Treasure of Saint-Lazare (15 page)

“Thanks. I’ll try to see them both.”

At eight o’clock the parking lot was almost empty. Eddie counted twenty spaces, but only two were filled when he arrived  — a silver Buick about five years old, parked facing the offices, and an older pickup truck on the opposite side, near the back door of a restaurant. He chose a spot next to the Buick, directly in front of a sign listing the building tenants.

The Longboat Sentinel was one of eight names listed. Four spaces were blank, a foreshadowing of worse economic times to come. In addition to the Sentinel there were an accountant, a chiropractor, a fitness studio, what appeared to be a
candle and gift shop, and several others with cute names giving no hint of their business.

To get there he’d driven again across the new bridge and past the restaurant where he and Jen had eaten two evenings before, then for ten minutes up Gulf of Mexico Drive, the long and narrow main highway running behind the golf courses and expensive condos lining the beach. On its other side was a line of smaller, older condos, plus all the shopping and support businesses needed by a flourishing high-priced tourist destination, from grocery stores to dentists. He’d stuck carefully to the speed limit after Thom’s warning that the Longboat Key cops were particularly diligent about speeding.

He bounded up three steps to a long covered hallway leading between two rows of glass shop windows. Halfway to the end on the right he found the newspaper, its name shining on the inside of the door in bright gold leaf, incongruous next to the sheets of yellowing newspaper taped to the glass next to it.

As he opened the door he heard a chime at the end of a hallway, dingy in the semi-darkness. The newspaper-covered window seemed to be a way for the features editor to keep visitors from looking into her cubicle. Eddie didn’t think the mall had enough visitors to make that a big problem.

“You must be Mr. Grant from Paris.” A voice boomed at him from the depths of the hallway, and he looked up to see an enormous woman silhouetted in an office door at the end of the hall.

“I am,” Eddie responded. “And you must be Ms. Gaudet. I presume Thom Anderson reached you? I hope I’m not too early.”

“Lindy. I had a nice chat with Thom. Haven’t seen him for a couple of years, although I know his wife. He told me some about what’s going on. That was a shame about poor Mr. Castor. I really felt sorry for Jen.”

“You know her very well?”

“We used to run in the same circles. We were even married to the same man. Different times, of course, and long ago. Before I looked like this.” She reached down to pull at her skirt on both sides, emphasizing her bulk. Eddie figured she must weigh at least a hundred pounds more than she should.

“I didn’t know that. I knew Jen had been married, but …”

“It’s ancient history. He was a dashing surgeon when I met him. He swept me off my feet before I learned I was the second trophy wife. In three years he kicked me out and Jen was the next one, same story. He’s still a randy old goat. He used to screw any woman who was remotely willing, including some patients. I hear he’s still at it, but now he’s a big wheel in town and a little more careful.

“Anyway, you didn’t come all the way to Longboat to hear about my history. Come in and I’ll see if I can add anything to what you know. Thom gave me some idea of what you’re looking for.”

Lindy lowered her bulk slowly into a large chair of webbing material. He suspected her weight gave her back problems, which she was trying to solve with the special chair.

“Lindy, I’m just here for a few days. I’m not trying to get in the way of the Sarasota police or solve Roy Castor’s death, but there’s an old issue that involves my father. That’s what I’m trying to shed some light on, if there’s any to be shed. Once I do that I can go back home to Paris. Also, I need to ask for your promise of confidentiality in this. I could be blackening someone’s name unnecessarily and I don’t want to do that.”

“This is personal, not newspaper stuff. I won’t print it.”

He summarized his father’s work with Roy during the war and the letter Jen had found and delivered to him. He told her of the Germans’ effort to kidnap Jen in front of the wax museum, and of the documents hidden in the safe deposit vaults in Paris and Arcadia.

“So,” she said after he’d finished. “Somewhere out there is an old painting that would be worth a hundred million dollars or so if it should turn up, maybe plus other goodies Hans Frank set aside to finance the Fourth Reich. Is that about it?”

“That’s the broadest possible case. The painting may have been destroyed or taken by the Russians. There may not be any gold or jewels, or even a painting, and Hans Frank may have planned to take care of himself, not the next generation of Nazis. But someone obviously smells money and they’re willing to kill to find it. That concerns me a lot.”

“Thom’s coming around to the view that the painting and Roy’s death are related. Is that what you think?”

Eddie sat and thought for a minute, deciding how much to tell her. He wished he’d had more time to talk to Jen about her, to get a better feel for Jen’s view of her trustworthiness. He decided to be open with her.

“We know from a couple of witnesses that Roy was confronted by two men. We know he was either pushed in front of the SUV driven by a third man, in which case it was clearly intentional murder, or — more likely — he accidentally ran in front of it while trying to escape. I’m inclined toward the second, but in either case the police will treat it pretty much the same.

“We know that there were two witnesses. One of them was killed within an hour or two of the time I talked to him. Someone burned the home of the other witness, after threatening his wife and child with a large knife. And did I mention, the dead witness’s throat was cut with just such a knife? And now Jen’s home has been burned. It’s all too similar to be completely coincidental.”

“Jeez. When I came here Sarasota was dead dead dead — as my favorite singer put it, dead as heaven on a Saturday night. Now we have Germans and Nazis and mysterious deaths. I don’t like it at all. What can I do to help?”

The door chimed and Lindy got up to see who had come in.

“It’s the feature writer and the layout man. We go to press tomorrow, so today’s a busy day for him, and his office is right next door to mine. These places have chicken-coop walls, too. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Up the Key to Harry’s. For my money it’s the best restaurant in or around Sarasota, and they open for breakfast. This time of year we’ll be able to get a table in the corner and not have people around us listening in.”

One of the new arrivals had turned on the hallway lights while Eddie and Lindy were talking, revealing two dozen framed newspaper pages showing the cream of Sarasota society at one black-tie event or another. To him, they all looked the same.

“Take a look at this one,” Lindy said, grabbing at his sleeve. “This was a cerebral palsy benefit in…” she squinted at the date at the top of the page “… 1992. There at the top right is Jen, with the banker she was dating at the time. He’s no longer around since his bank failed ten years ago.” She pointed out a slightly older version of the girl Eddie had met twenty years before. She was more mature, more obviously a woman, lovely in a green silk sheath.

“And this one is me.” The woman she pointed to looked almost nothing like the Lindy of 2008, certainly no more than a distant cousin. She was slim, with dark hair, and wearing a brilliant ruby evening gown. She was on the arm of a graying man Eddie figured was in his late 40s, a man with a look of confidence.

“That was my surgeon husband. The next time we had this party it was Jen who went with him, and shortly after that she married him. It lasted three years, about as long as mine did. I went to these parties for a few more years but I was getting tired of them and of the people, but I never did get completely away from them. There’s a saying here that the price of entry into Sarasota society is a tux.”

Lindy struggled into the passenger seat of the rental car and directed Eddie back onto Gulf of Mexico Drive, where they turned north. After a few minutes they parked next to Harry’s, a complex of converted residences with an outdoor patio facing a quiet side street.

“Nice,” Eddie said. “The outdoor tables make me feel right at home, except that we have more awnings than umbrellas.”

“You’ll be glad to have the umbrella later in the day. Let’s go inside where it’s air conditioned. It will be far too hot out here before we’re done.”

For the next hour, as Lindy ate two orders of pancakes with bacon and Eddie had one fried egg and multiple cups of coffee, she outlined her view of the political and power currents in Sarasota.

“And now,” she said at last, “we get to your man of the hour, Al Sommers.”

Eddie said, “The man I saw didn’t look like a killer or a major-league international conspirator. But I know he’s not completely truthful because I’ve caught him in a couple of flagrant and important lies. And his friend Sonny gave me the creeps. Is that still an American expression?”

Lindy looked directly at Eddie. “It is, and he gives me the creeps, too. There is absolutely nothing bad you could say about Al Sommers that might not be true, emphasis on might. For most of us there are moral and behavioral red lines we won’t cross. I don’t think he has those. He’s basically a weak man with no moral brakes. Nothing you’ve described to me is impossible.

“You seem like a nice young man. I know this is important to you because it’s something your father wanted, but you need to be very, very careful. The threat you had in Paris and the chase out of Arcadia should tell you there’s something bad going on. Thom will probably solve the murder within a few days, but for now my advice is that you get back to Paris, and don’t tell anyone but Thom until after you’ve left.”

Eddie sat back, surprised. While he’d not heard good things about Sommers from anyone, this was the first time anyone had voiced what he was beginning to believe, that Sommers, whether he was directly involved in the Paris attack or not, was probably directly behind the attempt to kidnap Roy.

“Within limits I can take care of myself. But I need to know more about him. Can you help me with that?”

Lindy paused and took another sip of coffee. She looked down at the cup and said, “Good.”

“Al Sommers is a man with an extremely well developed sense of entitlement, like a lot of business executives. He has really bad taste in people and he’s been responsible for a couple of his friends and fellow investors going bankrupt. One of those killed himself. I think the prosecutor looked closely at him when his bank failed but decided the evidence just wasn’t strong enough to bring a Republican party stalwart to trial for fraud.

“He started a little community bank a year or two after he moved here from West Texas, where he was in the oilfield service business. He sold that business for a considerable amount of money — I was told it was around five million — and came here to make his fortune bigger yet. Keep in mind that he was already pretty old. That would have been the mid-nineties so he would have been in his late seventies, fifteen years older than I am. He wormed his way into politics and society, but on the side he collected some really strange friends.”

Lindy told how Sommers had brought with him one of his employees, a skinny man named Mark Perry, whom she called “Mr. Fixit.” She indicated some of the things he fixed weren’t completely legal.

“Then after a couple of years Mark died and things got even stranger. Pretty soon Mark’s son, known only as Sonny — you met him — showed up with his Russian boyfriend. They bought a big house in Naples. The story was that it was halfway between Sonny’s work in Sarasota and Dmitri’s roots in Miami. Informed rumor says he’s a collector and enforcer for the Russian mafia.

After that, she said, Sommers hired an East German couple to live in a small house on his property. They were never seen in public but the accepted story is that Sonny fills in for them when they are off duty.

“There were tales of stolen gold and silver of unknown provenance, probably Nazi. People said that would fit Sommers’s personality. Around ten years ago the FBI came around asking some questions about him, but nothing came of it as far as I know.

“By that time he was a big man about town in politics, and a high liver. About the time of the Internet bubble his picture was in the local daily when he presented an old German chalice to the priest of the largest Catholic church in town. He said he’d bought it on a vacation trip back to where he’d been during the war, but there were suspicions that he’d looted it when he was in Germany the first time and had been sitting on it since.

“That was about the time he and some friends were raising money to start the bank. Unfortunately they started too late and within a couple of years the real estate market here was softening, big time. Even if the casual homebuyer or newspaper reader didn’t see it, the real estate insiders saw the storm brewing, or at least some of them did. They were busily reducing their own exposure at the same time they were selling thousands of new houses to unsuspecting northerners every year.

“Al got lucky. After a few years his colleagues on the board were up to here with his anti-semitism and very extreme right-wing views.” She ran her hand across her eyebrows. “He wanted to close all the public schools, stop all food stamps, cut taxes even further on the rich, raise them on the middle class. And it was all done in a hostile, snarly tone. Eventually they had enough and told him he had to leave. He said OK, but only if they paid cash for his stock. He took out two or three million dollars. That was two years ago.

“Last year the FDIC showed up one fine Friday afternoon and closed down the bank. Those partners who’d borrowed money to buy his stock, or a couple of them anyway, were bankrupt, while he had cash. One of them killed himself. Al paid off the family to keep it out of court. I don’t know what he has left, but I’d guess not much.”

They sat for a few minutes while he sorted out what she’d told him.

“I need to go track down Woody. And I appreciate your advice but I’ll be here at least another day, although tomorrow I’m flying to Washington for the day to do some background research. I am concerned about Jen, though. I think they’ve tried twice to kidnap her.”

“My guess is she’ll be perfectly safe here.”

Eddie thought about Lindy’s parting words as he drove back down Gulf of Mexico Drive. At 7:30 there had hardly been any cars on the road, but close to noon it was crowded and humming. He quickly counted four sidewalk cafés on St. Armand’s Circle, three of them nearly full.