Bone Island Mambo: An Alex Rutledge Mystery

by Tom Corcoran

  “Too many ‘I don’t knows,’ ” said Dexter Hayes.

  “You ever find Robbie Carpona?”

  Hayes shook his head.

  “Then I’m not the only one with an occasional dead end. Did Julie say anything else?”

  He hesitated but said: “She’s a mess. Her sister wasn’t returning calls. Julie’s been making all the funeral arrangements herself. She’s started to pull Mercer’s estate together, keep his financial plan alive.”

  “Some kind of charitable trust?” I said.

  He nodded. “She told me die morning they found him that Mercer had arranged to split his property into two groups, and donate it Two trusts or foundations, whatever. I don’t know squat about that kind of stuff. But one is local, for the natural environment. The rental income would cover upkeep, taxes, legal fees, and salaries. Essentially make the foundation self-funding. The other group would benefit the National Trust for Historic Preservation.”

  “Do you realize what you just said?”

  “What?”

  “Historic and natural preservation means no inheritance. It especially means that Kaiser wouldn’t be heir to his parents’ motel, the old El Mirador. I’d say we’re stacking up motives like crab traps.”

  Disgust on Hayes face. “Who’s we?”

  “So I guessed right?”

  “What?” he said.

  “That you’d blow off my logic.”

  “Well, I guess you were right about something after all.”

  “Who told you that Bug Thorsby jumped me?”

  “When it happened, some woman offered you her cell phone? Go back to the police station. Look in the office two doors down from mine.”

  “Am I off your list of murder suspects?”

  “On the word of Ms. Barga. She said that you’d wanted to go kayaking on Sunday morning, and she chose to work at home. I knew you had an alibi.”

  “You run hot and cold,” I said. “You’re a son of a bitch, then you act the good guy. You blow off my help. Now here I am, walking up the street about to help cover you with an ex-girlfriend.”

  “Ex-girlfriend?”

  I said, “I’ve known for a few days.”

  “Where are you at with that?”

  “I was never that lucky in high school. The pretty ones went after football players. I was a swimmer. How did Donovan Cosgrove walk?”

  “His credit card got him out of jail. He borrowed a friend’s station wagon Sunday morning. He drove to Home Depot in Marathon, bought materials to renovate a walk-in closet. His charge records verified his alibi.”

  “Why did they keep him in jail so long?”

  “They didn’t want to drop charges, in case he was indirectly involved. He had to wait for a judge to set bond.”

  We’d reached Holloway’s front walk. Dexter Hayes’s cell phone rang. He identified himself, listened a moment He motioned for me to continue up Southard with him, past Mercer’s house. He said, “Yes,” acouple of times. Then: “Oh, Jesus, both?” Then: “Thanks for your quick work on this.”

  He hung up, stared at me, stunned. “The FDLE’s Crime Lab in Tampa.”

  “And?”

  “That remark you made the other day? About me picking through piss and shit to find evidence?”

  “I recall that one.”

  “You were trying to mess with me. I took it as good advice. We got to the portable potties before they got cleaned. We found wadded-up duct tape in one of them. Stuck halfway down the bucket. The nasty crapper chemicals left us some usable images. I took the tape to Tampa yesterday. I flew up on the sheriff’s Bonanza.”

  My opinion of Dexter Hayes skyrocketed. Not just because he’d taken my advice.

  “Positive fingerprints?” I leaned forward for Hayes’s next words. The microphone inside my shirt tickled my chest. I wanted Sam to hear who’d killed Richard Engram.

  Hayes kicked a small chunk of loose sidewalk. “Kaiser and Thorsby.”

  32

  The morning sun had lifted the temperature to the low seventies. Dexter Hayes and I stood four houses east of Holloway’s home on Southard, staring at the street, checking out bike riders headed downtown. Hayes’s mission to assist Julie Kaiser had shifted from a personal favor to pure law enforcement. Courts require strict procedure. Duty demands that friendships fall aside. Dexter was shifting gears, recalculating priorities. The chill in his eyes spoke of loathing and duty.

  “Call for backup?” I said.

  “Two things first.” Hayes punched his phone keypad. After a moment he said, “Is he there?” He paused, then said, “Okay. Tucker, Donovan, and you?” He pressed two buttons. I watched him key another sequence. I recognized Detective Bobbi Lewis’s cell phone number.

  “Tallahassee called,” he said to Lewis. “You were right. Hats off . . . Oh, I thought that . . .” Dexter made a face like someone had pissed in his coffee, then looked at me. Lewis must have given me credit for my contribution. Hayes took a deep breath, went back to business: “If Thorsby called Kaiser, he could be anywhere.”

  I shook my head. Dexter waved me off.

  I insisted: “If Cosgrove caught him in his wife’s bed, Kaiser never heard from Thorsby.”

  Hayes winced, nodded slowly. He said into the phone, “One of us has to go to the judge.” He nodded again, and said, “I appreciate it” He clicked off, pocketed the phone. We started back to Holloway’s.

  I said, “You still need me along?”

  “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you, Rutledge?”

  “A man of your talents should have no use for jealousy.”

  Hayes spat, “Now it’s you talking like Mercer Holloway.”

  “Let’s shut up and go inside. Maybe we can figure how to put his killer in jail. Before the man notches his gun one more time.”

  The steely look again. “Let the police take care of that.”

  “Okay, Dexter. I’ll head along home.”

  Hayes studied the long walkway to the stately veranda. I guessed he was pondering his history with the Holloway family. “I can’t go in there alone.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said.

  “Neither do murders.”

  “Where’s Bobbi Lewis?”

  “The sheriff’s special enforcement group is on Summerland, raiding the chop-shop compound. Their operation began forty-five minutes ago. Plenty of vehicles, plenty of evidence. No humans. They caught three of them at a roadblock north of Key Largo. They think Thorsby made it to the mainland before they set up.”

  Donovan Cosgrove answered our knock. He strained his neck to look up Southard, then let us in. He showed us into Mercer Holloway’s office. Julie Kaiser sat in the chair behind Mercer’s desk. Bloodshot eyes, no makeup, rumpled clothing. Tommy Tucker stood next to a front window. He held an MP-5 semiautomatic rifle. He glanced our way, then went back to squinting through the blinds. There were no scents of leather and elegance. The room smelled like an all-nighter—a college dorm or a hospital vigil suite. Hours-old coffee, stale munchies, several variants of body odor. All the blinds canted to keep daylight outside where it belonged. No one questioned my presence.

  Dexter ignored the men and stared at Julie. He was stuck for words.

  Julie’s face showed no emotion. “My sister drove the Infiniti on Sunday morning. Donovan knows that for sure. She probably knew there was a body in the trunk. Mr. Tucker thinks my husband killed my father. My husband is screwing my damned sister. Thank you for coming to the house. Have you got anything that might surprise me?”

  “You know what I know. The county’s issuing an arrest warrant.”

  Tommy Tucker backed away from the window. “Donovan’s car is pulling to the curb.”

  Dexter went to the other window, peeked through the slats. Over his shoulder I saw the silver Infiniti. Philip Kaiser sat low in the driver’s seat. Someone, undoubtedly Suzanne, was slumped in the passenger’s seat.

  Dexter turned to Julie. “Why did you call me?”

  “I neede
d a friend. I could use a hug.”

  Hayes took a deep breath. They stared at each other, but he stood still. The desk phone rang. Julie checked the caller ID, scowled, and let it ring.

  Donovan lifted the receiver. “I want to talk to her,” he said. A moment later he said, “Hold on,” pressed a button on the phone base, and replaced the receiver.

  Philip Kaiser through the speakerphone: “Am I meeting with everyone?”

  “No one who wants to hear you,” said Julie.

  “I’ll bet you’re wrong. I’ll bet Dexter wants answers to questions. I’ll bet Rutledge wants to ask a few himself. And, yes, I was late arriving. I watched Donovan hurry you two through the door. I didn’t have a chance to speak to you directly, out here on the street. By the way, Detective Hayes. If I see one single uniform or squad car, Suzanne Cosgrove gets a bullet up her nose.”

  With the knife attack on me, the only unsolved murder that hadn’t been copied was the woman who’d been shot in the head. Kaiser’s threat was not hollow. No one spoke. I looked at Dexter. He stood in a far corner, whispering into his cell phone.

  I said aloud, “What comes next?”

  Kaiser said, “Hello, Rutledge. Let me put it this way. Remember that cop, thirty years ago, the one who shot his wife in Dennis Pharmacy?”

  “I’m not sure I recall the story.”

  “Break of day, he gets a tip she’s eating breakfast at the counter with her boyfriend. He goes to the station, drops his badge on his boss’s desk, quits his job, drives to the pharmacy. He walks in, pulls out his service revolver, starts firing away. He wounds them both. He runs out of bullets, goes back outside to reload. On his way back inside he almost tramples a little old lady hurrying out. She looks up at him and says, ‘Don’t go in! There’s a crazy man in there shooting a gun.’ He thinks to himself, Shit, I’m the crazy man. What the hell was I thinking? So he goes home, empties the bullets out of the gun, sits down at his kitchen table, drinks a beer, waits for the police to arrive.”

  I said, “Your point?”

  “I’m like he was, after the old lady spoke up. I’m standing outside myself, looking at a crazy man. The last week or so—”

  “How was this week different from the last eight years?” barked Julie.

  Kaiser said, “It’s more fun to talk to Mr. Rutledge.”

  “Okay,” she said. “After you’ve killed my father and I’ve interrupted, I’m supposed to apologize?”

  “I’ll get back to you. Anyway, whatever the confusion that made me kick ass all week, it’s about spent. Of course, the last six days, every move I made, Rutledge was my roadblock.”

  I said, “Why didn’t you kill me instead of burning the motorcycle?”

  “I almost did. But I had a great day on the water Tuesday. My best day in three years. Captain Turk and I remarked, It was a considerate boater who pulled up short before spooking my fish. There your ass was, in that boat. I appreciate that.”

  “What else?” I said.

  “I had some warped idea about sticking to my game plan. By the time you went back to Stock Island, it didn’t matter what the bum had witnessed. Bug Thorsby was already dead, and you were pissing up a rope. I spooked the reporter lady with that head in her Jeep. I tried to spook you with a flaming Kawasaki. But, looking back, you made this week more fun. Chicken Neck and Dexito were too stupid to get the point. Somebody had to come after me. You were the smart one.”

  I glanced at Hayes. He was off the phone. He sneered. The killer had praised me. What was this crap, the brilliant criminal respects the lucky amateur?

  “Back to my first question,” I said. “What next?”

  “I’m in the mop-up stage. I’m not crazy, but I’m not done.”

  “Your parents got screwed out of their lifelong dream?” “When they sold out to Mercer,” said Kaiser. “Like they had a choice.”

  “What’d he do, loan money, then come back and demand payment?”

  “You got it,” he said. “Hit ’em in the off-season.”

  I said, “Is that why we’re here right now? You’re trying to make a point?”

  “I’ve pretty much made it, haven’t I?”

  “You must have planned it for a long time.”

  “That’s correct,” said Kaiser. “For twenty years. The gritty details, maybe only three or four months. But don’t think it’s been plain old revenge. I’ve played this little puppet show out of honor.”

  “How would you like to honor your parents?”

  “I took care of that Wednesday night, with a rope. The man danced and his feet never touched the ground.”

  Julie put her face in her hands, rocked forward. Donovan Cosgrove looked hypnotized. He stared at a wall sconce. I heard Tommy Tucker’s weapon click. He’d switched from semi- to full-automatic.

  Kaiser said, “Maybe I’ll go on over to the Key Breeze Suites. Shoot those people, too.”

  “Shit, Philip,” I said. “Those people are tenants. They leased the motel from Holloway. They’ve got the same dream your parents had. They’re little people, powerless. They pay rent, they struggle.”

  “You’re good, Rutledge. You just saved their lives.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Tommy Tucker whispered softly.

  I looked over Tucker’s shoulder. Through thin slits between the blinds I saw the funky red Ford van pull to the curb fifteen feet in front of the silver Infiniti. The van that had parked there often, that had so riled Holloway.

  Change the subject I thought Keep it moving. I said, “I know why you did Mercer, Philip. I understand why you copied Liska’s unsolved murders. Why Richard Engram?”

  The van’s left-side door opened slowly. A lanky man with a scrawny salt-and-pepper beard stepped to the sidewalk. He calmly extracted a half-smoked cigarette from a wrinkled pack, lit it, and walked toward Simonton.

  Kaiser said, “There’s an innocent man. I could take him down right now. I could play the irony because he survived a war but not the island.”

  “Mercer hated that man for parking there,” I said. “I heard the speech Monday morning.”

  “I heard the speech fifty times,” said Kaiser. “How the wrong people are populating Key West But you’re right He pissed off Holloway. That’s a good reason not to shoot him. You’ve saved three lives in two minutes.”

  He’d taken four in one week. I said, “What happened to your game plan? You’re getting sidetracked, talking about popping people. I thought you’d spent your craziness.”

  “Right you are. I’m getting blabby.”

  “Why Engram?”

  “That horseshit project, that big wart on Caroline. I couldn’t burn it. The insurance money would bring it back even bigger. I had to make it a dead issue, an ugly reminder that anything can fail in Key West. Butler Dunwoody is nothing but a future Mercer Holloway. I wanted to scare him right the hell off the island. Make his failure a lesson to anyone who thinks they can take this town by its balls and screw the little guys.”

  “Killing him would do that?”

  “I tried to bribe Engram into leaving town. I knew from the way they were operating he was important If he went away, it would skunk the works. The fool refused, threatened to tell asshole Dunwoody what I was doing.”

  Dexter Hayes said, “Where are we now, Mr. Kaiser?”

  “One more detail and I’m out of here,” said Kaiser. “I’m through using Suzanne. Like I’ve used the other daughter for all these years.”

  Julie reacted: “How about it, Philip? Is my sister a good lay? Did she help you with your performance problem? I heard years ago she liked to get tied up. Is that still her thing? Is the whore worth the price?”

  Kaiser’s voice dropped. “The price she’s about to pay? I’ll peel the duct tape off her mouth and stick the gun where I stuck something else two hours ago. To answer your question, my lovely wife, you’re more inventive in bed. You two, your positions and likes and dislikes, the way you get off, all your passion, all her hatred, no one would guess you wer
e sisters.”

  Julie looked at Dexter Hayes. Dexter looked away. Donovan stared at the floor, slowly shook his head.

  Kaiser continued: “But none of that matters. The first time I had sex with you, I felt like a traitor.”

  “Was that when you started your revenge?” said Julie. “The first time we had sex?”

  “Long before that I had a plan with no shape, from the night my family moved out of El Mirador. That wasn’t just a setback. That was a high-wind, high-water hurricane in my life. Then I had to witness my old man’s affair with Seagram’s 7. And my mother plain gave up. But to answer your question, my plan didn’t take shape until Suzanne told me that your father was giving it all away. All of it including El Mirador. Suzanne knew that Donovan didn’t care. I knew you’d never complain.”

  Julie said, “The trusts were in place a month ago, Philip. When you killed my father, you made your loss of El Mirador a sure deal. All this killing got you nowhere.”

  “No,” said Kaiser. “You’re wrong. It also killed some of the hatred inside me. Now I’m taking down your family like your father took down mine.”

  I said, “Is that cop who shot his wife still in prison?”

  Kaiser forced a laugh. “That guy quit his job, so it wasn’t like he was a cop shooting a civilian. His wife and the boyfriend refused to testify. The case got rolled into a minor firearm-in-public charge. A misdemeanor, eventually wiped from his record. Last I heard, he was a detective in St. Pete Beach.”

  “You planning to skate that easy?”

  “No. They’ll strap me into Sparky.”

  “More like a chemical injection,” I said. “The whole process has lost its drama. Instead of a big power zap, it’s bedtime stories and warm milk.”

  Kaiser said, “Whatever. Maybe Jemison Thorsby’ll get me first. He hated Bug. Now he hates me worse for taking him out. Wasn’t that pretty good, planting his corpse in Jim Farmer’s trunk? I’m proud of that special touch.”

  “You missed your calling,” I said. “All these cable networks are looking for script writers. They’d have paid you so much in Hollywood, you’d have forgotten El Mirador.”

  “First of all, I’ll never forget. Second, that remark you just made offended me greatly. Miss Suzanne, who, by the way, is not into rope but she’s into handcuffs, will have to pay for the insult.”