I go to the Tarpon Springs police station, and sure enough, I’m brought right in to see Lieutenant Hunnicutt. His looks defines the phrase “grizzled veteran”; he’s in great physical shape but has got to be nearing retirement age. He has clearly spent a lot of his life in the Florida sun; his face has the texture of the first baseman’s mitt I used in high school.
But he greets me with a relaxed smile, and I thank him for taking the time. He shrugs it off, saying, “Any friend of Terry Burgess…”
It takes me a few seconds to realize that Burgess is the Miami cop who put Laurie in touch with Hunnicutt. He must think I know Burgess personally, so I just say, “That Terry is quite a guy.”
“She’s a woman,” he says.
I nod. “But as tough a cop as any guy I know.”
He frowns slightly, but doesn’t seem to view gender misidentification as a reason to end the conversation. “So what do you want to know?”
“I’m not completely sure; it’s one of those cases where I won’t know until I know. But it centers on two main areas. One, a guy by the name of James Haley came down here and shot some footage for a documentary. I need someone who can give me a road map as to where he went, what he shot, and who he spoke to.”
“And Haley is not available to help you with that?”
“He was murdered not long after being here.”
He nods. “What’s the other area you are interested in?”
“Frank Silvio.”
He almost does a double take; he is obviously very familiar with Frank Silvio. “He’s dead.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“I didn’t see the body, if that’s what you mean. And it obviously didn’t happen here, so I wasn’t involved, but he was identified through DNA.”
“Let’s start at the beginning, if that’s okay,” I say. I ask him to describe the area in general terms and Wilton Key, the town where Silvio was killed, more specifically.
“Tarpon Springs, where we’re sitting right now, has long been the center of the sponge-diving industry. Greek people settled here and started it in the early nineteen hundreds, and we still have the largest Greek population in the country. Don’t leave here without trying the baklava. The sponge industry is still strong, and it’s at least partially responsible for a good tourist turnout as well.
“Other smaller towns have sprung up along the coast near here as well; they’re just small municipalities that are basically miniature versions of Tarpon Springs, minus the Greeks. They survive on sponge diving and tourism.”
“And Wilton Key is one of them?”
“It is. One of five.”
“The filmmaker I mentioned, James Haley, did some shooting in Miranda City.”
He nods. “It’s the next town over from Wilton. They share some facilities and services; police, fire … that kind of stuff. Each town on its own is too small to handle it. Sorry, but I’m not familiar with Haley. Unless he got in some trouble here, I wouldn’t be.”
“And what can you tell me about Silvio?”
“A seriously bad guy. Originally out of Miami, the crime family he was a part of expanded into Tampa. He was the main enforcer, and I mean that in the worst sense of the word.”
“He was head of the family?”
“No, that honor fell to Anthony Mazzante. Silvio was easily his most valued employee; he was said to have been like a son to Mazzante. But then Mazzante got himself throat cancer and pretty soon went to that great crime family in the sky. And even though Silvio was like a son to him, Mazzante had a real son who took over the family. It was convenient; Mazzante’s son is also named Anthony, so they didn’t have to change the towels.”
“And the younger Anthony wasn’t quite as crazy about Silvio?”
“Apparently not; I guess it was a sibling rivalry of sorts,” he says. “But that was just the rumor; I have no firsthand knowledge of it. And now it doesn’t really matter.”
“So the younger Mazzante had Silvio removed from the picture?”
“Hard to say. But Silvio owned a boat, a thirty-five-footer. He took it out a lot; he was an experienced seaman. Apparently it relaxed him between killings. So on this particular late afternoon, he is said to have gone out on it alone, despite the fact that there was a storm predicted. It didn’t work out so well.”
“But the body was never recovered?”
“No, but there was DNA evidence. You might want to talk to the local cops there; I don’t have all the details.”
“Can you set it up for me?”
He smiles. “Sure, any friend of Terry Burgess…”
I return the smile. “Quite a woman, that Terry.”
Before I go back to the hotel, I take a drive to Miranda City, the town where James Haley shot the trailer about sponge diving that I saw online. It’s a very small town with everything centered on the pier. Across the street are a few restaurants and bars, plus some buildings where tourists can sign up for sponge-diving expeditions.
I go into one of the bars; it’s fairly crowded, which surprises me, because the street outside is mostly empty. None of the patrons have the look of tourists; this is a local place. It also has an intimidating feel, although that could just be me. People look over at me when I walk in, but it’s not like anybody brandishes a knife or makes throat-cutting gestures.
A large group of people are near the television set, watching the Tampa Bay Ray’s game. That would be reason itself not to move here. The other reason would be the Buccaneers; this is not exactly a sports mecca.
The bartender sees me and comes over. “What can I get you?”
I almost say “information,” but that sounds too much like a bad old movie. Instead I ask for a light beer, which draws a bit of a frown along with a nod. I don’t think this is a “light beer” kind of place.
When he brings the beer, I say, “Have you ever seen this guy?” and show him a photo of James Haley. I try to speak and show the photo so the other people at the bar can’t see or hear what’s going on, but that is pretty much impossible. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, no one is interested.
“Who wants to know?” the bartender asks. Based on that line, I think he’s seen the same bad old movie.
“I do. My name is Andy Carpenter; I’m a private detective.” It’s not that big a lie. I actually am private, in that I value my privacy. I admit the “detective” part is a stretch, but it’s not like I’m under oath.
“I don’t know him,” he says. I have a feeling he would have said that had I shown him a picture of his own brother.
There’s a woman sitting about three feet away from me at the bar, and I sense that she is interested and trying to see the photograph as I show it to the bartender.
I hold it up for her. “Have you ever seen him?”
She just shakes her head and turns away without saying a word. It is the same reaction I have gotten many times from women in bars over the years.
I turn back to the bartender. “What about Frank Silvio? What do you know about him?”
“Drink your beer,” he says, and walks away. The woman next to me also walks away, leaving the bar entirely. I’m making a lot of friends here.
So I drink my beer, watch an inning of the Rays game, and head back to the Hampton Inn. Just another night of life in the Andy Carpenter fast lane.
I have no idea where Marcus is.
He’s seen only when he wants to be seen. I know the right thing to do would be to call him and ask where he is and if he wants to have dinner, but I can’t seem to get myself to do it.
I want to go to my room, order room service, and get some sleep. I’m tired, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to have a client and an upcoming trial, and I don’t want to have to be protected from gang guys and who knows what else.
Other than that, I’m feeling upbeat and in a good mood.
Hunnicutt has gotten me a morning meeting with Sergeant Mike Morrison, head of the four-person police department that covers the groups of sm
all towns of which Wilton Key and Miranda City are part. I’m not sure what I’ll learn, if anything, but at least I got to spend some quality time with Marcus.
I call home to make sure that Ricky got home from camp okay. Laurie and the other parents were meeting the bus in Englewood. I’m feeling very guilty and a bit resentful that I wasn’t there to greet him.
But just hearing Laurie’s voice makes me feel better. She sounds really happy; I know she was missing Ricky at least as much as I was. He’s playing in his room with his best friend, Will Rubenstein; they’re having a sleepover, which means they spend the night doing anything but sleeping. When Laurie tells him I’m on the phone, he comes running.
“Hey, Dad! Where are you?”
“I’m in Florida.”
“When you coming home?”
“Very soon, Rick. I can’t wait to see you.”
I ask him a bunch of questions about the last week of camp, color war, the bus ride home … whatever I ask him about, he pronounces as “great.” He doesn’t even seem bitter about the foul-shooting contest; I guess it will be up to a therapist to bring that out in future sessions.
Laurie gets back on the phone and our talk goes to the kind of chitchat reserved for loving couples: we discuss the various murders we are dealing with.
She’s more hopeful than I am that we’ll come up with something. “It’s there to be found, Andy. Adams wasn’t hiding that stuff in the Cloud because he was in the Frank Silvio fan club.”
“Maybe. But you realize how many other possibilities there could be? James Haley was not George Adams’s first rodeo; he spent a career doing bad stuff. Silvio could have been involved in any one of those other things; we have no evidence that he had anything to do with our case.
“In fact, if he really is dead, a death which apparently has been confirmed by DNA evidence, then he could not have been involved with our case. For all we know, Adams could have been the one to kill Silvio; maybe that’s why he was carrying Silvio’s picture around. Maybe he wanted to make sure he killed the right guy.”
I continue my soliloquy. “And to make matters worse, I ordered a club sandwich without mayonnaise from room service, and they brought it dripping with mayonnaise. It is impossible to get a club sandwich without mayonnaise in this country. It was a hell of a lot different in the old days; they respected condiment preference back then. And Broadway was Broadway.”
“You finished venting?” she asks.
“No, I ordered the french fries crisp and … yeah, I’m finished.”
“Then what does your gut tell you?”
“That it hates mayonnaise.”
“Andy…”
“Okay. My gut tells me that there is something down here to be found. At its core our case is about the victim, James Haley, and the guy we believe murdered him, George Adams. Haley was down here shooting footage, then went north and was murdered. Adams was tied in to Silvio, who went missing down here.
“This is not that large an area; the fact that all aspects of our case connect to it has got to mean something.”
Laurie agrees with me, but then also adds a logical question: “But let’s say we’re right about this. Where does Chico Simmons fit in? And why was James Haley at Christopher Tolbert’s funeral?”
“Maybe the two things are completely unrelated,” I say.
“How so?”
“Well, we’re thinking it’s all connected, all part of the same puzzle. Maybe the situation in Paterson is a separate issue. Maybe Chico was just annoyed that Haley was filming on his turf—trespassing, as it were. And maybe Haley just went to Tolbert’s funeral because he was a homeless guy on the street who got killed. What better example of urban blight could there be than that?”
“That’s possible,” she allows.
“Maybe Haley was just a really annoying, nosy guy. So he pissed people off down here, and then he went north and pissed off Chico Simmons. But there’s a decent chance the two things have nothing to do with each other.”
“And what about the other murders that Sam uncovered around the country?”
I try to come up with a logical answer that includes every aspect of the case. If the widespread killings that Sam discovered are in fact unrelated, then it has nothing to do with our case. But if the opposite is true, if they are connected and part of a pattern, then it is beyond my current understanding.
Their connection would mean that it is part of organized crime, in the literal rather than the popular meaning. A large number of powerful people, not to mention dangerous ones, would have gotten together, would have organized, to engineer these deaths.
But why? These were homeless men; what value could they have had to their killers? They couldn’t all have been eccentrics with huge bags of cash tucked away in their nonexistent mattresses. And if it wasn’t something that they had to take away, could it have been a threat they represented? Could they have had knowledge that made them dangerous?
I don’t know any of these answers, so my response to Laurie is, “Beats the shit out of me.”
I hang up the phone and turn on the television. I doze off and am awakened by a knock on my door. I don’t like knocks on the door when I’m in a strange place; I actually find myself hoping it’s Marcus.
I go to the door. “Who is it?”
“Please open the door.” It’s a woman’s voice, speaking softly. I look through the peephole and discover that the reason it’s a woman’s voice is because it’s a woman doing the speaking. And unless I’m mistaken, it’s the woman who was standing next to me at the bar, the one who denied having seen James Haley.
She looks scared.
Join the club.
For all I know, there could be someone with her, but I’m counting on the invisible Marcus to make sure that’s not the case. I open the door and she doesn’t wait for an invitation; she just walks by me and into the room.
“You are going to want to hear what I have to tell you,” she says. “I think they killed my Vincent.”
“Who is your Vincent, and who do you think killed him?”
She tells me that her name is Lorna Diaz and that Vincent Grobin is, or was, her boyfriend, and she believes that the divers killed him. According to her, Vincent is, or was, one of those divers.
I’m not sure why she’s here and talking to me, but I have a feeling that the bar I was asking questions in was not exactly under the cone of silence.
“Which divers are you talking about?” I asked.
“The boat he worked on; it’s called the Ginny May. There are other divers on the boat; he was afraid of them.”
“Why did he continue to work there?”
“He was going to make a lot of money. He was afraid, but he couldn’t turn down the money.”
This is not getting any clearer to me; nor do I understand why she came here to tell me about it. “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” I suggest, since my questions are not really getting the job done.
So Lorna starts talking and I keep listening, and it gets more interesting as she continues. Her boyfriend, Vincent, has been promising her for months that they were going to be married and get rich, not necessarily in that order.
He wouldn’t tell her how it was going to happen, and she sensed he was fearful about parts of it, but the lure of the money was too great. He even told her when he would get the money: October 5. That was her birthday, she said, and they were going to leave Florida. They were going to leave for California, where apparently they would get married and live happily ever after.
Grobin, according to Lorna, wasn’t friends with his coworkers and said they could be dangerous; he scrupulously kept Lorna away from them.
She says that she warned him to be careful and said that money wasn’t what was important to her, but he disregarded the warnings. Then one day he went to work and never came back. She went down to the docks and spoke to the others on the boat, but they disclaimed any knowledge of a problem, saying that Vincent had just not shown
up for work that day, without calling in.
Lorna is positive that they are lying, that Vincent loves her and would never just disappear without contacting her.
“Did you go to the police?” I ask.
She nods. “They are doing nothing. Divers come and go all the time, they say. Vincent is not from around here, so they said he probably went home. They said they would file a report, but I don’t believe them.”
“So you don’t trust the local police?”
She laughs at the question. “No. No one here does.”
I ask what kind of boat Vincent worked on and she says it is a tourist boat. They dive for natural sponges, and retrieve some, but basically they make their money by taking tourists out and letting them observe the diving.
“Were there tourists on the boat the day Vincent disappeared?”
She shakes her head. “They say the boat was being repaired that day and didn’t go out. They are lying.”
“The photograph I showed you in the bar—have you ever seen that man? Do you know if Vincent ever met him?”
She nods. “Yes; that’s why I knew I should come talk to you. He is the man from the movies.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “And Vincent spoke to him?”
“Yes, at our house. They spoke alone; I don’t know what they talked about.” Then, “You’re a detective; can you help me find out what happened to Vincent?”
I don’t see how I’d be able to help her even if I were a private detective. I don’t know whether anyone can help her because I don’t know if what she is saying is at all accurate.
I do think that she’s telling the truth as she sees it; that’s not the issue. Clearly she believes what she is saying, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. Vincent Grobin could have just left town, or somehow cut off all contact with her.
I am suspicious, of course. Just my being down here is evidence of that. I’m especially intrigued by the talk of large amounts of money; it reminds me of Marcus saying that the word was that Chico Simmons suddenly had large amounts of money to spread around. Also, James Haley had told his editor, Cal Kimes, that he was going to get enough money to make the kind of movies that they wanted to.
Bark of Night Page 14