The Second Letter

by Robert Lane

  I said, “He’s a goner. I believe he succumbed a few years ago to the big C. Not far from here, actually.” Kathleen kicked me not too gently under the table. What’d I do?

  “Really?” Escobar sounded genuinely surprised, even hurt. “What a shame. No one nailed that Jimmy Webb song like he did. He just owned it.” He leaned back into his chair, his face relaxed, and wherever that song went that night, Raydel Escobar followed.

  “Would you care to join me for a cigar and a Cubano espresso?” Escobar inquired as if we were suddenly old chums.

  “A cigar will be fine. I’ll pass on the café Cubano.”

  He stood and walked over to a humidor that sat on the kitchen bar. I had noticed earlier that it had an engraved top, and I wondered if it had belonged to his father or his father before him. He retrieved a cigar, trimmed the end, and handed it to me. He placed a black ashtray on the table. It had “Copacabana” on its side in prominent white letters. I wondered if it was from the original pre-1992 location on Sixtieth Street in New York City.

  “That’s my ticket to leave. I can’t stand the smoke,” Sophia said. “We’ll be inside.”

  I sent Kathleen my own half smile. She could take a drag from a cigar that would melt a Hollywood camera.

  “Do you understand the conversation I had with Kittredge?” I asked after the womenfolk departed. If he didn’t give me the letter, I didn’t want it to be because he wasn’t aware that his balls were in a vise.

  “I know what I need to know.”

  We sauntered over to the chess game where we had sparred a few nights earlier, but neither of us made a move. “I don’t leave here with the letter, then I call Kittredge. He, despite the support Mendis gives him, will tell the FBI to dig deeper, and look harder at Mendis. If Kittredge doesn’t turn up the heat, I release the Bernie picture.”

  “But you won’t, and we both know that. You want the letter, and leaking the photo to the press doesn’t give you what you want. Kittredge will never turn the heat up on Mendis because Mendis has the picture. Mendis could tell Kittredge that if Kittredge does look into him, Mendis will release the picture. Your pathetic scheme would only work if Mendis didn’t have anything on Kittredge.”

  He was partially right, the fat little prick. But not as right as his conceited ass thought he was. I still couldn’t see how a guy like Walter Mendis would allow Escobar’s tax issue, or any issue, to even remotely threaten his existence. Maybe I should have tried to con Escobar, but it was too late for that.

  I started right in, “Mendis doesn’t want Kittredge in that vexatious position. Can’t take that risk. My bet is that Mendis will do anything to preserve his relationship with the congressman, keep him as comfortable as he can, and make equally certain that the government has as little interest in himself as possible. You’re the odd man out here. I’m here to tell you that if you hold the letter, Walter Mendis becomes your enemy. I will make certain of that.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said.

  “You think you got good odds?”

  “The next-to-last mistake, I believe you said.”

  “You’re making the last mistake.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s your call then.”

  I walked away.

  I thought Escobar was trying hard to be someone he was not. I recalled my visit to the Welcome In and visualized Escobar spending his evenings listening to his music, surrounded by the flesh of women, smoking cigars, drinking his dark Cuban rum, and engaging in the bloodless battle of chess where even if you lost, your senses enjoyed the passing moments before you placed the thirty-two pieces neatly back on their squares. Maybe that was as good as life got for him, but he didn’t know it and thought he wanted, or needed, more. His passion and hunger would carry him far offshore, but I’m not sure he had a harbor he could return to when the weather turned foul and the angry angels slashed bolts of lightning against his plans.

  All the beauty and music gone because of his greed.

  Kathleen and Sophia were sitting in the great room. I thanked Sophia and announced we were departing as if the plank was up and the boat was already pulling away. I stood over Kathleen, extended my arm, and in a brusque manner led her out the front door. Within a few minutes we were on Madonna Boulevard and close to her house on Columbus Drive. The warm and soft landscape lights of homes that passed outside the windows were a stark contrast to the chill inside the car.

  “What was that all about?” she demanded.

  “He didn’t turn over the letter.”

  “That’s an excuse for social gaffes?” She spit it out. I didn’t need to look at her to know that if her eyes were loaded, I’d be dead.

  “There was nothing social about tonight.” I was ticked at myself for enjoying a smoke with Escobar.

  “Oh, forgive me. Sophia and I aren’t real.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Silent homes passed us by.

  She wasn’t done with me. “You could have been more polite when you told him Maestro died. ‘He’s a goner’? Really, Jake? That’s the sum of your parts?”

  She’s worried about me hurting Escobar’s sensitive feelings? I wanted to jump on that like an osprey shredding apart a fish, but I was done talking that day. I quietly blew out my breath, uttered not another word, and kept my eyes on the road. I hadn’t been doing a very good job of that.

  When I feel sorry for myself, I do a damn good job.

  CHAPTER 17

  “We’ll head over there the next couple of nights. If he’s got business, maybe we’ll find out what he’s buried in,” I said.

  “Just because the boat was out thirty days ago doesn’t indicate he’s on a schedule, but it’s all we got,” Garrett said.

  I had picked Garrett up at the airport. Plan A wasn’t dead, despite apparently being thrown out at the plate. While I had no intention to ruin Kittredge’s career, let alone his family life—as if people have two distinct separate halves—I couldn’t imagine that someone like Walter Mendis would run that risk. My bet was that it just needed more time to unfold. But I don’t wait and I like to cover my bets.

  We were viewing a satellite photo on the table in my screen porch. An antique Cypress Gardens plate held cheese, crackers, and carrots. Escobar’s Intrepid had been gone one night in the last thirty days, and the armed guard was there a few days before it departed, vanished, and then reappeared a few days ago. Kathleen, after we resumed diplomatic relations, confided to me that Sophia planned to visit her sister and would be gone for a few nights.

  I planned to still squeeze Escobar even harder until I found out what he was involved in, and then blackmail him into giving me the letter in return for my silence. Depending on how grungy his dirt was, I might or might not renege on my end of the deal. If I couldn’t find anything, an outcome I deemed unlikely, I could always put him in a shime-waza, the fatal chokehold that Garrett favored from the beginning. Unfortunately, it carried serious drawbacks, namely the aforementioned orange suit that accompanied prison time if Escobar pressed charges.

  The colonel would not risk his network for any one of us. He had made it clear that Kathleen was the only mulligan we would ever receive. I wondered if my desire to retrieve the letter, to not fail him, was amplified by a subconscious yearning, or some primitive urge, to return the favor. Bottom line? I owed him. What had Garrett said? It seems personal this time.

  I said, “We’ll head over around ten and anchor. If he takes it out, she’ll leave Impulse bobbing in her wake. But at least we can see who takes her and, with luck, what they bring back.”

  “He never registered the boat?” Garrett asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Even money. It’s the cash crop of Florida,” I said. “I think we can still blackmail him. I’m not contacting Kittredge. Kittredge calls Mendis and Mendis has a persuasive talk with Escobar. It’s hard not to see that playing out. Perhaps it already has and Escoba
r is balking at his end. Regardless, the pressure is still on Kittredge and Mendis. In the meantime, we continue to dig and see what else we can use on Escobar.”

  “You should have run a con. Posed as an IRS agent who needed to verify the authenticity of the document and then never let it out of your hands.”

  “Thanks. But it’s a little late for that,” I said. “By the way, what did you ever find on Jim Harrison and his associates?”

  Garrett leaned back in the chair, stretched out his legs across the glass table, and stared out at the water where the red blinking channel marker off the end of my dock had started its nightly job. His face, like twilight, was neither day nor night.

  Garrett traced his ancestry to his four-time great-grandfather, a Frenchman who first touched US soil as an attaché to the Marquis de La Fayette in 1824 when President Monroe invited La Fayette to tour all twenty-four states. Jacques DeMarcus fell in love with the flatlands of Louisiana as well as a mulatto Creole girl whom he decided he could not live without. The marquis continued without him. Garrett’s own mother was Polynesian. Garrett was six feet three inches and looked like a bronze Greek god. When people guessed his heritage the range spanned from Cherokee to African American. No one actually believed anymore that we descended from Greek gods, which in itself is a real shame. He had alopecia totalis since childhood. Apart from eyelashes and eyebrows, not a speck of hair would ever come from his Herculean body. He escaped the Rangers without ever giving in to, or remotely comprehending, the urge to ink.

  In the age of ethnicity and body art, Garrett Demarcus is the antithesis.

  “Practically nothing,” he said.

  “Give me the practical part.”

  “A lot of those first-generation spies started with the OSS, Office of Strategic Services,” Garrett said. “The OSS was split up after World War Two between the Departments of State and War. But like a phoenix, it emerged within two years as the CIA. Harrison was an old-timer by Ike’s second term.”

  “I know the history, what did you find?”

  Garrett glanced at me and gave me a moment to calm down.

  “Not much on James Francis Harrison, but Harrison worked closely with a fellow agent named Theodore Wayne Sullivan, and Sullivan was a man who left a wake. He was a major player in the fifties. A big-time dove that was unappreciated in his time, although his views proved quite accurate.”

  “Anti-Korea?”

  “Pro peace. But that’s never been a big seller among men with guns,” Garrett said. “Ever since Eisenhower gave his domino speech in ’fifty-four, Sullivan found himself on the opposite side of prevailing doctrine.”

  I let my mind shift through the clutter until it recalled the era. I popped a slice of Welsh cheddar cheese into my mouth. “The Dulles brothers,” I said. “They dominated foreign policy in the fifties. Allen ran the CIA and older brother John was secretary of state, although I believe that John never saw the sixties. But in their day, Allen and John Dulles played with the world like it was a toy left under their Christmas tree.”

  “About as powerful as two brothers have ever been until the Kennedy boys came, and we know what happened to them,” Garrett said. “And you’re correct, John died in ’fifty-nine.”

  “And how is this related to Harrison?” A boat cut across the inside of the channel marker where the sandbar was. It was high tide and it was small boat, so he would be fine. I wondered if he knew that or was lucky.

  “As far as we can tell, Harrison’s views were lined up with Sullivan’s. They found themselves on the outside and they shifted their interest away from Southeast Asia and south toward Cuba. Harrison died in a plane crash, January 5, 1961. A CIA trip that ended up in the Gulf Stream about forty miles off Havana toward Key West. He was, we believe, returning from Cuba.”

  “So they were a pre-Bay of Pigs team. Were both Harrison and Sullivan in Cuba in ’sixty-one?”

  “It appears so. But if they were against US involvement in Southeast Asia, it’s very likely that they harbored dovish views on Cuba as well. That would have put them on Allen Dulles’s shit list. Bay of Pigs was his bay and his pig.”

  “And Sullivan? Did he make it to the eighties?”

  “No,” Garrett said, “Theodore Wayne Sullivan died in a car accident after he left the Occoquan Inn in northern Virginia on the night of November 29, 1961.”

  “Well, at least he never had to hear disco. The car accident?”

  “Sketchy at best. Hit a tree.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Two minor things. First, purely by accident, Mary Evelyn discovered, and pointed out, that Allen Dulles was forced out of office as director of the CIA on November 29, 1961.”

  I took another piece of cheese and chased it with a salty cracker. I suppose carrots are healthier—and you can have them.

  “As I recall,” I said, “Dulles took the fall for the Bay of Pigs. Think they simultaneously silenced Sullivan as well to bury the memory, like changing Stalingrad to Volgograd, or do you think Allen Dulles had it in for Sullivan?”

  “Sullivan was a vocal opponent and one with credentials and his own power base. My guess was that Sullivan was instrumental in the demise of Allen Dulles,” Garrett said.

  “And therefore Dulles had Sullivan taken out and on the same day that Sullivan turned in his badge. We’ll go with that. What’s the second item?”

  I took the last slice of cheese. Garrett hadn’t touched the cheese or the crackers. He was a carrot man and was burning calories on one as he spoke.

  “Second item’s even juicier,” Garrett said. “According to all known reports, Sullivan was the pilot of Harrison’s CIA plane that went down.”

  “Little hard to die twice.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Kathleen rushed through the porch carrying dishes to the outside table on the concrete patio. “Shouldn’t Morgan be here by now?” she asked, and a sense of panic accompanied her words.

  She was not a woman to panic. When she was kidnapped, her would-be assassin had his arm around her neck and a gun in his hand when she buried her elbow into his stomach and started the sequence of events that saved her life, changed her name, and put a scar on her left shoulder.

  But kitchen work? She was a girl in trouble.

  “He won’t miss dinner,” I said.

  “He better not. I’ve got vested time here,” she said. She deposited her plate on the table and vanished back into the kitchen.

  “You never told me she could cook,” Garrett said.

  “No. I never did.”

  “How bad?”

  “Thinks the oven’s the strangest looking clock in the house.”

  “Great.”

  “Hope you saved the munchies from the plane.”

  Morgan slid through the side door caressing a bottle of cabernet and greeted Garrett. They had developed a quick friendship on Garrett’s visits and often spent time together kite surfing at Fort De Soto as well as sailing.

  “What’s on the agenda?” Morgan asked.

  “Kathleen’s night,” I said.

  “Good lord. Remember last time? I’m going to give her a hand.”

  “We’re counting on you.”

  “What do we know about Mendis?” Garrett asked after Morgan dashed into my house.

  “Plays hardball.”

  “Would he take Escobar out?”

  “Maybe. It’s difficult to say whether Mendis simply cranks the heat or delivers a bullet to Escobar. The bullet’s not our friend—a dead Escobar can’t tell us where the letter is.”

  The colonel could care less if Escobar beat the IRS, ran drugs, or floated up on a pristine Gulf beach in the middle of a sunset wedding. He wanted the letter.

  “Maybe we’ll find something in the next night that gives us intelligence as to what their current association involves,” Garrett said. He took a swig from his bottled water. I doubt he had touched the sauce since our last night in Key West.

  The paddle-wheeler
churned past the end of my dock. The lower level was a solid window dotted with Playmobil heads. The guests were enjoying a dinner cruise that would culminate at the entrance to the pass just as the sun dipped beneath the water.

  Kathleen appeared, her hands buried in thick potholders that caressed a ceramic dish. “Outside, boys,” she announced. I checked. No high heels.

  We trailed her out to meet our fate, which wasn’t nearly as cruel as anticipated. Morgan’s late entry to the match no doubt had its intended effect. Our low expectations set us up for a tasteful dinner of bow tie pasta with pesto, black olives, tomatoes, onions, and chunks of salted red snapper. She lit the solitary candle and I poured the wine into Morgan and Kathleen’s glasses.

  “You’re not joining us?” she asked me when I passed over Garrett’s glass and mine.

  “We’re taking the boat out tonight. See if we can see any action at Escobar’s.”

  “Need a pilot?” Morgan asked.

  “Only if you’re not coming,” I said.

  He swirled the cabernet in the large glass and stuck his nose deep into the glass. “Tide’s in our favor tonight,” he said when he came up for air.

  “Probably have you anchor farther away. If there’s no activity, we’ll call it an early night, around two or so. If there is action, Garrett and I will get in the water and get as close as we can. We need to see who and what.”

  “Why tonight?” Kathleen asked, making motions with her utensils that rarely resulted in one of them finding her mouth. No matter what was placed in front of her, she ate like a bird. Except for pizza. That, she ate like a dog.

  Garrett said, “He’s had extra cover the past few days, which we’ve noticed he employs about once a month. Plus, according to our wonderful cook,” he raised his water glass at Kathleen, “his wife is out of the house for two days.”

  “Everything taste OK?” she asked.

  “Delicious,” Garrett said.

  She looked at me, and I was thinking of how to diplomatically tell her to cook the fish in with the sauce in order to absorb the flavor when she said, “You’re leaving Sophia out of this, right?”