Murder Key

by H. Terrell Griffin

  I spent the day on the sofa in my living room reading a new book by James Lee Burke, drinking coffee, and later hot chocolate. Winter in Southwest Florida is not truly winter, but we pretend it is. It was in the low 60s outside, and the sky was cloudless, as it always is once a front has moved through. Only a few boats were on the bay. A large flock of white pelicans was floating at the edge of the channel, uninterrupted by the wakes usually left by passing vessels.

  As dusk approached, I ordered a pizza from Oma’s on Anna Maria. It was delivered by a long haired teenager driving a new Jaguar. Things really are different in Florida.

  I caught the TV news, watched an old movie on AMC, and crawled between the sheets. The weather forecast for Friday was sunny with temperatures in the high 70s. Winter was over for a while.

  * * * * *

  The phone rousted me out of bed at six on Friday morning. It was Jock.

  “We got a match on the DNA. We checked the senator’s against our national computer database, and we got a hit. Your hunch was on the money.”

  “I’ll call Bill Lester. You’ll be in touch?”

  “Right. See you later.”

  I rolled out of bed and made myself a pot of coffee. No use in calling Bill at this hour. He’d be in his office by eight. I got the paper and spent the next couple of hours in quiet contemplation of the world’s peccadilloes.

  37

  Murder Key

  FORTY-THREE

  I was enjoying my late Friday evening, the last day of November, at the Monkey Bar in the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort. Debbie Keeton was at the piano, her voice smooth as she sang “Longboat Blues,” her own composition. Her husband Gary Deary played a softly muted trumpet in accompaniment. His range was extraordinary.

  I was sitting at a table in the corner, sipping bourbon. Debbie is too classy an entertainer for a beer drinker, so on my Friday forays into the Monkey Bar, I always ordered sipping whiskey. Jack Black on the rocks, or if I was feeling particularly expansive, Wild Turkey on the rocks.

  My mind was restless, wanting the whole fiasco to come to an end. I wanted the killing and the fear to go away. I still didn’t know why anybody would want to kill me, but I now had a good idea of who.

  I felt a presence beside me. A soft voice said, “Buy a girl a drink, soldier?

  I looked up into the thousand watt smile of Liz Birmingham. I stood, fumbling my chair like some adolescent jerk. Her attire was perfectly appropriate for the Monkey Bar, a pink golf shirt with the logo of the Colony embroidered on the breast pocket, white shorts, white ankle socks and tennis shoes.

  “Please, sit down,” I said, pulling out a chair. “What in the world brings you to the Monkey Bar?”

  She settled in, favored me with a smile that made me want to cry out with joy, and said, “Some of my sorority sisters and I get together here once a year for a little tennis and a lot of gab. I got tired of the gab and came looking for a drink.”

  I signaled to the cocktail waitress. Liz ordered bourbon straight up. Some women just know how to drink.

  She took a sip of the whiskey, held her glass up in appreciation. “I saw you sitting here, looking like you were about a thousand miles away.”

  “I was. It’s been a long few weeks.”

  “I’ve heard about most of it, but I’ve been out of the loop. I don’t know why. Do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know you weren’t part of the whole thing. I just assumed you were.”

  “I didn’t know anything about the bust here on Longboat until after the fact. I find that curious, since I’ve been the undercover guy on this thing from the beginning.”

  “Look, Liz, I don’t know how your department works, but maybe somebody at the top thought there was a leak.”

  “Matt, you were there. You’re a civilian, and yet you were part of the bust. You know more than you’re telling me. Did someone think I was the leak?”

  “I don’t think so. I never heard that from anybody. As far as I know, your bosses think you walk on water. I think they were just playing it close, so that if there was a leak, they’d have narrowed down the list of suspects. The bosses were probably trying to protect you.”

  “That sucks. I don’t need protection.” A hint of toughness was slipping out. It didn’t go well with her cool good looks.

  “We got the bastards,” I said. “Isn’t that what counts?”

  “Yeah, some. But we didn’t get the drug guys, and that’s what really counts.”

  “I guess you knew the senator is dead.”

  “Yes. Rufus passed that on to me yesterday, after he told me about the senator’s involvement. He brought me up to date on the whole exercise. I think Foster was probably the drug guy, too, regardless of what Byron told you.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It stands to reason,” she said. “He’d been bringing in aliens for a long time, he had contacts in Mexico, and he was found dead there after he escaped arrest here.”

  “You could be right. But I think there’s more to it than that. I’d like to find the blonde woman. She might be more than just a driver.”

  We sat quietly for a moment. Liz took a small drink of her bourbon, started to say something, thought better of it and took another sip. “What makes you think that?” she asked. “She’s probably just some bimbo making a few bucks driving the illegals.”

  “I don’t think so. She seems to show up a regularly and the agent we had with this last batch of illegals said the men showed her a lot of deference. She was also the paymaster. She paid off the go-fast captain in cash and was giving orders to the guys moving the coke.”

  “I didn’t know you had infiltrated an agent among the immigrants.”

  I wrinkled my brow in surprise. “You mean nobody ever told you about that?”

  “No,” she said. “Rufus must have left that part out. Who was he?”

  “A guy who works for another government agency. A one-shot deal. The Border Patrol or DEA or somebody recruited him for this exercise.” I wasn’t about to blow Jock’s and Emilio’s cover.

  “Did you get a description of the blonde woman?” Liz said. “No. I’m the only one who thinks she might be involved more deeply than it appears. Nobody’s interested in my theories. I’m just a beach bum lawyer. And glad of it.”

  I grinned. I actually liked being a beach bum, and I didn’t want Liz to think I was feeling sorry for myself. That’s not very macho.

  She changed the subject then, telling me stories of her years in college with her sorority sisters. We talked for an hour, drinking another shot or two, enjoying the music.

  Late in the evening, she placed her hand lightly on my thigh, down near the knee. “There’s a half moon out tonight. Interested in a walk on the beach?”

  “As long as you don’t have any ulterior motives,” I said.

  She winked. “Don’t bet on it, soldier.”

  I paid the check, waived at Debbie and Gary, who gave me the thumbs-up sign, and we left. We started toward the beach in front of the restaurant, walking arm-in-arm. She stopped suddenly.

  “Matt, do you know Beer Can Island?”

  “Sure, at the north end of the key.”

  “Why don’t we go down there? It’ll be deserted this time of night.”

  I drove the Explorer north, almost to the end of Longboat Key, a distance of about eight miles. Liz sat quietly in the passenger seat, deciding, I guessed, how the evening was going to end. Traffic was light on Gulf of Mexico drive, the island settling down for the weekend. I pulled into North Shore Road and parked at the end, near the wooden walkway across the dunes.

  Beer Can Island is a misnomer in a couple of ways. Its actual name is Greer Island, but almost nobody calls it that. It’s also not an island any more, but rather a spit of land where the key tapers to an end at Longboat Pass. The ever-encroaching sea had filled in the narrow slough that once ran between the end of Longboat Key and the little island.

  The beach is wide a
s it wraps around the end of the island, and it is bordered by a stand of Australian Pines. These trees have shallow root systems and thrive in the salty environment. A good wind can blow them over, and the beach at Beer Can is full of fallen trees, their roots sticking up like Medusa’s hair-do.

  We walked north on the beach, barefoot now, wading in the shallow surf. The water had cooled the last few days, another sign that winter was approaching. A bright half-moon hung high above the horizon, painting the sea with a soft shaft of light. A cloud floated lazily across its face, its shadow reflected briefly on the swath of sea lit by the moonbeam.

  Liz had her purse with her, a precaution that any sane Longboater takes when leaving his car at a beach access. About the only crime that regularly visits our island is the thieves who break into the cars parked there. I had mentioned this to Liz on the drive north and suggested she conceal her purse. Instead, she brought it with her.

  She leaned into my arm, holding it with both hands, her purse hanging from a shoulder strap. She looked at me and smiled. We stopped, and she reached up to kiss me. I was tasting that smile, and like in that old Beatles song, it tasted of honey.

  She broke away, stepped back and smiled at me. “That was nice,” she said.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Matt,” she said, “you know who the blonde woman is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Beth.”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Beth?”

  “Little Beth Horvath from Sanford, Florida.”

  She let out a long sigh. “How did you know?” she said, sadness tingeing her voice.

  “I saw your picture in the Salmagundi.”

  “God, Matt. I don’t look anything like that now.”

  “That’s for sure. But that smile hasn’t changed, and like you said, a blonde wig just makes a girl.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “I know that you’re the senator’s daughter.”

  “How?” she asked, surprised.

  “DNA. We got a sample from Foster’s body, and it matched yours from the DEA database.”

  “What put you onto me?”

  “The senator sent your mother money for a long time. The forensic accountant found it, and I went to Sanford to find your mom. That led me to you.”

  “Foster was a son-of-a-bitch. I didn’t know he was my father until just before my mother died.”

  “That must have been tough, growing up without knowing who your dad was.”

  “Tough doesn’t get it, Matt. Mom would never talk about him. Then she got stomach cancer, and was dying a pretty rotten death. On the day before she died she told me that she’d called him when she got the diagnosis. She asked him for help so that his daughter, me, could finish college without having to pay for her treatment. He told her to go to hell.

  “All those years busting her butt in the Colonial Room to keep us fed, and Foster wouldn’t help when we really needed it. He deserved to die.”

  “What about your grandparents?” I asked. “Couldn’t they help?”

  “Her parents kicked her out when she was seventeen and pregnant. They were rock-ribbed Baptists who hated the sin, and the sinner, too. They told her never to come back. They said she would burn in hell, and they didn’t want to get singed by the flames. How the hell do you do that to your only child? They died in a car wreck when I was four.”

  “But Foster was sending your mother a check every month.”

  “When she was in the hospital, Mom told me she called him when her parents threw her out and asked for help. The great senator told her she couldn’t prove I was his, so he wouldn’t help, except to send a little money every year. She was only thirty-six when she died.” Her voice broke.

  We were standing, facing each other, the small waves lapping at our feet. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Mom asked me to bring her an envelope from her underwear drawer in the chest in her bedroom. It had my birth certificate and some other papers in it. It listed my birth name as Elizabeth Birmingham. She named me for her home town, since she couldn’t give me my father’s name.”

  I said, “We got your school records, and saw where you had given the school administration people your birth certificate and asked that all your records be changed to Birmingham from Horvath. The DEA didn’t pick that up when they did the back-ground on you. Somebody would have to be specifically looking for the change to find it.”

  “I did that after my mom died. Just as well. When I started to school at UCF I had to work in a bar out in East Orange County. I wouldn’t have wanted my mom’s friends in Sanford to know what I was doing. The pay was good, but I had to screw the owner twice a week to keep the job.”

  I said, “I know from your personnel file that you went to work for the DEA when you graduated. How did that happen?”

  “I met an agent during a drug bust at the hole I worked in during college, and he suggested I apply. My degree was in Criminal Justice, so it was a good fit. I went through training and then spent five years on the Mexican border tracking drug runners. Do you have any idea how much money is in that?”

  “A lot.”

  “More than you can imagine. Here I was, working my ass off for the pittance the government pays, and these third grade drop-outs were taking home millions of dollars a year.

  “I made a couple of contacts on the Mexican end of things, and when I got transferred to Orlando I saw a chance to open a new pipeline. I’d begun to look into my father, hoping to find some dirt on him. I wanted to ruin the bastard. I stumbled onto his immigrant smuggling operation, and I knew I had a hook.”

  “How did you find out about Foster’s smuggling gig?”

  “Both Immigration and Customs were onto him. They couldn’t prove anything, and they thought there might be a drug connection. That brought DEA into the picture, and I heard about it.

  “I went to see the good senator, told him who I was and that I could protect him. The quid pro quo would be that he would use his immigrant pipeline to bring in drugs. My Mexican connection would take over the Veracruz end of Foster’s operation.”

  “So you set up the distribution end of things.”

  “Yes, that was easy. I was working undercover at Les Girls, and I found a guy who was mean as a snake and offered to set him up in business. He never knew who I was. We only dealt with each other on the phone. He recruited the sales force.”

  “But you gave us Merc and Jeep in Orlando.”

  “Those idiots. I knew they couldn’t tell you anything, and my snake had already scared the hell out of them with the head of the guy in Melbourne he had to take out. The only name they knew was Jimmy Wilkerson, and he doesn’t exist.”

  “Do you know who killed Senator Foster?”

  “I did. Or at least I ordered it done. The bastard was trying to run. I knew he’d make a deal and give me up. He was the only one in the world who could positively identify me.”

  “How did you know he was running?”

  “That’s the icing on the cake. His pilot is a Customs Service agent named Graham Rutan. He moonlighted as a drug courier for me sometimes. Foster didn’t know about that. He thought Graham was a free-lance pilot who worked for several jet owners.

  “The senator thought he was going to Cancun to hole up while he made a deal with the feds. Graham took the stupid bastard to Veracruz and shot him. Good riddance.”

  “Sounds like a good operation. What happened?”

  “That lawyer, Conley was getting close. He was using Pepe Zaragoza as a mole in the senator’s organization, and Pepe stumbled onto me. I had to take him out, but I wanted it to look like a drug deal gone bad. Some of my Mexicans flew in and killed the other two, and thought they’d killed Pepe. Stupid bastards left them on the beach for you to find.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” she said. “If we hadn’t tried to kill you, we might have gone right on with our business.”

  “Why did
you try to kill me?”

  “It wasn’t my idea. Mendez, my guy in Mexico, had one of his killers watching the beach that day to see what would happen when the bodies were found. He saw you bend down to Zaragoza and then call the police. He thought Pepe had said something to you, and he called Mendez. That idiot over-reacted and ordered you killed in Tiny’s. Stupid, stupid.”

  “We have to talk to Chief Lester,” I said.

  “I don’t think so, Matt,” she said, moving back a couple of steps and putting her hand in her purse. It came out holding a nickel-plated thirty-eight caliber revolver. She held it in front of her, pointed at the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you got mixed up in this, and I’m sorry for all those dead people.”

  “Liz,” I said, “you know that other people have the same information I do.”

  “Probably. But I came here looking for you. I had to know what you knew.”

  “So, there’s no sorority reunion?” I said.

  She laughed bitterly. “Those sorority snobs wouldn’t let somebody like me into their houses. I was like a ghost on the UCF campus. I went to class, got my degree, and didn’t even go to graduation. They mailed me my diploma.”

  “The others will come for you, Liz. Let’s go see Bill Lester.”

  “I’ve got a head start on the others. I’ll be out of the country within an hour, and I’ve got enough money stashed away to live large for the rest of my life. Rufus can look for me forever, and he probably will, but he won’t find me.”

  “So, Rufus wasn’t part of your operation?”

  She laughed. “Good God, no. Old Rufus is Mr. Upstanding Citizen. He’ll come looking for me, that’s for sure. I’ve ruined his view of what a good little agent should be.”

  “There’s still time to make some amends,” I said.