Luca Mystery Series Box Set

by Dan Petrosini

  “Come on, Doc, we’re talking about Gabelli. How much would be needed to cause him to have a heart attack?”

  “I’m not an expert on this medication.”

  “Gabelli had alcohol in his system. Would that contribute?”

  “It couldn’t help, but again I’m not very familiar with the interactions.”

  “Thanks, Doc, really I appreciate it. I gotta run.”

  I punched a number in my cell.

  “Vargas, we got the break we’ve been waiting for. Bosco, bless his scalpel-wielding tail, ran an extra test, and bingo, some drug used for asthma came up.”

  “Gabelli had asthma?”

  “No, but his buddy Stewart does.”

  “You think he—”

  “It looks like it right now, but we’ve been chasing whispers and ghosts for so long that I got to try to keep it in check. Look, call our pharma guy and get as much on terbutaline as you can.”

  “How you spelling that?”

  “T-e-r-b-u-t-a-l-i-n-e. I’m on the way in.”

  ***

  I ripped off my jacket and tossed it on a chair.

  “What do you have, partner?”

  Vargas held up a sheet of notes. “Terbutaline opens up the airways to make it easier to breathe. It’s generally only prescribed when inhalers don’t work. He said it has a lot of side effects and definitely can impact the heart. It makes the heart race, and he said it was believed to weaken hearts, especially in pregnant women.”

  “What forms does it come in?”

  “Injectable and pill form.”

  “How much would it take to cause an overdose and prompt a heart attack?”

  “He didn’t want to speculate, but said it’s a very dangerous drug and should only be prescribed if there’s no relief from inhalers. Get this, he said that a mere five-milligram dose elevates the heart rate by thirty percent.”

  “Wow, and that’s a tiny pill. You should’ve pressed him.”

  “I did, Frank. He was noncommittal, so I asked him if someone were given five or ten times the dose, what would happen. He said that the injectable form works super-fast and would push the heart to its limits.”

  “Stewart could’ve stabbed Gabelli with a needle.”

  “Maybe, but he also said mixing it with alcohol would exaggerate the effect, called,” Vargas looked at her notes, “peripartum cardiomyopathy. Which could lead to a sudden cardiac arrest, a massive heart attack.”

  I felt a pinch in my side as I said, “I wonder what Gabelli drank?”

  “You okay, Frank?”

  “Yeah, why?

  “You winced like you just had pain.”

  “I got a little pinch in my side.”

  “This the first time?”

  I couldn’t lie. “Got it two or three times. It’s no big deal. What else did he say?”

  “Did you tell the doctor, Frank?”

  “They said it could just be some scar tissue.”

  As Vargas stared at me, my side felt like it got skewered. “Ouch.” I doubled over.

  “That’s it, Frank. I’m calling an ambulance. You’re going to the hospital.”

  The pain was searing, but I said, “No. I’ll drive there.”

  “You’re in no condition to be driving, mister.”

  I grabbed my side. “I hope there’s nothing wrong. It doesn’t feel good, Mary Ann.”

  “What’s the doctor’s name who operated on you?”

  Vargas called for an ambulance and let my surgeon know. On the ride to the emergency room I couldn’t shake the belief my cancer had come back. The pain felt bad, really bad. Seeing the trapdoor opening to take me off life’s stage scared me out of my mind. I reached for Vargas’s hand, pleased she was in the ambulance.

  Chapter 50

  Stewart

  “All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.” - Napoleon Hill

  The sun warmed my face as I bounded down the stairs. I felt really good this morning and was sleeping a lot better since breaking away from Robin. The decision wasn’t easy, but it should have been. The only thing we can’t make is time, and I knew you shouldn’t waste it. No more making mistakes with that.

  The Mustang wasn’t a Porsche, but it wouldn’t look good to be driving a 911 with a gal whose father owned a couple of Ford dealerships. It certainly wasn’t the money; they had plenty. Not as much as Robin after she got the insurance money, but Melissa had no brothers or sisters, so it was a pretty good fit for me.

  I didn’t know anything about the car business, but that didn’t stop Melissa, who was the general manager for all the showrooms, from hiring me as the assistant manager for the Bonita store. The best part was telling Greely I was sick of his bullshit and then quitting. I couldn’t resist taking a few shots at him as I left. It felt good to finally execute that plan.

  The first couple of weeks at the Ford place I didn’t do much, just getting acquainted with everyone, but it was a busy dealership and I didn’t like the hours. They were open from nine to nine, six days a week, and Sundays from eleven to five. That sucked a lot of hours out of whatever allotment anyone got in life. I’d put the hours in now, but in a couple of months I’d lean on Melissa to work on the old man. He wouldn’t want to deprive his daughter of a home life, would he?

  I had to keep reminding myself to stop comparing Melissa to Robin. The thing with Melissa was I had to play the long game. She didn’t have the cash flow that Robin did; I found out she was only making a hundred and ten a year. That didn’t go very far, and they were only paying me eighty-five. Her dad was a fit, sixty-six-year-old, so the payoff here was a long way off.

  The other thing that bothered me was that even though Melissa had grown up with money, she didn’t have Robin’s sense of style. In virtually every category, Robin outclassed her. Melissa didn’t dress particularly well. I hated the frumpy pantsuits she wore to the dealership. And it bugged me when she’d tell me to wear shorts when we went out to eat.

  Oh, there was one more thing: her house. Melissa lived in an old, low-rise building in Park Shore that was painted an embarrassing canary yellow. She said the place was comfortable, convenient, and debt free. You can add, furnished like an eighty-year-old lived there.

  I’d have to reevaluate the time line for this relationship. Maybe it’d take me a bit longer than I thought, but if I played my cards right and stuck to the plan, I’d find a way to flourish. First, though, I’d wait another three months and then tell her we should move in together. That way I could get out of my place and cut my expenses. I had diddly-squat as far as equity was concerned, but I’d come out with thirty grand or so to pay off my credit card debt.

  Then I’d work on her to upgrade our living quarters. She liked the location? Okay, we could move into one of those new high-rises. It’d be sweet, looking at the gulf shimmer with a cocktail in hand.

  Chapter 51

  Luca

  I could see Vargas whispering on a phone as they rolled me back in from a test. I gave her a thumbs-up and a huge smile.

  “It’s just a kidney stone.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “You’re telling me. I thought I was done.”

  “They going to break it up with ultrasound?”

  “Yep. Hopefully, with one treatment it will break up. Either way, I’m gonna get released after they zap it.”

  “Oh, Frank, I was so scared for you.”

  “Thanks, Mary Ann, I know what you mean. You know, I really thought the cancer had come back and it was game over.”

  “We didn’t need the drama, did we?”

  “I’ll say. But thanks for coming with me. It was good you did.”

  “No thanks necessary. I’m just glad it was nothing serious.”

  “Not serious, but man, kidney stones are painful as hell.”

  “I know, my mom had them twice.”

  I adjusted my gown
to cover my legs. “It’s freezing in here.”

  Vargas ripped open another hospital gown and put it on top of the sheet.

  “Thanks. So, where were we on the Gabelli med thing?”

  “Just rest today. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  “I’m fine, the painkiller worked. We can’t waste any more time. We’ve been working this case for far too long. It’s either Stewart stabbed him with a needle, or he crushed up a bunch of pills and dissolved them in whatever Gabelli was drinking.”

  “It had to be crushed pills.”

  “Why?”

  “First, he’d only get one shot at it. If he hit him with a needle, he’d have to be sure the entire dose got in. There’d probably be a struggle as Gabelli tried to figure out what was happening.”

  “Unless one vial would be enough. You said the pharmacologist said it would work fast.”

  “Stewart would have to know what a deadly dose was, and even our guy wouldn’t commit to it.”

  “You’re right, but he’s got asthma. Maybe he found out from his doctor.”

  “Hm. Maybe.”

  “But I agree, it’s probably easier and safer to pre-crush a bunch of pills and put ’em in his drink. But do these pills have a taste to them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Check it out and let me know. But either way, we got to drag Stewart in and get a search warrant for his place.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Now get out of here and get to work.”

  “You sure you’re going to be all right?”

  “It’s only a kidney stone. I’ll be out of here in a couple of hours.”

  Vargas left and I lay there thinking, make that obsessing, over the Gabelli case. So many pieces of promising information had led nowhere. A lot of that data had pointed at Stewart, but now this asthma drug was the string that could tie them all up.

  I had to find out who his doctor was. It was always a delicate thing dealing with the medical profession. Those guys hid behind privacy better than the tech companies. In this case we needed to identify the doctor, then all we wanted from the doctor was to know if and when he prescribed terbutaline. We get that, and Stewart’s finished.

  We shouldn’t have too much of an issue getting a search warrant. We’d probably see something at his house that let us know his doctor’s name. Who knows, we may even find some of his weapon of choice during the search.

  Things always evened out, and we certainly deserved a break in this case. I had to call Vargas and make sure she included the drug in our warrant and told the DA about the threats Stewart made if he balked at issuing the warrant.

  Robin. I felt a bit bad at the way I pushed her off when she told me about the threats that Stewart leveled at one of her lovers. But you know what, she wasn’t the straightest with me. Like all type As, she thought she could manage me. That was her first mistake, but in the end, it looked like her only one, unless we could find evidence she was conspiring with Stewart.

  I needed to settle on a strategy for interviewing Stewart. He was going to be cagey; we couldn’t expect him to crack easily. But I’d find a way to make a tiny fracture and ram my crowbar in. I couldn’t wait. It was going to be enjoyable watching Stewart squirm.

  ***

  Vargas was at her desk when I got to work in the morning.

  “How you feeling, Frank?”

  “Almost as good as new. They were able to shatter it in one session. I’ll have some pain as it passes through, but you know how tough I am.”

  “Yeah, you’re a real superman.”

  “Any news on the warrant?”

  “Esposito said we’d probably have it this afternoon.”

  “Good, good. Now how we going to play Stewart?”

  “Hold on a sec, I thought you’d like to know that Gabelli wasn’t a thief, after all.”

  “I didn’t think so. Who stole the money?”

  “It was the CFO at Simmons who orchestrated the fraud and made it look like Gabelli.”

  “No shortage of people looking to pin crimes on the dead.”

  “And how. Now, back to Stewart.”

  “We need to figure out how we’re going do this. You think we drag Stewart in before the search or after?”

  Vargas said, “If we pull him in before, Stewart’s going to clean up anything that might raise questions. On the other hand, if we showed up with the warrant before talking to him, he’d really be on guard during an interview afterward.”

  “I know. But I have enough confidence we’ll crack him, even if he’s on guard. I think ten minutes in, he’ll put his Teflon up.”

  “We could arrest him first, then talk to him. That might shake him up.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t like it. We might get something we can use early on. We see him, try misdirecting him, maybe he’ll spill something. We arrest him, his lawyer’s there, and I don’t think we have enough to get the DA to sign off on an arrest at this point.”

  Vargas frowned. “I know everything is circumstantial.”

  “Unless we find something at his place. Okay, what’s our theory about how he killed Gabelli?”

  “The two of them got together at Stewart’s home. They’re watching sports and drinking. Stewart had crushed a dozen or so pills and dumped them into Gabelli’s drink.”

  I said, “You think he put them all in at once?”

  “I’d say he puts about ten percent in the first drink. This way it gets into Gabelli’s bloodstream, and then he loads the rest in the second one.”

  “Two drinks would get him to just under the legal limit, right where the autopsy said his blood alcohol level was.”

  “After the second drink, Gabelli suffers a massive heart attack and dies.”

  “Wouldn’t he be panicking beforehand as his heart started to race?”

  “Sure. Stewart probably talked him down, maybe pretends to call an ambulance.”

  I said, “Okay, now the body is on the couch or the floor. What does Stewart do next?”

  “We know where Gabelli was found. Why don’t we work it backward?”

  “Good idea, but before we move on, are we even sure he got the heart attack at Stewart’s?”

  Vargas said, “Stewart needed a place where they could have a couple of drinks. That could be anywhere, but more than that, he needed a private place where he could either dump the meds in his drink, at least one time, or plunge a needle into Gabelli. Plus, he wouldn’t know what the reaction would be. He couldn’t count on being able to get Gabelli out of there.”

  “You’re right, most likely this happened in Stewart’s place.”

  “So how does he get the body to Clam Pass?”

  “Any thought to whether he sat on the body before dumping him?”

  “I doubt it. Unless it didn’t happen at his house. Very few people have the stones to sleep in the same house with a person they killed.”

  “Stones? More like you gotta be out of your mind.”

  “Assuming he wanted to get rid of the body as fast as possible, he had to use his car to at least get him close to the water. He may have used a boat afterward, though we have no evidence of that.”

  “Stewart would’ve had to move Gabelli down the stairs and into his car.”

  “He probably wrapped the body in his garage.”

  Vargas nodded. “Then he waited until sometime in the middle of the night to drive it to Clam Pass.”

  “I want to take another run at the neighbor who said he borrowed Stewart’s car.”

  “Sure. You know, Stewart could have went in another way. We’ve got miles and miles of waterways. He could’ve put him on a boat somewhere, even on one of those streets in Seagate. They all have water access.”

  “I’m hoping we don’t have to prove that part. Stewart had an affair with the deceased’s wife. She says he wanted it to continue. We know he threatened other guys who were with Robin. If we can tie him to the drug that killed a healthy Gabelli, we’ve got a lot to wo
rk with. And that’s before a search. Who knows what else we’ll get?”

  Chapter 52

  Luca

  Vargas, four uniforms, and I slithered into Calusa Bay and parked our cars in front of Stewart’s home. The street was wet from a rain shower, and steam was rising from the asphalt. Before we were halfway up the stairs, two sets of neighbors opened their doors to see what was going on. On the verge of telling them to get a life, I pushed the bell instead.

  Stewart opened the door, and I thrust the warrant at him.

  “Mr. Stewart, this is a search warrant authorized by Judge Randolph. It allows us to search your property and seize anything we believe is related to our case.”

  “What case?”

  “The murder of Philip Gabelli.”

  Stewart started to breathe rapidly. “What do I have to do with that?”

  “Step aside, Mr. Stewart, we are going to conduct our search.”

  Stewart thrust his hand into his pocket and I drew my weapon. Vargas grabbed his arm and said, “Take your hand out slowly.”

  Stewart followed her instructions while gasping for breath. “It’s only my inhaler. I need my inhaler.”

  Vargas dug into his pocket and came out with a blue inhaler. She read the label, shook her head, and gave it to Stewart.

  I said, “Mr. Stewart, you stay in the foyer with Officer Putnak.”

  Stewart wheezed. “You’re detaining me?”

  “During the course of executing a search warrant the court allows us to control the inhabitants of the property in question.”

  He pulled his inhaler out of his mouth. “Control?”

  Even though he was sucking away on his inhaler, he was fighting back.

  Vargas said, “Mr. Stewart, the law is clear. If you resist we will have to put you under arrest. Is that clear?”

  Stewart stepped aside and we spilled into his house. Pulling on gloves, I told an officer to make sure Stewart stayed out of the way and in the foyer.

  Vargas whispered, “The inhaler’s a natural product called Dr. Kings. It’s over the counter.”

  “Okay, I’ll take the master. You check the kitchen and living room and have the officers search the garage.”

  Stewart’s bedroom was colorless. It wasn’t one of those modern white themes; it was a dull, old-looking white. The place was crying for color. I drew the silhouette shades and went straight to the nightstand. My methodology was to open the bottom drawer first and work my way up, leaving each drawer open so I’d know it’d been searched.