The Dollar-a-Year Detective

by William Wells

  “You will recall that, twice now, you’ve asked me to just take a look at a murder book and offer an opinion, and that I ended up doing far more than that. Including a case in Naples under a previous police chief.”

  “You don’t play golf,” Cubby said. “And your bartender mostly runs The Drunken Parrot, so what else have you got to do with your spare time?”

  He had me there.

  “When the storm passes, I’ll have a cup of coffee with your pal,” I told Cubby. “But I’m not promising more than that.”

  “Fair enough,” Cubby said. Then he left to organize his department’s storm preparations, including ensuring that everyone who’d not evacuated could get to a shelter over the causeway on the mainland.

  I called Marisa and said, “Hi, this is your first responder. Do you require assistance?”

  “I’m scared shitless, Jack. We should have headed north. What should we do?”

  I could tell she was frightened because she never had used language like that before.

  “Cubby Cullen was just here. We can shelter in the public service building. Hang tight for the moment. Sam and I will board up the bar’s windows then be over to do that to your properties.”

  “What about your boat?” she asked.

  “If Eileen wants it, she can have it,” I answered. “To try to secure it would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

  Marisa lived on Mango Street in a pink stucco cottage with a green tin roof. Her three-agent real estate office was downtown on Estero Boulevard in a one-story, white concrete block building that also housed an insurance agency and a dentist’s office. The insurance agency was going to be a busy place come Monday, if it was still there.

  Joe finished his tuna and meowed at me. “Don’t worry, buddy, I won’t forget you,” I told him as I scratched his head. “You’re going with me to the shelter.”

  Saturday morning, with Eileen scheduled to arrive sometime Sunday afternoon, the TV weather people were warning, as they always did, that the storm could still turn this way or that and end up farther west before heading north into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the Florida Panhandle, or Mississippi, or Louisiana.

  When I pulled my Vette into the bar’s coquina-shell parking lot, Sam already was up on a ladder screwing plywood onto the windows.

  “Thought you’d be in Chicago by now, boss,” he said.

  “Didn’t want to miss the excitement, Sam. You have somewhere to go before the hurricane arrives?”

  “I’ll be at the casino with friends and family. It’s built to last.”

  Sam and I spent the next two hours boarding up the windows, putting anything breakable, including liquor, beer bottles, and dishes, into cardboard boxes, and securing anything outside that we could. The tiki bar, like my boat, would be left to the storm. Maybe it would end up in Atlanta. Then we drove in Sam’s Ford F-150 truck to Marisa’s house. Later I’d find somewhere to shelter my Vette.

  Saturday afternoon, time to cross the Matanzas Pass Bridge from Estero Island onto the mainland. I was driving Marisa’s Range Rover, containing her and Joe, plus our important papers, my gun collection, her jewelry, family pictures, and selected clothing. Cubby told us we wouldn’t need food or bottled water because the Lee County Public Safety Center had plenty of both.

  When we arrived at the two-story, concrete-block building, the parking lot was full of cars and trucks, police, fire department, and Red Cross vehicles, EMT vans, and boats on trailers. The center had been designated as a staging area for first responders who would deal with Eileen’s aftermath. A garage used to store equipment was set up to shelter pets. Joe didn’t consider himself to be a pet, so I’d ask permission to have him inside with us in his carrier.

  Pending that permission, I left Joe in the Range Rover as Marisa and I carried our baggage into the building. A female Lee County sheriff’s deputy checked us in at a table at the entrance to a large auditorium which had been set up with cots and bedding. I hoped that the deputy was a cat person, which she was, telling me that I could bring Joe in as long as he stayed in his carrier, which was large enough to accommodate his litter box and food and water dishes.

  The center had a large kitchen and dining room where coffee and sandwiches were being served. So far, some four hundred people had checked into the shelter, with more expected. When it was full, people would be directed to other shelters, including Germaine Arena, where hockey games, rodeos, circuses, and concerts were held. Florida state and local governments knew how to prepare for hurricanes.

  Marisa and I picked out two cots along a wall and I went back out to the Ranger Rover to retrieve Joe. I put his crate on my cot and joined Marisa in the cafeteria where we had coffee and ham sandwiches and chatted with our shelter mates. There was a sense of community in the place, of shared danger and determination to endure whatever hardships were in store for us, and to do whatever necessary to rebuild our post-hurricane lives, whatever they might be.

  Every area of the country had its own brand of natural disaster—fires and earthquakes on the west coast, tornadoes in the Midwest, and hurricanes on the east coast. Blizzards during northern winters, and flooding from rivers. So there was nowhere you could live to hide from Mother Nature. At least with hurricanes, you got plenty of warning. Unless, of course, the track of the storm abruptly shifted, as had happened to us. As they said in the marines, sometimes there was nothing to do but bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.

  We awoke Sunday morning to two pieces of good luck: the Lee County shelter staff was making pancakes, waffles, eggs, bacon, and sausages for breakfast; and the hurricane was tracking farther west, up the middle of the gulf, heading toward the panhandle. Heavy rain, high winds, and the possibility of tornadoes were predicted for our neck of the woods, but not the devastating storm with flooding we were expecting.

  Dodged the bullet. I had dodged real bullets during my military and police career, but this reprieve felt just as fortunate.

  Marisa and I had a nice breakfast, passed on lunch, and by three P.M. we grabbed our duffle bags and Joe in his cage and left the shelter.

  Back at Marisa’s house, we watched cable news as Eileen slammed into a wide area of the panhandle. including the towns of Destin, Fort Walton Beach, and Gulf Breeze as a Cat 2, causing flooding and extensive wind damage to coastal buildings and trees. First responders and emergency crews gathered at our shelter headed north to help deal with the aftermath. On the way home, we drove through some flooded streets and around downed trees across roads. Electrical power was out in some areas, but not in Marisa’s neighborhood, and the county government advised boiling drinking water. With only those problems to deal with, we considered ourselves lucky.

  “Is it wrong to feel happy that the main storm missed us when it damaged other towns?” Marisa asked me as she was preparing one of her gourmet Cuban dinners.

  “That’s a philosophical conundrum,” I answered. “Churchill said, ‘There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.’ But I’m certain he didn’t want someone else to be hit by a bullet intended for him. All we can do at this point is to enjoy your nice dinner and make a donation to the Red Cross.” Both of which we did.

  By Thursday, the power was on all over Lee County, the roads were dry, the downed trees were off the streets, and water could be used right out of the faucets. Life was back to normal.

  Or at least it was until I had lunch with Cubby Cullen to hear more about the Naples murder investigation.

  Cubby and I met for lunch at Captain Mack’s Seafood Shack on the Caloosahatchee River. I found him sitting outside on the deck overlooking the river, enjoying a bowl of clam chowder. An osprey dove for a fish and came up with one—his own lunch.

  “You know the rule,” Cubby said as I slid onto a bench at the booth. “Whoever gets here first is allowed to start eating.”

  I looked at my watch. “I’m right on time, Cubby.”

  “As my first boss at the Toledo Police De
partment said, on time is ten minutes late.”

  The waitress came to take my order and the rest of Cubby’s. We’d both been to Captain Mack’s so often that we didn’t need menus. I asked for the chowder and we both added fried clam strip rolls and onion rings. Captain Mack had been a tuna boat captain in Massachusetts. When Japanese fleets overfished the waters, he sold his boat and moved to Florida with his wife to open an authentic New England seafood restaurant. I always went for the clam strips rather than the whole bellies. Bite into a whole belly clam and a greenish-brown substance oozes out. Know what that is? Clam poop. None for me, thanks.

  I asked Cubby about the Naples murder case.

  “As I said, the deceased was an eighty-two-year-old man named Henry Wilberforce III. He was found in bed by his butler with a gunshot wound in his forehead. He lived in Lake Forest, outside Chicago, with a winter home in Naples. He was the heir to the Wilberforce Food Company fortune. That’s a Chicago company you may recognize.”

  Being from Chicago, I did. A great many of the food items found on supermarket shelves were produced by Wilberforce Foods.

  “Any leads about who might have shot him?”

  “I’d rather have you hear that directly from Naples Police Chief Tom Sullivan. I owe him a favor. He’s expecting your call.”

  Our food arrived. I didn’t ask Cubby why he owed Sullivan a favor. I assumed it was confidential or he would have told me. I said, “Fine, I’ll call Sullivan this afternoon.”

  I did call him, and what happened next is another story entirely.

  Acknowledgments

  The Permanent Press in Sag Harbor, New York, has now published three of my novels. Many thanks to them for that. Co-publishers Marty and Judy Shepard and Chris Knopf, and copy editor Barbara Anderson all contributed skillful editing, somehow finding a readable book in the mountain of manuscript pages I delivered to them. Once again, designer Lon Kirschner has created a first-class cover.

  When I attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, every freshman was required to take a course in expository writing. We had to undergo a series of tests each semester (I don’t recall how many) which involved sitting in a classroom with a blue book and pen and writing an essay on a given topic. There were only two grades: “Yes” and “No.” To get a “Yes,” everything had to be absolutely perfect: grammar, spelling, punctuation, the logic of your argument, and whatever else the professor deemed to constitute a good essay according to the rules set forth by Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. This was before the age of word processing, computerized spelling and grammar checking, and Google and Siri to help you out. You had to get three “Yes” themes each semester to pass the course. I remember the premed students, especially, sweating this out; you couldn’t get into medical school with an F on your transcript. I never knew of anyone not to pass the course, but some had to wait until the last test to get that third “Yes.” Every time I hear from a publisher that it wants one of my books, I feel like I’ve just gotten another “Yes” theme and that, a half-century removed from College Hill, still feels very good, indeed.

  I would be remiss to not mention that, after the story ends in September of 2016, Jack Starkey’s beloved Chicago Cubs went on to win the World Series by beating the Cleveland Indians in game 7, 8 to 7. The Cubbies had appeared in eleven World Series, their last victories coming by winning back-to-back titles in 1907 and 1908. So it had been a long time, 108 years precisely, since the boys put on championship rings. Jack was there, watching the game on the roof of Bill Stevens’s apartment building, one of those Wrigley Rooftops, which are residential buildings near Wrigley Field with bleachers on their roofs providing a view of the games. Marisa was invited, but she had to stay home to close the sale of a multimillion-dollar house, this causing Jack to seriously question her priorities.