5 A Sporting Murder (6 page)

When I told Jill what I had learned about Izzy Isabell, she
got up from her desk, stared at me, folded her arms, and asked, “Could that
have been him lurking around on our street last night?”

“I hardly think so. I wouldn’t expect
Izzy to be driving an expensive SUV.”

She leaned against the desk. “If I
remember correctly, you were never able to find what he’d done with his money.”

“He did a good job of hiding it,
all right. What took us so long to find him was he didn’t live beyond the
lifestyle of a young lieutenant. If it’s been waiting for him all these years,
he should have plenty of cash to spend. But he was driving a Ford pickup when I
saw him. I’d say that’s more his speed.”

“Well, I don’t like the idea of his
being in Nashville.”

Neither did I, and I knew what I
needed to do as soon as we got back from our visit with Gordon Franklin.

The accounting firm of Franklin, Gretchen and Silverman
occupied a lavish suite in a suburban office building. Lavish in terms of size,
not in demeanor. The dark-paneled walls, mahogany desks and subdued lighting
rivaled the staid look of an old bank lobby. I’d always heard that number
crunchers were a conservative lot.

A prim, white-haired secretary
ushered Jill and me into a large room with all the pizzaz of the offices I had
occupied in the Air Force. A signed photo of the Republican president and a few
patriotic pictures adorned the walls, such as the Statue of Liberty and the
flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. Unlike my typical clutter, the dark wood desk held
neat stacks of spreadsheets. A paperweight atop one consisted of a small wood
block emblazoned with a round symbol that appeared to be a globe bearing “MARS”
in large letters. The first thing to come to mind was NASA’s program to
continue exploration of the red planet. I’d recently read about plans to launch
a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter next year. I wondered what connection Franklin might have to NASA.

He stood behind his desk, a short,
stocky man dressed in a gray business suit with a red, white, and blue-striped
tie. A neatly folded kerchief protruded from the breast pocket. I had seen my
share of dull expressions, but this one was a classic. As Brad Smotherman had
suggested, I suspected he found little of interest beyond those neat rows of figures
on a sheet of paper. Except for ice hockey, of course. He walked with a slight
limp as he came around to shake hands.

“Nice to meet you,” Franklin said, though it seemed only a formality. “I understand you’ve already talked to
Brad Smotherman.”

“We have,” I said. “He filled us in
on the background, but we thought it best to see if you might be able to add
anything.”

“Have a seat.” He indicated
straight-backed wooden chairs in front of his desk. “I’m not sure I have anything
to add, though.”

After being seated, I looked across
at him. “I was hoping you might know something about Arnold Wechsel.”

His eyes widened. “Wechsel? Wasn’t
that the young man you found at that garage? I’d never heard of him until Brad
told me about it yesterday. I read the story in the newspaper. I thought you probably
knew him.”

“I did know him, but I wasn’t aware
that he had any connection to this NBA deal, other than what he said when he
asked me to meet him.”

“Didn’t he say why he wanted to
talk to you?”

“No specifics. I suspect it
involved those rumors Bradley Smotherman mentioned. Have you heard anything
along that line? A hint of something shifty that might be going on?”

“Sorry.” He shook his head. “I don’t
travel in the same circles as Brad and Mack. I wasn’t privy to any of that
stuff.”

“Are you familiar with the three
men who are spearheading the effort, Louie Aregis, Howard Hays, and Fred
Ricketts?”

“I don’t know any of them
personally. I’m familiar with their reputations, except for this Aregis fellow.
He’s new around town.”

“What sort of things is Protect Our
Preds cooking up to counter the threat from the basketball competition?”

He gave a brief shake of his head. “I
left all that up to Brad and Mack. I agreed to help out with the financing, but
with tax season coming up, I’m too busy to get involved in all those details.”

“As an accountant, you must have
some idea of how an NBA team would affect the Predators financially.”

“Of course. There’s around a
million and a half people in the fourteen-county statistical area surrounding Nashville. The Titans’ stadium has been sold out since the first game. The Predators have
struggled, but we’re holding our own. In my opinion, adding a basketball team
to the mix would be disastrous.”

“So what can you do to prevent that
from happening?”

Franklin folded his hands and
looked down at them for a moment. “Frankly, that’s out of my area of
expertise.”

The interview seemed to be going
nowhere until Jill switched the conversation to a more chatty note. “How did
you become such an avid hockey fan, Mr. Franklin?”

He turned his high-back leather
executive chair to face her, displaying a smile for the first time. “I’d never
seen a big league professional hockey game until I joined the Marines and was
sent to Camp Pendleton, California. I got to watch a few L.A. Kings’ games and
was hooked. After I left the service, I studied accounting in Boston and became
a Bruins fan.”

“Are you originally from Nashville?” Jill asked.

“Yes. I grew up here, but that was
in the sixties. The only ice hockey back then was the Dixie Flyers. The
Municipal Auditorium ice was a small, cramped rink. I remember hearing that in
the early days the team traveled to out-of-town games in a former school bus.”

“Did you go to any of their games?”
I asked.

“A few, but it was nothing like
this. I played hockey as a kid, but that was on roller skates out in the
street. We used to flatten a tin can to use as a puck. My dad ran a Rexall drugstore
out Hillsboro Road.”

Jill turned to me. “I think I
patronized that drugstore. You remember I lived out that way.”

Her dad, who died a few years after
we married, was a highly successful life insurance agent. They lived in a fancy
area that gave me a real shock the first time I visited her large fieldstone
home. It looked like a mansion to me, the son of a St. Louis master brewer and
an English teacher.

“I’m retired Air Force,” I said.
“How long were you in the Marines?”

“Three years. I was injured in Vietnam and got out when I came back. That newspaper story about Wechsel mentioned he was
from Germany. Have you learned anything about him from over there?”

“His uncle is a former colleague of
mine,” I said. “We’re committed to tracking down who’s responsible for Arnold
Wechsel’s death. Our main effort, though, is to find out what’s behind this
so-called rumor, which doesn’t sound like a rumor at all. We plan to look deeper
into the NBA backers, starting with Louie Aregis. We have one good lead we hope
will pay off.”

I decided not to go into detail.
Although the CPA was one of Protect Our Preds’ major benefactors, Terry Tremont
had said Bradley Smotherman was the official client responsible for our being
hired. My law enforcement experience had taught me that people tended to
exaggerate or misinterpret information frequently. Spreading around too much about
a case could quickly complicate matters.

When we left a short time later,
Jill took me to task over what I had said. She gave me a squinty eye and
dropped her voice to a skeptical tone. “What’s that good lead we’re expecting
to pay off, dear?”

“I’m inclined to go with a mother’s
intuition,” I said. “I think the gambling angle involving Arnold Wechsel is
worth digging into a lot more deeply.”

At the moment, however, I had no
idea where to turn to pursue that possibility.

Nashville drivers handle winter weather in one of two ways.
They either dash madly like mail carriers facing a deadline to deliver despite
rain or snow or heat or gloom of night, or they creep along as though the
streets were glazed over. On the way back to the office, we navigated a
perilous path between both types as a mixture of rain and sleet pelted the
windshield. Our only mad dashing came when we parked a couple of rows out from
the small family restaurant at the opposite end of the shopping center.

“So what are the sleuths eating
today?” asked Tillie, our usual waitress, or female server as my PC friends
would say. A yellow pencil appeared from the graying hair above her ear. Round
spectacles joined it in a vertical position, as if she had eyes in the top of
her head. I suspected she did. She missed little.

“I’ll have that nice fruit salad
you’ve been pushing lately,” Jill said. “I don’t know where you’re getting the
fruit this time of year, but it seems really fresh.”

“The boss has a secret source at
the Farmer’s Market. I think it’s a Florida farmer.” Tillie nodded her head at
me. “What about the old guy?”

I gave her the eye rolling routine.
“The old guy would like a nice, juicy steak, but he’ll settle for a nice, fresh
fruit salad.”

“He’s on his good behavior these
days,” Jill said, smiling.

As the waitress flounced off to the
kitchen, I gave Jill a look. “Thanks for that vote of confidence.”

“It’s true. I don’t believe you’ve
gained a pound lately. Of course, you haven’t lost one, either.”

She kept me on a short leash, but
her magical touch made our low-fat, low-calorie dishes tasty.

“Enough chit-chat, babe,” I said, “you’re
still on the clock. What did you think of Gordon Franklin?”

“I have a hard time picturing that
Mr. Milquetoast as a Marine.”

“That limp could’ve been
service-connected.”

“He didn’t say he was wounded. I’ll
bet he broke his leg when he tripped over his calculator.”

“That’s not being very charitable,”
I said, emphasizing it with a tsk tsk.

Tillie appeared with our coffee and
poured. We didn’t need to ask.

Jill took a tentative sip. “Good
and hot.”

“Always is here. Not like Brother
Gordon. He’s a cool customer. I got the impression he wasn’t all that concerned
about the possibility of skullduggery among the NBA people.”

“Certainly not as much as
Smotherman.”

“Yeah. And he doesn’t call his firm
Puck and Stick Accountants, either.”

“Booo.” She twisted her nose.

“He livened up a bit when you got
him talking about hockey, though.”

“He’d have to be a big fan to put
up the kind of money Terry was talking about.”

“Right. But I have a feeling he’s
too busy crunching numbers to be of much help to us.”

I put the subject on hold when our
fresh fruit salads arrived.

 Back at the office, I got on the phone to Louisville while
Jill updated the case file on Preds vs. NBA. I reached Lieutenant Dobyns at the
police department and explained that I was a retired OSI agent in Nashville who had prosecuted a drug dealer/courier from Louisville years ago. I told him
about spotting Izzy Isabell in Nashville and asked if they had received any
information regarding him since his release from prison.

“I’m not aware of anything,” he
said, “but I can check it out. Do you have a contact in the Nashville Police
Department?”

“Homicide Detective Phil Adamson,”
I said.

“I know Adamson. He did a seminar
here a couple of years ago. I’m sort of constrained by policy from providing
information except through another police agency.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Just call
Phil if you come up with anything.”

I checked in with Phil and told him
about the conversation.

“You think this guy is still on
your case after all these years?” he asked.

“It doesn’t sound like he’s
changed. Worse, if anything.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know if I hear from
Louisville.”

With that out of the way, we sat
around Jill’s desk for a strategy session to prepare her for the interview with
Aregis tomorrow morning.

“One thing we need to know is where
the money’s coming from to finance this deal,” I said. “I’m sure we’re talking
about hundreds of millions of dollars. Is Aregis the investor, or is it his
Coastal Capital Ventures?”

She skimmed a newspaper clipping
from the file. “They haven’t confirmed what team they’re talking about, either,
but this story speculates it could be the Sacramento Kings, Portland Trail
Blazers or Minnesota Timberwolves.”

“See if you can get him to name any
people he’s talked with.”

“Wonder if he talked to Arnold
Wechsel? Be nice if I could get his reaction to that name, wouldn’t it?”

“True, but there’s no way you could
get into that. You might probe around a bit as to how he got interested in this
deal. I didn’t see anything in his background that would hint at a basketball
connection.”

Jill looked up from her notes. “Should
I inquire into what caused him to move his business to Nashville?”

“Sure. It might be significant if
his move was related to this NBA franchise. I’d doubt it, but it would be
helpful to know.”

We discussed several additional
possibilities before winding up our session. Jill had one other bit of
preparation for the interview. Being a whiz at computer graphics, she quickly
dummied up a business card for Contributing Writer Jill Parsons (her maiden
name) of
Sporting World Magazine
. She printed out a few to go in her
billfold.

Afterward, we spent a little time tying
up some loose ends on an insurance case we’d just finished, then took off early
to get dressed for our annual Sunday School Class Christmas Party. We had been
members of the class at Gethsemane United Methodist Church since moving to
Hermitage a few years back. I was a reluctant participant at first, but my wife
is a world-class persuader. We soon developed friendships that had served us
well since. After dinner at a local restaurant, we would adjourn to the home of
Sam and Wilma Gannon for a gift swap. Another Air Force retiree, Sam had gone
from flying B-26 light bombers in Korea to handling the controls of giant C-17
Globemaster transport planes.

At the dinner I got stuck beside
the class clown, a retired pharmacist in his seventies who fancied himself the
reincarnation of Jack Benny. He did resemble Benny a little, with his round
glasses and high forehead, and he had the requisite tight-lipped smile. But he
didn’t have the timing quite right. He made a dramatic pause before the punch
line, then botched it.

Jill was luckier. She sat next to
Wilma Gannon. They had become best friends since returning to Nashville, where both
grew up though on opposite sides of town. The daughter of one-time missionaries
to China, Wilma liked to say Jill was born with a silver spoon in her mouth
while she arrived with wooden chopsticks.

The Gannons lived in a brick ranch
not far from us. Though the neighborhood was like a chessboard in its
uniformity, the architects had varied the building materials enough to keep the
houses from resembling clones. The Gannons’ spacious den glowed with candles
large and small, abetted by winking strings of lights on a Christmas tree that
tickled the ceiling. You could tell it was real by the fresh evergreen smell. Cookies
and candy, crackers and dips vied for space on a long table anchored by a
sparkling glass punch bowl. Ice cubes drifted in a concoction as red as blood
spatters, though the others didn’t likely view it in those terms. Folding chairs
sat around the walls, where people drifted after loading up on the goodies.

Everyone had brought a wrapped gift
to put under the tree. Sam strolled along with a basket of paper slips bearing
numbers, and we each took one. Starting with the bearer of the number “1,” we
all trooped to the tree to choose a gift. Under the rules, you had to open the
gift and show it around. The person with the next number could either take that
gift or go to the tree. The third person to possess a particular gift kept it.
Things got pretty raucous at times, such as when a prim little lady unwrapped a
three-cup bra supplied by the class wag. He tried to look innocent, but
everyone knew who to blame.

While the women cleaned up the gift
wrap mess, I chatted with Sam, casually bringing up the NBA basketball deal. He
grew up in a rural area south of Tulsa and met Wilma at the University of Oklahoma, where he played basketball. Though he’d never been a starter, he had
the physique for it, being a few inches taller than my five-ten and a lot
slimmer. I’d heard him talk about how Oklahoma City should have an NBA team.

“What do you think about this bunch
wanting to bring a pro basketball team to Nashville?” I asked.

He leaned against a bookcase loaded
with paperbacks. “I’d probably buy a season ticket if Wilma didn’t object too vociferously.”

“Know what you mean. We go to a
Titans game occasionally, but I couldn’t talk Jill into taking the season
ticket route.”

“Some of the guys I play basketball
with over at the Y are really fired up about the possibility of a team here.
They say the people putting the deal together are loaded with cash.”

“This Aregis fellow seems to be the
ringleader, from what I’ve seen.”

“Right. They told me the deal has
been simmering the past several months. Aregis came up from Florida because of
his interest in it. They say he’s a real smooth operator, has lots of
connections.”

“Any of your friends involved in
it?”

“One of them works for Howard Hays
at Dollar Deal Stores. He’s apparently been involved in some of the
negotiations.”

“I wonder if they’ve talked to any
teams about selling?”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said,
grabbing a cookie from a dish as Wilma passed by. “At least it hasn’t been
mentioned.”

“I’d never heard of the other
fellow the paper said was an investor in the deal. Fred Ricketts is his name, I
believe.”

“I’ve heard the name, but nobody’s
said anything about him.”

“The Predators folks don’t seem too
happy about it,” I said.

“I suppose not,” he said with a
grin. “They would have some real competition for fans.”

Talking to Jill on the way home, I passed
along what I had learned from Sam. It made good background for her interview in
the morning.

Our neighborhood appeared clear of
lurking SUVs, but I patted the bulk of the Sig-Sauer pistol I carried now. It
was lighter and easier to conceal than the Beretta I had used since my Air
Force days.

I pulled into the driveway still
unsettled about how to take that SUV sighting Sunday night. Was it related to
Arnold Wechsel’s murder and Terry Tremont’s case? Was it simply a random thing
that had no relation to us? When we arrived at the house and checked the answering
machine, there was a call at 8:07 showing “Uknown Name, Unknown Number.” They
had listened to our message, then hung up.

Had somebody with an untraceable
cell phone checked to see if we were at home? Could it have been Izzy Isabell?

I had a sudden thought and turned
to Jill. “Is that box of old papers from my OSI days still in the walk-in
closet?”

“Unfortunately. Every time I try to
throw it out, you insist on keeping it like some stash of love letters from your
deep, dark past.”

“What do you know about such
things? Have you been hanging onto letters from some old lover?”

She put her hands on her hips and
gave a sensuous sway. “I might let you read them sometime. They’re from a
dashing young Air Force officer in Vietnam. Some of them get pretty steamy.”

I popped her one on the bottom and
headed for the closet. I hauled out the box that hadn’t been opened in years.
It contained copies of files from a few special cases I had kept for future
reference. One of them was the investigation of First Lt. Izzy Isabell. I took
it downstairs to the office and spread papers across the desk.

Isabell was assigned to a Strategic
Air Command refueling unit at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. When high quality cocaine began showing up in the area, the
local cops got concerned and asked for Air Force help. We picked up information
suggesting the source could be on base. Working with a Goldsboro police
officer, I got an informant to admit that the drug came from an aircrew member.
We finally narrowed it down to a particular KC-135. We searched the aircraft
thoroughly following a couple of missions that had landed in suspect areas, but
found nothing.

Although I spent many years in the
Air Force, I readily confess I do not like to fly. Even with my competent and
trusted wife at the controls, I am not a happy passenger. My motto is feet and
wheels should be kept firmly planted on the ground. However, this was a case
where duty prevailed. I arranged for a mission to a location the DEA identified
as rife with cocaine trafficking and flew along as a passenger. I posed as a
Department of Defense civilian on a familiarization flight. The guys would’ve
called it a joyride.

After a routine refueling operation,
we spent a couple of hours on the ground before returning to base. The crew
consisted of the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and boom operator. I wasn’t able
to keep an eye on everybody while we were killing time, but I did the best I
could. One thing I noticed, the navigator never let his briefcase out of his
sight. He disappeared while I had coffee with the pilot. When I saw him again,
he still wagged that briefcase at his side. It looked a bit heftier than
before.

On the flight back, I identified
myself to the pilot as an OSI agent and sent a message to my office to have a
narcotics-sniffing dog handy when we landed. The dog found Izzy Isabell’s
briefcase fascinating. He sat alertly beside it on the ramp. His handler said
it indicated he had found the scent of drugs. When I told Izzy to open it, he caught
me with a sucker punch. I retaliated with a right cross that flattened him. That
was back in the days when I was still scrappy. Our relationship went downhill
from there. I found three bricks of cocaine in the leather case. That’s three
kilograms, or nearly seven pounds, which would have brought a tidy sum, even in
the late eighties. Under interrogation, he admitted to bringing in dozens of
bricks worth a small fortune. While he was locked up awaiting trial, Izzy talked
to a cellmate about putting out a contract on me and another witness in the
case. Fortunately, he trusted the wrong person.