by John Pearce
“The whole affair started out corrupt and it will end that way. People are willing to kill to preserve either their secrets or their fortunes. This affair combines both. Roy found that out the hard way.”
Eddie turned another page in the Leitz binder, looked at the page for a minute and whistled. “Wait a minute. Look at what we have here.”
He pointed at the first of a series of letters to Roy. “My German isn’t up to this. Would you read it?”
“Sure,” she said. Her finger traced a path down the page and when it arrived at the bottom she stopped on the signature. “Damn,” she said.
“What is it?” Eddie asked.
“This is basically a blackmail note, and it’s signed by a man named Erich Kraft. Do you remember I told you my mother’s husband had an unpleasant son my age? That was — is — Erich Kraft. I guarantee you anything connected with either of them is no good.”
They counted six letters, written about two months apart, the last one dated November 2000. Roy had responded politely to each, saying he’d found no trace of the painting or any other treasure and was no longer actively searching. Each was more insistent than the last that he must know where to find the painting, or have already found it himself. The final letter cited a mysterious witness.
“You must deal with me honestly or bad things will happen,” the final letter said. “The painting and the gold were the property of my father, and they are mine now. I intend to have them.”
The receptionist helped them copy the contents of the binder and return the originals to the vault. Eddie put the copies into his old brown briefcase, which he’d tossed into the back seat at the last minute just in case they struck paydirt.
Following Billy Joe’s instructions, they walked across the street to a fading building whose last ground-floor tenant had been an antique shop. Under a sagging tin awning they found a wooden door, repainted a bright blue much more recently than the rest of the building. Its glass window had a sign, in gold leaf, announcing that James Dean, Attorney at Law, practiced on the second floor.
The wooden stairway had seen little recent care. A single bare bulb at the top threw each step into a half shadow that made walking up them difficult. Jen tripped and would have fallen once, but caught Eddie’s arm at the last second. At the top an unlighted hallway, its linoleum floor peeling at the edges, turned to the left. A man stood waiting in a pool of light at the open door of what appeared to be the building’s only inhabited office. He wore the trousers from an aged blue suit, a white shirt and a black bolo tie cinched tightly under his deeply sun-lined face with a large turquoise ornament. Brown cowboy boots with blue stitching stuck out below his too-short cuffs. His white hair was swept into an enormous pompadour that reminded Eddie of the television preachers he’d seen during his college days. Jen didn’t see anything unusual about it.
“Billy Joe called and told me you two would be here. Come on in and I’ll tell you everything I know, which ain’t much. And I am surely sorry at the death of your father, little lady. I didn’t know him well, but what I saw, I liked.
“Take a seat on the couch there.” He pointed to an old leather sofa. It stood under a window with a view out to Hickory Street, to the right of a roll-top desk that would have been at home in a Bogart movie. A row of filing cabinets, wooden except for a newer steel one at the end, stood against the opposite wall. Without the new-looking MacBook Pro on the desk, the room was pure 40s.
The old lawyer eased himself into an old wooden desk chair and turned to face them. He looked quizzically at Eddie. “Where do you fit in all this, young man? The banker told me you’re from France, but you look American to me.”
“Actually, I’m both, Mr. Dean. Roy and my father worked together during the war, and Jen brought me a letter from Roy. He didn’t know my father had died.”
“Where did they serve?”
“My father was in intelligence from 1940 on, but they served together at the end in Munich, helping recover art and treasure the Germans had stolen.”
“Ah. I’ve heard about that operation,” Jimmy said. “I was further north, in Belgium and at the Bulge, and then I got sick and wound up working in the pharmacy at a hospital in France. I was a completely green kid at the Bulge. Scared me to death.”
Jen sensed that Eddie was getting impatient. She knew his next question would be a pointed effort to get the conversation back onto Sommers, and that the old man might feel rushed. She raised her hand and replied to him, “You must have some stories to tell. Could we come back in a week or two and talk more when everything is more relaxed?”
It was the right touch. Jimmy sat up straighter in his chair and apologized. “I know you’re here about your father’s records, so I’ll tell you what I know about them.
“He came to me thirty years ago and said he needed a lawyer in Arcadia for something very specific. He wanted me to be his address of record for the safe deposit box he planned to open at Sun Bank, because he didn’t want anything in the records to show his home address. It had a different name then, but Billy Joe took charge at about that time.”
“That would have been in the late seventies, before I came to live with him,” Jen said.
“Yes, he told me he lived by himself and had no family here. But he was worried about something, I could tell. Most people wouldn’t jump through all the hoops he did to keep his address confidential.”
“Billy Joe — Mr. Maxwell — said you had an emergency contact for him. Please tell us about that.”
“Sure.” Jimmy got up from the chair, conspicuously favoring his right knee. “Arthritis. Old age. Whatever, it makes the stairs hell.”
He limped to the file cabinets and opened a wooden box standing on the top, rummaged in it and brought out an index card. “Here’s the card I keep whenever a get a new client. I ask them for all their addresses and contact information, although that’s blank on this one. But Roy did give me an emergency contact number just in case. ‘Bout ten years ago he came to see me and said he needed to change the contact name. Said the original man died and the new man would know what to do with all the stuff in the box. And he added your name, too, in case I couldn’t reach the primary.”
He handed the card to Jen, who looked at it and raised her eyebrows. She turned to Eddie and pointed out the contact name, carefully written in Roy’s European hand: Albert Sommers.
“Did you call Mr. Sommers?”
“Sure did. I talked to him right after I saw the notice in the newspaper a week ago Sunday, and he said he would see that Roy’s bank vault was taken care of. I got a funny feeling about him, though. When I told him I was calling about some papers of Roy’s, just for an instant he sounded surprised, maybe even a little bit frightened. I haven’t heard anything more from him.”
“The old bastard knew something was up when I talked to him yesterday. How much do you think Roy told him about the painting?” Eddie was beginning to feel like the man who finds a wasp nest but not the wasps and knows they’re lying in wait for him nearby. He had a sinking feeling that Roy had been surrounded by enemies, which he’d realized early and as a result had moved his files away from his home, but hadn’t spotted them when they closed in on him.
Jen said, “He never hid his interest in the painting, but he thought the search was a lost cause. I never heard him say anything different from what he told Erich in those letters eight years ago. I always thought Al Sommers was twisted in some way, but I chalked it up to his wartime injury and his nasty politics. He saw conspiracies everywhere. Do you think he could be behind Roy’s death?”
“Too early to say, but it certainly is suspicious. We need to know a lot more about him. Who are his friends?”
Jen thought a minute as she made the turn toward Sarasota on Highway 70. “We used to see him now and then for dinner, but since he left the bank and his health started to fail I don’t think he’s been going out much. At one time he was active in Republican politics, but even they got tired of his anti-S
emitic rants. He has a couple of gay friends who visit him from time to time, strange as that sounds. I think the father of one of them used to work for him in Texas — he was the guard your father met at Nuremberg. And there’s a couple who look after him. They’re East Germans but they’ve been here a long time and they keep pretty much to themselves. They live in a little caretaker’s house on his property, and the story is he won’t let them go into Sarasota, so they have to drive to Tampa on their days off. Otherwise I don’t know if he still has any friends.”
“I met Sonny yesterday. Strange guy. I’d better tell Thom some of what we found,” Eddie said as he pulled the iPhone from his shirt pocket. “I hope there’s a signal out here.”
Jen had brought the BMW smoothly up to 70 miles an hour as they passed through a section of pine forest, broken every quarter-mile by small houses, many with old appliances and cars in the yards. They were now fully in the country.
“Good idea,” she replied. “But hold on, because there’s a white car a half-mile back that may be following us. I saw them move out of a parking place downtown when we left Jimmy Dean’s office, and now they’ve followed us onto this road. It could be a coincidence, but ....”
“After what we’ve learned, we need to be super cautious. Do you think we should go back downtown?”
“We’ll have to deal with it eventually. They probably don’t know these roads as well as I do. In high school I used to come out dancing at the old roadhouses around here. Some of the gravel roads were prime stops for horny teenagers on the way back.”
Thom answered his phone this time and Eddie delivered a quick summary of the day, including the indication that Al Sommers had intervened to keep the Hans Frank interview out of official Army files, and that he knew about the Arcadia bank vault but avoided telling Eddie about it. Eddie did not think that was an innocent omission.
Thom broke in. “The guy you talked to yesterday, Deus Lewis. A dog walker found his body in a park this morning, not too far from the grocery store where you told me you left him. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d better figure that he spilled everything about your meeting with him.”
“Arturo is in danger.”
“I sent a car out there as soon as I heard. Arturo was at work, but somebody already tried to burn his house down with his wife and daughter inside. The only reason they escaped is she pushed a sofa in front of the door and slowed him down. When he forced his way in they hid in the bathroom, which has a really strong lock. She made so much noise the guy gave up but set fire to the sofa on the way out. A neighbor saw smoke and called the fire department.”
“And they’re OK?”
“Scared but otherwise fine. We picked up Arturo at his job and took him home.”
“Any idea who the pyromaniac is?”
“No, except that the wife said he had an accent. Not one like hers, but more guttural. I think maybe it was German, or Russian, but that’s a guess.”
Jen called out, “Eddie, they’re coming closer!”
“Oh, Thom,” Eddie said, almost as an aside. “We may have somebody chasing us. We’re on the way back from Arcadia, and Jen saw a white car pull out and follow us. We’re going eighty-five and they’re creeping up on us, so they aren’t out for a leisurely drive in the country.”
“Careful. There are some bad turns on that road.”
“We’ll be OK. Jen got to know it well during her misspent youth. She says tell you she’s going to cut through the two-lane roads around Myakka City if we have to. If the driver is a foreigner, or even an out-of-towner, he won’t know them.”
He described Jen’s BMW to Thom and asked him to alert any sheriff’s deputies or highway patrolmen in the vicinity. “And tell them to be careful. If these are the guys who killed Deus and tried to murder Arturo’s wife and baby, they are very dangerous and probably armed.”
“Will do.” Thom’s tone said he didn’t appreciate being told his job and Eddie made a mental note to back off.
Eddie turned up the ringer volume so he’d be sure to hear it over the wind noise. “He’ll alert the highway patrol, but no guarantee they’ll find us or we’ll find them. Can you deal with this guy?”
“I think so. We have about a two-mile straightaway before we get to a little road called Sugar Bowl. I’ll use that to see if we can clearly outrun them — I think we can. If not, we’ll head back into the farmland. I know I can duck them in there, but it’d be more dangerous because the roads are narrow.”
“Ok with me. I’ll watch them.” Eddie tightened his seatbelt as he felt the 300-horsepower engine respond to Jen’s steady push on the accelerator. As Eddie looked back, he saw the pursuers increase their speed but it was clear after only a few seconds that Jen was pulling away.
“I think we’re outrunning them pretty easily, Jen,” he shouted over the rushing wind.
“Good. I could maybe dig out a few more RPMs but I hate to do it on this road. You never know when you’ll come up behind a truck. We’re running at almost a hundred twenty now, and I’d be surprised if they can maintain a hundred for any distance without blowing up their engine. And we still have revs to spare.”
The 25-mile drive to the Interstate crossroads took them less than 15 minutes, even allowing for the truck Jen had to slow down to pass. For the last five a black-and-tan cruiser of the Florida Highway Patrol pulled in front of them and Jen was able to slow to 80. She let out a sigh and looked at Eddie. “That was fun when I was 18 years old, but at 40 it’s just stupid. I hope that’s the last excitement I have for a while.”
Two blocks past the Interstate the cruiser stopped behind a sheriff’s car waiting at the side of the road. The highway patrolman, a lanky sergeant who appeared about their age, walked back to Jen’s side of the car.
“We’re glad you were in the neighborhood,” she told him with relief.
“Me too. We’re still working through what’s going on, but for now the deputy in that car ahead will escort you downtown to the city Police Department. Detective Anderson is waiting for you there, and by the time you see him he should know something about what’s happening.”
The deputy led them through town and up the ramp of a parking garage, stopping on the third floor. As he opened the door of the unmarked white cruiser, Eddie thought he caught a murmured “Oh, shit!” from Jen as a tall blond deputy, his white shirt bearing captain’s bars on the collar, reached the car.
“Been out racing the Arcadia road again, Jen?”
“One last time, Kevin. I think that was it for me.”
She introduced him to Eddie as Kevin LaFarge, a high school classmate.
“Jen and I go ‘way back,” Kevin told Eddie. “I should have known it was her when the call came in. I was in the area and Thom Anderson said it was important so I took it myself. He’s waiting for you across the street.”
He waved at the entrance to a bridge that spanned a narrow street, connecting the garage to the police station.
“Old friend?” Eddie asked after Kevin had driven away.
“Part of my past. Important part. He’s one of the reasons I know the country roads. It was a close call back then, but he married the homecoming queen. Now they have four kids and she runs around on him when she can.”
At the end of the bridge Thom stood in a small reception area, its walls painted an institutional seafoam green. Two plastic chairs stood against a side wall, and one look at their seats told Eddie why Thom had chosen to stand. One appeared to have a dried-up puddle of ice cream residue; whatever had been dropped on the other was unidentifiable.
Thom said, “Well, we didn’t find the white car. Or, I should say, we found a lot of white cars but we couldn’t match any of them with your pursuers.”
“When Jen put the pedal down they dropped back,” Eddie told him. “At that point they were just a couple of guys out for a drive in the country.”
“And that’s what the Highway Patrol found — a lot of Sunday drivers. We have so many retirees here that every day
is Sunday to somebody.”
The door buzzed as Thom passed his card through a reader mounted on the wall. “Follow me and we can bring each other up to date on everything that’s been going on today.”
The desk and two small chairs left room for only one file cabinet in Thom’s small office. Eddie pulled out one of the chairs so Jen could take the second one, then waited for Thom to speak. He was already concerned that the detective would be offended that he’d found the second witness, and knew policemen could be territorial about their work — in Kuwait the civilian police called up to be MPs were among the thinnest-skinned soldiers and most likely to over-react to a slight, real or imagined. Although Thom didn’t strike him as that picky, he knew ruffled feelings could jeopardize Jen’s chances of learning the truth about Roy’s death, so he sat quietly waiting for Thom to begin.
He did. “Your message yesterday was significant in a lot of ways. Can we go over the day again? First, how did you get Arturo to tell you about Deus?”
“Respect and patience. He had to know more than he’d told, so I just told him how important his information was to solving the case and waited for him to make the right decision. In the end, his wife encouraged him to tell me about Deus. She’s the one who really got it done.
“By the way, do they have a place to stay?”
“The wife has a cousin here. That’s where they went today. But there’s not much room so they’ll have to find somewhere else in a day or two.”
Eddie turned to Jen. “They shouldn’t have to suffer because they did the right thing, and they should be somewhere with some security. I’ll pay the bill.”
