Fatal Decree

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “If he’s the one who killed Nell,” I said, “I guess both your jobs are done.”

  “What do you mean?” asked J.D.

  “You got your murderer, and Jock took out the guy who killed Gene’s wife.”

  “I don’t know,” said J.D. “There’s something screwy here.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t understand why he was trying to kill me. I had no connection to Nell Alexander until she was killed. I worked the cases in Miami, but we never caught the perp. So why would somebody connect me to the murders and want to put me out of commission?”

  “Unless,” I said, “you might have put the Miami killer in jail on other charges. That would explain why the murders stopped and why the killer is after you.”

  “This guy tonight wasn’t anybody I’ve ever seen before. And he couldn’t be over twenty-five. He was too young to be involved in the Miami murders. Maybe he’s just hired muscle, and the real killer is still out there somewhere.”

  “Let’s see what the forensics people find in the car and get an identity on the dead man,” said Jock.” Maybe we’ll know more then.”

  “J.D.,” I said, “why don’t you stay here tonight. In the spare bedroom.”

  “Thanks, Matt. But I think I’d rather sleep in my own bed.”

  “We’ve still got to wait for somebody to come take our statements.”

  “Since it’s an officer-involved shooting, it’ll be somebody from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,” said J.D. “The agent will probably have to come down from Tampa. I don’t think they work this late. I’ll call the chief and see what he says.”

  She stepped into the kitchen to make her call, returning in a few minutes. “Chief said to go to bed. Somebody will come by tomorrow. They’ll call first. I’m going home.”

  “I’ll drive you,” said Jock.

  “Thanks, but a patrol car’s coming to get me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Want another beer?” I asked.

  “Not tonight, Bucko. I’m headed for bed.”

  “I love it when you call me pet names,” I said.

  She grinned and said quietly, “You’re some sicko, Royal. Night, Jock.” And she was out the door.

  “I think she likes you, Bucko,” said Jock, grinning.

  I gave him the finger and went for more beer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jeff Worthington wore a navy-blue suit with a yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket, white dress shirt, yellow tie with blue polka dots, and cordovan loafers with tassels. He was a small man, perhaps five foot six and 135 pounds. His brown hair was thin and a little long over the ears, and his face bore the scars of the acne he’d suffered as a teenager. He had high cheekbones, a slender straight nose, a weak chin marked by a small dimple, and large teeth that, on the rare occasion when he smiled, looked as if they would jump out of his mouth. In short, he had the look of a predator.

  This was a good day. The sun was shining, the humidity was low, and passersby were smiling and greeting each other. Worthington stood for a moment on the landing that fronted the main entrance to the Sarasota County Judicial Center, looking up into a cloudless sky. He watched for a moment as a flock of seagulls wheeled in the currents high above, their harsh cries blasting the morning air. He shrugged and walked down the steps leading to the street, a smile struggling to break through the coarse visage he presented to the world.

  Jeff Worthington was a lawyer and had been one for about ten minutes. A harried judge had given him the oath of office, stumbling over some of the words, and shooed him out of chambers with a curt mumble of congratulations. All the documents certifying to his newly acquired profession were in the file folder he carried in his left hand. Today was the first day of what he planned to be a very short career. He had one client, one case, one matter to handle to its conclusion, and when that was completed, when he had won the case and done his client’s bidding, he would retire a rich man. The whole thing would be over in days, weeks at the most. Failure was not an option. The wages of failure were death. No appeal, no stay of execution, no clemency; just the agonizing death that he’d been promised as payment for failure.

  Worthington was perhaps the only member of the Florida Bar who had never been to law school. He’d gotten his license to practice law the old-fashioned way. He’d stolen it. From a dead man. That had not been easy, but he was a very smart guy, his intelligence quotient immeasurably higher than the half-wits who served as corrections officers in that pigsty they called Glades Correctional Institution. Fifteen hard years he’d been there, his entire fifteen-year stint. The prison executives were more interested in keeping the prisoners calm than rehabilitating them. Not that rehabilitation usually worked. Most of the cons were dumber than the dumbest of the men who guarded them.

  Worthington had grown up in public housing in a Tampa neighborhood that the city ignored. The elementary school that served him and his friends was one of those dying places where the teachers had given up and the administrators could not justify spending any more money on facilities. Jeff was bored with sitting day after day listening to the teachers as they tried to teach him things he already knew. He cut classes without anyone noticing, because to notice a truant kid meant paperwork and the teachers and administrators could find no good reason to spend their time on one more useless task. On the rare occasions when his parents weren’t drunk, they weren’t interested in making sure that the boy went to school.

  Jeff was a loner, a boy who wanted nothing to do with the other kids. He scratched around for things to do to occupy his mind, and one day, when he was about twelve, he found himself in the main public library in downtown Tampa. As he ambled idly through the stacks, he pulled random books from the shelves, thumbed through them, and put them back. His curiosity was piqued and he began to read passages from the books he chose so haphazardly. A spark was ignited in his nimble and curious brain and he began to read in-depth books that even his teachers had not read, and perhaps did not know existed.

  When he was fifteen, Jeff left the squalid apartment where his parents lived and moved to the streets. He never saw either of his parents again, and as far as is known, they made no effort to find Jeff. He made his living with small crimes, much as he had been doing for most of his life. A little shoplifting, a small-time burglary or two, a smash and grab. It provided all the money he needed to pay his share of the rent on a small house on the edge of downtown that he shared with several other young men whose circumstances mirrored Jeff’s own.

  Most of his roommates were addicted to one or another drug, but Jeff shied away from the temptations offered. He wanted a better life, somewhere other than public housing projects, and he figured that none of the men he lived with would ever get out of the rut in which they found themselves. Certainly not alive.

  When he was eighteen, Jeff was ready to make his move. He had studied the real estate market in the Tampa area and was convinced that he could make a lot of money investing in property. He just needed a stake, some money with which to get into the market and begin building his portfolio. He understood leverage, that you put the minimal amount down and borrowed the rest. He also knew that nobody would lend money to a teenager who lived in what amounted to a drug den. So Jeff set about building himself a new identity. He used the computers at the public library and became adept enough with them to fashion a new and fictitious persona. It hadn’t been easy. Computers were still rudimentary devices then, and the Internet was in its infancy. Still, with the help of a very good forger he had become acquainted with on the streets, he was able to turn himself into somebody he very definitely was not.

  Jeff’s alias was manufactured from whole cloth, but he appeared to be the scion of a wealthy family in Braintree, Massachusetts. The story was that the son dropped out of college the year before and decided to move to Florida and invest in real estate. He was twenty-one years old. Jeff thought the legend he’d built would do fine, but he still needed ca
pital. About twenty thousand dollars for starters, and Jeff knew just where to get it.

  An old warehouse on the edge of an industrial area near downtown Tampa had been turned into a club called simply “The Place.” It was a large space and drew hundreds of people every night. It stayed open until four in the morning, providing its patrons with booze and food and loud music. There was an underground economy within the club that relied on the retail sale of drugs of every kind. The management knew who the salespeople were and extracted a percentage of their nightly take as the price of doing business.

  The best thing about it from Jeff’s perspective was that it was an all-cash business. The owner of The Place advertised it as such. His thinking was that there would be a lot of patrons who would not want their credit card statements to show that they had taken part in the offerings of the establishment.

  Jeff had worked as a busboy at The Place for several weeks and had come to understand the system the proprietor used to handle the nightly receipts. He was convinced that the owner was skimming the take, sending most of the money to the bank by armored car shortly after closing each morning, but taking a substantial part of the cash for himself, probably from the payoffs provided by the illicit drug entrepreneurs who worked the floor. It was a neat way to cheat the tax man, and even a detailed audit would have shown that the money generated by the sale of food and alcohol was sent to the bank and duly accounted for.

  On the night that Jeff decided to stake his real estate empire, he hid in a closet after closing. He heard the armored car pull into the alley behind the club, and listened to the conversation between the owner and the driver. When the driver was gone, Jeff stole out of the closet and walked down the short corridor to the office. His face was completely covered by a Halloween mask that looked like Bill Clinton. He carried the Glock nine millimeter he’d stolen during a burglary two weeks before.

  Jeff stopped at the door to the office. There were voices, a low conversation coming from inside. He had not expected anyone else to be there. He stood silently for a beat, then shoved the door open gun in hand, pointing inward.

  The owner stood stock-still, an amused look on his face. Another man stood across the room holding a pistol, pointed at Jeff. He was one of the bouncers who stood nightly at the front door. The man fired, hitting Jeff in the left shoulder. Jeff fired at the same time, hitting the bouncer in the heart. A lucky shot? It saved Jeff’s life, but put him in jail for fifteen years.

  The owner pulled his own gun and stuck it in Jeff’s face while he used his cell phone to call the police. Jeff was in too much pain from the bullet in his shoulder to resist.

  Jeff was initially charged with first-degree murder, but it turned out that the bouncer had a checkered history and warrants for his arrest were outstanding in three states. The state attorney agreed to a plea to manslaughter with a fifteen-year sentence and no chance of parole. Jeff served every minute of it and had been released from prison on June 1, five months before.

  On the day Jeff walked down the steps of the Sarasota County Judicial Center, he had no understanding of any legal doctrine and would be unable to answer even the most rudimentary legal questions. That did not present a problem to him. He had no intention of practicing law, counseling clients, appearing in court, or, heaven forbid, going to a local bar function where as best he could figure, lawyers gathered to drink and brag about the cases they had won.

  When he was released from prison, Jeff had a mission. While not absolutely necessary, his being a lawyer would make his tasks easier to accomplish, and he didn’t have time to spend seven years at some university. At the beginning of October, he was told of a young man named Ben Flagler who had finished law school and sat for and passed the Florida bar exam. Jeff was assured that Flagler had no family and no friends in the area. He was from North Dakota and had gone to school there. His parents had been killed in a car wreck while he was in his second year of law school. He had no siblings, and if he had cousins or other family, he’d never met them. He decided that sunny Florida was a better place to practice law than the Dakotas, so he applied for the Florida bar exam and took it in August. When the results were posted in late September, the young man from North Dakota was among those who passed.

  Flagler rented a furnished apartment in Sarasota, dealing with the real estate agent through the Internet and by e-mail. Jeff was made aware of all these small details by his client, and he marveled, not for the first time, at the client’s ability to acquire information. On the day Flagler showed up to move into the apartment, Jeff was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa, a silenced pistol in his hand. Flagler walked in the front door and Jeff shot him in the head. He waited until dark and moved the body into the trunk of his car. He drove east, out Fruitville Road past I-75 to an intersection that held a closed gas station. As instructed, he pulled behind the station and waited. In a few minutes, an old Buick approached, blinked its lights twice, and pulled in next to Jeff.

  “You got the package?” asked the man behind the wheel of the Buick.

  “In the trunk,” said Jeff, and reached over and pushed the button that released the trunk lid.

  The other man wrestled the body out of Jeff’s trunk and into the Buick’s. “That one’ll keep the gators’ bellies full for a few days,” he said.

  Jeff got into his car and drove away without answering. He went back to the apartment Flagler had rented and went to bed. The next morning he would present himself to a judge at the courthouse and show the North Dakota driver’s license with his picture on it that identified him as Ben Flagler, and be sworn in as an attorney and counselor-at-law, duly licensed to practice law in the state of Florida.

  It was this chain of events that brought Jeff Worthington, now known as Ben Flagler, Esquire, to the Sarasota County Judicial Center on a beautiful November day. Not bad, Jeff thought, for a kid from the projects. A small cloud of fear sliced through his brain taking the luster off the day. There had already been a problem, and now he had to report to his client, try to explain the fuckup to the man he knew only as the controller.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Monday morning. The village was alive with people leaving for work. One of the things I like best about being a beach bum is that I didn’t have to join them. I was drinking coffee on the patio and reading the morning paper when Jock came out, a steaming cup in hand.

  “Have you talked to your people yet?” I asked.

  “I let the director know we’d gotten the one we think killed Nell, but I want to wait until we hear from forensics and get an ID on the dead guy before I give him a full report.”

  “You think there’s more to this than just the guy you shot?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what. We’ve still got some digging to do.”

  “Want to go for a run?”

  “Sure. What about the statements?”

  “I’ll take my phone. If we get the call, we’ll come back.”

  We ran on the hard-packed sand of the beach, leaching the lethargy out of our systems. If you weren’t careful, the desultory rhythms of the key would overtake you, turn you into a couch potato or worse. When there was no schedule, no plan to your existence, the sheer randomness of life would overwhelm you and turn you into a TV-watching, booze-swilling barfly. Running seemed to give some purpose to my existence, a way to corral the uncertainty of the day, to know that there was at least one thing I had to accomplish each day. Four miles on the beach. A tiring, sweating, balls-to-the-wall run. Then I’d slip back into beach bum mode.

  We finished our run at the North Shore Road access ramp and walked back through the village to my home. The peacocks that roamed the area were out in force that morning, pecking at the lawns and shrubs, occasionally letting out one of their raucous cries. They were pretty, but messy, and the village people were a bit schizoid about them. They liked the image of the birds running free in the neighborhood, but hated the mess they made and the god-awful noise. And the birds bred faster than rabbits. Every few
years, the flock was thinned, and many of the birds were taken to a farm out in the east end of the county. For a while, a relative peace would fall over the village, but soon enough, the little buggers would start procreating again, and the problems would start all over.

  As we were nearing my house, J.D. called. “The forensics people are finished with Nell’s BMW. Found some interesting stuff, but it didn’t answer many questions. The only fingerprints that didn’t belong in the car were the dead guy’s. A man named Pete Qualman, twenty-three years old, did time at Glades Correctional. He was released on parole two months ago. Never checked in with his probation officer.”

  “What was he in for?” I asked.

  “Held up a convenience store in Orlando when he was eighteen. Got six years and released in five.”

  “Any connections to Miami?”

  “None that we can find. Guy lived in Orlando his whole life. Dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and mostly worked at fast-food joints and did drugs.”

  “Anything else in the car?”

  “A couple spots of blood that were definitely Nell’s. The techs think she was probably shot while she was sitting in the driver’s seat. We’re thinking that when she came out of Pattigeorge’s, the killer was hunched down in the back seat. She probably died right there in the parking lot.”

  “At least it was quick,” I said.

  “Yeah. They also found some rope that matched the one Nell was bound with and some boat keys that matched the stolen boat. Another interesting tidbit was the mileage on the car. Nell had her oil changed at the BP station on the south end of the key Friday afternoon. The little sticker they put on the window, you know the one that reminds you when your three thousand miles is up and you need more oil, didn’t jibe with the odometer. Somebody put a little over three hundred miles on it after the oil change. I don’t think Nell did that after she left the BP.”