“I knew you were a good man to have around,” I said. “Wish you’d been over at Orange Beach Thursday night.”
“Sorry I wasn’t. You figure this developer’s the perp now, huh?”
“Right. And I’m wondering if you might be able to help us on that score. I need his cell phone log for early last Saturday morning.”
Red frowned. “Wouldn’t be any problem if it was a Navy case, of course. But I’ve developed some good telephone contacts. Depending on the company, I might be able to get hold of what you need.”
I handed him a business card that contained my name, P.O. Box and RETIRED. I had written Baucus’ cell phone number on the back. “I don’t know the company, but I’m sure you can find out from the number.”
“Yeah. No problem there. I’ll do some calling around and see what I can learn in the morning. How’s my buddy Kennerly?”
“I hope he’s staying out of trouble,” I said with a laugh. “If I’d leave him alone, he probably would.”
He looked at Jill, then back at me. “He told me what he helped you do on that scroll business. I’m glad everything worked out okay.”
I patted Jill’s hand. “She got the worst of it. Recently had rotator cuff surgery because of a fall over there the night it ended. The Zalman guy you mentioned and his buddy Lipkowitz gave us the most trouble. Except, of course, for the character called Moriah. But he got it in the end.”
Red smiled. “Well, you’ll be happy to know Zalman and Lipkowitz are both current residents at an Israeli prison. We nailed them and their sailor friends for trafficking in stolen government property.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That makes my day.”
Jill nodded at me. “Now if we can find a way to pin down Mr. Baucus tomorrow, you’ll be on Cloud Nine.”
That was not the position I found myself in when we arrived at Gulf Sands an hour later.
46
When I pulled in, the spot where I usually parked was occupied by a large white pickup with Tidewater Construction painted on the door. The window had been lowered and I could see the large and somber face of Claude Detrich peering out. I had no idea why he was here, but I had a solid hunch his interest wasn’t in furthering my career as a PI without portfolio.
I parked two spaces down and saw the truck door swing open as Jill and I alighted from the Jeep. Detrich confronted me immediately with his fists planted against the oversize waist of his blue jeans. He wore a short-sleeve yellow shirt that revealed a diamond-studded gold Rolex on his left wrist. If he was trying to impress me, he had. His black hair was hidden mostly by a white Saints cap.
“I hear you’ve been asking questions about me down at the Key Hole,” he said in a loud voice. “What the hell for?”
I drew back slightly as his alcoholic breath hit me. “You didn’t seem interested in telling us where you went when you left there on Friday night,” I said. “So I asked the bartender.”
“What did he say?”
“That you called Baucus and he came after you. Where did he take you?”
He snorted. “To my damned apartment, if you must know.”
“What did Baucus do then?”
“How the hell do I know? I guess he went back home and climbed in bed with that bitchy blonde wife. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I just might do that,” I said.
Bitchy blonde, I noted. Evidently Detrich and Greta were not big buddies.
“I told you yesterday to stay out of my way,” he said. “I meant stay the hell out of my life. I’ve had enough of your damned nosiness. You know what can happen to people who do that?”
I’d about had enough of Claude Detrich. He probably hadn’t killed Tim Gannon, but I was certain his reckless use of substandard materials had killed two people at The Sand Castle. I stared him in the eye, my blood pressure rising.
“I’m well aware of what can happen,” I said. “Do you know a couple of guys from New Orleans, both stocky build, one about my height, bushy black hair, gray-streaked, heavy brows, the other shorter and bald-headed?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about two guys in a rented car from Bayou Rentals, a mob business. They did this to my face Thursday night at Orange Beach. The same two came back here last night and I had to run them off with this.” I opened my jacket a little to reveal the holstered Beretta. Just enough for Detrich alone to see. I don’t care to advertise when I’m carrying a weapon.
Detrich’s eyes widened. “I don’t know nothing about it.”
Without another word, I grasped Jill’s arm and led her toward the stairway. As we walked up, I heard Detrich start his truck and head out of the parking lot, engine roaring like an Indy race car.
“Do you think that was wise?” she asked in a calm voice.
I was beginning to calm down also. “Maybe wise, but not smart.”
“Or smart, not wise, my dear.”
Then I thought of something and stopped her on the stairs. “Wait right here. I think I’ll move my Jeep back to where the camera is aimed.”
———
The clock on the living room wall showed 4:15 when we got inside. I had turned it back last night to mark the end of Daylight Savings Time. Dusk would come an hour earlier today. Jill walked out onto the balcony, leaned against the railing and looked down at the beach and the rolling surf. I joined her as the late afternoon sun glistened on the white sand. Aside from a couple strolling in the far distance, we saw only two women in bathing suits sitting in folding beach chairs not far beyond the Gulf Sands fence. Three small youngsters romped around them, alternately chasing gulls and each other.
“Do you realize we haven’t been walking since Tuesday?” Jill asked.
“Really? I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess you’re right.”
“How’s your ailing side? Are you up to a stroll on the beach?”
“Sure,” I said.
Despite the cool breeze, we changed into shorts and slipped on our rubber sandals with Velcro straps, which we preferred to padding through the sand barefoot. When we were ready to head out, Jill saw me eye the Beretta lying on the table.
“Are you taking that to the beach?” she asked.
“We shouldn’t need it out there,” I said. “But who knows what we’ll find when we get back here?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re the detective.”
I smiled and slipped the pistol under my belt in back, covering it with my shirttail. After I had put on my Titans cap, we took the elevator down to the walkway that led through the center of the building. The pool area lay in back, quiet now that the weekend visitors had departed for home. Jill and I strolled down a flight of wooden steps to the broad stretch of beach that covered a good fifty yards from the rear of the condo to the water’s edge. The breeze off the Gulf kicked up a few chill bumps on my arms, but a friendly sun warmed us as we walked along the sloping sand that washed smooth with each roll of the surf.
We had not gone far, me with the bill of my cap pulled low to deflect the dropping sun, when we encountered a white-haired man in shorts and a yellow, slicker-type jacket standing between two fishing poles sunk into the sand. The lines were stretched taut out into the water. A plastic bucket and a small tackle box sat behind him.
“Catching anything?” Jill asked, raising her voice to counter the sound of the wind and the surf.
He grinned. “I’ve seen better days.”
“Can’t ask for much better weather-wise,” I said.
“No argument there.”
As we walked on, detouring around him, I recalled my own brief fling as a fisherman. “Did I ever tell you about going fishing with my dad?” I asked Jill.
She grinned. “I thought the McKenzie men were fighters, not fishers.”
On a trip to Scotland some years back, we had visited the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum at Stirling Castle, finding my grandfather in photos taken in the trenches in Europe. I had told her that
was a typical McKenzie scene.
I shrugged. “Fighters sometimes need a change of pace.”
“Well, that’s one of your exploits we’ve never discussed. I wasn’t even aware you’d done anything around water but drink it.”
“Come on, Jill. We’ve been out on boats.”
“True. But I’ve never seen you dip anything into the water more than a toe or so.”
She was right. Splashing around in a pool loaded with chlorine was a real turn-off as far as I was concerned. And I didn’t find paddling about in fresh water or salt water any more appealing. I knew how, but swimming was just one of many leisure activities I had managed to forego.
“It was back when I was just a little character,” I said. “Not yet ten. We lived in the city, you know, but I had a buddy whose grandfather had a farm on the Missouri River west of St. Louis. He would come home after weekends at his grandpa’s telling all these tales about catching fish. I realized later it was like most fishing tales—more tale than fish—but at the time I was impressed.”
“So you had to go, too,” Jill said, stooping to pick up a small sand dollar.
“Right. I begged my dad to take me. I can be pretty persistent at times.”
“Amen to that.”
“But he was no outdoorsman. His idea of outdoor sports was watching the Cards play baseball.” I did a casual turn, a full circle, looking behind us.
“You told me about going to the ball park.”
“Right. Needless to say, he finally got tired of my harassment. One Friday he came home from work with a couple of poles and reels. The next morning we dug in the yard for worms, nearly filling a soup can with the slimy critters. Dad tied the poles on the car and we headed out into the country, two impersonators trying to act like real fishermen.”
“Was this after the war?”
“Shortly afterward. But he still drove a battered old pre-war Chevy. I wasn’t sure the thing would get us to the river and back. Anyway, a friend at work had told him about a fishing spot just off the road. We pulled up under some tall trees and carried our gear down to the riverbank.”
“Was it summertime?”
“End of summer. September. We sat on a rock ledge not far above the water. Dad put a worm on my hook and I dropped it in. After a few minutes, the line began to jiggle. I knew what that meant. It got me so excited I jumped up and my foot slipped. When I started to topple forward, Dad grabbed for me. He lost his balance, too, and we both fell headlong into the river. With his size, it made quite a splash.”
Jill began to snicker. “Is that why you don’t care for swimming?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it, but you may be right. For sure I wasn’t much of a swimmer back then. He wasn’t either. But somehow we both managed to make it to the riverbank. We were still soaked when we got home and mom nearly went into cardiac arrest from laughing.”
“Can’t blame her. And that ended your career as an angler?”
“It did indeed.” I looked at a woman just down the beach reeling in a line that appeared to have hooked something like a water-logged old hat. I shook my head. “That was my first and last fishing trip.”
I glanced at my watch and then at the sun, now appearing to rest almost flush with the horizon. “We’d better be getting back. It’ll be dark soon.”
I had been doing more talking than watching and we had gone farther than I realized. By the time we reached the stairs to the ramp off the walkway, the swimming pool lights had come on, as well as lights on each floor along the end of the building. Darkness had arrived in a rush, accompanied by a definite chill in the air.
We took the elevator to the second floor and walked quickly to our unit. Inside, I switched on the lights and closed the beachside window that was letting in an icy stream of air. Jill went into the kitchen to heat vegetable soup for supper and I sat down in front of the TV. I was about to turn on what was left of the news when I had an odd feeling that I should check my surveillance tape. Call it one of those hunches that sometimes cropped up for unexplained reasons.
When I played the tape, I found myself staring at the picture spellbound. Even if the camera had not been designed for low light use, the building lights likely would have provided sufficient illumination. The eerily bright picture showed a tall, darkly dressed man, clearly the one from the black Cadillac, moving in behind my Jeep. He disappeared for about a minute, then straightened up and hurried off.
47
Jill stood wide-eyed and watched as I replayed the tape...twice.
“That’s definitely him,” she said, fear in her voice. “Was he planting a bomb?”
“I don’t think so. He had nothing in his hand large enough to be a bomb. Let me go check it out.”
“Don’t go out there, Greg.” She reached out to grab my arm. “They could still be around.”
“I’ll look out first. See if I can spot their car.”
“But they may be driving something different.”
She had a point. They knew I had given the Cadillac’s license number to the cops. I reached for the phone and called the sheriff’s dispatcher. Learning that Sergeant Payne was on duty, I asked for him to call me.
The phone rang a few minutes later.
“What is it, Mr. McKenzie?” the deputy asked.
“My surveillance camera out front picked up one of the men who assaulted me. He was messing around the back of my Jeep.”
“When?”
“Within the last thirty minutes. We had gone walking on the beach. I had the camera targeted on the Jeep, so I caught him on foot. I don’t know what kind of vehicle he was in.”
“Could you see what he was doing?”
“No,” I said. “And I haven’t been out to check the Jeep. I thought I’d wait until your people came.”
“I’m on my way,” he said and hung up.
He must not have been far away, as he arrived in less than ten minutes. I was standing outside the door and saw him pull in. When he got out of his car, I called down to him.
“Come on up, Sergeant, and take a look at the tape.”
Back inside, I pressed the PLAY button on the VCR. Payne watched intently as the dark-clad figure approached the vehicle, looked directly at the camera, then walked behind the Jeep.
“Looks like he’s squatting down,” I said.
After the man came out from behind the Jeep and quickly walked away, I stopped the tape.
“You sure got a clear shot of his face,” the sergeant said. “We ought to be able to identify him with no problem. Let’s go see if he did anything obvious.”
I brought a flashlight along. We walked around behind the Jeep, shining the light from top to bottom. There was no sign of any tampering.
“Let’s check underneath,” I suggested. “I’ll take a look. No need in getting your uniform dirty.”
I lay on the gravel and scooted my head beneath the rear end. Sweeping the light back and forth, I looked around the gas tank and the muffler. Nothing. Then I moved the beam over to the frame and there it was. What appeared to be a plastic disk, likely stuck on with some sort of adhesive.
“I found it,” I said, sliding out from under the Jeep. I pointed toward the right side. “It’s stuck to the back end of the frame. My guess is it’s a tracking beeper, so they can keep up with where I’m going. Find me when they want to.”
“Let me get an investigator out here,” Payne said. “Maybe they left a fingerprint.”
“Good idea.”
The sergeant headed out on another call, and the investigator arrived some thirty minutes later. He was a slim young man named Wiggins who had curly blond hair and an easy smile. Using gloves and a knife, he removed the disk and dropped the device into an evidence bag, which he marked with the appropriate details. I showed him the video, then gave him the tape.
“You might want to consider some alternate transportation until we get to the bottom of this,” Wiggins said.
“Probably not a bad idea. Unfort
unately, I don’t have anything else available.”
“I’ve got a brother-in-law in the car rental business,” he said. “If you’d like, I can get him to deliver you a car in the morning. Or tonight, if you need it.”
I thanked him. “In the morning early would be fine. We plan to attend that nine o’clock hearing on The Sand Castle accident.”
Wiggins called his sister’s husband and explained the situation. I got on the line and arranged for him to deliver a Camry similar to Jill’s at eight a.m. The investigator said he would have the plastic device checked for fingerprints and examined by their electronics expert. He promised to let me know as soon as he learned anything.
———
The alarm went off at six o’clock. That was unusual for a stay at Perdido Key, but I felt certain this would be a busy day and we needed an early start. After showering and eating breakfast, I called Ted Kennerly at Arnold AFB. The clock showed a little after seven.
“I just called to give you my cell phone number,” I said. “We’ll probably be out most of the day. I wanted you to be able to get me in case your sources come through.”
“One already has,” Ted said. “They’re an hour ahead of us in New York. My FBI contact called with the scoop on Perseid, Limited.”
“Great. What did he find?”
“The company is run by a character named Galiano who came out of New Orleans. He has close ties to the Mafia. The FBI suspects Perseid is used as a channel for money laundering.”
“Well,” I said, “no doubt that answers one question I’ve had.” I told him about our problems with the two hoods from Louisiana.
“If it’s okay with you, Boss, I’ll pass this on to the FBI. They may want to talk to you about it.”
“Fine with me, Ted. I presume you haven’t heard anything yet from your man on the West Coast?”
“No,” Ted said. “But he should be getting back to me sometime this morning.”
I passed on the news to Jill, who listened with a studied frown.
Designed to Kill (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Page 21
