Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery

by H. Terrell Griffin

  I called Maggie as I drove out to the island, arriving at her house in the late afternoon. She offered me a drink. I declined. She was sipping something clear from a large tumbler. A wedge of lime was stuck on the rim. Gin, I thought. “I appreciate your seeing me,” I said.

  “I’m glad to help, Matt. You mentioned you wanted some information on Nate’s estate.”

  “I’m just pulling at loose strings, Maggie, but I’m wondering if somebody might have had a reason to kill Nate for money.”

  “Like me?” she asked.

  “No. I stopped by the courthouse and looked at the will. You get everything, but I can’t see you killing him over that. You’d have gotten enough out of the divorce to take care of you forever.”

  “If I’d killed him, it wouldn’t have been for the money. I’d have killed the bastard for being the bastard he was.”

  I smiled. “What about the project in Lakeland? Do you get that?”

  “No. Everything was set up in a corporation called BLP, Inc. I assumed he owned all the stock. When he died, I assumed I would get control.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. When my lawyer started digging into the assets, he found that Nate didn’t even own one share of the stock. He was just an employee of the company.”

  “Were you able to find out who does own the stock?”

  “My lawyer’s trying to unravel that now, but he says he may never be able to figure it all out. Apparently the stock is owned by some guy I never heard of, but none of that makes sense. Nate set up the corporation, and I’m pretty sure he owned the property individually. It wasn’t part of BLP.”

  “If BLP is operating in Florida, there must be a resident agent for service of process. That would be a matter of public record at the secretary of state’s office.”

  “Yeah. It’s some lawyer in Tampa. He won’t tell my lawyer anything. Client confidentiality and all that crap.”

  “Did Nate leave any papers here? Anything that might give us some background on the Lakeland project?”

  “No. But Nate did have a safe deposit box at the SunTrust Bank downtown. My lawyer has the key and the court order allowing him to open the box.”

  “Would you mind if I looked through the documents in that box?”

  “Not at all. I’ll call my lawyer and tell him to go ahead and get the stuff out of the box and let you see it all.”

  “Who’s your lawyer?”

  “Bob Crites. You know him?”

  “I do. He’s good. Do you think we could get this done so that I can go over the documents tomorrow?”

  “I don’t see why not. I’ll call Bob this afternoon.”

  * * *

  I was tired. My day had started early and I wanted to get out of my suit and tie and into my island clothes; shorts, t-shirt and boat shoes. I called J.D., and she suggested we have a drink at the Haye Loft. I decided I’d have to wait to change.

  I left my jacket and tie in the Explorer and climbed the steps to one of the nicest bars on the Suncoast. The downstairs part of the building houses a world-class restaurant named Euphemia Haye, and the Haye Loft Bar on the second floor was a favorite of both locals and snowbirds. It was virtually empty at five-thirty in the afternoon. As my eyes adjusted to the low light of the bar, I recognized Jon and Donna Boscia sitting at a table in the corner of the room. Jon waved me over.

  “I just left a message on your home answering machine,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you. Join us.”

  I kissed Donna on the cheek, shook Jon’s hand, and sat down. Eric Bell came from behind the bar with a cold Miller Lite and a frosted glass. “Where’s J.D.?” he asked.

  “On her way.”

  “Good. She’s the part of you I like best.”

  “Yeah. Everybody says that.”

  Eric laughed and went back to the bar. I turned to Jon. “I haven’t seen you guys around for a while. Have you been away?”

  “We were in Europe for a couple of weeks. Just got back this afternoon. I was going over the back issues of the Observer and read about the chief’s wife being arrested for Nate Bannister’s murder. The article said you were representing her.”

  “That’s right. Do you know Abby?”

  “Not really. I’ve met her once or twice, but I can’t say I know her. I knew Bannister, though. He was a bad guy.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Not well, but he came to me about investing in a project he was trying to put together. I looked at the deal and turned him down. He came back later, with another investor, but said he was still short and wanted me to take another look at it.”

  “Was the deal any better?”

  “I never got that far. You know that before I retired I was in the financial services industry. I called an old friend of mine who has a company that does background checks on people involved in the financial world. I asked him to check out the other investor, a man named Mark Erickson. Turns out, Erickson made his money running a nudie bar up in Tampa called Buns. My investigator friend said that a lot of drugs came through Buns, but nobody ever pinned anything on Erickson. That was enough for me to decline to get involved.”

  “Are you sure the bar was called Buns?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I drove up there to check it out. Ugly-looking place with an abandoned trailer park behind it.”

  “I know the place,” I said. “The trailer park isn’t abandoned. People actually live there. Do you think Bannister was involved in drugs?”

  “I don’t know, but he was close enough to the action that I didn’t want anything to do with him.”

  “Does this Erickson have any other job? Anything that would produce enough income for him to invest in one of Bannister’s projects?”

  “Not that I could find.”

  “How much was he planning to invest?”

  “Twenty-five million dollars.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot of dough.”

  “You said it.”

  J.D. came in the door, waved at Eric, and joined us. Eric brought over a glass of some kind of white wine, and said, “You and Donna sure do add a lot of class to this table.” He kissed her on the cheek and went back to the bar.

  “I heard you guys have been in Europe,” J.D. said. “Have fun?”

  “It was a nice trip,” Donna said, “but a bit tiring. We’re glad to be home.”

  “Jon was just telling me about some dealings with Bannister,” I said. I gave her a brief recital of what Jon had told me. When I mentioned Erickson’s name, I noticed a quick look of recognition cross her face, but she said nothing.

  “Jon,” J.D. said when I’d finished. “Was this Erickson a big blond guy?”

  “No. In fact, he was African American.”

  We chatted some more, had one more drink each, and J.D. and I took our leave. I thanked Jon for the information, and we made plans to have dinner together in a week or two.

  * * *

  J.D. followed me to my cottage. As soon as she walked in, she said, “Mark Erickson is our link.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s the link between the Favereauxes and Bannister.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s a black professor at USF named Mark Erickson. He and his wife share a chair that Jim Favereaux endowed to the tune of a million dollars. I’d be very surprised if there were two black men in this area named Mark Erickson.”

  “If Favereaux gave the money to the university, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that he even knew the Ericksons.”

  “No, but Lyn and Mike Haycock saw the Favereauxes and the Ericksons having dinner together. Erickson’s the link. We need to follow it up.”

  “Why did you ask Jon if Erickson was a big blond guy?”

  “Erickson sounds Scandinavian, and they’re all big blond guys. If I’d asked him if Erickson was black, Jon would have known I knew him. I thought I’d keep that our little secret for now.”

  “You’re a devious person.”<
br />
  “I am.”

  “And I like it.”

  “What are we going to do about dinner?”

  “Les Fulcher brought me some red snapper he caught yesterday. They’re in the refrigerator. We could grill them.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Bob Crites was a refugee from Delaware winters. A few years before, he’d moved his estate planning and probate practice to Sarasota. He was a middle-aged man of medium height and sported a head full of silver hair. He was also one of my drinking buddies from the various Longboat Key establishments.

  Maggie Bannister had made arrangements for me to meet Bob in his office in a downtown high-rise. The safe deposit box was in a bank on the ground floor of his building, and he’d emptied it as soon as the bank opened that morning.

  We were drinking coffee in Bob’s conference room, the documents from the safe deposit box spread across the table. “Tell me what you found out about the BLP stock,” I said.

  “Nothing, really. Bannister owned all the stock in the corporation until last year. He entered into an agreement with a local man and turned the stock over to him. The really strange thing is that the property on which the project is being built was owned outright by Bannister. Last year, as part of the agreement that transferred the stock, Bannister transferred the property to BLP, Inc. The agent for service of process is a lawyer in Tampa, but he won’t tell me anything. I’m guessing he set up the corporation since he’s listed as the sole incorporator in the corporate papers on file with the secretary of state. But I can’t be sure. A lot of times, the incorporator doesn’t have any real ties to the company.”

  “Do you know if he drew the agreement that transferred the property and the land?”

  “I asked. He refused to answer.”

  “Have the names James or Linda Favereaux popped up anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “How about Mark Erickson?”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the man to whom Bannister transferred the stock in BLP.”

  I sat quietly while Bob looked through the documents.

  “Here it is,” he said. “It’s an agreement between Erickson and Bannister, dated last year.” He handed me the document.

  The agreement was pretty straightforward. Erickson had put ten million dollars into the BLP project that Bannister had approached Jon Boscia about, and would supply another fifteen million when Bannister secured the financing. If Bannister could not arrange for the one hundred million dollars the project would cost within six months of the signing of the agreement, the agreement would expire and Bannister would have to return the ten million to Erickson. It appeared that Bannister had bought the land for the project some years before. According to a report attached to the agreement detailing the property records search by a reputable company in Lakeland, the land was mortgage-free. An attached report by a widely respected real estate appraiser in Tampa, appraised the land at fifty million dollars.

  The document required that the project’s land be transferred to BLP, Inc. Bob told me that the Polk County property appraiser’s office confirmed that the transfer had been made by warranty deed on the same day that the agreement was signed.

  I looked at the date of the agreement. “Bannister was killed five days before the expiration date,” I said.

  Bob continued shuffling through papers as I read. “Here’s another one that might be of some interest,” he said.

  He handed me photocopies of the original incorporation papers and the stock certificates for BLP, Inc. The corporation’s charter authorized the issuance of one hundred shares of stock. All the stock certificates were initially issued to Bannister, but on the same day the agreement had been entered into, Bannister transferred all of them to Erickson.

  “That was probably security for the ten mil loan,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Crites said, “but why would you use a fifty-million-dollar piece of property to secure a ten-million-dollar loan?”

  “Good question. Maybe it’s the only thing Bannister had that could secure the loan and there was no way to divide the property up and maintain all the approvals he had from the county to start the project.”

  “Possibly. But since the property was transferred into the corporation, why not just issue some of the stock in the corporation as security? He could have done that on a pro rata basis, so that the shares given to Erickson would only secure the ten million.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Erickson was only willing to put the twenty-five million in if he had all the real estate locked up.”

  “If Bannister had seventy-five percent of the hundred million he needed, why didn’t he just go to a bank for the rest? For that matter, why not just go to a bank for the fifty million, cutting Erickson out all together? Any bank would lend money that’s secured in its entirety by real estate.”

  “I think there may be some drug money in this deal.” I told him what Jon Boscia had said about Erickson.

  “Are you suggesting that Bannister might have been involved in the drug business?” Bob asked.

  “The evidence is starting to stack up. I think he might have been.”

  “That’s too bad. I wonder if Maggie knew.”

  “Bob,” I said, “now that Bannister is dead, what happens to the real estate in Lakeland?”

  “Nothing. The real estate is owned by BLP, Inc., and it looks as if BLP, Inc. is owned by Erickson.”

  “So, Erickson has benefited by Bannister’s death.”

  “Yes. To the tune of fifty million dollars. If that’s really what the land is worth.”

  “What about the ten million Erickson advanced?”

  “I’ll be willing to bet that money never changed hands,” Crites said. “Or if it did, it went right into the corporation.”

  “Then why the subterfuge with the agreement?”

  “It sure makes a nice paper trail, if anybody ever came looking. All aboveboard.”

  “And,” I said, “I guess if some law enforcement type did come looking and found what we did, he couldn’t prove anything more than we can. Nothing of a criminal nature.”

  Crites smiled. “Bingo, Counselor.”

  PART II

  THE TRIAL

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Florida’s new courtrooms have no personality, no history, no ghosts of the past hanging around lamenting like banshees the tragedy that would play out over the next few days. They’re just cookie-cutter spaces carved out of the new courthouses that have sprouted throughout most of the counties in the state. Florida’s phenomenal population growth over the past thirty years has required county commissioners to build new monuments to themselves, and cost constraints have relegated courtrooms to sterile environments designed by unimaginative architects who eschewed any input from lawyers and judges. The stateliness of ornately carved wood, classical murals, high ceilings, mahogany furnishings, and polished wood floors has given way to plastic, vinyl, and commercial carpeting.

  There are never enough elevators and the security measures are too cumbersome and mostly useless, resulting in long lines of people trying to get into the courthouse to do their public business. The result is a cheapening of the jurisprudential experience for all involved; judges, lawyers, litigants, the accused, and the victims.

  I was sitting in one of those courtrooms in downtown Sarasota on Monday morning, four days before summer officially began. It was early yet, and the room was deserted and cold. The air conditioning had been cranked up against the mid-June heat that seeped into even the sturdiest buildings. When all the actors arrived, the jurors, court deputies, clerks, court reporter, judge, prosecutors, my client, and the curious who had come to watch the trial, the room would heat up and the air conditioning would blow harder and, hopefully, keep us comfortable.

  I had, over the years, made a practice of arriving in court early. It gave me time to think about my case, my client, the law, and the consequences of what I did or did not do durin
g the course of the trial. Somehow, these new courtrooms didn’t bring me the solace I sought. They were like Starbucks without the coffee, all eerily similar, yet different in small ways.

  The door of the courtroom opened and George Swann, the prosecutor, swaggered in. I wondered if he’d had to learn that swagger or if he’d just never been taught to walk normally. He had an entourage with him, two women who were probably in their late twenties, and a thin young man with red hair and freckles.

  I stood and shook hands with Swann. He introduced me to what he called his team. The young man was a law clerk who would be a third-year student at Stetson Law School in the fall. One of the young women was a paralegal and the other an attorney. “Do you particularly want this table?” Swann asked. “I usually take the one closest to the jury.”

  I had absently sat down at the table nearest the jury box. The other counsel table was across the room, but the room was small enough that it made no difference to me which table I used. But Swann’s attitude did make a difference. “I’m comfortable here,” I said.

  “In the Fourth Circuit, where I come from, the prosecutor sits at the table nearest the jury.”

  “We’re in the Twelfth Circuit. Different rules.”

  “Are you trying to be difficult, Mr. Royal?” Swann asked.

  The battle had already started. Some lawyers, usually those who don’t have a great deal of confidence in their abilities, are contentious just for the hell of it. They seem to think they can intimidate their opponents by the force of their personalities, or their reputation, or maybe just their win-loss records. I had learned a long time ago that you took these guys head on, gave no quarter, beat them over the head with your brain and your mouth. And you never raised your voice. “George,” I said, “I think you’ll know when I decide to be difficult. Now, move away.”

  He stood over me for a moment, the school yard bully who’d been called to task in front of his posse, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. He chuckled. “We’ll see, Mr. Royal.” He turned to leave.

  I couldn’t help myself. “George,” I called. He stopped, turned and glared at me. I said in a quiet, even voice, “You fuck with me, and I’ll bury you.”