Detective Fiction

by William Wells

  Vasily took Sasha from the car and carried her. We got into the cart which drove along a wooden bridge with a mangrove swamp on the left and boat docks in a harbor on the right. More picturesque than Salty Sam’s, and with higher rents. The boats moored at the docks clearly would not fit into the storage building. We stopped at a two-story grey wooden structure that was obviously the clubhouse. People were dining at tables on a second-floor deck. I followed Vasily along one of the floating docks that ran out into the harbor.

  It was a perfect day for a boat ride, the sun glowing yellow in a cloudless, azure sky and a light breeze blowing in from the water. To the west, the harbor ended in a bay that fed through a pass leading to the Gulf of Mexico. Boats of all sizes came and went at idle speed through a channel marked with red and green buoys.

  “Red Right Returning” was the boater’s navigational mantra: Keep the red buoys on your right when returning from open water to port. Or maybe it was “Green Right Returning.” I’d have to get that straight if I ever piloted more than a fishing skiff in the backwaters.

  We stopped beside a motor yacht with a powder blue hull and a flying bridge. It was, I estimated, somewhere between sixty and seventy feet long. A big mother. A nameplate on the side near the bow said Azimut, which I recognized from boating magazines as a premier boat builder in Italy.

  The name of Vasily’s boat, painted on the stern, was Treasure Hunter. From the size of the boat, it was clear that its owner already had found the treasure.

  “We’ll cruise north along the coast toward Sanibel while we eat,” Vasily said as he led me across the gangplank and onto the deck. “That’s about two hours round-trip, if you’ve got that much time.”

  “Fine by me,” I said. The only other thing on my agenda for the afternoon was catching a serial killer. On a boat like the Treasure Hunter, cruising to Australia would have been just fine too.

  A young woman with short blonde hair, wearing a white tee shirt that said Treasure Hunter in gold script, white shorts, and blue canvas boat shoes (no socks), was waiting on the deck at the end of the gangplank. She smiled at me, probably thinking, “Not on your best day, gramps.”

  Standing near the ladder leading up to the flying bridge was a man in his thirties with a shaved head and muscles bulging beneath his Treasure Hunter tee shirt.

  “Inform the captain we are ready to get under way, Serge,” Vasily said to the man. He handed Sasha to the young woman. “She’ll have her lunch and then a nap, Elena,” he told her.

  Frankly I’d have preferred to have lunch with Elena, and then a nap, if she was drowsy too. Another impure thought, as Brother Timothy would have said. But he taught me that we couldn’t control our thoughts, only our actions. Because of my relationship with Marisa, I had no intention of taking any action with Elena, even if it were possible. But sometimes, impure thoughts are a lot of fun.

  So now I’d met Vasily’s staff: Stefan, Serge, Lena, and Elena. Maybe he used a Moscow employment agency that specialized in hard-ass special ops types and drop-dead gorgeous blonde Lolitas.

  “This way, Frank,” Vasily said. “I’ll give you a tour of my boat, and then we’ll have lunch.”

  THE WIND came up, causing a moderate chop on the gulf, no problem for the Treasure Hunter, as we made way for Sanibel, a barrier island to the north, just off the coast of Fort Myers.

  Sanibel is twelve miles long and four miles wide. It is best known for shelling on its sugar-sand beaches and for the heavy traffic on Periwinkle Way, the main artery. I always wondered what families from Saint Cloud, Minnesota, or Hammond, Indiana, did with all those shells when they got home.

  Elena served lunch as we sat at a teak table under a blue canvas awning on the upper deck. We ate grilled spiny lobsters with rémoulade and key lime pie. Vasily sipped an icy mug of Bass Pale Ale and I had freshly made lemonade. He made light conversation about sports and politics and climate change before getting down to business during the pie course.

  “Allow me to explain why I invited you to hear about The Atocha Fund,” he said, pushing back from the table and offering me a cigar, which I declined. He snipped off the end with a sterling silver cutter, fired up the stogie with a matching lighter, and continued:

  “There is, as I’ve said, a waiting list of people with considerable assets wanting to invest with me. I limit our client list to fifty so I can give everyone personal attention. Frankly the only way to get in is to be at the top of the waiting list when one of my clients dies. In this, we are not unlike the Olde Naples Country Club.”

  He smiled at this analogy, took a puff of the cigar, and went on: “In fact, sadly, three of our valued clients have gone to the great beyond recently.”

  Eileen Stephenson, Lester Gandolf, and Bob Appleby.

  “Only Mr. Gandolf’s widow has elected to cash out of the fund. I’ve decided that, as openings occur, it would be good to offer them to younger people. All of our clients are in the fund for the long run. It would be advantageous to fill the openings with people who have a longer term, so to speak. When I met you at Lady Ashley’s dinner party, I thought you would be a perfect candidate the next time there was an opening.”

  Only in a place like Naples would a man my age be considered young. Marisa told me that an old saying is, “I thought I was old and rich until I moved to Naples.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, even though it didn’t, to me. Money was money, and even when a client croaked, and the heirs wanted to withdraw the funds, there was that waiting list. Vasily must have a different agenda in offering me a spot. I’d have to let it play out.

  “I’m glad you agree. You would not regret your decision to invest with me.”

  Fish on! Vasily had swallowed the bait: me. Assuming that he would make such an offer, I had decided I would hit up my employers for my investment in The Atocha Fund. Then, after a while, I would find a reason to ask for it back, and be ready for an unannounced visit from one of Vasily’s employees. If Vasily was not legit. If he was, Marisa would have to come up with a Plan B.

  The nighttime visitor would most likely be Stefan the driver or Serge the first mate. Or maybe Lena the receptionist or Elena the second mate had been to assassin school in Mother Russia too. That would be a smart play, because I would hesitate to pull the trigger on one of those lovely ladies, and as they say, he who hesitates is lost.

  We finished lunch as the Treasure Hunter made a sweeping turn, heading south, back toward the yacht club. It was warmer now because the wind was at our backs. We moved down a deck and sat in canvas chairs, sipping Cuban coffees. It was a pleasant moment, out there on the blue water in an amazing boat, feeling content from a good lunch and the rich, dark coffee. Maybe Vasily had a barista on the crew. It would have been even more pleasant if my host weren’t a suspected serial killer. I hadn’t told anyone about the boat ride. If I didn’t return, no one would know what happened to me.

  “I would like to invest in your fund,” I told Vasily.

  He smiled at this. “Excellent, Frank. You can come to my office at your earliest convenience to do the paperwork.”

  He pointed out a pair of manatees floating off the port bow. The captain was turning right to avoid hitting them. Vasily said, nonchalantly, “Did I mention that our minimum investment is $10 million?”

  The minimum investment? Fortunately I wasn’t swallowing coffee at the moment or I might have choked on it and blown my cover. I recovered and winked at him. “As my father always said, go big or go home. I’ll start with one unit, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

  What my father really said was: “People who pretend to be someone they’re not always get knocked down a peg.”

  Or shot.

  18.

  SHOW ME THE MONEY

  I had a friend in the Chicago PD who was an undercover narc. He once got approval to use ten K of the city’s money for a drug buy. The buy went south, as did the dealer, with the cash and the drugs, all the way to Mexico. You want to take a limo from downto
wn to O’Hare or Midway airport, you can call my friend to drive you.

  If I sold The Drunken Parrot, the Phoenix, my ’Vette, emptied my bank account, and put everything else I owned up for sale on eBay, I could maybe get into the mid six-figure range, nowhere near the mountain of zeros Vasily required. It was possible that Bill Stevens had that kind of dough from his book sales. But that wasn’t the plan.

  When I got back to Ash’s house, I called Wade Hansen and explained the situation. Maybe his department had some counterfeit currency stashed away from arrests over the years that was good enough to pass Vasily’s scrutiny. Or maybe the city could float a bond issue.

  Hansen said he’d arrange a meeting with Mayor Beaumont and call back with the time and place.

  THE TIME was eight the next morning, and the place was the Naples City Dock at the end of Twelfth Avenue South. We were to go out on a charter fishing boat owned by a man Hansen knew. The man had been a Naples PD patrol sergeant whose wife had inherited some money, allowing him to live his own version of the cop dream.

  The boat was a thirty-seven-foot Grady-White named Eloise; the captain was a guy named Jimmy Burke. Eloise was Jimmy’s wife.

  It turned out that we were actually going to fish. Maybe my employers wanted to keep our meetings secret from then on, and didn’t want anyone to see me going into the Naples city hall now that I was pursuing an actual “person of interest,” as the feds say. Or maybe they just wanted a morning on the water.

  We were twenty miles out, trolling for bluefin tuna, when Beaumont informed me that he’d come up with the $10 million for Vasily Petrovich’s Atocha Fund. He made it clear that he’d like very much to get it back, and that he’d keep the source of the funds to himself.

  Did a city like Naples really have that much in the mayoral slush fund? Even if it didn’t, it wasn’t impossible to imagine that, in order to keep the city safe from scandal, there were individuals willing to front the dough without asking why on the mayor’s assurance that it was for something important. All of which was completely unreal to a kid from Wrigleyville, but what about this whole undertaking wasn’t?

  “A TD Ameritrade account will be opened in the name of Frank Chance,” Beaumont said as we sat in deck chairs on the stern, watching the lures trailing behind the boat. “The $10 million will be wired into the account a few days from now. I’ll let you know when it’s available.”

  “Fish on!” Captain Jimmy shouted as one of the poles bent down and line began running out, the reel emitting a high-pitched whine.

  The mayor was the ranking member on the boat, so the honor of fighting the first fish went to him. He moved to the chair holding the rod with the strike and did well for a man his age, the cords on his neck popping, and sweating and breathing so heavily I thought he might have a heart attack or stroke. But he shook off an offer from Captain Jimmy to relieve him.

  Macho man, all the way to the cemetery.

  After what seemed like a few weeks—fishing is boring when you’re just watching it—the mayor finally brought the tuna alongside the boat. Captain Jimmy hooked it with a gaff and horsed it onto the deck, where it flopped around until the captain gave it a whack on the head with an aluminum baseball bat.

  This time the catch was a tasty game fish and not a Russian count. If Vasily really was a count. Hansen was doing a background check on him and his firm. He told me this was taking longer than usual because it had been discovered that Atocha Securities is, in fact, registered in the Cayman Islands, as I’d guessed, where corporate and financial information is difficult to obtain.

  Difficult, but not impossible, Hansen said. Maybe, with the connections the mayor had, he could order the waterboarding of the president of the Cayman National Bank, if necessary, until he gave up the info.

  “LET’S TAKE a private jet to Paris for dinner,” I said to Marisa when I called her on my way back to Ash’s house after the fishing trip. I was driving the Bugatti this time.

  “Huh?”

  “Actually, we can do that a few days from now,” I said, “when a certain wire transfer arrives in my investment account.”

  “I didn’t know you had an investment account,” Marisa commented.

  “I don’t, but Frank Chance does. We’ll go to the fanciest restaurants, stay at the most expensive hotel, and go shop till we drop. I’ll explain everything over dinner tonight at Captain Mack’s Clam Shack.”

  “Captain Mack’s? So tonight I’m dining with Jack Starkey and not Frank Chance.”

  “That would be correct. Disappointed?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that. Money isn’t everything, but it does paper over a lot of flaws.”

  LATER THAT afternoon, I sat with Ash at a pine table in the kitchen where, I assumed, Martin and Suzette took their meals. Ash didn’t quiz me on the details of my developing investigation, but I could tell this took all of her willpower.

  Afterward I found Joe sleeping on a footstool in the living room. The stool was near a window that was in the sun at that time of day. Clearly he was comfortable in his new digs. I sat down beside him, scratched his head, and gave him an update on the case. I assumed that briefing my cat did not violate my confidentiality agreement, especially when he was asleep.

  19.

  BAD, BAD LEROY BROWN

  Captain Mack’s Clam Shack is just over the causeway from the mainland on Sanibel Island. It is a favorite of mine because most menu items were battered and deep-fat fried. Marisa always has some sort of broiled fish and a salad. In my opinion, you could batter and fry an old shoe, and it’d taste great with tartar sauce.

  Marisa listened to my explanation of this stage of the plan, with me investing in the hedge fund and then asking for a withdrawal, making me a possible target to test the theory that Vasily was behind the murders. When I was finished, she said, “If that fake count hurts you, I’ll hunt him down and cut off his balls just to get his attention, and then we’ll get into some really nasty stuff.”

  She was a very refined lady. That was her hot Latin blood talking. I found it to be erotic, but I found everything about her to be erotic.

  I put my fork into a fried clam, dipped it in tartar sauce, chewed, and swallowed it, and said, “It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”

  “And your front and your sides, big guy,” she responded with a wink.

  AFTER DINNER, we drove to Salty Sam’s so I could check on Phoenix. Because I was the real me tonight, I was driving my Corvette.

  My boat was as shipshape as it ever got. Sam checked on it periodically to make certain it wasn’t overrun by wharf rats. I thought about suggesting a roll in the hay to Marisa, but I didn’t want her to think that’s all I ever had on my mind, even though it mostly was.

  Then we went to The Drunken Parrot. I was pleased to find a good-sized crowd. We took seats at the bar. Without asking, Sam served a glass of chardonnay to Marisa and a chilled mug of root beer to me.

  “Looks like you’ve got things well in hand,” I told Sam.

  “I do. And when you’re not here, I find it easier to skim from the cash register.”

  Sam was completely trustworthy, and would never do anything like that. In addition, he didn’t need the money because he was a Seminole and got a share of the tribe’s substantial profits from its five Florida casinos. I don’t know how much that is, but he once told me that if I ever want to sell the bar, I should ask him first. I promised that I would.

  I heard raised voices. At the other end of the bar, two men were apparently staking a claim to the same woman.

  Jim Croce’s song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” covered the same situation in Chicago. One of the men was of medium height, portly and bearded, wearing a wife-beater tee shirt, camo cargo shorts, and cowboy boots. It was not a good look for him. The other guy was tall and wiry, wearing jeans and a black tee shirt with white lettering that said, “Fuck Off.” Apparently he wasn’t into making new friends.

  Both men appeared to be in their thirties. The woman, who
was apparently trying to choose between Dumb and Dumber, had long red hair and was wearing a tight blue tee shirt and Daisy Duke denim shorts. She was older than the men, maybe in her late forties, but she had a body worth fighting over, at least in a dim bar if you’d had enough to drink.

  I noticed that Sam was on full alert, watching for a line to be crossed. There was a shotgun under the bar, but Sam never used it if a troublemaker didn’t appear to have a weapon. I knew from experience that there were two kinds of men in this world: talkers and fighters. Talkers face off, belly-to-belly, trade threats and insults, and declare that, as soon as the other guy throws the first punch, there’d be hell to pay. Generally you could leave them alone; they’d talk themselves out and the confrontation would eventually dissipate. Fighters didn’t talk at all. If provoked, they’d move in on you and end the confrontation as quickly as the strike of a cobra. SEAL Team Six didn’t tell Osama to fire the first shot.

  These two guys were clearly talkers, but the talk was getting loud enough to bother the other customers, so Sam walked down to their end of the bar and said, “How about if you gentlemen take it outside?”

  The men stopped arguing and looked at Sam. The woman said, “And why don’t you mind your own damn fucking business, chief.”

  To which Sam replied, “Tell you what, ma’am. Why don’t you pick one of these two crackers and leave with him. The loser will get the next drink on the house.”

  She thought about that, looking at each man in turn, said, “I pick neither one,” and walked out of the bar.

  The men watched her go, then looked at one another as if uncertain about what the rules of macho behavior required of them in a situation like that.

  “So it’s two drinks on the house,” Sam told them, skillfully diffusing the situation. “What’ll it be?”