I raised my head. “You’ve been taken. Let me see what I can do. May I take these with me?”
“Certainly. Thanks, Matt. Keep track of your time and I’ll pay you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Predators stalk the elderly and infirm, targeting the least resistant, not unlike the lionesses who roam the African veldt in search of food. The lioness does it for survival, the human predator because he’s a lazy son of a bitch without a conscience. In Florida, where there are more elderly people, there are more predators trying for the easy buck. I had the name and address of this particular predator, and I would have his ass. I made an appointment for the next morning to discuss a reverse mortgage, and went to see him in downtown Sarasota.
His office was in a high-rise building overlooking Sarasota Bay and New Pass, the view reaching to the horizon. He had a small office, no receptionist, no outer office, just a door with his company’s name, Managed Investments, discretely etched on the glass. I knocked and went in.
A man of about thirty rose from behind the desk. He was five ten, two hundred pounds, with a hard belly hanging out of his unbuttoned coat. He wore a white shirt, green tie, and blue pinstriped suit. He had a big head, blond hair, an open Irish face set off by a nose that was too long, and a toothy smile. His had his hand out. I shook it.
“You must be Matt Royal. I’m Jim Corrigan. I must say you don’t look old enough for a reverse mortgage. You have to be at least sixty-two to qualify.”
I wasn’t old enough to qualify. Not even close. They say that youth is fleeting and I can attest to the fact that much of my youth has fled. I’m not yet a member of the senior citizen crowd and although I know the days of gray hair and arthritic aches are relentlessly chasing me, I resist them mightily. I was a bit insulted that the guy even thought I would be interested in a reverse mortgage.
“I don’t want a mortgage,” I said. “I want you to release Rose Peters’s mortgage and remove the lien from the public records.”
He looked puzzled. “Why would I do that?”
“Because you swindled her, and I’m going to sue the pants off you if you don’t fix this thing.”
He chuckled. “Lawyers cost a lot of money, Mr. Royal.”
I reached over the desk and laid one of my business cards on his blotter, the one that identified me as a lawyer. “They do, Mr. Corrigan. But Mrs. Peters is a friend of mine, and I’m not going to charge her a dime.”
“Wait a minute, Mr. Royal. I couldn’t do anything about that mortgage if I wanted to. It was sold on the secondary market. I don’t have any way to change the terms.”
“You can pay it off then.”
“No way. The old broad got the money. She owes it.”
“Let me put it this way, Mr. Corrigan. If you haven’t paid off that mortgage and released Rose from all obligations by the end of business tomorrow, I’ll be filing suit. I’ll also have a little discussion with the state attorney in this circuit, who, I might add, is a close friend of mine. I imagine that the U.S. Attorney would also be interested in mail fraud charges. You did use the U.S. mail now, didn’t you Mr. Corrigan?”
“Whoa. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You square things with Mrs. Peters’s house, and you won’t hear anything else from me.”
The idiot blustered a bit more, but in the end he agreed to pay off the mortgage. The next day, I checked with the clerk of court in Manatee County, where Rose’s house was located, and found that a satisfaction of mortgage had been filed at the opening of business that day. The house was once again free and clear.
Then I called the state attorney for the Twelfth Judicial Circuit, a man I’d never met. I identified myself and explained Corrigan’s scheme. The law was interested and I promised to drop the documents off the next day. I’d lied about knowing the state attorney, but I’d kept my promise. Corrigan never heard from me again. However, he did hear from the police and the postal inspectors, and he was now doing five to eight years in state prison and would face another five years in a federal pen when his state time was up.
Rose insisted on paying me for my help, and I insisted on not accepting anything. Life moved on, the rhythms of the key unbroken by the events surrounding Corrigan. I read in the newspaper that a number of elderly people who had been swindled by Corrigan got their money back.
CHAPTER SIX
Over the next year, I would see Rose occasionally at the Market. Once or twice we shared a cup of coffee and enjoyed each other’s company. Then one day I heard that Rose had died in her sleep. A neighbor noticed that her morning paper was still in the driveway at noon, and went to check on her. She’d apparently had a heart attack and died peacefully.
We had a memorial service for her at Tiny’s. It was the island way of mourning our lost ones. Rose would have enjoyed seeing so many friends. There were a lot of laughs and a few tears, and then we put her away, back in the memory banks with all the others we’d lost over the years. Longboat Key has a large population of elderly people. Death is a regular visitor, and while we never get used to losing one of the good ones, we have learned to live with the losses.
A few days later, I got a call from a lawyer in Bradenton whom I knew casually. “Matt, I’m the personal representative of Rose Peters’s estate. She left all her cash to various charities and she left her house to you.”
“To me?” I was dumbfounded. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“She also left a letter for you.”
“Can you read it to me?”
“Sure. ‘Dear Matt, I’m sure you’ll be shocked at the news that I’ve left my house to you. But I wouldn’t have the house if it weren’t for you, and I have no family to leave it to. You were a friend of my dear Ed and he always spoke so highly of you. When I needed help, you didn’t hesitate. You were there in a jiffy and you wouldn’t accept any payment, and you saved my home.
‘Take good care of the house. It was a place full of love during the twenty years Ed and I lived there. Treat it kindly and think of us sometimes. Thanks for being my friend. Love, Rose.’”
“What can I say?”
“Nothing, Matt. She wanted you to have this place. Enjoy it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I parked the Explorer and entered the Market by the door next to the newspaper racks. Bill Lester was sitting at a table, sipping from a cup of coffee. He waved me over.
“Enjoy your trip?” he asked as I walked up.
“I sure did. Why the urgent summons?”
“Let me get a refill. You want one?”
I nodded. He went to the counter and filled two Styrofoam cups with the black liquid, brought them back to the table, and took a chair. “Somebody took a shot at Logan today. Downtown.”
Alarm spread through my body. Logan was my best friend on the island, a man who’d retired as an executive in the financial services industry and moved to our key. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah. The slug got stopped by a book he had in the inside pocket of his windbreaker. He’s just bruised up a little.”
“Bill, talk to me. Who shot him? Why?”
“We don’t know. No arrests, no suspects. The slug was from a rifle, fired from a long way off. It was about out of steam when it hit Logan. Good shot, but I don’t think it was a professional hit. A pro would have known that the distance was too much. Logan got lucky.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“No. I figured if somebody was after him and realized he wasn’t dead, he might not be safe in a hospital. We’ve got him in a hotel.”
“Is that necessary?”
“There’s something else. Last night a security guard at Logan’s condo complex saw two men on the property. He asked them to identify themselves and one of them pulled a pistol. The guard turned and ran before the man could shoot him. He called for backup from the Longboat Key Police, but by the time the cops got there, the men were gone.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Don’t know, but
I think I’d rather have him safe in a hotel than at his condo.”
“What was Logan doing downtown? Somebody had to have set that up.”
“Logan moved onto Bill Gallagher’s boat at Marina Jack for a couple of nights. He had some kind of leak in his condo unit and the carpets are wet. He’s got people in there drying them out with those big fans and heaters.” Lester told me how the meeting had been set up. “Marie did not call our dispatcher. Somebody knew enough about Logan to know about Marie and that if she called I’d meet him for lunch. I just don’t know why they wanted me there.”
“Maybe you were part of the setup somehow. What did the dispatcher say Marie told him about where you were to meet Logan?”
“I was supposed to sit outside and wait for him. That was it.”
“If the shooter was trying to lure Logan into a kill zone, he might have had to place you so that Logan would come toward you. If you hadn’t been visible, Logan may have come another way, or ducked into the restaurant from the side and wouldn’t have been where the shooter needed him to be to get his shot.”
“That’s as good a theory as any. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.”
“Why would anybody be after Logan?”
“We don’t know. Logan doesn’t know of anybody who would want to kill him, and we haven’t found any evidence to help us.”
“Did you find out where the shot came from?”
“Yes, but there was nothing there. The shooter was on the rooftop of an unsecured building. The door to the roof was not locked, so anybody could have gone up there. We didn’t find the first piece of physical evidence.”
“Where’s Logan now?”
“He’s in a hotel out on I-75. We’ll move him into a safe house as soon as we can get it set up. In the meantime, a Sarasota County deputy is with him.”
“Can I see him?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m concerned that whoever is after Logan might be after you as well. If they follow you to Logan, we could have a bad situation on our hands.”
“Come on, Bill. Who’d want to kill me?”
“I can think of a few people. You’ve been in some scrapes with some pretty bad folks.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think any of them are still alive.”
“Maybe not, but you need to be careful. I want your permission to run an electronic sweep on your house. The reason I didn’t talk to you on the phone is that your house might be bugged.”
“Bugged? What are you talking about?”
“One of my patrolmen saw a couple of men in front of your house last night, just after dark. He didn’t think much about it. They were walking away from your front door, and my cop didn’t know you were out of town. He’d been on vacation himself until yesterday. Anyway, the men he saw matched the description of the ones at Logan’s.”
“Why would you think they planted a bug? They might have been Jehovah’s Witnesses or salesmen or something.”
“We found a small box near where the men at Logan’s scared the shit out of the security guard. It contained a listening device. I don’t know if it even belonged to the same guys, but I can’t imagine where else something like that would have come from. If they were planning to bug Logan, they may have done the same thing to you.”
“It won’t hurt to find out. Jessica’s here and I don’t want to alarm her. I also don’t want to sleep in a bugged house. Can you have your whiz kids debug my place while I take Jess to dinner tonight?”
“Not a problem, but why don’t you wait until tomorrow to go see Logan?”
I agreed.
“There’s something else,” said Bill. “I’m assigning my new detective to the case.”
“New detective? What happened to Martin Sharkey?”
“I promoted him. He’s the new deputy chief.”
“Who’d you promote to detective?”
“I didn’t. I hired from outside.”
“Name?”
“J.D. Duncan.”
“Where’d you get him?”
“Her.”
“What?”
“Her. J.D. is a woman. Jennifer Diane Duncan. Never call her Jennifer or Diane.”
“You hired a woman detective? Isn’t that taking affirmative action a little far?”
“She has a degree in criminology from Florida International and was with Miami-Dade PD for fifteen years, ten of those as a detective. She worked vice and narcotics, a lot of the time undercover. Her last assignment was second in command of the homicide division. She also owns a black belt in one of those Eastern martial arts.”
I blew out a breath. “Forget the affirmative action comment. She sounds way too good to be on this island.”
He gave me an exasperated look and slowly raised his middle finger in my direction. “When her parents died, she inherited a condo on the key. She wanted to move here, get out of the big city. So I hired her.”
“When do I meet her?”
“Soon.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was late. The streets of Belleville were dark and quiet, a small town where people worked hard all day and went to bed early. Lieutenant Charlie Foreman stood on the sidewalk in front of the Swamp Rat Bar, listening to the sounds of people talking, laughing, enjoying themselves. It was the only place open in the whole town, and it didn’t shut down until the last drinker left or 2:00 a.m. rolled around, whichever came first.
Foreman knew this town and he knew its people. He’d grown up in Belleville, gone to college over in Miami, and then to the Police Academy up in Orlando. He’d joined the Collier County Sheriff’s Department twenty years before, patrolling the back roads of a county that stretched well into the Everglades. He’d chased illegal poachers, moonshiners, drug addicts, and those who made their living purveying drugs to the unwary or the duped. He’d busted farmers growing marijuana, fishermen importing pot from mother ships out in the Gulf, crabbers trapping out of season, and a few gun-toting miscreants who came into his county to do harm to its citizens.
Charlie was a creature of Belleville, and through all his years in law enforcement, he’d never gotten the hardscrabble little town out of his system. He had worked hard and achieved success. He rose through the ranks until he made lieutenant. One day the sheriff called him into his office and offered him the job as resident deputy in Belleville. Charlie grabbed the opportunity and moved his wife to the little town hard by the swamp. Their only son was in college in Gainesville, so it was just the two of them.
Belleville had some years before disbanded its small and unprofessional police force. The town contracted with the sheriff to provide law enforcement. The contract called for a resident deputy who would be the de facto chief of police. He would be supported by other deputies who patrolled the vast area surrounding the isolated village. It was a good fit for Charlie Foreman and he planned to finish out his career right here, in the place where his life had begun.
His tenure as resident deputy had been smooth. There were the occasional fistfights, domestic disturbances, juvenile pranks, public drunks, speeders, and other miscellaneous misdemeanors. Once, there had been a hold up at the convenience store on the edge of town, out by the Tamiami Trail, and the perps were still at large.
There had never been a murder, not during Charlie’s time. In fact the last murder recorded in Belleville had happened when Foreman was a boy. One of the sugar cane cutters who lived in the camp on the edge of town had hacked up his girlfriend with a machete. He stayed with the body until the police came and then tried to slash the officer with the same machete he’d used to kill his girlfriend. The cop shot him dead. Case closed.
Charlie was as surprised as anybody when the town’s only lawyer was shot to death in a drive-by shooting that afternoon. It made no sense. Jason Blakemoore was essentially a harmless fellow, not too bright and kind of lazy, but he certainly wasn’t the type to generate the kind of animosity it would take for someone to kill him.
Was it random? Big cities were us
ed to that kind of violence, but Charlie didn’t think it had come to his town. Yet, gratuitous murder was not uncommon in other parts of Florida. Gang novitiates in Miami killed in order to earn their membership, show their manhood, prove their psychopathology. Maybe the big city law was clamping down on the gangs, putting a damper on their murderous impulses. Maybe the little bastards were being herded into the small towns where the authorities weren’t ready for them, not expecting city-bred violence to taint the essential peacefulness of isolated villages.
Foreman was a big man, standing six foot four and weighing 230 pounds. He was in his mid-forties, with dark hair going to gray at the temples. His face bore the remains of a teenaged bout with acne, his mustache clipped short and shot with gray. There was no fat on him, a testament to his wife’s near obsession with healthy foods and his routine of morning exercises. He was dressed in jeans, a powder blue short-sleeved button-down sports shirt. A nine-millimeter Glock was in a holster on his belt. His usual attire. He didn’t need a badge or a uniform. Everybody in town knew him and knew what he was. A cop.
He took a deep breath, knowing that the next few minutes were going to be difficult. He had to talk to the late night drinkers about what they’d seen that afternoon. They wouldn’t know much, and what they knew had by now been confused with what they had heard or wanted to believe or simply made up in their booze-addled brains.
The sheriff’s lab boys were good. They’d combed the area and found almost no evidence. Jason had been killed by a twelve-gauge shotgun and had died almost instantly. That’s all they knew. Other deputies had canvassed the area, taking statements from the witnesses. All they’d gleaned from this was that the car driven by the shooters was black or gray or dark green, that there were two or three or four people in the car, that it was a Mercedes or a Lexus or a Chevrolet. In other words, they had nothing.
Charlie hoped that somebody in the bar would know something, and because Charlie was one of them, would tell him things they wouldn’t tell the other deputies. He knew these men, most of them unemployed or underemployed. They picked up odd jobs when they could, working the truck farms and fish camps, crewing on the commercial boats out of Everglades City, sometimes moving on for a few months or years, looking for work out of state, supporting their meager lives, ashamed to be on the dole, not willing to accept the government’s charity. They were hard men, proud in their way, perhaps an anachronism in this day of federal and state largesse. And they were mostly honest, although some of them couldn’t understand why providing a commodity, like marijuana, to people who wanted it could constitute a crime. Some of them had done prison time for hauling the bales in from the Gulf, but they’d not taken to the prison culture. They didn’t consider themselves criminals, although they understood that the law took a dim view of some of their activities. They knew that going in, and figured they’d gambled and lost. They’d pay the price up at Raiford or over at Glades Correctional Institution, and then get on with their lives.
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