The Dollar-a-Year Detective

by William Wells

  Boyd hoists his bulk onto the pier, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket, taps out an unfiltered Camel, fires it up with a Zippo, takes a long drag, and lets thin white strands of carcinogenic smoke waft out of his nostrils.

  “The CSIs have done their bit and left,” he tells us. “Linda’s inside.” He means Linda Evans, the Medical Examiner’s crime scene tech.

  “Why’d this damn sailboat haveta drift into my fucking jurisdiction?” Boyd asks, rhetorically. “A few miles north, and it’s Cape Coral’s problem. Few miles south, and Bonita Springs catches the case …”

  If I were a Fort Myers Beach detective, I think I’d be happy to have some action to test my skills. But not Harlan Boyd, apparently.

  Cubby and I descend three steps into the cabin, move through the salon and into the galley. The Joie de Vivre is a luxury yacht and well-appointed. All brass and mahogany. First class all the way. In comparison, the houseboat I live on is a garbage scow—but it’s my garbage scow.

  Linda Evans has short brown hair and round, wire-rim glasses that give her an owlishly studious appearance. She joined the department a year earlier after getting a master’s degree in forensic science from Florida Gulf Coast University. Before that, she was a police officer in Bradenton.

  Linda is wearing blue coveralls that say “Crime Scene Tech” in white lettering on the back. She is squatting down, tying a plastic bag onto the right hand of a man lying on his back. He is, or was, a handsome man in his mid-to-late forties, I guess, with dark brown hair. I estimate that he is about six feet tall when vertical, which he never will be again. He’s wearing a blue-and-white striped tee shirt, tan canvas shorts, and boat shoes—typical sailors’ garb. There is a bullet wound in his forehead, apparently from a small-caliber handgun, from the size of the entrance wound. His eyes and mouth are open, giving him the expression of a man who’d been surprised by something—presumably by being shot in the forehead.

  “You know Jack Starkey,” Cubby says to Linda. “He’ll be consulting with the department on this case.”

  Consulting. First I’ve heard of that. I thought I was just taking a look. Cubby and I will have to talk.

  Linda looks up at me, nods, finishes bagging the dead man’s hand, then does the other one and stands up. DNA from the killer might be found under the dead man’s fingernails, or elsewhere, but that seems unlikely because there is no sign of a struggle. If the gunman has any brains at all, he didn’t get close enough to his victim for that. That’s the point of having a gun.

  Bedrooms on boats are called berths. Bathrooms are called heads. Kitchens are galleys. Floors are decks and walls are bulkheads. Doors are hatches. Rope is line. The front of the boat is the bow, the rear is the stern, the right side is starboard, and the left is port. All of this from Salty Sam, who told me I should know nautical terms, “In case you ever get a real boat.” Ha ha.

  Sam spent thirty years in the Merchant Marine before opening the marina where my houseboat is permanently moored (the previous owner didn’t list “seaworthy” as one of the boat’s amenities). I named my boat Phoenix after the bird of Greek mythology that rises from its own ashes, as I hoped to do by starting a new life in Florida. Sometimes, when I have a guest aboard, I show off my nautical knowledge by saying, “If you need to use the bathroom, you’ll have to go ashore. All I have is a head.”

  The woman on the bed in the master berth looks younger than the man, maybe in her thirties, with short dark hair and sightless blue eyes. She is lying on her back on top of the covers with a bullet wound similar to her husband’s in her forehead. She is wearing a black halter top and white shorts.

  “Okay, that’ll do it,” Cubby says, more to himself than to me, his “consultant.”

  We go back onto the pier, where Harlan Boyd is finishing his smoke. He takes a last puff and flips the butt into the water. A fish rises, noses it, and submerges. Not his brand.

  We’re standing beneath a clear sky and a luminescent, three-quarter moon. The lights of Sanibel Island are visible across the twelve-mile stretch of Gulf of Mexico water: a lovely night to be alive, which the victims on the boat are not.

  Boyd runs his fingers through his hair, looks at the Joie de Vivre, which had been transformed from a pleasure cruiser into a crime scene, and asks me: “This why you retired, Jack? Dealing with this kind of thing?”

  “Mainly it was getting shot, Harlan.”

  “Never been shot,” he says. “Shot at, but not hit. So far.”

  “Continued good luck with that. It can really ruin your day.”

  Cubby asks Boyd: “What’d the Coast Guard say?”

  “A fisherman called in a report of a sailboat drifting in Pine Island Sound, about seven o’clock. The Coast Guard sent out a boat with two crewmen, that SAFE boat there. They located the sailboat, hailed it on the radio and then with a megaphone, and got no response.”

  He pulls a notebook out of his inside sport coat pocket, flips it open, studies it for a moment, and continues: “Petty Officer Second Class Robert Michaels boarded the sailboat while Master Chief John Pulaski remained aboard the SAFE. Michaels rigged a towline, then went into the cabin and found the bodies. He vomited into the galley sink, went back aboard the SAFE, told Pulaski what he’d found, and Pulaski radioed it in. He was told to record the location and tow the sailboat here.”

  He looks at his notebook again. “Michaels wasn’t wearing gloves, but he said he didn’t touch anything. The Coast Guard duty officer, a Lieutenant Jeffrey O’Neil, called the department at 9:42. Patrolman Tom Breckenridge was closest in his squad and got here at 9:50. I got here at 10:10. Not that the timing matters one iota to the vics.” He closes the notebook and says, “That’s all we got so far.”

  “Any ID on them?” Cubby asks.

  “According to their Florida driver’s licenses, the man is Lawrence Henderson and the woman, presumably his wife, is Marion Henderson. They reside at 2010 Royal Palm Circle in Cape Coral. We’ll get the names of next of kin in the morning. The boat is registered to Lawrence. I Googled him. He’s president of Manatee National Bank in Fort Myers.”

  Boyd takes the pack of Camels from his inside coat pocket, taps out another cigarette, lights it with the Zippo, takes another long pull, tilts his head toward the sailboat, and asks, “Now who’d do something like that, for chrissakes?”

  “What we need to find out, Harlan,” Cubby answers.

  Harlan responds: “Not a robber, because no valuables were taken. It probably was someone who knew the Hendersons, knew that they would be on their boat, where the boat would be, and when. I’ll try to find out where they kept the boat, and if anyone saw anything before the Hendersons set sail.”

  So Harlan Boyd knows his stuff. I wonder why Cubby thinks he can’t handle this case on his own—if he doesn’t die of emphysema or lung cancer first. He says: “My brother Frank’s got his own insurance agency up in Jacksonville. Life, auto, homeowners. Does real well. Nice house, nice car, nice family …”

  He shakes his head.

  “Things like this make me think I should go into the insurance business with Frank. He says I can, anytime I want. I’ve thought about doing that in a few years. But maybe now’s the time.”

  He takes another hit on the Camel, flips it into the water—no interest from the fish this time—and continues: “Best thing about being in the insurance business? Frank’s never seen a dead body except in a funeral home. Whole different deal from police work.”

  “I hear you, man,” I tell him.

  Cops reach the end of the line at different times and for different reasons. Some put in their thirty and retire reluctantly. Some burn out earlier; maybe they’re the ones who care too much. This crime scene is bad, but nowhere near the worst I’ve seen.

  But, for whatever reason, Detective Harlan Boyd apparently has seen enough of them. I’m going below again to take a better look at the scene for myself.

  3.

  Once a Detective, Always a Detectiver />
  Cubby and I ride in silence back to my bar. Not having seen a dead body with a bullet hole for a while, I’m thinking about guns and the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment now happening in the country.

  A gun, by itself, is an inanimate object, a mechanical device, a machine made of steel, plastic, composite materials; all slides and levers and chambers and bores and springs, a complex tool engineered to produce a controlled explosion that sends a lead projectile at supersonic velocity toward a target. Sometimes the target is inanimate: a paper target in a shooting range, or a bottle or can set atop a fence. Sometimes it’s a living thing, a person or an animal.

  But a gun, by itself, is incapable of performing the task for which it was made. For that it needs a human operator. Be it a handgun or long gun, an ancient cannon, a big-bore behemoth mounted on a naval vessel, or a tank or ground emplacement, a gun cannot feel emotions, such as rage, or fear, or the thirst for revenge or the need for self-protection. It takes a person to feel those emotions, and then pull the trigger to unleash the lethal force.

  Bad guys will always find a way to have a gun, detectives will always be called upon to chase the shooters, and, as long as the bad guys have guns, I want to have one too. Whether or not limiting the public’s access to firearms will reduce gun violence is a hotly debated question. In countries such as England, Japan, and Australia, where firearm ownership is closely regulated, gun violence is very low. In the US, where firearms are easily obtainable, the gun homicide rate is twenty-five times higher than in other high-income nations.

  So: Will restricting gun ownership reduce the chance that some lunatic would walk into an elementary school and open fire, creating a horrific carnage? Or is the best bet to train and arm selected school employees, under the assumption that psychopaths will always find illegal weapons?

  I don’t know. But someone had somehow acquired a pistol, used it to murder Lawrence and Marion Henderson, and I’m being asked to help find the killer. The debate about the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is irrelevant to the task at hand. I’ll leave the rest to partisans, politicians, cable news talking heads, and Supreme Court justices. That’s about as philosophical as I get on the issue. The rest—as I said about law-enforcement fleet management—is above my pay grade.

  Cubby parks in front of The Drunken Parrot, turns toward me, and says, “I need you in on this one, Jack. A bank president and his wife were murdered. It’s as high profile as a case around here can get. And if you didn’t notice, Harlan has pretty much had it. I’ve seen that before, in Toledo. When someone gets that way, they’re no good to the department or themselves. Plus Harlan’s wife is pushing him to get a different job, what with all the shootings of cops these days. I expect him to pull the pin anytime.”

  “You’ve got two other detectives, Cubby.”

  “Yeah, Ronnie Patterson and Nick Montez. Good guys, both of them—if your car gets stolen or your boat gets vandalized, or some such. Nick took down a meth lab about a year ago. It was a big deal, but we’d gotten a tip about it. But those guys on this one … no way, no how. This is right in your wheelhouse.”

  “Last time you asked me to get involved in a case, chasing that serial killer in Naples, it almost got me killed.”

  Cubby gives me a knowing look. “Admit it, Jack. You loved the hell out of it. Once a detective, always a detective.”

  Cubby had introduced me to his friend, the former Naples police chief. Naples is a little city twenty miles to the south of Fort Myers Beach that is one of those playgrounds of the superrich. By the time many, if not most, of those residents arrived, their youth and middle age were in the rearview mirror; Naples, it was said, was a town populated by the elderly, and their parents. That also had begun as a consulting assignment. But soon I was leading an investigation involving a fake Russian count with Mafia ties running a hedge fund named after a sunken Spanish treasure galleon, and three wealthy, self-styled Old White Men, bored in retirement, who began playing dirty tricks on people who annoyed them, and ended up employing a Miami hit man to eliminate people they didn’t like. Including me. That was two years ago. I did enjoy the adrenaline rush of the hunt.

  “So what’s your initial impression?” Cubby asks as I open the SUV’s passenger-side door.

  I lean back in my seat. “Boyd nailed it. I agree with everything he said.”

  “So, speaking theoretically, if you were going to handle this case, where would you start?”

  “I’d take a theoretical pen and a theoretical legal pad and draw two theoretical columns. The first column would contain the pros of getting involved in your investigation, and the second column would list the cons. I’d start with the pros. After a while, I’d realize that there are no pros, and so it would be irrelevant to list the cons. I’d go back to my happy life as it was before you walked into my bar tonight.”

  “At least think about it,” Cubby says, not looking at me. We play poker with a group of guys at my bar once a week. When Cubby averts his eyes like that, it’s a “tell”: he’s got a good hand.

  “Okay, I’ll think about it, Cubby,” I say.

  No harm in that. Or so it seemed at the time.

  4.

  Stoney’s Dilemma

  I wake up the next morning aboard Phoenix, pad into the galley, hit the brew switch on the Mr. Coffee, slip a strawberry Pop-Tart into the toaster, and open a can of tuna for my cat, Joe.

  My houseboat is permanently moored at Salty Sam’s. Permanently, as in: it never leaves the dock. It’s very comfortable as a residence, cozy in fact, but whenever I go out onto the saltwater to fish, I rent a boat from the marina because it has a better chance than Phoenix of not doing a Titanic number on me. Sam told me he can’t recall the previous owners ever taking Phoenix out. It was delivered to the marina on a truck and used as a winter vacation home by a couple from Syracuse. The wife got it in their divorce.

  After I’d been living on Phoenix for about three months, a large tiger-striped feline with the scars of a street fighter came aboard uninvited. I was happy to have the company and named him after my brother, a Chicago fireman who died trying to save a young boy’s puppy from a burning four-flat. The puppy survived but my brother did not.

  I sit at the galley table, drink a cup of coffee while watching cable news on the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall (bulkhead), and then pour another cup. I’m not a morning person. Mornings, for me, are like waking up from a long coma. It takes awhile for all of my mental and physical functions to reactivate. That’s one reason I didn’t make the marines a career. For some reason, they think the workday should begin at zero dark thirty with a fifty-mile hike. Other reasons included sleeping on the ground and getting shot at.

  The caffeine kicks in as I finish the Pop-Tart. I walk out onto the deck and pick up my copy of the Fort Myers News-Press that the paperboy, on his bicycle, delivers each morning. As I’m reading the sports section, Cubby calls.

  “We’ve got some more on the murders,” he tells me. “The Hendersons have two children, an eight-year-old son, Nathan, and a six-year-old daughter, Elise, who were staying with an aunt and uncle on Sanibel Island when their parents were killed during their recreational sail. The coroner’s doing the autopsies now. And Harlan’s called in sick. Can we get together?”

  The fact that the children are safe, amidst the tragedy, is a blessing. Sometimes in this life, the most you can hope for is a positive balancing a negative, a yin balancing a yang, especially in the homicide business, although that’s rarely the case. “

  Sure, Cubby, as soon as I do something first,” I tell him.

  “No problem. How about I buy you lunch and I’ll brief you.”

  I know that agreeing to be briefed also means agreeing to consult, which inevitably means taking on the role of lead detective. I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. To seal the deal, Cubby says, “Stan’s Diner at noon?”

  It’s a bribe, and it works.

  Stan Kowalski is from Chic
ago. His diner features the cuisine I grew up with: deep-dish pizza, Italian beef and sausage sandwiches, and the famous Chicago-style hot dog—a Vienna beef frank in a poppy-seed bun, topped with diced tomatoes, bright green relish, onion, pickle spears, sport peppers, and mustard. You order ketchup on a hot dog in my hometown and they banish you to Michigan, where they put ketchup on everything, from steak to eggs. Stan’s wife, Irene, makes pies so good that they get eaten by the customers before they have a chance to cool off.

  “Okay, see you at Stan’s at noon,” I tell him.

  I need to do some work on a literary project this morning. Bill Stevens, a Chicago Tribune police reporter I know, writes a series of best-selling crime novels based upon my career as a Chicago homicide detective. He pays me to read through his manuscripts to help him get all the cop stuff right. If, for example, an author writes that a certain gun comes in a certain caliber, and it doesn’t, or that Ford’s Police Interceptor engine (like the one in Cubby’s SUV) has a maximum of two hundred fifty horsepower (it did, but the new engines go up to three hundred sixty-five hp), some readers notice, and get annoyed. In the old days, they might have written a note to the author via his publisher, but now they post their criticisms on social media, for all the world to see.

  Bill’s fictional detective is named Jack Stoney—not a big leap from Jack Starkey, but I don’t mind, even though I get a lot of ribbing from friends about how Stoney has a higher close rate than I do, both with his cases and with the ladies.

  I have the manuscript of Bill’s new book, Stoney’s Dilemma. Bill could retire from the Trib and just write books, but he says the job keeps his head in the crime game. He is my silent partner in The Drunken Parrot.

  I top off my cup of coffee, get the manuscript and a red Sharpie from a galley drawer, and begin to read where I left off a few days ago: