by John Pearce
She had changed to a thin light blue blouse and matching slacks. Eddie had put on a red golf shirt and Dockers khakis. They sat side by side in deck chairs, shoeless feet stretched toward the garden.
“Roy bought this old cracker house right after he moved here from Frankfurt, then he renovated it from the top down,” she told him. “He wanted something in the classic Florida style, with wide porches all around to catch the breeze, and a metal roof because he liked the sound of the rain on it. I think he was captivated by Sarasota when he came here on vacation a couple of times, and this is certainly the best part of the state. A lot of the rest is a little rough.”
“So you’ve lived here since your mother died?” Eddie asked her.
“I was just 13 when I came here, and I wasn’t a happy teen-ager. I was a handful for Roy the first few years. I had a European attitude toward sex, which was heaven for the high-school boys I dated but wasn’t really a good way to grow up. I think Roy sent me away to college mainly to get me out of his hair. And I matured a lot there. When you and I met I was just about to finish my art history degree, which seemed to come naturally, maybe because both Roy and my mother were interested in the same thing. I was here mainly because I was trying to decide what to do when I graduated, come back to Roy or go to New York. I finally decided to come back and I’ve only regretted it occasionally. Roy really was my family, and he didn’t have a lot of friends, so we became each other’s best friend.”
She told Eddie more details of how she had started working in her downtown art gallery when it was much smaller. Summers, she was a showroom assistant to an owner who mainly wanted to cut a swath through the town’s embryonic black-tie scene. She started to work full time when she graduated, then three years later she bought it at a very good price from his Michigan family after he died of a heart attack during the finale of a concert in the city’s purple symphony hall. “His heirs couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, which was great for me.
“The gallery took a lot of work at first and Roy was a big help to me. At the time it handled a lot of local art, which tended — still does — toward seagull sculptures and paintings of old Florida houses under the waving palms. I wanted to make it something more classic, and that was what he was good at.
“I had learned the academic side of art but he had been immersed in it for forty years and had developed a fine sense of what was good and what was not. And believe me, some of what’s still sold as good around here is not.”
“That sounds like a good reason to stay here with Roy.”
“While I was away at college he rebuilt the second floor into a nice two-bedroom suite with its own entrance and kitchen and told me I should live my own life there the way I wanted. He never went back on that, even when men lived with me for months at a time, or when I disappeared to live with them, once for quite a while, and once again when I was married three years to the society doctor. We usually found time to see each other several times a week, either at lunch downtown or for a drink on this porch. It was important to both of us. He was the reason I am whatever I am today. Sometimes I look around me at what’s become of some of my contemporaries and I think that could have been me. Not a happy thought.”
“It must have been a pretty good life. And by the way, what’s a cracker house?”
“Cracker is a cultural icon in Florida. Shakespeare used it to mean a windbag or braggart, and in the Florida frontier days it came to refer to the cowboys who herded cattle by cracking whips around them. But if you had to define it in one word today it would probably be redneck.”
Eddie tilted his head and looked at her for a moment, then said, “Redneck I understand. Lauren told me her father talked about all the redneck kids he had to supervise at college, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“It wouldn’t be. And they would have called him much worse behind his back.”
“A black man in the South, even an Army officer? I’ll say they would. The hardest lesson I had to learn was how much racial prejudice there was. Is it better now?”
“That depends on who you ask.”
As they talked the shadows in the garden lengthened, then it turned dark, illuminated only by a street light outside the privacy fence and small white lights Roy had installed to mark the garden path. Jen got up and went into the kitchen to serve the steak, potato and a small green salad. Through the screen door she called to him. “Why don’t you come in and open another Pinot noir? Then we can eat on the porch, at least until the bugs drive us in.”
At 9:30 they had finished dinner and had coffee. Jen said, “That’s it for me. It’s after 3 a.m. on my rundown body clock, and I’m going up to bed. Come in when you’re ready. And please lock the back door, just in case.”
The streetlight outside the fence turned the live oak trees a subtle gray. He poured the last glass of burgundy and sat back, his feet on the bench that ran along the edge of the deck. The light from Jen’s bedroom window shone into the garden, then went out. He remembered that twenty years before she had enjoyed the last minute before bed by standing naked in the window gazing out on the garden, and he thought briefly about turning around to see. The thought caused a not entirely unwelcome tightness. He forced his thoughts back to Roy Castor.
What was the nexus between his death in Sarasota and the Germans in Paris? It had to be Jen. That was the conclusion he and Philippe had reached two days before when they checked his apartment. The driver of the car had to be the only one of the three who knew what Jen looked like — Mutt and Jeff were hired muscle, and to them both blondes looked the same, so they had tried to seize Aurélie and had changed their target only when the driver sounded his horn.
So Jen was the target. But why that particular moment in Paris? Wouldn’t it have been more logical to kidnap her in Sarasota before she left, or to wait until she returned? Or had the Germans simply been caught flatfooted when she left town suddenly? Were they afraid she’d found something that needed to be intercepted? He smiled in the dark — she had found something, but so far it had contributed nothing but more questions.
“Oh, well,” he muttered under his breath as he stood up. “Time for bed. Tomorrow’s when the fun really begins.” He gathered the glasses and the now-empty bottle and took them into the kitchen.
He locked the door, went to the guest room’s small bathroom to brush his teeth, hung his clothes carefully in the closet and climbed under a single sheet.
In five minutes he was sound asleep and dreaming of his last visit to Sarasota and his first meeting with Jen. She was working that summer in the art gallery and Roy had called her to say he and Artie needed to have a private dinner. Would she take on Eddie for the evening? She had nothing else planned so agreed to entertain him. “Just this once,” she’d told Roy. “I’m really not that fond of military men.”
Eddie had gone to meet her at the gallery. She gave him a quick tour but soon realized he was bored by everything but one street scene of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. A streetcar, its headlight and windows brightly lighted, passed by the theaters at Châtelet. He had recognized the location immediately.
They had walked down sleepy Palm Avenue to a Spanish restaurant on Main Street. The dinner had been lively. Eddie told her of the changes in France since she’d been a student in Lyon and she told him of her life in Frankfurt before her mother had died, then of her life in Sarasota.
At 10:30 she looked at her watch and said, “We’re going to close this place. We’ve been here more than two hours and Sarasota’s not a late-night town. We can have a nightcap back at the gallery by the light of the pictures.”
She took his arm as they crossed the deserted street, holding it tight against her breast. They stopped once under a tree for a long kiss, and after Jen locked the front door behind them she took his hand and led him toward the back of the store.
“The previous owner lived in Orlando, and when he came here he didn’t want to go to a hotel, so …” She opened a door to reveal
a small efficiency apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen and a large double bed. “My boss won’t be back for several days.”
His dream replayed in slow motion as they slowly undressed each other. He dreamt of sliding under the cool white sheet, and of Jen climbing in beside him, pressing herself close.
He awakened slowly to the realization that it was no longer a dream. Then he was fully conscious of her naked body pressed close to his, her breast resting on his chest.
Without a word, he put his arm around her and pulled her astride him. After an hour they tried to sleep, but soon Eddie felt her hand caress him as she put her leg over his.
“My turn this time,” he said as she rolled onto her back and clamped her legs around him. “Sleep is for later.” As he entered her he heard her murmur, “Old times.”
8
Sarasota
“I want to help Thom Anderson solve this case. He seemed bright and determined, but I’m not sure he’s convinced yet it was murder.” Jen said.
She had been reviewing her conversations with the detective over the remains of a fried-egg-and-bacon breakfast. “I’m not used to this much breakfast,” Eddie told her. “I will have to watch my weight here.”
“I’ll do all I can to help you get exercise,” she said with a mischievous grin.
Eddie smiled but changed the subject.
“We need to be careful in case it goes beyond one murder. Tell me about the detective.”
“Thom’s a long-time Sarasota cop, and the force here is pretty good, based on the few experiences I’ve had with them at the gallery. Why don’t I call him and ask him to see you today?”
“Ask him to meet me at the site. That will make it easier for both of us to re-imagine what happened.”
Jen went into the kitchen to call the detective and Eddie took his iPhone from his pocket. A text message from Aurélie said she would call him later in the day, before midnight Paris time. As he returned the phone to his pocket, Jen came back carrying a note. “I reached Thom,” she said. “He’ll meet us in half an hour. I told him I will stay just long enough to introduce you and then I have to go to the gallery and make sure everything is still working there. Here’s his number.”
As they walked through the house toward the front door, Eddie said to her, “When we come back later today I want to go through the house carefully just in case there’s something that might help us.”
“I think you should. I looked it over carefully, but I didn’t know what we know now. I think it’s possible he left other clues for us.”
She locked the door as they left, then handed Eddie a key. “Keep this, in case you come back when I’m not here. You can use Roy’s study. There’s a wired internet connection there. He didn’t trust wifi.”
They turned to walk the block and a half to their rendezvous point, and as they approached the spot they saw a black Crown Victoria turn into the parking lot of a small apartment building. “That’s Thom,” Jen said. “The police think their unmarked cars make them anonymous, but who else drives a black Crown Vic?”
The detective stepped out of the car as they approached and stuck out his hand, first to Jen then to Eddie. As she and Thom exchanged pleasantries Eddie sized him up. He saw a man about his age but an inch or two shorter and twenty pounds heavier, with sandy hair behind a receding hairline. He was wearing beige slacks and a blue blazer, neither of them expensive, and a white short-sleeved shirt with a thin black tie. Eddie picked him for a former military man, probably an Army sergeant who had served a few years after high school and then gone to college, which he might not have finished. His eyes were active and curious, a good sign.
“Sorry,” Eddie said when he realized Thom was speaking to him. “I was thinking about what happened here.”
“It wasn’t important. The only real news I have for you is that we found the car. The airport police checked the surveillance pictures and it came in the same day Mr. Castor was killed. It was a pretty smart plan — the owner left it to catch his flight and the thieves drove it out within 15 minutes. Then, a couple hours later, they brought it back and left it in the same spot. We didn’t hear about it until the owner came back and found the damage to the front end. They had run it through a car wash to remove the blood, but we found enough inside the grill to match it to Mr. Castor, so we know it was the murder weapon.
“There’s no longer any doubt this was a crime, not an accident. We’ve upgraded it to a murder investigation and I’ve been told to focus most of my time on it. Unfortunately, we still don’t have much to go on.”
Eddie asked if he would walk them through the events, and Jen interrupted to say, “I think I’d rather skip this part, and I need to go downtown to the shop. Call me there if you need me.”
Thom gave Eddie some of the background. “As far as we can tell, Mr. Castor was walking home from a Greek restaurant downtown, where he and a half-dozen friends have gathered every Wednesday afternoon since forever to talk about things. You know that he went back to Germany after the war. His friends tell us he accumulated considerable assets there and sold his business to move here. One member of this Wednesday group was his commanding officer in Germany.”
Eddie asked if he had their names and addresses.
“That will be no problem. Nothing we’ve found in this case so far needs to be kept confidential, mainly because we haven’t found much.
“He walked up Main Street to this north-south cross street, where we’re standing now, which is Osprey. He turned onto Osprey for a block, and when he got to Ringling he crossed and continued down Osprey, although normally he would turn and walk further up Ringling so he could cross through the art colony, which is shady. We don’t know why he chose this route that day, but it probably didn’t make much difference. These guys were waiting for him wherever he went.”
The day was hot and humid, as coastal summers in Florida tend to be, and Eddie noted that the sidewalk opposite where he and the detective stood was a cool green oasis that smelled deliciously of honeysuckle. It would have been inviting on a June day to avoid traffic-clogged Ringling and walk down a pastoral residential street. Thom’s voice recaptured his attention.
“Did Ms. Wetzmuller tell you about the witness? He’s a busboy in one of the Towles Court restaurants — I think it’s the only one — and he was on the way back from the bank when the killing happened behind him. We’re pretty sure one or more people came out of the parking lot behind this apartment building, grabbed Mr. Castor, and pushed him into the path of the car they’d stolen, or that he was trying to escape from them. We estimate the car was moving just under 20 miles an hour when it hit him, which doesn’t sound like much unless the thing that’s moving weighs almost two tons. This was a big Lincoln Navigator.
“The busboy told us he was walking this way to his job, so his back was turned and he didn’t see much. He said he heard someone call out, then turned to see the impact. I think he’s mostly telling the truth. He seems to be a good kid, twenty years old, lives with his wife and baby daughter just on the edge of Newtown, our black area, and has been working steady since he got out of high school a couple of years ago.”
“May I have his name and address?” Eddie asked.
“I presume you’d rather go by yourself?”
Eddie just nodded.
Thom offered to show Eddie the damaged Navigator. Although it was the blow to his head when it hit the curb that killed him, the impact of the car had been strong enough to leave blood on the damaged grill. Its DNA had matched Roy’s.
“The final test results just came back from the state lab,” Thom told Eddie as they drove toward the garage, which was in the center of a dreary suburban industrial park on the east side of town. “I didn’t have any doubt, but we’ve settled it for certain now.
“We also got some fingerprints and a little DNA material from inside the car, but there weren’t any hits from either of them, either in the state or FBI databases.”
“You won�
�t find any,” Eddie responded. “I’m pretty certain the killers were the Germans Jen and I met, to our unhappy surprise, on a Paris sidewalk two nights ago. One of them was carrying a nasty-looking knife, a bayonet.”
“He tried to kill you, too?” Thom asked, surprised.
“No, I don’t think so. They were looking for something, and they thought at one time Roy knew where it was. They obviously decided he didn’t, so they killed him. Either that, or it was an ugly accident. Maybe he was trying to escape.”
Thom asked, “Pardon me if I’m being too inquisitive, but how are you involved in this? Don’t you live overseas?”
Eddie told Thom about his father’s association with Roy during the war and how they had stayed in touch for several decades after it ended, and how his father had brought him to Sarasota in the late 1980s, which was where he had met Jen for the first time. “But I think Roy’s interest flagged in recent years. He left a letter for my father that looks a lot like he’d reached the end of the line and given up on the project. It wasn’t dated, but it appeared to be several years old. It was marked for hand delivery to my father, so Jen got on a plane and delivered it.”
“So you think he may have been killed because of something out of the distant past?”
“It’s beginning to look that way. Someone is very interested in it. The two men who tried to attack us the other night in Paris were from the eastern part of Germany. That happened less than two weeks after Roy was killed, so I’m betting it was the same people.”
“How could you tell they were from the east?”
“The police in Paris arrested them after we got away. And, Jen heard them talking to each other and recognized the accent.”
“She speaks German?”
