“Is he Jewish?”
“I guess. His wife’s father was a rabbi in Sarasota.”
“Why have I never heard of René?”
“He lived a quiet life. Didn’t seek any publicity. His wife died while Dick was in college, and when Dick graduated, he came back to the area and took over the family business. Dick loves the limelight, but he’s an asshole.”
“You mentioned that. Is there any chance Dick will make it to the cabinet?”
“The election is still two years off, but I hear a lot about McKinley. He comes from a wealthy family that can probably finance a campaign out of their own pockets. Only child, never did much but run for Congress and then the Senate. Married, but no children. Still in his forties.”
I read her the other names on the list, but she didn’t know any of them. I thanked her for her help, and hung up.
I called Donna, catching her at her office. “Did any of the names on that list mean anything to you?” I asked.
“No. I recognized the name ‘Vichy’ but I don’t know if he meant the water or the town in France.”
“What about Professor Sauer? Do you know him?”
“No. I’d guess he was a colleague of Wyatt’s. Probably another history professor.”
“Okay. I wish we had the rest of the files. Any chance of recovering the data from the disc?”
“I’m taking it to an expert this afternoon, but I’m not optimistic. Usually, when that stuff is corrupted, it’s gone.”
“Stay in touch, Donna. Don’t be a stranger on Longboat.”
“Bye, Matt.”
I Googled Sauer, and found that he was a history professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I called the number of the history department, and a young-sounding woman answered. I identified myself and asked to speak to Professor Sauer.
“Ah, okay. May I say what this is in reference to?”
“It’s personal.”
“Hold, please.”
I listened to the tinny sound of Beethoven on the local PBS station. Then a man with a deep voice picked up and said, “This is Doctor Spencer King. I’m head of the department. May I help you?”
“I’m trying to get in touch with Professor Sauer.”
“Are you a friend of his?”
“Yes.” I lied, but what was this all about? You’d think I was trying to talk to the governor.
“I’m sorry to tell you that Dr. Sauer has passed away.”
“When?”
“A week ago Sunday.”
The same day that Wyatt died.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He was working late in his office here at the department, and somebody shot him dead.”
“A robbery?”
“The police don’t think so. The only thing taken was the hard drive from Dr. Sauer’s computer. Didn’t even take the monitor or keyboard. Just ripped the drive out of the CPU.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“No, the police say they have no suspects.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. May I ask if Dr. Sauer concentrated on any particular historical era?”
“I thought you were a friend of his.”
“More of an acquaintance, really. We had a mutual friend. Dr. Laurence Wyatt.”
“Sure. Down at UCF. I heard he died.”
“Yes. I was calling to make sure that Dr. Sauer knew about Wyatt’s death.”
“ETO, W.W. two.” King said.
“What?”
“Sauer’s expertise was in the European Theater of Operations during World War II.”
“Did he have anything to do with the Nazis?”
“If you mean did he study them, the answer is yes. He’d made a subspecialty out of the study of particular Nazis, and what happened to them after the war.”
“Thank you for your time,” I said, and hung up.
Chardone would have had plenty of time to kill Wyatt and drive the three hours to Gainesville, have a leisurely lunch, do a little coed watching, and kill Sauer. I thought I knew where Chardone got the extra ten grand I found in his apartment.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was time to talk to Bill Lester. I called him at the police department and arranged to meet him for lunch at the Mar Vista, a restaurant clinging to the shore in the Village on the north end of the key. I asked Logan to join us. He was my sounding board, and I wanted him to hear as much as he could firsthand.
When I walked out of my condo, I was surprised at the coolness in the air. It wasn’t so much cool as it was dry. The humidity had finally abandoned us a week or two later than usual. I decided to ride my bicycle the two miles to the restaurant.
The amiable hostess directed me to a table under the trees near the water and handed me a menu. I told her whom I was waiting for, and she said she’d send them over as soon as they arrived. I watched a commercial fishing boat chug south on the Intracoastal, a plume of black smoke emitting from the exhaust pipe that ran up the side of the pilothouse. A small tug pushing a barge with a construction crane on its deck passed slowly, heading north. The sun was high, the air cool under the trees. A fall day in Southwest Florida is hard to beat.
Logan and Bill arrived and pulled up chairs. The waitress brought us iced tea. We chatted about the fishing, or lack thereof, the stone crabs that had just come into season, and gossiped a bit about our friends on the key. Bill told us that some benefactor had anonymously mailed the library twenty thousand dollars in cash. “Some of our people have more money than sense,” he said. “There’re a lot of sticky fingers between the mail box and the library.”
When we ran out of small talk, I said, “Bill, a University of Florida professor named Paul Sauer was killed on the same day as Wyatt; shot to death in his office. He was a historian, and his name was on some papers Wyatt left. I’m wondering if there’s a connection. Can you check with Gainesville PD?”
“I got some interesting calls just this morning,” Lester said. “A New York City cop was shot to death over near Orlando last week. The Seminole County detectives working the case found a .45 in his apartment, and when they ran the ballistics through the national data bank, they found our entry and one from the murder at UF. It looks like the gun killed both Wyatt and the professor in Gainesville.”
“What was a New York cop doing with the murder weapon?” Logan asked.
“That’s very interesting. The dead guy’s name was Michael Rupert. There were credit card receipts in the apartment and a post office box in Rupert’s name. When the detectives checked with the credit card company, they found charges at a restaurant here on the key for the night before Wyatt’s murder, and another from a barbeque joint in Gainesville the day of the murder there. Then, somebody anonymously sends the lead detective a computer hard drive with pictures showing Rupert and the New York cop, a guy named Rudy Chardone, having sex with young children. The pictures were e-mailed back and forth from Rupert’s computer to Chardone’s in New York, but the funny thing is that the pictures of Chardone and Rupert were of the same person. NYPD confirmed that it was Chardone. Apparently, he wanted the pictures on both his computer at home and the one in Florida. The guy was a pervert, and the working theory is that he was moonlighting as a hit man.”
“So, you think he killed Wyatt?” I said.
“It looks that way.”
“Why? Does anybody have any ideas as to why?”
“Sorry, Matt. That seems to be a dead end.”
“Do they know who killed the hit man?”
“No,” said Lester, “but the cleaning lady told the detectives that a man had been asking about Rupert the day he was killed. Described the guy as nondescript, but he may have been a cop. He showed her a badge.”
I was not at all flattered by the description, but I liked the idea that Tammy couldn’t really identify me. “Why would a cop kill him?”
“Maybe because Chardone was a bad cop, or maybe his killer wasn’t a cop at all. Used a .38. You’ve got a .38, don’t you M
att?”
“Yep. A brand-new one.”
“I thought you’d had one for a number of years.”
“I did, but I lost it in that fracas down in the keys a couple of months ago. Was anything taken from Sauer’s office? Was it a robbery gone bad?”
“The only thing missing was the hard drive from his computer.”
“Just like at Wyatt’s.”
“Yeah.”
We finished our lunch, and the chief went back to work. Logan and I sat and enjoyed the weather and ordered a beer.
“I didn’t like that question about your .38,” said Logan.
“Neither did I. I’ve got to be very careful here. Bill Lester’s a good friend, but he’s also a cop. I hate being on the wrong side.”
Cracker Dix came over and asked if the information he’d given me turned out to be any good. I told him to have a seat.
“Cracker,” I said, “Logan knows what you did about the credit card information from that guy Rupert, and we both appreciate it. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Either the deaf girl misunderstood Rupert or he was talking about some other Wyatt. He turned out to be an accountant from Jacksonville.”
I didn’t like lying to Cracker. He was a good friend who’d helped me out in the past, but I didn’t want that kind of gossip going around the island. Ours is like many small towns. Secrets are hard to keep, and I wouldn’t want anybody to ever tie me to Rupert/Chardone or to his death. Particularly after the question about the pistol from Chief Lester.
After Cracker left, I showed Logan a copy of the list from Wyatt’s disc. “Does any of this mean anything to you?” I asked.
He took a moment to peruse it. “Not really. I know who Dick LaPlante is, or at least who the papers say he is. I used to look for his picture in the society pages just to see what was falling out of the dress of the woman he was with.”
“You’re a pervert yourself.”
“I know. I like it that way.”
“How’s Marie?”
“I talked to her this morning. She misses me. We’re going to dinner tonight. I think I’m smitten.”
“Smitten?”
“Yeah, smitten.”
“Is that like being in heat?”
“Exactly like it. Only those of us who are more highly evolved prefer ‘smitten’ to ‘horny.’”
“Whatever. Let’s have another beer.” And that’s what we did.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I threw my bike into the back of Logan’s convertible, and we drove south toward my condo. Traffic was picking up, and I saw two car carriers along the side of Gulf of Mexico Drive. They were bringing the snowbirds’ cars down while the owners came by plane. Pretty soon, traffic would be heavy. Our island swells from about 2,500 people in the summer to 25,000 in the winter. It’s a trial, but the cold weather in the North brings a lot of old friends back to paradise.
Logan said, “I don’t get the connection between Sauer and Wyatt. You got any ideas?”
“None. Donna didn’t know him, and I never heard of him, so he and Wyatt probably weren’t real friendly. Maybe just colleagues.”
“But why would the same person kill Sauer and Wyatt, and on the same day?”
“I’m guessing that the timing of both murders was so that one victim wouldn’t find out about the other and go to the police with whatever he knew. But who knows?”
“These guys were both history professors,” said Logan. “Maybe the names on that list have some historical significance. Why don’t you call Austin Dwyer? He might recognize something.”
Austin Dwyer was a retired history professor at a small college in Connecticut. Logan and I had met him in the Florida Keys earlier in the year and formed a friendship. If he didn’t know who the people on the list were, he might be able to tell us the name of somebody who would.
“Good idea, Logan. I often underestimate you.”
I e-mailed Austin, attaching the list, and asked him to see if any of it made sense to him. I gave him my cell phone number and asked him to call. Minutes later, I got an automatic response telling me that Austin would be away until Friday and that he would respond then.
I searched the Internet for the names on the list, but what little information I found made no sense to me. I’d have to wait to hear from Austin.
I was at loose ends. I paced my living room trying to put the puzzle together. The pieces didn’t fit. None of the information I had so far fit together in any coherent pattern.
I gave up and turned to more mundane things. My Explorer had been hard to start the past couple of days. The starter would drag and almost die before catching. I probably needed a new battery. It was also time for an oil change and a brake job. I called the shop I used on Cortez Road and made an appointment for the work. The manager said he’d have one of his men pick the car up the next morning.
I needed to clear my head. A jog on the beach, a shower, and a nap finished off my afternoon, and I drove down to the Hilton. There is always a gathering of locals on Thursday evening at the outside bar. Logan was on the mainland having dinner with Marie, and I needed a little company.
Billy Brugger, the long-time bartender, poured me a Miller Lite, shook my hand, and said, “I understand you’ve been asking around about Dick LaPlante.”
“Are there no secrets on this island?”
“Nope.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Dora Walters over at the paper told me you had an interest in LaPlante. Said Gwen Mooney told her you were asking about him.”
“Not so much an interest as curiosity. His name showed up on a list I found in Wyatt’s stuff, and I wondered what the connection was.”
“I know the guy. He’s an asshole.”
“There seems to be a consensus on that.”
“He’s been in here a couple of times. Always with a different woman. He treats the staff like they were his personal servants, and he doesn’t tip worth a damn. When the manager asked him to be nice, he threatened to buy the hotel and fire us all. A real asshole.”
“Anything else?”
“He speaks French. Last time he was here, he was talking to his date in French. A couple of our regular snowbirds from Quebec were here and said he was fluent.”
“His dad’s French-Canadian.”
“But the snowbirds said he was speaking with a Parisian accent.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I was up early on Friday morning, sitting on the sunporch with my coffee and newspaper. Low dark clouds hung over the bay. The wind was blowing from the north, hard enough to kick up whitecaps on the gray water. A sailboat was motoring south, its sails furled, a lone helmsman wearing bright yellow wet gear hunkered over the wheel. Not a pleasant day for boating.
I went to answer the knock on the front door. It was a young man, mid-twenties maybe, wearing jeans and a work shirt with the name of the auto shop sewn over the right breast pocket. His name, Jimmy, was above the left pocket. I gave him my car keys and went back to my paper.
The morning quiet was ruptured by an explosion. My first thought was incoming artillery, but then I realized where I was. Home, not a war zone. My second thought was that a boat in the marina had exploded. But the noise had come from the parking lot. I ran to my front door, which overlooked the lot. The first thing I saw was the smoldering remains of my Explorer.
The car parked next to mine, a Buick with Alabama plates, was burning, flames eating the interior, the paint cracking and peeling, glass blown out. I knew it belonged to an Episcopal priest named Ben Alford. He and his wife, Lynn, were visiting from Wetpumpka and were supposed to leave that morning for home. I saw an airline ticket in their future. Father Ben would not be pleased.
My neighbors were coming out of their apartments, some still in pajamas. They milled about on the walkway, talking, worrying, wondering whose car it was that blew up. I’d backed into a guest parking space away from the building the night before, because I wanted the mechanic to have easy access to the
car in case he had to jump-start it. Had I been in my regular place, we’d have lost part of the building. Pieces of the car were strewn across the lot. I saw no sign of Jimmy and knew he was dead, blown to bits by an explosion powerful enough to destroy an SUV.
I hadn’t really known Jimmy, but I’d seen him around the shop when I took my car in for service. He was always polite, and I was vaguely aware that he had a wife and a child. He should not have died on a drab morning in an empty parking lot. And his death was my fault; not directly, but a result of my obsession with Wyatt’s killers. I would have to live with that, but how would I explain to his son or daughter that Daddy had been killed because I was seeking vengeance?
The death of a man I hardly knew brought the same exquisite pain that I had associated with Wyatt’s death. Now I had another reason to get the bastards who killed Wyatt. That reason’s name was Jimmy.
I heard sirens in the distance, getting louder as they got closer. Moments later, two fire trucks and an ambulance wheeled into the parking lot, a police cruiser behind them. I took the elevator to the ground floor and walked over to the cop who was standing alone, watching the firefighters, a confused look on his face. I knew him.
“Steve,” I said as I approached, “that was my car. There was a young guy from the auto shop over on Cortez driving it. You’ve probably got a murder scene here.”
“Shit. I’d better call the chief.”
I left him while he made calls on his cell phone. The firefighters had doused the car with water and were now packing up their equipment. One was stringing crime-scene tape about the remains of the Explorer. “Is this your car?”
“Was,” I said. “There’s probably a body in there. Young guy from the auto shop.”
“I know. I saw parts of him. I’ve called the fire marshal and my chief. They’ll want to talk to you.”
I gave him my name and apartment number and went back upstairs to my coffee. I was shaken. The bomb was obviously meant for me. Why? And who? Had somebody figured out my role in Chardone’s death and taken revenge? I didn’t see how that could be. I’d covered my tracks very well.
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