The Quick Adios (Times Six) (36 page)

“I don’t have to know that. I don’t have to be a football expert. Just a hoist jockey working overtime.”

“He’ll probably be in a bronze Hyundai,” I said, “parked a good distance from the bank’s security cameras. Mispronounce his name at first. He’ll jump all over that, give us an extra minute or two. Talk about your forklift career.”

“Didn’t you say that somebody might be trying to screw with the criminal?”

“Beth and I thought so. You don’t, by chance, have your weapon…”

“Under your seat,” said Sam, “but that’s a good idea. You and Malcolm can bring his car the long way around.”

“Am I going to protect you with your gun?”

“I’m not Wyatt Earp. If he has a weapon, I’d rather depend on your aim than my quickness. You and Malcolm drive around and south on Kennedy, pull in the row just beyond that line of utility trucks that’s always there. Put up the hood, mess with the distributor cap. Do something to make yourself credible. Park at an odd angle as if you just broke down.”

“Hell,” I said. “I’m going to park where I have a clear shot.”

We pulled into the shopping center and rolled over the speed bumps. My phone buzzed: Beth, finally. It took fewer than ten seconds to tell her what was going down.

“I hope this is good, Alex,” she said. “God, I hope this is good. Don’t let him out of your sight!”

She ended the call.

“She’s rolling,” I said. “There’s Malcolm over there, getting out of that Subaru. Let’s try one more thing.” I called Sam’s number and we both heard it ring. He took the call and dropped his phone in his Velcro-flap shirt pocket.

He said, “The code word is, ‘Oh shit.’”

His voice came through to my phone, at low volume but clearly. I left the Bronco and started toward Malcolm Mason. Sam drove toward the rear entrance to the big bank’s drive-through slots.

Sam’s voice came through my phone: “Wave if you can hear me.”

I waved. His taillights flashed twice.

“Here we go…” he said.

I explained the confusion to Malcolm the best I could while I monitored what I barely heard from the phone in Sam’s shirt pocket. On my directions, Malcolm drove east out of the Key Plaza parking area, turned right and headed toward the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority Building, south of the bank’s drive-through. Through the phone to my ear I could tell that Sam already had begun to speak with Fonteneau. This was happening too fast.

I heard: “Right, pal. Are you Fontaine?”

The muffled response to Sam’s question came through faintly.

Sam again: something about meeting Mason five minutes ago.

Now, more clearly, Fonteneau: “I don’t know who the hell you are. What is this, a rip-off attempt?”

“Fuck that,” said Sam. “I wouldn’t know your name if Malcolm hadn’t told it to me. Why would he want to rip you off when he can just sell you the boat? Here’s my wallet. You can see who I am.”

We drove past them on Kennedy, perhaps sixty yards away. I watched Sam hand his wallet to Fonteneau.

Fonteneau said, “Why isn’t the boat being put in the water right now?”

“I don’t have the keys to the hoist,” said Sam. “I don’t know which boat it is, and when I work on Sundays I get paid cash in advance. Mr. Mason didn’t explain all that to you?”

“Am I paying you or is he?” said Fonteneau.

“I don’t care,” said Sam. “It’s all green on one side and black on the other.”

Malcolm angle-parked farther away than I would have liked, but we were stuck. We couldn’t move again without drawing attention. Our view of the two men was partially obscured by a decorative line of sabal palms native to the Keys but not to that parking lot. Sam, for a moment, looked toward the palms, allowing himself to be distracted by a scampering cat. His chat with Fonteneau had stopped, or our phones had lost contact. I was down between parked vehicles, creeping closer to Fonteneau with Sam’s gun in my hand.

I heard the Ducati before I saw it. Beth pulled her motorcycle into the drive-through and attempted to open the night deposit drop box. She rattled it roughly, gave up, stopped her engine and let the cycle rest on its kickstand. Pulling off her helmet, she walked toward a cashier’s window and peered around inside.

Pretending to read an off-hours number, she tapped her phone.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I crouched, put Sam on hold to take the call and said, “I’m in the line of utility pickups to your south.”

I watched her look at her phone and shake her head, as if not getting an answer. I switched back to listening to Sam.

“Ma’am, it’s not like a FedEx box,” yelled Sam. “You might need a key.”

Sam Wheeler walked toward Beth, offering to help with the drop box. In my peripheral vision I saw two city squad cars pull into the lot from the direction of Office Max. Then two more blurs to my right.

“Thank you, but it’s that other man…” She slipped her phone into the carrying case on her belt and turned toward Fonteneau with her pistol drawn.

Bobby Fuck No had seen the squad cars and was one step ahead of Beth. His gun was aimed right at her chest. I raised Sam’s weapon and aimed at Fonteneau’s back, began to squeeze the trigger.

I heard a gunshot and a shrill woman’s voice. “Mister Triple Deal, like your slimy old father. Now you die like him.” Then another gunshot. “There’s your suicide, cheap shit.”

Robert Fonteneau went down ass-first on the concrete then toppled, dead on the spot.

I heard a Taser pop and a man yelled, “Clear.”

Sam’s voice came through my phone: “Oh, shit.”

“What the fuck just happened?” yelled Beth. She had crouched alert, her weapon pointed upward and held with both hands.

I ran closer, still ready to dive to the pavement. Near the Kennedy Drive sidewalk I saw Officer Darrin Marsh waving a Taser, its wires dangling. Next to his police car was Carlton Gamble’s silver BMW X3, and on the ground, in spasms, then trembling and whimpering, was Christi Caldwell. She had dropped the weapon she had used to shoot Fonteneau.

Beth stood and ran to Christi, kicked away the gun then stopped to catch her breath, assess the scene. I had run close enough to hear the ring of her cell phone. She looked and took the call. “Positive?” she said. “Thank you,” and hung up.

“Good Taser shot, Officer Marsh,” she said, putting her phone away. “Not just good but great, and timely, thank you. That woman needs to wait right there for the EMTs. Please cuff her to that sign post.”

Sirens approached us from at least two directions, perhaps three. Chatter came from three or four compact shoulder-snapped radios. Marsh and I looked at each other without speaking while Beth stepped away to speak quietly with a lieutenant and three other officers. With a nodding of heads they gathered, surrounded Darrin Marsh for an impromptu sidewalk ceremony. Marsh stood in the middle, puzzled, his broad chest huge in contrast to Beth’s head.

“Okay, JD, Carson and Steve,” she said, “you’ll be getting letters in your upcoming fitness reports. This thing could have gone messy, so I appreciate your quick response to my backup request. Officer Marsh, a permanent commendation will be attached to your file for action in defense of a fellow officer. As you know, we have a procedural formality since you fired a weapon in the line of duty. You’ll have forty-eight hours’ relief of duty and the mandatory shrink chat, but that’s it.” She smiled and continued, “If you’ll make yourself available for a few pats on the back… I noted your wide stance and two-handed grip, like they taught us all in school. You didn’t burn your wrists on the backfire, did you?”

“Backfire?” Baffled by the question, Darrin Marsh extended his arms and turned his palms upward. “There’s no backfire on a Taser, detective.”

“There is this time,” said Beth. She and the lieutenant snapped their handcuffs onto his wrists. One of the other officers knelt to clamp on an ankle chain. “I don’t expect this to get ugly, Marsh, because if it does, I’ll be the first one to shoot you. You’re under arrest for the murder of Greg Pulver.”

“No goddamn way,” said Marsh. “No fucking way.”

“We discovered traces of Greg Pulver’s blood on the underside of your cruiser’s trunk lid. You did a fine job bleaching out the trunk, Marsh, but you failed to realize that blood can splatter upward when a body shifts. Even when it’s been dead for a while. That was the call I just got, about the blood match.”

The first group of EMTs hoisted Christi Caldwell onto a stretcher. They wheeled her past our group just as Beth Watkins began reciting the Miranda Warning.

“You the cop that killed the wrong dude?” said Christi, laughing at Marsh. “Your girlfriend was fucking my husband, not the boy.”

They took away Robert Fonteneau’s body, then found a briefcase in his car with seven grand, a pistol and three nautical charts for Florida’s west coast. There was no forty grand. He was going to rip off Malcolm Mason, perhaps kill him for the boat.

“How did Christi Caldwell happen to show up?” I said to Beth.

“I went to Gamble’s home on Von Phister to question him about his car and his clients. Driving up his street, I saw the X3 parked about ten houses away from his and, for an instant, saw movement. Someone was hunkered down in the front seat. I ignored it, stopped and parked on the sidewalk and knocked on Gamble’s door. I’d been inside for maybe five minutes, learning that Gamble had loaned his vehicle to Mrs. Caldwell, when I got your message about the bank. I drove the wheels off that Ducati to get here. Somehow she kept up with me.”

“You let her follow,” I said.

“Maybe so.”

Two other city detectives showed up to deal with Darrin Marsh. The crime scene team had yellow-taped the area and the city’s official police photographer was hard at work.

“You brought this together, Alex, but now it’s time,” said Beth. “Show me a badge or get the hell out of here.”

I got the hell out, asked Malcolm Mason for a ride. We didn’t say much until he turned into Dredgers Lane. I wasn’t sure how to bring up the lost boat sale.

I opened the car door and said, “We needed to catch this bastard.”

“No problem, Alex,” he said. “You probably saved my life.”

“Too much drama, Malcolm. No matter what, we both suffered short-term memory loss.”

Mason looked at me, confused.

I said, “What four thousand dollars?”

He grinned, shrugged and nodded. “I’ve got plenty more boats to photograph, whenever you’re ready.”

I felt like I’d been in a plane wreck.

Or watched a gunfight.

I went inside, called the Aristocrats, said a simple “Thank you,” drank two beers and went to bed.

T
he next morning, after only thirty minutes of daylight, it was 72 and sunny. I had planned to sleep late but birds woke me, or maybe the fresh air fluttering the crotons and wafting through screens. Perhaps I emerged early to make sure that the past seven days were really behind me. The radio promised an imminent cold snap, nights in the fifties and days only in the high sixties, but I was comfortable for the moment. If Key West was a board game, this kind of morning would cancel out three days of flooded streets, power outages and sewer-work street detours within a block of the house.

I was barefoot in fishing shorts and a T-shirt, forsaking my usual Bustelo for a coffee called La Llave suggested by a recent Havana transplant named Mercedes. I was using a dinner knife to open a week’s worth of mail that had stacked up on my porch table.

Marnie Dunwoody’s headline story about the shooting of murder suspect Robert Fonteneau and the arrest of Officer Darrin Marsh dominated the
Citizen
’s front page. As she had promised to do, Marnie had taken credit for one of my exterior photos of the ten-unit Tideline condominium building. Banished to below-the-fold was the paper’s story about over-zealous post-Playoff game celebrations downtown, and the arrest of six men for group-urinating on a losing team’s jersey in the middle of the intersection of Duval and Greene. I was in no hurry to read the articles.

I heard a vehicle drive slowly down the lane. I didn’t even look up. Nothing could be worse than the treachery and violence already in my rear-view mirror. I heard a car door shut in front of the house, then a second door. I gave up and looked.

Liska stood back by the lane’s pavement, his arms crossed, a stern expression on his face. Manatee County Detective Glenn Steffey approached the porch, a badge held high for visibility’s sake.

“Why are you waving your authority at me, detective?” I said. “I remember you from way back thirty-six hours ago.”

He stopped walking six feet from the porch door. “If you look closely you’ll see that it’s not my badge, Rutledge. It’s yours.”

“I would sing for you the Buddy Holly classic, ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ except I can’t stand my voice in the morning.”

Steffey opened the door, walked in and sat. He placed the Manatee County Junior Deputy badge next to my coffee cup. “You were wrong about Edwin Torres being Justin Beeson’s son, but not too far off the mark.”

“Coffee?” I said.

“Had mine at four a.m., thanks,” he said. “Beeson’s first wife, the murdered one, was Edwin’s older sister, and he and his family have held for years what they thought was evidence of Beeson’s guilt. It was information her family kept to themselves because they were afraid of bringing up unresolved immigration issues.”

“Have you arrested Justin?” I said.

Steffey shook his head. “Unfortunately, the evidence was bogus. It was similar to a tip we received way back when, and our office disproved it. It’s sad, but we may never solve that case, unlike the current one which I wrapped up forty minutes ago.”

“Edwin’s revenge—or attempted revenge?”

“Right,” said Steffey. “Except it’s far more complicated and greedy.”

“Did the twin sister, Sonya, push Edwin to kill Amanda?”

Glenn nodded but raised an index finger to make a point. “Anya researched the previous dead wife, Maria Rodriguez. I suspect you already know that name. Anya concluded that Edwin was Justin’s brother-in-law and told her sister. Sonya crafted the plan for the four of them to kill Amanda and take over Justin’s world. Each had a different motive but, as I said, the fundamental stimulus was greed.”