Longboat Blues

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “I wish to hell I knew. They owe me a couple of grand, and the whole company seems to have disappeared.”

  Rundel had made a big mistake. Never stiff a lawyer on a fee. It makes the lawyer angry as a swarm of horny bees, and he will tell you anything you want to know about his client. It’s a breach of professional ethics, of course, but the lawyer feels the biggest breach of all is when a client doesn’t pay his bill. “What can you tell me about the outfit?” I asked.

  “Not a whole lot. Guy name of Rundel had me incorporate the business and do a few other small items for him. Nothing big, but then if it had been big, I guess he would have gone to one of the larger firms here. I have a one man general practice, is all. I’m sure not in your league, Mr. Royal.”

  I’d been a pretty good lawyer, and pretty well known in the Orlando area, but I certainly didn’t have a statewide reputation, and I couldn’t figure out where this guy was coming from with all the compliments. However, I seemed to have some clout with Jones, and I wasn’t about to blow it by asking him how he knew about me. I may have met him somewhere and didn’t remember it. “What about the president, Rundel?” I asked.

  “That’s kind of funny, you know. He seemed to be a real money man. Drove a big Mercedes, and he lived in one of those high priced condos on the Gulf out on Longboat. But one day he came into the office with another guy, who didn’t look like he had money for bus fare, and said this other guy was putting up money to buy the first plane for Rundel. They wanted me to hold the money in my trust account until they told me the name of the seller. I was then supposed to send a trust account check to whoever it was.”

  “What happened?”

  “The guy gave me a cashier’s check for one million dollars, made out to my trust account, and about two weeks later he sent me a certified letter telling me where to send the check. My first thought was that it may have been a drug money laundering deal, but you don’t get a cashier’s check when that is going on. Do you?”

  “It doesn’t sound like the usual way. Can you tell me who the check was made out to?”

  “This was over a year ago, but my trust account records would show that. You know how the Bar is about keeping accurate records of trust accounts. They’re probably in storage, but I can find them and call you back.”

  “ Why don’t I just call you back this afternoon. You wouldn’t remember the name of the man who gave you the check, would you?”

  “Sure do. It was John James. Don’t know why that name has stuck with me. It was the only time I ever saw him. Lived in Gulfview, up in Ware County, in the big bend country.”

  I thanked him again for his time and cooperation, and told him I would call back later that afternoon. It had apparently not occurred to him to wonder why I needed the name of the payee on the check, if all I wanted was to buy an airplane.

  The address given by the Secretary of State’s office for Rundel was on the south end of the Key, an imposing ten stories of concrete, blocking the view of the Gulf. I entered a driveway off Gulf of Mexico Drive at a sign announcing that I had arrived at Gulf Breakers, Exclusive Condominium Living at its Best. About a hundred yard down the driveway I came to a gate, with a guard dressed in a khaki uniform. I told him I was going to see the manager, and he raised the gate, giving me a sloppy salute. The rest of the driveway was another hundred yards or so of brick pavers, lined with coconut palms. The grand entrance at the end of the driveway was fit for one of the finer hotels. I drove underneath a frescoed overhang and was met by a doorman wearing the same uniform as the gate guard. He was expecting me, apparently called by his buddy on the gate, and directed me to the manager’s office on the first floor, next to the elevators.

  A woman of about fifty, dressed as if she were twenty, invited me into her private office. She had blond hair, which had the dried out look of too many bleachings, done in waves falling almost to her shoulders. She wore a tight blouse of pale yellow, unbuttoned enough to show an ample cleavage. Her dark blue shorts were about three sizes too small and hugged a butt of a size and shape that cried out for a loosely draped skirt. Her feet were encased in plastic mules with six inch heels. She was the typical New Yorker, moved to Florida, with her youth recaptured.

  “We have two nice units for sale, Mr. Royal,” she said, “and right now the mortgage rates are about as good as we’ll see.”

  I said, “Actually, I’m looking for an old friend, Hale Rundel. His brother gave me this address, and I thought that while I’m in the area I’d buy him a drink.”

  “Oh, goodness. You’re not interested in buying a unit?”

  “Sorry. Just looking for a friend.”

  “Well, you won’t find him here.” Her breezy mood disappeared as the thought of a nice sales commission danced out of the office. “He moved out three months ago in the middle of the night owing a months rent.”

  “He wasn’t an owner?” I asked.

  “No. He rented Penthouse A during the off season while the owner was living in North Carolina. I can tell you the owner was mad, getting stiffed on a months rent. He wants me to give him back the entire commission I made on the deal. Says if I’d been doing my job I’d have made sure the rent was collected in advance.”

  “How long did Hale live here?” I asked.

  “About two months this time. But he rented the place two years in a row, for six months each year. He was supposed to stay six months this year. How was I to know he’d skip? He’d always paid the rent before.”

  “What did he do for a living?”

  “Hey, I thought you were his friend.”

  “I was. I haven’t seen him in several years, though. When I knew him, he was a pilot.”

  “Well, he wasn’t flying airplanes while he was here. I don’t know what he did. I always thought he was retired. He seemed to have plenty of money, and he threw a lot of parties. We got a few complaints about the noise from some of our residents, but if you called him about it, he was always polite and would quiet everything down real quick like.”

  “You haven’t heard anything from him since he left, I take it.”

  “No. And I don’t want to hear anything either. Unless he’s calling to say he’s sending me the rent. You sure you don’t want to take a look at one of those units we got for sale?”

  “Some other time, maybe.”

  “Sure.”

  I thanked her for her time and left.

  I stopped by O’Sullivan’s. It was still early, but the girls were always there.

  Molly came over as I walked in. “Want something to drink, Matt?”

  “No, thanks. I wanted to bring you up to date on your tip this morning. The man you saw is named Sam Cox, and he works for a guy named Hale Rundel who used to live on the Key. Do you know either one of those names?

  “Sure, I know Hale. About fifty years old, getting fat and likes to wear those muscle shirts the kids wear. Looks pretty funny in them too. He’s like a lot of the people that come down here, wearing clothes they shouldn’t, and trying to stay young.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “It’s funny, you know. He was a quiet type. He’d come in regularly for drinks at happy hour, and occasionally he’d have dinner. Always by himself. He’d sit at the bar, but didn’t usually talk to anyone, and I don’t think I ever saw him have dinner with anyone. He got to know one of our waitresses and invited her to a party at his condo one night. She later said she’d never go back there. Seems he had some pretty weird friends.”

  “What did she mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say anything more about it, and I didn’t feel it was my place to ask.”

  “Does she still work here?” I asked

  “No. She left when the season was over and moved back north someplace.”

  “When did you last see Rundel?”

  “I haven’t seen him in several months. He just stopped coming in. I figured he might be embarrassed to see that waitress again, or figured she told us something
about that party that made him not want to face us. I did see him a couple of times with Dick Bellinger at the bar at Pirates’ Cove. He might know something.”

  “I need to stop and see Dick anyway. I’ll check it out.”

  “Look Matt, I’ve got to get back to the drudgery. It was good to see you again. I hope this leads you somewhere good for Logan”

  I called Don Jones from my cell phone as I drove north toward Pirate’s Cove Inn and Marina. He told me that the one million dollar check he wrote on his trust account was made payable to Hawker Industries, an aircraft manufacturer.

  On the bay side of Longboat Key, down a short road and across a narrow creek, sits a small island, perhaps five acres in size. It is protected from the open bay by a hook of the main island that comes out to the east and around to the south. The water between the hook and the little island forms a natural harbor called Pirate’s Cove. The only establishment on the little island is the Pirate’s Cove Inn and Marina. The Inn consists of a grand old restaurant and bar decorated as a Pirate’s den dreamed up by Walt Disney. The marina has about fifty boat slips arranged in a semi-circle around the little island’s protected shore. It was to here that I ran away from the world when Laura left. And it was here that Jason Clark rescued me.

  A marina is always in a state of change, metamorphosing like a giant amoeba on a weekly basis. The liveaboards suddenly move ashore. The permanents, those who keep their boats in the marina, but don’t live aboard, decide that the next marina down the line is a better deal. The regular transients sell their boats and don’t come around anymore. The winter liveaboard decides to try the other coast this year. There’s always somebody new at the bar. In the years since I’d sold my liveaboard boat and moved into the condo, there had been a complete turnover, except for me and the dockmaster, Dick Bellinger.

  Dick had been a good friend during my down times after Laura left. He lived in the marina on a production boat that looked like a working tug boat, but was in fact a pleasure yacht of about thirty-six feet. He was my age, and the spitting image of a television series star, one of those balding guys with a gray beard who always looked distinguished. If a female tourist on the island happened to mistake Dick for the T.V. star, he was not one to disappoint her. I suspect that a lot of small town school teachers in Ohio still go to sleep nights, reflecting on their good fortune in having had an affair, although brief, with a television personality.

  Dick had been a Navy fighter pilot in his youth, and then spent many years as an airline pilot. He woke up one morning and simply decided that he was finished with flying. He called his supervisor at the airline and quit. That day he loosed the lines from the mooring where he kept the sailboat on which he lived, and headed south. He spent a year traveling the Carribean, and then washed ashore at Pirate’s Cove. When he heard the management was looking for a dockmaster, he took the job. Somewhere along the line he got rid of the sailboat and bought the tug. I was worried that Dick seemed to be slipping deeper into a bottle of vodka, but he had shrugged off my concern the one time I had voiced it.

  Dick’s small office looked out over the pool to the marina. This time of the week one could always find a number of the local women taking the sun by the pool. Dick was usually behind his darkened windows enjoying the fleshy view. At five he would move his portable radio to the bar for a few drinks of straight vodka with the regulars who always frequent any bar in any town.

  The air conditioning in the tiny office puffed cold air, providing a respite from the June heat. Dick was on the phone taking a reservation from a boater who wanted to spend Independence day in the marina. He had his ever present filtered low tar cigarette burning in the ashtray. He looked up at me, grinned, and waived me to the only visitor’s chair in the room. I remained standing and coughed a couple of times for emphasis. I had been telling him for years that his bad habits were going to kill him some day.

  He hung up the phone. “Silly bastard. Thinks he can make a reservation this late for July 4th. I gotta get out of this business.” Dick always groused, but he loved the Key and enjoyed his job. I had used Dick during my case with Jason to do some basic research on medical products, and to take telephone statements from some of the witnesses. He got himself qualified by the Circuit Court to serve subpoenas, and he took care of that for me when we needed depositions in Southwest Florida.

  “I need some help, Dick. I’m looking into a guy named Hale Rundel. Molly O’Sullivan told me you might know him.”

  “Oh, I know him, but not well. A buddy of his brought a boat in here for a month winter before last, and Rundel spent a lot of time here in the marina. That was during the time you were so caught up in the doc’s case that you didn’t get over here for a time. I had a few drinks with him, and he invited me over to his condo for a party. Great party, but Rundel’s a big sack of shit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Matt, you know I like to party. And I do love the girls. Rundel had these parties every now and then and would invite a very select crowd. Mostly folks from the mainland who had lots of money. The one I went to had a lot of drugs around. There was actually a dish of white powder on the coffee table, and people were sucking it up their noses with straws. If it wasn’t cocaine there were sure a lot of people acting very satisfied with whatever it was. There were other kinds of pills and stuff to smoke and plenty of booze. Booze was being served by waitresses, who were all nude.”

  “Naked?” I asked rather stupidly.

  “Buck-ass naked,” said Dick. “Rundel told me that when he invited me. I figured I could get drunk and get laid without too much trouble. But the drugs scared me. You know how I feel about that, Matt.” Dick’s younger sister died from an overdose after she had put the family through years of hell. “I don’t mess with them, and I won’t stay around where they’re used. I had one drink and left.”

  “Is Rundel in the drug business?”

  “I don’t think so, but who knows. He had a lot of money, and he didn’t seem hesitant to spend it. I saw him after the party and told him I had left because I was not comfortable with the drugs. He told me he didn’t do any drugs himself, but had to have them available for his business associates. He said he brokered airplanes, and that he suspected that many of his buyers were drug runners. He apparently hired a few of the girls from that topless place over in Sarasota to come over and walk around nude to kind of get things moving. He said that when everybody is standing around sucking coke and looking at nude chicks, there ain’t no pretension and he can do business better. We got pretty drunk over at the bar the last time I saw him, and he was telling me that he had cameras hidden around the apartment. He said that it was amazing how cooperative some of his disgruntled customers would become once he showed them pictures of them and their wives or girlfriends standing around in a crowd of nudes snorting coke. Like I said, a sack of shit.”

  “Do you know why he left?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t see him that regularly, and I guess he had been gone for some time before I heard about it. I ran into Sally, the manager down at Gulf Breakers, over at the Holiday Inn one night and she was bitching about him stiffing her on the rent. I figured maybe somebody caught up with him and he either ran, or somebody dumped him out in the Gulf one dark night.”

  “Did he ever say anything about where he came from or what he did before he landed on the island?” I asked.

  “Nah. Like I said, I didn’t know him well, and I really didn’t care to. Sorry.”

  We chatted for a few more minutes about mutual friends, and I took my leave and headed home.

  Chapter 16

  Gulfview is a typical old Florida town, sitting on a part of the Gulf coast that has not yet been discovered by the developers and despoilers. It is home to a paper mill, which employs most of the men of the area. Inland, there is a little farming, and a few people still make their living fishing for mullet or taking oysters from the shallow bay. It is the county seat of Ware county. With a population of un
der twenty thousand, it is the smallest county in Florida. It is the kind of place that the northerners never see in the brochures put out by the tourist industry. It is also the kind of place where the sheriff knows everybody and everything that is going on.

  I drove up from Longboat Key through St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and on up Highway 27. I had decided to see what I could find out about John James. If he were in fact involved in shady or illegal dealings, it was likely that a number of his fellow citizens would be aware of it. These people are very protective of their own.

  As in many southern towns the courthouse sat on a square, with most of the stores and shops on the streets surrounding it. On the front lawn there was the usual statute of a Confederate soldier, facing his enemy to the north.

  I parked on the street in front of the courthouse and went into the sheriff’s office. I identified myself to the deputy at the desk, gave him my business card, and asked to speak to the sheriff. He was out but was expected back any moment, and I was welcome to wait. I had barely sat down on the hard bench when a small man in a suit walked in.

  “Sheriff,” said the deputy, “Mr. Royal here is a lawyer from Longboat Key. Wants to see you.” He handed the sheriff my card.

  “I’m Dave Tuten,” said the sheriff, sticking out his hand. “I’ll be right with you.” He disappeared into his office shutting the door. A few minutes later the door opened and he invited me in.

  Sheriff Tuten was not at all what I had expected. He was about five foot seven, one hundred forty pounds, with dark hair graying at the temples. He was dressed in a navy blue suit, white shirt, burgundy tie, and had a Phi Beta Kappa key pinned in his lapel. He was in his mid-forties.

  “I appreciate your taking some time for me, Sheriff.” I said. “I’m looking for a man named John James. He’s not listed in the phone book, and the operator says his number is unlisted. I was hoping you might be able to help us.”