Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (2 page)

“Do you want any help?” asked the paramedic.

“No, thanks.” He turned to Chief Lester. “You might as well come with me.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

They pushed the gurney down a long corridor and turned into the autopsy room at the end. The place smelled of disinfectant and ancient medicinal odors that the air-conditioning was unable to purge. The fluorescent lights reflected off the highly polished tile floor and bounced off the expanse of white walls unbroken by pictures or other decorations. The morgue was not a pleasant place.

Hawkins removed the sheet from Logan, saying, “Let’s get this piece of shit onto the table so I can start cutting.”

“Cutting, my ass,” said Logan as he sat upright. “What’s going on, Bill? My chest hurts like hell and I’m lucky I’m not dead. Who shot me? Why am I in the morgue?”

“We don’t know who shot you. I called Bert from the ambulance and told him I was bringing you in, alive and well.”

Bert cleared his throat. “You know that the Sarasota PD is going to be swarming this place in a few minutes. They’ll want a statement from the victim.”

“I still don’t know what the hell is going on,” said Logan. “Who wants me dead, and why?”

“I’m kind of making this up on the fly,” Lester said. “When I saw you go down after the shot was fired, I thought you were dead. The shooter probably thought so, too.”

“He was almost right.”

“Yeah. If we keep you under wraps for a few days, you’ll be safe and we might get a line on who’s trying to kill you and why. If you end up in a hospital, whoever is after you might try again.”

“Somebody just tried to kill me. I don’t have any idea who or why,” said Logan. “Is that the best idea you can come up with?”

“For right now.”

Bert said, “I’ve got to get this gurney back to the ambulance guys. You stay here.”

“Logan,” said the chief, “I’m glad you’re okay. Your girlfriend’s message said it was important that we meet for lunch. What’s up?”

“When did you talk to Marie?”

“I didn’t. She left the message with our dispatcher.”

“The dispatcher called me on my cell and said you wanted to meet for lunch,” Logan said. “At the Sports Page.”

Lester opened his phone, dialed, identified himself, and said, “Did you call Logan Hamilton and ask him to meet me for lunch today?” When he hung up, he said to Logan, “The dispatcher got the call from Marie and called me. That was all he knew about our meeting. Somebody was setting you up. But why did they want me on the scene?”

“I don’t know. Why the hell would somebody want to shoot me in the first place?”

“Good question. Maybe the CSI people will turn up something on the shooter. We’ll get you into a hotel for tonight and figure out something more permanent tomorrow.”

“I’m hungry,” said Logan. “Never did get lunch.”

“Let Doc Hawkins take a look at you and we’ll grab a sandwich.”

“Somewhere safe,” said Logan.

Hawkins returned. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“You know everything we know,” said Lester.

“Okay. Let me take a look at you, Logan.”

Hawkins did a cursory examination. He shined a penlight into Logan’s eyes, palpated the back of his skull where it had hit the sidewalk when he was shot, looked closely at the bruise left by the bullet. He finished and said, “No signs of concussion or anything broken. You’ve got a knot on the back of your head and you’re going to be sore for a few days in the area where you took the bullet. All in all, you look better than most of my patients.”

“You’re the medical examiner,” said Logan. “Your patients are all dead.”

“Yeah. That probably explains it.”

I eased my boat slowly into its slip, adding power as I fought the current flowing through the lagoon with the outgoing tide. A brown pelican sat on the outboard piling, watching nervously. As I laid the boat gently against the dock, the bird took flight, rose a few feet, and landed on a nearby pier.

Jessica Connor stepped from the gunwale onto the dock and looped a line around a piling. I shut down the big outboards and walked another line to the bow, lassoed a cleat, and pulled the boat in snug against the pilings. I would loosen the lines after we unloaded, giving the boat a little room to float away from the dock with the wind and current.

It was mid-afternoon on Saturday. We’d had a good run the sixty miles from Boca Grande Pass, staying about two miles offshore on a sea of glass, the autopilot engaged, the engines humming, and Jessica sitting nude next to me enjoying the sun and my reaction. She put the bikini on as we came into Longboat Pass and idled under the bridge. Just inside, I turned south and then east, rounded Land’s End, and came to my cottage clinging to the edge of Longboat Key, facing the lagoon and Jewfish Key.

“Matt,” said Jessica, “you’d better check this line before you go up. I’m never sure I’ve got it tied right.”

“No sweat. Let’s haul the junk up to the house and then I’ll secure the boat.”

The sun was warm as we worked at unloading a week’s worth of dirty clothes and the other detritus of a vacation well spent. Jessica made several trips, carrying the gear to the end of the dock, while I washed down the boat. She was a twenty-eight-foot Grady-White with a small cabin,
powered by twin Yamaha 250-horsepower outboards. A sweet piece of machinery that I called
Recess
.

Jessica and I had spent the week boating around southwest Florida, stopping at likely looking places in Charlotte Harbor, Pine Island Sound, and points south. We stopped for cheeseburgers at Cabbage Key and I was glad to see a portrait of the longtime dockmaster, Terry Forgie, hanging in the restaurant. He’d been an institution, and the place was a little less lively with his passing. We had dinner with my friends Dan and Cher Clark in Punta Gorda. We stayed two nights at Everglades City and spent Friday night at the old Miller’s Marina just inside Boca Grande Pass.

We’d made a pact that we’d tune out the world. We turned off our cell phones and refused to watch TV or read newspapers. If somebody dropped the big bomb on New York or Washington, we’d probably hear about it from somebody at the marinas we visited. Anything less than that wasn’t worth our attention.

We’d had more than our share of wine and beer and good seafood and outstanding sex, but our idyll was about to end. Jessica would leave the next day for Paris and her job at the American embassy there. I would rejoin the slow rhythms that make up life on my slice of paradise, Longboat Key. My buddy Logan Hamilton and I would fish, walk the beach, eat good food at the island establishments, drink our share of beer, ogle the women, fish some more when the mood struck us, and on occasion talk of things deep or amusing or silly. We’d spend time with our friends at Tiny’s, the bar on the edge of the village, eat lunch at Mar Vista or Moore’s, and gobble up the days that seemed to stretch endlessly before us.

My name is Matt Royal. When I was a young man, I’d been an officer in the United States Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, the toughest fighting men on the planet. I’d been to war, killed some people, lost some friends, got shot up, and came home and tried to put it behind me. I was mostly successful, but some nights the dead visited me, the ones I’d killed and the ones I’d lost. The ones I’d killed didn’t have faces, but I knew who they were. My men came dressed as they were on the day they died; grimy jungle fatigues, floppy hats, boots, and belts full of gear. Their faces were
stubbled with several days of beard, and sweat pooled at their necks. They carried their M-16s with an ease born of repetition. The rifles were the only thing about them that was clean.

During those dark nights in my sweaty bed, they’d discuss their lives with me, just as they had on the long evenings of boredom that interspersed the firefights. But their lives had ended on a hot day in a jungle far from home. Mine went on. I never remembered what the dead enemy said and, truth be told, I did not want to know, could not bear their opprobrium.

The government that wouldn’t let us win the war gave me some medals when I got out of the military hospital and helped me finish college and law school with the G.I. Bill. Those medals were stashed somewhere in a drawer with a piece of the shrapnel the docs had dug out of my gut and a picture of my team standing in front of a Huey, the helicopter that took us into that last patrol. They were all there, those tough young men, grinning and cavorting for the signal corps guy with the camera. For five of them, it was their last flight, if you didn’t count the one that brought their bodies back several days later.

I found a career as a trial lawyer, but over the few years became disenchanted with the profession that was becoming a business. Finally, I tired of the rat race, retired early, and moved to Longboat Key, a barrier island off the southwest coast of Florida just below Tampa Bay, about half way down the peninsula. Life is easy in our latitudes, where it never gets cold in the winters and the Gulf breezes cool the summers enough to make them bearable. Island living was pleasant and tranquil and fulfilling. I wasn’t rich, but I had enough money to live modestly without working.

I’m a bit of an exercise nut, trying to keep the old body going as long as possible. I try to run four miles a day on the beach, work out in the island gym a couple times a week, and take martial arts lessons once a week. I’m six feet tall, weigh the same 180 pounds I did when I got out of the Army, and have a face that has been described as nice, not handsome mind you, just nice. My nose is bigger than I’d like it to be and a little off-center and I think my eyes are too small. My hair is still dark and covers my head the same way it did twenty years ago. I have a mouthful of good teeth and a smile that I like to think melts the hearts of the young ladies. That may
not be true, but I do smile a lot, because living on my island makes me happy. I tend to grow on people, it seems, and the women don’t find me completely unattractive.

Our island is small, about ten miles long and a quarter-mile wide. Life is easy on the key, one day rolling into the next, the sun diligent about its daily arrival. Our pace is slow, without stress, our lives filled with friends and good food and beer and booze and fishing and beachcombing. We are separated from Sarasota by a wide bay, and one has to cross two bridges and another island just to find the mainland. We like it that way and live with the conceit that the real world seldom finds its way into our bit of paradise.

I’d met Jessica some months before when I was in Europe. She’d visited me on Longboat Key at Christmas and had wrangled another week away for what she called her spring fling. She’d arrived on Saturday and we’d left on the boat on Sunday morning. Our six days of idleness seemed to reenergize her, and she was anxious to get back to work. And as much as I enjoyed her company, I was looking forward to some time alone and to readapting to the ever-present rhythms of island idleness.

We piled our stuff on the patio that ran the width of the back of my cottage. I went around to open the front door. There was a note taped there:

Matt, call me on my cell ASAP!!! Very damned important!!!!!

Bill Lester

Bill was a good friend, but he was also the Longboat Key police chief and he wouldn’t have left such a note unless it was urgent. Jessica followed me inside and went toward the bedroom, shucking her bikini as she walked. I heard the shower in the master bath come on as I dialed Bill’s cell phone. He answered on the first ring.

“Matt, are you back?”

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“Meet me at the Market in five minutes.”

“What’s this about, Bill?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.” He hung up.

I put the phone down, confused by his abruptness. I went into the bathroom and stuck my head into the shower. Jessica’s sleek body was soaped up and she was standing under the water, her head thrown back letting the shampoo rinse out of her hair.

“Come on in.”

“Can’t. Gotta meet Bill Lester at the Market. I’ll be back soon.”

“What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know.”

Jason Blakemoore closed the office door behind him, jiggled the handle to make sure the lock was engaged, and trudged off into the mid-afternoon heat, warm for late March. He wore a white shirt, red tie, and navy pants over wing-tipped shoes. He was about six feet tall, two hundred pounds, blond hair, early thirties. He looked back at the squat cinder-block building that housed his office. It was small, nondescript, flat roofed, its white paint glaring in the South Florida sun. A large sign over the door announced that the building was a law office.

Belleville wasn’t much of a town, but then Jason Blakemoore wasn’t much of a lawyer, so it all seemed to fit into the cosmic plan. The town was small, its few buildings old, decrepit, many of them empty. One could walk from the town square to the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp in under ten minutes. The Tamiami Trail ran near the southern edge of town, lightly traveled since the opening of I-75 through the Everglades.

Blakemoore had grown up in this dismal place, the son of a waitress over at the truck stop on the Trail and a fishing guide out of Everglades City. Jason wasn’t real bright, but he knew how to play football. He’d been an outstanding linebacker in high school and was recruited by several colleges. His academic credentials were nil. He’d made the same score on the SAT that he would have if he’d just written his name and walked out. He missed almost every question.

The glaring lack of college preparation doomed his chances of playing for a major university. A coach at the University of Florida managed to get Jason a scholarship to a junior college in Kansas, where he excelled in football and made passing grades in class. As long as he played well, his grades were good. Good enough to allow him to transfer to the University
of Florida for his junior year. He was red-shirted, which meant that he didn’t play his junior year, but his eligibility would not be threatened. He could still play two years at Gainesville. Again he excelled on the field and his grades were mediocre, not bad for a guy with no intellect. Against all odds, he graduated. He still had a year of football eligibility left and the Gator coaching staff thought this would be his year to shine. They talked the law school into taking him.