Caribbean Capers

by Dan Kelly

  He called Millie Trumball and passed along his mom’s offer which was gratefully accepted. He then grabbed a beer and some sandwich fixings and began to ponder over what might be in store for him in the days ahead if he called that number. He decided to hold off calling for a while to see what his old buddy would do, if it really was his old buddy. Besides being nosy by nature, he was also very cautious. His past experiences with the Scrounger have heightened those tendencies.

  Chapter 3

  -Miami, FL-

  Pete’s parents live in the exclusive community of Bal Harbour which is a short drive from his condo in Miami Beach. At 6:40, as Pete heads for the door and his car with the thought of stopping off for some nice wine to go along with the fare Rosa is preparing the phone rings.

  When he answers, there is a brief silence and then a woman’s voice says, “Good evening. This is just a courtesy call to let you know that there’s a terrific one day sale on diving equipment tomorrow from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Morrison’s Dive Shop, including some old but still serviceable bathyspheres and bathyscaphes. As a valued customer, we want to make sure you have the opportunity to take advantage of these exceptional bargains. We hope to see you here. I’m sure you’ll agree that what’s on display is a scrounger’s delight. Have a nice evening.” The caller disconnects before he manages to react to the word ‘scrounger’.

  “I knew it. I just knew it. Desoto’s up to something and whatever it is means trouble for me. I can feel it in my bones. All I’ve got to do is stay away from Morrison’s tomorrow and I can dodge the bullet, but I know me and he knows me damn it. I won’t do the smart thing. I’m too damn nosy. My curiosity is already greasing the runners for my slide down the hill of stupidity.”

  Thinking of the phone call, he almost blows past the liquor store where he wants to buy the wine. At the last minute, he brakes hard, gets the beeping horn and middle finger salute from the guy behind him, and turns into the parking lot alongside Julio’s Wine Palace. Julio carries the widest selection of quality wines for miles around and he is a fishing buddy of Pete’s.

  “Hi Pete. What’s the rush? You almost made the local eleven o’clock evening news out there. Making quotations marks with his fingers he added, ‘Yacht captain, master seaman and navigator of the seven seas, has his driver’s license revoked by DMV for unsafe docking of his mini-van.’ You got a heavy date or something?”

  “Nah. I’ll tell you all about it on Saturday. We’re still on for fishing aren’t we?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it even if all the Dolphin cheerleaders walked in an offered me an evening to remember.”

  “Julio, you’ve really got to lay off the sauce. It’s affecting your libido. If they were to make me the same offer, I guarantee you’d be fishing solo.”

  Chuckling Julio asked, “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “I’m having dinner with my family at my folks’ house in Bal Harbour and you know how mom gets when you show up late. Do you have any of that Caymus Conundrum in stock? I’d like a few bottles if you have them. Mom and Dad love it.”

  Checking his computer he said, “You’re in luck. I have three bottles left.”

  “Terrific. Bag them and put it on my tab, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  Pete grabs the bag and heading for the door shouts back, “I’ll pick you up at five a.m. on Saturday.”

  Leaving the parking lot he manages to get another beeping horn and several middle finger salutes. He’s on a roll.

  He pulls into his parents’ driveway with one minute to spare and his seven year old niece, Cassie, with her fire red hair bouncing all around that angelic face of hers comes running out to greet him. “Hi, Uncle Pete! Hey everybody, Uncle Pete’s here!”

  He stoops down, scoops her up in his arms and gives her a big uncle hug and a bunch of smooches all over her face. “Hi yourself, Pumpkin. How’s my favorite niece doing?”

  “Uncle Pete, you know I’m the only niece you have.”

  “Yeah, but if I had more you’d still be my favorite. I wouldn’t let the others know though. It would be our secret.”

  Mimicking her mother’s doubting frown and squinting eyes she said, “Uncle Pete, you’re dishing out the baloney again.” Then she starts to giggle like only a seven year old little girl can giggle and he joins in with his 39 year old giggle.

  Setting her down and taking her hand, they head for the front door, Cassie skipping and Pete walking. “Giggling I can do. I’ll pass on the skipping.”

  The Brody gatherings are always convivial affairs and this evening was no exception. Rosa out did herself as her unique repast was way above the usual five star accolades and the conversation aided by the fine wine was intoxicating. The highlight of the evening, however, was quite unexpected. About nine-thirty, the door chimes (door bells are so gauche according to the senior Brody’s interior decorator) softly resounded with a passage of what sounded to Pete like something from a Johann Strauss waltz.

  Since Pete was closest to the door, he answered it. When he opened it, he was flabbergasted by the gorgeous, raven haired, green-eyed woman with the dental commercial smile that greeted him. “Hi Paul. Would you please give this to your dad for me?” She handed him a tape measure and added, “He let me borrow his tape measure several weeks ago to do some measuring for some new drapes I want to hang and I kept forgetting to return it. Please tell him thanks for me.”

  “And you are?”

  “I beg your pardon? Don’t you remember me, Paul? We met a few weeks ago. I’m your folks’ new neighbor, Abby. I just moved in next door.”

  “If I met you before, I definitely would have remembered I assure you.”

  Watching the confused look spread across her face he smiled and said, “I’m having some fun with you. I’m Pete. You met my brother Paul.”

  “Boy you sure do look alike.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized what she should have grasped immediately. She smacked herself on the forehead and said, “Your identical twins right? Of course you are. Slow, slow, slow, dumb, dumb, dumb.”

  Having said that, she turned around, shook her head and walked away muttering to herself.

  “Hmm, a do-it-yourselfer. That’s a rarity in this neck of the woods.” He watched her cut across the lawn through an opening in some low lying flowering shrubs and step onto a walkway that runs from the front of her house to a gate that opens up to a flower garden on the right side of the walkway and then goes around to the back of the house. As she closed the gate, she looked up, caught him watching her, flashed a killer smile, held up her hand and wiggled her fingers and then disappeared around the corner of the house. “Man, she’s got to be the most beautiful woman these eyes have ever roamed over. Way out of your class though, Brody. You wouldn’t get to first base with that lady. Hell, you wouldn’t even get off the bench.”

  As he closes the door and turns to go back into the living room, he walks into his brother who’s got a ‘caught ya’ smile on his puss. “I see you met Mom and Dad’s new neighbor. Is she a looker or is she a looker? She’s single, but she’s also some kind of special cop. So, even if you were to be crazy enough to think you could get her to go out with you and crazier still she would agree to go out with you, one wrong move on your part could put you in a world of regret. I’m hoping a word to the wise is sufficient. You reading me bro? Give that one a wide berth. She could be trouble with a capital T.”

  “How do you know so much about her?”

  “When I was over for dinner with Mom a few days after Abby moved in next door, she came over to introduce herself. She was very nice and friendly, but she asked an inordinate amount of nosy questions and avoided answering most of ours. That put me on the alert as to her real motive. There’s something about that lady that doesn’t ring true.”

  Paul is a former detective with the Miami Police Department, spending thirteen years with Miami’s finest, the last eight as a detective in the narcotics arena, before going private and estab
lishing his own PI agency with a former partner of his, Frank Delucia.

  “This is her story, what there is of it. She said her full name is Abigail Keenan and she works for the federal government as a researcher for the Department of the Interior – Latin America Region. She said she had inherited a considerable amount of money from a maiden aunt which enabled her to buy the property next door. She told us she graduated from Fordham University with an undergraduate degree in International Programs and Services and until a year ago was living in New York City. A promotion within the Department of the Interior brought her to

  Miami a year ago and she loves it here. That’s it.

  “On the surface, it appears plausible. However, when I tried to check her out through my usual contacts they ran into a lot of dead ends and need-to- know static. They did manage to find out that an Abigail Keenan did attend and graduate from Fordham University about the time she would have graduated. They got a copy of a New York driver’s license that has a picture of an Abigail Keenan that looks something like the one we met, but those pictures aren’t always the greatest, and they determined that three Abigail Keenans do work for the federal government.

  “Here’s where things get intriguing. None of them works for the Department of the Interior. One works for the Department of Commerce, one works in the Department of Consumer Affairs and one works for an innocuous Department of Special Investigations. My contacts were able to get the addresses of the two Keenans that work for the Departments of Commerce and Consumer Affairs which enabled them to get copies of their Miami driver’s licenses thus their pictures and through the process of elimination, seeing that they didn’t look anything like the Keenan woman in the picture on the New York driver’s license, concluded that our Abigail Keenan really works for this Department of Special Investigations and is some kind of special federal cop.

  “My contacts couldn’t dig up any personal history on her at all, date of birth, social security number, family, friends, memberships, banking relationships, things like that. There’s something very strange about that lady. Why is there all this secrecy surrounding her?”

  “Judging from my brief conversation with her, she didn’t know that you had a twin brother. If she was being so nosy, how did she miss uncovering that piece of trivia? Mom has pictures of us all over the house. Plus a normal question for someone to ask when in the process of getting to know someone is ‘Do you have any kids?’ That subject didn’t come up?”

  “We stayed in the kitchen and there are no pictures of us there and questions about offspring never came up. She was primarily interested in what Mom, Dad and I did for a living and places we have traveled.”

  “If she is some special kind of cop, maybe the reason she didn’t ask more of the normal questions was because she already knew the answers. Maybe her surprise at Mom and Dad having twin sons was all an act.

  “I wonder if her inquisitiveness is somehow tied up with the strange messages I’ve received from my old Coast Guard buddy that I told you about over dinner. This Abby showing up here at about the same time Scrounger pops up after all of these years is a wee bit odd to be just coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “You may be right. I’ll do some more probing and see what I can uncover.”

  “Sleuth away and I’ll keep you posted on what develops with Phil Desoto. Let’s get back to the family before they get too curious about what we’re talking about. I think it would be a good idea to keep our thoughts to ourselves for now. No sense in causing parental worry to rear its ugly head unless there’s a damn good reason to do so.”

  “Agreed. Want to get Dad and shoot some nine ball? Maybe we’ll get lucky and win some of our money back from the old hustler.”

  “Let’s go for it. Maybe he’ll have a sneezing episode and we can pounce on him before his eyes stop watering. Where can we hide some pepper?”

  Laughing, they head on back to the living room and another trouncing by dear old dad.

  Chapter 4

  -Miami, FL-

  A little after nine the next morning, Pete stops at an ATM to get some cash, his dad cleaned him out of all he had last night playing nine ball, and then he cruises by Morrison’s Dive Shop to see what he can see which is nothing. If there’s a special sale on, no one has shown an interest so far. The grounds surrounding the shop are empty and the parking lot has one truck and an SUV in it.

  Moving on down the road a piece, he stops at Pasqual’s Pantry for some breakfast. He comes here often for breakfast when he’s in port because they make the best Mexican omelets loaded with a delightful potpourri of spices that nobody has been able to identify and Pasqual isn’t talking.

  As Pete settles into a booth by the window, Cindy his favorite waitress comes over with a cup of coffee and a big welcoming smile. “When did you get back, Pete? You’re supposed to be out somewhere in the Caribbean hauling some rich folks around for another month or so. At least that’s what I remember you telling me the day you left.”

  “Hi, beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with your memory. There was just a change in plans that’s all.”

  “What are you having this morning? Your favorite?”

  “Along with a tall glass of tomato juice.”

  “Coming right up?”

  “No sense in announcing to the world that the Blissful Times was a target for piracy and a victim of a kidnapping. Bad for business.”

  As he’s looking out the window and sipping his coffee, a black BMW Series 6 convertible with the top down pulls into the parking lot and parks with its rear facing the window, so Pete can’t get a good look at the driver. When the driver steps out of the car, however, he gets a stunning view. “As Yogi Berra would say, It’s deja vu all over again.” It’s the woman who recently moved in next door to his parents, Abby Keenan. “Well, well, isn’t this an interesting coincidence?”

  She’s dressed in black dress slacks, a white short-sleeved tailored shirt with the collar turned up, black low-heeled patent leather shoes, a wide brimmed white straw hat with a black ribbon and bow around the crown and dark sunglasses. Her jet black hair is brushed back into a ponytail and she’s got heads turning as she walks across the parking lot to the entrance of the restaurant.

  When she steps inside and takes off her sunglasses, Pete hears a low collective gasp from the diners around him. Those dark green eyes of hers are mesmerizing all by themselves, but when you’re looking at them as part of the entire package, the flawless skin, the bikini body and the dazzling smile, they’re beyond description. The lady is definitely a sight to remember.

  Since Pasqual’s is a seat yourself operation, she stands by the counter where the tabs are settled and looks around for a place to sit. As she scans the place, she spots Pete, waves and heads his way. “Either this is just a coincidence or this lady should receive an Oscar.”

  “Hi Pete or Paul, it looks like you’re eating alone. Would you like some company?”

  “That’s the best offer I’ve had my entire life. I’d be nuts to say no and I’m Pete.”

  “Well thank you, Pete. Hearing comments like that is a great way for a woman to start her day.”

  “Have you eaten here before?”

  “No I haven’t, but I’ve been hearing nice things about the place from people at work and thought I’d check it out.”

  “Aren’t you working today or don’t employees of the Department of Special Investigations work on Wednesdays?”

  “Despite what you might have heard, most government employees don’t have it any better than non-government employees. I took the day off because my drapes are being delivered and hung today. I wanted to .....” She stopped in mid-sentence as she belatedly realized what Pete had said. Looking at Pete’s penetrating stare, she concluded that it would be fruitless to try to lie her way out of the situation. “Okay, it looks like someone has resources that I wasn’t aware of. How did you dig up that little tidbit?”