No Right Turn

by A. J. Stewart

  “I don’t see Beadman.”

  “Is that an eye complaint thing, or do you actually believe him to be invisible?”

  “What? Not literally, you maggot.”

  He really needed a new curse word.

  “I see him at the track,” he spat.

  “Were you at the track the day the hurricane hit Palm Beach?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Why? There was no racing.”

  “We’re making a film.”

  “A film? Like a movie?”

  “Yes. I’m an executive producer.” He didn’t raise his chin as he said that, but I knew he wanted to.

  “What’s the movie about?”

  “What do you think? NASCAR.”

  I nodded. I recalled that Dale Beadman said he had been delayed in Charlotte because of some filming and had not gotten back to Palm Beach for the delivery of his beloved F-88.

  “Is Dale Beadman in your movie?”

  “Not if I can help it. That’s what editing is for.”

  “But you filmed him. That day.”

  “I don’t work the camera, pal.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re getting at, but I’ve got friends here and I’m not wasting any more time on you. Get off my property or I will call the police.”

  “That would be fun for your guests.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. That’s the only reason I’m giving you a chance to leave. But I’ll do it. I give a lot of money to our fine police department, and I’m sure they’d be happy to host you for a day or two in their cells.”

  My guess was that he was bluffing, but I also knew a little about how police departments functioned in areas where rich people lived. Palm Beach was my turf. And I didn’t like the idea of a day or two in the local lockup. I glanced at Lucas, and he shrugged like it was time to go. We walked out and Brasher closed the door behind us and then followed us across the lawn. He herded us toward the side of the house, away from his party.

  “Don’t come back,” he said.

  “Tell me one thing,” I said. “That race at Indy. Dale Beadman had the racing line, right?”

  “Get lost,” said Brasher, and he turned and marched away toward his patio. I saw his personal secretary standing in the light of a tiki lamp, watching me. So I walked away into the shadows.

  “Nice guy,” said Lucas. “Seemed to like you.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You see how he hesitated when you asked about the F-88?”

  “I did. And he’s involved in this movie, which was what kept Dale from being at the delivery. Convenient if you wanted to steal it.”

  A valet was standing on the road when we walked across the front lawn.

  “You can’t park there,” he said. “It’ll get towed.”

  “We’re leaving,” I said.

  We got in and I started the engine but didn’t put it in drive.

  “What ya thinkin’?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m thinking I’m tired of talking to people who don’t want to talk to me. What about you?”

  “I’m thinking those steaks looked pretty good. We haven’t eaten since brekky.”

  I started the engine and pulled away from Ansel Brasher’s house. Away from the peninsula. I put beer into my GPS and was directed south into Charlotte to the periphery of the downtown area. It looked like a theater district. We stopped at a place that called itself VBGB, with a large beer garden out back and a list of beers as long as my arm. Lucas had a Narragansett Lager that made me think of my high school days in New England, and I stayed local with something called a Red Oak. The place was hopping both inside and out. People played giant chess, and we shared a long table with two guys with lumberjack beards who played Connect Four all night. We watched the crowd around us but didn’t say much. Lucas ate a burger and I had a pork brat that was so good I had another.

  I was better for the meal, but I felt my spirits dragging. I wanted to get home. But Lucas was as fatigued as I was, and after a few beers, we decided that the smart play was to stay local. I found a business hotel on my phone, and we left the lights and the energy of the beer garden and my vehicle in the lot and walked around the train line and cut through the adjacent cemetery. Our room was a star or four better than our digs the previous night, but it was essentially two beds and a television, and I wondered what the extra dimes bought us. I didn’t care. They weren’t my dimes. They were Dale Beadman’s dimes, and he seemed to have plenty to spare. We flicked on SportsCenter but Lucas was snoring before I even got my head comfortable on the pillow. I lay in the light coming from the parking lot, watching headlights play on the ceiling, and I fell asleep thinking about fast cars and movies and ladies with kitties that were no longer of this world.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One of the benefits of sharing a motel with a guy who snores is that there is plenty of incentive to get an early start. We left Charlotte, North Carolina, at four a.m., got drive-through coffee in South Carolina and crab sandwiches in Georgia, and I pulled into the lot beside by my office in West Palm a tick before one in the afternoon.

  I thanked Lucas for coming, and he thanked me for taking him. We made a date to visit Lenny in a few weeks. Lucas got in his truck and pulled away toward Miami. I hoped he didn’t get pulled over for speeding. I didn’t go into the office. I didn’t get out of the car. I hadn’t showered in a couple days, and in between I had sweated a few gallons inside a racing suit, so I headed back up 95 toward Lucas’s condo at PGA.

  I didn’t get there. I found myself veering off the freeway at Blue Heron Boulevard as if my SUV was a homing pigeon. I stopped in front of my house. It looked weathered but not beaten, and certainly not uninhabitable. I got out and wandered around the side to check if someone had collected the speedboat yet.

  They had not. It lay sadly marooned on its side where it had been before. It was proving to be a bit of an obstacle to the men working in my backyard. Two Hispanic guys were holding opposite ends of a long measuring tape and were trying to get it to hold a straight line over the top of the speedboat.

  “You guys checking your yardage?” I asked.

  The two guys looked up at me and the one in the straw hat said, “Cómo?”

  “The hole is a solid nine iron from here, if that helps.”

  “Qué?”

  “What are you boys doing?”

  “Measuring.”

  Ask a stupid question. . .

  “Why are you measuring?”

  “To dig the hole.”

  “What hole are you planning to dig?”

  He looked at me like it was more than a lost in translation thing. He genuinely thought I was insane.

  “For the pool.”

  I was going to say what pool? but I could see this conversation continuing for hours the way we were going, so I said, “I didn’t order a pool.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “No pool?”

  “No pool.” It wasn’t that I had anything against a pool. It was just that my house was currently unfit for habitation according to the county and I didn’t have the bankroll to fix that, let alone dig a pool. Then the thought popped into my head that maybe I wasn’t the one ordering the pool.

  “Who told you to put in a pool?”

  “The boss,” he said.

  “Which boss?”

  The guy nodded across the fence at the wedding cake that I had to live next to.

  “They ordered the pool?”

  “Si. I thought you leave.”

  I shook my head. “No. I didn’t leave.”

  “You sell house?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” He gave me a look that said that kind of stuff happened all the time, and he fired off a flow of Spanish at his buddy, who smiled. They wound up their tape measure.

  “The boss around now?” I asked the guy in the straw hat.

  “Si.”

  “Is he always th
ere?”

  “Si.”

  Suddenly I felt like I knew how the sheriff had found out that Danielle and I were in the house after I got the no habitation order, and how the deputy had turned up so quickly. Someone was watching, and they weren’t sitting in a car on the street doing it. They were inside the house next door. Maybe they were fixing some stuff, or maybe they were house-sitting, or maybe they were just getting fifty bucks a day to watch out for me.

  “Tell your boss I want to sell.”

  The poor guy looked thoroughly confused.

  “You want to sell?”

  “Si. I want to sell. Tell your boss to get his man to call me.”

  “Okay. I tell him.”

  The two guys walked back around the side of my house to the street and turned to the house next door. They were shrugging their shoulders the whole way.

  I went over to the back door that still hadn’t been replaced. The plastic flapped in the breeze. I had a good deal of stuff inside, but I wasn’t worried about those guys stealing anything. They weren’t criminals. They were just guys doing a job. In some respects it was good they were around. It kept the real criminals away from my house while it was open to the world.

  I was standing on my back patio, looking up at the house next door, wondering if the boss was up there watching me, when my phone rang. I didn’t know the number.

  But I knew the voice.

  “I hear you’re ready to sell, amigo,” said the Latino guy with the sharp suit and the faded movie star looks.

  “For the right offer,” I said.

  “Your house is not in such good shape, amigo. What kind of offer do you have in mind?”

  “Let’s talk about it. Meet me tonight.”

  “You want to meet? Okay.”

  “You know a club called Ted’s? In Lauderhill?”

  “No.”

  I knew he wouldn’t. That was more or less the point.

  “Ask around. You’ll find it. Tonight at eight.”

  “All right, señor. I’ll bring the paperwork.”

  “You do that.”

  I hung up without further pleasantries. I saw no movement in the wedding cake, but I knew someone was in there. I was having a hard time getting my head around the idea that whoever owned the house wanted a pool so badly that they would instigate a campaign to kick me out of my house. This wasn’t Palm Beach real estate. Don’t get me wrong, the market had gone up and my plot was right on the water. But how badly could you want a pool? Especially in a house that you were never in. I had never seen anyone in there other than cleaners and garden and other maintenance guys. The whole thing just didn’t seem real.

  We’d see how real it got in Lauderhill.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a pleasant aroma, so I headed back to the condo to freshen up. Danielle had stocked the fridge in my absence, so I tossed a banana and some frozen berries and a dollop of good old Florida OJ into the blender and whizzed up a smoothie after my shower. Then I cruised on back to the island.

  The gate to the Beadman residence stood open, and a small army of guys was sweeping the new decomposed granite driveway. They stood aside to let me in and I gave them a wave of thanks and pulled around in front of the house. The black Camaro was sitting askew in front of me.

  I let myself in. It’s generally impolite, but in certain circumstances it was worth being considered such a beast. The house was quiet downstairs. Upstairs I could hear the faint whine of a vacuum cleaner. Probably a maid. Angie and Missy didn’t grab me as vacuuming types. I knew fellow vacuum allergy sufferers when I saw them.

  I walked down the corridor toward Angie’s office. All the office doors were closed. I stopped for a moment outside the room with the computer server in it, where I had seen the security video. I opened the door. The computers were humming away and the room was uncomfortably warm. I closed the door and knocked on Angie’s office.

  “Come in,” called Angie and I opened the door. “Miami,” she said. “Did we have an appointment?”

  “No, I was in the neighborhood.”

  “You were?”

  “Sure.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  She looked at her computer as if it was too important to leave and then looked at me and must have concluded I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She gave a sigh like a walk was hard labor and stood from her desk.

  We walked out through the great room onto a spacious deck that I hadn’t seen before. There was a dining setting under an umbrella, a stone fire pit and another outdoor kitchen to match the one outside Dale’s faux-English pub.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Angie as we stepped down onto the lawn.

  “I was up in Charlotte yesterday.”

  She stopped and then started walking again. “Really? Do you think my dad’s cars are there?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I’m just learning the lay of the land.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  “I learned that a lot of people think your dad’s a pretty great guy.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “No reason at all. There are also a lot of people up there who think pretty highly of you.”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “I know, it’s for me to say, and I’m saying it.”

  “Okay. What’s your point?”

  “Why aren’t you running DBR?”

  “I’m the COO.”

  “Exactly. There’s an E missing in there.”

  “I do my part.”

  “No one’s saying otherwise. But the question is, why are you sitting in a disused bedroom down here in Palm Beach instead of being in a big glass-fronted office in Charlotte?”

  She said nothing. She didn’t shrug and she didn’t make any kind of facial expression that conveyed anything. With a lot of people, I would have been waiting for them to come up with a story, to create a narrative that answered the question to some level of satisfaction. Angie was smart enough to have already come up with a story. I suspected she had to tell herself something on a regular basis. So the pause wasn’t to create the narrative. That was already there somewhere. So I didn’t know what the pause was for.

  We walked down onto the beach. The sea debris had been removed. No kelp and jellyfish left here. The water winked brightly like a woman who had hurt me badly before but whose charms I could never deny. I kicked off my shoes and stepped into the sand. Angie wore jeans and Keds, so getting her shoes off took a little more effort. She pulled her shoes off from the heels and peeled off the little socks she had underneath. Then she rolled her jeans halfway up her calves.

  We resumed walking along the beach but Angie didn’t feel the need to fill the air with an answer to my question. I liked people who didn’t feel the need to hear their own voices all the time, but I also liked answers. But silence was its own response.

  “I met Rex,” I said.

  Angie nodded.

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  She nodded again. “Yes, he is.”

  “A little on the sad side for Florida.”

  “He lives in North Carolina.”

  Maybe that was why. I couldn’t say. I’d never lived in either of the Carolinas. I had visited here and there. I found the people to be very hospitable.

  “He’s known your mom and dad a long time.”

  “Since the very beginning.”

  “I don’t think he was involved.”

  “Why would you think Rex was involved?”

  “I have to eliminate everyone. He had a big truck. He was here.”

  “Rex would take a bullet for my mom and dad.”

  “Like I say, he wasn’t involved. I met someone else who knew your parents back at the beginning.”

  “Did you?”

  “I did. Ansel Brasher.”

  Angie stopped on the hard wet sand. “Ansel Brasher. How did you meet Ansel Brasher?”

&nbs
p; “I went to his house.”

  “You went to his house? In Lake Norman?”

  “Yep. You been there?”

  “I have. Once, for a NASCAR charity event.”

  “Nice place.”

  “If you like that sort of grotesque architecture and waste of space.”

  I was liking Angie even more.

  “Yeah, especially then.”

  “Why did you visit with Brasher?”

  “His name came up.”

  “In what context?”

  “In the context of being a rival to your dad. In the context of someone who might have a long-running beef that itself might have led to the theft of eleven cars. Or one car.”

  “What do you mean, one car?”

  “I mentioned the F-88 to him. He didn’t say as much, but I got the distinct impression he was more than aware of it.”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of car fanatics who are aware of it.”

  “Aware enough to steal it?”

  “You think Ansel stole the F-88?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. He and Dad have had their moments, I grant you that, but I don’t think Brasher would stoop to something like that.”

  “How can you know? You’ve only met him once.”

  “I’ve only been to his house on Lake Norman once.”

  “But you’ve met him on other occasions?”

  “He’s a race car driver. He was even in NASCAR for a couple years. Of course I met him. But if you think he stole the Oldsmobile, what about the other ten cars?”

  “Smokescreen, maybe.”

  “Smokescreen?”

  “Yeah. Steal them all to hide the fact that you only ever wanted the one. The cops, people like me, anyone trying to figure out what happened, we’re all looking at a case of eleven cars. Lots of directions those cars could go, lots of leads to manage. Harder than just thinking about the one car.”

  “But you are thinking about the one car. Dad said he only cared about you finding the F-88.”

  “Exactly. But Brasher doesn’t necessarily know that.”

  “I don’t know, Miami. I don’t think this has anything to do with Ansel Brasher.”