“He probably fell off a pier,” Cassel said. “Doesn’t sound like you have anything but speculation. Those videotapes at the Seashore should be enough to convince anybody. You realize you are the only person who has come forward with the slightest suspicion that Timothy Gannon’s death could have been anything but suicide.”
I nodded. “I’m well aware of that. But I also know of four people who had a motive to kill Tim. I’m not going to stop digging until I find out who did.”
———
When I arrived back at Gulf Sands, something unusual caught my eye. The parking area was still sparsely populated, with plenty of empty spaces up against the narrow flower bed that ran alongside the building. Only two vehicles were in the row next to the fence. One, a black Cadillac, had been backed into the parking space. Two men sat in the front seat.
My venture into the PI business, even though just a one-shot deal, had heightened my alertness. I had returned to my OSI roots, paying close attention to anything out of the ordinary. And people did not ordinarily sit in black Cadillacs at Gulf Sands parked so they could keep watch on the building. I might have suspected some of Lieutenant Cassel’s flunkies, but I knew they would not be driving a Caddy. The way the vehicle was parked, I couldn’t see the license plate.
While climbing the stairs to the second floor, I got a quick glimpse of the car. The two occupants were definitely looking my way. When I entered our condo, I called out for Jill but got no answer.
I froze, gripped by a sudden, irrational fear.
My session at the Big Lagoon Precinct had been mercifully brief, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that she had not returned. But a year-old memory of arriving home to a ransacked house and Jill missing left a hollow feeling in my stomach. I had almost lost her that time. I didn’t intend for it to happen again. As I looked around, however, everything appeared to be in perfect order, just as we had left it less than an hour ago.
Taking a few deep breaths to calm myself, I moved to the bedroom window that faced the parking area. I was just in time to see the Cadillac moving toward the Gulf Sands exit. I could tell the license plate was not Florida or Tennessee, but the car was too far away to make out what state it was from.
I removed the steel pin that prevented anyone from opening the sliding glass doors and walked out onto the balcony. I hoped the salty breeze would help clear the confusion in my mind. Were those guys really waiting for me to return? If so, who were they, and what were they up to?
I was about to dismiss it as the work of an overactive imagination when I spotted Whitley down below, fishing something out of the swimming pool with a net attached to a long pole. He saw me at about the same time and waved.
“Afternoon, Whitley,” I said. “Hot enough for you?” The sun beamed brightly in a sky so blue it seemed painted on.
“This ain’t nothing, Mr. McKenzie. You know that. Now July and August, that’s hot.”
“Did you by chance notice a black Cadillac in the parking lot?” I asked.
He looked up. “You mean the one with the guy who asked about you?”
I frowned. “Asked what about me?”
Whitley lifted his cap and swabbed his forehead with a large red handkerchief. “He wanted to know which unit you lived in.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Of course.” He grinned. “Ain’t no secret, is it?”
I had to laugh, although the feeling I experienced deep down inside was not amusement. “I guess not. He want to know anything else?”
“Just if you still drove a Jeep Cherokee. I told him you did, that it was a brown one with a Tennessee license plate. I figured he was an old friend.”
“Well, if he was, he must have owed me some money,” I said. “He drove off right after I got here. Did you happen to see his license plate?”
“Sure. I was coming across on my riding mower when he stopped me. It was from Louisiana. Had some kind of New Orleans sticker on his bumper.”
I thought of Claude Detrich from New Orleans, and I remembered what had happened to Ollie O’Keefe from New Orleans. And I did not like the implications.
31
Jill made her triumphant entry shortly after 3:30 and my stomach eased. Her enthusiasm bubbled over like a fountain, so I decided to hold off any mention of the Cadillac from New Orleans.
“Wait till you hear what I found out,” she said, eyes dancing.
I ushered her over to the sofa. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Let’s have it.”
“Sherry is a very charming young lady,” she said, leaning back and brushing a hand through her hair. “I tried my best to pay the check. After all, getting together was my suggestion. But she made the waitress hand her the check and she wouldn’t part with it for anything.”
I mimicked Jill’s eye-rolling maneuver. “I guess she figured living with an ogre like me, you needed all the help you could get.”
“Dummy,” she said with a grin. “Like Charlie Brown told us, Sherry is terribly bright. I suspect she can be pretty intense, too, when she’s after something. She likes to be in control. And I think she gets her way most of the time. That business with Evan Baucus was apparently an exception.”
“Does that mean Tim was not an exception?”
“Well, yes and no. They had a rather torrid affair during his days at the Naval Air Station. He spent a lot of time at her house when the admiral was out of town. She told me her mother had died when she was young. That was something we had in common that helped us to bond.”
“How did she and Tim come to break up?”
“It was that penchant she has to control things. Tim was unhappy with his assignment, as Sam told you. He had decided to get out of the Navy and come back to Tennessee. But Sherry had other ideas. She wanted him to stay in the service and asked her father to put Tim on a fast track for a Navy career. When Tim found out what she had done, he went ballistic. He told her she was not going to run his life. He submitted his resignation and left Pensacola.”
“So he went to Nashville and approached Tara on the rebound.”
Jill nodded. “That’s about the way it went. Sherry also got married on the rebound, but it turned out a disastrous mismatch. The guy didn’t measure up to what she had seen in Tim.”
“Did they really have no contact until The Sand Castle?”
“Sherry never heard from him, but she never forgot him, either. It was a real shock when she encountered him at the condo project. When she talked about their meeting, I could almost feel the fire it had stirred inside her. Tim told her about his family back in Nashville, of course, but she couldn’t believe he didn’t experience the same depth of passion that had gripped her.”
I scratched my chin thoughtfully and tried not to sound too skeptical. “Sherry Hoffman just voluntarily bared her soul like this?”
Jill shrugged. “Well, I asked a few leading questions now and then. Isn’t that what investigators do?”
“They do.”
“I also had the feeling she needed someone to talk to. I was not from around here, so I posed no threat. And like I said, we found we had several things in common.”
“Oh? You mean you had some torrid affair I don’t know about?”
“Silly. We had both survived the military life. Our fathers were well off. Our mothers had died when we were girls, and neither of us had any siblings. Things like that.”
I reached over and took her hand. After some thirty-five years, we still do that a lot. “Okay, babe, I confess, you did a great job. But did you find out anything about our friend Boz?”
Her eyes widened. “I was just about to get to that, which is the really intriguing part.”
I understood why, once she began her story. Whenever Tim came to Pensacola, Sherry kept after him to go out with her or come to her house for dinner. But he always had an excuse and consistently put her off, except for an occasional lunch. Then one day he mentioned something about the problems he was having with the inspector, Boz Farnsworth. He tol
d her that Boz had begun to nitpick everything about the project. Sherry knew why. Recently Farnsworth had been making a play for her, but after her old lover had showed up, she started keeping Boz at bay. He soon figured out the problem was Tim Gannon.
Sherry was a schemer, Jill said, and immediately saw the possibilities. She told Tim she could handle Boz, keep him off Tim’s back. But there was a price. Tim would have to accept her invitation to dinner “to discuss what could be done.” When he arrived, she had the table set with candles and wine and the stereo playing soft music. Sherry had set him up with a classic seduction. After dinner and more wine, they went for a skinny dip in the pool and wound up in bed.
Tim suffered a severe case of wounded conscience and totally avoided her for weeks after that. Jill said the timing corresponded to the period when Tara sensed things had become terribly complicated with her husband. Sherry didn’t like it but kept her side of the bargain, playing up to Boz, urging him to go easy on Tim. She had accompanied Boz to the party last Friday night, though they came in separate cars. After seeing how crushed Tim was by the accident, she skipped out on Boz and drove to our condo a little after eleven to console him.
“That’s how the red jacket got here,” I said.
“Right. She said she tried to cheer him up, told him the accident wasn’t his fault. Tim said he knew that. He told her the balcony had not been built according to the specifications he had called for. He had the plans out on the table and showed her where the correct figures were. Of course, she didn’t understand all that construction talk.”
“Did she say anything about the laptop?”
“I asked about that. She said he never mentioned the computer and she never saw it. She also said he was calm and didn’t seem to feel any personal responsibility for those deaths.”
“How did she happen to leave her jacket here?”
Jill smiled. “They got into an argument over something personal, as she put it, and she got mad and stormed out, forgetting the jacket. I got the impression her temper can be pretty volatile.”
“What time was that?”
“Shortly after midnight. She went home, had a couple of drinks and calmed down. Some thirty or forty minutes later, she tried to call Tim but got no answer.”
“Must have been close to one o’clock,” I said. I presumed Tim was not using the answering machine. We always turned it off when we departed from Perdido Key.
“Sherry went on to bed and slept late Saturday morning,” Jill said. “She tried to call Tim again, but of course got no answer. Finally, Boz called her around noon. He had heard about Tim’s death from Claude Detrich. Said it was on the radio.”
“Did you get anything else out of her?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
I reached over and hugged her. “More than enough, babe. You were terrific. And you’re right—I couldn’t have pulled any of that out of her. I told Whitley you were on a fence-mending mission, but you did a hell of a lot more than that.”
“When did you talk to Whitley?”
“About an hour ago.”
I figured it was time to let her in on the mysterious visitors, so I told her what had happened.
She reached over and gripped my arm, anxiety clouding her face. “Who do you suppose they were, and what were they after?”
“I wish I knew. The first thing that came to mind was Detrich.”
She stared at me for a moment, brows knitted. “Should we call Sergeant Payne?”
“Ha...I suspect the sheriff’s boys would think I made it all up.”
I described my disgusting interview with Lieutenant Cassel.
“The Lieutenant wanted to know if I was carrying,” I said. “I told him I wasn’t, but I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea now.”
That brought a grimace. “I wish you didn’t have to carry that gun, Greg. And I certainly don’t want you to have to use it.”
She didn’t like guns. I had tried to get her to learn to shoot years ago, for her own protection. But she had refused. She knew I had no choice but to be proficient with firearms. But that didn’t make her any happier with the prospect of my using them.
“I know,” I said. “And I don’t expect to need the Beretta. But I’m a lot more comfortable having it around.”
Afterward, we sat in our plastic lounge chairs on the balcony, watching the gulls gather at the beach like a flock of neighborhood kids waiting for the ice cream man. Going over what we had learned, we knew Boz and Detrich had left The Sand Castle separately around eleven and both wound up at a bar down the beach. But we had no idea what time they had left the bar. Baucus, according to his wife, got a phone call somewhere around twelve-thirty and left. Had Detrich or Boz called him? Had one of them called Tim and asked him to meet at the National Seashore?
When the portable phone on the small table between us rang, I picked it up, checked the number and answered. New Horizons on the ID told me the caller was Walt Sturdivant.
“I just heard from the computer people,” he said. “They recovered the file.”
“Great. Here’s what you need to do. Copy the file to a disk, place the disk in an envelope with a signed statement attesting to the facts about the file and how they recovered it. Then seal the envelope and have them sign and date it across the flap. That will give you a legal basis for proving the file existed before Tim’s death.”
“Will do. Have you had any luck checking out those guys who left?”
I told him about Oliver O’Keefe.
“Oh, God. You think it had something to do with this mess?” Walt asked.
“I think so, but I have no proof. We’re working on it.”
“Sam called today. Wanted to know if I had heard from you.”
I had been so busy digging for clues that I had forgotten to call our friends and tell them what we knew. “I’ll fill him in tonight,” I said.
My watch showed nearly five o’clock when I got off the phone. I found Jill eyeing me with a critical gaze.
“Do you realize we’ve been down here for three days now and haven’t been to Doc’s yet for shrimp?” she asked.
I grinned. “Well, we’d better do something about that. How soon can you be ready?”
“About as quickly as you can say ‘royal reds.’” She finished off her reply with a tacky chuckle and headed for the bedroom.
I twitched my nose and shook my head. Doc’s Seafood Shack and Oyster Bar at Orange Beach, Alabama, a few miles west of Perdido Key, claimed the best shrimp around. Nothing fancy, Doc’s had tables with checkered plastic cloths, a roll of paper towels for napkins and a box full of condiments and hot stuff to mix your own sauce. When it came to shrimp, I normally opted for the peel and eat variety. The last time we were at Doc’s, I noticed a menu item called royal reds, which I assumed was just a minor color change from my usual fare. However, when the waitress brought my plate, I faced an enormous pile of reddish shrimp that looked like they had just come off the boat. Complete with legs, tails, heads and wiry antennae. Jill helped, but by the time we peeled away all those messy appendages, I didn’t have much appetite—or shrimp—left. Royal reds had become a joke with me as the butt.
When I picked up the holster that held my 9mm Beretta, however, I had no joke in mind. Although I didn’t expect any trouble, I intended to be ready just in case.
32
The sun sat on the horizon like a large red beach ball as we headed down Perdido Key Drive past the stretch of sand dunes known as Perdido Key State Recreation Area. Except for that brief break in the action, both sides of the road were cluttered with a seemingly endless array of condos, from large elegant projects to small structures that appeared little more than beach houses. A new crop had sprung up every time we came down. Just beyond the Alabama line, a high bridge spanned Perdido Pass, which provided an inlet to Perdido Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe it was the blinding sun, which now was rapidly disappearing, or maybe it was just a plain lack of concentration, but we were almost to th
e highway that branched off to the north toward Doc’s before I spotted the black Cadillac in my mirror.
“I think we have company,” I said.
Jill looked around. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a black Caddy a couple of cars back. Just like the one that came visiting this afternoon at Gulf Sands.”
“You think they’re following us?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
We were approaching the turn-off. In this flat country, night came almost instantaneously when the sun dipped below the horizon, but both the beach highway and the road heading north were well lighted. As soon as I made my turn, I looked in the mirror and saw the car just behind me continue on down the beach. The Cadillac turned and stayed on my tail. I was happy I had put my Beretta in the Jeep.
Jill looked behind us. “I see what you’re talking about.”
“Maybe they’re with the Chamber of Commerce,” I said. “They probably want to be sure we’re eating seafood tonight.”
“Well, I hope they’re going somewhere besides Doc’s.”
The road was five lanes here, with plenty of room to pass. I thought that’s what the Cadillac pair had in mind as the black car began to pull around, but then it started crowding us into the curb. I glanced across and saw the guy in the right seat grinning. I was about to hit the brakes to keep the idiot from colliding with my Jeep when I saw a street leading off to the right just ahead.
I swerved into the side street and gunned the accelerator. I would turn at the next intersection and double back. In the mirror, I saw the Cadillac had started past the street but was backing up to make the turn.
“Hang on, babe,” I said.
A street branched off to the right at the end of the long block. I skidded around the corner into it. As soon as the headlights flashed down the road ahead, I knew I had made a big mistake. We faced the tall wooden skeleton of a two-story house under construction. The street was a cul-de-sac. And there would be no sanctuary among nearby residents. The subdivision we had stumbled into was a work in progress. Totally unoccupied.
Designed to Kill (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Page 15
