Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  Before she’d retired and turned over her businesses to her children, Teresa had owned a chain of funeral homes—Funeraria Toraño—a jai alai fronton, and a Chevrolet dealership. She was an astute businesswoman and often helped Steve in cases that required some knowledge of accounting.

  Teresa was a handsome woman with charcoal hair, thanks to regular salon visits. She wore a strand of pearls with a stylish black silk dress. Marvin, bald since he was a corporal in the Korean War, wore plaid pants, a turquoise Banlon shirt, and a madras sport coat that had been very briefly in style in the 1970’s. The two were madly in love.

  Teresa glanced at Marvin, who waved to get their attention. “Stephen. Victoria. Come back here. Both of you.”

  Steve hustled through the swinging gate, then belatedly held it open for Victoria.

  Teresa smiled up at both of them. Her laptop computer rested just where it belonged, in her lap. “This is very fast, mind you, so I don’t have all the answers. But if you cross-reference Wellfleet Dynamics and all those other Wellfleets on file in Tallahassee with similar names incorporated in other states, you’ll find they’re all owned by a holding company called ‘Cheyenne Range, Inc.,’ a Delaware company.”

  “What’s Cheyenne do?” Steve asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just a holding company. But it’s owned by a Bermuda trust called ‘Island Group Investments.’ Whoever formed that company made it hard to trace back, but whoever owns Island owns Cheyenne and therefore owns all the Wellfleets.”

  “And the owner of all the Wellfleets is . . . ?”

  Teresa waved a finger at him. “A publicly traded corporation. A big one. Four billion in sales. Hardcastle Energy Services.”

  Teresa clicked a key on her laptop, and the Hardcastle website flicked onto the monitor. Rugged men in hard hats, oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, tankers at sea.

  “The oil company?” Victoria said.

  Steve was puzzled, too. Hardcastle owned chemical plants, refineries, and pipelines. The company was in the news when it helped put out the fires in Kuwait’s oil wells after Desert Storm.

  “Not just an oil company,” Teresa told them. “They’re a defense contractor, too. Submersibles, body armor, night vision goggles. Hundreds of items for the military.”

  “Fine,” Steve said. “But why would Hardcastle send two guys to roust me? Why do they care what Gerald Nash knows?”

  “No sé. But they also make communications equipment for the military.”

  “So does AT&T,” Steve said. “So what?”

  “Ten paciencia, Stephen. Have patience.”

  Teresa clicked the “Defense Subsidiaries” button on the screen. An instant later, a new picture appeared. Two dolphins arcing from the water, both with white harnesses circling their bodies. One harness was fixed with an antenna, the other with a camera.

  “The communications gear is for dolphins,” she said, hitting another button. The image changed. Six dolphins in a turquoise sea, all swimming fast enough to leave foamy wakes. Printed over the image were the words: “Keeping Ports Safe at Home and Abroad. The Marine Mammal Strike Force.”

  “Holy shit,” Steve said. “There’s a new villain in the courtroom. Hardcastle Energy Services. Big, rich, powerful. What more could I ask for?”

  “A defense based on the evidence,” Victoria suggested tartly.

  “Sanders was an ex–Navy SEAL who handled dolphins. He worked for two guys from Hardcastle, a defense contractor that provides dolphins for the military. Like I said before, A leads to B, and B leads to C.”

  “Okay. Keep going. Where’s C lead?”

  “Jeez, give me a couple hours. By dinner tonight, I’ll have my theory of the case, and I’ll spell it out for you.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Here’s the crazy thing, Vic. My client’s always railing about the military-industrial complex. An unholy alliance between big business and warmongering politicians. The State Attorney is just a tiny cog in a big wheel of conspiracies and corruption. All that left-wing boilerplate from a guy who’s not very bright. But you know what, Vic? Gerald Nash is right. The bastard’s been right from day one.”

  Twenty-eight

  THE BASHERS

  Coach Kreindler told Bobby he could pitch. But only in practice. And only to two batters.

  Still, it was something. Whatever Uncle Steve had said to the coach—or whatever he’d threatened—had worked.

  But where’s Uncle Steve now?

  A sticky evening. Mosquitoes and no-see-um gnats were buzzing in the glow of the field lights. Bobby was already lathered in sweat and his glasses were fogged.

  On the mound, Bobby nervously toed the dirt the way he’d seen pitchers do on TV. One difference. Those guys never caught their spikes on the rubber and tripped. He’d nearly fallen twice and hadn’t yet thrown a pitch.

  Uncle Steve was late. He’d called from the car, saying traffic was backed up on Dixie Highway. Bobby had wanted to ask a question about his grip for the fastball, but his uncle was focused on his trial.

  “Bobby, what do you know about the Marine Mammal Strike Force?”

  “Not much. It’s mostly classified.”

  “But you’ve heard of it.”

  “There’s stuff on the Internet, but no way to know if it’s true.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Dolphins being trained to fire toxic darts at enemy divers or drag them under and drown them, that kind of thing.”

  “Jesus. Gives new meaning to the term ‘wet work.’ ”

  “Suicide missions, too. Dolphins loaded with explosives to attack terrorists’ boats. Really weird stuff.”

  “Is that real?”

  “Dunno. You’d have to really be a sicko to do that to a dolphin.”

  Now Bobby wondered, just how could he pitch without his uncle here?

  “Let’s go, Robert,” Coach Kreindler yelled from behind home plate. He was wearing a “Kreindler Means Kosher” T-shirt and leaning over the catcher in the umpire’s position.

  Barry Roth stood in the batter’s box, crowding the plate. Thin, wiry, the Bobcats’ leadoff hitter. Quick wrists, a singles hitter. Not a bad kid, at least compared to Rich (The Shit) Shactman.

  The catcher was Miguel Juarez. His family didn’t belong to Beth Am, but Miguel’s dad was the security guard at the synagogue, and none of the Jewish kids wanted to catch. Miguel had short, thick legs, and could throw out a runner at second without ever coming out of his crouch. Bobby looked in for the sign. Miguel wiggled one finger.

  Fastball.

  Bobby worked the ball in his hand, his index and middle fingers running across the seams. He wound up, a jumble of herky-jerky motions. He looked uncoordinated. But his arm was a whip.

  He let fly.

  The ball sailed straight toward Barry Roth’s head.

  Barry’s legs flew out from under him as he hit the dirt, the ball rocketing all the way to the backstop.

  “Ball one!” Coach Kreindler shouted. “Robert, watch it out there. No brushbacks.”

  But Uncle Steve had told him not to be afraid to throw inside.

  “The inside of the plate is yours. You have to take it away from the batter.”

  A shudder ran through him. What if he hit Barry? What if he hurt him?

  “What are you waiting for, Solomon? Chanukah?” Rich Shactman yelling from the on-deck circle. The jerk was swinging three bats, showing off his muscles.

  Miguel Juarez signaled for another fastball. Bobby wound up and threw again. High and wide. Miguel came out of his crouch to nab it. Ball two.

  Barry Roth crowded the plate even more. Another pitch, Bobby tensing up and hanging on too long. The ball skidded in the dirt before it reached the plate. Ball three.

  Where are you, Uncle Steve?

  Bobby tried to relax, but he couldn’t. He tightened his grip even more, and the ball squirted out of his hand like a watermelon seed. A floater that looked like slow-pitch softball, going straight up
and falling ten feet in front of the plate.

  “Ball four!” Kreindler yelled. “One more batter, Robert.”

  The coach seemed pleased, as if letting Bobby pitch had been both annoying and a waste of time.

  “Rich, get in there and take a couple swings,” Kreindler said, smiling at his slugger.

  Swaggering to the plate, Rich Shactman glared at Bobby, who took a shaky breath, picked up the resin bag, bounced it in his pitching hand a couple times, then tossed it away.

  Stalling.

  Tension gripped Bobby, a hundred pigeons flapping inside his chest. He tried to remember everything Uncle Steve taught him.

  The grip. The windup. The release. I’ve forgotten everything.

  “C’mon, Robert,” Coach Kreindler yelled. “We only have the field for an hour.”

  “Which ends in two dang minutes,” came another voice. A husky man in a pin-striped baseball jersey stood at the fence along the first-base line, his gut hanging over the steel railing. Shug Moss. Coach of the First Baptist Bashers.

  A dozen kids in Bashers uniforms sidled up to the fence alongside Moss. Most seemed bigger than Rich Shactman. The ones who weren’t had the long, lean look of sprinters or Dominican outfielders.

  “Git a move on, Kreindler!” Shug Moss shouted. “You can’t hog the field. It ain’t kosher.”

  The Bashers laughed at their coach’s southern-fried wit. Kreindler offered a feeble wave of his hand.

  Moss had been a three-sport star athlete at Homestead High thirty years earlier. Having failed to show up for any classes his senior year, he forfeited a variety of college scholarship offers and signed a minor league baseball contract. A ferocious fastball hitter, his line drives splintered outfield fences in Dunedin, Lakeland, and other bush league towns. In four years, he got a shot with the Baltimore Orioles. He had one hit in thirty-four at-bats before being sent back to Double A ball. Just as he had failed basic grammar in high school, he never learned to hit a breaking pitch in the minors.

  These days, when tanked on gin, he still talked about making it to The Show. His favorite story was to recall a blast into the upper deck at Yankee Stadium. Unfortunately, it was batting practice, and the ball was foul by fifty feet.

  Now, Moss sold disability insurance, but his prime objective in life was to win the championship in the Kendall Sunday School Baseball League. He’d succeeded the last four seasons with a team composed not only of members of the First Baptist Church but also of undocumented Haitians who looked old enough to vote and a couple of players who had honed their skills in the Miami-Dade Youth Corrections Facility. Truth was, Moss would play an Al Qaeda suicide bomber if he could lay down a decent bunt.

  On the mound, Bobby looked nervously toward the hulking Bashers, itching to get on the field for practice.

  “Gib zich a traisel, Robert,” Kreindler urged him. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Bobby started his motion, feeling like his arms and legs belonged to someone else. He let the pitch go too soon, and the ball sailed over the backstop.

  Whoops and hollers from the Bashers along the fence.

  “Ball one,” Kreindler announced.

  Bobby tried again. This time, the pitch sailed ten feet behind Shactman.

  “Ball two.”

  “This your new pitcher?” Shug Moss taunted. “Stevie Wonder has better control.”

  Bobby wiped the sweat off his glasses, then threw another fastball, this one skittering across the plate.

  “Ball three,” Kreindler called out.

  Shug Moss smirked. His players laughed and highfived.

  Shactman stepped out of the batter’s box. “This is embarrassing, Coach. The Bashers think we’re all weenies.”

  He’s embarrassed, Bobby thought, hating all those eyes on him.

  “Robert, just relax,” Coach Kreindler shouted. “Lay one right down the pipe.”

  Shactman stepped back into the batter’s box.

  Bobby took a smaller windup and floated a pitch chest high across the middle of the plate.

  Shactman jumped on the pitch with a ferocious swing. A cannon shot, the crack of metal hitting leather. A rising rocket, the ball soared toward left field, gaining height and speed, never seeming to hit its apogee. The ball was still rising as it cleared the wooden fence and bounced high into a strand of live oak trees.

  Holy shit!

  Once at Pro Player Stadium, at a Giants-Marlins game, Bobby had seen Barry Bonds launch a home run that left the yard so fast, it seemed to be over the fence before Bonds had finished his swing. Outside of that, he had never seen a ball hit so hard.

  Shactman still stood in the batter’s box, like a golfer admiring a tee shot.

  Kreindler rose up from his umpire’s position and looked skyward. “Got in himmel!”

  Shug Moss beamed toward Shactman. “Nice hitting, kid. Too bad you’re on the wrong team.” Then he turned to Bobby, who slumped toward the dugout. “And you! Four eyes. You ever think of taking up chess?”

  Twenty-nine

  NEVER TRUST THE SUITS

  “I’m sorry I was late, kiddo,” Steve said.

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Bobby sulked.

  “Steve could have given you some tips,” Victoria said.

  “I’d still suck.”

  Victoria ran a hand through the boy’s squashed hair, which bore the imprint of his ball cap. “Steve says you have potential. Something about your arm.”

  “A live arm.” Steve made a throwing motion. “All you need is some confidence and a little practice.”

  Bobby picked up his root beer and sucked at the straw. He was deep into self-pity mode. They were sitting at an outdoor table at the Red Fish Grill in Matheson Hammock Park. The night was warm, but a breeze from the Bay cooled them. Across the water, they could see the lights of Key Biscayne. Some of those lights lined the dock at Cetacean Park, but from this distance, you couldn’t really make out the place.

  Bobby looked toward the darkness of the bay. “I don’t wanna talk about baseball, okay?”

  “How about the case, then?” Steve asked. “You really helped me today, kiddo.”

  “You’re patronizing me, Uncle Steve.”

  “I mean it. You helped me prove that Hardcastle kidnapped Spunky and Misty.”

  “Prove it?” Victoria tried not to sound skeptical as she sipped at her Pinot Noir.

  “Think about it,” Steve said. “Hardcastle needed the world’s smartest dolphins for its Marine Mammal program. That was the motive for the raid.”

  “I don’t want to diss your case,” she said, “but Hardcastle’s a New York Stock Exchange company. A four-billion-dollar company. A company in the public eye.”

  “You ever hear of Enron? Never trust the suits, Vic.”

  “You’re a suit.”

  “I wear a suit. There’s a difference.”

  “Still not buying it,” she said. “All you’ve got is a theory, not proof.”

  “Really? Bobby, how long does it take to train dolphins?”

  “Four or five years to get to Spunky and Misty’s level.” Bobby dipped a piece of his broiled mahimahi into a spicy tartar sauce.

  “Don’t you see, Vic? Hardcastle wins a contract to provide trained dolphins to the military to guard the ports. But they don’t have five years to do it. The clock’s ticking. Fort Lauderdale. Long Beach. New York. Every port authority wants to be protected yesterday. They also want the sexiest, newest item in the defense arsenal, dolphins with cameras and transmitters, and for all we know, dart guns and iPods.”

  Victoria sipped at her wine, shook her head. “I still can’t see a giant company taking a risk like that.”

  “Forget that Hardcastle’s a billion-dollar conglomerate. It’s made of divisions and departments. Somewhere there’s a guy running the dolphin program, and he reports to a numbers cruncher who reports to a hard-ass who reports to the guy who runs all their defense subsidiaries. If the dolphin guy can’t produce, there’s no y
ear-end bonus. There’s bad publicity. If it’s bad enough, 60 Minutes comes knocking on your door. There are congressional investigations. Cries of boondoggles and pork-barrel politics. Taxpayer money down the drain. Hardcastle loses bigger contracts just because they couldn’t supply dolphins who can do the job.”

  Victoria thought it over a moment. In the nearby saltwater pond, a pair of yellow-crowned herons poked their beaks in the shallows for crabs. “Let’s say you’re right and Hardcastle doesn’t have time to train its own dolphins. Why not just buy them?”

  “Mr. Grisby loves Spunky and Misty,” Bobby said. “He’d never sell them.”

  “Even if Grisby wanted to, he couldn’t do it,” Steve said. “Think of the uproar. One day, Spunky and Misty are nuzzling kids with muscular dystrophy. The next day, they’re packing explosives. I don’t think so.”

  A waiter came to their table with offers of key lime pie and tres leches cake. Bobby went for the pie. Victoria ordered cinnamon apple tea, and Steve stood pat.

  “If Hardcastle’s as corrupt as you say, what’s a retired naval officer like Sanders doing mixed up with them?” Victoria asked.

  “I figure he was a legitimate hire, the perfect guy to run the dolphin-training program. Then Hardcastle tells Sanders he has twelve months to produce, and he says it can’t be done. They say make it happen. Again, he says it’s impossible. Finally, they put someone else in charge, two guys from their security division, or whatever they call their department of dirty pool.”

  “The men in the Lincoln,” Victoria said.

  “They tell Sanders they’ve got a shortcut. Steal trained dolphins. But they need cover. It’s got to look like the Animal Liberation Movement is behind it.”