Crash Tack

by A. J. Stewart

  “How do you know that?”

  “Doorman.”

  “They’re not very discreet, are they?”

  “If you ever live in a building with a doorman, tip generously. Their lips tend to loosen for a twenty.”

  “I’m gonna go up for a closer look.”

  “Don’t let him see you.”

  I stuffed my phone away and crawled under the hedgerow and jogged past the Royal Poinciana, and came up on the side of the Biltmore. I pressed close to the building, which would have looked awfully suspicious to anyone who saw me, but I was more worried about being seen by Alec. I waited in the shade of a palm tree on the corner of the building and watched the front entrance. It took only a minute for Alec to come out. He looked agitated and was pacing up and down in front of the building. The doorman strode out under the canopy that extended out onto the driveway, which was raised above the street level.

  “You can’t just stand here, sir.”

  “You don’t own the damned sidewalk!” Alec was on the phone but clearly getting no response as he started banging the buttons with his fingers, as if it were the technology at fault. He turned to the doorman.

  “Just tell me where she is,” he said.

  “Sir, I told you. I don’t know where Mrs. Colfax is, and I don’t know when she will be back. Now it would be best if you left.”

  So old Alec was too cheap to blow a twenty to get the same intel Lenny had. Alec paced for a bit more, and then he strode down the driveway past me, toward the sidewalk. There he turned away from view. I wasn’t sure if he was taking off again, so I called Lenny.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  “He’s just standing under the canopy out the front. Looks like he’s waiting for her to come back.”

  “Then I guess we wait, too.”

  I moved away from the front of the building, back to the lawn in front of the Royal Poinciana. The entrance to that building was actually around the side on Sunset, so I guessed I would only be disturbed by a gardener. As it was I didn’t even see that much. The hedge blocked my view of the street, and Alec was out of my eye line, so I leaned against a palm tree. There was no sun, which was a blessing, but the air was so thick it was like drowning. Breathing came harder than it should, and I was sure the clouds were reaching down to the tops of the trees. After about a half hour Lenny called.

  “I see a car coming.”

  I dashed back to the side of the Biltmore, and saw a conservative silver Mercedes pull up into the driveway. It looked very much like the car that had met Drew Keck late at the yacht club. That got me thinking about their conversation. She had said he had driven a bargain, and he had replied not for what he had done.

  I pushed the thoughts from my mind and crept up the front of the building and pressed myself in behind a small palm tree. The doorman ran out and opened the door, and Celia Colfax stepped out.

  “Celia!” called Alec Meechan as he ran up from the street level.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Colfax,” said the doorman. “He’s been here for some time.”

  “Can’t you do something about that?” she snapped at him, and I understood what Lenny had meant about looking after your doorman.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll call the police right now.”

  “No, damn it. Don’t call the police. We don’t want a scene.” She left out an exasperated sigh, and then turned toward the approaching Alec. “I’ll handle this.”

  Alec was puffing when he reached her. This was no weather to be running anywhere.

  “Celia,” he repeated.

  “I told you to stay away from here.”

  “I need the papers,” puffed Alec. His hair was dropping over his red face, and his suave appearance was lost.

  “I don’t care what you want, Alec, and I don’t care what you were up to with Will. That’s done now. We’re done. Goodbye.”

  Alec stood straight and brushed back his hair, and spoke to Celia as she walked away.

  “You walk away from me, then you’re done too.” He’d gotten his wind back because the words struck Celia like bullets. She stopped. She must have been considering her options because she took her time turning around, but eventually she did.

  “Are you threatening me, Alec? ”

  “Those papers are mine, Celia.”

  “Those papers are Will’s.”

  “They’re no good to Will, and they’re no good to you.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “If I give you what you want, this is the last time I see you.”

  “The last time, Celia.”

  She turned away again. “Come on, then.”

  I watched them walk away, toward the building entrance. I figured I wasn’t going any further myself, so I retreated to my bike and called Lenny.

  “Celia has some papers Alec wants, something he was doing with Will. She wasn’t too keen, but she seems to be getting them.”

  “Your sheriff raid story seems to have lit a fire under him.”

  “It does, and there’s more. She didn’t want to do it, but he said if she didn’t, she was done.”

  “Done how?”

  “No idea. And there’s more. I’m almost certain I saw Celia’s Mercedes at the yacht club last night, meeting with Drew Keck.” I explained the hard bargain and Drew’s retort.

  “So what is it that Drew did for the widow Colfax?”

  “Someone more cynical than me might suggest he murdered her husband.”

  “That would be cynical. I’ll keep on Celia,” said Lenny. “See if she goes out again. You keep on Alec.”

  “Roger Wilco,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I saw it in a movie.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I GOT ON my bike and waited about ten minutes, and then saw Alec jog down the driveway and back to his car. He looked to have his mojo back. He was carrying a large manila envelope, which he tossed onto the passenger seat, and then he dropped into the sleek car and powered away. I followed, shooting a quick wave at Lenny as we passed. We did a loop of the block and headed back to the mainland. Alec didn’t head back to the freeway, instead turning onto Route 1. The traffic was heavy and clearly frustrating the hell out of Alec, because he constantly revved the engine, pulsing an annoying whine out into the ether. I followed him up toward Riviera Beach, but before we got there, Alec pulled off into the parking lot of liquor store. I kept going, not sure if I was made, or if he needed to buy a fifth of off-brand whiskey. I pulled into the next side street and walked back, helmet in hand, and stood outside the office of an insurance agent. I glanced around the corner at the lot. Alec was sitting in his car. He didn’t appear to have gotten out, and he didn’t appear to be doing anything but waiting. I looked around me. Just north of me the houses and stores stopped, and the road lifted into the air, as it passed by the open lots and container storage of the Port of Palm Beach. It reminded me that I needed to visit Drew Keck, whose boatyard was nearby.

  I watched a shiny Dodge Ram pull into the parking lot and stop on the far side of Alec. The two vehicles could not have been more mismatched for a clandestine meeting if they sat down and planned it that way. Both were nose in, so the drivers weren’t window to window. The Dodge truck stood so high off the ground it should have been marketed with a free stepladder. The Porsche on the other hand was practically a go-cart. The drivers might have been contemplating who was going to come to whom, and they did it for so long I decided that they had nothing to do with each other. Then the driver of the truck got down and walked around to Alec’s window. Alec didn’t get out. His window came down and Alec handed the manila envelope to the other man. Before he took it, the guy from the truck looked around the lot, appearing to check if they were alone. But it was all for show, or because he’d seen it in a movie. If he had really looked, he would have seen me standing on the corner, watching him. But he didn’t. He swept his eyes across the scene so quickly he would have missed a Sher
man tank. He took the envelope and stuck a hand inside. He pulled out some papers, white and blue and yellow sheets, if my eyesight was all it should be. He gave them a quick look, slid them back in and pulled out something else, holding it close. I wasn’t sure what it was until he flicked the end of it, and ruffled through a wad of cash. If they were ones, there must have been a thousand bucks. And I was betting they weren’t ones. The guy dropped the cash back in the envelope and returned to his truck, and then he pulled out and drove away. I pretended to look at the interesting material in the window of the insurance agent, and then I turned back to the lot. Alec still wasn’t moving. He turned the engine on to keep the AC working. I, on the other hand, was sweltering. My jeans were sticking to me like an abrasive second skin, and the sight of a liquor store I couldn’t visit was something from the demented dreams of an explorer lost in the Sahara. After thirty minutes I was ready to throw in the towel. I certainly needed one. I saw Alec take a call, and then he pulled the Porsche out of the space. I ran back to the bike, and was putting my helmet on when he zoomed past. By the time I got onto the road, he was gone. I rode up the overpass, and as I headed down I noticed the orange Porsche below me, on the surface street, turning into the port offices.

  I pulled my bike over to the side of the overpass and watched Alec park the Porsche in the lot and stride into the customs office. He was clearing something through the port, and if I knew one thing about the customs office, like all good government agencies, it was that bureaucracy moved like a glacier. I figured Alec would be a while, and I had no intention of standing in my helmet, the humid skies baking me from within like a microwave oven. So I jumped back on my bike and zoomed down to Riviera Beach.

  I parked just inside the lot for the boatyard, left my helmet and wandered down to the water. I was looking for any breeze to cool my overheating core, but there wasn’t a breath of wind, so I gave up and took my time getting to the large boathouse. I slipped inside and walked over to where Drew Keck had been working on the polished wooden boat. The boat stand remained in place, but it was empty. There was no boat. There was no Drew Keck. The area had been cleaned, and his tools were gone. I stepped around a patchy-looking white barge in the next space and found a guy who looked like Drew Keck’s cousin, same hat, same mustache, bigger belly. The guy was sanding the hull of the barge and I waited for the buzz to stop before I could be heard.

  I was going to try ahoy , but figured I’d better check the cred on that with Ron before I used it in public.

  “Hey, there,” I said.

  The guy looked up through thick plastic safety goggles. He nodded.

  “I’m looking for Drew Keck. He was working next door.” I pointed in the general direction of the next slot in the shed.

  “Gone,” said the guy, which was really helpful.

  “Yeah, I see that. You got any idea where?”

  The guy shook his head. “Think he was headed north.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Put her in the water this morning.” The guy turned the sander back on and that was the end of that productive conversation.

  So Drew was into something with Celia Colfax, possibly involving the demise of her husband, and now he had taken off. It was suspicious, but I had no lead to follow, so I figured I’d better get back to the port office before I lost Alec as well.

  But I didn’t lose Alec. I stood out by a shipping container for another half hour, and then I saw him come out of the customs office. He strode out to the access road to the port, as if he planned on hitching a ride. Within a couple minutes, a convoy of trucks appeared from the port and stopped on the road. The drivers stayed in their air-conditioned cabs, and Alec walked alongside, looking up at the shipping containers that each semitrailer held. I grabbed a pen out of my pocket and scribbled down the container numbers on the back of Alec’s business card. Alec walked the length of the convoy, turned back to the lead driver and spoke to him for a few seconds. Then with a collective grunt and sigh, the trucks pulled out. Alec wandered back to his car, and I followed him away from the port.

  East-west driving in South Florida is a drag. The Florida turnpike and I-95 run side by side down the east coast this far south, and they make getting north-south a breeze. But the east-west roads are like a fat man’s arteries. We crawled west, out past the turnpike, until we got onto the Beeline Highway and the traffic fell away and we sped that last few miles to a warehouse near the raceway. Alec pulled in the gate and I stopped on the roadside. The whole area was just west of civilization, halfway to Lake Okeechobee. It was surrounded by lush vegetation, and even though it was only a few miles from Palm Beach Gardens, it felt like the middle of nowhere. The trees and scrub and low clouds and silence were claustrophobic. It didn’t feel like a place man belonged. But men were there, in a convoy of trucks, lined up one after the other. I watched through the hurricane wire fence as one at a time the trucks entered the warehouse, and then one at a time they left, bare naked, their shipping containers gone. The whole process took an hour, and by the time the last truck pulled away, I was seeing unicorns. Unicorns drinking steins of beer. Beer that was delivered by Scandinavian wenches. And I had no idea what a Scandinavian wench was, or if such a thing even existed. I shook my head at the thought, and shook it again at the thought that the idea of unicorns hadn’t fazed me at all. I was dehydrated and my head was pounding. I wondered if sunstroke was possible when there was no sun.

  I saw Alec come out of the warehouse, get in his car and pull out. I wasn’t sure I could follow. I was worried about keeping the bike in a straight line, but I had no intention of being out here after dark, so I got on and followed Alec back toward town. I lost him pretty quickly. He shot off into the distance, and it was a pace neither my bike nor my brain could match. I drifted into Palm Beach Gardens, and I figured I’d try the car lot. It was an educated guess, and as it turned out, the education paid off. I stopped in front of the taco shop again. The chain on the driveway was lying across the pavement, the Porsche was back in place, and Alec was sitting in his office, doing what appeared to be absolutely nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I HAD AN idea that there must be some kind of place where I could check the container numbers I had written down, but I had no idea where that might be. Fortunately I knew a guy who always knew a guy, and I happened to be meeting my guy that evening. I turned up at Sally’s store looking like a reconditioned zombie. I had made it home, drank a couple gallons of water with half a dozen ibuprofen, and then stood under the shower until I resembled an old man. The humidity had sucked the hunger from me, and I could feel the water sloshing around inside, so I just put on a fresh shirt and pair of chinos, and headed for Sal’s. The girl in the check cashing booth was gone, and Sal recoiled as I walked in.

  “What the heck happened to you?”

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said.

  “Seriously, kid. You look like you just crawled out of Dachau.”

  “I’m not sure that’s an appropriate reference.”

  “Then you haven’t looked in the mirror. You sure you can drive to PSL?”

  “We’ll make it.”

  “That’s encouraging. Give me a second.” He disappeared into a back room, and then came out with an ill-fitting Mets cap on his head. “The car will be here in a few minutes. ”

  “Okay.”

  I had gotten tickets for the baseball game up in Port St. Lucie, and given my lack of a suitable vehicle, we had agreed I would drive Sal’s car to the game.

  “You get anywhere with those containers?” I asked.

  “Got a kid looking at it now. He’ll have something by the time we get back.”

  We chatted for a bit, then a horn blasted twice outside and we walked out and Sal locked the front door. In the parking lot sat his classic ’67 Cadillac Eldorado coupe. The car was the size of the Titanic, but didn’t handle quite as well. A young guy sat behind the wheel. I made for the driver’s side door, but Sal called me around and fli
pped the front seat forward and we both bent low and dropped onto the rear bench seat.

  I looked at Sally. “I thought I was driving?”

  “Like I said, take a look at yourself. I wanna make it there and back. Besides, young Christopher doesn’t mind driving us, do you son?”

  “Not at all, Mr. Mondavi.”

  “You gonna do some study while you wait?”

  “Got my textbooks right here, Mr. Mondavi.”

  “Good boy.”

  The kid pulled the mammoth car out toward the freeway, and Sal and I leaned back and enjoyed the ride. It took about five miles for the Caddy to reach top speed, but once it did it floated above the blacktop with a grace that belied its age. We reached St. Lucie West inside an hour, and the kid dropped us by the entrance for the corporate boxes.

  “See you in a couple,” said Sally, to the kid.

  “I’ll be here, Mr. Mondavi. ”

  I walked up to the stadium gate where the GM had left our names. The guy checking the names looked familiar, and when he glanced up from his sheet, he smiled.

  “Say it ain’t so. Miami Jones.”

  I pointed at him. “It’s Pete, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Jones.”

  “It’s Miami. Mr. Jones was my dad.”

  He smiled. “Miami. Great to have you back here.”

  “Rex said he would leave some tickets here.”

  “Yes, sir. You gentlemen are up in the sponsors’ box. Take the elevator right here.”

  Sal and I waited for the elevator, and were joined by some more Mets fans who didn’t recognize me. I was okay with that. Even when I was a professional I always found it strange when folks recognized me. Most people would recognize the guy who cuts their hair every three months before they recognized a minor league baseball player. But in the small towns where teams were often based, there were always plenty of folks who did. I didn’t mind people wanting to chat or grab an autograph, even though I never understood why, but the part I found disconcerting was the familiarity. People acted like you’d been college roommates, or shared a trench on the beaches of Normandy. Fame distorted our sense of familiarity, and the sense of access and entitlement that came with it. One time on the mound I was abused from the stands by a spectator for not turning up to the bar mitzvah of his son, who I couldn’t recall ever meeting.