Fatal Decree (8 page)

Jeff had worked as a busboy at The Place for several weeks and had come to understand the system the proprietor used to handle the nightly receipts. He was convinced that the owner was skimming the take, sending most of the money to the bank by armored car shortly after closing each morning, but taking a substantial part of the cash for himself, probably from the payoffs provided by the illicit drug entrepreneurs who worked the floor. It was a neat way to cheat the tax man, and even a detailed audit would have shown that the money generated by the sale of food and alcohol was sent to the bank and duly accounted for.

On the night that Jeff decided to stake his real estate empire, he hid in a closet after closing. He heard the armored car pull into the alley behind the club, and listened to the conversation between the owner and the driver. When the driver was gone, Jeff stole out of the closet and walked down the short corridor to the office. His face was completely covered by a Halloween mask that looked like Bill Clinton. He carried the Glock nine millimeter he’d stolen during a burglary two weeks before.

Jeff stopped at the door to the office. There were voices, a low conversation coming from inside. He had not expected anyone else to be there. He stood silently for a beat, then shoved the door open gun in hand, pointing inward.

The owner stood stock-still, an amused look on his face. Another man stood across the room holding a pistol, pointed at Jeff. He was one of the bouncers who stood nightly at the front door. The man fired, hitting Jeff in the left shoulder. Jeff fired at the same time, hitting the bouncer in the heart. A lucky shot? It saved Jeff’s life, but put him in jail for fifteen years.

The owner pulled his own gun and stuck it in Jeff’s face while he used his cell phone to call the police. Jeff was in too much pain from the bullet in his shoulder to resist.

Jeff was initially charged with first-degree murder, but it turned out that the bouncer had a checkered history and warrants for his arrest were outstanding in three states. The state attorney agreed to a plea to manslaughter with a fifteen-year sentence and no chance of parole. Jeff served every minute of it and had been released from prison on June 1, five months before.

On the day Jeff walked down the steps of the Sarasota County Judicial Center, he had no understanding of any legal doctrine and would be unable to answer even the most rudimentary legal questions. That did not present a problem to him. He had no intention of practicing law, counseling clients, appearing in court, or, heaven forbid, going to a local bar function where as best he could figure, lawyers gathered to drink and brag about the cases they had won.

When he was released from prison, Jeff had a mission. While not absolutely necessary, his being a lawyer would make his tasks easier to accomplish, and he didn’t have time to spend seven years at some university. At the beginning of October, he was told of a young man named Ben Flagler who had finished law school and sat for and passed the Florida bar exam. Jeff was assured that Flagler had no family and no friends in the area. He was from North Dakota and had gone to school there. His parents had been killed in a car wreck while he was in his second year of law school. He had no siblings, and if he had cousins or other family, he’d never met them. He decided that sunny Florida was a better place to practice law than the Dakotas, so he applied for the Florida bar exam and took it in August. When the results were posted in late September, the young man from North Dakota was among those who passed.

Flagler rented a furnished apartment in Sarasota, dealing with the real estate agent through the Internet and by e-mail. Jeff was made aware of all these small details by his client, and he marveled, not for the first time, at the client’s ability to acquire information. On the day Flagler showed up to move into the apartment, Jeff was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa, a silenced pistol in his hand. Flagler walked in the front door and Jeff shot him in the head. He waited until dark and moved the body into the trunk of his car. He drove east, out Fruitville Road past I-75 to an intersection that held a closed gas station. As instructed, he pulled behind the station
and waited. In a few minutes, an old Buick approached, blinked its lights twice, and pulled in next to Jeff.

“You got the package?” asked the man behind the wheel of the Buick.

“In the trunk,” said Jeff, and reached over and pushed the button that released the trunk lid.

The other man wrestled the body out of Jeff’s trunk and into the Buick’s. “That one’ll keep the gators’ bellies full for a few days,” he said.

Jeff got into his car and drove away without answering. He went back to the apartment Flagler had rented and went to bed. The next morning he would present himself to a judge at the courthouse and show the North Dakota driver’s license with his picture on it that identified him as Ben Flagler, and be sworn in as an attorney and counselor-at-law, duly licensed to practice law in the state of Florida.

It was this chain of events that brought Jeff Worthington, now known as Ben Flagler, Esquire, to the Sarasota County Judicial Center on a beautiful November day. Not bad, Jeff thought, for a kid from the projects. A small cloud of fear sliced through his brain taking the luster off the day. There had already been a problem, and now he had to report to his client, try to explain the fuckup to the man he knew only as the controller.

Monday morning. The village was alive with people leaving for work. One of the things I like best about being a beach bum is that I didn’t have to join them. I was drinking coffee on the patio and reading the morning paper when Jock came out, a steaming cup in hand.

“Have you talked to your people yet?” I asked.

“I let the director know we’d gotten the one we think killed Nell, but I want to wait until we hear from forensics and get an ID on the dead guy before I give him a full report.”

“You think there’s more to this than just the guy you shot?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what. We’ve still got some digging to do.”

“Want to go for a run?”

“Sure. What about the statements?”

“I’ll take my phone. If we get the call, we’ll come back.”

We ran on the hard-packed sand of the beach, leaching the lethargy out of our systems. If you weren’t careful, the desultory rhythms of the key would overtake you, turn you into a couch potato or worse. When there was no schedule, no plan to your existence, the sheer randomness of life would overwhelm you and turn you into a TV-watching, booze-swilling barfly. Running seemed to give some purpose to my existence, a way to corral the uncertainty of the day, to know that there was at least one thing I had to accomplish each day. Four miles on the beach. A tiring, sweating, balls-to-the-wall run. Then I’d slip back into beach bum mode.

We finished our run at the North Shore Road access ramp and walked back through the village to my home. The peacocks that roamed the area were out in force that morning, pecking at the lawns and shrubs,
occasionally letting out one of their raucous cries. They were pretty, but messy, and the village people were a bit schizoid about them. They liked the image of the birds running free in the neighborhood, but hated the mess they made and the god-awful noise. And the birds bred faster than rabbits. Every few years, the flock was thinned, and many of the birds were taken to a farm out in the east end of the county. For a while, a relative peace would fall over the village, but soon enough, the little buggers would start procreating again, and the problems would start all over.

As we were nearing my house, J.D. called. “The forensics people are finished with Nell’s BMW. Found some interesting stuff, but it didn’t answer many questions. The only fingerprints that didn’t belong in the car were the dead guy’s. A man named Pete Qualman, twenty-three years old, did time at Glades Correctional. He was released on parole two months ago. Never checked in with his probation officer.”

“What was he in for?” I asked.

“Held up a convenience store in Orlando when he was eighteen. Got six years and released in five.”

“Any connections to Miami?”

“None that we can find. Guy lived in Orlando his whole life. Dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and mostly worked at fast-food joints and did drugs.”

“Anything else in the car?”

“A couple spots of blood that were definitely Nell’s. The techs think she was probably shot while she was sitting in the driver’s seat. We’re thinking that when she came out of Pattigeorge’s, the killer was hunched down in the back seat. She probably died right there in the parking lot.”

“At least it was quick,” I said.

“Yeah. They also found some rope that matched the one Nell was bound with and some boat keys that matched the stolen boat. Another interesting tidbit was the mileage on the car. Nell had her oil changed at the BP station on the south end of the key Friday afternoon. The little sticker they put on the window, you know the one that reminds you when your three thousand miles is up and you need more oil, didn’t jibe with the odometer. Somebody put a little over three hundred miles on it after the oil change. I don’t think Nell did that after she left the BP.”

“Did you check the time of the service?”

“Of course I checked. She paid with her VISA card at five fifteen Friday afternoon. And her neighbor told me that the BMW was in the driveway of Nell’s house between six and eight, because the neighbor was sitting on her front porch chatting with her husband during the entire two hours.”

“What about the gun that was used to kill Nell?” I asked.

“Nowhere to be found. He must have ditched it somewhere. I ran the ballistics through all the federal databases, and there’s no indication that the gun has been used in a shooting anywhere in the country since it was used to kill the Miami victims.”

“Any thoughts on how he came into possession of that particular gun?”

“No. And that scares the hell out of me. Where did he go in that BMW after he killed Nell? And where did he get the gun, and what did he do with it? He’s too young to have been involved in the Miami murders. Was he just a killer hired by the real Miami murderer? If so, where is the real killer, and why does he want me dead?”

“This isn’t doing my indigestion any good. Did you get anything from Miami yet?”

“Not yet. It should be along shortly.”

“What about the statements?”

“An FDLE agent’s coming down from Tampa. He’ll talk to me and then he’ll meet with you and Jock. I’ll call you when he gets here. Bye.”

I related the information to Jock.

“Doesn’t sound good, podna. Maybe I shot the wrong man. It’s obvious that he’s not the killer from Miami.”

“It’s also pretty obvious that he’s the one who killed Nell.”

“It could be just a fluke that the pistol ended up in Qualman’s hands. Or maybe, the killer from Miami is running this show and wanted to let J.D. know that he’s still out there.”

“And you want the guy who ordered the hit.”

“Damn right. It’s an article of faith in the agency that if you take out one of us, you pay the price. You die. And that applies to our families.”

“You shot the right man. It just might not be the one you wanted most.”

J.D.’s call came an hour later. The FDLE agent was at the police station and ready to speak to us about the shooting. He met us in the lobby and identified himself as Don Fielding. He wanted to talk to Jock first, so I spent a few minutes reading an ancient magazine I found in the lobby. Jock came out and said the agent was ready for me.

“That was quick,” I said.

“He took one look at my credentials, called the number in Washington, and then talked about Florida State football for a while. He seems a bit obsessed with it.”

I laughed. Jock carried credentials identifying him as a special agent of the president of the United States and giving him extraordinary powers. Jock told the agent to call a phone number in Washington, D.C. The number was to an office in the White House and the person who answered told the agent not to question Jock. He also told the agent that the agent’s boss in Tallahassee would call him right back. Fielding got the call within a minute, recognized the voice of the director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said yes sir, hung up, and turned the conversation to football.

I didn’t have any credentials, so I spent the better part of an hour with Agent Fielding, answering all his questions. He was an astute interviewer, and by the time we finished, he knew exactly what I knew about what happened. We discussed Jock’s actions in protecting J.D., and Fielding seemed satisfied that Jock had done the right thing. He told me he would recommend that the FDLE find that the actions of a private citizen, one Jock Algren, who held a concealed weapons permit, were taken to protect the life of a police officer and were fully justified. In short, a righteous
shooting. We were finished. We shook hands and Fielding said, “Nice to meet you. Go ‘Noles.” I left, shaking my head.

It was almost noon, and I was getting hungry. I stuck my head into J.D.’s office and asked if she wanted to go to Mar Vista for lunch. She shook her head. “Sorry, Matt. I’m going through the information Miami-Dade e-mailed me. I’ll touch base later. I want Jock to see what we have. So far, I can’t make much sense out of it.”

Jock and I were pulling into the Mar Vista parking lot when my phone rang. Blocked number. Probably Agent Fielding wanting to talk football. I answered.

“Matt, David Parrish.” The deep voice rumbled over the circuits, tempered with the accents inculcated into him during a childhood in Statesboro, Georgia. The many years he had lived in Orlando had not robbed his voice of the richness of the Old South.

“Damn, it’s good to hear your voice. It’s been too long.”

“It has been too long, but I’m afraid I’m calling on business. Do you have time for lunch?”

“Sure. When?”

“How about now?”

“Where are you?”

“Just crossing the Cortez Bridge.”

“Come on to the Mar Vista. Jock Algren’s with me. We’ll meet you there. You know where to go?”