Jill swung her head around as I parked near the elevators at the center. “Looks like we’ll have the place to ourselves,” she said.
The building was a box-like structure without the fancy lines of newer condos, but each unit had a large balcony that faced the Gulf, only yards from the broad white sand beach. The structure was eight stories high with eight units on each floor. There would be lots of unlighted rooms tonight.
“It was probably like this Friday night,” I said. “Nobody around to notice Tim’s comings and goings.”
I could have used a witness to his demeanor, as well as the time he left for the Seashore. I hoped I would be able to confirm one thing with the Medical Examiner, however—the time of his death.
After rolling a baggage cart out of the storage room, I piled on all of our bags and boxes. We always brought too much. Boarding the elevator, we lumbered toward the second floor. The narrow balcony that served as a walkway at the front of the building was deserted as I pushed the cart along, its screeching wheels echoing through the early evening quiet. Since Jill’s left arm was still too weak to be of much use, she carried only a handbag slung over her right shoulder. Dr. Vail had forbidden her to hold anything heavier than a cup of coffee in her left hand.
She unlocked the door and switched on the hall light, then propped the door open for me to roll in the cart. Walking ahead of me, she stopped beside the dining room table, stuck her nose in the air and sniffed.
“Do you smell that?”
I hadn’t noticed anything in particular. “What?”
“Shalimar. Somebody’s been in here wearing Shalimar.”
“If you say so. You’ve got a sharper nose than mine. However, Sergeant Payne didn’t impress me as a man who would use Shalimar. I’d say he was more a Giorgio of Beverly Hills type of guy.”
“Be serious,” she said. “Nobody should have been in here but Tim and the deputy. I guess Marilou would have been with him to unlock the door, but she doesn’t use Shalimar.”
Marilou Edens was in charge of the condo office. Besides keeping the owners happy, she had a staff that handled rentals.
“I’ll check with her in the morning,” I said. “Maybe a female deputy came along with the Sergeant.”
As I unloaded the cart, Jill moved about turning on lamps. The sun was almost gone, leaving the living room in near darkness.
“Oh, oh.”
That stopped me in my tracks. Such an observation could only mean she had found something amiss. I walked over to where she stood beside a cushioned rattan chair. “What is it?”
She held up a woman’s lightweight velvet jacket, a well-tailored red garment with an expensive look. Jill held the collar open to show the label stitched inside. “It’s from The Bodde Shoppe. Isn’t that in the Cordova Mall?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Expensive ladies shops weren’t high on my list of places to frequent. I moved closer to study the jacket, which bore the familiar scent of Shalimar. “There are some initials marked very small in the corner of the label,” I said. “Appears to be SH.”
Jill dropped down onto the sofa and patted the cushion. “Sit down, Greg. There’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t want to bring it up while Walt was with us.”
When she goes into a serious mode like this, I know it’s time to pay attention. I sat down and leaned my arm on the back of the sofa. “Okay, let’s have it.”
She stared back with a somber expression. “Remember when we were at the funeral home this morning before the service, and I wanted a cup of coffee?”
“Yeah. I stopped to corner Sam and ask a few questions about Mr. Sturdivant. I could have used some coffee, too, but you didn’t bring me any.”
She ignored the mild reproach. “Well, Tara followed me back to the kitchen. We were in there alone. I offered her some coffee, but she declined. Obviously, she just wanted to talk. I’m still not really sure why she chose me. Maybe because she was so distraught and felt she needed to tell this to someone, but she didn’t want to go into it with her mother or Wilma.”
When she paused, I prompted her. “Go into what?”
“She said she and Tim had been having some problems. At first it stemmed from his determination to spend most of what he was making off The Sand Castle project on improving the business. She insisted they should build a new, larger house. For one thing, she thought the boys needed separate rooms. But then, after he came home from Florida a few months ago, things seemed a bit more complicated. He was terribly preoccupied, distant at times. But she couldn’t get him to talk about why. She was never sure if it was something about the project...or somebody.”
“Another woman?”
“That was the implication. I don’t think she was really accusing him of anything. It was just a suspicion, but something that obviously had bothered her.”
I glanced back at the jacket with the initials. “And you think this might be the other woman?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just hope for Tara’s sake this jacket got here some other way.”
“I agree. But one thing’s for damned sure. If some woman was here Friday night, we need to talk to her.”
12
Walt Sturdivant showed up just before nine o’clock. Opening the door created a draft, letting the breeze rush through toward the balcony, sweeping across the dining room table like a sudden gale. Papers scattered about where I had been scribbling notes for follow-up.
Jill and I had changed into shorts, but Walt still had on the long-sleeve white shirt and dark trousers he had worn to the funeral and on the drive to Florida. The pipe protruded from his shirt pocket. A newspaper was stuck under his arm. When I invited him in, Jill, ever the perfect hostess, approached him immediately.
“Would you like some supper?”
“I grabbed a bite on the way over,” he said in that rapid-fire voice. “I’ve been busy.”
He looked ready to chew glass.
I frowned. “What have you been doing?”
“First, I read the accounts in the newspaper. Here, you can have it.” He shoved the folded paper toward me. “They included some quotes from Baucus and Detrich. The same old crap that police sergeant was giving us. After nearly gagging on that, I couldn’t wait till morning to check out The Sand Castle.”
Jill’s eyes widened. “Are you on your way over there?”
Walt sat on the sofa, hunched over, leaning short arms on his legs as he answered. “I’ve just come from there.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
“They had a private security guy in the lobby. He said both the developer and the contractor had gone back to Biloxi. And the elevator was locked off from the penthouse.”
“Right. The sheriff considers it a crime scene. Probably until they get the investigation done regarding the balcony collapse.”
“Well, I let the guard know who I was. And why I needed to see what had happened.”
“What did he say?”
Walt shrugged. “After I dangled a fifty in front of him, he decided it probably wouldn’t hurt to take a look. So long as we didn’t touch anything.”
“Did you see anything of interest?”
His blue eyes flared with anger. “That damned balcony was not built according to specifications.”
“How do you know?” Jill asked.
“The exposed rebars I saw were smaller than what we specified. No wonder it gave way.”
What I know about construction wouldn’t fill much more than a matchbook, but I knew those steel bars imbedded inside were what made reinforced concrete a popular building material. I presumed the larger they were, the stronger the concrete would be. “You’re sure about that?” I asked.
“Hell, I’m a stickler for details. What I saw looked no larger than number eight rebars. The specs called for number eleven. If I had the plans, I’d show you.”
A silence fell over the room as we realized the impact of that statement. The plans were missing.
Tha
t prodded Walt to ask, “Have you seen anything of the blueprint case Tim had with him?”
“It’s not around here,” I said. But his question spawned another idea. “We found Tim’s laptop on a desk in the bedroom. Could the plans possibly be in it?”
His eyes brightened. “Damn. I never thought about that. I’m sure he copied the file from our PC to it.”
I brought the laptop in and handed it to Walt. He set the machine on the coffee table, opened the cover and pressed the power button. As we watched and waited, the Windows operating system loaded, accompanied by a horde of colorful icons flashing on the screen. Walt found the program he needed and checked the directory. Listed among the files was “Sand Castle Plans.”
He double clicked the file name and the screen went blank.
Frowning, he followed the same procedure again, with the same result.
“Why don’t you check the file properties?” I suggested.
When he clicked on Properties, we had the answer. It showed the file had been modified on Saturday at 1:32 a.m. Under size was the notation “0 bytes.”
“The contents of the file have been erased.” Despair crinkled the corners of Walt’s eyes.
“And it was apparently done at 1:32 a.m. the morning Tim died,” I said.
Walt shook his head. “But why would he have erased it?”
“He couldn’t have,” I said. “Remember, the surveillance tape showed him entering the Seashore around one.”
“Then who did?”
“That’s a question I’ll have to find the answer to.”
I recalled something I had learned before retiring from the OSI. “There’s a possibility that file can be restored, Walt, if the defrag program hasn’t been run since it was erased. You’ll need to take the laptop to an outfit that specializes in data recovery.”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” he said.
“Check in the Yellow Pages.”
“How can they find a file that’s been deleted?”
“As I understand it, the file is still there, as long as it hasn’t been written over. It just has the tags removed that point to its location on the disk.”
“I’ll check into it when I get back.” Walt rubbed his cheek, where a stubble of beard was beginning to show. “Claude Detrich, the contractor, has a copy of the plans. But why did he use the wrong rebars?”
Good question, I thought. “Shouldn’t the inspector have caught it?”
“Yeah. If he was paying attention. From what Tim said about him, the SOB’s a lot of talk but not much action. I’ve had experience with a few like that.”
Walt told us about an inspector he had encountered on a construction project in Memphis. The man was competent at his job, but lazy. When he went out to the site to inspect a large air conditioner installation, he found there had been a delay and the contractor had not completed the work. Rather than wait for them to finish the job, the inspector said from what he could see they were doing things right, so he would go ahead and sign off on it. When Walt later tested the system, he found the unit had been connected improperly.
While he related his story, Jill had walked into the kitchen. Now she came out with two small bottles of juice hanging between the fingers of her good hand. “Anybody thirsty?” she asked.
Walt chose an orange-banana and I took the raspberry. I didn’t bother to explain this was part of Jill’s campaign to keep me eating light and healthy. Fruit juices were big, as were fresh fruit salads. Admittedly, they’re tasty, but the whole deal had to do with her efforts to keep me from repeating the eating binge that ballooned my belt line during my squabble with the police department.
As we sipped our fruit drinks, Walt sidestepped the painful subject of the accident and told us how he had come to join Tim in starting New Horizons.
“Back in the mid-nineties, I was involved in a project he designed. It happened that I worked out solutions to some unexpectedly knotty problems. A year later, he decided to go out on his own. When he came to me with an offer to take the plunge with him, I didn’t hesitate. It’s been a great five years. I’m a single guy, very independent. Tim gave me the freedom to do my own thing. But he made me a part of the family, too. You heard how the boys call me Uncle Walt.” He looked down at his hands and wrung them in anguish. “I still find it hard to believe he’s gone.”
I knew how he felt and when I looked at Jill, her eyes were moist.
We had decided not to mention the velvet jacket, but I thought an oblique approach might turn up something useful. “You told us about three people Tim dealt with down here—the developer, the contractor and the inspector,” I said. “Was there anyone else he was involved with we should know about? It’s looking more and more like he may have been a victim of foul play.”
After thinking for a few moments, he shook his head. “I can’t recall anyone else.”
“Do the initials ‘SH’ mean anything to you?”
His eyes showed nothing but puzzlement. “No. Where the hell did that come from?”
I smiled. “It was just a shot in the dark. Do you plan to go back to The Sand Castle in the morning?”
“I don’t know what it would accomplish. The people I’d want to talk to are in Mississippi. I might try to call Boz Farnsworth. And I’ll probably go by the Building Inspections Department to see what they know.” His brow suddenly furrowed as he looked up. “Did you find the condo key Tim had?”
“No,” Jill said. “We’ve looked everywhere.”
———
Walt left for his motel shortly after ten. The newspaper he had given me was Sunday’s. Mostly a wrap-up of Friday night and its aftermath, the stories merely confirmed what Sergeant Payne had told us that afternoon. Along with a few eyewitness accounts were several photos. Included were head shots of Evan Baucus and Claude Detrich. I studied the faces closely, knowing this was a pair I would be meeting soon.
After a long, tiring day that began with an anguishing funeral and ended with a spate of disturbing revelations, Jill and I were thoroughly bushed. We closed the balcony door, switched off the lights and headed for bed, where Jill’s ailing wing had caused a change in our normal routine. Instead of relaxing with arms entwined after a good-night kiss, we lay on our backs now, snuggled side-by-side. With the bedroom window open I could hear the ceaseless pounding of breakers against the beach, a rumbling, splashing sound.
Though Jill was only an indistinct outline in the darkness, her voice came through loud and clear. “What are you thinking?”
She knows me too well to deny I was thinking about Tim and what we had uncovered so far. “I don’t like this business of the missing plans and the missing files. It has to tie in with that collapsed balcony. But who ordered the theft? And also, what the hell happened to our condo key?”
“Walt says those plans would show the contractor used the wrong size bars—rib ...whatever they’re called.”
“Rebars. Yeah, and despite some early misgivings about him, I haven’t had the feeling that Walt was deliberately lying about any of this. But could he have a faulty memory? What if the plans didn’t specify larger rebars? Tim would have known it. Could he have deleted the file here, then called somebody in Nashville he trusted, to do away with any evidence of the blunder there?”
“What about the laptop?” she asked.
“Good question.”
This was shaping up to be a damnably troubling case. The only comparable situation I could recall involved an investigation I worked on back in the eighties. The OSI was ordered to look into a rash of accidents involving a fighter aircraft after rumors that defective parts may have been used by the manufacturer. Tests showed the materials used in fabrication did not meet the specifications called for in the contract. Somebody had substituted something cheaper.
We traced the problem back to a small company that supplied the metal stock for machined parts. The owner was an engineer. We found he had doctored the specification sheets to boost his profits. Unfortunately, his
playing fast and loose with the project resulted in the death of a pilot. The owner ended up facing a murder charge. He tried to commit suicide but botched the attempt.
For Sam and Wilma’s sake, I hoped I would be able to prove that Tim’s role in this case was something entirely different.
13
The water sparkled like a sea of diamonds beneath the sun’s glare. Breakers crashed white and frothy, the foam scurrying crab-like onto the beach. I actually found myself smiling at the glistening white sand that stretched off to either side as far as I could see. And even though the puzzle I was trying to fit together seemed to get more difficult with each new piece I turned up, getting back into “the game,” conducting a real investigation, had done wonders for my attitude. For a change, the morning view from our Gulf Sands balcony appeared downright charming.
“Breakfast is ready,” Jill called.
I turned away from the railing to find her taking a seat at the white plastic table set with cups of coffee and plates of bagels. A container of strawberry-flavored, fat-free cream cheese sat in the middle, along with the coffee carafe.
“Looks like a great morning for walking,” I said as I joined her.
“Glory be.” She rolled her eyes in amazement. “Last time we were down here, I thought I’d have to beat you with a bamboo pole to get you out on the street.”
I blamed the weather for that—it had been too damned hot. Anyway, I had been better about working to keep in shape since I was nearly done in by a lack of stamina at the climax of that rescue trip a year ago. Most of the time when we came down to Perdido Key, we did our walking on the road up to the National Seashore.
“I thought we’d do the usual,” I said. “See if we can locate the ranger. I’d like to take a look at where Tim’s car was found.”
“I’ll be ready to go soon as I do my exercises.”
As I started painting my bagel pink with cream cheese, the thundering roar of jet engines sent a shock wave through the air. I looked up just in time to see two Navy F-18 Hornets flash by no more than a few hundred yards offshore. No doubt a couple of Blue Angels honing their jet jockey skills. The team gave dress rehearsals occasionally at the Naval Air Station.
Designed to Kill (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Page 6
