The Marlboro Man: A Moira McElvaney Mystery

by Derek Fee

  ‘Jesus, Frank, this is an investigation not some business school assignment. We look like a couple of blue-assed flies because that’s the way an investigation works. Get with the bloody programme. We don’t have time to waste discussing strategy because there is no other strategy. Just in case you hadn’t noticed it, we’re at a dead end. We need a break. And if we get a big break, we immediately hand it over to Miami PD or Boston PD. Are we agreed on that?’

  Reluctantly he nodded his head. ‘If we get a big break.’ Shea had been taught the Pareto Principle at business school and the idea of twenty per cent thinking and eighty per cent action didn’t sit well with him. The opposite is the norm in the financial world. You collect as much information as possible before you make the trade. The people who buy blind often end up in the shit. The financial crisis of 2007/8 had proved that point in spades.

  They left the coffee shop and went into the lobby. Shea was looking around for Carmichael and didn’t bother with the attractive African-American lady at the reception. His phone rang and he checked the caller ID. It was Jean.

  ‘Hi, how’d it go?’ he asked.

  ‘Strange,’ she said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I did like you said. They guy I spoke to, Detective Gattuso, wasn’t very helpful. And that’s putting a gloss on it. Some might say that he was downright abusive. He is not happy that I’ve launched a parallel investigation. Like you told me, I threatened to go above his head and that seemed to mollify him. You’re to call him when you arrive in Miami.’ She gave him a mobile number. ‘Be careful, Frank. I’ve got a bad feeling about this Gattuso fellow.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’ Shea pressed the red icon on his phone. When he looked up, an attractive black woman was standing in front of him. He looked her over, noting her fantastic body. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘It’s me, you asshole.’ Carmichael laughed. ‘Some fuckin’ private investigator’.

  Moira had been to the washroom. As she came into the lobby, she saw Shea talking with a good-looking black woman. They were both smiling. She felt a twinge of jealousy. She was marching purposefully towards them when she recognised the dress. The last time she’d seen it was when it was hanging in Carmichael’s cupboard. She slackened her pace. She was going to have to do some soul-searching when she was on her own. It should not bother her to see Shea smiling with another woman. She and Brendan were a couple and she wanted it to continue like that. Most ménages à trois end in disaster.

  ***

  Detective first class Anthony Gattuso was not a happy man. Two days after he had landed the Gardiner disappearance case, he’d met a man on the fifth floor of the College Station parking garage in downtown Miami. The man had handed him an envelope. In order to earn the fifteen thousand dollars inside, he was to ensure that the Gardiner case went nowhere. He didn’t recognise the man, but the guy certainly looked the part. Gattuso decided that Gardiner had upset someone and was made to disappear. That was over two weeks ago. Up to now, he’d been as good as his word. Whoever had made Gardiner disappear had been professional. The cameras at Miami International had gone dead for exactly one minute and in that minute Gardiner had vanished. It took major juice to make that happen. It had been a pleasure to kill the case off. Now the wife had engaged some gumshoe to follow up.

  Also in the envelope had been a slip of paper with a number on it. Gattuso called the number now. After three rings, a disembodied voice said, ‘Leave your message.’

  ‘It’s Gattuso, I think there might be a problem.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A s the man dressed in a plain white cotton shirt and cotton pants passed through the open-plan living area, he noticed the red light on the handset flashing to indicate that a message had been received. He unplugged the phone and carried it carefully onto the terrace, plugged it in to a phone jack and laid it on the table where a woman was having a late breakfast. The woman currently using the name Louise Portillo picked up the phone and listened to the message. Her demeanour remained unchanged. She was not a woman who flapped easily. She looked out at the calm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and sipped her tea.

  The woman’s real name was not Louise Portillo, but during two decades of crime she’d had so many names that she had almost forgotten the name her mother gave her at birth. She had as much use for names as she had for nationalities. She had a collection of passports that enabled her to pass muster at any airport in the world. Her particular area of crime was grifting and within that category her speciality was the long con. She saw herself as a dramatist constructing a complex drama in which there were many characters, none of whom felt the hand of the dramatist controlling their actions. And as with any good drama, there had to be a protagonist. In the world of the grifter that protagonist is known as the ‘mark’. Portillo had a knack of selecting the perfect mark. In her most recent scam, it had been an innocuous accountant with a tiny office in a non-descript town in Massachusetts.

  Gregory Gardiner had the most necessary attribute of the perfect mark: he wanted to get rich quick. When the glamorous Louise Portillo presented him with a project that promised to make him a millionaire many times over, he grabbed the opportunity with both hands and played the part that she had devised for him perfectly. When the play is over the protagonist must leave the stage, but that point had not yet been reached in this real-life drama. For she was a master puppeteer who was uncomfortable with death, and Greg believed that she loved him.

  She thought about Gattuso’s message. It was probably inevitable that the wife would hire a private detective to locate her missing husband. She had been careful to leave no trace of Louise Portillo behind and she was sure that she had left no clue as to Greg’s involvement with her. And no one was aware that what had truly disappeared was the money they had collected. It had already been washed through a dozen offshore accounts. She sipped her tea and smiled. Gattuso was sweating that the betrayal of his employer would be exposed for the paltry sum of fifteen thousand dollars.

  ‘What a fantastic day.’

  She turned and looked up into her partner’s face. The alabaster white skin he had arrived with in Florida was already turning brown. He looked better tanned. She hadn’t set a time limit on their time together. They had a lot of money and he was an energetic lover. She surmised that his previous lovers had not been as experienced as her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What shall we do today?’

  ‘Why don’t we go out and spend some money?’ He smiled.

  ‘Yes, why don’t we.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ‘T his surely is the way to travel.’ Jamie Carmichael was seated in one of the Lear’s deep leather chairs. Her legs were stuck out in front and she had noticed Shea glancing at them more than once. Men were so damn easy. She didn’t know what to make of her new companions. Shea looked the part of the bored rich dude. He had the Celtic good looks, the greying temples, the expensive threads, the handmade shoes and the demeanour that goes with lots of dollars in the bank. Moira was a cute chick. The red hair made her look naturally feisty and when she walked into a room the guys took notice. She wondered whether there was something going on between them. There was electricity in the air, but she didn’t think it had sparked anything just yet. In a way they were like those kids in the books she used to push at children in the library. Gregory Gardiner was their quest, but she had a feeling that it wasn’t really him that they were looking for.

  ‘Just got an e-mail from O’Malley.’ Moira looked up from her computer. ‘He included the attachments he received from Miami PD. It’s just like I thought. They’ve done the absolute minimum. The investigation consists of the tape from the airport, which shows Gardiner exiting the plane at the airport but not exiting the airport itself. Add to that the interviews with the staff at the airport, Jean and Jamie and you’re there. I suppose we couldn’t have expected much more. It’s a very old police mantra – no body no crime.’

  ‘So this trip to Miami is use
ful, why?’ Shea was sitting behind Moira. He had no idea that investigating would turn out to be so damn boring. It certainly wasn’t like this in the movies or in the private eye books that he’d read. He’d once heard a piece on the radio about a guy who was refused a job with the cops in Connecticut because he scored too high on the IQ test. The chief of police said the guy would have been unsuitable for the job because it was boring and anyone with two brain cells to rub together would quit. He was beginning to see the chief’s point.

  ‘Plod,’ Moira said.

  ‘What’s that?’ Carmichael said.

  ‘That’s what they call the police in England, the plod. Because that’s what the job is about. Plodding ahead when there’s no apparent reason to. Frank here is living the dream of being a real-life private eye.’ She turned her head to look at Shea. ‘Isn’t that so?’

  Shea returned her look and smiled.

  God he looks so good when he smiles, Moira thought. She turned back to Carmichael. ‘Did you see the way he examined the business card? “Frank Shea – Private Investigator” has a ring to it, doesn’t it?’

  Shea continued to smile. He didn’t believe that he could be so transparent. Moira must have seen the look on his face when he had taken the She Investigations business cards from the clerk at Coastal Printing. He’d felt like a child at Christmas opening a gift from Santa Claus and finding the cowboy suit he always wanted.

  Carmichael looked from Moira to Shea and back again. Yeah, there sure as hell is something goin’ on, she thought, and added her smile to those of her new friends.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  T he Special Victims Unit of the Miami-Dade Police Department is located in one of a series of buildings at 1701 NW 87 Avenue in Doral. Shea had rented a Mercedes at the Miami Homestead General Aviation Airport and, having called ahead, drove directly to Doral.

  ‘You don’t mind if I stay in the car do you?’ Carmichael asked as they pulled into the parking lot.

  ‘Any reason why?’ Moira asked.

  ‘Two’s company, three’s a crowd,’ Carmichael replied. In truth, she didn’t want to face Gattuso again. The guy had given her the creeps, and because of that she had almost given away the existence of the USB during her initial questioning.

  Moira nodded. They didn’t need Carmichael anyway. The humid air hit her like a hammer as soon as she left the air-conditioned Mercedes. The Irish climate didn’t prepare the pasty-skinned natives of the island for the rigours of a Florida summer. Within seconds, Moira’s hair was drenched and sticking to her head. They were parked at the extreme end of the parking lot so it took them several minutes to make their way to the reception. By the time they arrived, Moira was gasping for relief from the humidity.

  Anthony Gattuso was also sweating, despite the efforts of the air-conditioning in the open-plan office that was home to the Special Victims Unit. He knew that he had nothing to be worried about but that knowledge didn’t help. He and his partner, Lucius ‘Doc’ Halliday, had played it by the book. The most that could be said was that they hadn’t gone over and beyond what could be considered necessary. He just wished that Gardiner’s wife had accepted that her husband had disappeared, but the local and national law enforcement bodies were on the case. His phone rang and he answered it quickly. His visitors had been shown into one of the interview rooms. He sighed as he picked up his notebook and an iPad from his desk and signalled for Halliday to follow him.

  Shea and Moira looked up when the two men entered. The man in the lead was short and squat with a heavy black moustache and a mop of jet-black hair above a sallow-skinned face. The man directly behind him was his mirror opposite. He was tall, slim and black and his pate was as smooth as a bowling ball.

  Gattuso walked forward with a smile on his face. He held out his hand. ‘Mr Shea.’

  Shea and Moira stood. Shea took the proffered hand. ‘Detective Gattuso, this is my associate Moira McElvaney.’

  Gattuso shook Moira’s hand and introduced his partner. After handshakes all round, the four sat at the small wooden table.

  ‘Welcome to Miami-Dade Special Victims Unit,’ Gattuso began. ‘How can we help you?’

  Shea put his hand in his pocket and removed some business cards identifying him as the managing partner of Frank Shea Investigations and gave one to Gattuso and one to Halliday. ‘As I understand it, Mrs Gardiner has already informed you that she has engaged my firm to look into her husband’s disappearance.’ He could see that Gattuso was about to speak and put up his hand to stop him. ‘We know that you guys are working the case, but we all know that after the first forty-eight hours the case starts getting cold and after three weeks it gets displaced by new cases. How many unsolved disappearances are you guys working at the moment?’

  ‘One hundred,’ Gattuso said. ‘And one of those is the disappearance of Gregory Gardiner. We appreciate Mrs Gardiner’s concern and we can assure her, and you, that we’re doing everything we can to find her husband. We’re just a little worried that a parallel investigation will hinder that process.’

  Moira could see Gattuso’s point and would have said the same kind of thing when she was with the PSNI. A parallel investigation, especially by a couple of under-resourced amateurs, can create ‘noise’ that can interfere with the proper police investigation. She observed that the two officers in front of her were not only mismatched physically: while Gattuso leaned forward intensely, Halliday didn’t so much sit in his chair as lounge in it. Moira made eye contact with Halliday and noted that despite the laid-back appearance his eyes stared intently at them.

  ‘That’s something that we definitely want to avoid,’ Shea said. ‘Mrs Gardiner is aware that you have to divide your precious time between a large number of cases. We’re on this one twenty-four/seven. You can rest assured that anything we turn up will be handed over to you immediately. You guys are, after all, the law.’

  Gattuso smiled. This was going better than he’d anticipated. The Shea guy looked like a smooth operator. He would take Gardiner’s wife for a few weeks’ work and pocket in those few weeks more than he and Halliday would earn in three months. The woman was, so far, eye candy. But they’d make a good couple pitching their wares to a client. ‘So how can we help?’

  ‘We’d like to see the CCTV from the airport, if that’s possible.’ It was the first time that Moira spoke.

  A real-life Mick, Gattuso thought. He opened the iPad and brought up a video file. He put the iPad on the table facing Shea and Moira.

  The quality of the video was excellent. Shea pointed at the figure exiting the passport control. ‘That’s Greg.’ His voice was soft as though he was watching a dead man.

  ‘This is a composite video that follows his progress through the airport,’ Gattuso said.

  Moira noted that Greg was dressed in casual clothes and had a weekend case in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He looked harassed. The camera followed him past the baggage claim area, where he didn’t stop, and on in the direction of internal connecting flights. He could be seen walking down a long corridor and approaching a corner. Then he abruptly disappeared from the screen. The corridor was clear.

  ‘What happened?’ Moira asked.

  ‘The CCTV system went down,’ Gattuso said.

  ‘Does that happen often?’ Moira asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gattuso replied. ‘It only went down for a minute.’

  ‘And you looked at all the footage after the break and you don’t see Greg in any of it?’ Shea asked.

  ‘We’ve looked at footage from every camera,’ Gattuso said. ‘After the break, there’s no sign of Gardiner anywhere in the airport.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a hell of a coincidence?’ Moira asked. ‘Gregory Gardiner disappears at the very moment the CCTV system breaks down for just one minute. Don’t you think that’s at least strange?’

  Gattuso was beginning to get nervous. Shea and the woman were not as dumb as he thought and they seemed hell-bent on earning their money.
‘It is what it is,’ he said simply. ‘We’ve examined hours of footage just to get those few minutes. If the technology goes bust occasionally that has nothing to do with us. Take it up with airport security.’

  Moira noticed Halliday moving uneasily in his seat. ‘We’re not here to lay blame,’ she said. ‘I was a police officer myself at home in Northern Ireland so I’m well aware of the constraints that you guys operate under.’

  Gattuso had to get these two back onside. ‘We’d like to solve one hundred per cent of the cases that cross our desk, but that’s not humanly possible. In the past three weeks we’ve canvassed every hotel in Florida, every bus company, every airline. This guy has simply vanished off the face of the earth. But who knows, maybe tomorrow, or this evening, some lead will come in that will help us find him.’

  Shea could see that the meeting was reaching a natural conclusion. ‘I want to thank you guys for agreeing to meet us.’ He started to get up and looked at Moira. She seemed reluctant to rise but eventually followed his lead.

  Gattuso smiled. ‘No sweat.’ He held out his hand.

  Shea took the outstretched hand. ‘Anything we find, you’re going to hear about it immediately. We’re all on the same side here and, like I said, you guys are the cops.’ He held out his hand to Halliday, who took it and shook.

  Moira made eye contact with Halliday and thought she saw something in his eyes. She shook hands with him first and then Gattuso.

  ‘You guys going back to Boston?’ Gattuso asked as they were walking back to the reception area.

  ‘We might just stay on a while,’ Shea said. ‘We’ve got to show the client that we covered all the bases.’

  ‘Well have a good trip home,’ Gattuso said. ‘And don’t forget, you hear something, we get to hear it next.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Shea said.