Other Titles by William Wells
Ride Away Home
Face of the Devil
DETECTIVE JACK STARKEY SERIES
Detective Fiction
The Dollar-A-Year Detective
THE PERMANENT PRESS
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Copyright © 2020 by William Wells
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, unless explicitly noted, is entirely coincidental.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wells, William, author.
The now-and-then detective: a Jack Starkey mystery / William Wells.
Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, 2020.
Series: Jack Starkey mysteries; 3
ISBN: 978-1-57962-588-7 (cloth)
eISBN: 978-1-57962-636-5
1. Mystery fiction.
PS3623.E4795 N69 2020
813’.6—dc23
2019053162
Printed in the United States of America
“In a real-life whodunit, half the job is figuring out whodunit. The other half is proving it.”
—DETECTIVE JACK STARKEY
This book is dedicated to all those detectives who preceded Jack Starkey on the printed page, including, but not limited to, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Spenser, Travis McGee, Archy McNally, Lucas Davenport, Virgil Flowers, Harry Bosch, Dave Robicheaux, Jack Reacher, Elvis Cole, Hercule Poirot, Columbo, Charlie Chan, and Miss Marple, who have entertained me over the years.
PROLOGUE
Good Old Henry
AMay morning, the balmy wind off Lake Michigan bearing the sweet perfume of flowering lilacs, as an old man pushed an empty supermarket cart along a sidewalk on Western Avenue in downtown Lake Forest, Illinois, the cart’s wheels bumping and clacking on the cracks and fissures in the concrete.
The man wore a white pin-striped Chicago Cubs home-game jersey with the name “Hartnett” lettered on the back, blue cotton pajama bottoms, brown leather bedroom slippers, and a tweed Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap, the cap’s brim shielding his rheumy brown eyes from the sun. A fringe of white hair was visible beneath the cap; bristles of stubbly hair obtruded from the man’s nostrils and ears; his eyebrows grew wild as Scottish gorse. A curious apparition indeed in Lake Forest, one link in the golden chain of commuter towns stretching along Chicago’s North Shore, where a vagrant tended to stand out.
Some passing motorists may have wondered about this man with momentary curiosity: Did grandpa wander away from a nursing home between head counts? But to the town folk who knew him, he was just good old Henry Wilberforce, recently eccentric in this manner, out and about on one of his quixotic errands.
A black-and-white-striped railroad crossing gate descended across Western Avenue, red lights flashing, bell clanging, announcing the arrival of the southbound 8:07 Metra commuter train at Lake Forest Station. Henry stopped to watch.
“You know, Buddy,” Henry said, “when I was a young man, I rode the 7:10 every weekday morning into the city. Father believed public transportation, and not limousines or fancy cars, was more appropriate for someone my age on his way to work. He was driven to the office in his limo.”
Although no Buddy, or anyone else, could be seen with Henry, Buddy answered, “Yes, I know.”
The train creaked and groaned to a stop, its air brakes whooshing, and its doors slid open for the men and women in business attire waiting on the platform. They stepped up into the line of silver-sided, double-deck Metra cars.
“Look at them, Buddy,” Henry said. “Foot soldiers in Chicago’s vast army of commerce! Ha! Got my honorable discharge from that outfit many years ago.” He smiled. “Used to be hog butchering, tool making, wheat stacking in my day. City of Big Shoulders. I could recite that Carl Sandburg poem as a boy, all of it; Father had me do it at dinner parties to amuse the guests. What they do in the city now is shout at one another in the commodity pits, and move money around with computers while sitting in their high-rise offices. Nobody actually makes anything anymore.”
Buddy answered, “Yes, I know.”
As the train lumbered out of the station, a Lake Forest police cruiser pulled up to the curb and parked. The driver, Sgt. Stan Kowalski, powered down the window and greeted Henry with a smile: “Morning there, Mr. Wilberforce.” Taking note of the shopping cart, he asked, “On your way to the grocery store?”
Henry nodded and said, “Yes, Sergeant Stan. I need a few items.”
He stood erect, put his hands on his hips, tilted back his head, filled his lungs, and said, “It’s a fine day to be alive, that’s for sure.” “Considering the alternative,” Sgt. Stan responded. Their usual repartee.
“Say hi to Sergeant Stan, Buddy,” Henry said.
Sgt. Stan knew the drill; he looked down at the sidewalk beside Henry, nothing there, and said, “Hi there, Buddy. Nice day for a walk.” He knew that Buddy was the name of Henry’s golden retriever who’d died at a ripe old age many years ago. Whatever gets you through the day, the sergeant reflected.
“I heard about all that money you gave the city to fix up the town beach,” he said. “That was real nice of you.”
“It was?” Henry responded. “Well, I don’t seem to remember that.”
Driving up, Sgt. Stan had noticed the name on the back of Henry’s Cubs jersey. “Who’s Hartnett?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s Gabby Hartnett, the starting catcher. Looks to me like a future Hall of Famer.”
“Huh. What happened to Contreras?”
“Now there’s the mystery,” Henry said. “In the game yesterday, this Hartnett fellow was behind the plate without any explanation.”
Sgt. Stan, who worshiped at Saint Leo’s and Wrigley Field, knew for certain that Willson Contreras was the team’s starting catcher. He also knew that the team’s schedule showed an off day yesterday, with no game that Henry could have seen. He eased the cruiser away from the curb, saluted, and called out, “Take er easy, Mr. W!”
“Only way to take er, Sergeant Stan,” Henry replied, clicking his slippered heels together as he returned the sergeant’s salute in the British army manner, palm out and vibrating. Then he said, “Let’s move along, Buddy, we need the exercise.”
Henry arrived at the Jewel Supermarket, a single-story redbrick building three blocks north of the train station on Western. He guided his cart through the automatic entrance doors, one of which had a sign on it reading “Service Dogs Only” and exchanged greetings with the checkout ladies, baggers, and shelf stockers as he headed to aisle three, canned fruits and vegetables. Buddy was not a service dog, but he could go anywhere he pleased, being invisible to everyone but his master, including into this supermarket.
Henry moved along the aisle, Buddy at his side, selecting only certain brands of green beans (whole, sliced, dilled, French and Italian cuts), garbanzo beans, wax beans, lima beans, kidney beans, baked beans, peas of regular and baby diameter, beets (plain, pickled, and Harvard), mushrooms (whole, and pieces and stems), corn (regular and creamed), spinach, artichokes, mixed vegetables, asparagus, sauerkraut, carrots, okra, pearl onions, white potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, cranberry sauce (jell
ied and whole berry), applesauce (regular, chunky, and chunky with cinnamon), apricots, blueberries, cherries, grapefruit sections, and fruit cocktail, all delivered from field to truck to canning factory to truck again to grocery shelf to the dining tables of the nation and the world, a cornucopian production line that Henry knew as well as anything in his life.
From one pass down the aisle, the cart was packed to overflowing and now too heavy for Henry to push. That was the signal for Bob Buehler, the store manager, his starched tan jacket bearing the Jewel logo, reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck, who had been watching, to round up four of his employees. One took over Henry’s cart and headed it toward the checkout lanes while the others lined up behind Henry with empty carts. Bob watched this parade, calling in reinforcements as needed. In this fashion, Henry led them throughout the store, pointing out items, again always specific brands, with which his Jewel squad filled their carts.
It turned out to be a seven-cart day. As Henry stood chatting with Bob about sports—Bob not asking about Hartnett because Bob was a White Sox man and didn’t know from Cubs—and weather and politics, the groceries moved along the conveyor belts of three checkout stations that had been closed to other shoppers, some of whom, not having witnessed this scene before, glared and huffed with annoyance until Bob handed them coupons applicable to various products. There was some swapping of coupons as the shoppers attempted to match the discounts with items actually in their baskets.
The checkout nearly complete, Henry found his Bank of Lake Forest debit card in the rear pocket of his pajama bottoms and handed it to Bob, who swiped it through the three card machines. Then he presented Henry with three receipts to sign totaling $880.42. The baggers did not ask, “Paper or plastic?” Instead, they loaded Henry’s groceries back into the carts.
Leaving the groceries behind, Henry pulled an empty cart from the lineup, and headed for the door.
“Always a pleasure, Mr. Wilberforce!” Bob called out to his best customer. “See you next time!”
Henry acknowledged with a nod and a wave as he pushed the cart outside. He looked over at the base of an elm tree growing in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.
“There’s a good spot to relieve yourself, Buddy boy,” Henry said, and Buddy did.
Inside, Bob Buehler ordered Henry’s groceries to be restocked. He would mail a store check in the amount of $880.42, as Henry had instructed him to do when he began these shopping trips three months ago, to the Our Lady of Grace Food Bank in Waukegan, a blue-collar city nine miles and a world away to the north, their being, so far as anyone knew, no hungry people in Lake Forest.
Back at police headquarters, Sgt. Stan was curious about whether Gabby Hartnett existed only in Henry’s mind, like Buddy, his dog. A computer search led him to the information that Hartnett was behind the plate for the Chicago Cubs from 1922 to 1941, when Henry was a boy. Hartnett was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown in 1955.
The sergeant shook his head and thought: Good old Henry sure is one unique piece of work these days.
1.
The Corpse in Question
It was the third week of October and I was feeling lucky because I’d just dodged another bullet. This time, it was not the hot-lead kind, it was a Category 3 hurricane named Irena. Twelve days earlier, Irena, who was definitely not a lady, delivered only a glancing blow to Fort Myers Beach, the small town on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast where I lived, and then spun northward up the Gulf of Mexico toward the Florida Panhandle.
We lost a lot of trees, power was out for a few days, there was some flooding, and damage to roofs, mobile homes, and structures not built to modern building codes, and tiki huts on the beach blew to Iowa, but no one was reported killed or injured and everyone felt very lucky that we’d been spared the devastation that people living in Panhandle towns like Apalachicola, Fort Walton Beach, and Pensacola had suffered.
Winston Churchill said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Got that right.
I was sitting in a folding aluminum lawn chair on the rear deck of Phoenix, my houseboat, moored at Salty Sam’s Marina on Estero Bay, which had provided safe harbor from the storm, having a morning cup of coffee and reading the sports pages of the Fort Myers News-Press, when my pal Cubby Cullen, the Fort Myers Beach police chief, called me on my cell phone and offered to buy me lunch. Cubby was, shall we say, penurious, so whenever he offered to pick up a check it meant he wanted something in return.
I met Cubby at Captain Mack’s Seafood Shack on the Caloosahatchee River, one of my favorite restaurants, where I always got the fried shrimp roll with onion rings. Everything tasted better when battered and deep fried. Cubby was of the same epicurean opinion.
Clarence “Cubby” Cullen was a short, portly man with a round face, in his mid-fifties, who resembled a teddy bear. Apparently he always had, because he picked up that nickname as a boy. But his appearance was deceptive. Cubby had been an army ranger, and the deputy chief of the Toledo, Ohio, police department before he retired to Florida with his wife, Mable, got bored playing golf and fishing, and applied for the Fort Myers Beach chief’s job when the former chief drowned in a boating accident. I met him when he became a regular at The Drunken Parrot, the bar I own, and we sometimes fished and went to the police shooting range together.
As we waited for our food, Cubby and I chatted about the hurricane damage, sports, and politics, and then, knowing that he had something else on his mind, I finally asked, “So, Cubby, what’s up?”
“Ten days ago, a man from Lake Forest, Illinois, near Chicago, was murdered in his winter home in Naples,” Cubby told me. “The police chief, a man named Tom Sullivan, called me yesterday. He knows that you worked with the Naples Police Department, before he started there, on another homicide case.”
I knew what was coming.
“Tom asked if you would talk to him about this murder,” Cubby said.
To which I replied, “That last case involved a serial killer, Cubby. But one murder? … They’ve got detectives. Why do they need me?”
Cubby took a bite of his fried shrimp roll, cocktail sauce dripping onto his white uniform shirt, and said, “This one’s got some very sensitive aspects, Jack. The corpse in question is a guy named Henry Wilberforce. Murdered in his sleep. Naples PD has positioned the killing publicly as a burglary gone bad, and maybe it was, but Sullivan thinks that Henry might have been targeted. And Tom Sullivan knows his stuff.”
“And who was this Henry … ?”
“Wilberforce. He was a billionaire known for his generous philanthropy,” Cubby explained. “The newspaper stories about his death didn’t appear on the sports pages, and you don’t watch TV news, so I’m not surprised you haven’t heard about it.”
“I’ve never gotten into trouble reading the sports pages,” I said.
“Granted, but sometimes trouble just comes a-knockin’ on Jack Starkey’s door,” Cubby said, speaking the God’s honest truth.
“I don’t know if I want to take on another case,” I said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
I noticed that Cubby was looking at my plate.
“Are you going to finish your onion rings?” he asked.
I was going to, but I pushed my plate toward him and said, “Feel free, Cubby my man. You’re paying for ’em.”
I retired from the Chicago Police Department’s Homicide Division after being shot three times, once while a United States Marine and twice while on the City of Chicago’s payroll. It took me a while, but eventually I got the point: Detective Jack Starkey had enough holes in his hide and would do well to become Private Citizen Jack Starkey while he was still ambulatory and reasonably lucid.
I noticed that Cubby was smiling, as if enjoying some private joke. And he was, because, by the time Captain Mack’s world-class key lime pie arrived, I had pretty much decided it was time for another jolt of the excitement that came from the hunt for a kill
er.
Cubby just kept on smiling that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, because he knew I’d agree to talk to Sullivan, and where that talk would lead. So did I. Have you read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?
“Okay, Cubby, I’ll at least talk to Tom Sullivan about his case,” I said. “As a favor to you.”
Cubby was looking at my pie plate. A few bites left. I slid the plate over to him and said, “Next time we go dutch.”
So that’s how my next adventure in the world of murder and mayhem began. If a detective agrees to just look at a case, he’s hooked. It’s like going to an animal shelter, just to look at the inmates. You don’t go home alone.
The waitress came over and put the check onto the table between us. Cubby picked it up, winked at me, and said, “Tell Tom Sullivan he owes me lunch.”
Naples was one of those sparkling, twenty-carat enclaves of wealth and privilege, like Palm Beach, but lower key, where 1-percenters bought multimillion-dollar estates to shelter them from the winter storms of the north. See something you like? If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. You could fire a cannon down Fifth Avenue South, the main drag, and not hit a Democrat. We’re not in Wrigleyville anymore, Toto, is a thought I had during my first visit. So the fact that the late Henry Wilberforce was a billionaire who was generous with his money didn’t, on its face, make him much different from a great many of the city’s other inhabitants.
The best definition of wealth I’d ever heard was that, if you had enough money to support the lifestyle you chose, you had it made in the shade. You were a resident of Fat City. Rolling in clover. A winner in the game of life. The trick was to choose a lifestyle your skill set could support. For example, a retired Chicago homicide detective like myself should not try to live like Johnny Depp. Nor, as it turned out, should Johnny Depp.
As a full-time detective, my skill set involved solving murders, so I didn’t expect to live in a mansion with a water view, or drive a Bentley, or fly private. Overreaching bred unhappiness. While on the job in ChiTown, I found contentment by carrying a badge and a gun. I played the hand I was dealt, day to day, as well as I could, and, for me, that was enough. Win some, lose some, suck it up and soldier on, and, as the great philosopher Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”
The Now-And-Then Detective Page 1