Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons (6 page)

I said, “I don’t think Zack had anything to do with me being kidnapped.”

“You can’t be sure of that. The guy who kidnapped you thought you were Zack’s wife.”

Well, yeah, there was that.

Ella turned her head and looked at me with something of alarm in her eyes.

All of a sudden the memory of Vern’s angry eyes came barreling at me, and I felt my fear again, remembered how my heart had pounded, remembered how scary it had been to have my head covered and my mouth taped shut, how frightened I’d been when I didn’t know what was going on, who my captors were, what they planned for me. Even if Zack Carlyle’s involvement was totally tangential, he was involved through Ruby, and his part couldn’t be ignored.

I must have zoned out for a moment remembering the morning, because Guidry caught my attention with a light tap on my shoulder. He leaned to kiss my cheek and said, “See you later.”

Ella and I watched him walk to his Blazer and drive away. I don’t know what Ella was thinking, but I was wondering
Later like when?

That’s the thing about men. They’re not specific. They come to your house intending to tell you something important, but then they change their mind and talk about something else. They leave you dangling with indefinite words like
later
and
sometime
and
see you
. They really are the most exasperating other sex in the world.

7

When it was time to make afternoon pet rounds, I put Ella in Michael’s kitchen and headed for my first stop. Always, mornings and afternoons, that’s at Tom Hale’s condo in the Sea Breeze on Midnight Pass Road. Tom’s a CPA who has been in a wheelchair since a wall of wooden doors fell on him at a home improvement store, so I go twice a day and run with his greyhound, Billy Elliot. In exchange, Tom handles my taxes and anything having to do with money.

I parked in the big lot in front of the condo and took the elevator to Tom’s place. He and Billy Elliot were watching
Oprah
on TV. It must have been a show about physical fitness because Oprah was watching a man on a metal contraption hoist himself upwards, like chinning. His arms were shaking from the strain, but he kept doing it, over and over. Except for his middle-aged body, he looked like a kid showing off for a girl. Oprah looked slightly bored. She’s probably used to men showing off for her.

Tom switched off the TV and watched me snap Billy’s leash on his collar. Tom has a mop of curly black hair and wears round Harry Potter glasses. He’s like a cute poodle you want to pet on the head.

He said, “How’re you holding up in the heat?”

I would have told him that the heat wasn’t as bad as being kidnapped, but Billy Elliot whuffed to remind me that I was there to run with him, not to chat with Tom, so I led Billy out to the elevator in the hall. Downstairs, we went out to the parking lot where cars park in an oval around a central green spot. The track between parking spaces and the center makes a perfect running track for me and Billy. Like the kind of track I imagined all race cars sped around on.

Contrary to their reputation, some greyhounds don’t enjoy running at all. They’d rather sit and watch TV. But not Billy Elliot. Billy Elliot likes running better than anything in the world. He doesn’t run because he’s a greyhound, he runs because he’s like those people who get up early every morning and run two or three miles just for the fun of it. I don’t understand those people, but I’m sure Billy does.

After he’d peed on every tree trunk he thought needed peeing on, Billy led me onto the track and we set off. Billy is considerate. He always begins slowly so my muscles can get warmed up before he really takes off. But about halfway around the track, he speeds up. By the time we’ve made two rounds of the track I feel like a lab rat trying to stay upright on a moving conveyor set too fast. At the condo entrance, I pulled Billy to a stop and leaned over and panted with my hands on my knees. A grandmotherly woman came from the building carrying a white Lhasa Apso with Cindy Lou Who hair tied with a pink ribbon on top of its head.

The woman stopped. “Are you all right?”

I wheezed, “Just out of breath.”

She walked on toward her parked car while the Lhasa looked over her shoulder at me. Before she got into her car, the woman called, “Awfully hot to be running.”

I nodded and flapped my hand to say thanks for the tip, while Billy pranced around me, grinning. When we went inside and got into the mirrored elevator, my face was still beet red. Billy was still grinning and wagging his tail in doggy joy.

In Tom’s apartment, I went in the kitchen where he was at the table typing on a slim laptop computer. Personally, I’m not a computer person. I’m probably the only living person in the western hemisphere without a Web site or an e-mail address. My life is complicated enough without adding all that electronic crap to it, so I don’t blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, or text-message. But every now and then, when I want to take advantage of the availability of instant information, I impose on friends who are computer savvy. People like Tom.

I got myself a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and rested my back against the countertop edge while I drank it.

I said, “If I gave you an address, could you find the person who lives there?”

With his fingertips poised above the keys, he looked at me over the top of his glasses. “What’s the address?”

I gave him the house next door to Mr. Stern, the one where I’d seen two women looking out the window. In about two nanoseconds, he had the owner’s name.

“Myra Kreigle.”

I went still, with the same kind of
something’s-not-right
feeling that comes just before you realize you’ve stepped into thong bikinis wrong so the crotch part is riding on your hip. I had asked about the address because I wanted to know who had looked down at me with such fury from the house next door to Mr. Stern. Now that I knew she was Myra Kreigle, the way she’d looked at me seemed even more peculiar.

Tom said, “You know who Myra Kreigle is?”

“Sure, the big flipper.”

In Sarasota,
big flippers
once meant the appendages loggerhead turtles use to propel themselves onto the beach every year to lay eggs. Now it means somebody who fraudulently drove up real estate prices and fueled southwest Florida’s economic meltdown.

Tom said, “Worse than that. Myra Kreigle was a big flipper with an REIT Ponzi scheme.”

I vaguely remembered skimming over newspaper headlines when Myra Kreigle was indicted for fraud in connection to her real estate investment company. A vivacious, attractive woman in her fifties, Myra’s photo had usually been in the paper in connection to her investment seminars or because she’d donated money to a charity or an arts association. I had been surprised to learn of her dark side, but since I didn’t travel in Myra’s social circle, she had only been a name to me, not a real person.

Tom said, “She’s used up all her trial postponements. They’ve already selected the jury, and her hearing starts Monday.”

I hadn’t even known a trial date had been set. I wondered if the young woman I’d seen at Myra’s window was her daughter. If she was, having a notorious liar for a mother would explain why she looked so unhappy. My mother had been a liar too, so I could relate.

I said, “Can you tell me in twenty words or less exactly what Myra did?”

“It’ll take more than twenty words, but I’ll condense it as much as possible. You know how flipping works, right?”

“Somebody buys a house at its real value, then gets an appraiser to inflate the value. He does a bogus sale to an accomplice at that inflated price. The accomplice gets a mortgage, a banker who knows what’s going on lends the money and gets a bonus, and the accomplice either passes the money he borrowed to the seller or they split it. Then the buyer walks away and lets the house be foreclosed on.”

“That’s how small flippers worked. Big flippers formed a bunch of post-office-box companies or limited partnerships and sold the same property back and forth between them with ever bigger appraisals, larger mortgages, more profits. Myra Kreigle bought and sold hundreds of properties that way. That in itself was a crime, but Myra had formed a real estate investment trust, otherwise known as an REIT, through which she suckered investors by telling them they would get double-digit returns if they gave her money to invest in real estate. About two thousand people fell for that, but it was a scam.”

Any time people talk about big money, I always feel like my eyeballs are rotating. Maybe they really were, because Tom grinned and began to speak more slowly.

“A Ponzi scheme is when a lot of people invest in something too good to be true. The con pays the first investors from the money the later investors put in, so word spreads and more people rush to get in on a good deal. As long as new investors are pouring in money, it works. There’s enough money to pay off people who ask for their profits, and the con running the scheme can live high on the hog on other people’s money.”

“So Myra never really invested in real estate?”

“Oh, she bought some mortgages, but most of them were high risk, and none of them paid back what she was promising her investors. The fraud was in sending her investors false monthly reports showing huge profits she claimed she’d made for them by brilliant real estate trades. Most people let their profits ride, but if somebody wanted to collect, she paid them from the investment money. She took in nearly two hundred million dollars that way. Her investors will never get their money back. I imagine most of it is socked away in offshore banks.”

“I don’t understand how she got away with it for so long.”

He rolled his eyes. “If pigeons are getting fed, they aren’t picky about who’s feeding them.”

I nodded, but I still didn’t see how intelligent people could be fooled so easily.

Tom said, “Ponzi schemes are called
affinity
crimes because the criminal preys on his own people. Fundamentalists hoodwink fundamentalists, New Agers manipulate New Agers, Catholics scam fellow Catholics. Myra went after her own kind.”

Myra’s own kind were the cream of Sarasota’s society, the smart set who ordered three-hundred-dollar wine when they lunched at Zoria’s. Smugly confident, they were the beautiful people who traveled the world, went to all the classy parties, had their photos in the society pages. Myra had smiled, beguiled, sucked the fat right off their sucker bones, and left them gasping for air like stranded fish. When they went down, they took with them all the little people who had cleaned their houses, landscaped their lawns, taught their children, and sold them goods.

Tom continued to tap keys on his computer and peer at his screen. Some people can multitask like that. Personally, I have difficulty talking and walking at the same time. His fingers raised from the keyboard and he leaned toward the screen to read something he’d pulled up. He wrinkled his lips like he’d bit into moldy cheese, and closed his laptop.

“It’ll take a decade before our economy gets back to normal. Myra Kreigle should be in jail now, and if that Tucker guy hadn’t put up a two-million-dollar bond for her, she would be.”

The short hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

“Kantor Tucker?”

“That’s the one. Everybody else thought she was a flight risk, but Tucker is a close friend and put up the money. He can’t protect her forever, though. State investigators have a solid case against her. Several counts of securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering fraud. Unless something happens to make the case fall through, she’ll serve several years in a white-collar-crime prison.”

I finished off the glass of water and filled it again. “Some guys kidnapped me this morning and took me to Kantor Tucker.”

Now I had Tom’s complete attention. “Somebody
kidnapped
you?”

“They grabbed me outside the Village Diner and drove me east of Seventy-five where Tucker has a place. Big spread with a landing strip and a hangar beside his house. The guys who took me to him thought I was somebody else. When they found out I wasn’t who they thought I was, they took me to a Friendly’s and put me out. I called Guidry and he came and got me. I reported it. I don’t want the publicity, and I can’t prove they did it, but Guidry made me report it.”

“Good God, Dixie.”

“I know. I looked at mug shots at the sheriff’s office but I didn’t see the driver of the limo. His name is Vern.”

“That’s all you’ve got? The guy’s first name?”

“They put tape on my mouth, and I saved the tape. It may have latent prints on it. I gave it to the investigators.”

“Is that why your mouth is puffy?”

“Is it still puffy?”

“I thought maybe you and Guidry had been playing rough kissy-face.”

I took another drink of water. “Some of my lip skin stayed on the tape when I ripped it off.”

His hand rose to his own lips as if he needed to confirm they were in one piece. “Who did they think you were?”

I shrugged. “They didn’t say anybody’s name.” Strictly speaking, that was true.

“Do you think grabbing you had something to do with Myra Kreigle?”

“Not really. Probably just a coincidence that the limo was in front of her house when I left the house next door.”

I tried to sound convincing, but Tom knows me well enough to know when I’m not being totally honest.

I got busy emptying my water glass and putting it in the dishwasher. When I left, Tom and Billy Elliot watched me leave with identical wrinkled brows. Billy Elliot was probably pondering how long it would be before he and I ran again. Tom was probably wondering what Myra Kreigle had to do with me being kidnapped.

So was I.

8

Myra Kreigle and her kind weren’t the first real estate swindlers in Sarasota’s history. As Sarasota became fashionable during the 1920s, the town was flooded with land speculators who sent property values skyrocketing. Fortune hunters razed orange groves for subdivisions, but left without completing them. People bought property in the morning and sold it for a profit that same afternoon. But in September of 1926, a destructive hurricane ended the real estate boom. The Great Depression struck next, when businesses went broke and tourism slowed to a trickle.