Olympia Heights in the south Miami area was a slightly older but decent area of town. Most of the houses were old style cinder brick Florida homes with tiny square windows that had weathered a lot of hurricanes over the years. Even though many of the homes were squarish two bedroom models, the prices still ranged from $250,000 and up. Many homes had in-ground pools which was the only way to tolerate Miami’s brutal summer heat.
This was a surprisingly nice part of town and it is unlikely Raphael Valle could have afforded a home in this neighborhood on a fisherman’s take home pay but, according to Anita’s notes the couple had inherited the house from his parents when they passed away. The house and a small inheritance that paid for the Burja got Raphael, the only child, into the fishing business. Growing up in the area he had several contacts at the local markets and restaurants that ended up buying most Raphael’s catch and, along with Ana’s part-time job, would have made a fairly comfortable living. They were saving for college for the kids and had money in savings but not enough to make them a target.
The Valle house was on a quiet side street where few homes showed any evidence of having kids. Olympia Heights was an older, whiter demographic than many parts of Miami and, according to the information Deek added to the case file, only 30 percent of married couples had kids living at home. It wasn’t an ideal choice for a family with two young kids but it was a safe neighborhood that was well patrolled. Even though the streets were narrow, they all had neatly painted bike lanes. The quiet neighborhood, combined with well-tended and fenced lawns, reduced the possibility in my mind that this was any kind of turf war or gang activity.
We parked in the wide, semi-circle driveway behind a silver minivan. Like the rest of the homes in the area the Valle house was neatly maintained and landscaped with taste. It was a larger two bedroom painted kind of a muted brownish tan with a dark brown terra cotta roof. It had a brick-faced carport sheltering the front door and, instead of a pool in the backyard, the house featured one of those fort/jungle gym combinations for the kids. Looking at the obvious loving care that went into this house and the landscaping, there was no way Raphael Valle walked away from this. Before we even rang the doorbell I was convinced only violent hands would have kept Rafe from this place which, by Miami standards, was a serious hookup.
The door opened before we could push the button and I noticed the night vision security cameras covering the front and back. Whatever happened to Rafe, it didn’t happen here. Or, if it did, it wasn’t a surprise.
Ana Valle was a slender, petite Hispanic woman who I guessed to be in her early 30s. That would make Rafe a few years older. She was wearing tan shorts, a white embroidered top and was barefoot with her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail. She invited us in.
The house was small but it didn’t feel cramped due to an open floorplan. Tasteful brown wicker furniture in the living room melted seamlessly into a small dining area just off the kitchen. Instead of a wall between the kitchen and living room, which would have broken up the space, there was a low counter with four stools. A sliding glass door opened into the backyard where a large, slightly overweight dog slept on the cement back porch. There was a family portrait on the wall behind the dinner table, a picture of Raphael and Ana with their two boys that had been taken at a park or picnic, the family frozen forever in a happy embrace.
“You are the Fat Man, yes?” she asked, inviting us to seats in the meticulously neat living room. Like many homes in Florida the house had polished white floor tiles that didn’t have to be replaced after a hurricane and were cooler in the summer heat.
“This is my associate, Q,” I said, settling into a comfortable low-backed wicker chair.
“You have a lovely home, Mrs. Valle,” he said by way of introducing himself, taking a seat at the far end of the long matching couch next to my chair.
“Anita told me a little about you; she said you find things.”
“I guess that’s the high level mission statement,” I agreed. “The reality can be a little more complicated.”
“She said you were...vaqueros,” she said with a sly smile.
“Cowboys,” I translated for Q. “Buckaroos.”
Q smiled. “Some truth to that,” he admitted.
Ana’s smile faded quickly. “Rafe...Raphael, would not have left us,” she said defiantly, as true believers do when confronted with a contradictory situation.
“We believe you, Mrs. Valle,” I replied automatically.
“Please, Ana.”
“Mrs. Valle...Ana, is there anything you might have overlooked? Anything you might not have mentioned to Anita?”
She thought about it for a moment before shaking her head. “I’ve thought of little else,” she informed us. “I keep wondering if there was something I missed.”
“Anita’s report mentioned Rafe had an office in the house and maybe a small shop.”
“Si,” she said, pointing down the hall. “We converted the garage to an office for Rafe, until the boys got older and then we were going to make it into a third bedroom. Come, I show you.”
She led the way past two bedrooms and a bathroom that opened to the hallway that must’ve been for the boys as it had a cartoon character shower curtain and one of those goofy kid’s electric toothbrushes. Like everything else in the house it was tiny but neat. All that changed when we stepped into the converted garage.
“Please forgive how it looks,” she said with a touch of embarrassment, “this was Raphael’s space.”
She used his full name when she was annoyed at him about something and I’m sure hearing it would have let him know the Mrs. wanted a word. It was one of those cute, familiar things couples do.
The converted two car garage was bigger than the living room and dining area put together. They hadn’t ducted the central A/C to the garage and there was a large window A/C set into a specially made hole in the far wall. In one corner was a desk and filing cabinet. The desk was a mess of papers, some of which were recognizable from Anita’s case file photos. It was certain she had gone through them for anything that might be useful.
In the far corner near the door was a workbench with tools hanging on a piece of pegboard screwed to the wall. Next to the workbench was a very sturdy looking stick welder, a heavy duty grinder and, stacked up next to the workbench, was a small pile of 1/8 inch flat steel bars. There were cut pieces of the flat bar all over the workbench. I checked a small metal bucket next to the bench. There was three or four inches of sand in the bottom and about a dozen end pieces of welding rods.
“Was Rafe building something?” I asked Ana.
“A few weeks ago he was working on something but he was always making things for the boat or fixing things,” she pointed out.
“Did you see what it was?”
“There was something...like a big basket,” she said, “he was fixing it.”
“With these?” I pointed at the flat steel bars.
“Si.”
“Where’s the basket now?” I asked. It wasn’t on the boat, it wasn’t here and Anita Guerrero would have noted it in the truck report.
“He took with him one morning on the truck,” she replied. “That’s all I know.”
At that moment a heavy diesel engine pulled up outside followed by a backup alarm. Ana went over to the garage wall and hit the automatic door opener which still worked and opened the garage door with a noisy rattling whine. The impound lot had sent Rafe’s truck back and Ana asked the driver in Spanish to please take it around to the curved driveway and unload it there.
“We should go,” I said to Q on the sly.
“The welding rods?”
“He used the flat steel to fortify a bottom dredge,” I concluded. “Whatever he was bringing in was lying on the bottom and it was heavy,” I said, tapping a piece of the flat steel on the workbench before slipping it into my pocket.
“Then where’s the dredge?”
“My hunch is by the time we figure that out we’re going to know wha
t happened to our buddy Rafe.”
We saw ourselves out and took our leave of Mrs. Valle in the driveway. I gave her a card with my local number on it and asked that she call if she remembered anything else and showed her the chunk of flat steel I confiscated off the workbench. We assured her we’d be in touch as soon as we knew anything. She thanked us, perhaps a bit surprised that we didn’t want to look over the truck. Doing so would have been a waste of time. The truck had certainly been cleaned before it was abandoned and Anita Guerrero had already been over it in either aspect.
The Star would be arriving soon and I wanted to see the warehouse before we went out to meet them. Doubtlessly Mrs. Valle had a lot she wanted to say but we walked away leaving a sad, lonely single mom in our wake.
“I feel like I’m abandoning a puppy,” Q said, once we were in the car.
“We could hold her hand and blow smoke up her ass, or we can go figure out what happened to her husband,” I pointed out. “Let’s go find these fuckers.”
The car’s GPS guided us south and west toward the Kendall-Tamiami Airport. We took the toll way to SW 120th and headed west. I called ahead to the warehouse office and they said we could come down any time and that the nice lady cop said we might be coming and it was alright to let us in.
“Marshal Guerrero was pretty confident we were going to take the job,” I said to Q after hanging up with the warehouse manager.
“You were high as fuck and took the job before you even knew what it was,” he reminded me.
“That makes her remarkably insightful,” I countered. “I think she’d make a great addition to the team.”
“Our team?”
“No, the Miami Heat,” I panned. “Yes, our team. She’s not happy where she is.”
“You don’t think she aspired to be an inter-agency liaison?” Q grinned.
“That’s the Siberia of job assignments. The kind of job they give you so you can make connections in other agencies--”
“And land a new job,’ Q finished for me.
“Right. It’s one step above special projects. And yet she’s careful, thorough, hard as nails and a damn good investigator.”
“She must have pissed someone off,” Q countered, “to get shuffled off to Siberia.”
“I want to know what that was,” I concluded, texting Deek the information request.
“If someone was trying to infiltrate us…” Q began.
“She would be a good pick, but no one would get authorization for an op like that,” I pointed out. “We still have too many government clients and a lot of what we do is above the line anyway. Five years ago maybe, but not today.”
It was clear Q wasn’t hot on that idea but he didn’t like Amber at first, either. That was the main reason, by unanimous agreement, that team hiring decisions were up to me. Corporate hiring was delegated to the individual companies. If anyone wanted to infiltrate our organization, that’s where they’d start, not with the ops team. Even if someone like Ashley was covertly working for the Feds, they would have precious little to show for years of undercover work. Not to mention having their electronic world under Deek’s constant monitoring. In the grand scheme of shit law enforcement had to deal with, we just weren’t that important and we never around long enough to attract attention.
“I want to go to Mardi Gras,” I said out of the blue.
“That sounds like fun,” Q agreed. “What’s that place with the donuts?”
“Cafe du Monde,” I reminded him.
“Yeah! And that restaurant where we sat with four strangers?”
“K-Paul’s.”
“That steak with fried oysters on top was really good.”
All the talk of food was making me hungry. “Maybe when we get done here we can take the Swan out for one last going away cruise.”
“I’m in,” Q agreed. “We can go to Cuba now, too.”
We had avoided the Gulf side of Florida for a long time because of the oil spill in 2010, but it might be alright now. Still, Cuba would be interesting and new. We could do a circle around the gulf and end up in Cuba and head over to the islands from there. Thinking about Cuba made me think of masas de puerco, marinated pork chunks served with onions, fried plantains and black beans. I had to stop thinking about food.
The warehouse was on the edge of a residential neighborhood and was more of a self-storage place. The owner, who looked to be in his mid-sixties and at least that many pounds overweight, was nice enough.
“The rent’s paid through the end of the month,” he told as he puffed his way out to the unit. “That Mexican fella that rented it, he was real nice.”
He probably thought that was high praise for Raphael Valle; a nice guy, for a Mexican fella. I let the comment slide because there was no fixing that kind of stupid. My only options were tolerating it or beating him to a bloody mess and that wouldn’t make him any smarter, so I kept my mouth shut. Another day, not that long ago, the decision might have gone the other way.
The unit had a sliding garage type door and Q had to help him open it. He reached in and turned the light on for us.
“Help yourself, as long as you need. Just close the door and check back at the office when you’re done.” With that he puffed off back toward the office.
“I wonder what he would think if I told him Raphael was from Puerto Rico?”
“He probably thinks it’s part of Mexico,” Q grinned, surprisingly dismissive even though his mom was American born but of Hispanic descent.
The storage unit was roomy and had a small office at the far end. It wasn’t wide but it was nicely arranged and had both 110v and 220v wall plugs. There was a workbench along one side with high pressure air lines that ran along the wall to an empty space where an industrial sized air compressor used to be bolted to the floor. Like everything connected to Raphael’s disappearance it had been meticulously cleaned, so well a faint whiff of chlorine still clung to the office.
“I hate neat bad guys,” I grumbled. “No DNA, no prints, no nothing.”
“The big bupkis,” Q echoed.
My phone beeped a message.
Q looked over with a puzzled look as I just stared at the message.
“What?” he finally asked.
“Our first real break,” grinned, holding up the phone for him to see.
BLUE CARD!
Attached to the message was a picture of white van with a dashboard littered with trash and papers as it passed through the security gate at the marina. Clearly visible on the side was Klinefelter Mobile Service with a fragment of a phone number I couldn’t make out, but Deek would certainly be texting me in a minute.
“Jackpot!”
Chapter 5
We opted to hunt down the boat cleaner before meeting the Star. Amber sent me a text indicating the marina in Key Largo was a dead end and we could scratch that off the list. She was on her way to meet Fred after arranging dockage for the Star at a commercial marina. It was always amazing to me how liberating it could be having someone to handle the mountain of miniscule little details we had to deal with on a regular basis. Attitude or not, in that regard, Amber was positively priceless.
Daryl called us just as we were about to leave, informing us that there were two cleaners at the marina that day. I asked if one of them was Klinefelter and he seemed surprised we already knew the name. I thanked him and hung up.
Deek texted us the address of Steve Klinefelter at an address in North Miami. His home and business address were the same which meant he, like a lot of people in that business, largely worked out of his truck. Given all the trash and junk on the dash he could be living in it. Imagine our surprise when our GPS lead us in a decidedly odd direction.
The neighborhood we were in stopped just short of swanky but it was very nice. It was what people in Florida call a “canal community” which means the houses have a canal and a dock in the backyard that eventually provides a path out to the Intracoastal and the ocean. Canal homes with a dock were not cheap, certa
inly more than you’d think the owner of a boat cleaning business could afford. Yet there was a very nice one-story shotgun style light blue home with a white roof and the white van in the driveway. We parked up the street and phoned home.
“Operator,” Deek answered.
“Anything hinky about Klinefelter’s finances?”
“There’s a lot hinky,” Deek confirmed, “but not enough that he’s any kind of major player.”
“Alright then, let’s go have a chat,” I said to Q and hanging up on Deek.
“We might want to try a different tactic on this one,” I said as we walked up to the house. “Just follow my lead.”
The woman who answered the door, along with a glimpse of the inside of the house, definitely made me rethink my opinion of the boat cleaning business. She was in her mid-30s with blond streaks in her brown hair. She had a $100 French manicure and fake boobs stuffed into a bikini top that was straining the fabric. She was hot in a trailer-trash-turned-trophy-wife kind of way and her nipples suggested the A/C in the house was working just fine. She had an expression of perpetual mild surprise and, judging by the wrap skirt, we had interrupted her time by the pool.
The Blue Tango Salvage: Book 2 in the Recovery and Marine Salvage, Inc. Series Page 5