We got back to Gulf Sands around seven o’clock and found a message from Walt Sturdivant on the answering machine. He advised in that staccato delivery of his:
“I got a call late this afternoon from Pensacola. The building inspector has retained a structural engineering firm. Their job is to investigate the balcony collapse. Everyone connected with the project is to be there for a hearing Monday at nine. I thought you’d like to know.”
Chapter 33
The hot shower helped soothe my aching side but only irritated the tender, scraped spots on my face. My cheek felt like it had been caught in the midst of a cat fight. After carefully slipping on my pajamas I eased onto the sofa, where Jill brought me a tray with a bowl of vegetable soup, a slice of toasted five-cheese French bread and a cup of coffee. She sat and watched as I began to eat.
“Where’s yours?” I asked.
“I lost my appetite at Orange Beach.”
“You aren’t eating anything?”
“I nibbled on some crackers. I’ll get a cup of coffee in a minute.”
I tried a smile but it made my face hurt. “You’ve got to keep your strength up if you’re going to look after me, babe.”
“That’s becoming a bigger job than I had counted on.” Then she tapped a finger against her chin. “Do you remember what you promised to do tonight?”
“What?”
“Call Sam.”
As soon as I finished eating, I made good on my promise. I gave Sam an abbreviated version of what had happened so far in the investigation, leaving out a few thorny details. like my run-in with Lieutenant Cassel and the encounter with the boys from Louisiana.
“So Tim definitely wasn’t responsible for that accident,” Sam said, his voice upbeat.
“That’s right. And he told somebody that night he didn’t feel any responsibility for it.”
“That knocks out the suicide motive, doesn’t it. Who told you that?”
I caught myself before replying. It didn’t seem advisable to bring Sherry Hoffman into the picture. “I don’t recall offhand. It’s in my notes.”
“But you’re sure they didn’t build the balcony the way Tim designed it?”
“I’m sure.” Again because of what Tim had said to Sherry. “But I don’t have anything yet to conclusively prove it.”
“I have a feeling you’ll find it. I’ve got confidence in you.”
The feeling I had at the moment was closer to weariness than confidence. “We’re giving it our best shot, Sam.”
“It sounds like any of those three guys could have killed him, if they were all out running around late that night.”
“That’s true. We’ll try to dig a little deeper tomorrow into what each of them was doing.”
“What’s behind this, Greg? Is it money?”
“Probably.”
“Damn! How do you put a price on a man’s life? A father of three boys?”
“You can’t, Sam.”
“Find him.”
“I will.”
I punched off the phone and sat there. My head hurt. My side hurt. I hurt in places I couldn’t touch. I hurt for Sam.
“What happened?” Jill asked. “You look worse than you did on the pavement in Orange Beach, if that’s possible.”
“Sam doesn’t understand how somebody could murder his son.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve got some good ideas. They don’t make sense to a rational person, but rational people don’t commit murders.”
“You told Sam ‘I will.’ I will what?”
“Find the guy who killed Tim.”
She moved over to sit beside me and gripped my hand. “I don’t like the way this is going, Greg. You could have been killed tonight. Don’t you think it’s time to turn this over to Sergeant Payne?”
“Turn over what? I don’t think the sergeant or his boss would be impressed with my speculations.”
She shook her head with a sigh. “I might have known. You won’t let go of this until you solve it or it kills you.”
True. I hoped it wouldn’t be the latter, but if I went charging blindly into another ambush, it might be my last.
Chapter 34
I woke up Friday morning on my right side. The pain pills I had taken before going to bed had long since fizzled out. The pain persisted in the left side of both my body and my face. I felt Jill pressed against my back, her arm lying across my hip. Since the surgery, she moved her left arm frequently at night, searching for a comfortable position. Had her hand brushed against the tender spot where I had been kicked, causing me to awaken? I glanced at the clock and saw it was nearly seven.
We were not early risers, unless we had something special on our agenda. Normally, the first to awaken would turn over and the other would roll in tandem. Seen by a fly on the ceiling, we probably looked like a pair of porpoises performing at a sea life show. Then we’d play a little game with the clock, saying ten more minutes, five more minutes, one more minute. Jill was fine after she got up, but her resistance to making that first move seemed to grow with age. I didn’t push her since I loved to feel the warmth of her body against mine. Occasionally, the rubbing and patting would lead to other things, but we won’t go into that now. Certainly not this morning.
I didn’t even feel up to turning over. But I soon realized I would be better off vertical than prone. Slowly, I pushed myself up and sat on the side of the bed.
“Are you okay?” Jill asked. She elbowed herself up from the pillow.
I looked around and groaned. “About as okay as a surfer who just got tossed headfirst onto the beach by a twelve-foot breaker.”
She sat up and leaned against the headboard. “And you, a career law enforcement professional, a tenacious advocate of law and order, have no intention of reporting what happened to you?”
“If I thought it would help anything, if I thought the cops in Orange Beach would have a chance of catching those characters, I would gladly report it. But the answer to both is no. So what’s the use?”
“I can’t believe you don’t intend to do anything about it.”
I finally managed a halfhearted grin. “And you’d be right, babe. For one thing, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for them. And I’ll be carrying my Beretta from now on. But I also have another little trick in mind.”
A hot shower eased the pain and put me in a mood to resume the hunt. I didn’t know whose business I had been butting into, but I was determined to keep butting until I found out.
The morning was cool, the sun nowhere in sight, a solid deck of rippled white clouds stretching out over the water. Some sort of front must have come through overnight, putting the mercury in a skid. After checking out the balcony, we decided to stay inside for breakfast. The tasty aroma of bacon and eggs shifted the old appetite into high gear and we talked about the investigation as we ate.
“Did anything I got from Sherry yesterday ring any new bells?” Jill asked.
“For one thing, we know your hunch was right about Boz being jealous of Tim. Sherry had been playing Boz along until Friday night, when she ditched him. I’ll bet he knew it was because of Tim. I’d love to know what time he left that bar and where he went.”
“Think he would talk to you again?”
“Not a chance. He probably wouldn’t even give me one of his worn-out tennis balls. Sure wish I had Sergeant Payne’s authority. I’d call Boz in and grill him.”
“Could you talk Payne into that?”
“Yeah, about as easily as I could talk him into swapping jobs with a pizza deliveryman. I’ll just have to find another way to get the information. Remember, the time he left the bar was the question that set Detrich off the other night at the casino.”
“Do you think Boz and Detrich could have been working together on that scheme to save money on the steel and concrete?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “Boz should have realized the materials weren’t strong enough to do the job. He obviously raised no objection. I i
magine he and Detrich and Baucus will all be on the hot seat at that hearing Monday.”
We were finishing our final cup of coffee when the phone rang. I picked it up off the table. When I saw the ID, I handed the phone to Jill.
“Maybe you’d better take this one,” I said.
The caller was Sherry Hoffman.
Chapter 35
Jill answered the phone, listened for a bit, then said, “Sure. We’d be happy to talk to you anywhere. Where would you like to meet?”
When she ended the call, Jill had a look of concern on her face. “Something’s happened. Sherry wants to talk to us again, but not where we’d be recognized. She wants us to go to a little souvenir shop down the beach called The Shell Game at ten o’clock. It’s run by a friend of hers. She’ll park in back and meet us inside.”
“She didn’t say what it was about?”
Jill shook her head. “Just that it was important. And she wanted you there, too.”
We had just enough time to make a quick run into the edge of Pensacola before meeting Sherry. I was thankful for the change in the weather, which allowed me to hide my Beretta beneath a jacket. Our destination was a small electronics shop called Chief’s House of Security. I had wandered into the place out of curiosity on a previous trip. The proprietor was a big, muscular, totally bald ex-Navy SEAL known as Chief Vester. He specialized in what he called spy stuff.
“Hey, Colonel,” he greeted me. “Haven’t seen you since before the big blow.”
I was surprised he remembered me. “Afraid we haven’t been down for a while, Chief. You remember my wife, Jill?”
He tipped his black baseball cap and grinned. “Nice to see you, ma’am. What can I do for you folks this morning?”
“I need one of your little video cameras to mount outside unobtrusively,” I said.
“Wired or remote?”
“Remote,” I said. “How about motion activated?
“No problem. You gonna hook it to a VCR?”
“Right. Completely unattended.”
He laid all the components on the counter and showed me how to hook up the system. In no more than fifteen minutes, we were on our way back to Gulf Sands. Handyman that I am, I quickly mounted the camera on a post overlooking the parking area, aimed to catch anyone entering or leaving. I plugged the small receiver with its mini-antenna into the VCR connected to the TV in the living room.
We drove up to the small shop shortly before ten. The building was located on the opposite side of Perdido Key Drive from the beach, the exterior painted in typical Florida flamingo pink, blue shutters and awnings. Huge conch shells decorated the windows. But the shells turned out to be mostly window dressing. Inside, racks of T-shirts and tables piled with the usual array of souvenirs featuring palm trees, coconuts, pelicans, oranges—you name it—cluttered the large rectangular room.
We saw only two other customers in the place, a grossly overweight woman who didn’t need to be in shorts, and her teenage daughter, whose mismatched outfit included a bulky jacket and a bikini that hardly appeared legal. The woman behind the counter looked late thirties and wore a bright cotton dress with frilly sleeves.
“Anything I can help you with?” she asked, smiling.
“We’re meeting Sherry Hoffman here,” Jill said.
“Oh, sure. She’ll be right along. You can wait in my office.”
She opened a door to the back, and we entered a small room with a table for a desk. An assortment of junk gave the office the same cluttered appearance as the shop. Pictures on the wall looked similar to the beach scenes for sale out front. Jill and I sat in a couple of canvas chairs beside the table and waited.
Sherry arrived less than five minutes later, dressed in a stylish yellow suit with a brown scarf at the neck. “I’m on my way to show a condo,” she said. Then she stared at my face with its array of Band-Aids. “What happened to you?”
I grinned. “Jill didn’t beat me up, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
She sat down next to us and smiled nervously.
“It’s good to see you again, Sherry,” Jill said, hoping, I’m sure, to put her at ease.
“Thanks for coming, Jill. You too, Mr. McKenzie.” She looked across at me with troubled brown eyes. “I apologize for the way I acted over at my house on Tuesday.”
I smiled. “No apology is necessary. You were quite upset and we were intruding.”
“I guess Jill told you about our discussion?” Sherry asked.
“Yes. I hope that was all right.”
“I assumed she would. This business about Tim has been a real burden on me. I didn’t want to talk about his death, but after what you said the other day, that you didn’t think it was suicide, I felt I had to talk to somebody. You were a godsend, Jill.”
Jill reached across the table and patted her hand. “I’m glad I could help.”
Sherry took a deep breath, then looked at me. “But I didn’t tell her the whole story.”
“What didn’t you tell?” I asked.
“After you were over on Tuesday, Boz came by the house. He got really agitated when I told him what you were doing. He wanted to know everything you had asked and what I told you. He seemed quite relieved that I hadn’t provided much information, but then he made me an offer. He said if I would keep quiet about what I knew, he would get his dad to help finance my campaign for state senator.”
I frowned. “About what you knew?”
She nodded. “Some months ago, Tim told me he didn’t trust Claude Detrich. He suspected they were cutting corners to the detriment of the project. Later, when I told Boz what Tim had said, he just laughed. He said, ‘Why do you think they picked a small time guy for that project? They looked on him as someone they could manipulate.’”
“He was serious?”
“Oh, definitely. I asked what do you mean, manipulate?”
“What did he say?”
“He said you know, put things over on, sneak things past.”
“Did he elaborate on that?”
“Not exactly. But he said something else I didn’t really understand. Boz is a big tennis player, as you may know. He said he had to be careful. He’d been playing too much tennis, sometimes when he should have been elsewhere.”
I looked at her curiously. “This was at the same time he talked about Tim and the project?”
“Right. The comment didn’t make any sense to me, but I thought it might to you.”
At the moment, it didn’t.
“I understand he’s not on the best of terms with his dad now,” I said. “If he was willing to push old dad to finance your campaign, this business must really have him shook up.”
“I thought so, too,” Sherry said. “I know he was on edge after the building inspector called him in last Monday to ask about his certifications. Last night Boz called again and said they want him at a hearing on the accident this coming Monday. That’s really got him pulling his hair.”
I thought of Boz’s thick crop of wavy blond hair and tried to imagine him pulling out a handful. But I was more intrigued by what we had just learned about the Threshold Inspector.
“We really appreciate your leveling with us,” I told Sherry. “I know you want that Senate seat, but I’m sure you can find the financing in a more palatable way.”
She nodded. “I hope so.”
Chapter 36
On the drive back to Gulf Sands, Jill looked around uncertainly. “Do you think this makes Boz a more likely suspect?”
“He’s certainly a much bigger question mark now. Obviously, he knows a lot more than he let on. But will this give me a big enough wedge to pry any more out of him? I’m not sure.”
“What about that comment on playing too much tennis? Make any sense to you?”
I had thought about the possibilities. Where should he have been, on the job? Perhaps, but there must have been more to it than that.
“I’m still working on that one,” I said.
I had kept a close
watch on the traffic both going and coming from The Shell Game, and now I swept my gaze around the Gulf Sands parking lot. No black Caddy or any other strange vehicle with watchful occupants. We got back to the condo just before eleven, and Jill stirred us up two large cups of cappuccino with a French Vanilla mix.
I quickly reviewed the tape in the VCR and found only a couple of cars besides my Jeep going in and out of the lot. There were also two pairs of walkers headed out to the road. I rewound the tape and had just sat down on the sofa to savor my cappuccino when the phone rang.
“You’re going to love this, Boss,” said Ted Kennerly.
“You must have dug up something juicy.”
“Did I. Your contractor has quite a background, including several brushes with the law. Turns out he was originally from Greenville, Texas, just east of Dallas.”
“I didn’t expect you to come up with anything this fast,” I said.
He laughed. “I really hit it lucky on this one. My Dallas source had just come off a really tough assignment and was ready to tackle something simple. He found that back in the seventies, Claude Detrich signed on with an American contractor building big projects in Saudi Arabia. Hospitals and that sort of thing. Evidently Detrich was good with his mouth as well as his hands, and he wound up talking himself into the job of doling out construction materials. He was canned in the late seventies and sent home when they caught him selling steel and concrete to the Arabs.”
“A real self-made entrepreneur.”
“Can’t you just see them hauling off loads of rebars and bags of cement strapped to the backs of camels?”
“I suspect they were a little more sophisticated than that,” I said.
“Probably so. Anyway, there’s more. Back in Dallas, he moved about in the heavy construction field, getting in a few brawls and making the police reports. Then in the late eighties, he moved into home building. He got in with an older guy who soon decided to retire. When Detrich took over, he started producing cheap tract homes in the suburbs. The quality was poor and the complaints poured in. He has a nice fat file at the Better Business Bureau. When the heat got too much for him, he bailed out and resurfaced in New Orleans. I think you know the rest.”
Greg McKenzie Mysteries Boxed Set—Books 1-4 Page 39
