The Shop

by J. Carson Black

  As they walked in the direction of the octagon house, Franklin took the lead, pointing out hidden cameras and infrared sensor grids. “A lot of the equipment was installed by the Secret Service for Owen’s visits,” Franklin said. He added for Landry’s edification, “The veep. This stuff is all inactive right now. Some of the equipment is Danehill’s, but not much. Are you sure you guys have it covered?”

  “You’re covered. You can’t see our people, but they’re there.”

  “When I was in the DOJ, I had a very good relationship with the FBI.”

  “That’s good to know,” Landry said.

  They continued on. Franklin walked on ahead, rehearsing his lines for his upcoming conversation with Cardamone. He was far enough ahead so they couldn’t hear what he was saying. Riley moved closer to Landry and said, “Why do you keep looking around like that?” she asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Back and forth.”

  “Looking for threats.”

  “But you said the FBI has it covered.”

  “Ever heard of measure twice, cut once?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I can’t believe Daddy stood up to Graus that way.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just not like him. He lets things slide.”

  “What else does he let slide? You?”

  “Oh, I get away with stuff.”

  “Are you sure you’re getting away with anything?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Children need guidance. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? For your emotional well-being, you need someone to set the parameters every once in a while.”

  “That’s fine for a child, but I’m seventeen.”

  He said nothing.

  “Can a child give you a blowjob that will set your hair on fire?”

  All this acting out—he found it disturbing. “You’re a regular little potty-mouth. If my daughter said that to a stranger—”

  “You’d what? Give her a spanking?”

  “Take away her iPod, her iPhone, her television, her bed, her furniture, and make her stay in her room for a month.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad. What if she did it again?’”

  “I’d flush her hamster down the toilet.”

  “You wouldn’t do that!”

  “You have a hamster?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not in a position to know, are you?”

  Frank stopped on the oyster-shell path by the maintenance shed and looked back at them. “Do you want to go with me in the golf cart?” he asked Landry.

  “I’d rather walk.”

  “Okay.” He sounded perturbed, but by the time he took off in the golf cart, his lips were moving and he was once again practicing his speech for Cardamone.

  “Is your mother here?” Landry asked Riley. “Grace?”

  “She’s either shopping or she went to Tallahassee.”

  “Tallahassee?”

  “To her church. She spends half her time there.”

  “You know when she’ll be back?”

  “If she’s shopping, maybe late this afternoon. There’s not a whole hell of a lot to shop for around here. Now it’s Kohl’s instead of Bergdorf’s. She used to fly to Atlanta to do her shopping, when we had the jet. That’s all over now. This place is so lame. I was born here, and I can’t wait to get voted off this island, you know what I mean? What a backwater. There is nothing to do! And now you got rid of Mr. Clean.”

  “Mr. Clean?”

  “The guy you pushed into the water. I used to think he was hot.”

  “He didn’t look so hot to me.”

  She giggled. “That was funny, the way he sputtered like a wet cat! He was, like, so surprised! He told me he has a really big dick, but we didn’t get that far.”

  Again with the provocative statements. He knew she did it just for its shock value.

  “So your family’s cutting back?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t believe. Mommy didn’t even want the veep to come here the last time, thought it was too ostentatious. That’s her favorite word now. She’s afraid the peasants’ll storm the castle or something.” She told him about the “ratty old oriental carpets” and the fact that her mother kept her saddles and bridles in her bedroom, which was a huge mess and smelled of dirt and horse hide. The way they used things over and over, all the equipment breaking down. The heater for the pool. The air-conditioning in the octagon house. “Which is, by the way, falling apart! It looks good from the outside, but it smells. Those old walls, I bet there’s mold. That’s where we keep the senator.”

  “The senator?”

  “My grandfather. Dad calls him the senator. As if he’s still the senator. He’s got round-the-clock nursing care. Dementia.”

  Landry nodded. His mother-in-law suffered from dementia. It was a terrible disease.

  “But he gets around. He’s always in the hothouse playing with his roses—thinks he’s gardening, but he’s actually making them worse, touching them so much. He used to raise champion roses.”

  Landry ticked the family off on his fingers. “Your mom, your dad, the senator, and you. Have I got that right?”

  “My cousin Zoe lived here until last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “We got in a fight and she moved out. She’s a pain in the ass, but in another way, she’s really amusing. God, was she upset when I threw her out.”

  “You threw her out?”

  “Uh-huh. She said bad things about my boyfriend.”

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  Riley told him about her boyfriend, Luke. He’d worked for the tree and lawn service that kept the grounds neat. She told Landry that she and Luke had been in love and were planning to run away together, like Romeo and Juliet. But then he died.

  “How’d he die?”

  “In a shoot-out with the police.” She told him the story, portraying Luke as an outlaw. “He wasn’t going to let anyone take him—he wasn’t going to go without a fight.”

  Landry thought that kind of logic was the ultimate in stupidity. “Why did he take that woman hostage?”

  Riley didn’t have an answer to that—it didn’t fit with Luke’s heroic image. She had no idea why Luke Perdue would take a woman hostage in a motel. None at all. So she glossed over it with proof that he loved her, then went back to blaming Zoe for saying bad things about him.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said he was sneaking around spying on the vice president. She was lying.”

  Landry thought this was an interesting side trip. He didn’t know if it had any bearing on his own investigation. He’d have to ask Franklin about it. It was an interesting coincidence that Luke Perdue got himself killed in a motel holding a woman hostage.

  Was this the hostage Special Agent Eric Salter shot? Eric Salter, the FBI agent he was currently impersonating.

  Eric Salter had been consumed with guilt because his shot had taken out both the bad guy and the female hostage. Someone—Cardamone, probably—blackmailed Salter into doing jobs for him. He had been one of the two men keeping track of Franklin Haddox.

  Small world.

  The dogs accompanied them to the octagon house. They’d run ahead, then circle back. Always watching Landry and Riley to gauge their reactions. Outside the octagon house, Riley turned into a tour director. She gave Landry a canned speech she must have repeated a hundred times. There were two stories, a basement, and a cupola, she said. The low hill it sat on was man-made, she said. You could see the whole island from the cupola, she said.

  Close up, the octagon house looked smaller than he’d expected. Riley told him the island had been built almost from scratch in the twenties—the reason it could accommodate a basement and the tunnels in an area where you normally wouldn’t find basements or tunnels. The tunnel, she said, was considered a “structural marvel”—those were the words she used—and had been designed in such a way that i
t would not flood during storms. She also told him her grandfather was sensitive to sunlight, so he had a room in the basement. Stairs from the outside led down to the basement. Landry noted that the steps had once been wide but were now narrow, to make room for the wheelchair ramp running alongside.

  They went up the steps into the house, the dogs’ toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. The ankle-biters had given up trying to penetrate Landry’s desert boots.

  The floor was empty of furniture. The room partitions had been taken out, except for what appeared to be a kitchen and a bathroom by the stairwell along the far wall. The windows let in plenty of sunlight. You would be able to see someone coming from all eight windows.

  “What do you use this place for?” Landry asked.

  “Mostly press conferences, when the veep is here. We rent this floor out for parties and weddings. We don’t really need the money, but Mommy thinks the place should be used. Once a month, some wildlife group meets here. Upstairs is storage.”

  “May I look around?”

  She shrugged. “Sure.”

  She’d clearly lost interest in him. The novelty had worn off. It was heartbreaking. He would need years of therapy to recover from such a devastating blow. As he went up the stairs, he heard her talking on her cell phone.

  The upstairs was as advertised. Jumbles of old furniture, some of which might be antique—Landry wouldn’t know. Ranks of folding chairs and long folding tables, school cafeteria-type stuff. The door to the cupola was locked. He came back down the stairs, his shoes echoing in the empty space. The dogs funneled down behind him and followed as he stepped into the sunlight.

  Riley was outside, texting.

  Frank drove up in his golf cart. “Don’t you think we should get this show on the road?”

  “We’re just getting to know each other,” Riley said between text messages. By now it was a symbolic fight, not a real one.

  “Scoot.”

  “Daddy—”

  “I mean it.”

  “Fine.” She didn’t stomp off, but it was close.

  Frank patted the passenger seat of the golf cart. Landry got in. “I thought we’d go to the cabanas,” Frank said as they zipped down the path. “It’s private, so no one will overhear.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Nope. Just cautious. This guy has antennae like a lobster.”

  “He won’t be able to bother anybody when he’s in supermax.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  As Landry had surmised, the cabanas were really bungalows, tastefully done up in what Landry thought was a cross between art deco and beach cottage. “Before we get started,” Landry said, “I’d like to see the passageway.”

  “Sure thing.” Franklin led him outside and around to a small structure, a pool shed set flush to their cabana. Inside, pool equipment was hung neatly. There was a narrow space to the right, and beyond that a small closet—a restroom for the landscapers, Frank said. He opened the door to what looked like basement steps in a regular house. The steps and walls were concrete. The workmanship was nothing to write home about, but the tunnel had lasted since the twenties—not bad. Frank pulled the string to the overhead lightbulb and they started down, their footsteps echoing on the walls. It got damper and cooler as they went down, seven steps. The steps opened onto a narrow passageway stretching into the darkness. The tunnel reminded Landry of a mineshaft, timbered at intervals. He had to hunch his shoulders and pull his head in like a turtle to go through. Overhead bulbs lit the way. You had to pull each one on as you went—very low-tech. Three of them were out. About thirty yards in, they came to a T. Franklin explained that the tunnel on the left led to the octagon house. They took the tunnel on the right. At the end of the passageway, they reached another door, also without a lock. Approximately fifty-five yards in. The steps up were wooden and led to a structure similar to the pool shed. Wood-planked and cramped. They emerged out onto one of the docks inside the cavernous boathouse.

  “Pretty neat, eh?” Franklin said. “They had wheelbarrows they’d trundle the bootleg whiskey in. It’s also how my great-grandfather smuggled in his girlfriend.”

  “His girlfriend?”

  “An actress called Ariel Sawyer. She was big early on in the silent era. She was the girlfriend of a notorious gangster named Hugh Gant. Great-granddad was seeing her on the sly. That’s what the tunnel was for—not the booze. The booze came in by boat, and they could have just as easily carted it along the paths. It’s a private island—who’d see them? But he couldn’t take a chance with Ariel.

  “The tunnel looks jerry-rigged, but it’s not. There’s actually a sophisticated construction, the way the floors are slanted, places to catch runoff—architecturally, it’s quite brilliant. When you consider that this is an island in Florida, built-up or not. We don’t use these tunnels now, except as an alternate escape route for the president or vice president when they’re staying here.”

  Landry eyeballed the boathouse, in case he needed to come here again. He did not have a photographic memory, but he’d trained himself to observe quickly and thoroughly. He looked for places where he could ambush someone or places where someone could ambush him, places where he could see and yet not be seen. He looked for cover. He looked for concealment. He looked for places to escape if he had to. And here it was: an official escape route for the president.

  The boathouse had an old fish camp feel. Distinctly Southern. “Let’s go back,” he said.

  When they got back to the pool shed, Franklin said, “Wait until you see this.” He motioned Landry over to a shelf which held more pool accessories and pushed aside a case of shock treatment bags. Set into the wood at the back of the shelf was a window. Landry looked in at the cabana they’d just left. From this vantage point he could see the bed, the small dinette, the couches covered with throw pillows.

  “One-way glass,” Frank said. “Like the cops use. Used to be just a little hole, discreetly placed. But somewhere along the line came the upgrade. No one’s supposed to know about this,” he added.

  “No one?”

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure everyone knows. At least the immediate family.” Franklin looked at his watch. “Time to rock and roll.”

  44

  As Jolie entered the house after her run, she spotted the light blinking on her phone. It was Kevin Moran, the FBI special agent she’d worked with on a kidnapping a few years ago. Another friend of Danny’s. Kevin was an ideal special agent; he was eminently self-contained. She wondered, though, how much he liked working this area, where very little happened.

  Of course, plenty was happening now. Jolie had a feeling it would only get worse, not better. Whatever she was stuck into, it was like swimming in the pond. You had no idea what else was in there with you.

  When she reached him she said, “So, you think you can help me?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I heard the FBI was investigating Luke Perdue even before the Starliner Motel.”

  “Chilly this morning, don’t you think?”

  It was nothing of the kind. “Okay, so maybe that’s not true about the FBI watching Luke. But it would stand to reason, since the FBI was involved in the hostage situation, there would be an investigation after the standoff at the Starliner Motel.”

  “Then again, we do live in a tropical climate.”

  “In fact, if you guys were any good, you’d dispatch someone immediately to his home address.”

  “Warmer. Let me go turn the fan on.”

  “Did the FBI go to Luke’s house?”

  “It’s possible. Probable, even.”

  “To interview Mrs. Frawley?”

  “You’d think.”

  “Did they collect evidence?”

  “That would be a negative.”

  “So you’re saying it was just Gardenia PD? They were the only ones who collected evidence?”

  “You have any idea how hot it is here? I’m loosening my tie as we speak.”
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  “So the FBI has no evidence from Luke Perdue? Not even, say, a cell phone?”

  “Gotta open a window. It’s like an oven in here.”

  “No cell phone? You sure? You talked to the agents involved?”

  “Look, I’ve got an appointment in a couple of minutes.”

  Jolie pushed through. “I understand that Special Agent Belvedere was the secondary during the hostage negotiation.”

  “Not my jurisdiction. Sorry.”

  “Special Agent Frederick Belvedere—that’s what I hear. He worked with Chief Akers.”

  He said nothing.

  “I wish I could talk to him. Clear up a couple of things.”

  “Well, what do you know? They finally put the air-conditioning on in here.”

  “Just a couple of things. Yes or no. We could even play twenty questions.”

  “It’s getting frigid in here.”

  “Couldn’t you ask him, just in case he’s feeling talkative?”

  A pause. And then, “No promises.”

  “Sounds like a warm front’s coming in.”

  “Time will tell,” he said, and hung up.

  The phone rang again immediately. Jolie thought it was Agent Moran calling back. But it was Skeet.

  “What are you doing today?”

  “Not much.”

  “Then why don’t you come down to the office? Say, half an hour.”

  Skeet Mullins asked, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  He sat at his desk, feet up, and swiveled on his office chair, back and forth, squeak-squeak-squeak. Annoying as hell, but Jolie was used to it. “What do I think I’m doing?”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  On the drive over, Jolie had tried to figure out how much Skeet knew about her activities, and she came to the conclusion that Detective Jeter of Panama City Beach PD might have called and left a message with Louis. That was the logical assumption, so she went with it. She gave him her most mystified look. “Do you mean going to Panama City? I didn’t know going to Panama City was a problem.”

  “Panama City?”

  “I was there yesterday. Is that a problem?”