Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (20 page)

“I think King had probably been in the bathroom and was walking toward the living room when the killer came through the door and shot him. He fell backward onto the bed and the killer dropped the gun and took off. He probably went down the stairs.”

J.D. was silent for a moment, biting at her lip the way she does when she’s thinking. “Why do you think he went down the stairs?”

“No evidence of it,” said McAllister, “but I think it makes sense. Why take a chance with the elevator?”

“He might have come up that way, too.”

“The stairwell doors are locked from the inside. You can get out but you can’t get in. He would have had to have come up the elevator.”

“Too bad about the video,” said J.D. “What about those statements?”

“Detective Harry Robson is finishing up inside the condo. He’ll be with you in a few minutes. I’m going back to the station.”

Robson was a tall, gangly man who wore a bottlebrush mustache and smiled a lot. He shook hands all around and said, “I overheard some of
the conversation between McAllister and J.D. I’m sorry about that. He’s seemed unusually tense lately.”

“Thanks, Harry,” said J.D. “It’s no big deal. We all get frazzled from time to time.”

“Mr. Algren,” Robson said, “I’ve met Matt before and I know both of you by reputation. All good. Bill Lester speaks highly of both of you. I know you’re not just a couple of civilians who get in the way. Sometimes the captain speaks before he knows the facts.”

Jock grinned. “Don’t blow my cover, Harry.”

Paulus Graf Von Reicheldorf was floating in a field of debris from the sunken U-boat. Pieces of the hull bobbed in the oil slick that was spreading over the surface, painting the water with a multicolored sheen. He rummaged around in the small compartment that contained his rations and found a compass. He pulled the folding paddle from another pocket, locked it into place and headed north.

The sun was brutal, leeching hydration from his body, blistering his skin. Paulus was wearing the duty uniform he’d been in when the attack occurred, long pants, a short-sleeve shirt, and hat. He knew his face and arms would not fare well in the sunshine. He sipped his water carefully, aware that he might be in the raft for days. He had plotted the U-boat’s position just before the attack, so he knew he was about twenty-five nautical miles south of St. George Island in the Florida panhandle. There was a lighthouse on the island that at night could be seen from fifteen miles at sea. He decided to paddle north and hope that by dusk he would be in sight of the light, if it hadn’t been darkened because of the war.

Paulus set a schedule for himself. He’d paddle for an hour and rest for fifteen minutes, sip his water, and use his bailing bucket to soak himself with water from the Gulf. By the time the first hour was up, his hands were blistered from the paddle and his arms were bright red from the sun. He rested as much as he could and then set off again, paddling north.

He was young and strong and during the weeks in the submarine he’d kept in shape by working out with sit-ups and push-ups and other exercises. He could make it ashore if the sun didn’t kill him first. He kept to
his schedule, but had no sense of how far he traveled during each hour. A slight wind was blowing from the south, and the current seemed to be flowing northward, but he wasn’t sure. The seas remained flat and he knew that whatever current might be present was minimal. He pushed on through the long day, checking his compass every few minutes, making sure that he was on course. At noon, he ate one of the rations. He thought about it and decided that if he didn’t find land within the next couple of days, he’d die from exposure, and the rations would be wasted. The sun was too hot, and his arms were going limp from the strain of the paddle, the blisters on his hands open and painful. He needed the energy provided by the rations, so he ate another one, drank some more water, and rested for thirty minutes.

The August days are long in that part of the world. The attack had occurred at seven in the morning and full darkness would not fall until nine in the evening. He had about thirteen hours of paddling before he’d be able to see the light from the St. George lighthouse. If it was there. If he was on the right course. If he was still alert. A lot of ifs.

He knew this part of the Florida coast was virtually deserted and he also knew he had to find people. He expected to be arrested and taken to a prisoner-of-war facility. As long as he was in uniform, he wouldn’t be seen as a spy. He thought his best bet was to simply knock on the lighthouse keeper’s door and surrender.

There was no reasonable way for him to complete his mission. He was a long way from San Antonio, and he didn’t have the documents he was supposed to deliver. They were still in the submarine’s safe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. If he was able to make it to San Antonio, there was no way to identify himself to the agents there. They would not open their escape route through Mexico to a stranger with no identification and nothing to explain his appearance in San Antonio other than his word that he was an Abwehr agent.

Paulus didn’t like the idea of surrendering, but he had thought a lot about his beloved fatherland during the long trip from France. His country had been taken over by a bunch of hooligans and murderers. He and Captain Kuhlmann had discussed the rumors that were circulating through the military about death camps where the SS, the dreaded black-uniformed
Schutzstaffel, were murdering Jews and Eastern Europeans in numbers that were impossible to comprehend.

Hitler had taken them into a war that was already lost. Once the Americans declared war, Germany had been assured of defeat. Sure, the Afrika Korps was still taking care of the British in North Africa, but the army had become bogged down in Russia after making great strides in the first months after the invasion the year before. The generals were learning the lessons of Napoleon’s campaign. Russia was just too big and its winter too long and too cold. The Germans had also begun to realize that Stalin was willing to shed rivers of his people’s blood in order to defeat them.

America was tooling up, training a great army, turning its industrial might into war production. They would strike soon, and the beginning of the end for Germany would be apparent to anybody with a brain. Hitler and his idiot advisers would be able to prolong the war for a few years, wasting the resources and youth of a great culture, but in the end they would succumb to the overwhelming might of the United States. And if the rumors of death camps were true, Germany would become a pariah among civilized nations and would never regain its rightful place in the world.

His thoughts turned to the young U-boat captain with whom he’d spent long evenings discussing the war and Germany, what their country had been, what it had become and what it might be in the future. Paulus would visit Kuhlmann’s wife when he returned to Germany. He wanted this young woman who had meant so much to the captain to know that he’d died a hero, had lived up to the code of the sea and gone down with his ship. Such a waste. A crew of forty-nine good men lost in a war that couldn’t be won.

The young graf had decided that he’d rather spend the next few years in a prisoner of war camp, than waste his life in a lost cause that he had never believed in. He paddled on, his thoughts of a lost Germany bringing a sadness that he couldn’t shake.

The night brought relief from the relentless sun and a glimpse of a light on the horizon. He watched it for several minutes until he was sure that the light was flashing with a rhythm that had to be the lighthouse. He was
too tired to go on. He lay back in the raft staring at the stars that blanketed the dark sky. A sliver of a moon hung among the stars like the one in the pictures in the fairy-tale books his mother had read him as a child. He wondered if she was looking down on him now with that smile that she seemed to reserve just for him. He hoped so. He sipped some more water and then dropped off to sleep.

He awoke with a start and looked at his watch. Almost midnight. He’d only slept a couple of hours, but he felt refreshed. He ate two of the ration meals and drank some of the water and started paddling toward the light blinking on the horizon. He stuck to the schedule he’d set for himself that morning, one hour of paddling, followed by fifteen minutes of rest.

The night was hot, but better than in the sun. He slogged along for several more hours, the light becoming brighter and more defined. Just before dawn, he heard the surf and knew he was close to shore. Soon, the bottom of the boat scraped along the sandy Gulf floor and the surf began to take control of his little vessel. He jumped overboard, grabbed the painter, and pulled the boat up onto the beach. The sun was still below the horizon to his right, but the sky was lightening with every minute that passed. The beach and the dunes behind it began to take shape. Paulus was perhaps a half kilometer west of the lighthouse, just about where he had planned to be.

He found a large piece of driftwood and tied the raft’s painter to it. He then walked west for another half kilometer and then up into the dunes. He was looking for a landmark of some kind, something that would mark a spot that he could find later if he needed to return. He came upon a lone pine tree just landward of the dunes. It stood like a sentry among the low palmetto scrub that seemed to cover most what he could see of the island. He went to the tree, turned, and walked fifty paces due north, consulting his compass the whole way. He sank to his knees and used his hands to dig a shallow hole. There he placed his waterproof money belt, the one that held all the documents that would make him an American citizen. He wasn’t sure why he decided to keep them, but it didn’t make much sense to throw them away.

When he finished, he tamped down the spot and picked up a dead palmetto branch. He backtracked to the pine tree using the branch to wipe
away his tracks. He walked back to the beach, still wiping away his tracks, and trudged eastward toward the lighthouse keeper’s quarters, his back straight, his pride intact. He was a German naval officer and he was about to do what none of his seafaring ancestors had ever done. Surrender. But the country that his forebears had so honorably served was no more. It had been subsumed into the Nazi empire and until that fell, his Germany, the nation of his ancestors, had ceased to exist.

When the war was over, when Germany lay in ruins, Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf would go home and help lead his people out of the darkness. It would be a big job.

We were quiet on the drive back to the key. I was not happy with McAllister and his surly attitude. I think my feelings were hurt by his calling Jock and me dumb civilians. I decided not to say anything to J.D. I didn’t want to get into a conversation about why I had tried to intervene with McAllister. Actually, I wasn’t intervening. I was ready to put a fist in his mouth. Not a very good idea. One does not assault a detective captain at a homicide scene without consequences.

J.D. broke the silence as we were driving through St. Armands Circle. “I think I’ll stay at my place tonight. Give you two some bonding time.”

“We bonded in junior high school,” I said.

“Still, you guys need some time to hang out and get drunk and tell lies, or whatever you do when I’m not around.”

“We mostly talk about you,” said Jock.

“Be careful,” she said. “I have a gun.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jock.

J.D. dropped us at my cottage, and Jock and I went to Tiny’s. We took seats at a high-top table across the little room from the bar. “That Detective Robson seems like a good enough guy,” said Jock.

“He is. J.D. and I met him back in the fall. He called Bill Lester about me, and Bill told him I was okay and if you showed up to treat you like family.”

“I gathered you guys knew each other.”

“Robson’s an old-fashioned detective who thinks before he opens his mouth,” I said. “He knows about J.D.’s background as the assistant homicide
commander in Miami and seems to have a great deal of respect for her.”

“He took a chance on really pissing off McAllister by apologizing to us,” Jock said.

“He did, but he’s been on the force for a long time. I don’t think he has to worry too much about the captain. Robson will always do the right thing, no matter the consequences.”

“What do you think is going on with McAllister?” Jock asked.

“Who knows? I’ve heard he’s not a favorite of the chief of police. He’s a little rough around the edges, and there’s always been a suspicion that he’s not above stepping over the line if it’ll help put the bad guys away.”

“Why do they keep him on?”

“He closes a lot of cases. He’s very good at what he does.”

“It’ll catch up to him someday,” said Jock. “He’s going to make a mistake, screw over somebody with the power to take him out.”

“That may be his problem now. The press is going to be all over him on this one. The reporters have all heard the rumors about the tactics he’s used. He might be worried that the heat will get too high. This is one murder he’s got to solve and he’s going to have to do everything by the book.”

Logan came through the door, strangely sober for so late on a Saturday evening. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“I told you. Marie’s aunt is visiting from Jacksonville, and we went to dinner.”

“You didn’t drink?” I asked

“Marie said she’d kill me if I did. Her aunt thinks anybody who touches alcohol is going to hell.”

“You’re probably going there anyway,” Jock said.

“Yeah, but Marie’s aunt doesn’t know that.”

Susie brought a tall glass of amber liquid to the table. “A triple, just like you ordered.”

“You didn’t put too much water in that, did you?” asked Logan.

“Just a splash.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Susie,” Logan said.

“Be careful,” she said. “You’ve got to drive home.”

“Aw,” said Logan, “the cops are okay. If the town commission hadn’t
meant for people to drive drunk they wouldn’t have insisted on all those parking spaces for a bar.”