by Tom Corcoran
The elegance these days amazed me. Marble flooring, tasteful art, sturdy furniture, unbleached cotton, black leather, oversized pillows in mock-carpetbag fabric, and all those palm trees. There was no piped-in music. I heard only the motor whine of the huge ceiling fan, muffled voices from the registration desk, and distant murmurs from the restaurant nearer the sidewalk.
Copeland Cormier entered through the driveway portico. There was an obvious age spread, but he matched his wife in style.
He was distance-runner slender, maybe six-one, one-eighty max. He wore the ultimate in light-tackle fashion. Sage green Beach Crocs, a ventilated long sleeve flyweight shirt, matching sage pants with knee-level side pockets and a couple days’ worth of chin stubble and cheek sunburn. Stylish sunglasses hung from his neck on a woven leather cord. He carried a khaki long-brim Columbia nylon hat (which dangled a “hat saver” leash) and a faded Crips-blue Bass Pro bandanna. I assumed that he would ask me to shoot action photos on a guide skiff. That was more appealing than my fear as I had left Louie’s, that the Cormiers wanted kink shots of themselves in a four-bills-a-night hotel suite.
He spotted me, took the short stairs to the sitting room in two steps and stuck out his arm. We shook hands without exchanging names. He looked around for a bellman. “Can I order you a coffee or a drink?”
“I’m fine for now,” I said, wishing for coffee or water. “Let’s talk business.”
“You’re a good friend of Sam Wheeler, the fishing guide.”
A light bulb went on along with alarm bells. Was Marnie right? Was Lisa Cormier the new attraction for Sam?
“Is that a question?” I said.
“Oh, no, Mr. Rutledge. An absolute statement of fact.”
He paused so that I could respond. I waited for him to continue.
“I’ve known Sam for almost twenty years,” he said. “Ours was a captain-client deal that turned into friendship and trust. Sam has told me about your friendship and a bit of your history. He mentioned, in particular, a little misadventure you two shared in Miami several years ago…”
Again a stranger knew too much. I was ten seconds away from bolting.
“Is that so?” I said.
“Indeed. Your saving the life of a city detective impressed me. I laughed for days thinking about Sam sending the FDLE’s satellite tracking device northward on a tractor-trailer.”
The “fisherman” was angling outside of my comfort zone. “This isn’t about a photo gig,” I said. “What other tidbits have you stockpiled?”
“Sam also said that you’d suspect me of being, let’s say ‘unfriendly.’ He gave me a key fact that would confirm the confidential nature of our conversation so you and I can continue our talk.”
“That would be your talk.”
“Correct,” he said. “So here’s the deal maker. When Sam wants to leave an object at your home that he wants only you to find, a piece of equipment he might loan you, there’s a hiding place. He would place it on a hook between your house and your outdoor shower’s east wall. Behind the soap dish, hidden by overgrown crotons.”
I ran that one through my memory for a good minute. I couldn’t recall ever telling anyone about the pistol stash, even Carmen. Sam would never have had a reason to tell anyone, even Marnie. I squashed the thought that Marnie, had he ever told her, might spill our secret.
“He would hang it by its trigger guard,” said Cormier.
“Got it,” I said.
He nodded. “Does that mean you trust me?”
“Why isn’t Sam here to introduce us? Is he in danger?”
“For the past day or two he’s had good reason to take precautions. Why don’t you hear me out, then decide for yourself?”
“I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
“Good.” He handed me a business card and gave me a moment to study it.
Dr. R. Copeland Cormier
Director of Surgery
Buckhead-Vargo Memorial Hospital
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
“Let’s stay right here.”
“This is a lot more public than you think.”
I glanced around, saw no one within earshot or who appeared to care about two men shooting the breeze in Hemingway’s sitting room. While I was certain that the hotel had video surveillance, I couldn’t imagine hidden microphones.
But I was there for Sam. I’d let Cormier call the first shots.
“Go out to Duval,” I said. “Go left, cross the street, and walk into St. Paul’s. Up front and to the left of the central sanctuary there’s an alcove with four pews and a communion rail. I’ll be there in four minutes.”
“Make it three, please,” said Cormier. “I’m a practical man, short on prayers.” He descended to the main lobby, put on his sunglasses and strode toward the Duval doors.
I gave him a minute so I could bid goodbye to Ernest’s ghost and approach the registration desk at the rear of the lobby. A smiling hotel management major with a brushed brass name tag asked if she could help me.
“I need to leave a short note for one of your guests, Eliza. I would appreciate the loan of a ballpoint pen and the outright gift of a piece of paper.”
“Certainly, sir.” The pen was at hand; it took her an embarrassing ten seconds to locate a blank sheet of hotel letterhead. “Would you rather use a house phone to leave voice mail?”
“I would rather leave the note. Can you make sure Dr. Cormier receives it?”
“Of course…” She turned to her computer monitor while I wrote: “Mary had a little lamb but Eliza had cute cheeks.” I folded the note, began to write Cormier’s name on the outside.
“How is he spelling his name?” said Eliza.
I told her my best guess.
“No one in the hotel has that… Not even close, starting with C.” She poked a few more keys. “Nothing in the Ks, either. Cormier?” She tried two or three alternate spellings then looked up and shook her head. Her face showed more frustration than I felt. I supposed from the start that he wasn’t a guest.
“Maybe he hasn’t checked in yet.” I wadded the note and stuck it in my pocket. “I’ll call back in a couple hours and leave that voice mail. Thanks for your help.”
A man on a tricycle towed a two-wheeled cart full of beach gear down Duval. A cooler, an umbrella, a chair, a portable stereo and a tarp. A leashed Dalmatian walked ahead, no doubt anxious to play in the ocean.
Someone and his dog had figured out the climate and locale.
I swear I know the formula. I just can’t make it happen.
The chapel, with a half dozen stained-glass windows swiveled open, smelled cleaner than the sidewalk and street. Its peace welcomed me until a straight-pipe Harley at the Eaton Street stoplight tarnished its sanctity. I took a moment to cut off my ringtone and drop five bucks into the donation box. Cormier, the only other person in the sanctuary, sat in the center pew of the military alcove. With his hat removed his hair looked darker than his facial stubble. I entered the pew and sat five feet away from him.
“Sam’s involved in important, risky work,” he said. “His contributions have been quite valuable.”
My soup kitchen remark to Marnie Dunwoody was about to bite me in the ass.
“You make it sound like charity,” I said.
Cormier nodded once. “The beneficiaries are innocent Cuban nationals.”
“Steering refugees to safe landing spots?”
“It’s not that simple,” said Cormier, “and not that local. He makes nighttime trips to Cojimar. He delivers legitimate pharmaceuticals to doctors on the island.”
“Legit… from a medical standpoint?”
“Right,” said Cormier. “But his trips are not legal. This country’s arbitrary laws regarding business with Cuba could be held over our heads.”
“So… the danger comes from the expansive hand of law enforcement?”
“A small part of it,” he said. “We consider jail an
d lawyers to be costs of doing business. We worry more about the transport cowboys who shuttle humans and contraband in either direction for a price. We donate legitimate drugs. They think our missions cut into their profit potential, and they resent our presence.”
“Why don’t you pay the bad boys to run your supplies?” I said. “Make them part of the team?”
“They could skim or steal loads, let the drugs roast in the sun, or jack up their transport prices and threaten to expose us if we complain. Once we let them in the door, there’d be no getting rid of them.”
I pondered his tale while a stereo inching south on Duval broadcast a battle of fifty kettledrums versus thirty mooing cows.
After waiting out the thumps Cormier said, “I know you came here to hear my pitch, but can I ask you a couple of things?”
“You can ask.”
“Has anyone come to you in, say, the past several days asking about Sam?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“How about asking for personal info about yourself or offering some kind of deal too good to be true?”
I flashed an image of Catherman on his first visit. But I shook my head.
“How about bogus-sounding phone surveys or someone who knows both you and Sam asking about him, what’s he up to lately, that sort of question?”
I flashed an image of Marnie, distraught over Sam’s unexplained absences.
“Nope.”
“Your, girlfriend, or however you refer to Detective Lewis. Has she asked about Sam?”
“She hasn’t even asked about me,” I said. “Who’s the ‘we’ you mentioned, as in ‘We consider that a cost of doing business?’”
“I assume you know the concept of ‘need-to-know’ in classified data.”
“When I was in the Navy it meant, ‘Please don’t load me down with secrets I can’t use.’”
“Right. So I’m going to tell you enough to satisfy your curiosity. Sam assured me that you would respect our level of caution. Are we on the right track?”
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“I co-founded… or brought together a group of successful people who want to make a difference. There are five of us, three doctors and two tactical types. We call ourselves Doctors with Deep Wallets.”
“Same concept as Doctors Without Borders?” I said.
He shook his head. “We admire Medecins Sans Frontieres. We pay attention to their effective methods, but we have no connection and narrower goals.”
“You probably don’t have their money or support.”
“No,” he said. “And they have the world’s media on their side, at least in the free world. We most assuredly don’t share the same methods. We prefer total anonymity. We wallow in our secret self-satisfaction, with the occasional glass of fine wine.”
“Where does Sam fit into your organizational chart?” I said. “Is he a tactical type or the hired help?”
“Let’s call him core member number five, except…” Cormier looked upward to a stained glass window.
“I assume we just hit a ‘need-to-know’ snag,” I said.
“For now, yes, we have issues that I can’t discuss with you. I can assure you that Sam’s fine. He probably needs you to explain to Marnie that he won’t be home for a few days. A message from you would offer a degree of confidence. Right now, out of respect for her occupation, she can’t be told about his trips to Cuba’s north coast.”
“Why do I need to know any of this?”
“Three reasons,” said Cormier. “First, so you could deal with Marnie. Also, Sam felt that someone local, and that means you, should understand the dynamics of our operation, the nature of his involvement. He also feared that you would answer to your own curiosity and start trying to figure out his actions. He didn’t want you to turn over stones that, for the moment, are best left alone.”
“All this build-up, this stealth meeting, is this your way of asking me to do nothing except bullshit Marnie?”
“The church was your idea,” said Cormier, “though I caught the irony. Helping Sam Wheeler calm Marnie doesn’t sound like a stretch among friends. Revealing details of our enterprise was not my idea, believe me.”
“Why all the sudden commotion?” I said. “Why is Sam laying low?”
“We have a system to monitor the safety of our group members. It’s fairly simple, and one man hasn’t called in for two days.”
“Go back to your twenty questions,” I said. “Mutual friends, deals too good to be true.”
Cormier spoke with forced calm. “I’d like to hear about anything you felt was out of the ordinary.”
“Talking about two deals,” I said, “from one man. I don’t know if this falls into your category, but…”
Cormier’s eyes flashed. “Offers or deals?”
“I didn’t agree to a thing. My guess is that each is kaput.”
“Please,” he said.
I explained Bob Catherman’s home purchase offer and my refusal to bite. That got no reaction from Cormier. I described that morning’s follow-up, Catherman’s changed appearance and his fake big-dollar offer to hire my photo skills. Cormier interrupted to apologize for using a job ploy to draw me to the La Concha. Then he apologized for interrupting, asked me to continue, but I’d said it all.
“Did you see the vehicle Mr. Catherman was driving?”
“Yesterday, a dark-colored Yukon or Suburban,” I said. “This morning I didn’t notice.”
“With tinted windows? Tint darker than legal?”
It dawned on me. A dark, tinted Yukon or Suburban was a typical federal ride. The vehicles could have been Secret Service vans or DEA surveillance, Homeland Security or Border Patrol. “Am I taking you into the shit?”
“That was our doing,” he said. “You’re letting me know its depth.”
We sat in silence for a minute. It might have been a good time to say a prayer for Sam, but he wasn’t into prayers and my mind was sifting facts, failing to find a pattern.
I said, “Are you really a fisherman?”
“People believe what they want when they see certain things. I travel a lot and this outfit provides fine camouflage in many countries. I would rather be thought an angler than an invading businessman or a Peace Corps hippie or a Red Cross junior executive.”
“Do you ever consider the number of Americans who could use your aid?”
Cormier gazed at the ceiling, considered his answer. “We doctors never knew each other until we volunteered for Baghdad a while ago, the same month, same year. We all chose to help our soldiers in a war zone. We got housed in a poorly ventilated mobile home in the Green Zone. When they found work for us, it was fucking intense. When we sat around, with vodka from Kazakhstan rather than fine wine, we figured there must be a better way to donate, to lay our asses on the line. We’d all done inner-city work and, for many different reasons, found it unfulfilling. So, yes, we considered fellow countrymen. We all felt that the more anyone gives to Americans, the more Americans expect freebies to continue indefinitely.”
We all have opinions, I thought. I had no comeback for him.
“I think we’ve covered everything,” said Cormier, “except for a couple of warnings. You should consider your home and cell phones insecure, open lines to anyone with the technology to intercept. And bear in mind, even if you don’t talk, they will know who you’ve dialed.”
“But I can’t control who calls me,” I said. “What else?”
“Would you mind meeting my wife for another drink around 7:00, give or take a few minutes? Some place other than Louie’s. Your choice.”
I wasn’t happy with the prospect of joining them in their mess. And I almost said, “Another offer too good to be true.” But keeping Sam’s ass out of a grave, a prison, or the deep blue sea was the only reason for my sitting in the church, plotting against the government or the human smugglers or a combination of the two. “Let’s make it Prime 951,” I said, “the steak house on Caroline.”
&nbs
p; “One of our favorites,” said Cormier. “She’ll have her bells on.”
And her shirt, too, I hoped.
“If she’s there when you walk in,” he added, “don’t sit next to her. Don’t act like you know her. Let her make the move to you.”
Another good time to clamp shut my mouth.
I gave Cormier a one-minute head start. On my way out of the church I saw a slight movement in an archway about four feet above me. I stepped aside then stepped back. Ah, sweet paranoia. A nesting dove, worried that I was there. You can’t ask for more protection than a church.
Fat good it would do.
4
I parked the Triumph in its custom-built, weather-tight shed, now worth about sixty grand on the Catherman scale, and walked down Dredgers Lane to check on Carmen. Her two-year-old Passat wagon sat in its usual spot, half on the lane’s pavement, half in her grass-and-gravel lawn. The boys had wedged their battered Honda between two croton bushes. An empty bike rack rode its rear end. A bumper sticker screamed END WAR NOW! I couldn’t argue with the sentiment, but I wondered who, exactly, might pull up behind the car, read the message and possess the power to act upon it.
Carmen walked out the kitchen door as I approached to knock. “The boys are out job hunting. Maria and I are going to Mickey D’s for chicken wraps.”
“Everything smooth?” I said.
Her face clouded. “Hector and Cecilia want to sell. They’ve got no social life here. All their friends who are still alive have moved to the new island, that circle around Ocala with the forty-mile radius.”
“They’ll get a good chunk of change for that house,” I said. “They’ll never worry again about money.”
“My mother, in a rare moment of clear thinking, came up with this. We sell this cottage and Maria and I move into their house. I can buy them a nice place in central Florida and I’ll inherit the big house with less capital gain if I ever sell.”