Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (42 page)

February passed into history and, as it does every March, spring slipped early onto Longboat Key. The jacaranda, frangipani, and begonias were all in bloom, giving the island a tropical feel. Sunbathers were back on the beach, the air was dry and warm and spiced with the scent of flowers. Walkers and joggers smiled and greeted each other and chugged on their way, getting the exercise they had been robbed of by our colder mornings. We were done with winter and even as mild as the season is our latitudes, the islanders were glad to see the temperature inch into the high seventies.

Katie was still staying in my guest room, venturing out only in the evening for walks with either me or J.D. She was getting a bad case of cabin fever, but we didn’t think it was safe for her yet; not until we solved the Bonino equation.

Reicheldorf had gone back to his house in Cortez and was still living as Bud Jamison. He and Katie had confirmed their relationship through DNA testing, and she was becoming more at ease with the idea of having a grandfather. Bud visited us every couple of days, often staying for dinner. He and Katie talked for hours, filling the gaps in their lives. Katie was amused by the fact that she was now a German countess.

Jock had called from Orlando on Friday of the week before and told us about George Bass’s death and that there was a connection to an Orlando banker named Travis Watson who’d been murdered. He said he thought he’d solved the Bonino puzzle, but wanted some time to confirm what he’d been told. He planned to be back on Longboat Key with all the answers by the end of the following week.

On the last day of the first week of March, Jock showed up at my
cottage, a big smile on his face, the kind he gets when all is right in his world. That usually meant that he’d just broken ninety in a round of golf. This day was different. He’d solved the Bonino puzzle and wanted to talk to J.D. and me outside the presence of Katie.

I called Logan Hamilton and asked him to come over and stay with Katie while I took Jock and J.D. to lunch. I didn’t think she was in any danger, but Logan was a tough guy and, if needed, he could protect her as well as I could.

We walked the two blocks to Mar Vista and took a table under the trees. The place was crowded on this glorious Saturday, the snowbirds basking in the warm sun, soaking up memories to sustain them in their northern cities until they returned in the fall. We ordered our lunch and, after the server had gone off to the kitchen, Jock said, “I think I’ve got the whole story, including the U-166 documents.”

“Was there anything in them that would justify King in killing all those people?” I asked.

Jock shook his head. “Sometimes, man’s greed astounds me. King figured that if the documents were in a safe aboard a submarine at the bottom of the Gulf, they had to be important. I guess they were, but not in any way that would make King rich.”

“What were they?” I asked.

“Instructions, mostly. The Germans were trying to set up a new way to get spies into the U.S. through Mexico. The borders were pretty tight then, and it was almost impossible to get anyone into the country from Mexico. The documents had the names of some corrupt U.S. border guards and some bank account numbers from which they could be paid. It was a pretty elaborate scheme, but there’s no record that it was successful. Maybe when the documents didn’t reach San Antonio, the Abwehr just gave up on the exercise. Maybe the men on the border didn’t turn out to be corrupt. One of them was killed in action during the Normandy invasion, and the rest of the people involved have all since died of natural causes.”

“What about the bank accounts?” I asked.

“They were stripped of cash and closed during the war. We suspect that the spies used the money for living expenses.”

“So there was no treasure and no one to blackmail,” said J.D. “What a useless reason for good people to die.”

“How did Katie react to the death of her father?” Jock asked. After he’d called us from Winter Park to tell us about George Bass. J.D. and I had told Katie.

“She had a lot of emotions rolling around,” said J.D. “Part of her was sad that he was gone. After all, he was the only father she’d ever known. I guess even a bad father can be better than no father.”

“Not always,” Jock said.

“I know,” said J.D., “but his death was still a shock to her. She worried about her mother. She was afraid that George’s death only a little over a year since her own supposed death would be devastating to her mom. She wanted to go to Winter Park and let Betty know that she was alive. Matt and I talked her out of it.”

“An FBI agent and I spent some time with Betty Bass on the night George was killed,” said Jock. “George Bass was Sal Bonino. Betty showed us a safe where he kept a lot of incriminating documents. The FBI somehow got somebody out on a Friday night to open the safe. Everything was there.”

“I can’t believe that,” J.D. said.

“I’m afraid it’s true,” said Jock.

“I believe you,” said J.D., “but that’s a real shocker. I’ve known him for years.”

“What did Betty have to say?” I asked.

Jock told us about his and Lisa Coyle’s conversation with Betty, what they’d learned and what they suspected. The trove of documents in the safe confirmed everything they had suspected. “That P.I. from Tampa, Appleby, was on Bass’s payroll. We found a copy of a check Bass sent to him. So was DeLuca, the one who tried to beat up Matt.”

“Did you find any tie-in to the guy who took shots at us at my house on Sunday?” I asked.

“One of Bass’s cell phones showed a contact with a cell phone registered to the shooter.”

“Then that means Bass also set up the attempt with the garbage truck,” said J.D.

“Looks like it,” said Jock.

“Why would Bass want us dead?” I asked.

“We’ll never know for sure, but I think it was because you were digging into Katie’s death. I suspect Bass at least had some suspicion that McAllister was somehow involved in Jim Fredrickson’s death and Katie’s disappearance. He was probably afraid that whatever you found might lead back to McAllister and maybe to himself. At the very least, if you tied McAllister into the drug running, it would cause Bass to lose an awful lot of money.”

“So,” J.D. said, “it’s over.”

“Yes,” said Jock.

“We have to tell Katie,” she said.

“Yes,” said Jock.

“I’ll do it,” said J.D. “Did you tell Betty that Katie is alive?”

“No,” said Jock. “I thought that decision should be left to Katie.”

“Do you know who killed George Bass?” I asked.

“The Tampa Mafia, as it turns out. Our agent, the one who’s working with the mole in the organization, said that the boss had figured out the name of the banker who was moving money around for Bonino. When some of his goons went after the banker, this guy Watson, he pretty quickly gave up Bass as the man he was dealing with. Watson had never heard of Bonino, but it was pretty clear that Bass was Bonino. Or at least that he was a top lieutenant. They took Bass out. They figured if he was Bonino, they’d solved a competition problem, and if he wasn’t Bonino, at least they’d be rid of somebody who ranked high in Bonino’s organization.”

“We still have the problem of Katie having killed her husband,” said J.D. “How do we handle that?”

“I think we leave it alone,” I said. “It was self-defense.”

J.D. thought about that for a minute. “I guess you’re right. After Doc Hawkins figured out the DNA and McAllister was killed, it was just assumed that McAllister had something to do with her disappearance. It also looked like McAllister killed Jim Fredrickson, so why not leave it at that?”

“I agree,” said Jock. “Katie is going to have some money from the estate, so she’ll be fine.”

“I thought the government would get all that money,” J.D. said.

“The government will get the drug money, but they’ve agreed to only take the ten million. Katie will end up with a couple of million that was legitimate. The proceeds from the house, Jim’s IRA and another retirement account, some legitimate cash they had in a savings account.”

“Will Katie feel safe enough now to come back to life?” I asked.

“I’m sure she will,” said J.D. “She’s a survivor.”

“What about her mother?” Jock asked. “Will Katie be ready to see her?”

“More than ready,” said J.D. “She’s really looking forward to it.”

We finished our lunch and walked home through the soft spring afternoon. We were alive and Katie was about to restart her life. Jock would stay a few days and then return to Houston and the dark world in which he lived so much of his life.

My and J.D.’s world was slipping back into the languid rhythms of island living and we were content. We had lots of sunshine and friends and a deepening love affair to look forward to in the coming months. As we walked, I felt her hand slip into mine, a simple act that confirmed that all was right with the world. We were happy and you just can’t ask for more than that.

I believe it is the fiction writer’s prerogative to take occasional liberties with history, changing the hard facts so that they conform to the plot. However, it is also the novelist’s duty to set the record straight when the story is finished.

Part of this book was written with World War II as a backdrop. I’ve been diligent in researching the history of that time as it relates to my story. The wonderful people at the Manatee County Library main branch in downtown Bradenton have been most helpful in bringing the Cortez of the 1940s into reality for me. Their collections of Cortez, Anna Maria Island, and Longboat Key memorabilia have been of immeasurable help in putting this story together. The curator of this trove of memories, Pam Gibson, who has lived on Anna Maria Island her entire life, made the period come alive for me. All mistakes in the historical record are mine.

There really was an
Unterseeboot
, the famed or infamous German submarines known as U-boats, designated as U-166 and it was sunk at the end of July, 1942, about forty-five miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River. It was the only U-boat sunk in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. The boat was captained by twenty-eight-year-old Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Gunther Kuhlmann, born in Cologne and married to Gertrude Wee of Flensburg for two years when he started on his fateful journey from Lorient, France, on June 17, 1942. Leutnant zur See Paulus von Reicheldorf is a figment of my imagination, but the U-boats did on occasion infiltrate German spies and saboteurs into the United States.

U-166 was a class IX C boat, launched in 1941. She was two-hundred-fifty-one feet in length and had a cruising range of thirteen thousand nautical miles.

This first war patrol of U-166 under the command of Captain Kuhlman was essentially as I described it. On July 11, 1942, Kuhlmann sank an eighty-four ton Dominican flagged schooner off the coast of the Dominican Republic, using cannon fire. On July 13, he encountered the 2,309-ton U.S. steam freighter
Oneida
off the Cuban coast and sank her with a torpedo. On July 16, he encountered a small, motorized fishing boat about forty-five miles north of Havana and sank it with gunfire.

On July 30, 1942, U-166 found the American passenger freighter, the
Robert E. Lee
, about forty-five miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. The
Robert E. Lee
was launched in 1924 and was owned by the Eastern Steamship Company of Boston. She was home ported in New York and under the command of Captain William C. Heath. On the night she died, the
Robert E. Lee
was carrying a crew of one hundred thirty-one, two hundred seventy passengers and forty-seven tons of cargo. She was cruising at sixteen knots on a northwesterly course to the Mississippi River in water that was approximately five thousand feet deep.

She was escorted by an American navy patrol craft, PC-566, under the command of Lieutenant Commander H. G. Claudius, U.S. Navy. She was 178 feet long with a top speed of twenty knots. She’d been launched in Houston in March 1942, and commissioned on June 15, 1942, two days before U-166 left Lorient on her final patrol.

The fatal encounter between U-166 and the
Robert E. Lee
occurred at ten thirty on the evening of July 30, 1942. There is no way to know what actually was happening aboard the U-166 during her attack run or during the depth-charge attack that followed. I could find no information as to whether the U-boat attacked on the surface or submerged, but German captains preferred to attack on the surface at night.

Once Captain Claudius of the American patrol boat realized there was a submarine attack on the
Robert E. Lee
, he went after the U-166, dropping a number of depth charges. PC-566 ended her attack when the crew saw an oil slick on the surface of the water. Captain Claudius turned his vessel and went to rescue survivors of the
Robert E. Lee
. Twenty-five crewmen died in the sinking, but the rest of the crew and all the passengers were rescued by the PC-566.

Captain Claudius claimed that his ship had sunk the submarine, but
there was no debris on the surface and, because of events two days later, PC-566 did not get credit for the attack.

On the afternoon of August 1, 1942, two days after the sinking of the
Robert E. Lee
, a U.S. Coast Guard Widgeon aircraft, crewed by Chief Aviation Pilot Henry Clark White and Radioman First Class George Henderson Boggs, Jr., spotted a U-boat on the surface south of Houma, Louisiana, while flying a routine patrol south of Isles Dernieres, Louisiana. The U-boat had apparently spotted the Coast Guard plane and was crash diving when White and Boggs attacked with their single three-hundred-fifty pound depth charge. The Coast Guardsmen circled the site of the attack until they saw an oil slick on the surface. They reported by radio that they had sunk a U-boat. After the war, when it was determined that the only unaccounted for U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico was the U-166, White and Boggs were credited with its sinking.

The reader will note in the story that I moved the site of this encounter eastward to near the Florida Coast and while the Coast Guard attack occurred in the afternoon, I moved it to sunrise. Moreover, I have written the story as if the attack by the Coast Guard aircraft actually sank the U-166. Even though this sinking became part of the Coast Guard tradition and was accepted as fact for many years, the truth was discovered in 2001, when a U-boat wreck was found near the wreck of the
Robert E. Lee
in five-thousand feet of water. In 2003, this wreckage was positively identified as the U-166. It had indeed been sunk by the American patrol boat, PC-566.