by Jack Hardin
“Nearly twenty years. Twenty good years except for the last one.” He took a step toward her, and his eyes narrowed slightly as he continued to assess her. “Do we know each other from somewhere?”
“I don’t believe so.”
But as the words were still leaving her lips, Barry suddenly brightened and snapped his fingers. “St. James City,” he blurted. “You work at The Salty Mangrove.” He shook a finger at her. “You’re… Ellie, right?”
Ellie instantly felt exposed, which, given the furtive circumstances of her visit, was undesired. She didn’t know Barry and didn’t know if he could be trusted. But now she could only concede her identity. “Yes, Ellie.”
“You’re Frank’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Hearing her father’s name spoken caught her emotions off guard. “You knew my dad?”
He chuckled. “Did I know your dad? Sweetie, I played poker with him every Thursday night for nearly a decade. When he wasn’t traveling, the six of us were out at Lee Ackerman’s place in Cape Coral. As a matter of fact,” Barry’s expression softened, “he was driving back home from the game the night he died in that god-awful crash.”
Ellie suddenly wanted to hug this man.
“With you studying overseas all those years, you and I never got a chance to meet. I hated when your sister told me you couldn’t make the funeral. I believe I sent you a sympathy card when you got back home.”
And that was when Ellie realized where she had seen Barry’s name. It was on the front corner of the envelope; the return address. But on the inside, he hadn’t signed it “Barry.” No, it was a nickname of sorts. Muddy? Morty? Then she had it. “You’re Mutt?”
“In the flesh,” he grinned. “I don’t really ever get down to St. James City. Most of my time not spent here is out on Boca Grande. But I did see you behind the counter at The Salty Mangrove once. Would have said hello, but I was late getting on a charter, and the bar was slammed.
“Thank you for the card,” she said. “I do remember getting it. It meant a lot.”
“Your father, he was one of the good guys. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss him something terrible. We all do.”
Ellie couldn’t tell Barry the truth concerning her father’s car accident that night. So she said the only thing she could. “I miss him too.”
“Well, come on,” he said. “Let’s go inside and talk.” Barry led the way out from under the pavilion to the stairs. As she ascended, Ellie wondered why there wasn’t a rail on the left. As they neared the landing, a nervous lizard skittered off a step and flung himself off into a cluster of high-standing hibiscus. Barry opened the side door to his home and went in first. Ellie followed behind him and entered a small kitchen that smelled of fresh pineapple. A window unit was pouring in a generous stream of air conditioning that was welcome against her hot skin. Barry wiped a line of sweat from his cheek. “Get you something to drink? It might be January, but someone seems to have forgotten to tell the sun.”
“Water would be great. Thank you.”
Barry offered for her to take a seat at a tiny table nestled against the wall. He grabbed a cup from the dish rack next to his sink. A filter was attached to the end of the faucet, and he flipped a nozzle and filled the cup before setting it in front of Ellie. “My ice maker quit on me a couple of months back. Haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet.”
“This is fine. Thank you.”
Barry left the kitchen for a moment and disappeared into another room. When he returned, he sat down across from Ellie and slid his hand across the table. When he opened it, Ellie heard a thin metal click on the formica. Looking down she saw a large gold coin. She picked it up. It was a solid gold poker chip. Engraved on it were the words “Life is no different than poker. Go all in.” It was followed by the initials F.O.
“Frank gave that to me,” Barry said. “In fact, he gave us all one, not a few weeks before he was killed by that idiot truck driver.”
The coin was thick and had to be a couple of ounces. Six of these would have cost her father a fair amount. She smiled at the thought. He lived what he taught her and Katie from a young age, that a rich life was synonymous with having good friends. Ellie set the chip down and gently slid it across the table. “I’m glad you have that,” she said. “That’s quite special.”
Barry folded his hands on top of his manatee-sized midsection. Long gray hairs stood out along his shoulders and arms and danced in the flow of the air conditioning. “Now,” he said, “you didn’t come all the way over here to reminisce about your father. What’s your interest in Breakwater?”
Even the good guys could break bad, but Ellie decided that if her father had once trusted this man, then she would too. She spent the next several minutes filling Barry in on Nick, the email, and her brief conversation with Avi. “To be honest,” she finished. “I’m just trying to sketch an outline. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” Barry said. “I hate to tell you that I don’t know anything about the new ownership. They took over after I left.”
“How do you mean?”
“If you’ve talked with Avi, then he may have told you that Breakwater used to be called Garwood Construction. It was never a huge company, but we kept thirty folks or so on the payroll. Beyond that, of course, we had our subs. John—John Garwood—owned it for as long as I was there. He hired me on just a couple of years after he started the company. A good ol’ boy, John was. Cared a lot about his employees and treated all of us like family. When he decided to hang up his cleats, he sold it off to David Tolson and, well, that’s when things went off the rails. John, you see, had a specific way of doing things. A standard, and it gave the company a certain reputation among suppliers, subs, and customers. David Tolson was a project manager with the company for nearly half the time I was there. Ten years, I guess. Smart guy. Got things done well and on time, if not ahead of schedule. But after he bought the company from John, it went down faster than a sick seagull. Turns out he didn’t have the business sense we all thought he had. He’s the one who changed the business name to Breakwater. Which was foolish in itself because everyone knew the company by Garwood.”
“So he sold the business too?”
“After John retired and left it in Tolson’s hands, I stayed around for another year before leaving. He sold it a little while later. Don’t know to who.”
“What did you do for them?”
“Bean counter.” He tapped his head with a forefinger. “I love numbers. They have an inherent beauty, like that of any music, if not more. Problem was, the company’s numbers weren’t looking so beautiful. The worse they got, the angrier I became.”
Ellie took a sip of her water as she vaguely recalled a principle about not upsetting the company accountant. “Angry?” she asked.
“Oh yes. See, when John sold Breakwater to Tolson part of the agreement was that I would get a small stake in the company. That was his way of thanking me for sticking with him over the years. However, the finer print had it so I wasn’t able to cash out of my shares until at least three years after the transition. That clause was there to make sure everything remained stable and the company kept its cash flow. But by the next year, there wasn’t much left. I’m in the back office working through the numbers, and every week I’m seeing more and more stuff I don’t like. We were paying our subs way too much, over-ordering materials that were never used or returned. And no one was playing the part of the bulldog, making sure invoices were paid in a timely manner.”
“So you left?”
“So I left,” he repeated. “My pops taught me how to make hobby art years ago. So I decided to start doing it for income. I spent too much time behind a desk anyway.” Barry tossed his meaty hands. “This is the life I was meant to live.”
Barry’s home was at least a mile from the nearest person. With no road access and an unsullied view of the sunset every night, there were certainly worse place
s to live. Ellie asked, “Do you know what happened to the company after that?”
He nodded. “About a year after I bailed, Tolson ended up selling it to someone else. I don’t think he got much for it. There wasn’t much left. Last I heard he was back to framing houses for a developer up in Jacksonville.”
She said, “I couldn’t find a website on them. Seems a little unusual for a company serving the general public.”
“I suppose. Unless they’re serving government contracts or won a large bid of some kind. They may not market to the general public.”
She took a sip of her water before continuing. “Avi mentioned that the new ownership asked him to invoice for work he didn’t do.”
Barry frowned easily at that. “Really? I don’t think Avi is the kind of guy who would do something like that.”
“He said he didn’t. But other subs he knew were asked to as well. Any ideas why?”
“Well, I can only think of one, really.” He hesitated. “You need to understand that I’m not saying this is true, but if they were testing the waters and seeing who was willing to over-invoice, they might have been looking to wash some dead presidents.”
“Money laundering?”
“It happens a lot. And in construction, there are a lot of trades, a lot of different kind of work that can be done. Getting subs to invoice for more than they charge and then giving them a little kickback on the side is a creative way to launder dirty money. Did your friend Nick do any work for them?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m not sure though.” And suddenly the lines were starting to fill in. With a dull pencil perhaps, but at least now she had something to work with. Nick was new to the area, having moved to Pine Island only three months ago. If someone from Breakwater had poked him to see if he might be willing to over-invoice them, and if Nick said “no” with enough gusto, if he threatened to out them, there could be the motive.
But then a sickening thought swooped through Ellie’s mind like a dark bird dispatching appalling lies. What if Nick was actually working with them? What if he needed a little extra cash of his own and massaged his invoices? And what if something finally went wrong? She pushed the thought away but was troubled that she couldn’t rid herself of it altogether.
Barry shook his finger at Ellie. “But you know, it’s funny you should bring up Breakwater. I’ve got a fabricator—Tim Ellis—that I sell most of my welding art to. He offloads it retail from there. But he’s got a shop in east Fort Myers, out in the old industrial district. Last week I took some finished pieces over to him.” Parenthetically, Barry said, “I’ve got a truck I keep parked about three miles from here, over at a dock in Placida. That’s how I get things to and from here. Whenever I drop my stuff off with Tim, we usually end up sharing a small case of Miller Lite and shooting the breeze for hours. Sometimes I don’t leave until ten or eleven. A couple weeks ago I left late again and saw an F-250 pull out of the old fire station. The one they quit using years ago. The truck had the Breakwater logo on its door. Kinda strange.”
“Why was that strange?” Ellie asked.
“Because it didn’t look like it belonged. There were other cars parked along the curb, and one followed the truck out. They were all black, with dark windows. A couple men were standing around smoking, and they were wearing leather jackets.”
“Maybe someone had the work truck on personal time.”
“Yeah,” Barry said. “Could be, but I looked into the building when I passed, and it looked like a brawl of some kind was just breaking up. I don’t know, something just didn’t seem right. Can’t really explain it.”
Ellie stood up and for the first time, really noted the inside of the odd building. She spent a curious childhood going through all the estuaries and coves off Gasparilla Sound and could not recall ever seeing this place. It wasn’t something easily forgotten. “Did you build this?” she asked.
Barry let out a spirited laugh that brought him to lean against the table for support. “No, sweetie. I didn’t build it. Believe it or not, an old chicken farmer from Pasco County sold off his farm to one of those conglomerates about ten years ago. He moved out here and built this place. Got about four or five years in before he had a stroke and had to move to a nursing home. Can you believe no one wanted to buy it?” He tossed her a wink. “So when I retired this place was going for a steal. I keep meaning to paint it a dark blue or green but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. So for now, it’s still ‘The Egg.’ It’s not the coolest place to entertain, but as you can imagine, I don’t get a lot of folks coming out here. Joe Benson, he’s on marine patrol with the Sheriff’s Office. He’ll stop by every now and then. And then Brenda Tate, she keeps on thinking she’ll convince me to leave here and join her over in Punta Gorda.” He smirked. “But I’m not going anywhere. Not even for a looker like Brenda Tate.”
Barry walked Ellie down to the dock and gave her an open invitation to come back and see him. She left thinking that she would like that very much. As she ran her boat back to St. James City, she did so beneath a small cloud of disappointment. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping to hear from Barry. “Oh, of course, I know who killed your friend. And I can also tell you why.” Whoever sent her the email appeared to be somewhat inefficient when it came to leads in an apparent murder investigation. Still, she owed the email a response. After that, seeing as she had no other plans for tonight, Ellie decided to take a drive into Fort Myers and check out the old fire station.
Chapter Fourteen
The doorbell didn’t work. His knuckles tingled as he rapped on the door. He waited a half minute before it flung open and revealed a man in an oversized t-shirt and baggy jeans. Felipe acknowledged him with a quick thrust of his chin. “Benito. Hey.”
“Whoa, Felipe! How are you, man? It’s been a quick minute.” The men drew close and clapped each other on the back. “What are you doing here?”
“I was around. Thought I’d come by. What you been up to these days?”
“Man, just chillin’, you know? Come in, come in.” Felipe stepped into the small house and followed him back into a dirty kitchen where old dishes were stacked high in the sink and the garbage can was spilling Taco Bell wrappers and used napkins onto the floor. Benito reached into the cabinet and pulled out a plastic food container. He produced a couple of joints and handed one to Felipe. “Just got this stuff last night. They’re calling it Purple Tsunami. You had it before?”
“No.” They lit up, and Benito led them into a side room with thick brown carpet and a couple sagging couches. The television was set to Maury, where a panel of women was getting ready to tell their boyfriends that they had been simultaneously dating their fathers.
Both men sat in silence, the drug starting to hit their blood and flood their minds as they watched women in tank tops and men with mullets start to yell at each other. “You really watch this basura?” Felipe said slowly.
“Oh, yeah. It’s loco. They go out and find all the crazies and get them to come on the show. Yesterday, they had on a bunch of people that looked like they were from that movie I watched when I was a kid.” He said nothing else as if that cleared everything up.
“What movie?” Felipe finally asked.
“You know, that one with Johnny Depp. Where he plays that creepy guy who makes all the chocolates.”
“You mean Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. The little people in that movie. That’s what they looked like.”
“An Oompa Loompa? You’re telling me that they all looked like Oompa Loompas?”
“Yeah. Just like them.”
“So they were midgets?”
“I think it’s not cool to use that word anymore.”
Felipe rolled his now bloodshot eyes. “A little person then?”
“Yeah, yeah. They were all little persons.” Benito chuckled. “One of them was all mad because he was saying he identified as a tall person.” On the television, two women were now throwing
chairs at each other as a boyfriend and a security guard tried to hold them back.
“By the way,” Felipe said, “the old one was better.”
“What old one?”
“The old Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
“There’s an old one? Before the Johnny Depp one?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“For real? Is it any good?”
“Better. The Oompa Loompas look really dope in that one.”
Maury went to break, and a commercial for a do-it-yourself DNA test appeared on the screen. “So where you working now?” Benito asked. “I’m still down at my brother’s car shop.”
Felipe took another hit off his joint. He closed his eyes and felt the room fall away from him. He felt lighter now, like he was floating or on top of something that was floating. He couldn’t tell which. “I got a good thing going. Been at it for a while now.”
“So what is it?”
As it turned out, Purple Tsunami was far more potent than Felipe had anticipated. Maury Povich was now in the living room with them, floating in the air just in front of him. And it was also potent enough to loosen a tongue that, had his mind been unaltered, would have never spoken his next words. “I help some chicas get into another line of work.”
“Another line of work? You mean like stripping?”
“No. Think about it like this.” Felipe put the joint back to his lips, and hazy bursts of smoke escaped his mouth as spoke. “You’re rich. I mean, like you could buy your own city kind of rich. But you live in a different country. Maybe Frankfurt or Hong Kong or Rio. But you’re in Miami for business and want to have a little fun.”
Benito asked, “So you’re recruiting hoes? I guess if you got big money clients, then the girls get paid a lot more than they would at the clubs, huh?”
“No, no. You don’t get it.” Felipe looked knowingly at Benito. “We don’t pay them.”
Benito’s own circuits were working slower, but his eyes finally lifted in understanding. “Oh. Damn, man.” He whistled low. “I’ll bet you’re makin’ the good money. How’d you get into doing that?”
