Suffer Not Evil: A Florida Action Adventure Novel

by Scott Cook

  “New GF?” Lisa asked. She was lying on her side, her right leg tucked up and her head propped on her fist. Her long brown hair spilled across her right shoulder and over one breast. She reminded me of Kate Winslet from Titanic.

  I smiled broadly at her, “I’m very charming.”

  She giggled, “It’s scary how much you can do now, thanks to ICE.”

  “That’s right, baby-cakes,” I said, diving onto the bed and covering her with my body. “Never oppose the Evil Doctor Jarvis!”

  16

  I awoke sometime during the wee hours of early morning. According to my phone, it was just after three. I tried to go back to sleep, but the knowledge that I had what might be an illuminating email from Ellen Parker kept my mind from relaxing.

  I slipped silently out of bed, silently pulled my lappy from its handy carrying satchel and stealthily made my way downstairs and out onto the pool deck. I liked it out there. At three in the morning, it was comfortably cool, and no dew had set in yet. I found Sonny sitting at the tiki bar smoking a cigarette.

  “Checkin’ on things, Captain?” He asked wryly.

  I grinned, “Nah. Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Figured I’d come out and do a little work until I got tired again. Where’s Jimmy?”

  “Downstairs,” the man said. “We been takin’ turns. Every half hour or so, one of us goes down and walks around the house and sits in the dark, and the other one eyeballs things from up here. So far, nothhin’.”

  “No news is good news,” I commented.

  He shrugged, “I guess. It also means no action, y’know? Me and Jimmy like the action.”

  I nodded, “Most of your work is sitting around and waiting. Or being present to make sure nothing happens. It’s rare when you really get to use your skills, huh?”

  Sonny grinned now, “Pretty much. Not as rare as you’d think, but I hear what you’re sayin’.”

  “You and Jimmy Santino’s best shooters?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How good?”

  “I can stuff a 9mm round up a gnat’s ass from fifty paces. Jimmy’s almost as good, but he’s gotta do it from forty-eight.”

  I chuckled, “I love a man who’s modest.”

  “Hey, you asked.”

  “I did.”

  “How about you?” Sonny inquired, lighting another smoke. “Mr. Santino says you’re an impressive guy. Must be right, considerin’ what we heard been goin’ on down here the past week or so.”

  “I can hold my own.”

  Sonny chuckled, and I opened my laptop.

  The first email was composed of a lot of summarized information about Bradford Avionics. Profit and loss statements, annual reports and other boring stuff going back as far as the corporation. It listed all of the officers and board members, of course. The Bradfords, Veronica, Wilfred Franklin and a handful of lower-level vice-presidents of one department or another. It also listed how many shares the company currently held and in what categories. It seemed that the employees shared in the profits through common stock, the VP’s held some preferred stock, and the officers held the majority of the voting shares and so forth. No surprise there. I wondered how that would work when and if the company went public.

  I also saw the salaries for the big five. Veronica’s was the highest, with Marcus coming in second, then Wilfred Franklin and then Andrew and finally Sarah Beth. Not one of them was any less than a millionaire, with salaries seemingly assigned to their positions. That was interesting… certainly if Veronica was no longer CEO, then everybody would move up.

  After about an hour, my lids were growing heavy, and I was about to shut down and go back to bed. Sonny and Jimmy had switched positions a little while earlier, and now the other brother was pacing around the pool smoking his own cigarette. Then something caught my eye.

  I remembered Jean and maybe somebody else mentioning how Franklin was big into research and development. That was apparently true. He had no less than six pet projects going. Each had a couple of employees attached as well. The projects ranged from improved radar, the use of solar power on aircraft, satellite communications, airborne internet and so on. Each project had a large sum of money funneled into it, for a total of nearly eight million dollars annually.

  What was interesting, however, is that over the past two years, very little had come out of these projects. One or two ideas, but they seemed mostly research as opposed to development. Also, only one of the projects was located on BA property. The other five were given to smaller firms that all seemed to be located in Massachusetts and claimed to have some connection to MIT. All of the companies were also LLCs registered in Nevada.

  I couldn’t quite say why, but something about that rang a small tinkling bell in my mind. Why have a bunch of independent firms in or near Boston doing the research? Okay, MIT was close, and maybe they could get some good people, or use student interns or whatever… and why were the LLCs registered in Nevada and not Mass? Or Wyoming, for that matter?

  I knew enough about corporate stuff to know that Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming had strong corporate protections. That’s why many companies registered there. It gave them even more protection and made it that much harder to pierce the corporate veil should there be a lawsuit or something.

  Still… Franklin was in charge of them all, and the only member of each LLC… and each one was getting large sums of money pumped into it each year… I couldn’t put my finger on it then, but something about the scenario was sending up a small alarm.

  I put that aside and looked at the next email Ellen had sent. This one was in regard to good old Doc Campbell. According to the bio, he was fifty-two, had been educated at UCF and then did his medical training at John’s Hopkins. He’d been with Palms at Pasadena for ten years now, had been in private practice for ten years before that and did his residency at Tampa General. All as an obstetrician. None of it as a surgeon who might even hint at a specialty in cranial surgery or whatever it was called.

  There was a footnote that was of interest as well. Apparently, Campbell had been sued last year, and his attorney, Ted Whittaker of all people, had settled with the plaintiffs. That was odd for an attorney who supposedly specialized in business law.

  It was becoming very evident that this situation was far more complex and far-reaching than I’d originally suspected. Perhaps going back years or decades. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were some heavy-duty shenanigans going on and I’d better start catching up. I closed the laptop and went back to bed, knowing that the upcoming day or two would be busy ones.

  If only I’d known how prophetic and understated that thought truly was…

  With my four Goodfellas in place, I felt confident in leaving Veronica and assigning Lisa some research work. She’d visit the Pinellas and Hillsboro County courthouses and research records on Doctor Felix Campbell. I’d try to interview both the doc and Ted Whittaker.

  My first disappointment came when I drove to Palms at Pasadena and found that neither of my targets was even there. Whittaker had been released the evening before and the good doctor was not scheduled to come in until Sunday morning. Strange how the receptionist didn’t know that the previous night.

  Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for my unwitting adversaries, I happened to have both Whittaker’s and Campbell’s home addresses. I drove to Ted’s place first, since he was further away in Sarasota. It seemed odd to me that a man with a head injury and amnesia would be released from the hospital only a couple of days after he came out of a coma. This only further reinforced my gut feeling that Whittaker, and now his doctor, were lying.

  Sarasota, although heavily populated like the cities and surrounding areas of Tampa and Saint Pete, has some of the highest quality neighborhoods in the state and even the country. I was not surprised to find that old Teddy Bear owned a home in the Cherokee Park region just south of downtown Sarasota. Even less surprising was the fact that his modest thirty-four hundred square foot classic WW2 era home was
built along one of the fairways of the golf course at Palmer Ranch. The home sat on a half-acre lot and featured a number of mature oaks, elms and eucalyptus trees. The two-story home was painted in a pale yellow with white trim and even featured two small dormer windows jutting out from the high-peeked roof. The attached two-car garage door sat open, revealing a late-model Red Lexus parked in the center. I had almost forgotten that Ted wasn’t married.

  The house was apparently built on a crawl space because I had to mount three wide steps to gain access to the full-width covered porch. I depressed the doorbell, and the faint sound of a musical chime rang from within. I waited a moment or two and then rang again, punctuating the doorbell with a firm but not unfriendly knock or two.

  I waited for several minutes and got no response.

  “Somebody must be home,” I said to no one. “The car is in the garage and that’s open… unless he’s got two cars…”

  I stood and absorbed the late spring morning in Florida for a moment. Birds twittered in the trees around me, somewhere down the street a commercial lawn mower roared to life and the rhythmic chicka, chicka, chicka of Whittaker’s sprinklers was only broken when they reached the end of their arc and rapidly clattered back to the starting position. The scent of wet warm grass permeated the air, underscored by a delicate whiff of someone’s rose bushes wafted to me on the light morning breeze.

  A very pleasant scene to act as backdrop for shaking down a shyster.

  I waited another minute and then walked back to the driveway and around the side of the garage. A paver-stone walkway led me past two active air conditioner condenser units, the pool pump and a pool heater. I rounded the rear of the garage to a spacious lawn and the stone-paver pool deck that looked out over the rest of the yard and the fairway beyond.

  The deck was at the same level as the sliding glass door set into the rear of the house. Beyond the pool and the lush, green lawn, a chest-high picket fence separated the property from the fairway.

  About a hundred yards to my left, a group of golfers was teeing up. Perhaps fifty yards to my right, where the fairway dog-legged to the left, another group was lining up what looked to be a two-hundred-yard shot to the distant green.

  No one was in the pool, sitting at the table or on one of the four loungers. I moved to the sliding glass door and could see that it wasn’t locked. It had been left open just enough to show that the latch couldn’t be closed. I frowned, shrugged and slid it open and stepped into the cool dining room.

  There is a sense that you get when entering an empty house. The silence and the heaviness of the unmoving air, perhaps. Somehow, though, you almost always know when a house is empty or at least when no one inside is moving and even hiding. I got that sense when I walked in and closed the slider… yet there was something else, as well. Another sense. A sense of something darker and more ominous.

  Was it really there, or did my imagination manufacture it later?

  Something was wrong in that house. I knew it before I’d taken half a dozen steps. There was something bad lingering inside those walls.

  My hackles went up and I pulled my 1911 from my rear waistband where I’d hidden it beneath the hem of my red guayabera shirt. I racked the slide, cringing at the seemingly thunderous metallic sound in the quiet house.

  The dining room connected to a large kitchen to my left and a large living room on my right. Ahead of me, a hallway connected to the front foyer and gave access to the stairs. I carefully and silently cleared the first floor, including the home office behind the kitchen. Then I crept up the stairs, wincing more than once when the old wood crackled and creaked beneath my weight. Again, in the oppressive silence that enveloped me, the sounds were rifle shots by comparison.

  Upstairs were four bedrooms and a small library. I found no one living in any of them. It wasn’t until I went into the master suite and heard the sound of the shower running that I began to wonder if perhaps I’d been mistaken. Maybe the feeling of impending unpleasantness was just a figment of my imagination after all.

  Having come this far and feeling as if I had little choice, I crept into the master bath to inspect the last of the house. Whittaker would doubtless be annoyed at my intrusion… but what was a boy to do?

  He lie half propped up in the corner of the walk-in shower stall. An overhead ceiling-mounted shower rained down on a naked and now very pale body. There were three small holes grouped very closely in his fish belly-white chest and nothing flowed from them at all.

  I bit my lip and reached out with my handkerchief to turn the now very cold shower off. The artificial rain ceased and only a few drops pattered down onto the wet tile beneath Ted Whittaker. There wasn’t a drop of blood anywhere. Not on him and not even in the tile grout. Whatever blood had been able to escape his body already had some time ago, leaving behind a cold and pasty caricature of what had once been a human being.

  I took hold of one of his wrists with my hanky-covered hand and tried to lift the arm. Whittaker was as rigid as old firewood. It was nearly ten o’clock in the morning; if this had happened that morning and not the previous night, then it had been a couple of hours at least. I couldn’t tell either way, and in the grand scheme of things, it probably didn’t matter much.

  For whatever reason, someone had decided that Ted Whittaker was a liability. That he was no longer worth the trouble of the pretense that he’d been a victim of the first attack on Veronica Bradford. I noted with little satisfaction that he no longer wore a bandage around his head and that there was no visible sign of any kind of surgery.

  I stood in the quiet bathroom, listening to the periodic drip of the showerhead and wondered what I should do next. Call it in and deal with the cops for the next couple of hour’s maybe? Leave quietly and keep Whittaker’s murder a secret for a little while longer?

  “Doesn’t much matter to you, does it, Ted?” I asked bitterly.

  A poem by Wallace Stevens materialized in my mind as I stared down at the pale dead man. His lank salt and pepper hair hanging over his forehead, his dead eyes wide in their last expression of shock. His bare toes showed purple lividity and the nails appeared starkly yellow by comparison.

  “Let be be finale of seem,” I quoted. “Let the lamp affix its beam… the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream…”

  Death, no matter how it came, no matter when it came, was an ugly thing. Perhaps some deaths were uglier than others. A murder victim evoked more disgust than an old woman passing peacefully in her bed. Yet no matter how one came to one’s end, it was the end. A journey through a mysterious portal that opened but one way and beyond which no one knew what lay.

  In the end, I left him. Not for long. I’d call it in later that day, but for reasons I couldn’t quite have illustrated then, I felt that Ted Whittaker’s death shouldn’t be made public just yet. Right then, only I knew. Me and his murderer or murderers. And perhaps those who’d set the killing in motion. Something told me they wouldn’t be broadcasting it on Bay News Nine any time soon, however.

  I drove back onto I-75, then onto I-275 and over the huge Sunshine Skyway suspension bridge that took you from Bradenton across Tampa Bay to the south side of Saint Petersburg. It was nearing noon now and the day was nearly cloudless. Off to my left, Egmont Key sat in a glittering slash of light on the water. To my right, a variety of boats plied across Tampa Bay along with a container ship making its way toward the center span of the tall bridge. A lovely and alluring scene. Living water, full sails and the brilliance of a summer’s day. Not a day to be murdered.

  I don’t know why Whittaker’s death was affecting me so. In my career as police detective and private investigator, as well as my new Navy hitch with ICE, I’d certainly seen more than my fair share of death. I’d been party to a great many killings, a cringe-worthy number at my own hands. Yet somehow, this one was sticking in my craw.

  It wasn’t that I liked Whittaker. I didn’t. I didn’t know the man, and the only time I’d talked to him, he’d lied to me. H
e’d wormed his way into my client’s trust and betrayed her. It was looking more and more likely that he had a history of shady dealings as well. Yet, something about his death had gotten under my skin and was itching like a bastard.

  Perhaps it was the way he’d died. Naked and alone, caught off guard in the shower. Perhaps that was it, the expression of ultimate vulnerability, or at least an example of it. His home and his privacy had been invaded, and he hadn’t even had time to react.

  I’d just have to try and push it out of my mind and let it stew. I tried to focus on the drive instead.

  The barrier islands in Pinellas County were populated by a series of small townships. Some were sub-communities of Saint Pete, and some were little communities that had an independent town management board. Pass-a-Grille, Saint Pete Beach, Treasure Island, Madeira Beach, Reddington Beach, North Reddington Beach and so on as you moved north from the tip of Saint Pete.

  All of these communities had large hotels or condos on the beach and a number of single-family homes on the intracoastal side of the islands. The properties out there, as one might expect, required a moderately cumbersome pouch of nickels to acquire.

  That included Doctor Felix Campbell’s North Reddington Beach home. Located near 169th Avenue on the inshore side of the island, the good doctor’s house was a three-story modern McMansion. It had been recently built atop an older lot whose home had been demolished. As per new ordinances, all new homes in the area had to be built on stilts, thus making his two-floor home a three-floor home with the first floor being garage and storage space.

  The house sat on a finger. More than a canal, the canal-like finger was probably two or three hundred yards across and connected to the intracoastal. I didn’t know what might be parked at the dock behind the house, but I was determined to find out.

  Before I shut down my engine, my Bluetooth began to warble with an incoming call from Lisa. I graciously accepted.