie flicked her hood up and dashed out into the rain.
“Where were you going now?” I asked.
“Back to the house. I had to lock everything up and then get the hell out of Dodge.”
I watched as the ramp on the trailer closed up tight and then Rex took a phone out and made a quick call. Then he flicked the garage lights off. The space was plunged into darkness and I saw the shadow of the driver step out into the rain. He moved away from the truck and out of view. Then the roller door shuddered. I waited for the video to rotate through again, which was getting tiresome, and then it was back in time to see the roller door lower the last few feet until it shuddered to a close. It took the infrared sensors in the camera a few seconds to do their thing, but gradually the shapes of the cars formed in the darkness of the garage.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Angie. “I mean, I haven’t watched the whole thing, but we forwarded through it with Detective Ronzoni, and it just stays like this until the power cuts out.”
“How long until that happens?”
“About twelve hours, I guess. There’s no timestamp or anything on this video.”
“Do you remember what time the truck arrived?”
“It was eleven. I remember Dad’s grandfather clock chimed as I was getting my rain jacket on.”
“So what did you do after you left the garage?”
“I went back to the house. We packed some things, made sure all the storm shutters were in place, and then we left.”
“You and your mother.”
“That’s right.”
“How long later?”
“About two hours, by the time we got everything ready.”
“That’s a while. The hurricane wasn’t that big a surprise.”
“My mother doesn’t travel light.”
I could see that. “And the truck was gone.”
“Yes.”
I watched the video loop through a couple more times. Nothing happened in the garage or the bar. Outside I saw the top of the trailer the next time around. The time after that the truck was gone. Rain was pelting down on the gravel, a portent of the flood to come.
“Anyone else still here when you left?”
“No. We sent everyone home the previous night. The groundsmen put the shutters up before they went. We told them not to come back until it was safe.”
“Your mother told me you drove to Charlotte. How did you get off the island?”
“Flagler was closed, so we had to use Royal Park.”
“It was still open?”
“Yes.”
“And then I-95?”
“Yes. It was pretty slow, but it opened up after Port St. Lucie.”
“Which car did you take?”
“Mine. The Camaro.”
“Take long to get to Charlotte?”
She smiled a little. “Not that long. Not in my baby.”
Apparently, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree when it came to speed.
“Can I get a copy of the video?”
“All of it?”
“Sure.”
“You’re going to watch twelve hours of nothing happening?”
“Someone is.”
“I can set up a user account. You can access it securely over the internet. You have internet access restored?”
I wasn’t sure about that. I didn’t have any power at my house at all, but then I didn’t have any internet access, either. I knew we had it at the office, but whether it was up or down was between Lizzy and the cable company.
“I’ll work something out. Set me up.”
Angie tapped some keys and then scribbled something on a piece of DBR notepaper and tore off the page and handed it to me.
“You need anything else?” she asked.
“Not right now.”
Angie walked me out to my car. Guys were raking the decomposed granite across the driveway and I think they were happy about me moving out of the way. I told Angie I’d be in touch and got in my car. I looked at the piece of paper in my hand and thought about the video. And how the hell someone had gotten eleven cars off an island during a hurricane.
Chapter Seven
I drove the long way home. First I went north all the way to the top end of the island, which wasn’t far from the Beadman estate. I stopped at the top end of North Ocean Boulevard. The road to the right was a sliver of a one-way street, not all that suitable for a vehicle transporter. A pier sat at the end of the island behind a waist-high gate that would let a couple people in side-by-side. There was a bicycle rack, and a woman in a white blouse stood on the end of the pier, letting the breeze blow across her face. I tested the gate and the fence. The fence was firm and the gate lay permanently open.
On further inspection, I realized that the gate opened on both sides from the middle. The open side was just one half. The other side was locked to the peg in the concrete. Neither the lock nor the peg looked recently disturbed. I stood back and assessed the width of the entrance. It was wide enough for a car. Not a truck or a Hummer or anything equally ridiculous, but certainly a sports c
ar.
The paved path led onto the pier. A boat could quite easily pull up to the pier. I knew that because a boat came in and tied up as I watched. There was a slight breeze and small chop and the boat bobbled on the water. A guy in the boat offered a hand to the woman in the white blouse. She took it and stepped carefully into the vessel. The boat wasn’t rocking with any kind of violence, but I could see it doing so in the kind of wind that the hurricane had pushed down the coast. Then there was the storm surge. My backyard had a speedboat dumped sitting in it thanks to the surge. There was every chance that the pier I was looking at had been underwater for the majority of the storm. It didn’t seem like any kind of smart way to get cars off the island.
I turned away and headed south, all the way down the east side of the island, past the debris-strewn beaches along South Ocean Boulevard. I headed past the Bonita Mar Club and down onto Southern Boulevard. I had an itch to scratch and I had a reasonable idea of how to do just that. I drove across Bingham Island and onto the mainland and pulled into a small lot in front of a low office building. There was a sign for a realty business out front, and palm fronds had fallen across the lawn. I had had occasion to visit the offices before, but the franchise had changed hands and a new company’s decal was on the door.
The young guy at the reception desk was still the same, though. He was shuffling papers, trying to keep busy while waiting for the phone to ring or someone to need an emergency Starbucks run. The door creaked a little as I stepped in, and he looked up. I was happy to see that he remembered me.
“Not you again,” he said.
“You’ve got the place in good shape, considering,” I said.
“It took a lot of mopping if you must know. The water was everywhere.”
“I’m sure.”
“What do you want?”
“I notice you have a security camera over the front door.”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“You record it or is it just for show?”
“Of course we record. It wouldn’t be very secure if we didn’t.”
I shrugged. “I’d like to see it.”
“I need to see a warrant or something.”
“I’m not the cops, junior. I don’t do warrants. So you gonna help me out, or am I going to cause trouble?”
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