Collateral Damage (15 page)

“Anything from your agency on Soupy?” I asked.

“A lot, but I've still got to sort through all the data. He's pretty big in the poppy business and apparently commands a sizable army. He's well known to our intelligence groups as one of the Golden Triangle warlords.”

“Any Laotian government involvement?”

“He's right in the middle of it. Most of the warlords have their own people in the various ministries. I don't know how much control Soupy has over what the government does, but he certainly has influence.”

“Any indication that he operates outside Laos?” I asked.

“None. I asked our director to query the intelligence agencies. It all came back negative. Apparently Soupy is happy to stay right there in Laos.”

J.D. had been sitting quietly. “That doesn't mean he couldn't have sent some goons to take out Jim Desmond.”

I shook my head. “The ones who tried to kill me grew up in America. Their English was too good, too idiomatic, to have been learned somewhere else.”

“Maybe the ones who attacked you were born here, but their parents are part of Soupy's organization,” said J.D.

I nodded. “That's a possibility. I wish I'd been able to hold onto one of them.”

Jock said, “I also checked on the Otto Foundation. It's legit. Sends kids to build schools in Southeast Asia. Its director Bud Stanley is another matter.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“His real name is Robert Charles Bracewell, Jr. Thirty years ago, when he was in his early twenties, he and his dad were involved in a heroin import business in Long Beach, California. The DEA busted them and both went to prison. Senior died there, but Junior, who was called Bud, did his ten years at Lompoc and went on to better things. He legally changed his name to Bud Stanley, went to college at Cal State Northridge, got a degree, and went into the charitable business. He's kept his skirts clean.”

“Sounds like a guy who learned his lesson,” I said.

“Possibly,” said Jock. “But guess who was on the other end of the heroin pipeline?”

“Shit,” I said. “You're going to tell me it was Soupy's dad.”

“You get the gold star. None other than Soupy's old man.”

“No evidence Stanley's still involved?” J.D. asked.

“None,” said Jock. “His bank accounts show he's living on his salary from the Otto Foundation.”

“Family?”

“Never married. No kids. Mom died while he was in college.”

“That's very strange,” I said.

“There's more.”

I looked at Jock. He was showing a half smile of anticipation. A surprise was coming.

“I'm waiting,” I said.

“Bud Stanley has a very nice history. There is no connection to Bracewell. The record of his years before college, the years he was really in prison, is full of jobs that lasted a year or two. All in little companies that no longer exist. He was a typical young man struggling to make a living and then went back to college in his thirties.”

“I don't understand,” said J.D.

“Somebody manufactured a pretty airtight background for our Mr. Stanley. I even have his high school records, the ones that Cal State got when he applied. He was a mediocre student who did not seem to the advisors to be college material. They're all bogus.”

“How airtight is it if you can find out all this stuff in one day?” asked J.D.

“Damned airtight. Nobody would find the connection to Bracewell unless the one looking happens to be an intelligence agency of the United States government.”

“So,” I said, “Bud had some help. Could he be part of the U.S. Marshal's witness protection program?”

“We checked,” said Jock. “The Marshals have never heard of either Stanley or Bracewell.”

“Any ideas on how he manufactured such an extensive background?” I asked.

“It's possible he did it himself, but more likely he had help. This was a professional job.”

“How did you tie Bracewell and Stanley together?” asked J.D.

“Anytime somebody's doing business with our government in a foreign country, they're fingerprinted. Unless there's some reason, such as a security clearance, to compare the prints to others, it's not done. The prints are just put in a file and can be used for identification if needed. I asked my agency to run Stanley's prints. We got a hit on Bracewell and followed up.”

“Did Bracewell just drop out of sight after Stanley showed up?” asked J.D.

Jock grinned. “A death certificate was filed on Bracewell in Los Angeles
County about the time that Stanley applied to Cal State. Showed a death from natural causes and burial in a local cemetery.”

I knew the look on Jock's face. “What else?”

He laughed. “The only other place that Bracewell's name has shown up in the past twenty years is on a bank account in Switzerland.”

“Still active?” J.D. asked.

“Yep.”

J.D. frowned. “I understand that there's no way to crack Swiss bank secrecy.”

“That's generally true,” said Jock. “But there are ways to do it.”

“Can we get a look at that account?” I asked.

“My agency has a mole in the bank that holds the account. But, the director doesn't want to use him unless we have something that touches on national security. If we can tie the Desmond murder into a security issue, we can get the information.”

“Fat chance,” said J.D.

It was late when we finished our meal, but I wasn't sleepy. Jock and J.D. were ready to call it a day and headed home. I stopped by Tiny's for a beer and a little conversation with friends. The place was nearly empty. Susie, the proprietor, was leaning over the bar talking to Cracker Dix. Two men sat at the end of the bar deep in conversation. The TV above the bar was muted, a baseball game in progress. Somehow the games always seem a little better without the incessant chatter of the announcers.

Susie looked up as I came in. “Hey, Matt.”

“Hey, Susie. Cracker.”

I took the stool next to Cracker. Susie moved to the cooler to retrieve a Miller Lite for me, brought it back, and set it on a cardboard coaster on the bar. “I heard that Jock was in town.”

“Yeah, but the weenie wanted to go home to bed.”

“Where's Logan?”

“With Marie. They're having dinner on the mainland. How're you doing, Cracker?”

“No complaints. I heard you've been looking into the murders on
Dulcimer
.”

I chuckled. Everybody knows everything on a small island. Cracker was an expatriate Englishman who'd lived on Longboat Key for thirty years. He'd come with his bride to visit his new in-laws when he was in his mid-twenties and stayed. The marriage didn't last, but his love for our key was as deeply ingrained in his persona as the accent he'd never lost. He stood about five feet eight and his wardrobe seemed to be limited to Hawaiian shirts, beige cargo shorts, and flip-flops, and on cooler days, boat shoes. He wore a thin strand of gold around his neck and a small gold
stud in his right ear. He was as bald as an onion and much loved by the islanders.

“Not really,” I said. “I'm trying to help an old friend find out who killed his son on the beach the same day as the
Dulcimer
murders. I don't think there's any connection, but I'm checking it out.”

“Did you know that Dora was aboard
Dulcimer
that night?”

“No. What was she doing on a tourist dinner boat in June? She's usually in the mountains by then.”

“She was late leaving this year and the
Observer
asked her to do a piece on the boat.”

“I'd like to talk to her. Do you know how to reach her in Blue Ridge?”

“Don't have to. She's here.”

“What's she doing on the key in August?”

“She had to come back for a doctor's appointment or something. She's only here for a couple of days.”

“Thanks, Cracker.”

The evening wore on. The two men at the end of the bar left, and a few minutes later Tracy Tharp and three other servers from Pattigeorge's came in. Tracy gave me a hug and chatted a few minutes before joining her friends at one of the high-top tables near the bar. A group of workers from Mar Vista arrived for what Susie called the second shift, a time when the restaurants on the north end of the key closed and the workers stopped at Tiny's for a nightcap before heading home.

Cracker was in a storytelling mood, and I enjoyed hearing about his hilarious escapades in Wales, India, Pakistan, and other places that his hippie culture had taken him before he settled down on Longboat. I'd heard some of the stories before, but when Cracker was on a roll, new tales appeared, each one funnier that the last. I often wondered which were true and which were the result of the hyper imagination that rolled around in Cracker's enormous brain. I left Tiny's in a better mood than when I'd arrived, and headed home.

The house was quiet except for the snoring coming from Jock's room. I locked up and went to bed and dreamed of soldiers who had died in a strange land. My soldiers.

Jock and I were sitting on the patio drinking coffee under whirring ceiling fans. The sun was up, the sky cloudless, the bay green and clear. I heard the clatter of a low-flying helicopter and soon spotted it, a Coast Guar-chopper heading north over the bay. An osprey flew low above us, a fish in its talons, gliding toward its nest on Jewfish Key. I was telling Jock about my conversation the night before with Cracker Dix.

“I've met Dora,” he said. “She's the small gray-haired lady who comes into Tiny's sometimes.”

“Yes. I didn't remember anything being printed in the paper about the killings, so I called J.D. She said there was nothing.”

“That seems a little strange. You've got a reporter on the scene of two murders and she doesn't even do a human-interest-type story.”

“Yeah. Dora spent a lot of years with major news organizations covering some of the world's hotspots. She'd surely know how to write a story about two people knifed to death on a boat. Why didn't she?”

Jock smiled. “I guess you've got to ask her that.”

I looked at my watch. Nine o'clock. I opened my cell phone and dialed her number. She answered on the second ring.

“Good morning, Dora. This is Matt Royal.”

“Good morning, Matt. How are you?”

“A bit perplexed.”

“Well, that won't do. How can I help unperplex you?”

“I was talking to Cracker Dix last night. He said you were aboard
Dulcimer
the night of the murders.”

“I was.”

“But you didn't write a story.”

“No.”

“Mind telling me why?”

“Not if you'll buy me lunch today.”

“Isn't there some law against bribing journalists?”

“Probably.”

“Well, you never eat much anyway. I guess a small bribe won't hurt.”

“I don't think so. Mar Vista at noon?”

“I'll see you there.”

Dora Walters was a petite woman with a cap of gray hair, a ready smile, and eyes that sparkled with the vestige of the beautiful girl she'd been fifty years before. She was in her seventies now, and spent her winters on our key and her summers in the North Georgia mountain town of Blue Ridge. She'd been an internationally known reporter who had semiretired to her job on our local paper. She had traded the reporting of international incidents for taking pictures of self-satisfied partygoers holding drinks and smiling vacuously for her ever-present camera. She always seemed amused by her job and the people she covered. It wasn't the same as reporting on heads of state, but it suited her and she was content to spend her winters slipping into parties and taking pictures and writing stories of this or that charity fund-raiser.

I walked the short distance from my house to the restaurant and was sweating in the August heat by the time I arrived. Dora was just pulling into the parking lot, so I waited at the door for her.

“Matt, you must be nuts, walking in this heat.”

“Well, it was only a couple blocks.”

“Yeah. In this heat.” She walked through the door shaking her head. We took a seat by the windows overlooking the bay. A waiter came and took our order, a salad for Dora and a burger for me. He brought our drinks a minute or two later and disappeared into the dark reaches of the kitchen.

“Why are you here this time of the year?” I asked. “Aren't you usually still in the mountains?”

“Yes, but I had to come home for a few days to take care of some business matters. I'm headed back tomorrow.”

“So,” I said, “why no story about the murders on
Dulcimer
?”

“By the time I could write it, it wasn't a story.”

“What do you mean?”

“The
Observer
is a weekly. Our absolute drop-dead deadline is Tuesday evening. I was on the boat on a Monday evening. The story would have to be set up on Tuesday to be in that week's paper. It wasn't supposed to be much of a story. And it wouldn't have been without the murders. Just something to fill space during the summer dearth of news on the key.”

“Why were you even here? Don't you usually go to Blue Ridge in May?”

“Usually. But I was having some work done on my house and it was taking longer than expected. So I stayed put for an extra couple of weeks.”

“So, why didn't you write the story on Tuesday?”

“I was in the hospital.”

“What?” I was surprised. I hadn't heard that Dora had been hurt.

“It was nothing. When
Dulcimer
ran aground, I was knocked off my feet. Pete Collandra was one of the medics on the scene and he sent me to the hospital to be sure I hadn't hurt something important. I got out the next day, but it was too late to write the story. By the following week it was old news. Thus, no story.”