Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay (19 page)

He padded away before I could respond. I followed him into a long hallway with several rooms on either side. We passed an open door and I spotted a large four-poster bed. Another room was bare except for some plastic storage tubs and a set of weights. His office was a dimly lit twelve by twelve room with a threadbare oriental rug covering the hardwood floor. Three computers, two Dell PCs and an iMac with a large monitor, were lined up on an eight-foot folding table; their power cords neatly bundled with plastic ties. Along with two filing cabinets and a bookcase, the room had four speakers mounted in each corner connected to a compact audio system. A tall rack of cd’s hovered over the components.

“This is where the magic happens,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “I already have some great ideas for your website. Man, you’ll be amazed what this will do for your business. Quint Mitchell, super PI.”

Grimes grinned and spread his arms over his head as though unveiling a banner advertising my business. I almost hated to tell him why I was really there. Almost.

“Denny, I’m not here to talk about a new website.”

“You’re not? But I thought you said—”

“Maybe I misled you. I needed to talk to you about William Marrano’s murder.”

He stiffened, his mouth working like a fish out of water. “What the hell,” he sputtered. “What the hell, man. Do you think I had something to do with that jerk-off’s death?”

“I didn’t say that, Denny. I’m just following up on all possibilities. That includes talking to people who might have had a motive for—”

“You’re full of shit if you think I had anything to with killing Marrano. Poe’s the man, isn’t he?”

“I don’t believe Poe killed Marrano, and neither does Marrano’s wife. She hired me to help find who did it.”

“You can believe what you want, but you’re not laying this on me.”

Grimes’ arms were at his side, fists clenched. His knees were slightly bent, making him even shorter, and I eased one leg behind the other, adjusting my body weight, in case he charged me. He may have been eight inches shorter than me, but he was compact and muscular. I’d seen the damage some of these small guys could do when you pissed them off.

“Cool down, Denny. No one’s accusing you of anything. I’ve been talking with a lot of people. Someone is framing Jeffrey Poe and I’m just looking for leads.”

“I should lead you out the front door. After I kick your ass for lying to me.” He scratched at his bearded chin, and I heard him inhale, his chest rising and falling.

“Hey, I’m sorry about lying. I just want to talk.”

Some of the tension seemed to leave his body. “So let’s talk.”

We returned to the living room where he dropped into a large easy chair. I sat facing him on a high-backed couch covered with a faded floral design and matching pillows.

“Sure, I had a hard-on for Marrano,” he said. “The prick got me fired. I’d been with the city for twelve years. Worked my way up to head of the IT Department.”

“Why did he have you fired?”

“You want the official reason? Gross insubordination. Failure to follow city guidelines. Fucking goats on city time. You name it. It was all bullshit.” Grimes glared at me, all the while pressing one hand down against his other hand, doing some kind of isometric exercise while he talked. The muscles in his forearms bunched and corded like strands of steel cable.

“So tell me the real reason.”

He thought about it for a few seconds, his face going slack. “I’m not sure. Guess the piss ant just didn’t like me.”

“Come on,” I said, “there must be more to it than that. What was the last thing you worked on?”

“Marrano asked me to pull together everything in our system on a piece of property the city owned.”

“You mean the property the St. Johns Group bought?”

“No, I’m talking about Ripley’s Believe It or Not. What the hell do you think?”

I ignored his sarcasm and asked, “What did he want to know?”

“How long had the city owned it. How much we paid for it. Other real estate surrounding the city’s property. He wanted to know the entire history of the site, whether any toxic chemicals had been stored there. What had been on the property before we bought it? Like I said, everything I could find.”

“This doesn’t sound like a job for IT.”

His eyes met mine, narrowed. His shoulders hunched as he leaned forward. “You think I’m just some button pusher? All hardware and no software? I have lots of smarts, asshole. Probably a higher IQ than you.” The tone of his voice told me this was one of Denny’s hot buttons.
Poor little man, underestimated and underappreciated
.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything,” I said.

“My job was more than showing screw-ups how to use their email or loading new software into the computers. Before I took over the IT department, I coordinated a project to gather information files from every department and construct a central database. It took us almost three years.”

He puffed out his chest and thrust his jaw up in the same defiant gesture I’d seen at Poe’s house.

“That was it? You ran a report on the old motor pool property and they fired you?”

“Pretty much. Remember this was before the city announced they were going to sell the property, but I’d heard the scuttlebutt. Hard to keep secrets in city hall. I figured Marrano’s a real estate guy, right? He was probably looking for a way to cash in. He knew the area would take off after the developers began turning dirt.”

“Seems like Marrano could have found this out himself since that’s his business.”

“That’s what I thought, so I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“Asshole gets all huffy with me. Tells me it’s none of my business. I might have said a few things back to him in my defense. Next thing I know, Mayor Hal comes to me and says they’re cutting my budget and I have to take a twenty-five percent pay cut.”

“That’s pretty steep.”

“You think? They weren’t paying me a hell of a lot to start with. I told them to go fuck themselves. Well, not in those words, of course. Next thing I know, I’m out on my ass.” Grimes released his hands and settled back in the chair, his legs dangling inches above the floor.

“Sounds like you got royally shafted,” I said. “Are you sure Marrano instigated your early retirement?”

“Had to be. So, yeah, I didn’t exactly grieve when I heard the news Poe had killed him. He did us all a favor.”

“Except Poe didn’t do it.”

Grimes attempted to stare a hole in my face before breaking into a lopsided smirk. “Loyalty is one thing, Mitchell, but you’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment.”

“How so?”

“I’m just saying that Poe’s the man, whether you want to believe it or not.”

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people in my job. Maybe thousands. After listening to so many people, hearing their excuses, absurd alibis, and bald-face lies, I’ve developed a pretty good bullshit detector. Most liars are easy to spot. Body language, facial expressions, even eye movements give them away. Grimes was telling the truth.

“You seem pretty sure that Poe killed him. Almost like you know something.”

Grimes folded his arms across his chest and remained silent. I saw his face shift imperceptibly, lips pursing as though running a search program through his head, finding the data he was seeking, and deciding whether to tell me or not.

After a minute of silence, he finally said, “I’m an insomniac, okay. Sleep about three hours a night. Helps me get a lot of work done while the rest of the world is sleeping.”

“Okay,” I said, not sure where this was leading.

“When I get tired of playing with my computers I run. You probably didn’t know it, but I’ve run a few marathons; even did a triathalon last April.”

Grimes knew how to milk the moment, build the suspense. “Go ahead,” I said.

“I love to run through the old city in the middle of the night. No sun. No traffic. I hardly ever see anyone, but Sunday morning I did.”

He held my gaze, expecting a response from me. I didn’t disappoint. “You saw someone Sunday morning. What time and where?”

“I like to vary my route. Makes it interesting,” he said, ignoring my questions. “Sometimes I run along the bay front all the way up to the Visitor’s Center and back. That’s a great run. Sometimes I run through the center of the district, right in the middle of the street, not having to worry about traffic or those damn horse carriages.”

I tried again. “And on Sunday morning?”

He nodded to let me know he was getting to it. “The moon was nearly full, made it easier to see, which was why I selected the historic run, turning and twisting through the side streets instead of the main thoroughfares. It was about three-thirty in the morning and I was running full out along Cordova, not another soul around. I turned right onto Hypolita down by Scarlet O’Hara’s, raced through St. George Street, then Cathedral Place, my breathing steady and—.”

“I get the picture, Denny. You’re one running stud. Get to the point.”

Grimes jumped off the chair, and I thought he was going to do something foolish. I was right.

“Hey, watch this,” he said.

Grimes dropped to the floor and proceeded to do one-armed push-ups. He did fifteen of them before standing and displaying his bicep to me. “I can do that all day,” he said.

“Very impressive. Let’s go back to why you believe Poe killed Marrano.”

He smiled, all of his facial muscles stretching. A liar has a hard time with facial expressions. Their muscles tense up and a smile is obviously forced, using just their mouth rather than the entire face.

“Right. You know where Artillery Lane intersects with St. George?”

“Sure.”

“There’s the Parish Hall, a parking lot, and that fenced in area.”

“Uh huh.”

“Here’s the part you’ve been waiting for. I was hoofing it past the fenced area, heading toward the bay when I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“Poe. Haven’t you been following me?”

“Back up a minute. Where was he exactly and how do you know it was Poe?”

“He was behind the wall walking away from me toward your survey site. He probably heard my feet pounding the street, but he kept walking. A tall guy, carrying a shovel. One of the long-handled kind.” Grimes’ head bobbed a few times, and he shrugged as if that was the end of it.

“Let me see if I understand this. You’re hoofing it behind the church and you see a tall man walking away from you carrying a shovel. It’s the middle of the night. You don’t even see his face, but you know it’s Poe. Do I have it right?”

Grimes did his jaw-jutting trick again. “Glad to see you’ve been paying attention. Sure it was the middle of the night, but like I said, there was a moon and there are street lamps every hundred feet or so. And yes, I know it was Poe.”

“What makes you so sure if you didn’t see his face?”

“You know that big, floppy hat Poe always wears at his digs?”

I nodded, fearful of what he would say next.

“He had it on that night. No mistaking it. And I’ve never seen anybody else with a hat like that.”

TWENTY-SIX

Standing on Grimes’ front porch I listened as the heavy metal music resumed, an amped up guitar and gruff voice blasted from the house. I wondered if Grimes was doing his one-armed pushups again.

Across the street, a neighbor watered a leggy hibiscus while a pair of Yorkies ran along the edge of his lawn yammering in my direction. The man cut his eyes toward me and back to the hibiscus.

I felt sick to my stomach. Pain shot through my abdomen as I thought about what Grimes had told me. Could I have been so wrong about Poe? Had he been playing me for a fool this entire time? Maybe Buck Marrano was right about why Poe tried to kill himself.

I thought about all the dead ends I’d been pursuing, wondering why I couldn’t find evidence of anyone else’s involvement when the answer might have been sitting in a jail cell the whole time. Once again, I let my mind scroll through the details of Grimes’ eyewitness account. He may not have been lying, but that didn’t mean Poe was the man he saw. Grimes made an assumption based on seeing a tall guy wearing a hat similar to Poe’s. Poe is an inch or so shorter than me, but Grimes is five-foot six. To him, most men might seem tall.

I decided I should trust my own instincts and not give up on my friend. It would take more than Grimes’ early morning sighting to convince me Jeffrey Poe was a murderer. And I still wanted to question Henderson about his connection with Sternwald, the adoption attorney. But I made a mental note to ask Poe about the hat next time I saw him.

My meeting with Denny Grimes put me behind schedule. The St. Augustine City Commission meeting had already started. I drove through the historic district searching for a parking place before I found one around the corner from city hall. I ducked inside just as the first raindrops began falling. Upstairs, in the Alcazar Room where the St. Augustine City Commission held their meetings, I located a seat in the back near the door and gazed around the crowded room until I spotted Lemuel Tallabois staring at me. Tallabois leaned against the wall near the railing separating the commissioners from the common folk. His eyes were glued on mine and one corner of his mouth curled upwards in a smirk. As I watched, he slowly raised his right arm and pointed his forefinger at me, cocking his thumb like the hammer on a pistol.

I ignored Laurance’s thug and turned my attention to the meeting, which had already started. The commission normally met on the second and fourth Mondays of the month, but William Marrano apparently called this special meeting the week before his death. Henderson seemed to be the only one who thought Marrano had a change of heart about Matanzas Bay, but I was still curious about tonight’s meeting.

“Vice Mayor Marrano will be missed by all of us for his passion to make our city a great place to live,” Mayor Hal Cameron intoned. Cameron, a rotund, florid-faced man with a dark thatch of hair that did everything but scream
toupee
, wore a string tie over his navy blue polo shirt. He squinted at his notes. “Bill realized we were taking a radical departure from the way things had been done in the past and he called this special meeting, with my blessing, to reinforce the commission’s decision backing the St. Johns Group and the Matanzas Bay project.”