The Miami man said he’d be in touch when the job was completed and would give them instructions about how to wire his fee into a numbered account at a bank in Switzerland. I guess he didn’t think Cayman Islands banks were secure enough.
With all of them on a speakerphone, they described the situation with Eileen Stephenson. Maybe she could be warned by a threatening phone call in the middle of the night to stop gossiping in general. Maybe there could be a break-in at her house while she was sleeping . . .
The Miami man stopped them short by saying, “Don’t tell me how to do my job.” He agreed to “take care of their problem” with Eileen.
Five days later, they read Eileen’s obituary in the Naples Daily News. It was possible that she had died of natural causes as her obit said, a heart attack or stroke, while swimming laps, before their man had the chance to do anything to her. It happened to people her age all the time.
They decided not to call their man in Miami to ask how Eileen died because it didn’t really matter, and because they were better off not knowing.
“However it happened, it certainly shut her up,” Knowland had commented when they got together that morning for their usual round of golf, and they all surprised themselves by laughing. It was just like the old days, they discovered. They made a phone call, and appropriate action was taken.
The day after Eileen’s obituary appeared, Bradenton received a text message on his cell phone that said, “$100,000.” The man had doubled his fee. They wondered what kind of complications could possibly have developed in offing an old woman like Eileen. But when you worked with a hit man, “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the golden rule.
Bradenton answered the text with one word, “Agreed.” The money was wired to the Swiss bank account. Even if the man couldn’t prove that Eileen had died because of his actions, you didn’t challenge a man like that, you just paid his bill.
Time passed. The three returned to their privileged routines: golf, boating, poker, cocktail hours, dinner parties, symphony concerts, charitable work, and trying the many new restaurants that constantly opened in Naples, replacing an equal number that closed.
Paige Bradenton oversaw a complete remodeling of the kitchen in their home, which had been remodeled only one year earlier—something about her hating the backsplash, which led to a total gut job. Lucille and Chris Knowland went on the South Beach Diet; she lost ten pounds in six weeks, he lost nothing and was accused of cheating. The Coxes took a Caribbean cruise aboard a charter schooner which ran into heavy weather; they vowed that all of their future vacations would be on land.
The Eileen Stephenson matter was never again discussed. They hadn’t asked the Miami guy to kill her, just to scare her. Her death wasn’t on them. It was collateral damage, if that, and nothing more.
Then Cox placed a conference call to his friends, reporting that he and Lester Gandolf were vying for the one vacant seat on the Republican National Committee. It looked like Gandolf would get the seat because, as a billionaire, he’d given more money to the party and its candidates over the years, his beneficence exceeded only by the Koch brothers.
Cox had been out of politics since his term as ambassador to France ended. It would have been fun to get involved in national politics again, he said, but money talks, and Gandolf’s talked louder than his.
They chatted about that for a while and then Knowland said, “Three oh five, seven seven seven, nine six eight two.”
“What’s that?” Cox asked.
“The phone number of our man in Miami.”
They started calling the Miami guy “The 305 Man,” after his Miami area code. They spoke again about Gandolf, and decided it was not a joke. And that’s how Lester Gandolf came to take a header down the marble staircase of his house. The fee for that was $200,000, double the last charge. Maybe Gandolf put up a fight, or maybe the assassin was upping his fee just because he could. After all, his clients weren’t about to report him to the Better Business Bureau.
A line had been crossed, the three men knew. This time, if they had not actually ordered a killing, they certainly knew that that could be the result. They were officially murderers.
During a round of golf they actually discussed who “needed a date with destiny,” Bradenton told me during his interrogation. No one in particular was bothering any of them at that time. But they were getting bored.
Then Cox said the name Bob Appleby, who had applied for membership at the Olde Naples Country Club. Cox knew that because he was on the membership committee.
They agreed that Appleby and his wife did not fit in to the social fabric of their town and did not belong in their country club. The Funeral Home King of Iowa? A man who’d somehow earned his way into Port Royal by planting stiffs into the Midwestern prairieland? Are you fucking kidding me? Even though it seemed unlikely that Appleby would actually be approved for membership, they were annoyed that he’d even applied to their club.
Boom. Good-bye Funeral Home King, and his girlfriend aboard his yacht, a Naples Daily News story reported. Too bad about the girlfriend, but shit happened.
This time, $300,000 was wired into The 305 Man’s Swiss bank account. Apparently explosives were an additional expense item in the hit man’s fee.
I asked the men if they had somehow learned about my investigation and had decided to end it by having their man kill Charles Beaumont, Wade Hansen, and me, with the mayor heading the list. Bradenton said no, they didn’t know about the investigation. He suspected his wife, Paige, of having an affair and assigned a private detective to follow her. She was, with Charles Beaumont. Bye-bye Mister Mayor.
Until that moment, I had wondered if maybe hizzoner did off himself, even with that golf tournament coming up. Running a car in a closed garage to cause death by carbon monoxide poisoning was a standard suicide method. It is said to be painless, but the only people who could confirm that aren’t talking. I couldn’t imagine how the Miami guy could have pulled that off without leaving a sign of a struggle. With both the golf tournament and Paige Bradenton to look forward to, wouldn’t Beaumont have put up a fight? I guess that’s why The 305 Man got the big bucks.
Knowland told me what I already knew: Gilbert Merton was in the way of my real estate deal, so he became roadkill. I’d have to find a way to live with that, if I could.
With Charles Beaumont now a confirmed kill, I still wondered about Ash’s death. The men denied any involvement. Maybe they were innocent, or maybe they were afraid to tell me—if not her nephew, then her friend—the truth, given that we were out there in the Everglades, where anything could happen. Had Ash awakened (at three a.m.) to find The 305 Man staring down at her, scaring her so badly that her heart stopped?
While on the job in Chicago, I had experiences with sociopaths who felt no remorse for any of their actions. When their behavior turned violent and they hurt people, they were reclassified as psychopaths.
That’s whom I was dealing with now: The Three Old White Psychopaths. They were responsible for six, and maybe seven, deaths before we stopped them. That didn’t compare with the worst of the worst, men like Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered more than thirty-five women in at least six states; or John Wayne Gacy, who killed at least thirty-three men and boys and kept their bodies buried under his home or in his yard in Chicago; or Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee, whose total was seventeen men and boys in Wisconsin and Ohio, with cannibalism involved.
In some way, our guys were scarier to me than the likes of Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Those three were part of an infamous, deranged brotherhood with abnormal brain anatomy and chemistry, as studies have shown, and, at least for some of them, unpleasant childhoods. They were misshapen Calibans, incapable of leading normal lives. But Cox, Bradenton, and Knowland were successful, upstanding citizens, pillars of their communities, who had turned themselves into stone killers.
I’d run up against plenty of otherwise upstanding citizens driven to murder by sudden and unexpected circumstances, but nobody else
like these three, who went looking for it out of sheer boredom and a sense of frustrated entitlement. You had to go back to the case of Leopold and Loeb in 1924 to find anything like that. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were students at the University of Chicago, with wealthy parents, who murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, just to show they were smart enough to pull off a “perfect crime,” they said. Obviously they were not; even the courtroom skill of Clarence Darrow could not keep them from a sentence of life in the penitentiary, although he did save them from the electric chair.
I asked the self-made psychopaths how long they thought they would have continued. They all said they didn’t know, but they’d paid The 305 Man $600,000 so far, and they were discussing that. Should they hammer out a budget for their organization? They could afford to keep going, but did they want to? Maybe there were less expensive, and less risky, ways to get even with people they disliked. A cost-benefit analysis. Businessmen to the very end.
When we were all gathered in the living room, I told them that their thinking was deeply flawed. Four of their victims were old white men, just like themselves, another one was an old white woman, and one was a young woman who was an innocent bystander. You didn’t earn self-respect by ordering executions. When you did that, you were a murderer, nothing more.
However, to make certain I was getting the complete story, and that they hadn’t been responsible for other murders in Naples or elsewhere, I played Russian roulette with Rollie Cox. This technique seemed appropriate, given that Vasily was my partner.
Cox didn’t know that I’d unloaded my Smith & Wesson. I had him sit in a wooden chair in the kitchen and stood behind him so he couldn’t see the empty chambers. Bradenton and Knowland could see us from the living room.
Doing the Dirty Harry thing, I asked Cox how lucky he felt and pulled the trigger once. Hearing the click, he shouted, “Hey! Stop! Are you fucking crazy?”
I pulled the trigger again.
Click.
By then, Cox was sobbing and had wet his (Vasily’s) grey sweatpants, and I believed he’d told me everything. No need to play the game with the other two. Marisa had a framed print of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream on her living room wall. Chris’s and Art’s faces looked like that. I guess they didn’t feel lucky either.
I led Cox back to the living room. Then Knowland said it: “I’m glad you’ve stopped us.”
There were only two more loose ends to tie up. I asked Cox, who was especially primed to tell the truth, about keeping Vasily off the symphony board, and about bribing a city councilman to gain approval of a marina project. Guilty on both counts. “You should have stuck to your dirty tricks,” I told them. They didn’t disagree.
I’d never been on a serial killer case before. But an FBI agent with the bureau’s Chicago office told me that many of the killers, when caught, said they were relieved that it had ended.
Now it was time for them to make the call to Miami.
42.
KILL SHOT
Three nights later, I was alone in Ash’s house, in my bedroom on the second floor, with the lights off. I was sitting in an Chicago upholstered chair with my feet up on a hassock, reading the Chicago Tribune sports section on my iPad.
To my own arsenal of pistols, I’d added Sir Reginald’s Mossberg 935 semiautomatic shotgun, which he’d used for bird hunting and I was using for different game. Marisa had picked up Joe because I didn’t want to worry about him. I think Joe sensed the impending danger because he didn’t object (hissing, biting, threatening legal action) as she carried him out to her car, a nebula grey pearl Lexus LS 600h L sedan (business was very good). Martin and Suzette were in rooms at a nearby hotel. Bradenton, Knowland, and Cox were still at the cabin, with Vasily. They didn’t need much guarding, with the airboat gone and their spirits broken.
The three men’s wives reported them missing when they didn’t come home at their usual time after golf and cards. A country club grounds crew found the two golf carts in the trees, but didn’t report that immediately because they assumed that the golfers decided to walk the rest of the way. It happened sometimes.
I’d called Hansen from the cabin to inform him that Vasily and I had the three men, and what we were doing with them. He said that, at this point, he wouldn’t be surprised if I’d said we had them hanging from meat hooks in a warehouse somewhere. He agreed to let us play out our hand. Murders trump kidnappings every time.
The chief told their wives that he’d put out a BOLO (be on the lookout) alert to all of his patrolmen and to other law enforcement agencies in the area, but that it would be forty-eight hours before they could be officially declared missing. That wasn’t true. With their street shoes and other personal items found in their lockers, and their cars still in the country club parking lot, the forty-eight hour rule would not apply.
At three A.M., I thought I heard a noise. So The 305 Man knew about the witching hour too. I guess it was an open secret among us pros. The Old White Men had told their assassin that I was a trustfund layabout and heavy drinker who would most likely not hear him even if he kicked in the front door. An easy kill.
My Russian sniper team was set up somewhere outside, scanning the terrain with a night-vision scope, under orders to wound only, not kill. That was a fiction from old cowboy movies: “I just winged him, ma’am.” Whenever you sent a steel-jacketed projectile at 3,900 feet per second toward a human body, the distinction between shooting to kill or merely wounding disappeared. Serge’s Dragunov didn’t have a “gentle” setting. But, unlike Jack Stoney, I wasn’t willing to take on a contract killer without backup.
I walked quietly to the bedroom door, opened it a crack, and listened.
Nothing.
Maybe I hadn’t really heard anything. Could The 305 Man, no matter how good he was, sneak past the Russians?
Then I heard the sound again. I thought it was the sliding glass door from the kitchen to the backyard.
There are two theories about the best way to handle a situation like that: you can wait for the danger to come to you, or you can meet it head-on. I told Bill Stevens about that once, over beers at the Baby Doll, and he’d used it in one of the books. Guess which option Jack Stoney always chose thereafter?
Like Stoney, I’ve always been a straight-ahead kind of guy because waiting is boring and I like to call the play. So I picked up the Mossberg, used the barrel to ease the door open farther, and stepped into the hallway. Moonlight through second-floor windows provided enough light for me to see. The other bedroom doors were all closed, so I assumed that the guy from Miami, if he was in fact in the house, hadn’t come upstairs yet. He wouldn’t close himself into a room.
I moved along the wall to the head of the stairway, looked down, and saw nothing. I made my way down the stairs slowly, swinging the shotgun barrel from side to side, Navy SEAL fashion, and went through the hallway and into the kitchen, which was brightly illuminated by the light of a full moon.
The sliding glass door was open just wide enough for a man to get through. It was locked when I went to bed, to not arouse suspicion. But the lock was easy to pick.
I was thinking about my next move when a nylon rope went around my throat. I clutched at it, as it cut into my neck, and stomped down hard with my bare foot on my assailant’s instep. I heard him grunt. That usually shattered bones and ended the fight. But not with this guy. He kept the rope tight, so tight that I wasn’t able to get my hand between it and my neck. Soon I’d lose consciousness as the blood to my brain and the air to my lungs was cut off. It is said that your life passes before your eyes at a moment like that. It doesn’t. You just panic and hope to see another dawn.
Suddenly the rope slacked and the man behind me slumped to the floor. Coughing and gasping for breath, I looked down at him. He was a big, muscular man, dressed in black, just like my Russians, and like me when I broke into Vasily’s office, part of clandestine tradecraft.
I couldn’t tell his hair color because the top of his hea
d was gone. I felt a wetness on the back of my head and neck and shoulders. Blood. Fortunately not mine, I discovered, as I quickly checked myself out.
On the floor beside the body was a garrote, a length of nylon rope with a wooden handle fastened to each end.
Then Serge was at the door, holding his Desert Eagle pistol, which was better than the Dragunov in close quarters. Stefan remained outside. Serge came into the kitchen, kicked at The 305 Man with his boot, and watched him for a moment even though there was no possibility a man could survive without the top of his head.
“There was no other way,” he said to me, showing no emotion at all. In this encounter, one killing machine had bested another.
“I know,” I told him. “Thanks.”
Those were the first words in English that Serge had ever spoken to me. Stefan had also said nothing I could understand. I’d assumed that neither of them spoke English. I was glad that I’d never said anything disparaging about either one of them in their presence, such as, “Hey borscht-for-brains, got a match?” The corpse at my feet was evidence of what could happen if you got on their bad side.
Serge had made an amazing kill shot, with my head just inches from the killer’s, shooting through the narrow open section of the sliding door so that the bullet wouldn’t be deflected by the glass. The rifle must have had a sound suppressor because I didn’t hear the shot. The house next to Ash’s had been occupied for the last several days. Thus the need for a silent shot.
Serge used his cell phone to call Vasily and spoke to him in Russian. Then he handed the phone to me.
“We’ve got to let them go,” I told Vasily. “Even though I hate it.”
Without the assassin’s testimony, we had no proof of their crimes.
“I know,” he agreed.
I ended the call, handed the phone to Serge, who left, and used my cell phone to call Wade Hansen. When I looked up from finding Hansen in my phone’s contacts list, Serge was gone.
Detective Fiction Page 20
