Florida Getaway

by Max Allan Collins

  “Guesses. Just a buncha stupid guesses.”

  “Well, right now I’m guessing the gun’s in the Sinatra sack you arranged to slip into the box.”

  Delko stepped forward, cuffs in hand, and Ciccolini lurched toward the young CSI, shoving him into Caine, knocking Caine back even as Delko tumbled into the river with a yell and a splash.

  Ciccolini was running now, sprinting down the path into the darkness.

  Caine scrambled to his feet and ran after the suspect. He did not draw his weapon—he didn’t take the time. The old man was quick, his long legs striding, his arms pumping. It seemed to take forever to close the distance, and as Caine came up he yelled, “Stop, Vinnie! Stop before I stop you!”

  But Ciccolini only kept running, and got out in front again, and Caine—breathing hard—gave it all he had, charging up behind the man and throwing a tackle into him, bringing him down in a rolling pile on the grass.

  Ciccolini twisted around, throwing Caine off, and the CSI grabbed onto the man’s nylon jacket, yanking on it, stopping him from fleeing. But the old hit man slipped out of the jacket and ran free from it, and Caine was left just holding the garment.

  So he flung the thing and it whipped around and caught Ciccolini at the ankles, tripping him. The man went down and then Caine was looming over him, hand on the butt of his pistol, about to draw the weapon….

  Ciccolini kicked Caine in the stomach. Doubled over, all the air out of him, Caine made a perfect target for Ciccolini, who swung a hard right fist into the CSI’s jaw.

  But now Caine had his pistol in hand, trained on the suspect, whose yellow teeth were bared in a savage grimace that made the CSI think he was getting a glimpse of the real man.

  Ciccolini—his face a contemptuous mask—put his hands in the air. He was breathing hard, but then, they both were.

  “Don’t have a heart attack, Lieutenant,” Ciccolini said.

  Caine wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with his free hand. “Hands in front, Vinnie.”

  Ciccolini lowered his hands. “You arresting us, then? Next stop, jail?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then can I get something out of my pocket?” And the hit man began to slip his right hand into his jacket pocket.

  “Don’t!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the old man said. “It’s not a gun—I’m reaching for my cell phone to call my lawyer!”

  Caine leaned in and patted the pocket—it was a cell phone.

  After examining the phone, Caine allowed Ciccolini to call his attorney (“I just want him to be able to meet us over at lockup”) and then cuffed the man and walked him back down the beach to where Eric Delko—dripping wet—had taken Rosselli into custody. Rosselli’s fishing rod was draped across the nearby lawn chair.

  Delko had already called for uniformed backup, who within minutes had arrived and deposited the two suspects in separate squad cars, where Caine presented each of them with a search warrant for their homes and cars. The concession he had made to their age—allowing them to be handcuffed in front—also allowed Caine to hand each man his warrant.

  “Vinnie,” Caine said, “you want to turn over the keys for your car and house?”

  The old man sneered and grunted a that’ll-be-the-day response.

  “Your choice,” Caine said. “I’ll just have to break into your car and house, then. We’re not responsible for any loss or damage, by the way. Your call.”

  “Fuck it,” Ciccolini said. “Left jacket pocket.”

  Caine reached in and came back with a ring of keys—five, only one of which was a car key, for a Chrysler. Caine pointed to a silver Intrepid a few spaces down and Ciccolini nodded sourly.

  “Nice ride,” Caine said.

  “I’m fuckin’ thrilled you approve,” Ciccolini said.

  Caine went over and fitted the key into the lock, opening the trunk just as the squad cars were rolling off into the night.

  Delko ambled up. “Anything good?”

  “Not at first glance.”

  Caine had hoped to find something here—the machete, a roll of garbage bags, the masks, something; but the trunk was so clean, the car might have come off the showroom floor this morning.

  Shortly thereafter, Delko reported: “Passenger compartment looks scrubbed, too, H.”

  Caine stood with hands on hips. “Car’s just not gonna help us, Eric. Oh, we’ll give it the full process, but…let’s just hope the rest of the team’s having better luck.”

  A devilish grin was crinkling Delko’s lips. “Okay, H. And I promise not to tell them.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “That you were dukin’ it out with a retirement home escapee. That he almost outrun ya.”

  Caine couldn’t hold back the smile. He turned his gaze on Delko, still damp from his trip into the river. “That’s thoughtful of you, Eric. And I won’t tell them how you got wet.”

  “Uh, yeah…thanks.”

  Caine put a hand on Delko’s shoulder. “Look at it this way—you finally got to go diving on this case.”

  And they headed back to HQ.

  Detective Sevilla snugged her leather coat around her.

  A chill hung in the night air like a persistent ghost and—although she was hardly superstitious—Sevilla was not overjoyed to be standing in the middle of a cemetery, next to a backhoe, as it grunted away under the harsh glare of halogen work lights.

  She respected Caine’s dedication, but…wouldn’t the damned gun still be there tomorrow?

  That is if it’s even there to begin with.

  The backhoe roared again as it pawed at the freshly turned earth packed on top of Abraham Lipnick’s coffin. The diggers had to be careful—the wooden coffin would be no match for the backhoe, if the operator dug a little too deep in his haste…after all, the guy was probably just as anxious as Sevilla to get the hell out of here.

  The only one here who was not in a hurry was Abraham Lipnick.

  The cemetery crew was working their second night in a row—first to bury Lipnick in the timely fashion his friends demanded; and now to dig him back up. To them this was probably starting to feel like a futile exercise.

  “We’re used to makin’ deposits,” the operator had told Sevilla. “Not withdrawals.”

  “Shouldn’t be much longer,” Calleigh Duquesne said, coming up behind the detective, yelling to be heard over the noise of the tractor motor.

  Sevilla nodded.

  Calleigh held out a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee to the detective, who gratefully accepted it in both hands. “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Don’t sip it yet—it’ll scald you.” Calleigh was also bundled up, a heavy CSI jacket zipped to the neck, her hands already encased in latex gloves, ready to get at it.

  Sevilla said, “Smells like heaven.”

  “Eric’s cafe cubano recipe. It’s got some bite to it.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Calleigh’s pretty, infectious smile flashed. “The good news is there’s enough caffeine we won’t have to worry about fallin’ asleep out here…or probably anywhere else, for the next two days.”

  Sevilla chuckled, the laugh feeling good. They stood awhile and finally Sevilla braved taking a sip, and the warmth flooded through her. “Thanks, Calleigh—I needed this.”

  The tractor’s motor cut off in the middle of “thanks.” The rest of it came out way too loud in the sudden silence, but the three-man work crew was concentrating on their task. One still sat in the seat of the backhoe while the other two jumped down into the newly excavated hole and started digging more carefully, precision work with smallish shovels.

  The two women moved closer, peering down inside the grave.

  “See anything?” Sevilla asked.

  “Mud and men’s boots—that’s it.”

  They stood in silence at the grave’s edge, drinking their coffee for a couple of minutes. Sevilla wondered if Calleigh was at all spooked by the eerie circumstances and surrounding
s; she seemed unflappable in almost any situation.

  One of the men down in the hole said, “I think we hit paydirt, fellas.”

  The one on the backhoe came down and shone a flashlight in: they could all clearly see the wood that one of the shovels had unearthed.

  Sevilla said, “Getting close now.”

  “I’ll get my camera,” Calleigh said, as peppy as a tourist at Sea World preparing to snap dolphins.

  Sevilla knew, however, that this was an important investigative and procedural step. The CSI would record the exhumation from here on with her 35 millimeter, so they would have documentation when it came time to lay all this out in front of a jury.

  Perhaps Abraham Lipnick was in heaven or hell facing eternal judgment right now; but his friends, Sevilla hoped, would be facing judgment here on earth, very soon…

  …thanks to what they hoped to find in the dirt.

  Two hours later, Calleigh Duquesne found herself alone in the lab with Abraham Lipnick’s spare wooden coffin, the heavy wooden box poised atop a heavy metal worktable.

  The temperature of the room was turned down in order to keep the body as cool as possible; Calleigh had ditched her coat, accordingly, and now wore a blue lab coat over her sleeveless green blouse. Working carefully with a short crowbar, she jimmied loose one corner at a time and then slowly pried up the sides.

  Caine wandered in just as she finished.

  “Are the old fellas in custody, Horatio?” she asked.

  “Yes. We had enough to bring them in. Not enough to prove we’re right about them.”

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” she said, her voice cheerful. “That is, I will if you can give me a hand gettin’ the lid off this cigar box.”

  She moved to the far end of the coffin and together they lifted the lid off and set it on the floor, leaning it against the legs of the table, nails facing in. Per Jewish custom, the body inside hadn’t been embalmed, and twenty-four hours in the ground—if a relatively short tenure for a corpse in a cemetery plot—hadn’t done any favors for the still-ripening body.

  They took time to put on painters’ masks. Then, with Caine looking on, Calleigh reached over the side of the coffin and began feeling around the edge of the shroud. She began at the head and worked her way toward the feet—she wasn’t quite tall enough to see straight down the side, so her impressions were mostly tactile.

  “You want me to do that?” Caine asked.

  “No thanks,” she said, “I’m fine.”

  She worked a little further, the cotton of the shroud stiff and chilly to her touch, the wood of the coffin cool against her bare wrist where the sleeve of the lab coat rode up and her latex glove didn’t quite reach. She was almost to the midway point when she touched something metallic….

  A chill ran through her that had nothing to do with the temperature.

  A nice chill, though—a satisfying one; not surprisingly, a gun was involved.

  Wrapping her hand around the object, she pulled it up and brought it out…

  …a silver-plated .25-caliber automatic pistol.

  “Nice work,” Caine said.

  “I’m just getting started,” Calleigh said, on the move. “I’ll get it through the lab as fast as I can.”

  Only when a firearm showed itself did Calleigh Duquesne truly spring into inspired action.

  Tim Speedle and Eric Delko took the Rosselli residence.

  The two CSIs thoroughly searched the house, while brawny Detective Bernstein sat on the sofa with a tearful Rebecca Rosselli.

  They found no guns, but confiscated two different pairs of shoes to be checked against footprints on the limo’s brake pedal; also, a black suit that looked vaguely like a chauffeur’s uniform and would be compared to fibers lifted from the driver’s seat.

  As they walked out, Mrs. Rosselli got up and walked them to the door. Speedle, touched by her politeness, turned to apologize for the intrusion, but before he got out a word, the door slammed in his face.

  A uniformed officer—who had possession of the key Caine had gotten from Ciccolini—met the CSIs and Bernstein outside the man’s house. They entered, finding the house dark and silent, the living room feeling lonely and cold. Speedle found a wall switch and flipped on a light.

  The room had an Old World feel—heavy, long swords crossed on the wall behind a dark Mediterranean sofa, a large leather globe on its perch between the sofa and matching chair, which faced a television only slightly smaller than the monster monitor at the Rossellis. A painting on the wall to Speedle’s left showed three wooden ships sailing toward the setting sun—the ships of Christopher Columbus on their way to the New World.

  “Upstairs or downstairs?” Speedle asked.

  “Upstairs,” Delko said.

  The two CSIs separated, Delko heading up to the second floor, Speedle staying down. Moving to the back of the house, Speed decided to start in the kitchen and work his way forward.

  In the kitchen’s junk drawer, he found a blister pack containing several small, flat hearing aid batteries identical to the one Delko had picked up on the beach. With a smug smile, he put them in an evidence bag and marked it.

  Under the sink, he discovered a roll of garbage bags, the same green-black as the one Lessor’s head and hands (and cell phone) had been buried in on the beach. With any luck, he could match up the perforations and prove the bags came off the same roll; but that would be a long shot.

  Rest of the first floor yielded little, though of course Speedle went through everything painstakingly. He was just finishing up when Delko came downstairs lugging two more black suits, two more pairs of shoes, and an evidence bag.

  “What’s in the goodie bag?” Speedle asked optimistically.

  Delko held up the evidence pouch for him to see: inside, a hearing aid. Most likely belonging to the late Abraham Lipnick.

  Nodding his appreciation, Speedle showed Delko the batteries he had found.

  “What’s left?” Delko asked.

  They had a decent pile of stuff already, but they both knew there was one more item well worth finding…if it was here, and hadn’t been flung off the side of a road or into the ocean.

  Speedle said, “We still got the garage.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  They took what they’d gathered out to the Hummer and stowed it in the back. The two-car garage seemed to have been cobbled onto the house as an afterthought, its masonry a slightly different shade of gray. Going back through the house to the connecting door, the pair of CSIs strolled into the empty garage and looked around.

  A small oil stain in the center of the cement floor told Speedle that only one car had been parked in here. A homemade workbench crafted from two-by-fours and plywood ran along the far wall, a small window centered over it, two toolboxes on the floor below the bench.

  The right-hand wall was the double overhead door, the left-hand wall the back of the garage along which stood the lawn mower, a small wheelbarrow, and a grass seed spreader. Various tools could be seen: a leaf blower, a hedge trimmer, shears, and two rakes, hung from nails. The wall with the access door had two garbage cans and a recycling container along it.

  “It’s a garage, all right,” Delko said.

  “I’ll take the far side,” Speedle said.

  “Why not.”

  Even though the night was chilly, the lack of ventilation in the garage had them sweating heavily after an hour of going through everything, taking the tools off the wall, going over the workbench, sifting the trash. Speedle had even gone through the toolboxes twice and come up with the same thing both times—nothing pertinent.

  A little exasperated, Speed called out, “Any luck, Eric?”

  Delko shook his head. “If that machete’s here, it’s duct-taped to the rafters.”

  They locked eyes, shrugged simultaneously, and shone their flashlights upward for a moment…no. They looked at each other in frustration.

  Shrugging, Delko said, “They knew we were on their tail, sin
ce that funeral home visit. It’s probably in a canal somewhere.”

  “Damn,” Speedle said, pounding the workbench.

  “Would be nice to have that sucker!”

  Delko stared at him, kind of goofily.

  “What? It would be nice!”

  “No, Speed…do that again.”

  “Do what again?”

  “Hit it.”

  “The workbench?”

  “The workbench.”

  Speedle frowned. “Is this some sort of sadomasochistic trip? Because if it is, well, Speedy don’t play that.”

  Delko’s expression was thoughtful. “Just hit the bench again, like you did the last time. Same place and everything….”

  Speedle tapped the bench with his fist.

  The heavens did not part.

  “Don’t be a wimp, Speed! Hit that baby—pissed, like you did before.”

  Still not getting it, Speedle smacked the bench. This time, he heard it too…

  …a faint bump.

  Like something on the underside of the bench, reverberating when he banged the wood. He hit it again, harder this time, and the bump was easy to hear.

  Bending down, Speedle looked under the workbench for the third time, and still saw nothing.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Then he sat on the floor and turned to face the front as he leaned back under the bench. Shining his Mini-Mag Lite up under the bench, he finally saw what he had been looking for all along.

  There, on the underside of the bench, Tim Speedle saw the black handle of an object.

  A machete.

  The blade was wedged between the two-by-four frame and the plywood bench top.

  This time, Delko pounded the bench, and the machete’s handle bounced off the plywood. Dust flew.

  “What’s the idea!” Speedle said, waving a hand in front of his eyes and nose, coughing.

  “What can I say?” Delko said. “I’m a cut-up.”