The Black Palmetto (22 page)

They stepped around T-Rex, as Simone had named the iguana, and went out the back door. When Edison ambled toward the front stoop and out of their view, they headed through the gate and retraced their steps to the car.

Back behind the wheel, Sam said, “Let’s wait out by the street for a while and see what happens.”

About ten minutes later, two police cruisers approached Edison’s house from the other way and turned into his driveway.

“If he was Knox,” Sam said, “I don’t think he would call the police about the break-in.”

“Yeah, but he still might be connected. He did have the cocaine stash. Not exactly your average prosecuting attorney.”

Sam turned the car onto the street and pointed it back toward Ford’s cabin.

“Call J.T. and see if he talked to Harpo,” Sam said.

Simone got him on the line and put the phone on speaker.

“He said he thought he remembered seeing our man going in at Chopin’s one night,” J.T. said, “but lots of people go into a place like that, especially if it’s the only game in town.”

“That’s all he said?” Sam asked.

“Yep. You find anything at Edison’s place?”

“Not much,” Sam said. He told him about the cocaine, the e-mails, and the rest.

“Huh, I don’t know. What if he’s helping Knox, hoping Boozler would say something on his e-mail about the two million?”

“Why would he do that?” Sam asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m just trying to fit this guy into the equation. If he isn’t Knox, he might be a friend or a relative.”

Sam hadn’t thought about that. He’d assumed Knox to be a lone wolf. In his kind of business, he probably wouldn’t have many friends, but Edison could be a relative.

“That might explain what we found,” Simone said.

Sam shook his head, not too sure they had hit on any plausible answer. He said to J.T., “Can you dig a little deeper on him and see if he had any family that would fit Knox’s description?”

“Sure, soon as I get back to the place.”

“Okay, see you there.”

Simone broke the connection. They rode in silence for a few minutes and passed Chopin’s bar. The rear end of the maroon hearse hung from the edge of a pine thicket about fifty feet down the road. When they got closer, Sam saw Harpo nearing the big vehicle. J.T. had already gone.

Sam had an idea. “Why don’t we take Harpo back to talk with Benetti? Both of them have seen Knox, but they have different takes on his description. Maybe something will click.”

Shrugging, Simone said, “Worth a try.”

They pulled in next to the hearse and the homeless guy stopped and turned around, probably ready to run. A guy like him wouldn’t like all this attention.

“I’ll go get him,” Simone said.

When the car stopped, she got out and called his name. He waited for her to catch up.

They talked for a minute or so, saying things Sam couldn’t hear, the guy smiling and nodding. He obviously liked her looks. Who wouldn’t? She turned around and headed to the car, with him following.

Back on the road, Simone said, “Listen to this.” She turned in her seat to face Harpo sitting behind Sam. “Tell us again why you went to that beach house.”

“I told the other man, and he said you wouldn’t put me in jail because of the door.”

“No, we’re not the police. Nobody’s going to tell them you broke the door open. But why did you go there?”

“I told my friend Alton—he’s dead now—about the man I saw at the marina, and he thought he’d seen him at that beach house. But I don’t know if it was the right one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alton said it was the house next to the one for sale. But after I left and had a chance to think about it, I decided he could’ve been talking about the one on the other side.”

Simone took out her phone. “I’ll call J.T. and ask him who lives there.”

Sam slowed the car, made a U-turn, and headed back toward the beach houses.

After a few moments, she said, “He doesn’t answer.”

“That’s okay. We can check out the place.”

They drove by the home for sale and kept going past a couple of vacant lots. Sam stopped the car in front of the next house down the road. This one looked older than Edison’s, and its stucco walls had vines growing up the sides. The screen door appeared to be warped, maybe from water damage, and stood ajar. Several tiles on the roof were missing. A fifty-seven Cadillac convertible sat under a metal awning. It had a flat tire, and its poor condition gave Sam the impression that it might have been parked there like that for a long time.

“You think anybody’s home?” Sam asked.

Simone shrugged. “That old car doesn’t look like it runs. I’d guess whoever lives here has gone somewhere in another vehicle. Let’s check it out.”

He backed up and hid the car in the yard they had used before.

“Wait here,” Sam said to Harpo, who sat with his head bowed, eyes closed. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Harpo never looked up. His lips moved without sound, as if lip-syncing a song…or saying a prayer. A man lived inside there, but Sam wondered about his sanity. And at that moment, the idea of following his directions searching for a killer seemed pretty insane, too.

They got out and tracked to the rear of the property. No fence, just a back door with peeling paint. Wearing the gloves again, Sam stepped onto the stoop and twisted the knob. To his surprise, the door opened. The owner might have left it unlocked, but someone could be inside, too. He pulled his gun and glanced back at Simone. She motioned for him to go ahead and followed him in.

Unlike Edison’s home, the kitchen here had been used a lot. Dirty dishes and pans cluttered the sink. Empty paper bags from fast-food restaurants lay on the counter among wadded burger wrappers and unused napkins. They pushed through to a dining room. The table had been pushed to one wall, and a single chair sat under it. A flat-panel TV about twenty inches wide sat on one corner. Empty beer bottles and more fast-food bags kept it company. A roach raced across the table surface and down one leg.

Sam listened for noise, but didn’t hear any. Simone touched his arm and pointed to a door swung back to within a foot of the wall. He pointed the gun toward it and nodded for her to pull it back. She did, and its hinges squeaked, but nobody stood behind it. They moved through the room to the hallway, down past an empty bathroom to one of two bedrooms. The door stood open. No bed. Boxes littered the floor space.

A few feet farther, the door to the second bedroom hung ajar. As Sam reached to bump it with his toe, he heard a noise. He stepped to the side and flattened himself against the wall. Simone did the same on the other side of the door. They waited for a couple of moments and nothing happened.

With his gun at the ready, Sam said, “I hear you in there. Come out with your hands in the air!”

All quiet.

His pulse pounded in his ears as he eased back to the door and kicked it open. It swung back and banged against the wall inside. From the doorway he could see that the window stood wide open in the empty room. They entered and he went to the window and peered out. A cheap aluminum screen lay in the shrubbery, its frame bent as if someone had stepped on it. He climbed through to the ground and ran to the edge of the yard. Nothing moved up or down the street. Then a car careened onto the street from the vacant lot next door and sped away. Sighing, he relaxed, and even laughed to himself.

Simone met him at the front door and let him in.

“Did you see who it was?”

“Yeah, it was J.T.”

“What?” Her eyes narrowed. “I told you about him. He could have shot us.”

“Yes, he could.”

Then a hint of a smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. “Ran like a baby. What are you going to say to him?”

“Maybe nothing. He knew it was us, even before I spoke.”

“What makes you say that?”

Sam shrugged. “If he hadn’t, he would’ve shot us through the wall and never given it a second thought.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, I know so.”

Simone sighed. “Okay, he must have thought this place belonged to Knox, or he wouldn’t have been here. He didn’t have time for much of a search, so let’s see what we can find.”

He took the front of the house this time, and Simone took the rear. Tossing the cushions on a worn sofa, he found only food crumbs. A stand next to a recliner yielded a couple of skin mags, along with a periodical for classical pianists. An odd combination. The TV in the living room sat on a cabinet with doors. Sam found nothing inside but a couple of instruction manuals for the television and a video player. In the kitchen he searched through the cabinets and found a mismatched set of dishes and a couple of pans with spider webs inside.

A drawer next to the sink contained bills, going back six months, for utilities and cable, all in the name of C.R. Crowne. Sam sighed. Didn’t ring any bells.

He strode to the bedroom where he found Simone on one knee, her head inside the closet. Eight or ten pairs of shoes and their boxes covered the floor around her, along with a pile of dirty clothes.

“We need to get going,” he said. “Probably been here too long already.”

Simone stood and shook her head. “This guy’s a real slob. You find anything?”

“Not much. Only this.” Sam handed her one of the bills.

“Crowne. Huh. I don’t remember that name ever coming up.”

“Yeah, me, either.”

She pointed to the closet. “He has a big box full of shoes in the corner. But I found a stack of heavy books in the bottom. Let me thumb through the books for a minute and we’ll go.”

“You check the junk room?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, nothing but junk.”

“How about the chest of drawers over here?”

“I looked in that, too. There’re some photos I didn’t get a chance to sort through.”

The pictures were in the top drawer, along with some mismatched socks, a couple of old wrist watches with broken bands, an owner’s manual for a cell phone, a pair of tarnished silver cufflinks, and an old baseball. There were eight photographs, all old. Sam scanned through a couple, but the people in them didn’t strike a chord. He stuffed them into his pocket and checked the other drawers. All were empty.

“Okay, here’s something,” Simone said from the closet. Down on her knees, she had the box pulled all the way out. “The baseboard is loose in the corner. I pulled it out and there’s a hole in the wall behind it. It has cash in it.”

Sam leaned in and saw a hole about the length and width of a brick. “How much?”

“Hard to tell without pulling it out. It’s in bundles like at the bank, and they’re stacked up inside the wall.”

She extracted a couple of the bundles and two more dropped down into their place. “They’re hundred dollar bills, about fifty in each stack. As she pulled them out, more kept dropping down. It took a few minutes, but when she finished she had thirty-nine stacks.

“About a hundred and ninety-five thousand,” she said. “This might be part of the money Benetti stole. Even if it isn’t, it’s illegal or he wouldn’t have it in the wall.”

“Okay, let’s take it and get out of here.”

He found a shopping bag in the junk room and dumped a bunch of old clothes from it onto the floor. They filled the bag with the money and went out the back door.

Back in the car, Harpo still looked as if in a trance. Sam started the engine and thought about the pictures. Before driving off, he took them out. One snapshot caught his eye. It looked old and worn, as if carried in a wallet for a long time. Two men sat at a table in a bar having a beer. The flash and age had bleached out their faces, but both men had long hair and beards, one dark and one sandy colored. The darker one appeared to be in his mid-twenties, the other several years younger. Despite the difference in coloration, their faces had what appeared to be a family resemblance.

“They’re brothers,” Sam said, holding it up for Simone to see.

“Yeah, and the younger one is Marlon Knox.”

Sam remembered seeing an image of the other man the night before. A thin Chopin seated at a piano, resplendent in a tuxedo, playing to the crowd at the Lincoln Center.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sam drove the car into the bar’s parking lot and pulled into a space on the side where he could see Chopin’s car. The clock digits on the dash registered 6:25 p.m. Two other cars had followed them in and parked close to the entrance, part of the early happy-hour crowd. He turned off the engine and took out his phone, but before he could dial, the phone chirped. Jack Craft’s number flashed on the display.

“Jack, what’s going on?”

“I’m almost back to Miami, and I wondered what you found down there.”

Sam told him about them finding Benetti, but that he didn’t give them anything they could use. “We did learn that Knox has a brother in Iguana Key, though. His name is Chopin Crowne. Owns a bar, and we’re about to go in and roust him.”

“Crowne. Huh,” Jack said.

“You know him?”

“Well, no, I don’t know him, but I remember a movie actress in the eighties named Ava Crowne. She was quite a beauty.”

Sam didn’t remember anyone named Ava Crowne, and didn’t have time to hear Jack reminisce about an old silver-screen heartthrob.

“Let’s talk about this later, Jack. I need to call J.T. and get him over here to help us.”

“Wait, let me finish. Ava Crowne had a fling with our friend the senator. They got caught together in a hotel in Cozumel. It was all over the tabloids for a month or two. Blaine’s wife threatened to leave him, then the buzz died, and I never heard anything else about it. I believe she had a young son at the time.”

“So you’re saying she could be Knox’s mother?” Sam said.

“Maybe. I’ll check it out for you.”

“That would be great. Thanks, Jack.”

“You bet.”

Sam broke the connection and looked up to see Chopin getting into his car.

“This might be easier than we thought,” Simone said. “Maybe he’ll lead us to Knox.”

Chopin backed the car out and headed toward the highway. Sam started the engine and waited a moment before following.

“What was that about Knox’s mother?” Simone asked.

He relayed Jack’s side of the conversation.