He frowned. “That’s different.”
“Maybe you’d feel the same way I feel when someone calls me a spic.”
“Spic? You ain’t no spic. You talk like a white man.”
“Just because I speak proper English doesn’t mean that I’m not a Mexican-American,” Chuck said in Spanish.
“What you say, man?”
Chuck translated.
“Here’s a small life lesson, Sneakers: It’s okay to care about people, even people you don’t know. It doesn’t hurt, and it might help you in some way in the future.”
Sneakers walked toward the access door shaking his head and laughing.
Chapter 26
Chuck stared out his office window at Bayfront Boulevard. He didn’t see the traffic or the palm trees. All he could see was Sneakers, the kid on the dead-end street. What can I do for this kid?
He called Renate Crowell, a reporter with the Port City Press-Journal. He stared at her picture on the screen as he waited for the call to go through. When she had interviewed Chuck for the Simonetti story, she’d insisted that they take each other’s pictures for their phone contacts. Chuck figured that his picture on Renate’s phone still showed the background of his hospital room.
The phone rang twice and she answered. “Hello, handsome. Did you call to ask me out?”
Chuck’s heart froze in his chest. His stomach tied in knots. Ever since middle school, he’d been shy around girls. The last time he spoke to Renate, she’d flirted with him, but she knew he was in a relationship with Terry. Panic-stricken, Chuck stared at the phone and wondered what to say.
“You there, big guy?”
Ignore it. Just pretend she said “Hello.” “I may have a story for you, Renate.”
“Well, that’s the next best thing to a dinner invitation. You sure know how to sweet talk a girl. What you got?”
“Foster care fraud at the Department of Children and Families.”
“Old news, hotshot. Everybody knows that DCF is rife with fraud. They almost have to kill a kid to rate a story in the Pee-Jay.”
“I found a kid who ran away from his foster home six months ago. The foster parents fed him one meal a day of rice and beans. They collected seven hundred fifty dollars a month to care for the kid. They had six other foster kids in a three-bedroom house.”
“Maybe. You got anything else?”
“The kid says the DCF inspector never came to the house the whole time he lived there. You might find that the foster parents still collect their money even though the kid ran away six months ago. Just a thought.”
“That’s actually a pretty good angle, Chuck. Anything else?”
“The foster parents do not live with the foster children. The foster parents live in the house next door and leave the kids alone every night. The youngest is five. My contact looks about sixteen.”
“Oh, God. Maybe I can do something. Where can I interview your kid?”
“You can’t. He doesn’t want to be found. But maybe you could look him up in the public records. From that you could trace his so-called foster parents. Kid’s name is Bill Clinton Watkins.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Hey, my grandparents have neighbors named after Franklin Roosevelt and my parents’ next-door neighbor is named after John Kennedy. Why not Bill Clinton?”
“Why not, indeed? Okay, is that all you have? These allegations and the kid’s name?”
“They’re pretty serious allegations.”
“Good thing for you I specialize in making mountains out of molehills. I’m not working anything else hot right now. I’ll check it out and get back to you.”
Chapter 27
Chuck poured Terry more wine from a bottle of Chianti and took a bite of his lasagna.
Terry twirled spaghetti on her fork and used it to sop up meat sauce. She took a bite and licked her lips as she winked at him. “Chuck, you seem quiet tonight.”
He sighed and put down his fork. “I found this kid a couple of nights ago. He squats in a warehouse building near the site where Franco was hit.”
“What about him?”
“I can’t get him out of my mind.”
“Why you so preoccupied with this kid?”
“He’s sixteen, he ran away from several years’ worth of bad foster homes, and he’s lived hand-to-mouth for the last six months, squatting in a partially-occupied warehouse. He’s got nothing going for him.”
Terry sipped her wine. “I don’t want to sound callous, but so what? There’s thousands of kids like him in Port City and millions around the world. Why does this one kid grab you?”
“I feel bad for him. He’s not had much schooling, so I don’t know how smart he is, except maybe street smarts. He’s in bad shape physically. He’s callous without being tough. He’s emotionally stunted—”
“Like you would recognize ‘emotionally stunted’ if it bit you on the ass.”
“Hey, I have emotions. I’m a sensitive person. For a barbarian.” He sipped his Chianti.
She snickered. “Tell me more, Mr. Sensitive.”
“Kid’s got no friends. His only family is a junkie mother and a bunch of folks who are dead or in prison. His possessions are a torn sleeping bag, junk furniture, and the clothes on his back—which are ancient, by the way.”
He took another bite of lasagna.
“And?”
“Odds are, five or ten years, this kid will be dead or, if he’s really lucky, in prison. He doesn’t know anything about…” He searched for the right word. “Civilization. He’s never even gone to church, other than getting a few meals at a rescue mission.”
“You don’t go to church.”
“I’ll have you know that I attend church regularly.”
“I spend almost every weekend with you. You don’t go to church.”
“I attend services every Easter. And at Christmas when I visit Mom and Dad in Texas. And every Sunday when I visit my grandparents.”
Terry smiled. “Easter and Christmas barely qualify as ‘regular,’ but I’ll go with you this Christmas, assuming you take me to meet your folks.”
That was a shocker. Of course, Christmas is several months away. A lot could happen between now and then. Is Terry getting as serious about me as I am about her? “I look forward to it. Anyway, the kid doesn’t know how to hold a fork. Doesn’t know the first thing about common courtesy, good manners, or being sociable. No one’s taught him anything about how life works. He acts like he was raised in the woods by bears.”
“That’s pretty sad, all right.”
Chapter 28
The next time Chuck called his parents, he told his father about Sneakers.
“You think he witnessed this hoodlum’s murder?”
“He probably did. But he doesn’t trust anybody.”
“Son, I think your interest in this boy is more than just professional. Why does this kid fascinate you?”
Chuck thought about that for a moment. “The kid’s a natural Bonsai tree, a seed that falls in a harsh place on the rocks. No soil, not a good place to grow, but the seed sprouts in spite of the environment. It struggles to survive, but it grows. It grows stunted and twisted, but it grows.”
“Hmm. Anything more about that?”
“Yeah, Dad. It just hit me: Sneakers is the complete opposite of me. I had every advantage; he’s had no advantages. I have two parents who love me; he doesn’t even know his father, and he hasn’t seen his mother in forever. I got a good education; he dropped out after eighth grade. Yet he hangs in there and tries.”
“And you admire him.”
“Yeah. In spite of everything, I admire this kid. I wonder how well I’d survive if I’d been born into his conditions.”
“Chuck, I remember you reading one of my detective novels in high school. A character in this book described the hero as a ‘knight errant,’ and you asked me what that was. We looked it up together in the dictionary. You remember what it said?”
Chu
ck smiled at the memory. “I’ll always remember. It’s a knight who travels in search of adventure, to champion the underdog, to right wrongs, and to defend justice. That’s when I decided to be a knight errant like that detective in the book.”
Chuck’s father laughed. “Once you came home from middle school with a black eye and a cut lip. I asked what you fought about. The fight wasn’t even about you. You’d fought a school bully to protect a younger kid.”
Chuck smiled. “I remember. That’s when you signed me up for boxing lessons.”
“Ever since you were a boy, I’ve known that you’re an anachronism, a throwback to another time, the age of the knight errant. Whatever your interest in this Sneakers kid, it’s not because he might be a witness. You see this kid as an opportunity to make one small piece of the world a better place.”
Dad’s right, of course. He’s always right.
Chapter 29
“Ted Smoot. Where do I know that name from?” Chuck asked.
Dan Murphy squinted at him from across the table. “He was a dirty cop—maybe. But a dirty private eye definitely. It was before your time.”
“What’s the story?”
Murphy took a huge bite of cookie and chewed for a few seconds. “Smoot was a narc. He and his partner Benny Benton used to arrest drug dealers. You ever been on a drug bust?”
Chuck sipped his coffee. “Just once. I was in uniform. I covered the rear in case anyone tried to escape out the back door. It wasn’t very exciting. I never even saw the bad guys.”
Murphy waved that away. “That’s not what I mean. You see, drug dealers don’t take credit cards. It’s not unusual to find twenty, thirty thousand dollars or more on the site, along with the contraband.”
“Sure, everyone knows that.”
“So Ted and Benny handled a lot of cash. I mean a lot of cash.” Murphy raised one eyebrow.
Chuck nodded for him to go on.
Murphy sipped his coffee. “Some of the dealers Ted and Benny collared said that the cops confiscated more money than ever found its way into evidence.”
“How so?”
“Like the perp says he had forty thousand dollars in his apartment, and Ted and Benny turn thirty thousand into evidence.”
“Don’t all the perps say that?”
Murphy shook his head. “No, they don’t.” He waved a hand. “I mean, it happens sometimes. Cop’s word against drug dealer’s. Who’s gonna believe a drug dealer? But with Ted and Benny it happened a lot. The thing is, there’s no record of how much cash should be there when they’re busted. So, who knows?”
Chuck wrote a note. “How much we talking about?”
“They weren’t greedy. Usually five or ten thousand went missing. And only every few months.” He paused. “At first. But then it happened more frequently.”
“So what happened?”
“Ted and Benny busted a dealer who’d just done a deal with a Fed undercover narc. The Fed paid the dealer fifty thousand in marked bills. The Feds expected the dealer to split the marked money with his distributor. They were waiting to catch a bigger fish.” Murphy ate the last of the cookie and licked his fingers.
“So the dealer still had fifty thousand in marked bills when Ted and Benny busted him?”
“Yeah. And only half the bills made it into evidence.”
“What happened to the other half?”
Murphy laughed. “Some of it was laundered through a casino in Nassau.”
“So how’d the bills wind up in the Bahamas?”
“It turns out that Ted Smoot and his wife took a cruise to the Bahamas two weeks after the drug bust. Internal Affairs asked Ted about it and he said it was a coincidence, yada, yada, yada, benefit of the doubt, yada, yada.” He shrugged. “IA had no case, but morally Smoot and Benny were toast.”
“What happened to them?”
Murphy smirked. “They were both requested to resign ‘for the good of the Department.’”
“Where’s Benny now?”
“Last I heard, he landed a job as head of security for a casino on some Indian reservation some place in New England. A casino. Ain’t that ironic?” Murphy laughed. “You see, the rest of the marked bills didn’t turn up right away. My guess is that was Benny’s share of the cut and he was smart enough to lie low. He launders them at various stores around New England. Some bills still turn up at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.”
“Was Jorge the guy who investigated them?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that.”
“So what’s the connection to Jorge? Why is Smoot on your list of people who want him dead?”
Murphy laughed. “Ted became a private eye, just like you.”
“So?”
“So, this rich banker’s wife hires Ted to catch her husband with his girlfriend. Ted gets the goods on the guy, but Ted gets this bright idea. The banker is lots richer than the wife. So Ted rousts the banker. He shows the guy the evidence, but he offers to keep quiet if the banker will pay him more money than the wife is paying. The banker knows a good thing when he sees it, so he pays Ted and Ted tells the wife that the banker is clean.”
“When was this?” Chuck asked.
“It was ten or twelve years ago, before you moved to Port City.”
“What’s that got to do with Jorge?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
Chapter 30
Jorge plopped down on a concrete bench shaded by a handful of sabal palms. “Let’s sit here, Chuck.”
North Beach stretched from the edge of the boardwalk to the ocean.
Jorge crossed his legs. “Mm, mm, mm. Look at that one.”
“The girl in the red bikini?” Chuck asked.
“No, the one on the blanket to her left. Yellow bikini. Just took her top off. Must be double-D cups.”
“Now I see why you wanted to meet here, amigo.”
“It’s got the best view in the city, Chuck. Dan and I always have our confabs here.”
Chuck put on his sunglasses. “Yeah, well, we still need to take care of business. Tell me about you and Ted Smoot.”
“Why? He’s in prison.”
Chuck shook his head. “Nope. He’s out now.”
Jorge pulled his gaze away from the beach. “He was sentenced to ten to fifteen years. It hasn’t been ten years.”
“Prison overcrowding, plus good behavior. He got out nine months ago.”
“I’d forgotten about Smoot.”
“That’s why I want to know about him. Dan Murphy told me he was fired for stealing drug money, became a private eye, and blackmailed a customer who cheated on his wife.”
Jorge nodded. “All true, as far as it goes.” His eyes drifted back to Yellow Bikini. “Sort of makes life worth living, doesn’t it? You think her boyfriend appreciates what he’s got?”
“Business, amigo, business.”
Jorge turned toward Chuck. “Smoot didn’t stop with the banker. He did so well milking that poor schlub that he decided to expand.”
“How so?”
“Next time a woman client comes to him with a cheating husband, he tries it again.”
Chuck’s eyes wandered of their own accord to Yellow Bikini. “You think she knows we’re watching her?”
Jorge smirked. “I’m not watching her; I’m watching them.”
Chuck feigned indignation. “That remark displays a sexist, chauvinistic, piggish attitude that is demeaning to women and beneath the dignity of every enlightened twenty-first century man. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“And I am indeed truly, truly ashamed.” Jorge grinned. “Of course she knows we’re watching her.” He clapped Chuck on the shoulder. “That’s why she does it, bro’. That’s why she does it.” He raised his eyebrows. “Now who’s forgetting about business?”
Chuck grinned. “Okay, so I’m a red-blooded American boy. Anyway, what happened with the new cheating husband?”
“Guy was an Atlantic County Commissioner with his eyes on the F
lorida Senate.”
“Sounds like a perfect candidate for blackmail.”
Jorge nodded. “Yeah. Smoot approaches the Commish with pictures of him and his PR manager checking into a motel in Orlando. Ted asks the guy for a payoff to keep quiet about the affair.”
Jorge leaned toward Chuck. “Here’s where it gets good. What Smoot didn’t know was that the PR manager was pregnant and she’d already told the Commish. The girlfriend was Catholic and wouldn’t have an abortion. The Commish knew that the pregnancy would be obvious in a few months regardless. He figured that if the affair was coming out anyway—and it was—his career would soon be toast regardless of what he did.”
Chuck said, “So the commissioner was immune to blackmail because exposure was inevitable.”
“Right. So the Commish does something smart.” Jorge leaned back.
“What did he do?”
“He comes to us to run a sting on Smoot. The captain assigns it to me. I put a wire on the Commish, give him ten thousand in marked bills, and video him giving the cash to Smoot. We sent him to prison for ten to fifteen.” He laughed.
“What happened to the commissioner?”
Jorge waggled his hand back and forth. “So, so. The poor schlub is sort of a hero for helping to catch a crooked former cop, and sort of a jerk for knocking up his girlfriend, y’know? Divorce, child support to the girlfriend, and alimony to the ex-wife. He lost his house and his political career and went back to practicing law. Last I heard, he was scrambling to make his alimony payments.”
“Who was the commissioner?”
“Armando Acevedo.”
Chuck did a quick Internet search on his smart phone. “This is not good, amigo.” He showed the screen to Jorge. “Acevedo died in a hit-and-run accident a month ago.”
Chapter 31
Kelly Contreras looked up from her lunch when Chuck McCrary walked into the squad room. She sat up straighter, set her sandwich aside, and smiled. “Nice to see you, Chuck. Have a seat.” She waved him into a chair.
“What do you know about the hit-and-run on Armando Acevedo?”
Double Fake, Double Murder (A Carlos McCrary, Private Investigator, Mystery Thriller Series Book 2) Page 7