Collateral Damage

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Do you want me to go see him?”

  “He may be in Charlotte. Why don’t Jock and I stop by his condo? If he’s here, he might get spooked by a cop.”

  “Yeah, like he wouldn’t get spooked looking at Jock.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  “Go see him. Let me know what you find out.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Seventy-Fifth Street West is a north-south artery linking Manatee Avenue to Cortez Road. The apartment complex where Doremus lived was only about five miles from the Cortez Bridge that led to Anna Maria Island. It was late morning when I knocked on the door. A black man opened it. He was in his late sixties or early seventies. He had a head full of gray hair, a face that easily wrinkled into a grin when he greeted us, and a voice that was deep and Southern.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?”

  “My name is Matt Royal. This is Jock Algren. I’m a lawyer on Long-boat Key, and I’m trying to find John Doremus.”

  “You’ve found him. I’m John Doremus.”

  “Sir,” I said, “the man I’m looking for is white and about forty years old.”

  He grinned. “You’ve probably noticed that I don’t fit either of those descriptions.”

  “Do you own a home in Charlotte, North Carolina?”

  “I do. Y’all come on in and tell me what you want with a white guy with my name.”

  The condo was large and tastefully furnished and neat as a pin. The only sign of disorder was the pile of newspapers lying on the floor next to a recliner. It looked like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Doremus caught my glance at the papers and said, “I like to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Have a seat and tell me what I can do for you gentlemen.”

  “I was surprised to find you here in August,” I said.

  “I live here year round. My wife lives in the house in Charlotte. We’re separated. Seems to make the marriage better.” He chuckled.

  “We came up with your name by running a property search in both Charlotte and this area,” I said. “You popped up, but you’re obviously not the man we’re looking for.”

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “Do you remember the murders on the dinner cruise boat about two months back?”

  “Sure. That was the big news around here. At least for a couple of days.”

  “The man we’re looking for is a person of interest in those murders.”

  “What’s your interest, Mr. Royal, if I may ask?”

  “I’m representing a family whose son was killed the same day over on the beach. The murders may be connected. Jock and I are trying to find this guy named Doremus to see if he can help us out.”

  Jock stirred in his chair. “Mr. Doremus, can you think of why someone would be using your name in Charlotte?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It could explain why a white guy has an unusual name, a name that shows up owning property in both areas,” said Jock.

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Doremus. He was silent for a beat, then, “Can you describe the white guy?”

  “Six feet tall, heavyset with a belly, short, dark hair that he parts in the middle, acne scars, a receding chin, northern accent, very white teeth. He wears diamond rings on each pinkie.”

  “Crap,” said Doremus. “That’s Chick Mantella. He’s sort of my nephew.”

  “Nephew?” I was surprised. As far as I knew the guy was white.

  “Sort of. Thirty years ago my brother Arthur married a white woman who had a small son from a previous marriage. That was Chick. Arthur raised him, gave him a good home, but Chick turned out to be an asshole. Never could hold a job for more than about three months.”

  “Is Chick his given name or a nickname?”

  “His real name is Chesley Ambruster Mantella, Jr.

  “No wonder they call him Chick,” said Jock.

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “Charlotte, but he comes here a lot. Stays in my spare room. He’s not a bad guy, just full of shit.”

  “Why do you put up with him?”

  “His mother’s a sweetheart. My brother’s been ill for a long time and she’s hung in there. Takes great care of him. Putting up with her son is a little bit of payback for all she does for Arthur.”

  “When was he here last?” Jock asked.

  Doremus thought for a moment. “He was here when the murders took place. I remember, because he left abruptly. Didn’t even say goodbye. I was out with a lady friend that evening and when I got home, he’d packed up and gone. Left a note saying he had to get back to Charlotte.”

  “Have you heard anymore from him?”

  “No, but I talk to his mom regularly. I know he was back in Charlotte living with her.”

  “Does he work that you know of?”

  “I don’t think so. His biological father died about two years ago and left him a bunch of cash. That’s when he bought those gaudy rings. Hasn’t hit a lick at a snake since.”

  “Mr. Doremus,” I said, “I know Chick is kin and all, but can I ask you not to tell him about our visit?”

  “Not to worry, Mr. Royal. I don’t like the kid much, and I sure don’t want to have anything to do with a man who’s involved in a murder.”

  “We don’t know that he is. We just want to talk to him. Can you find out if he’s still in Charlotte?”

  Doremus hesitated, a look of resignation on his face. “I don’t want to, but I know the family you’re representing must be hurting. I’ll call his mom tonight and let you know.”

  I gave him my card, shook hands, and left.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Jock and I were having lunch at the Seafood Shack when his cell phone rang. He excused himself and walked out to the marina dock next to the dining room. He was back in a few minutes.

  “Matt, I hope you’re not going to be pissed at me, but I need to tell you something.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. I made a come on gesture with my hand.

  “I had Chaz Desmond checked out.”

  “Why would I be pissed about that?”

  “He saved your life.”

  “I checked him out too, Jock. As best I could on Google.”

  “Glad you’re okay with it, because we got some curious information when we ran him through the systems. Did you know that he was sending money every year to a man in Vietnam? A lot of money.”

  “I didn’t know that. How much?”

  “Two hundred grand.”

  “That is a lot. Who’s the recipient?”

  “A man named Tuan Nguyen.”

  “Tuan Nguyen? That’s mighty close to John Nguyen, the guy from O’Reilly’s.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Jock.

  “Chaz just writes him a check?”

  “No. The scheme is a little more sophisticated than that. Chaz owns Desmond Engineering Consultants, Inc. Every year, according to the firm’s tax returns, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar donation is made to a charitable foundation named Evermore. Evermore has only one beneficiary, this guy Tuan Nguyen.”

  “Is the foundation recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a charitable organization? Are the contributions deductable?”

  “Yes on both counts. On the other hand, the IRS doesn’t check into these things very closely. Almost anybody can set up a foundation and get a tax-deductable certificate.”

  “I’m guessing that you found the man behind the foundation.”

  “Right. Charles Desmond.”

  “So,” I said, “his firm contributes to a charitable foundation that he controls and the money always goes to the same person. How long has this been going on?”

  “This is the fifth year.”

  “Blackmail?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose if somebody was blackmailing you and you wanted to save a little money, you could do it by making a tax-deductable donation to a charity and running the money that way.
”

  “How does the money get from the foundation to Nguyen?”

  “Wire transfer,” said Jock. “To a bank in Ho Chi Minh City.”

  “And from there?”

  “We don’t know. I’ve got my computer geeks trying to break the encryption on that bank. They’ll be able to get in sooner or later, but you know we’re still a low priority.”

  “Can Deb help us?”

  “Something like this is way above her head. If she tried to get in, she could leave footprints that could be traced back to her. That might put her life in danger.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to wait until your guys can help us out.”

  “This case is getting stranger and stranger,” Jock said.

  “Maybe the guy at the airport was Vietnamese.”

  “But why would he be interested in killing you?” asked Jock. “You’re working for Desmond.”

  “I don’t know, but I think I need to talk to Jimbo Merryman.

  At eight that evening, Doremus called. Chick Mantella had moved out of Charlotte and was living in a condo in downtown Orlando.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The air smelled of rain and dying fires and unwashed bodies. The tinge of coffee boiled too long wafted over me, the need for caffeine roiling my gut and reminding me that I’d missed breakfast. Smoke drifted over the campsite that puckered like a boil on the prairie near the Myakka River. Horses whinnied and snickered in the nearby stand of trees. The sun had not yet shown itself through the overcast that had settled on the camp, its filtered light giving everything a gray pallor as if disease had taken over the world.

  Men in the gray and butternut uniforms of the Confederate States Army moved like ghosts through the campfire smoke that hung low to the ground, dodging the tents where they’d slept the night before. Bacon was sizzling in pans held close to cook fires. Voices were muted, low, conspiratorial in the heavy air that presaged rain. I wondered if there was fear in those voices, fear of the coming battle, of the death that some of them would certainly endure on this day. A semblance of death anyway.

  I walked through the camp angling toward the command tent. I saw a squat man, five feet eight maybe and 220 pounds of muscle, standing at the entrance sipping coffee from a tin mug and talking to a small group of officers. The man with the coffee wore the three stars of a Confederate colonel on his collar, tall riding boots, a cavalry saber, and a slouch hat favored by horsemen. A small flag fluttered from the top of the tent identifying it as the headquarters of the Fourth Georgia Cavalry.

  “Morning, Jimbo,” I said as I approached the knot of officers.

  “Matt. What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “I called Molly last night. She said you’d be here reenacting the Battle of Olustee. Kind of far south, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. Lot of the guys can’t get enough time off to travel all the way to Lake City.”

  “I ran into a bunch of Yankees just down the road,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s some of Butler’s troops.”

  “Butler? I thought Seymour was the Union General.”

  “He was. I’m talking about Billy Butler. He’s a pharmacist at the Walgreens over in North Port. But how did you know that Seymour commanded the Union troops?”

  “Well, Colonel,” I said, “I know a lot about the Battle of Olustee. My great-grandfather, Harmon Royal, was a trooper in the Fourth Georgia Cavalry commanded by Duncan Clinch.”

  “I’m impressed. But what brings you way out here?”

  “I need to talk to you about an old friend. Privately.”

  “Would you excuse us, gentlemen?” Jimbo asked the assembled officers.

  They saluted and we walked a few yards away from the headquarters tent.

  “It’s about Doc Desmond,” I said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Do you have any idea why Doc would be sending two hundred grand a year to some guy in Saigon?”

  “Wow. No. What’s this all about?”

  “A man named John Nguyen, an American apparently of Asian descent, tried to kill me a couple of days ago. Then yesterday, Jock’s agency’s magic computers spit out the information that Doc is using a charity he set up to send money every year to a man named Tuan Nguyen in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City or whatever the hell they call it these days.”

  “That’s very strange. How long has it been going on?”

  “Five years. I’m wondering if it’s some sort of blackmail scheme.”

  Jimbo shook his head. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If it’s tied to the war somehow, you’d think he’d have been paying it long before the past five years.”

  “Unless something happened then and the blackmailer just found Doc.”

  “I guess that could have happened. The five years coincides with about the time Doc started making the real big bucks.”

  “Tell me what you know about that.”

  “He had a pretty good business going for a number of years,” Jimbo said. “He had an office in Atlanta and one in Orlando and I think another one in Miami. Then all of a sudden it exploded. He moved into other states and in five years had a really big outfit.”

  “That sounds a little odd, don’t you think? All that growth that quickly.”

  “I don’t know, Matt. I’ve never understood business and I never wanted to. Doc always seemed on the up-and-up to me.”

  “I called a friend last night and asked her to see what she could find on his company. She’s a pretty good hacker. Apparently he owns it by himself. No partners or other stockholders. But I’d think the expansion would have taken a lot of money, and she couldn’t find any specific influx of dollars except for some legitimate loans from banks.”

  “Maybe that was enough.”

  “Maybe, but then why the payments to some guy in Vietnam? And why would an Asian man with a suspiciously similar name want me dead?”

  “I don’t know, Matt, but keep in mind that Doc was one of us.”

  “I know, Top. And he saved my ass that day in the grass. I can’t forget that. But I’m afraid it might get in the way of my seeing Doc as he is today, not as he was in Nam.”

  “Matt, I know you’ll do what’s right. Now I’ve got to go attack some Yankees.”

  “Good luck, Colonel. If you hear anything about Doc, let me know. And keep this conversation under your hat.”

  I drove back to Longboat Key in a mood that matched the weather: dismal. What the hell had Doc gotten himself into? Was he being blackmailed? If so, did it have to do with his service in Vietnam, his business affairs? If he was being blackmailed, could his son’s death be tied into it somehow? But if that were the case, why would he want me to look into Jim’s murder? Did Doc think the death was part of whatever he was involved in with the man in Ho Chi Minh City? Did he expect me to be able to turn over some rock that would give him leverage against his blackmailer? Lots of questions and no answers.

  I drove northwest on Highway 70, the sky ahead getting darker. A storm was coming in from the Gulf. I looked at my watch. Not yet nine o’clock. When summer storms came in the morning, they were usually big ones and brought a lot of rain. Before long, I was in it, the windshield wipers working overtime, pushing the waves of water, barely clearing my view ahead. I had my headlights on and had slowed, driving cautiously. By the time I crossed the Cortez Bridge, the rain had slackened, but the dark clouds hovered like an omen. A slight chill ran up my spine. I didn’t think the rest of the day would be a lot of fun.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  I was antsy as I drove onto Longboat Key, out of sorts, confused, and more than a little bit pissed. I was concerned that my friend Doc wasn’t what he seemed to be, or perhaps was more than he seemed. We had odd threads running through the investigation, some leading to a man in Ho Chi Minh City and perhaps a killer in Bradenton, another to a Laotian warlord, a third to a creepy guy named Mantella who now lived in Orlando. And we weren’t even sure the Dulcimer murders were related to the d
eath of Jim Desmond. I was beginning to think that Doc knew more than he was telling me and maybe was using me in a way that played on my moral debt to him. Could he be that callous? It did tend to piss me off.

  Jock was at my desk, his head buried in the computer monitor when I walked in. “Any coffee left?” I asked.

  “In the pot. Been there a while. Can’t vouch for its taste.”

  “I’ll make some more. You want another cup?”

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

  “What’re you looking at?” I asked.

  “Trying to run down some more info on your buddy Doc. Did Jimbo have anything?”

  “Not really, but he did tell me that Doc started making the big money at about the same time he started sending those checks to Vietnam.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Jock. “I had the guys in Washington send me the information they got on those transfers. The payments were all made in April. Except for this year. The payment didn’t go out until early July. And that one was for three hundred thousand. An extra hundred grand.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Suppose that Doc is being blackmailed and for some reason he decided to stop making the payments. Maybe whoever he was paying off decided that murdering his son would be an object lesson and the money would start flowing again. The extra hundred may be interest.”

  “Why kill his son?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the message was that Doc’s wife would be next, or maybe his daughter-in-law, if he didn’t pay up.”

  “And add a little vig to the payment,” I said. “Say, a hundred grand.”

  “Right.”

  “But if they’re blackmailing him, why not just release whatever evidence they have that he had done something crooked or whatever it is they’re holding over his head.”

  “Because that would kill the goose that lays the two hundred grand eggs. By killing his son, the bad guys would send a powerful message and keep the money rolling in.”

  “We need to bring J.D. up to date,” I said.

  I called her cell phone. “You busy?” I asked when she answered.

  “On my way to the Village. Another murder investigation.”