Survival Is a Dying Art

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I can do that. I’ll reach out to Venable and get back to you.”

  While I waited for Frank and Wagon, I went back to Venable’s operation at Trader Tom’s. Was there anything else I could find about the booth that might help with the investigation into Venable?

  I turned to my computer and combed through reviews on places like Yelp, looking for customers complaining about counterfeit goods, as well as articles in the local press and our own internal reports. Just in case something new had popped up, I went back to Google and searched for Trader Tom’s.

  The first link that popped up was a headline from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. “Margate man dies after motorcycle wipes out on the Sawgrass Expressway.”

  Why did that come up with a search for Trader Tom’s? I clicked through to the article. The dead man was identified as Lawrence Kane, 28. “According to friends, Kane was returning from a part-time job at a call center, where he worked a late-night shift. He previously worked as a barista, a store clerk and at Trader Tom’s flea market.”

  Whoa. Could Lawrence Kane be Larry, the guy I’d spoken to at Venable’s booth? I didn’t have anything more to go on than a hunch, but my spidey-senses were tingling.

  There wasn’t much more to the article beyond some statistics about motorcycle deaths. Kane hadn’t been wearing a helmet; Florida law didn’t require one. I imagined him taking down his man-bun and his long hair flowing behind him as he raced down the highway, and I shivered.

  A search on Lawrence Kane through the FBI database came up empty. He’d either been a model citizen, or he’d evaded arrest. I knew one of the bartenders at Lazy Dick’s, and that he had not protected his list of Facebook friends. I flipped through page after page of mostly men until I found a contact of his called Larry Kane.

  Unfortunately, Larry’s profile was pretty flimsy—a photo that focused more on his abs than his face, and a couple of check-ins at random bars. But evidence was building that I had flirted with a man who died soon after.

  If I was right, then Kane’s death was an additional piece of information in the dossier I was building on Jesse Venable. Maybe an irrelevant one, but I owed it to our brief connection to follow up on Kane’s death and make sure it didn’t have anything to do with my case.

  I called my contact at the Broward County morgue, an assistant medical examiner named Maria Fleitas, and asked her to send me a photo of the dead man. “Not going to be pretty,” she said. “His face was messed up. You should come over and see him.”

  I had been to the morgue too many times already, but I agreed. I hopped into my Mini Cooper: green, like my name, though if I said anything to Venable it would be that I’d chosen the color of money.

  I followed a winding local road until I could get onto I-75, which ran beside our office in Miramar. It was a hot, humid July day, with ominous thunderclouds forming out over the Everglades. I got stuck behind a yard company truck zooming down the highway, and leaves and branches and bits of debris kept flying off the back of the truck at me.

  I was glad when I could zip past the truck, turn east on I-595, and put my pedal to the metal. It seemed like wherever I wanted to go I had to take one highway or another, but at least it was better than getting stuck in stop and go traffic on local roads.

  The Broward County Medical Examiner’s office was headquartered in a collection of single-story buildings and trailers next to a sheriff’s station, a few miles off the highway beyond the animal shelter and a Tri-Rail station.

  Dr. Fleitas was a short Latina with shoulder-length dark hair, bangs, and funky red-framed glasses. She wore light-green scrubs under a lab coat with her name embroidered on the left breast. “Always a pleasure to see you, Agent Green,” she said. “Though this time I already have an ID on my client. What’s your interest in Mr. Kane?”

  I could have said that I’d flirted with him at his job, but I didn’t know Dr. Fleitas well enough to joke around with her. “I bought some counterfeit merchandise from a booth at Trader Tom’s last week. I have a feeling Mr. Kane was the guy working there.”

  She didn’t ask any further details, and I didn’t volunteer any. I followed her to a refrigerated cooler, where she opened the door and bent down to check the ID on one bed-like shelf. Then she slid the shelf out and pulled down the sheet covering the face.

  Larry Kane wasn’t handsome any more. The right side of his face had been scraped on the pavement and though the bleeding had obviously stopped by then his face looked like it had been run through a meat grinder.

  “This the guy?” Dr. Fleitas asked.

  I gulped. His wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen, but he was the first I’d flirted with. “It is. An accidental death?”

  “Not my decision to make. A detective with the BSO’s Traffic Homicide Unit is on the case.” The Broward Sheriff’s Office investigated crimes in unincorporated parts of the county.

  She turned to a nearby computer and after tapping for a moment or two looked up at me. “The detective’s name is Chancy Pierre. Right now there’s no official verdict. But if you know something about Kane that might indicate it’s not an accident, you ought to discuss it with Detective Pierre. I’ll email you his contact information.”

  I said that I would, and thanked Dr. Fleitas for her time. When I got out to my car, I pulled up the information she’d sent me, and called Detective Pierre. I introduced myself and said, “What can you tell me about the motorcycle accident on the Sawgrass Expressway that killed Lawrence Kane?”

  “What’s the Bureau’s interest in Kane’s death?”

  “Can we meet somewhere and I’ll explain?”

  “Just about to get my lunch,” he said. “You know Big Poppa’s Subs on Griffin Road west of the Turnpike?”

  “I’m at the morgue now, so I’m sure I can find it.”

  “See you there in fifteen then,” he said.

  10 – Daily Entertainment

  When I walked into the sub shop, a tall man with ebony skin and a shaved head hailed me. “You must be Agent Green,” he said. “Detective Pierre.”

  He had a light accent and a strong grip. “What’s good here?” I asked.

  “You can’t go wrong with a sub,” he said. “They slice the meat for you, and all the toppings are fresh.”

  My mouth was already watering. “I haven’t had a good hoagie since I moved here.”

  “Hoagie? You must be from Philadelphia.”

  “Scranton. But I lived in Philly for a couple of years after college.” We talked casually as we waited for our sandwiches. He had lived in New York for a while, visited Philadelphia, liked the Liberty Bell.

  I paid for both the sandwiches and our drinks and we walked over to a flimsy plastic table by the wall. “So,” he said. “Mr. Lawrence Kane, motorcyclist, deceased.”

  I told him about my experience at Trader Tom’s. “There was a fight between a vendor and a customer at a neighboring booth. The customer was angry that he’d been sold fake sneakers, and eventually he punched the vendor.”

  “Heard about that,” Pierre said. “Ended up with an assault charge. Got to be careful where you shop these days.”

  “Mr. Kane was right there, and he looked pretty unhappy about what had happened. He shut the booth down right after that.”

  “And?” Pierre asked, between bites of his sub.

  “I wondered if Mr. Kane challenged his boss over the counterfeit goods and wanted to quit,” I said. “That maybe his accident wasn’t an accident, if you know what I mean.”

  I took advantage of the time he put his thoughts together to bite into the sandwich, which I still insisted on calling a hoagie. Rare roast beef, bright green shreds of lettuce, a juicy slice of beefsteak tomato. A sprinkle of black olive bits and the tang of salt over it all. Heaven on a long roll.

  “Sadly, I do,” Pierre said. “I don’t have much to tell you. It wasn’t raining and the highway wasn’t slick, so it’s unlikely he slid out of control. I tracked the 911 call that reported the crash,
” Pierre said. “The man who called it in was traveling southbound, in the opposite direction of the motorcycle. He was the only one in his lane, and he saw the single headlight of the bike approaching, and a pair of headlights right behind it.”

  “He saw the accident?”

  “He says that he saw the motorcycle veer off the road and the car behind it continue forward. He couldn’t stop because there was no way to get over to the other lane, so he called 911.”

  “I assume he didn’t have any information on the car.”

  “Can’t even say if it was a car or an SUV,” he said. “He was going seventy miles an hour and he was past the scene very quickly.”

  “Was the scene consistent with an accident?”

  “I reviewed the skid pattern and checked the tires of the bike. My best educated guess is that a vehicle changed lanes in front of him, sending him into the skid. But without witnesses I can’t say whether that was intentional or accidental.”

  “Have you spoken with any friends or family? Was he a careless rider? He wasn’t wearing a helmet, right?”

  “Not required in Florida,” he said. “I spoke with his parents in a suburb outside Chicago. They were heartbroken, of course. His father said that Kane had an accident when he was much younger and that made him a very careful rider. His roommate agreed with that, said Kane would never ride while intoxicated and so on.”

  “I’d like to talk to the roommate,” I said.

  “His name is Paul Snyder, and he works at the same call center, lives off Commercial Boulevard between Sunrise and Tamarac. You can probably catch him now before he leaves for work.”

  Pierre texted me Snyder’s phone number. “The owner of the booth is a guy named Jesse Venable,” I said. “He’s the subject of an ongoing Bureau investigation, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t approach him until I give you the go-ahead.”

  “I have no reason to speak with him until you dig up a connection.”

  We ate our sandwiches and Pierre told me a bit more about how he investigated traffic homicides. Then I walked out to my car and called Paul Snyder. I introduced myself and asked if I could speak with him about Larry Kane.

  “I’m really broken up about this,” he said. “No way could this be an accident. I’m glad somebody’s looking into it.”

  I arranged to meet him at the condo he’d shared with Kane in a half hour. As I drove there, I wondered what Larry Kane did after he shut the booth down. Did he complain to his boss, maybe ask for extra money because of the hazardous conditions? How could that lead to his death?

  How could any of that have led to an intentional attack on him as he rode home from his other job? There was no logic I could follow. I was accustomed to the structure behind a balance sheet. Revenue minus cost plus expenses equals profit or loss. Numbers made sense when you looked at how they related to each other.

  You could pull each entry out of a balance sheet and see how it affected the bottom line. This was more like a jigsaw puzzle. All I could do was rely on my instinct to lead me to additional pieces that might help me to figure out what the picture would be when all the pieces were in place.

  The address Snyder gave me was in a run-down complex of apartments linked by exterior catwalks, between a car repair shop and a small strip shopping center. It didn’t look like the kind of place where a good-looking young gay guy would live.

  An ambulance was parked in front of building 12, where Kane and Snyder lived, and my heart seized up. Was I too late to talk to Snyder? Had something happened to him, too?

  An elderly woman in a wheelchair sat in the shade on the first-floor walkway and stared at me as I approached the building under a brutally hot sun. Two other elderly women stood on the second-story catwalk chatting. It was marginally cooler in the shade, but the elevator was tied up and I had to climb four flights of exterior stairs.

  I was relieved to see the EMTs wheeling a stretcher out of a third-floor apartment. Too bad for whoever was on it, but at least it wasn’t Paul Snyder.

  The guy who answered my knock was much older than I expected, at least fifty, skinny, with thinning hair.

  “Come on in,” Snyder said. The apartment was as cold as a meat locker, which was a delightful contrast to the heat outside. “You saw our daily entertainment, I guess.”

  “The ambulance?”

  “It’s what they do here. The vultures cluster along the catwalk every time the EMTs show up, wondering whose ticket was up.”

  I followed him into the living room, where the sofa was covered in plastic. “You lived here long?” I asked, as I sat.

  “It was my mother’s place, and I inherited it when she died last year,” he said. He shrugged. “It’s not great, but it’s paid off. I thought I could start over again down here, but I never finished college and I can’t work outside in this heat, so the best job I could find was this part-time gig at the call center. They only give me twenty-eight hours a week so they don’t have to pay benefits. It’s lousy money, too, and it means I have to live close to the bone. I met Larry at work and when he needed a place to live, I rented him the second bedroom.”

  I was trying to use my gaydar to determine Snyder’s sexuality, and his relationship to Kane, but all the signs were coming up that they were just roommates.

  “What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  “Good guy. Quiet. When he first moved in, I told him I had two rules. If he wanted to do drugs, he had to do it outside. Same with guys. He wanted to get into somebody’s pants, he had to do it somewhere else.”

  “You didn’t mind that he was gay?”

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Snyder said. “I don’t swing that way, but then, I haven’t swung any way in a couple of decades.”

  TMI, I thought, but then so was most of what Snyder had said. He seemed like the kind of lonely guy you run into at bars sometimes, who have no one in their lives so they’ve lost the art of ordinary conversation.

  “You said that he was a careful motorcyclist,” I said, trying to shift the conversation back to what I needed to know and away from Paul Snyder’s nonexistent sex life.

  “Absolutely. He was fanatical about it. Hated to ride the bike in the rain. Wouldn’t go above the speed limit.”

  “So you don’t think what happened to him was an accident?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Did he have any enemies? Anybody ever threaten him?”

  “Not that I know. Like I said, he was quiet. And we didn’t talk that much. After an eight-hour shift on the phones, you kind of want to just shut up, you know?”

  I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway. “What about his other job? At Trader Tom’s?”

  “Like I said, it’s hard to get two nickels to rub together at the call center, so he took this other job on the weekends. He seemed to like it.”

  “Did he ever say anything about the stuff he sold?”

  “What do you mean? Wallets and purses?”

  “Mostly knockoffs,” I said.

  “Yeah, he wasn’t happy about that. He’d had some arguments with his boss, and he was ready to quit, and he told me that something happened at the market that made him realize it was time to go.”

  So the incident I’d witnessed had meant something to Larry Kane. Good. “So he quit?”

  Snyder nodded. “His boss wasn’t happy about it. He and Larry got into a shouting match on the phone.”

  His mouth opened wide and he stared at me. “You don’t think his boss killed him, do you? So that Larry couldn’t rat him out about the fake merchandise?”

  That would mean that Venable knew when Larry worked at the call center, and the route he took home. Something he could have learned, had he wanted to. “It’s something to consider,” I said. “Did you and Larry talk about the conversation?”

  “No, I had to work the night shift Sunday, so I left right after they talked. I didn’t notice that he hadn’t come home until Monday afternoon, when the police called me.” He leaned forward. �
�You don’t think I’m in danger, do you? I never even went to the flea market.”

  “There’s no indication at present that Larry’s death is anything other than a traffic accident,” I said. “But if his boss happens to call you, don’t tell him anything, and let me know.”

  I hesitated for a moment. “Are you going to pack up Larry’s things to return to his family?”

  “I guess so.”

  “If you see anything unusual, or anything related to Jesse Venable, will you let me know?”

  He agreed, and I gave him my card and walked back outside. It was still hot and humid, but the ambulance had left by then and the vultures, as Snyder had called them, had gone back inside.

  11 – Innocent Victims

  It was late Monday by the time I finished with Snyder, so instead of heading all the way back to Miramar I drove home. I met Lester for a workout and dinner. “Where are you off to tonight?” I asked.

  “Bar called Saddles in Tamarac,” he said. “It’s country-western line dancing night and they’re making Boulevardiers with two different bourbons I represent.”

  From my years behind the bar, I knew that a Boulevardier contained bourbon, Campari and sweet vermouth, garnished with either a cherry, an orange slice, or a lemon twist. “Kind of an old guy’s drink, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “That’s the crowd they get up there, or so I’m told,” Lester said. “You want to come with me? I could use your help with the social media stuff again.”

  “I was just in that neighborhood this afternoon,” I said. As I looked up the address of the bar, I explained about my visit to Paul Snyder. “I wonder if Larry Kane hung out at this place or if anybody there knew him.”

  “So you kill two birds with one stone,” Lester said. “You take some photos and make some posts for me, and you schmooze the clientele in case anyone knows this Kane guy.”

  We left soon after that. Saddles had a faux-western façade, complete with a hitching post in case any clients arrived by horse. Doubtful on this commercial strip, but in Florida you never know what you’re going to find.