Miami Mayhem (Jerry eBooks) (2016)

by Anthony Rome

  “Then I met Rudy. He fell for me, wanted to marry me. No questions asked about my past. I was still Nimmo’s wife. But I was afraid to go to him for a divorce. He’d have gotten curious and found out about Rudy. He’d have told Rudy about some of the things I’d done during my lousy life. Or blackmailed me the way he finally did. So I just went ahead and married Rudy and came down here. I thought no one would ever know. I hardly ever came into Miami, where I might run into somebody I knew from the past. I stuck pretty much to home. And it worked out well for me. For almost four years . . .”

  “Until Nimmo Fern showed up,” I said.

  She nodded, her eyes filled with hate and misery. “Yes . . . after almost four years . . . I’d changed a lot in those four years, Rome. When I married Rudy, it was because he was a nice guy and could give me security and a chance for a decent life. But then I got to love the guy. Really love him. And I was happy because I knew I was being a good wife to him . . . And then Nimmo came back into my life, threatening to ruin it completely, blackmailing me with the jewels as the payment.

  “He never let me get out from under my fear that he’d ruin my life with Rudy. He even got a little photostat made of our marriage license and carried it in his wallet. He’d threaten to give it to Rudy if I got out of line—he even made me come here to him a couple of times by using that as a threat . . .”

  She was silent then. And so was I. Because now the last question was answered.

  The marriage license in Nimmo’s wallet.

  Without that it had seemed that only Rita stood to gain by Kosterman’s death. And through her, Nimmo. Now that was changed.

  Now I knew who’d wanted Kosterman murdered. And where Nimmo was. And where to find Catleg.

  I stood up. Rita quickly raised the gun off her lap, afraid I was about to snatch it from her.

  “Put it away,” I told her. “You aren’t going to need it after all.”

  “What?” She blinked at me, not understanding.

  “Wait for me,” I said. “I’ll be back for you.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  IT WAS LIKE experiencing all over again the first night I’d come to Boyd’s ruined estate. Everything was the same—the darkness, the silence, the high crumbling brick wall overgrown with vines. And somewhere inside lurked Dr. Boyd’s brother, Sam—who could find a man in the dark and stalk him silently.

  Like the first time. Except that this time I knew he was in there.

  I entered through the broken iron gate, making no effort to spot Sam; knowing I couldn’t if I tried. Instead, I moved swiftly toward the hulking, decaying French château in the middle of the estate, following the same path as the last time. Pushing through the high tangle of weeds, I found the broken flagstone path and followed it to the abandoned swimming pool surrounded by the immense shapeless hedges. I could detect no sign that Sam was stalking me. But I banked on the probability, and just hoped he didn’t decide to jump me before I was set for him.

  Slipping through the hedges, I climbed the overgrown incline to the dark front of the hulking, sagging mansion. The smells of the decay and mold inside came out to me through the smashed windows. I halted in front of the window I used to enter the last time, as though I intended to use it again.

  Then, I made a sudden thing of striding past it and around the corner of the building. Two steps around the corner I stopped, whirled, and dragged from the bulging right-hand pocket of my jacket one of the items I’d brought with me.

  It was one of Nimmo’s socks, loaded with wet sand and pebbles. It made an effective blackjack.

  I had the heavy little sandbag raised above and behind my shoulder when Sam came noiselessly around the corner after me. He stopped short when he saw me standing there waiting for him. I didn’t give him time to think. I swung the weighted sock as hard as I could.

  It made very little sound as it slammed off his temple. His eyes rolled up in their sockets and his legs buckled. He fell down on his hands and knees. I bent and hit him again, behind the ear. He went all the way down and lay motionless.

  It took me a moment to get my breathing back under control. I’d been more frightened than I’d let myself know. Kneeling beside his unconscious form, I got the roll of adhesive tape out of my other pocket, used strips of it to gag him and bind his wrists and ankles securely together behind him.

  Leaving the loaded sock beside him, I straightened, took my gun from its belt holster, and continued around the abandoned mansion toward the cottage behind it.

  Lights showed through two of the windows in the front of the cottage, and the front door was slightly ajar. I stopped and listened tensely. There was no human sound, anywhere. I moved silently to one of the lighted windows, looked in. I found myself looking into the living room of what had once been the tastefully furnished servants’ quarters. The furnishings were still the same, but the place was disordered and badly in need of a cleaning job.

  The only one I could see in the room inside was Lorna Boyd, Diana’s mother. She lay face down on the living-room couch, one forearm lying on the floor beside a half-empty liquor bottle, breathing harshly and heavily through her open mouth.

  Raising the gun a little in my hand, I went to the front door, pushed it all the way open. I took one step inside, then waited. There was still no sound, other than what came from Lorna Boyd. I drifted across the worn rug to the couch, touched her with my free hand. She didn’t move. The tempo of the harsh breathing of her drunken sleep didn’t change. I didn’t have to bend down to smell the liquor on her breath.

  Quietly, slowly, I went through the rest of the cottage interior. There was no one else inside it. Lorna Boyd was still in oblivion when I returned to the living room. I stepped out of the cottage, stood for a while studying the rear of the empty mansion.

  Finally, I saw it—a faint gleam of light in one of the windows. The window of the room in which I’d tangled with Sam, the last time I’d come there. I remembered the bed in that room. There’d been no dust on top of it. There’d been stains on the sheet that could have been dried blood . . .

  I retraced my steps around the mansion, pausing when I reached Dr. Boyd’s brother. He was still unconscious. I went on, to the front of the dark, looming building. At the window I’d used as an entrance the previous time, I stopped and took off my shoes. Leaving them behind, I climbed over the window sill.

  This time I didn’t have to use a flashlight. I remembered the route. Feeling my way cautiously, I moved through the dark maze of the decaying interior till I found the narrow, curving stairway leading upward. I began climbing it slowly, testing each step before trusting my full weight on it to make no sound. My hand was wet around the metal of my gun.

  As I neared the top of the stairway, I saw the light from the bedroom ahead. I reached the second-floor hallway and slipped toward the light.

  Through the open doorway of the room I saw that the light came from an oil lamp set on one side of the bed and a standing candelabra on the other side of it. Dr. Boyd was bending over the bed with his back to me, bandaging the chest of a man stretched out on the bed. The man on the bed was naked from the waist up. I couldn’t see his face, but his narrow, short frame told me who he was.

  A floorboard creaked under my foot as I stepped into the room.

  Dr. Boyd straightened and jerked around to face me. His eyes went wide at the sight of me. Catleg—the man on the bed—came up on one elbow. The bandage was wide and bulky on his chest where my bullet had gotten him. His face was ashen and twisted with the pain of the wound.

  But when he saw me, he didn’t hesitate. His movement was instinctive and instant. He grabbed up the .38 revolver that lay on the sheet beside him.

  There was only one thing to do.

  The explosion of the gun in my hand rocked against the walls of the room and brought a shower of plaster dust down from the ceiling. The gun slid out of Catleg’s hand. He bent over sideways and fell off the bed to sprawl motionless in the tangle of shredding ca
nopy material beside it.

  I spun toward Dr. Boyd. He was dragging a small automatic from his pocket, but he stopped when he saw my gun aimed at him. Neither of us spoke as I took the automatic from his limp hand. His face was frozen. He stared at me and through me, at something far beyond that only he could see.

  I turned and looked back down at Catleg. In death, he looked even smaller than he had in life. The hunt that had begun with finding Turpin’s murdered body in my office was finished. I pictured Turpin laughing in Hell at all the trouble I’d gone through to avenge him.

  Dr. Boyd said nothing all the way back to the cottage. Inside, his wife still lay lost in her alcoholic sleep on the couch. For all the attention he paid her, she might have been part of the furniture.

  I used the rest of the adhesive tape I’d brought with me to bind him securely to a heavy, sagging wing chair. Then I left the cottage, got my shoes back on, and dragged Sam back to the cottage with me. It was quite a job. I was winded and perspiring when I finally settled him on the living-room floor leaning against the wall. His eyelids fluttered as consciousness seeped slowly back into his brain. I checked the tapes around his wrists and ankles to make sure they’d hold him.

  Then I used the cottage phone to call Art Santini at Miami homicide.

  “Anthony Rome,” I said when Santini came on the phone. “I’m ready to square myself with the department.”

  “That’ll take some doing, Tony.”

  “Suppose I give you a doctor without a license who’s been patching up wounded criminals? Red-handed. And along with him the guy that killed Ralph Turpin—who also happens to be a professional killer the cops want for a job six months old?”

  There was a moment’s silence at the other end of the line. Then Santini said quietly, “We might almost like you. I’m listening.”

  I told him where to come, and to bring some men with him.

  After hanging up the phone, I settled in one of the living- room chairs, holding my gun on my knee while we waited. I looked at the three of them—Sam with his eyes wide open now, glaring at me, Lorna Boyd still out; Dr. Boyd lost in his bitter memories and thoughts of the future.

  I thought of all the diverse lives’ you touch, once you dig beneath the surface of any single person’s life. One life affects another, which in turn affects still another—on and on like a long chain of turning gears. People who have no knowledge of each other’s existence, yet change each other’s manner of life and time of death.

  A nice, slightly spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman lost a small piece of jewelry—and as a result a slum girl with a hunger for dope smashed to her death in a car crash.

  A restless divorcee from Detroit met an unscrupulous gambler from New York—so a jeweler from Holland drowned in a bathtub.

  A reasonless anger took hold of me as I sat waiting with the Boyds in that cottage. I was tired of other people’s lives. I had a hunger to be alone in an empty world for a while . . .

  Santini had two uniformed cops with him when he arrived. He looked from me to the Boyds, then back at me—holding out his hand.

  “All right,” he snapped as I gave him my gun. “Tell me about it.”

  “That one,” I said, pointing to Lorna, “is Mrs. Boyd. She had too much to drink, and she’s been out like that since I got here. She doesn’t know what’s gone on around her.” I nodded at Sam. “Be careful with that one.” I explained about Sam.

  Then I turned to the man I’d tied to the chair. He stared frozenly at the far wall, as though not part of any of this.

  “This,” I told Santini, “is the ex-Doctor Boyd. He got caught performing abortions and lost his license to practice. He’s been making ends meet since then by handling things no honest doctor’ll touch. Like patching up men who don’t want their wounds reported to the cops. You’ll find one of them in that mansion next door. He’s wanted for killing a Miami gas-station owner six months ago. Called himself Catleg. I had to shoot him, in self-defense. You’ll find his gun with him. I’ll lay odds it’s the one that killed Turpin.”

  “Well, well . . .” Santini said mildly.

  “He followed Turpin up to my office—together with a New York gambler named Nimmo Fern. They had an argument with Turpin about something. Turpin went for his gun. Catleg shot him, but Turpin managed to squeeze his own shot off before he tapped out. It didn’t hit Catleg though; it got Nimmo.”

  “Yeah? And where do we find this Nimmo?”

  I told him, “You’ll have to dig for him.”

  I picked up Rita Kosterman at Nimmo’s villa and drove her back up to Mayport. On the way, I told her how I’d figured it. There was only one way it could be figured, once I’d found out about the photostat of the marriage license in Nimmo’s wallet.

  I’d known a lot of it before—up to the point where Turpin had taken Catleg’s bullet, and put a slug into Nimmo before dying. Now the rest of the story had fallen into place.

  Leaving my office after killing Turpin, Catleg had been dragging a badly wounded Nimmo with him. And he’d taken him straight “to Boyd—whom he probably knew from having his hip patched up after that gas-station owner shot him. He got Nimmo to Dr. Boyd, but Nimmo had died of his wound before Boyd could do anything for him. That accounted for the fact that no one had seen or heard from Nimmo since Saturday morning.

  So Boyd and Catleg had a corpse on their hands and had to get rid of it. The easiest thing would be to bury Nimmo somewhere on that overgrown estate. But first they went through Nimmo’s wallet for whatever money he had on him. And they found that marriage-license photostat.

  It didn’t mean anything to Catleg. But it meant a lot to Boyd. He knew who Rita Nielsen was. And if Rita was really married to Nimmo at the time of her wedding with Kosterman, then she wasn’t legally Kosterman’s wife. Boyd saw in that a way out of his poverty.

  If Kosterman were dead, it would take only an anonymous phone call to his lawyers to start them checking the New York marriage-license records. They’d find out that Rita was Nimmo’s wife when she married Kosterman. And Kosterman’s will left almost everything to his wife—which, legally, Rita was not.

  Once Rita’s bigamy was established, there was only one person left to inherit it all—Kosterman’s daughter, Diana. And Lorna Boyd would have no trouble getting enough money out of her daughter for her and her husband to live the rest of their lives comfortably and decently. And they’d be safe. Rita might be suspected of the murder, but the Boyds would never even enter into the case.

  So Dr. Boyd made a deal with Catleg to murder Kosterman. And Catleg would have succeeded if I hadn’t happened to be there to yell a warning to Kosterman and scare Catleg off after that first shot . . .

  Rita Kosterman listened silently to the whole story I told.

  When I finished, the first words from her were: “Then . . . Nimmo is dead?”

  “Uh-huh. We found him buried under some bushes near the swimming pool. With a forty-five slug still in him.”

  She took a few moments more, absorbing it, believing it. Then she asked, shakily: “And how much of all this that you’ve told me do the police know?”

  “Nothing about you,” I told her. “They know Langley somehow managed to steal all the jewelry from your house and switch the gems. They know what happened between Catleg, Nimmo and Turpin, but not why. And they know about Boyd doctoring Catleg and Nimmo. They don’t have any of the facts that connect any of those things with you. And with a little luck, that’s the end of it.”

  I pulled the Olds up at the curb in front of the Mayport Hospital and looked at Rita. “Maybe you’d like to be the one to tell him the whole story,” I suggested.

  She nodded. “Yes . . . I should have told him long ago.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Then there wouldn’t be so much to tell.” After she went into the hospital, I headed for the corner diner, and breakfast. I gave it another hour. Then I phoned Art Santini in Miami.

  “You’re smelling better now,” he said when I got hi
m on the phone. “It was like you said. Catleg’s thirty-eight checks with the bullet we took out of Turpin. And that slug in Nimmo Fern came from Turpin’s forty-five.”

  He told me the rest of it. My luck-and Kosterman’s—stayed solid. Boyd’s twin brother, Sam, of course, couldn’t tell the cops anything that helped them. Lorna Boyd was hysterically swearing she knew nothing of her husband’s activities with criminals. And Boyd was maintaining a stony silence. He hadn’t said anything about hiring Catleg to murder Kosterman. And he wasn’t likely to. He was in enough hot water over his illegal practice without adding that.

  “There’s still a lot of things to be answered,” Santini warned me. “Like why Turpin and Nimmo Fern and Catleg started shooting each other in your office.”

  “They must’ve disliked each other,” I said.

  “Dammit, Tony! That’s not enough answer and you know it.”

  “It’s all the answer any of us are likely to get,” I told him. “They’re both dead now. You’ve got no grounds for complaint. You’ve got the man who killed Turpin. And you’ve got a wanted killer-for-hire and an illegal doctor as a bonus. It will look good on your record. And in the newspapers. And I’m the one who turned it all up for you. Don’t forget that. And don’t let Captain Jones forget it.”

  “You’re a pretty tricky guy,” Santini rasped.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A real sneak player.”

  I hung up the phone and went to see Kosterman in his hospital room.

  Rita sat in a chair beside his bed. They were holding hands and looking like blissful newlyweds enjoying the repentant aftermath of a lovers’ quarrel.

  “Rita has told me everything,” Kosterman said. “I only wish she’d told me the truth when we first met. I’d have arranged her divorce from this man Fern. It seems the ones I love best are always keeping things from me. Darrell. Diana. And now Rita. I wish I knew why.”

  I passed on to them what Santini had told me.

  “Well,” Kosterman murmured, “there’s one good thing that’s come of all this. With Fern dead, there’s nothing to interfere with Rita and me having a quiet remarriage somewhere.” He smiled faintly at Rita and squeezed her hand.