Danielle smiled.
“Not quite,” I said. “We need to see the other one.”
“The other what?”
“The other hangar.”
“This is the Beadman hangar.”
“But they had another plane, right? A single prop?”
“Yeah, similar to the one that landed earlier. But they sold it. Upgraded to the Lear that lives here.”
“And where did the other plane live?”
“In a smaller hangar. Out back. But I’m telling you they don’t have that plane anymore.”
“I don’t care about the plane. Show me the hangar.”
Adam looked a little put out, but a smile from Danielle put it right. I didn’t hold that against him. The same thing worked on me. We got back in the pickup, and Adam drove us around the airport to the row of hangars closest to the Beeline Highway. Not that we could see the highway. The foliage was on a rampage. He checked a list and pulled up beside a hangar. We got out again. This hangar looked a little older, like it had been the first row built. Adam worked the door, and it folded in on itself in the same way. He called us over again. We stood next him and looked inside. The space wasn’t as large as the hangar for the Learjet.
But it was big enough to hold a blue-sided vehicle transport trailer.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The space was barely big enough to contain the trailer. It had been backed in so it was diagonal across the space. Someone who really knew how to back a trailer had done it. Someone with decades of experience. I took a picture. Danielle told Adam that he needed to close the hangar and not tell anyone about the truck and not let anyone else in. The penalty for doing so might include an IRS audit, which seemed to be a real pain point for him.
“How did you know about the second hangar?” she asked when we got back to my car.
“Missy told me they had upgraded their plane, but I remembered she said they had hangars out here. Hangars, plural.”
“We need to call the PBSO,” she said.
“No.”
“MJ, this guy stole the cars. I don’t know how, but he did.”
“I know.”
“So we need to call the sheriff.”
“No. Hon, give me today. There’s more going on here than it seems. And for the first time, I think I get it.”
“Did he steal those cars or not?”
“It’s complicated. But I don’t want anyone innocent to get hurt. Just give me today. Tomorrow, if we haven’t sorted it out, we call the sheriff.”
She wasn’t happy about it, but she relented. Danielle drove while I placed calls. I called Angie to say we needed to meet. She said she was in a meeting in Daytona and would be back that evening. She told me to drop by. I said I would.
Then I called Ron. I told him I really needed the address of Great Southeast Permanent. The CEO needed to chat. Urgently. Ron told me that Kent Fulsome had a tee time that afternoon.
“Does that guy ever work?”
“A lot of deals get done on golf courses.”
“And they don’t get done faster or better in an office?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” said Ron. “They’ll kill you if you let that news out.”
I thanked Ron and hung up. Danielle drove back to Lucas’s condo to get her truck.
“You want to come?” I asked.
“Tonight?”
“Or now.”
“I need to get to work. There are still a lot of people who need help.”
“Then tonight.”
I left her to go save the world. I couldn’t think of a better person to try. I had something else in mind. I slipped into my SUV. I needed some lunch. I decided I felt like a Cuban sandwich. There are lots of good places to get a Cuban sandwich in South Florida. But I had a particular sandwich in mind. I headed down around the airport to a little place behind a strip mall.
Peter Malloy, my errant building inspector, was doing his job from his usual perch at a table outside at Bar Playa. I stopped at the bar and ordered said Cuban sandwich and a beer. The smiling young Latina behind the bar handed me a Tecate and told me she would be happy to bring my sandwich to me. I thanked her and turned to Peter Malloy.
He was reading a magazine, eating a Cuban sandwich and drinking a beer, and I wondered how he kept his figure with a diet like that. Maybe his fiancée made him go running as well. I plopped down opposite him and took a sip of beer. He glanced up from his magazine and his mouth dropped open, showing a partially eaten sandwich.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you to eat with your mouth closed?” I said.
To his credit, he did shut it. He badly wanted to say something to me, but now that I had questioned his mother’s parenting, he really wanted to swallow first. But the sandwich was thick and bready and needed a lot of mastication. The end result was almost death. He tried to swallow the damned sandwich before it was small enough and it got lodged in his throat. His eyes bulged and he started banging himself in the throat, which really didn’t seem to be the right approach. A couple of guys at the bar heard the commotion and pointed. They thought it was pretty funny. Malloy started turning blue.
“You want some help?” I asked him.
He nodded, I think. It was difficult to discern from the chocking. I stood up and moved behind him and then came in hard on his chest with a sudden massive bearhug. The sandwich dislodged and popped up into his mouth and he spat it onto the concrete.
I sat down and sipped my beer. I was having a reasonable day. Life, like cases, is about momentum. You stop moving, you die. Momentum was everything, and I had some now in my case. I also had some with regard to my house. And that was before I had saved Peter Malloy’s life. I gave him a good chance to collect himself. It took a while. I had time. The lovely girl from the bar delivered my sandwich and asked if I wanted ketchup. I asked her what kind of heathen put ketchup on a Cuban sandwich. She said Americano. I said nothing to that.
Malloy got his breath back. He sipped some beer and it stung his throat and made him cough.
“Try some honey,” I said.
“This doesn’t change anything,” he said.
A prince among men.
“I don’t expect it to. I don’t save people’s lives in expectation of a return favor. In your case, I did it because I didn’t want to spend hours at West Palm Beach police HQ providing a statement to a guy who types with two fingers.”
He coughed.
“But let me tell you what does change things. Let’s start with Juan Gotlieb. And his actor/driver/hard man, Domingo. I can inform you that they are no longer interested in my property. Further, my new friend, Domingo, has let me know that it was he, and not you, that placed a no habitation order on my house. Paperwork, he tells me, he got from you in return for a cash payment.”
“You think you’re clever?”
“Not as clever as my better half, but considerably smarter than an oyster.”
“You can’t touch me. The union won’t let you anywhere near me.”
“I have no desire to be near you, not the way you eat sandwiches. But let me tell you who might be happy to be near you. How about the Palm Beach Post?”
“No one reads that rag anymore.”
“Perhaps that’s true. Maybe it’s all online now, I don’t know. But I do know about stories going viral.”
“A story about me going viral? You’re out of your mind.”
“I am. But it doesn’t have to go Kardashian viral. It only has to reach your wife. And her church group. And the principal at your kids’ schools. And the nasty piece of work who runs the PTA.”
“How do you know Lucinda?”
Lucky guess.
“There’s no upside here, Pete. You did a dumb thing. We all do dumb things. Me included, as hard as that is to believe. But there’s no upside. The guy who paid you has had a change of heart, and he isn’t coming back for the money. He’s not looking for you to do anything from here. And you know it’s a sham order. So all you need t
o do is rectify it. Call off the dogs. Give me my house back.”
He looked at me through smudged glasses. I could tell he was weighing it up. He didn’t want to give me a damned thing, lifesaving or not. But he was also the kind of man who avoids hassle like a child avoids broccoli. He was trying to find a way to concede without conceding. Which is pretty hard to do without looking like a complete moron.
I gave him time. I ate half my sandwich while he was thinking. It was food from another planet. A good food planet. The ham was thick and smoky and the pork was roasted to perfection. And there was a cheese in there that was mild but tasty at the same time. I was halfway through the sandwich before Malloy did anything.
He didn’t speak. What he did was take a tablet computer out of the satchel at his feet. He fired it up and tap, tap, tapped. Then he spun the screen around to me.
“Violation removed,” he said.
There was some horribly formatted page on the screen. But the county logo was at the top, so I took it as read that Malloy had done what he said he had done. If he hadn’t, I knew where he lunched.
“But if you don’t get that house up to code asap, I will slap an order on it.”
“I’ve already had a contractor in,” I said. “Because I don’t want to live in a house that isn’t to code in a hurricane zone.” I sipped my beer. “But, if you slap any kind of order anywhere near my house, I will find you and shove the rest of that sandwich back down your damned throat where it came from.”
Malloy went white. Whiter. He again took a moment to compose himself, and I again ate some sandwich.
“Are we done?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Then stay the hell away from me,” he said.
“Gladly,” I said.
I didn’t move. I had a quarter of a sandwich and a half a beer left. The beer was run-of-the-mill but the sandwich was heavenly. I wasn’t going anywhere until I was done.
Peter Malloy glared at me through his librarian glasses. Then he stuffed his tablet into his satchel like he was making a point. He stood, gave me a glare that made me think of a book about Ted Williams that I never returned to the New Haven Free Public Library when I was a boy, and he walked out.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I met Ron at South Lakes Country Club. It was a mild afternoon and the breeze was light, so a good number of people had decided that work was for chumps and had left their offices and dental suites and such to hit the fairways. The lot was pretty full, but there was space at the back where I parked. I strode past two men and one woman in three BMWs who were sitting in lanes closer to the clubhouse, waiting to pounce on any spot that was vacated.
I found Ron in the upstairs bar. It was a nice wide-open room with a wonderful view of both sides of the twenty-seven-hole layout. Ron was sitting on a beer at a table by a screened window. I grabbed an iced tea from the bar. I had plenty left to do on this particular day and I needed my wits about me.
We watched a group of golfers in the distance standing on the tee waiting to hit to the fairway, and a group on the fairway waiting to hit to the green, and a group on the green taking their sweet old time over three-foot putts that counted for nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Eventually, I noted that the group waiting on the tee included my old friend, Kent Fulsome. He appeared to have ditched his Miami Dolphins cap in favor of allowing the breeze to ebb through his luxurious hair. He was wearing Ray-Bans and leaned on his driver.
A guy on the green hit a two-foot putt to ten feet past the cup, and the groan from the group on the fairway was audible through the mesh bug screens in the bar. The guy walked a wide circle around the green to analyze why things had gone so badly. He got down on his haunches and assessed the angle of the green like it was one of those unreadable monsters at Augusta National. It was no such thing. The green ran downhill, back to front. Gary Player could have read that green from his home in South Africa, or Arizona or wherever it was he lived now. Everyone on the course knew it was an easy read.
Including Kent Fulsome. The pain of watching someone pull off a Band-Aid one hair at a time was too much for him. I watched him from my perch in the bar. He bullied his way to the tee box and he mounted his ball on a high tee and then he took one, two, three waggles of his backside and he whacked the ball right up the middle of the fairway. He was good under pressure. He was fired up and the blood was pumping and the shot was straight up the middle. Proof positive that golf was played in the mind, not on the course. Score one for not thinking and just doing.
The guys on the fairway were not impressed. In their defense, they were not the reason for the holdup. They were waiting for the schmo on the green like everyone else. So when Fulsome’s ball went flying through their group at head height and landed on the fairway just ahead of them, they weren’t all that happy. Three of them turned and started yelling abuse back at the tee. Fulsome gave them a mouthful back. The fourth guy in the group took a fairway wood from his bag and stormed up to Fulsome’s ball. He faced the wrong way—back toward the tee—dug his heels into the lush fairway and smacked the ball right back at Fulsome.
It didn’t make it. The guy on the fairway had used a shorter club and had hit off the fairway, not off a tee, but he hit a decent shot. And his point was made. The next thing that happened was Custer and Sitting Bull. The group on the tee jumped into their two carts and tore along the cart path as fast as their electric motors would go. The guys on the fairway saw this and got in their two carts and took off the wrong way, straight up the fairway.
Ron’s mouth dropped. He was old-school and very big on golf course decorum. He didn’t abide drinking, cursing or betting on a golf course. I wasn’t sure where jousting fell on his list. Not high. His face went white as he watched the two sets of carts closing in on each other.
Then they met. They zoomed past each other, clubs flailing outside the carts like swords. Each of the carts did a wide turn and came back for a second shot, two-on-two. The left pair flew by each other again, the click of graphite shafts connecting echoing up the fairway. The right pair did not. I wasn’t sure if it was a miscalculation or if one of the drivers was a demon at playing chicken, but the two carts smashed into each other head-on.
Golf carts go fast but not that fast. Especially on thick fairway grass. But it was enough for the passenger of the cart coming toward us to end up in the lap of the guy driving the cart headed away. The other driver got out, wielding a putter like it was a lightsaber. It was Kent Fulsome. He was doing that time-honored move of boorish morons the world over and begging his companions to hold him back from beating the daylight out of someone while simultaneously making no attempt to move in and do any such thing.
“I think we need to call the police,” said Ron.
“Nah,” I said. “Leave it with me.”
I walked out of the bar and down the stairs that came out in front of the green, where the guy who had missed the putt was still trying to assess his next attempt and was most aggrieved with the fuss that was disturbing his concentration. I wandered past him and headed for the melee. I ambled down the fairway with my hands in my pockets, a glorious sunny day to take a walk.
By the time I got there, the fight had descended into name-calling. That’s one thing about golf players and fans. They’re generally not big fighters. You don’t see a lot of that action at the PGA. So once the bluster and the testosterone had been worked through, they really didn’t know what to do.
So I decided to the throw some gasoline on the fire.
“Kent Fulsome, imagine finding you here!”
I marched toward him with a big grin. He frowned, dropped his shades and squinted over them like he needed a new prescription, and then the penny dropped.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I was thinking the same thing about you. Do you ever work?”
“This is work, genius.”
“Only if you’re Phil Mickelson, and you’re not.”
“
This is harassment, pal. I’ll call the cops.”
“That’s okay, the cops have already been called. You dunderheads are all on video. You’re gonna go viral.” I smiled even wider. I was having a better time than I thought I would. Every one of the knuckleheads on the fairway spun toward the clubhouse, where a decent-sized gathering had formed to watch the idiocy. Contrition was rapid. Clubs were slipped back into their bags and guys from both groups starting shaking hands in truce. Foreign diplomacy should happen so easily. Of course, it does. When you have a common enemy. Apologies were offered and accepted and then, as one, they all turned their thoughts on the guy up on the green, who had just putted again. And missed.
I focused on Kent. He had offered no such apology. He was the big man on campus. The financial wunderkind who had started an insurance business from scratch and turned it into an enterprise worth hundreds of millions. A lot of those hundreds of millions had evaporated in the winds of the hurricane. Even with his business on the line, he stood firm. He saw it as his greatest strength. Weaker men could not have done what he had done. He was the alpha male. He was about to learn about being beta.
“How’s business, Kent?”
“Great.”
“Cashed up, are you? No? I hear you’re wearing a mountain of debt.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? Then I guess I don’t know that you don’t have the cash to cover the claims on you. And without cash, you can’t even pay the lawyers you’ll need to hire to defend all the lawsuits from people like me. And then the regulators will come in. And they’ll freeze everything. And they’ll take your nice little mansion on Washington Street.”
“You don’t know anything. The house isn’t a company asset. Dream on.”
“I will. You know what I’m dreaming of? I’m dreaming of a guy who needs a bit of extra finance to paper over his losses. And I’m dreaming that the only way a guy could get that sort of financing is to offer a director’s guarantee. Using his home as collateral.”
He didn’t fold, but his veneer cracked a little. “You’re crazy,” he said, but it wasn’t very convincing.
No Right Turn Page 23