The Dollar-a-Year Detective

by William Wells

  “You say you want a lawyer?” Stoney asked Lonnie Williams as they sat across at a table in the precinct interrogation room. “Sure, that’s fine. You can do that. Just like I told you when I cuffed you in that alley. You remember what I told you, right?”

  Lonnie Williams didn’t answer, just as he hadn’t answered any of Stoney’s questions about the rape of an eleven-year-old girl snatched from a school playground on Dearborn a week ago. So far, the only evidence against Williams was the word of one of Stoney’s snitches, Jake the Snake, who’d traded the tip for a double shot of Four Roses with a beer back at the Baby Doll Polka Lounge. An unreliable witness who a prosecutor would not call to the stand in a courtroom.

  So, to make the case, Williams had to admit to the crime. The department had gotten touchy about “enhanced interrogation techniques” ever since the scandal involving a warehouse on the West Side of Chicago known as Homan Square, where perps like Williams could disappear from the public record. Stoney had gotten his share of confessions at Homan, but that was then, and this was now.

  “I told you that you have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, that anything you say can be held against you in a court of law and all that other Miranda bull crap. So say the word, and we’re done here, and you’ll obtain the services of some young assistant public defender from a fourth-rate law school who just barely passed the bar exam on his umpteenth try, and who will give you the representation you’re paying for, by which I mean zip.”

  Lonnie Williams averted his eyes and kept on saying nothing. Stoney went out of the room and came back with a plastic evidence bag containing something made of white cloth and slid it across the table toward the suspect.

  Williams glanced at it and said, “That supposed to mean somethin’ to me?”

  “These are your victim’s underpants,” Stoney said. “I’m betting that the stain on them is from your bodily fluids, proven by a DNA match.”

  5.

  The Dollar-a-Year Man

  It’s Thursday. That means the pie of the day at Stan’s is strawberry rhubarb, if I remember correctly, one of my favorites. The pies Irene makes on the other six days are my favorites too.

  I swing into Stan’s lot, which is covered with ground seashells called coquina. The building is classic 1950s diner style, looking like a large aluminum Airstream trailer with illuminated multicolored neon lights around the roof, sides, and front door.

  Cubby, wearing his police uniform, is seated in a booth near the door. The Beach Boys song, “I Get Around,” is playing on the old-time flashing-neon Wurlitzer jukebox, similar to the one in The Drunken Parrot.

  As I slide into the booth, Cubby says, “Let’s order, then I’ll tell you what I’ve got.”

  Miriam, one of Stan’s veteran waitresses, comes over and takes our orders for bacon cheeseburgers and fries. My next annual physical is eight months away, so I have plenty of time to get my blood chemistry in order by eating Greek yogurt and kale. But probably not.

  Miriam is in her fifties, with reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck, and she’s wearing a white uniform with a name tag. I ask Miriam to reserve a piece of the strawberry rhubarb pie for me. Cubby preorders the rice pudding, another popular item. She heads for the kitchen and Cubby says: “The autopsies are still underway, but the coroner reports that the Hendersons died from shots to the head with a .22-caliber pistol from close range.”

  “Like a pro does it.”

  “My thought too.”

  “Meaning it was a planned execution, like Boyd said.”

  “Looks like it.”

  He takes a spoonful of pudding. “Can’t have a professional hit man roaming around shooting up the citizenry, Jack. Not on my watch.”

  “I’d say that’s bad for property values,” I comment.

  Cubby looks at me. “I can’t pay you as much as they did in Naples. Basically what a detective first grade makes, which is eighty grand a year plus expenses.”

  I don’t need the money, but, I realize, I want to feel … useful … again. “Save your money, Cubby. I’ll do it for a dollar a year.”

  Cubby grins, seeming unsurprised. “Thank you, Detective Starkey. Speaking of money, I assume you’ll want to start with an audit of the Manatee National Bank.”

  Good idea. The number one rule in the Detecting for Dummies handbook is: follow the money. Maybe Henderson’s bank is laundering drug money. Something went wrong, as drug deals usually do, and it had gotten him and his wife killed.

  “I know the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Tampa, which covers Lee County,” Cubby says. “Daniel Morrissey. I spoke with him this morning and he offered his full cooperation. The murders fall under our jurisdiction but if Henderson’s bank is involved in illegal activity, the Feds have an interest because banks are federally insured.”

  “Obviously, you assumed I’d take the job,” I say.

  He just smiles. Our food arrives. Cubby takes a bite of his burger and says, “Stop by my office for your badge and gun.”

  6.

  On the Job Again

  The next morning after breakfast, I drive to Fort Myers Beach police headquarters, a two-story brick building on Peck Street. I enter through the glass door, nod a greeting to the desk sergeant, Lenny Warinski, detour into the break room to pick up a cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut, and walk up a stairway to Cubby’s office. I could have taken the elevator, but I need to work off the Pop-Tart before I eat the doughnut.

  Cubby is seated at his desk, reading a file. A large tarpon is mounted on the wall behind him. I was with him when he caught it in Boca Grande Pass. He looks up and says, “Day one on the job, Jack. Today you’ll earn one three-hundred and sixty-fifth of your salary.”

  “I’ll let it ride until it adds up to a quarter.”

  He opens a desk drawer and hands me the real compensation for the job: a black leather case containing a gold detective’s shield. I put it in the front pocket of my khakis, where it feels right at home.

  I didn’t get a shield while working on the Naples murder case because I was undercover. I’ll confess that I’ve never felt fully dressed since turning in my shield in Chicago. A detective’s shield and gun don’t come with a license to kill like James Bond had, but they sure come in handy when you’re sticking your nose into some bad guy’s business.

  “Do you want one of our department-issue 9mm Sig Sauers?” Cubby asks.

  “Thanks, but I’ll go with my Colt.”

  Meaning the .45-caliber Colt 1911 semiauto that I carried earlier in my life. It saved my bacon more than once.

  “Best to stick with an old friend,” Cubby says. “So what’s first on the agenda Monday morning?”

  “I’ll drive to Tampa to meet with the FBI. After that, I’ll pay a visit to Henderson’s bank.”

  “Be careful out there,” Cubby says as I’m leaving, echoing the phrase from one of my favorite TV shows, Hill Street Blues.

  Cubby is flying to Cleveland this afternoon to attend a funeral. The son of one of his high school friends was a police officer who’d been shot and killed during a routine traffic stop. Part of the daily risk a policeman takes.

  So I’m on the job again. Phoenix is aptly named. Like the bird of Greek mythology that rose from the ashes, I hoped that my move would help me become a better man. My single-minded devotion to my job as a homicide detective caused me to neglect my family and, as with so many cops, the stress of the job caused me to drink too much. No excuses—many, if not most, cops handle the stress without self-destructing. My wife, Claire, finally had enough of me and the whole package of cop life. She asked for a divorce. I didn’t contest it because I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to me either, back then.

  My retirement from the Chicago PD came not long after I took a .380-caliber round in the right shoulder, through-and-through, that limited my range of motion so badly that I was granted a three-quarters disability and get monthly checks in the mail. Rehab restored
my full range of motion, so the joke is on the taxpayers of the City of Chicago. I don’t feel badly about that because the pols would waste or steal the money. And because it’s the third time I’d been shot, once in the Marine Corps while guarding a United States Embassy in the Middle East, and one other time while on the City of Chicago’s payroll. Get shot once, consider it bad luck. Twice, examine your tradecraft. Three times, think about a different line of work.

  7.

  The Big Kahuna

  Tampa is a three-hour drive from Fort Myers Beach on I-75 North. It is a perfect morning, the sun looking like a lemon Necco Wafer in a cloudless azure sky (loved them as a kid), the temperature in the high seventies. Just another routine day in paradise. I have the top down and the radio tuned to a Golden Oldies station playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Perfect tune for a motor trip.

  I spent the weekend puttering around the bar and doing some maintenance on Phoenix, which mainly consisted of hosing seagull poop off the roof and deck. I did my daily three-mile run on the beach and one hundred push-ups and sit-ups. Back in the day, it was six miles, and two hundred of the rest. You do what you can, right up until the day you find yourself sitting in the day room of the Happy Pelican Retirement Home, drooling oatmeal on your pj’s, watching Judge Judy reruns and trying to remember if it’s bingo night. I hope that day is a long way off.

  The FBI’s Tampa office is a four-story stone building with a red tile roof, surrounded by a low iron fence on West Gray Street. The architecture, the palm trees on the grounds, and the pond with a fountain on the front lawn give the place a deceptively serene appearance, more like a private residence than a government office building, except for the manned guard gate. Inside, wars are being fought on many fronts: crime, organized and disorganized, drugs, illegal immigration, and terrorism.

  I pull up to a gate as a man wearing the blue uniform of the Federal Protective Service, a bulletproof vest, and a side-arm appears from the guardhouse. He is tall and muscular, in his thirties, with a military haircut; he looks like he could pick up my car and turn it around as a sign that I am being refused entry. I give my name, show my detective’s badge, and tell him I have an appointment with Special-Agent-in-Charge Daniel Morrissey.

  He tells me to wait, goes into the guardhouse, comes out, hands me a cardboard car pass, which he instructs me to display in my windshield at all times, and then goes back into the guardhouse and opens the gate electronically.

  There is a convention in crime fiction—novels, TV shows, and movies—that an institutional animosity exists between the Feds and local police forces: jurisdictional disputes, information hoarding, and a negative view of one another’s abilities. But, in my experience, this is not the case, having worked with FBI agents, state police detectives, and county sheriff’s departments, always with a good result. We were all focused upon tracking down and apprehending the bad guys, especially when we were brought together on an anti-terrorism task force, so I have no apprehension about working with the Feds on this case, or any other.

  I find a visitor’s spot and leave my Colt locked in the trunk. If you want to stir up some excitement, try carrying a gun into a federal building. I enter through double glass doors and encounter two more uniformed guards manning a security portal like the ones in airports. One of the guards orders me to put my personal items into a basket on a conveyor belt that passes through a scanner and to walk through the portal. The alarm goes off as I do. One of the guards puts his hand on his holstered pistol while the other runs a hand scanner over me. When that produces nothing he has me take off my belt, which has a large metal buckle. I do and walk back through the portal. It was the buckle.

  I see an information desk near the elevators. A woman in her twenties, with short dark hair, wearing the same kind of guard’s uniform, checks for my name on her computerized visitors’ log, then says that Morrissey’s office is on the fourth floor. Maybe, when she is off duty, she can gin up a nice smile.

  Riding up in the elevator, I wonder if the FBI provides visitors with doughnuts and coffee. Arriving on four, I follow a sign indicating that the Big Kahuna, aka Morrissey, can be found down the hall to the right. I head that way and come to a set of floor-to-ceiling glass doors which have the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on one of them and Morrissey’s name and title on the other.

  Inside a young woman in civilian clothes sits at a large reception desk; she is typing on a computer keyboard.

  “May I help you, sir?” she asks me.

  “I’m Detective Jack Starkey. I have an appointment with Agent Morrissey.”

  She checks a log and says, “Yes, Detective, please have a seat and someone will be out for you.”

  I sit on a brown leatherette couch along a wall opposite the reception desk. A glass coffee table is in front of the couch. On the wall behind the couch are framed color portraits of the president of the United States and of the FBI director. A large corkboard on another wall holds posters of the Bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. The faces are all male, as unsmiling as the female lobby guard’s. Their crimes include bank robbery, murder, racketeering, escape from prison, and terrorism. Thanks to Seal Team Six, Osama bin Laden is no longer on that list.

  I select a magazine from among those on the coffee table. Slim pickings: Federal Law Enforcement Journal, The Catalog of Tactical Weaponry, The Grapevine (official publication of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI), Crime Scene Technology … It would be nice if they threw in an Entertainment Weekly or People, just to lighten the mood.

  Before I can make a choice, a woman comes through the door from the inner offices. She is in her thirties, with shoulder-length auburn hair, green eyes, and freckles, and is wearing a navy-blue suit, white blouse, and low black leather heels. She doesn’t have pigtails, but otherwise, she reminds me of the girl in the Wendy’s hamburger chain logo. The model for the Wendy’s girl is the daughter of the chain’s founder, Dave Tomas; he named his restaurants after her. I’ll admit to scarfing down a Dave’s Double Stack from time to time, those times being whenever I pass one of the restaurants and haven’t recently eaten.

  Wendy offers her hand and says, “Detective Starkey, I’m Special Agent Sarah Caldwell.” I wonder why FBI agents always think that they’re special. As I rise and return her handshake, she says, “I’ll show you to Agent Morrissey’s office.”

  I follow her through the door and down a hallway, past offices whose doors are all closed, until we come to one whose door is open, and we go in. It is a large corner office, nicely appointed with furnishings several cuts above standard government issue.

  A man stands from behind the desk and comes around to greet me. You call Central Casting and order up a poster FBI agent and you get Daniel Morrissey. He is tall, about six two or three, maybe one hundred ninety pounds, with black hair cut short, and wide shoulders. Morrissey is one of those fortunate guys who still look like they are thirty when they are into their forties and fifties, like Paul Newman did. He is wearing the same kind of suit as Agent Caldwell, but with pants instead of a skirt, and the addition of a red-and-blue striped tie: the standard-issue FBI uniform ever since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, who, I’ve heard, sometimes wore a dress and heels when off duty.

  Detectives usually shrug off their suit coats and loosen their ties (if they ever tighten the knots at all, which I didn’t) when working at their desks. Maybe that’s against FBI regs. Morrissey has his suit coat on. Maybe he sleeps in his suit just in case he’s called into action during the night.

  “Dan Morrissey,” he says as he shakes my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detective Starkey.”

  Morrissey is either a very nice guy, or a good liar, because the Feds always do their homework. I’ll admit that I wasn’t the easiest guy to work with, especially during my drinking days. I never let inconsequential things like rules or playing well with others stand in the way of closing a homicide investigation.

  “Good to meet you too,” I
tell him.

  We are mutually pleased to meet one another.

  He returns to his desk chair, gesturing for me and Agent Caldwell to take the two wooden guest chairs in front of his desk.

  For a trained investigator like myself, this is a revelatory moment. Rather than having all of us sit on the grouping of couch and club chairs over by the window, Morrissey put himself in the catbird seat, relegating Caldwell and me to positions of subservience. The idea is to make you feel like you’re in the school principal’s office to answer for some bad behavior. The chairs seem lower than normal, so we are looking up at him. Maybe he had the chair legs sawed shorter.

  Morrissey obviously wants visitors to know that, on his turf, he is large and in charge. Also reinforcing this idea is the fact that he doesn’t ask if I want a beverage, let alone a doughnut. That treatment is reserved for VIPs apparently. Or maybe there’d been a federal budget cut and the snack money is needed for bullets. But no problem. I learned in the marines to do without the niceties of life, which sometimes included food, water, and enough ammo, and still accomplish the mission. Lock and load and bring it on.

  “So, Detective Starkey,” Morrissey begins, “you have a distinguished record in the Marine Corps and with the Chicago Police Department.”

  Just as I thought. J. Edgar Morrissey had pulled my file. I wonder if he knows about that Milky Way I pilfered from Talbot’s Pharmacy when I was six. No problem if he does because the statute of limitations on petty theft has long since run out.

  “Better than some, worse than others,” I reply in an attempt at modesty, and also the god’s honest truth.

  “We’ll be involved in your case if it’s determined that the murders of Lawrence Henderson and his wife are in some way related to his position with the Manatee National Bank, a federally insured institution,” he informs me, something that I already know.

  Morrissey looks at Agent Caldwell for the first time. I have good peripheral vision and have been checking her out ever since we sat down and she crossed her legs, causing her skirt to ride up on her tanned, muscular thighs. Brother Timothy taught us that we cannot control our thoughts, only our actions, and that is enough.