The Black Palmetto

by Paul Carr

  Simone shrugged. “That old car doesn’t look like it runs. I’d guess whoever lives here has gone somewhere in another vehicle. Let’s check it out.”

  He backed up and hid the car in the yard they had used before.

  “Wait here,” Sam said to Harpo, who sat with his head bowed, eyes closed. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Harpo never looked up. His lips moved without sound, as if lip-syncing a song…or saying a prayer. A man lived inside there, but Sam wondered about his sanity. And at that moment, the idea of following his directions searching for a killer seemed pretty insane, too.

  They got out and tracked to the rear of the property. No fence, just a back door with peeling paint. Wearing the gloves again, Sam stepped onto the stoop and twisted the knob. To his surprise, the door opened. The owner might have left it unlocked, but someone could be inside, too. He pulled his gun and glanced back at Simone. She motioned for him to go ahead and followed him in.

  Unlike Edison’s home, the kitchen here had been used a lot. Dirty dishes and pans cluttered the sink. Empty paper bags from fast-food restaurants lay on the counter among wadded burger wrappers and unused napkins. They pushed through to a dining room. The table had been pushed to one wall, and a single chair sat under it. A flat-panel TV about twenty inches wide sat on one corner. Empty beer bottles and more fast-food bags kept it company. A roach raced across the table surface and down one leg.

  Sam listened for noise, but didn’t hear any. Simone touched his arm and pointed to a door swung back to within a foot of the wall. He pointed the gun toward it and nodded for her to pull it back. She did, and its hinges squeaked, but nobody stood behind it. They moved through the room to the hallway, down past an empty bathroom to one of two bedrooms. The door stood open. No bed. Boxes littered the floor space.

  A few feet farther, the door to the second bedroom hung ajar. As Sam reached to bump it with his toe, he heard a noise. He stepped to the side and flattened himself against the wall. Simone did the same on the other side of the door. They waited for a couple of moments and nothing happened.

  With his gun at the ready, Sam said, “I hear you in there. Come out with your hands in the air!”

  All quiet.

  His pulse pounded in his ears as he eased back to the door and kicked it open. It swung back and banged against the wall inside. From the doorway he could see that the window stood wide open in the empty room. They entered and he went to the window and peered out. A cheap aluminum screen lay in the shrubbery, its frame bent as if someone had stepped on it. He climbed through to the ground and ran to the edge of the yard. Nothing moved up or down the street. Then a car careened onto the street from the vacant lot next door and sped away. Sighing, he relaxed, and even laughed to himself.

  Simone met him at the front door and let him in.

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “Yeah, it was J.T.”

  “What?” Her eyes narrowed. “I told you about him. He could have shot us.”

  “Yes, he could.”

  Then a hint of a smile twitched at the corner of her mouth. “Ran like a baby. What are you going to say to him?”

  “Maybe nothing. He knew it was us, even before I spoke.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Sam shrugged. “If he hadn’t, he would’ve shot us through the wall and never given it a second thought.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, I know so.”

  Simone sighed. “Okay, he must have thought this place belonged to Knox, or he wouldn’t have been here. He didn’t have time for much of a search, so let’s see what we can find.”

  He took the front of the house this time, and Simone took the rear. Tossing the cushions on a worn sofa, he found only food crumbs. A stand next to a recliner yielded a couple of skin mags, along with a periodical for classical pianists. An odd combination. The TV in the living room sat on a cabinet with doors. Sam found nothing inside but a couple of instruction manuals for the television and a video player. In the kitchen he searched through the cabinets and found a mismatched set of dishes and a couple of pans with spider webs inside.

  A drawer next to the sink contained bills, going back six months, for utilities and cable, all in the name of C.R. Crowne. Sam sighed. Didn’t ring any bells.

  He strode to the bedroom where he found Simone on one knee, her head inside the closet. Eight or ten pairs of shoes and their boxes covered the floor around her, along with a pile of dirty clothes.

  “We need to get going,” he said. “Probably been here too long already.”

  Simone stood and shook her head. “This guy’s a real slob. You find anything?”

  “Not much. Only this.” Sam handed her one of the bills.

  “Crowne. Huh. I don’t remember that name ever coming up.”

  “Yeah, me, either.”

  She pointed to the closet. “He has a big box full of shoes in the corner. But I found a stack of heavy books in the bottom. Let me thumb through the books for a minute and we’ll go.”

  “You check the junk room?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah, nothing but junk.”

  “How about the chest of drawers over here?”

  “I looked in that, too. There’re some photos I didn’t get a chance to sort through.”

  The pictures were in the top drawer, along with some mismatched socks, a couple of old wrist watches with broken bands, an owner’s manual for a cell phone, a pair of tarnished silver cufflinks, and an old baseball. There were eight photographs, all old. Sam scanned through a couple, but the people in them didn’t strike a chord. He stuffed them into his pocket and checked the other drawers. All were empty.

  “Okay, here’s something,” Simone said from the closet. Down on her knees, she had the box pulled all the way out. “The baseboard is loose in the corner. I pulled it out and there’s a hole in the wall behind it. It has cash in it.”

  Sam leaned in and saw a hole about the length and width of a brick. “How much?”

  “Hard to tell without pulling it out. It’s in bundles like at the bank, and they’re stacked up inside the wall.”

  She extracted a couple of the bundles and two more dropped down into their place. “They’re hundred dollar bills, about fifty in each stack. As she pulled them out, more kept dropping down. It took a few minutes, but when she finished she had thirty-nine stacks.

  “About a hundred and ninety-five thousand,” she said. “This might be part of the money Benetti stole. Even if it isn’t, it’s illegal or he wouldn’t have it in the wall.”

  “Okay, let’s take it and get out of here.”

  He found a shopping bag in the junk room and dumped a bunch of old clothes from it onto the floor. They filled the bag with the money and went out the back door.

  Back in the car, Harpo still looked as if in a trance. Sam started the engine and thought about the pictures. Before driving off, he took them out. One snapshot caught his eye. It looked old and worn, as if carried in a wallet for a long time. Two men sat at a table in a bar having a beer. The flash and age had bleached out their faces, but both men had long hair and beards, one dark and one sandy colored. The darker one appeared to be in his mid-twenties, the other several years younger. Despite the difference in coloration, their faces had what appeared to be a family resemblance.

  “They’re brothers,” Sam said, holding it up for Simone to see.

  “Yeah, and the younger one is Marlon Knox.”

  Sam remembered seeing an image of the other man the night before. A thin Chopin seated at a piano, resplendent in a tuxedo, playing to the crowd at the Lincoln Center.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sam drove the car into the bar’s parking lot and pulled into a space on the side where he could see Chopin’s car. The clock digits on the dash registered 6:25 p.m. Two other cars had followed them in and parked close to the entrance, part of the early happy-hour crowd. He turned off the engine and took out his phone, but before he could dial, the p
hone chirped. Jack Craft’s number flashed on the display.

  “Jack, what’s going on?”

  “I’m almost back to Miami, and I wondered what you found down there.”

  Sam told him about them finding Benetti, but that he didn’t give them anything they could use. “We did learn that Knox has a brother in Iguana Key, though. His name is Chopin Crowne. Owns a bar, and we’re about to go in and roust him.”

  “Crowne. Huh,” Jack said.

  “You know him?”

  “Well, no, I don’t know him, but I remember a movie actress in the eighties named Ava Crowne. She was quite a beauty.”

  Sam didn’t remember anyone named Ava Crowne, and didn’t have time to hear Jack reminisce about an old silver-screen heartthrob.

  “Let’s talk about this later, Jack. I need to call J.T. and get him over here to help us.”

  “Wait, let me finish. Ava Crowne had a fling with our friend the senator. They got caught together in a hotel in Cozumel. It was all over the tabloids for a month or two. Blaine’s wife threatened to leave him, then the buzz died, and I never heard anything else about it. I believe she had a young son at the time.”

  “So you’re saying she could be Knox’s mother?” Sam said.

  “Maybe. I’ll check it out for you.”

  “That would be great. Thanks, Jack.”

  “You bet.”

  Sam broke the connection and looked up to see Chopin getting into his car.

  “This might be easier than we thought,” Simone said. “Maybe he’ll lead us to Knox.”

  Chopin backed the car out and headed toward the highway. Sam started the engine and waited a moment before following.

  “What was that about Knox’s mother?” Simone asked.

  He relayed Jack’s side of the conversation.

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Yeah, me either, but if she is his mother, she might be in contact with him.”

  Chopin headed inland toward the Iguana Key downtown area. Sam called J.T. and brought him up-to-date, including their visit to the second beach house and the conversation with Jack.

  “You didn’t happen to go to Chopin’s house after we talked, did you?” Sam asked.

  “Uh, you mean the beach house?” J.T. asked.

  “Yeah. The reason I ask, somebody was there ahead of us and went out the window. I caught a glimpse of the guy, and he looked a little bit like you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Was that you? Huh. Well, I went by there, but I didn’t get a chance to search the place. See, Harpo told me the same thing he told you, about maybe mistaking which house to go to. I checked it out and found a guy’s name I hadn’t heard of before. Turns out, it’s a rental, and I didn’t find a name for the renter. You saw the place. Whoever lived there had been there a long time. Probably not our guy. But I thought, what the heck, I’d take a look around.” He kept talking about the house without saying anything important, and Sam knew he was just trying to postpone dealing with why he had gone there and tried to conceal it from them.

  “That’s okay,” Sam said, “just wondered if it was you. By the way, did you ever find out who owned the property up on Big Pine Key, where you followed Knox to the boat house?”

  “Oh, yeah,” J.T. said, relief in his voice, “I was working on that a few minutes ago and got sidetracked. Hold on a minute and I’ll get it for you.” Keys clicked, and within seconds, he said, “Wow, you won’t believe this. It belongs to Ava Crowne.”

  Too bad he hadn’t done that when Sam had first asked him about it. Maybe they would have been further along. Then again, they might not have known what to do with the information if they’d had it. Jack had only mentioned the affair a few minutes before, and that had been sheer luck.

  “See what you can learn about her. Particularly if she had two sons, or was ever married to someone named Knox.”

  “Already ahead of you, brother,” J.T. said, the bravado back. “It says here that she married a millionaire named Adam Crowne when she was twenty and had a child named Chopin. Made several movies, and the last couple bombed. Divorced a few years later, stayed single a couple of years and married her second husband, a struggling writer named David Knox. They had another son, Marlon, and that marriage lasted only a year. She’s been a recluse ever since.”

  She’d probably gotten a fortune in a divorce settlement from Crowne, and stayed with Knox just long enough to give her new son a name other than Blaine.

  “Okay, so now we know. How’s Benetti doing?”

  “He’s doing a lot of whining. Says the ties hurt his wrists.”

  “Well, let him whine. I’m hoping we’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  When he hung up, Chopin slowed ahead and turned into the parking lot of an apartment complex. He got out of his car and went into the lobby. About ten minutes later, he came out rolling a large metal suitcase. He struggled getting it into the trunk and took off again.

  “That case looks heavy,” Simone said. “Maybe weapons or cash.”

  “Yeah, I’m guessing weapons. He probably took the Cigarette boat from Boozler, and I assume he got the money at the same time. I can’t see him bringing the cash back here, so he probably has that with him already.”

  Sam followed the killer’s brother through downtown and onto the road leading to Ford’s cabin, but when Chopin reached the coastal highway, he turned south toward the marina where Sam and Simone had first seen the old cruiser.

  “Knox is probably waiting at the marina with the Cigarette boat,” Sam said.

  “He’s making his getaway, and like you said, he has the money with him. So we take him dead or alive.”

  “Okay, but keep the collateral damage to a minimum.”

  She huffed. “What? You’re worried about Chopin getting hit?”

  Shrugging, Sam said, “Well, you do have a reputation.”

  She grabbed his arm and squeezed in a playful tease. Her fingers lingered a moment or two longer than necessary. Or was that his imagination, maybe wishful thinking? Then she pulled her hand away and turned in the seat.

  “What about him?” she asked, nodding toward Harpo in the back seat. “He might get hurt if he gets in the way.”

  Sam had forgotten about him. In the rearview mirror, he saw the homeless man watching the car up ahead, seemingly oblivious to their conversation, maybe thinking about what he would do to Knox when they caught up with him.

  “We should’ve left him back at the hearse.”

  “Too late now.” Turning back to the front, she said, “The big boy’s slowing down.” She put the field glasses to her eyes. “He’s talking on the phone.”

  “Maybe the plans changed, and Knox wants to meet him somewhere else.”

  The speedometer read fifty-two mph. They kept getting closer to Chopin’s car, so Sam put his foot on the brake and lagged back.

  Several minutes dragged by at the slow speed, and then they passed a side road where several men sat on motorcycles, their engines running. Sam watched the rearview mirror and saw them enter the highway.

  “That’s the reason he slowed down,” Sam said. “He spotted us and called his friends.”

  Simone turned to look.

  “They’re right behind us. I think they’re going to pass.”

  Engines thundered as the bikers cut around the rear of the car. There were six of them. When they got even with the car, the one next to Sam’s window yelled for him to pull over.

  Chopin’s car picked up speed and began to put distance between them.

  “I’m going to try to outrun them,” Sam said as he floored the accelerator. “If we get waylaid, we’ll lose Chopin.”

  They sped ahead, but their lead lasted only a few seconds before the bikes caught up. As the men passed, the last one to go by pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a scabbard mounted under the handlebars. He swung it around and fired. Even with the window closed, it sounded like an explosion, and the steering jerked to the left as the car slowed, the front tire blown.

/>   Sam wrestled with the wheel, steered to the side of the road and stopped. His face felt hot, and his pulse beat like a bass drum in his ears. A bead of perspiration tickled the side of his face. Chambering a round in his 9mm, he said, “Call J.T. and tell him to go to the marina. He should be able to get there before Chopin.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know, yet.”

  The bikers had stopped in front of them and dismounted. None of them wore helmets. Half of them wore bandannas on their heads. All of them sported week-old beards and aviator shades, and looked as if they could stand a shower and a change of clothes.

  Chains appeared in the hands of a couple of the men. One of them looked older than the others, and Sam thought he might be the leader. He stepped up to the car, the man holding the sawed-off right behind him.

  “Get out,” the leader commanded.

  Sam swung the door open and stuck the gun behind his back into the waistband of his pants as he got out. He eased around the corner of the car toward the men.

  The leader held his hand up, palm facing Sam. “Hold it right there and tell us why you’re following that car.”

  “He’s headed to meet with the man who killed all those people in Iguana Key. We’re after the killer, not your friend.”

  The leader turned to one of the bikers to his side, a questioning expression on his face. The other guy shrugged. They probably didn’t know anything about it.

  Sam gazed beyond the bikers up the highway. Chopin’s car seemed to melt into the horizon.

  “Hey, pay attention!” the guy with the shotgun said. “We’re talking to you!” He stepped up close to Sam and stuck the muzzle to within inches of his head.

  Sam’s face felt as if on fire. The decision about what to do crystalized in that moment. He smacked the barrel of the saw-off away with the heel of his left hand, drew the 9mm, and shot the biker.

  The shotgun fired wild as the man screamed and fell backward. On the ground, he let go of the weapon and clutched what was left of his kneecap. Blood ran between his fingers. Sam stepped over and kicked the gun out of range.

  “Who’s next?” Sam asked. He extended his arm and moved the sights of the 9mm over the faces of each of the five bikers still standing.