The Quick Adios (Times Six) (Alex Rutledge Mystery Series)

by Tom Corcoran

  “Hell,” I said. “I’m going to park where I have a clear shot.”

  We pulled into the shopping center and rolled over the speed bumps. My phone buzzed: Beth, finally. It took fewer than ten seconds to tell her what was going down.

  “I hope this is good, Alex,” she said. “God, I hope this is good. Don’t let him out of your sight!”

  She ended the call.

  “She’s rolling,” I said. “There’s Malcolm over there, getting out of that Subaru. Let’s try one more thing.” I called Sam’s number and we both heard it ring. He took the call and dropped his phone in his Velcro-flap shirt pocket.

  He said, “The code word is, ‘Oh shit.’”

  His voice came through to my phone, at low volume but clearly. I left the Bronco and started toward Malcolm Mason. Sam drove toward the rear entrance to the big bank’s drive-through slots.

  Sam’s voice came through my phone: “Wave if you can hear me.”

  I waved. His taillights flashed twice.

  “Here we go…” he said.

  I explained the confusion to Malcolm the best I could while I monitored what I barely heard from the phone in Sam’s shirt pocket. On my directions, Malcolm drove east out of the Key Plaza parking area, turned right and headed toward the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority Building, south of the bank’s drive-through. Through the phone to my ear I could tell that Sam already had begun to speak with Fonteneau. This was happening too fast.

  I heard: “Right, pal. Are you Fontaine?”

  The muffled response to Sam’s question came through faintly.

  Sam again: something about meeting Mason five minutes ago.

  Now, more clearly, Fonteneau: “I don’t know who the hell you are. What is this, a rip-off attempt?”

  “Fuck that,” said Sam. “I wouldn’t know your name if Malcolm hadn’t told it to me. Why would he want to rip you off when he can just sell you the boat? Here’s my wallet. You can see who I am.”

  We drove past them on Kennedy, perhaps sixty yards away. I watched Sam hand his wallet to Fonteneau.

  Fonteneau said, “Why isn’t the boat being put in the water right now?”

  “I don’t have the keys to the hoist,” said Sam. “I don’t know which boat it is, and when I work on Sundays I get paid cash in advance. Mr. Mason didn’t explain all that to you?”

  “Am I paying you or is he?” said Fonteneau.

  “I don’t care,” said Sam. “It’s all green on one side and black on the other.”

  Malcolm angle-parked farther away than I would have liked, but we were stuck. We couldn’t move again without drawing attention. Our view of the two men was partially obscured by a decorative line of sabal palms native to the Keys but not to that parking lot. Sam, for a moment, looked toward the palms, allowing himself to be distracted by a scampering cat. His chat with Fonteneau had stopped, or our phones had lost contact. I was down between parked vehicles, creeping closer to Fonteneau with Sam’s gun in my hand.

  I heard the Ducati before I saw it. Beth pulled her motorcycle into the drive-through and attempted to open the night deposit drop box. She rattled it roughly, gave up, stopped her engine and let the cycle rest on its kickstand. Pulling off her helmet, she walked toward a cashier’s window and peered around inside.

  Pretending to read an off-hours number, she tapped her phone.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I crouched, put Sam on hold to take the call and said, “I’m in the line of utility pickups to your south.”

  I watched her look at her phone and shake her head, as if not getting an answer. I switched back to listening to Sam.

  “Ma’am, it’s not like a FedEx box,” yelled Sam. “You might need a key.”

  Sam Wheeler walked toward Beth, offering to help with the drop box. In my peripheral vision I saw two city squad cars pull into the lot from the direction of Office Max. Then two more blurs to my right.

  “Thank you, but it’s that other man…” She slipped her phone into the carrying case on her belt and turned toward Fonteneau with her pistol drawn.

  Bobby Fuck No had seen the squad cars and was one step ahead of Beth. His gun was aimed right at her chest. I raised Sam’s weapon and aimed at Fonteneau’s back, began to squeeze the trigger.

  I heard a gunshot and a shrill woman’s voice. “Mister Triple Deal, like your slimy old father. Now you die like him.” Then another gunshot. “There’s your suicide, cheap shit.”

  Robert Fonteneau went down ass-first on the concrete then toppled, dead on the spot.

  I heard a Taser pop and a man yelled, “Clear.”

  Sam’s voice came through my phone: “Oh, shit.”

  “What the fuck just happened?” yelled Beth. She had crouched alert, her weapon pointed upward and held with both hands.

  I ran closer, still ready to dive to the pavement. Near the Kennedy Drive sidewalk I saw Officer Darrin Marsh waving a Taser, its wires dangling. Next to his police car was Carlton Gamble’s silver BMW X3, and on the ground, in spasms, then trembling and whimpering, was Christi Caldwell. She had dropped the weapon she had used to shoot Fonteneau.

  Beth stood and ran to Christi, kicked away the gun then stopped to catch her breath, assess the scene. I had run close enough to hear the ring of her cell phone. She looked and took the call. “Positive?” she said. “Thank you,” and hung up.

  “Good Taser shot, Officer Marsh,” she said, putting her phone away. “Not just good but great, and timely, thank you. That woman needs to wait right there for the EMTs. Please cuff her to that sign post.”

  Sirens approached us from at least two directions, perhaps three. Chatter came from three or four compact shoulder-snapped radios. Marsh and I looked at each other without speaking while Beth stepped away to speak quietly with a lieutenant and three other officers. With a nodding of heads they gathered, surrounded Darrin Marsh for an impromptu sidewalk ceremony. Marsh stood in the middle, puzzled, his broad chest huge in contrast to Beth’s head.

  “Okay, JD, Carson and Steve,” she said, “you’ll be getting letters in your upcoming fitness reports. This thing could have gone messy, so I appreciate your quick response to my backup request. Officer Marsh, a permanent commendation will be attached to your file for action in defense of a fellow officer. As you know, we have a procedural formality since you fired a weapon in the line of duty. You’ll have forty-eight hours’ relief of duty and the mandatory shrink chat, but that’s it.” She smiled and continued, “If you’ll make yourself available for a few pats on the back… I noted your wide stance and two-handed grip, like they taught us all in school. You didn’t burn your wrists on the backfire, did you?”

  “Backfire?” Baffled by the question, Darrin Marsh extended his arms and turned his palms upward. “There’s no backfire on a Taser, detective.”

  “There is this time,” said Beth. She and the lieutenant snapped their handcuffs onto his wrists. One of the other officers knelt to clamp on an ankle chain. “I don’t expect this to get ugly, Marsh, because if it does, I’ll be the first one to shoot you. You’re under arrest for the murder of Greg Pulver.”

  “No goddamn way,” said Marsh. “No fucking way.”

  “We discovered traces of Greg Pulver’s blood on the underside of your cruiser’s trunk lid. You did a fine job bleaching out the trunk, Marsh, but you failed to realize that blood can splatter upward when a body shifts. Even when it’s been dead for a while. That was the call I just got, about the blood match.”

  The first group of EMTs hoisted Christi Caldwell onto a stretcher. They wheeled her past our group just as Beth Watkins began reciting the Miranda Warning.

  “You the cop that killed the wrong dude?” said Christi, laughing at Marsh. “Your girlfriend was fucking my husband, not the boy.”

  They took away Robert Fonteneau’s body, then found a briefcase in his car with seven grand, a pistol and three nautical charts for Florida’s west coast. There was no forty grand. He was going to rip off Malcolm Mason, perhaps kill him for
the boat.

  “How did Christi Caldwell happen to show up?” I said to Beth.

  “I went to Gamble’s home on Von Phister to question him about his car and his clients. Driving up his street, I saw the X3 parked about ten houses away from his and, for an instant, saw movement. Someone was hunkered down in the front seat. I ignored it, stopped and parked on the sidewalk and knocked on Gamble’s door. I’d been inside for maybe five minutes, learning that Gamble had loaned his vehicle to Mrs. Caldwell, when I got your message about the bank. I drove the wheels off that Ducati to get here. Somehow she kept up with me.”

  “You let her follow,” I said.

  “Maybe so.”

  Two other city detectives showed up to deal with Darrin Marsh. The crime scene team had yellow-taped the area and the city’s official police photographer was hard at work.

  “You brought this together, Alex, but now it’s time,” said Beth. “Show me a badge or get the hell out of here.”

  I got the hell out, asked Malcolm Mason for a ride. We didn’t say much until he turned into Dredgers Lane. I wasn’t sure how to bring up the lost boat sale.

  I opened the car door and said, “We needed to catch this bastard.”

  “No problem, Alex,” he said. “You probably saved my life.”

  “Too much drama, Malcolm. No matter what, we both suffered short-term memory loss.”

  Mason looked at me, confused.

  I said, “What four thousand dollars?”

  He grinned, shrugged and nodded. “I’ve got plenty more boats to photograph, whenever you’re ready.”

  I felt like I’d been in a plane wreck.

  Or watched a gunfight.

  I went inside, called the Aristocrats, said a simple “Thank you,” drank two beers and went to bed.

  26.

  The next morning, after only thirty minutes of daylight, it was 72 and sunny. I had planned to sleep late but birds woke me, or maybe the fresh air fluttering the crotons and wafting through screens. Perhaps I emerged early to make sure that the past seven days were really behind me. The radio promised an imminent cold snap, nights in the fifties and days only in the high sixties, but I was comfortable for the moment. If Key West was a board game, this kind of morning would cancel out three days of flooded streets, power outages and sewer-work street detours within a block of the house.

  I was barefoot in fishing shorts and a T-shirt, forsaking my usual Bustelo for a coffee called La Llave suggested by a recent Havana transplant named Mercedes. I was using a dinner knife to open a week’s worth of mail that had stacked up on my porch table.

  Marnie Dunwoody’s headline story about the shooting of murder suspect Robert Fonteneau and the arrest of Officer Darrin Marsh dominated the Citizen’s front page. As she had promised to do, Marnie had taken credit for one of my exterior photos of the ten-unit Tideline condominium building. Banished to below-the-fold was the paper’s story about over-zealous post-Playoff game celebrations downtown, and the arrest of six men for group-urinating on a losing team’s jersey in the middle of the intersection of Duval and Greene. I was in no hurry to read the articles.

  I heard a vehicle drive slowly down the lane. I didn’t even look up. Nothing could be worse than the treachery and violence already in my rear-view mirror. I heard a car door shut in front of the house, then a second door. I gave up and looked.

  Liska stood back by the lane’s pavement, his arms crossed, a stern expression on his face. Manatee County Detective Glenn Steffey approached the porch, a badge held high for visibility’s sake.

  “Why are you waving your authority at me, detective?” I said. “I remember you from way back thirty-six hours ago.”

  He stopped walking six feet from the porch door. “If you look closely you’ll see that it’s not my badge, Rutledge. It’s yours.”

  “I would sing for you the Buddy Holly classic, ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ except I can’t stand my voice in the morning.”

  Steffey opened the door, walked in and sat. He placed the Manatee County Junior Deputy badge next to my coffee cup. “You were wrong about Edwin Torres being Justin Beeson’s son, but not too far off the mark.”

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “Had mine at four a.m., thanks,” he said. “Beeson’s first wife, the murdered one, was Edwin’s older sister, and he and his family have held for years what they thought was evidence of Beeson’s guilt. It was information her family kept to themselves because they were afraid of bringing up unresolved immigration issues.”

  “Have you arrested Justin?” I said.

  Steffey shook his head. “Unfortunately, the evidence was bogus. It was similar to a tip we received way back when, and our office disproved it. It’s sad, but we may never solve that case, unlike the current one which I wrapped up forty minutes ago.”

  “Edwin’s revenge—or attempted revenge?”

  “Right,” said Steffey. “Except it’s far more complicated and greedy.”

  “Did the twin sister, Sonya, push Edwin to kill Amanda?”

  Glenn nodded but raised an index finger to make a point. “Anya researched the previous dead wife, Maria Rodriguez. I suspect you already know that name. Anya concluded that Edwin was Justin’s brother-in-law and told her sister. Sonya crafted the plan for the four of them to kill Amanda and take over Justin’s world. Each had a different motive but, as I said, the fundamental stimulus was greed.”

  “And the chief selling point was seduction.”

  “You bet,” said Steffey, “in stereo. They double-teamed both mechanics. Sonya was the creative one, for sure. She taught Edwin how to truss up Amanda to make it look like a sex crime. They all thought it would be an unsolved crime, like the killing of Maria Rodriguez. Anya insisted that Beeson hire you, by the way. She thought your rep as a sleuth would bolster everyone’s alibi.”

  “Is anyone in jail?”

  “Edwin stayed with us last evening in Manatee, and Sheriff Liska’s team grabbed the other three on Olivia Street first thing this morning. What Key Westers might call ‘the last thing last night.’ They’re being processed into the system right now. Oddly enough, they were not all in the same bed. Nor will they be again for twenty years, minimum.”

  “After all that effort,” I said, “was Justin’s world even worth two cents?”

  “It would be huge after he and Eileen inherited Amanda’s personal wealth. Her money financed Beeson’s projects, including 23 Beeson Way. That’s why she kept all her cars there. Part of the divorce settlement was that Justin would oversee Eileen’s trust.”

  “It sounds like you’re going to overlook the idea that Justin suspected Edwin from the start,” I said.

  “Tough to prove in court,” said Steffey, “especially given the relationship, the brothers-in-law thing. Also, the girl needs her father, which brings us to…”

  “What’s her status?” I said.

  “I spoke with her last night and mentioned that I might come down here to the Keys.” He reached to hand me a small envelope. “She asked me to give this to you, if I saw you.”

  I extracted and unfolded a piece of copy paper. The message read:

  I guess I will always miss my mommy but I missed her alot when she was alive, too. Writing this note to you feels good so if it’s okay I will send you postcards or whatever. The school called Ringling just said I could start taking college courses next year. I’m not sure, I don’t think I have to pay. If you find any more books like that one you gave me on the airplane, I would like to borrow them, okay? That would be cool. Your friend, Eileen.

  Steffey was standing, ready to leave, when I looked up again.

  “Amazing resilience,” I said.

  “One last thing,” said the detective. “I asked Edwin Torres if he had any reason other than revenge to murder Amanda Beeson. He explained that she didn’t appreciate what she had. He couldn’t get out of his mind the fact that she left the top down on one of her cars during a rainstorm. The dampness shorted out her electric seat warming
circuitry, and every time she started the car while wearing shorts, the seat shocked her thighs. He didn’t think that was enough punishment.”

  I went inside to drink the last of the coffee and clean out the pot. I was staring downward, studying the grounds when Wiley and Dubbie arrived on their bicycles.

  Dubbie was first onto the porch. “Would have been here a half-hour ago,” he said, “but we saw mucho officialdom in the lane. Nice to see you still sitting here. Are we off the hook, too?”

  I patted the Citizen. “See your names in the paper?”

  “I read it twice,” said Wiley, shaking his head. “Didn’t see your name, either.”

  “That’s one sign of a successful operation,” I said.

  Tanner said, “We continue to blend into scenery like two blades of grass in left field. But we still need camera advice and a couple of favors.”

  “And some work,” said Fecko. “To generate a continuing cash flow.”

  “Obviously our approach requires credible introductions,” added Tanner. “You know, referrals for word-of-mouth growth. Given the fact that we intend to work more or less undercover, we can’t exactly advertise.”

  “We need to start building rep by word-of-mouth,” said Wiley. “We need someone like you to front for us.”

  Dubbie grinned. “Put our best monkey on the front of the train.”

  “Me?” I said. “Be your agent?”

  “That would be great, thank you,” said Dubbie, “though ‘representative’ has a more solid ring to our ears.”

  Wiley agreed. “You could say it implies a flexible fee structure.”

  “Appreciate your acceptance,” said Tanner. “We need to be at a meeting in ten.”

  An unplanned two-hour return to napland was shortened by a knock at the door. A cab driver delivered a tray of chilled seafood from Malcolm Mason identical to the one that had caused me to drool four days earlier. Conch seviche, steamed shrimp, salmon mousse, thin-sliced ahi tuna, smoked fish dip and water crackers plus two chilled bottles of Willamette Valley Pinot gris.

  As if on cue, Marnie and Sam approached the porch.