CAPRIATI'S BLOOD (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 1)

by Lawrence de Maria

  “By the way,” I said. “I’m having lunch after with a member. William Calloway. I forgot his address. Please look it up for me.”

  He went to his computer and was back in a minute. A car pulled up behind me.

  “Sorry, sir, we don’t have anyone living here by that name.” He saw my confusion. Another car pulled up. Then he smiled. “I bet he’s a renter. Hold it a sec.”

  It was more like another minute. Enough time for a third car to line up behind me. I felt like I was leading a parade.

  “Yup. He’s a renter. Annual. In Mr. Payson’s house. Here’s the address.” He handed me a piece of paper. “Second block past the clubhouse, make a right, then another right. Can’t miss it.”

  It made sense that Capriati was a renter. It gave him flexibility. And he obviously was pretty sure nobody would find him in Naples, since Pelican Cove was about as secure as a liquor cabinet with a teen-ager in the house. He probably joined the club for the golf, not because it was a gated.

  Capriati lived in a complex that bundled six condominiums together, each with its own garage. His Crossfire was in the driveway of his unit. It hadn’t rained but there were beads of water on plants and shrubs lining the walkway and both the walkway and driveway were wet. I assumed an automatic sprinkler system had recently shut down. There were no curbs or sidewalks, which made parking conspicuous but there was a community pool just a few doors down with a small adjacent lot. I backed into a vacant spot that gave me a clear view of his front door and car. I had no plan other than to follow Capriati if he came out. After I heard from Cormac, that might change. I shut off the engine. Idling cars attract attention or are remembered. There were several other cars in the lot, including one facing the way I was. My windows were tinted. I doubted anyone would notice me sitting there.

  The front door of Capriati’s condo edged open. I waited. Nobody came out. Was he peeking out. Perhaps I should have been more cautious. The door began to close and then opened up a little more. It oscillated like that for a moment until I realized that it was reacting to a breeze. It finally opened halfway and stayed that way. Something didn’t fit. I got out and walked over to Capriati’s condo. There were faint footprints in the driveway. Someone had recently walked through the wet area to and from the front door. The footprints seemed to end in the middle of the driveway where, I assumed, another car had been parked behind Capriati’s. I went to the door. The security chain was hanging limply with a piece of wood. It had been ripped from its housing. Cue the ominous music. I drew my gun and kicked the door open, then slid quickly to the left once inside, crouching low.

  Capriati was lower than I was. He was about six feet in front of me staring at the ceiling. Which was quite an accomplishment, considering he was splayed out on his stomach. I smelled coffee. There was a mug on the floor halfway between me and the corpse and a brownish stain on the white carpet. Not wanting to become a source of stains myself, I cautiously checked out the rest of the house. It was empty.

  I went back to the body. Uncharitably I thought that, after all my brilliant sleuthing, Capriati could have had the common decency to stay alive. I’d never even had the chance to say hello. He was barefoot, wearing only golf shorts and a white T-shirt. His neck was obviously broken. I thought of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. I also thought about the kind of strength it took to twist an ex-wrestler’s neck like a pretzel. I touched an arm with my wrist. It was still warm. Capriati hadn’t been dead long. There was blood pooling around his left hand. I looked closely. Someone had cut off his ring finger. His nose was smashed and there was a smear of blood on his upper lip that traveled around to his cheek but coagulated before it reached the carpet.

  I walked over to the front door. Sure enough, there was a red splotch on the inside of the door, about nose high. It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. Billy had answered his front door but left the security chain on when he opened it. A man in witness protection would be cautious. I looked at the peephole. Someone, presumably the killer, had clogged it with a dab of mud. Inventive.

  When Capriati opened the door a crack whoever was on the other side rammed it open, mashing his nose and hurling him backwards. The killer would have been on him almost immediately. Maybe Billy tried to crawl away, or maybe the killer flipped him on his stomach. In either case he probably knelt astride Capriati, grabbed his head and snapped it like a twig. Then cut off the finger, walked outside, left a few footprints that would be dry in a few minutes and drove away. Probably had less trouble getting into Pelican Cove than I did. A pro job. Maybe five minutes in and out. There would be no fingerprints. Except mine.

  I had just finished wiping down everything I’d touched when my cell phone buzzed. It was Mac.

  “I’ve got some bad news.”

  “They’re dead,” I said dully.

  “No, it’s much worse than that.”

  I walked over to Capriati’s corpse while he told me. He was right.

  “Called the Carlyle and was put through to the woman’s room. A man answered, said he didn’t know any Ellen James. Been in the room two days and was just leaving for Rockefeller Center with his family. I could hear kids nagging him in the background. So I called the front desk. They said the James woman checked out Thursday.”

  I felt the first twinge in my gut.

  “Maybe she moved to another hotel, or into the hospital.”

  “Called Sloan-Kettering. Neither of them was there. Or ever had been. No record of a Savannah James being treated for leukemia or needing a bone marrow transplant. I spoke to the head nurse on the pediatric oncology floor. No kid fitting the description had been treated in the last month. You never actually saw her in Sloan, did you?”

  The twinge was now a hollow feeling.

  “No.”

  “You’ve been had, Alton. You’d better warn Capriati.”

  “Won’t do any good.”

  “Why not.”

  “I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes for Billy. I’m looking down at him right now. Somebody broke his neck and chopped off a finger.”

  “Well, I guess you can rule out accidental death.”

  I had probably missed the killer by half an hour. Unless it was one of the greatest coincidences in crime history, I had led Capriati’s murderer right to him. He was probably just now catching a plane at the same airport I had conveniently been stuck in while he aced his victim. The only person I had told about Pelican Cove was Ellen James, who had now disappeared, and who had apparently lied to me from the very beginning. Whoever hired her did fast work.

  “What are you going to do?”

  I had a lot of questions and a dead body. Unfortunately, the police would have several hundred more for me if they found me standing over it looking perplexed.

  “Any suggestions?”

  “You’re in state where traffic violators get the electric chair. You leave a trail?”

  I thought about it. Some bartenders and citrus workers knew I’d been asking for Capriati. They might be able to describe me, but I’d paid cash for everything. I told Mac.

  “Get the fuck out. Now.”

  Sound advice. I wanted to search the house, looking for anything that might help me figure what the hell was going on. But my goose would be cooked if a couple of Billy’s golfing buddies showed up, so after taking out my handkerchief to wipe the spot I’d touched on Billy’s arm I headed to the door. I stopped when I heard the fan from the home’s air-conditioning cycle on. I found the thermostat on a wall in the hallway between the kitchen and back bedrooms. Time was my friend so I used my handkerchief to dial the thermostat to 60 degrees. The longer it took Billy to get ripe the better. He wouldn’t be concerned about his electricity bill.

  There was something on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area. It was a cell phone attached to a wall outlet. Next to it was a plate with some toast. Some crumbs had fallen on the counter and one or two tiny ants, each no bigger than a period, were reconnoitering. In Florida
they are called grease ants and singly almost impossible to see. One of them was already heading back to the nest with the information about the crumbs. In a half hour there would be a conga line of reinforcements. I grabbed the phone and charger.

  On the way out I stopped to look down at Capriati’s body. There was a small rivulet of coagulated blood extending from the stump of his severed finger. Against the white carpet it appeared almost black.

  “They got the blood they were after,” I said aloud. “Sorry, Billy.”

  I went to the front window. There was nobody about. I closed the door and heard the lock click. Walking unhurriedly to my car I noticed newspapers in some neighboring driveways. I hadn’t spotted any in Billy’s house. Without papers piling up in the driveway, it might be a while before he started stinking up the neighborhood. Unless the body was discovered quickly in the chilled house I doubted the cops could narrow a time of death to less than a two-day window. The gate guard was busy waving other potential hit men through with a smile and didn’t see me leave. I drove to my hotel and checked out. They were mildly disappointed at my sudden change of plans.

  “Death in the family,” I said.

  I took the first plane out of Dodge.

  CHAPTER 28 – SAVANNAH ON MY MIND

  Back on Staten Island I tried to maintain a normal routine, not easy to do when you expect a SWAT team from the U.S. Marshalls Service and/or another hit team from Nando Carlucci to drop by. If they arrived simultaneously, I wondered if one group would hold the door for the other.

  Cormac was watching the wires, or whatever cops do now, for any sign of interest in me. For my part, I was monitoring the website of the Naples Sun Times. I’d picked up the paper in the Fort Myers airport while nervously waiting for my plane to Cleveland to take off. I hadn’t planned to go to Cleveland; it was the first flight out. The paper had been chock full of real estate ads, some of which had a whiff of desperation. But there was a decent news hole and buried deep on an inside page, as is the case with most papers catering to a resort area dependent on tourists and vacation home owners, was a small section devoted to local crime: mostly burglaries, bar fights, DUI’s and domestic squabbles. But there was also a sprinkling of felonious assaults, rapes and murders that, from the names involved, appeared to occur mainly in Immokalee, where there was a Seminole casino and an impoverished community of immigrant workers.

  Finally, on Wednesday, I had spotted a small item online:

  PELICAN COVE MAN FOUND DEAD

  A spokesperson for the Collier County Sheriff’s Department said that a man was found dead yesterday afternoon in his Pelican Cove villa. The man, identified as William Calloway, 43, may have been the victim of foul play.

  I wondered what had given that away, the smashed door or the broken neck.

  Calloway’s body was discovered by two women who work for Reliable Cleaning Service in Bonita Springs.

  “The air-conditioning was set very low,” the spokesperson said. “That apparently slowed the rate of decomposition. It may be some time before the county coroner can establish an approximate time of death, or cause.”

  If Billy hadn’t been so damn lazy and done his own cleaning, it might have been weeks before his body was discovered. The rest was boilerplate crime reporting gibberish, short on details.

  The next day, there was a follow-up story:

  MURDERED MAN HAD GAMBLING PROBLEMS

  William Calloway, whose body was discovered Tuesday in his Pelican Cove home, and whose death was initially considered suspicious, apparently was the victim of a freak accident, police said. According to a spokesperson from the Collier County Sheriff’s Department, Calloway was changing the battery in a ceiling smoke detector when he slipped off his ladder and hit his head on a table, breaking his neck.

  The Feds were covering up. It got better.

  Calloway is survived by his brother, Edgar, of Washington, D.C. A private funeral service will be held there Saturday, with cremation to follow.

  A brother “Edgar.” Someone in the F.B.I. had a sense of humor. I wondered what they would really do with the body. Was Billy destined to sleep with Bin Laden?

  The kicker:

  In lieu of flowers, friends are asked to send donations to the Collier County Police Benevolent Association.

  So that’s how it was done. Neat. I thought about Mrs. Capriati. She would never know her son was dead.

  The next morning I met Cormac at the Kings Arms. I ordered coffee.

  “You really fucked up,” Mac said pleasantly as he dug into a platter of French toast. He was one of those people who cut up the toast into little squares, then spear the pieces. I didn’t approve of that method, but this wasn’t the time to be censorious about his table manners. “In fact, I may nominate you for the Fuck Up Hall of Fame.”

  “Some people might argue it was brilliant detective work,” I said.

  He pointed a forkful of toast at me.

  “They’d be fucking idiots.”

  Before the fork reached his mouth a drop of syrup landed on his shirt.

  “Shit,” he said, dabbing the spot and spreading the stain. “Shit.”

  I handed him a printout of the Naples newspaper stories. After he read the now syrup-stained printout, he said, “I figured as much. Nothing has popped officially. Didn’t want to call down there. Never thought to check the paper. Who reads papers anymore?”

  “You think I’m in the clear?”

  “Probably. The Feebies want this as dead and buried as Capriati. They won’t want it blasted around that they lost someone. They’ll think there was a leak inside, or he got careless. They may check his phone records, but that’s about it. They’re not going to waste time looking for a professional hit man, which they will assume was the case. Even if someone describes you, they won’t care. And the Chinese Wall works both ways. I doubt if my friend on the Task Force will ever find out that Capriati or Calloway, whatever the fuck he called himself, is dead. If he does, I’ll say one of my snitches told me the Carluccis were asking about him. They’ll get the credit for the kill.”

  “So, there would be no problem if I advertised that I found someone in witness protection?”

  “You might want to leave the part out about getting him killed. Marshalls Service and the F.B.I. might also take a dim view of a marketing campaign.”

  Cormac had finished his breakfast. His shirt looked like a crime scene. He waved over our waitress.

  “Agnes, honey, bring us more coffee and a glass of club soda, please.”

  After she left he looked at me.

  “The most dangerous thing in the world is a beautiful woman.”

  “Agnes?”

  She was pushing 80.

  “No, you meshuga. The James woman.”

  “You stole the line from Richard Condon,” I said. “Prizzi’s Honor. I read the book.”

  “I only saw the movie. But truer words were never spoken.”

  “I don’t know. I want to find her, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Compared to her, Capriati was easy. At least he existed.”

  “Prints?”

  “My office has been painted and I even polished the furniture. Besides, I don’t recall them even touching anything.”

  Our coffee and the club soda came. Cormac started dabbing the spots on his shirt.

  “I’ll bring the bottle,” Agnes said.

  “So, Alt, what’s next? Judge Crater. Amelia Earhart. The Abominable Snowman? The second shooter on the grassy knoll?”

  “Actually, I was hoping you’d help me out on something tougher. I’m stumped.”

  I reached into my pocket and brought out the poison pen letters that were bedeviling my neighbors.

  ***

  Despite what I told Cormac, when I got to my office I turned on my laptop and opened a Word document. I started making a list, each line denoted by a bullet point. All salient, embarrassing admissions of incompetence. Every sentence I typed was accompanied by a loud self-remonstration. Finally,
when I looked at them in total, I said, “You fucking idiot.”

  I was startled by a knock on my door. It wasn’t a SWAT team, just the cleaning lady I’d just hired. I made a mental apology to Capriati about his laziness. From the look on her face I could tell she’d heard me. She probably thought I had Tourette’s.

  “Sorry, I was talking to myself.”

  “That’s no good, you know.”

  I told her to start in my reception area. A moment later I heard her vacuuming and I went back to the list: Atlanta embezzlement, sick child, worried mother, bone marrow transplant; I’d bought the whole shebang. I assumed none of it was true. Whoever put it together wouldn’t have left any strings in the story to follow. They wanted Capriati found and needed the kind of tall tale that would motivate me. But why me?

  “I got to do this room, mister.”

  The cleaning lady, vacuum and duster in hand. I opened a desk drawer and pulled out a rocks glass I’d recently brought from home. Then I went over to my small refrigerator and took out a bottle of bourbon. I poured three fingers in the glass. I could sense the cleaning lady’s disapproval. I don’t take disapproval well, so I took the bottle with me out into my reception area and stood by a window. I was going to have to get some chairs. I’d do that soon as I was sure I wasn’t going to be arrested or shot by the Carluccis. I sipped the bourbon, cold but warming.

  The Carluccis. They had tried to kill me, presumably because I was looking for Capriati, Nando’s old wrestling buddy. They obviously suspected he could be found. Had he contacted them? But who had killed their hit men? Someone who wanted me to find Billy? None of it made any sense. I sipped more bourbon, which made sense.

  The vacuuming in my office stopped. I went back and sat at my desk as the cleaning lady started wiping and dusting everything in sight. Her movements were robotic and precise. A hard-working Hispanic woman who was probably supporting a family of eight, she could clean a room in her sleep. I sat back to think. Chances were I was no longer a threat to anyone and was in the clear. I had been used. But, so what? I was still breathing, and had made a couple of grand. Maybe Cormac was right. I should hook up with a big national security firm and hang around hotel lobbies. I poured a few more fingers. Are people with thick fingers more prone to alcoholism?