Dangerous Depths (29 page)

Talk then turned to the election, and by the
time I left Betty’s office, I’d gotten an earful about dirty island
politics. She’d gone on for a good half hour about the anonymous
calls that the paper had received implicating Abernathy, the
candidate running against Freeman, in everything from homosexual
affairs to jay walking. She’d been the one to check the stories
out.

“Nothing to any of it. Abernathy’s a good
man. He doesn’t stand a chance against Freeman though. He doesn’t
have the money to throw at this campaign that Freeman does. Don’t
know how Freeman pulls it off—sure he has money, but most of it is
tied up. Must have a big piggy bank somewhere. Of course, I’m
checking it out. And if Billings knew something that got him killed
and it’s connected to Freeman…jeez.”

Betty was putting a fresh coat of hot pink
polish on her nails when I left. I stopped at Abe’s Lumber Company
and tracked down Abe in the back of the lumber yard. He was running
a forklift filled with bundles of plywood. When he saw me, he
turned off the engine and jumped down off the machine.

“No one but employees allowed back here,” he
said. “Don’t want nobody gettin’ flattened under a load of
wood.”

“Police,” I said. That’s all it took. We went
back to his office and he pulled out the accounts for Freeman while
I looked over his shoulder. He fingered through the bills. There
were no unusual charges or purchases with Billings’s signature.
When I’d asked him whether Freeman had ever questioned any of the
charges, Abe told me that neither Neville nor his accountant had
come in to go over the account. So, Freeman had lied about why he
had fired Billings.

***

I went back to the station and managed to
talk Stark into going out to Flower with me. I had to promise to
avoid all wakes, keep the speed down, and to buy Caribs and
calamari down at the docks when we got back.

I pulled the
Wahoo
up to one of the
moorings out in the bay at Flower and Stark and I motored to shore
in the dinghy. Stark wore one of those orange life preservers that
went over the head and hung around the neck—one of the most
cumbersome and uncomfortable lifesaving devices known to man,
especially when the thermometer was topping a hundred. He tried to
look nonchalant as he held fast to the ropes that ran along the
sides of the dinghy.

The boat dock on Flower was deserted. I
wondered where Freeman’s guard was. Stark pulled the lifejacket off
and threw it in the dinghy, his demeanor now restored to
hard-assed. We ignored the no trespassing signs and walked straight
through the trees to the main house. No one responded when we
knocked. I tried the door. Locked. Stark and I agreed that it would
be foolhardy to break in. Dunn would have a hard time explaining
what the hell we’d been doing, especially to someone like Freeman.
We walked around the grounds, checking the outbuildings. They too
were locked.

“What would possibly be in a shed worth
locking up and putting a guard on the island, no less?” I wondered
aloud. We still hadn’t seen the guy. Maybe Freeman had let him
go.

“Could be tools, boat engine, all sorts of
valuable stuff.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

We found nothing at all on the grounds that
indicated why Freeman would have wanted Teddy Billings off the
island, or why Teddy had been out here on several occasions
watching from his boat through binoculars and sometimes coming
ashore.

We walked back to the beach and along the
shoreline. Neither one of us knew what we were looking for.
Billings has told Betty Welsh that something was going on out here
that Freeman wanted kept hidden.

“Look at this.” Stark bent down to examine a
stake that had been pounded into the sand. “It’s a survey
stake.”

When we examined the area, we found more, an
entire layout for a large structure. It was an ideal spot, backed
against the trees and facing the beach. It looked too big to be a
house, but then Freeman might be in for opulence and an image once
he got elected.

Along the back edge of the staked area I
stumbled across a disturbed turtle nest. Hundreds of broken
eggshells were scattered in the sand.

“What the hell?” I squatted and examined the
area with a stick.

“Musta been rodents, maybe birds, got to the
nest,” Stark said.

“Freeman told Liam and Tom that there weren’t
any turtles nesting out here.”

“Maybe he never saw this nest.”

“Well, someone spread poison around it.” I
pointed the stick to a few pellets that were mixed into the sand.
“This is the same stuff that they are using over at the project on
Hermit.”

When we got back to the
Wahoo
, I
pulled out my dive gear and began suiting up.

“What do you think you’re doing, Sampson?”
Stark asked.

“LaPlante said the dead turtle on Billings’s
boat could very well have ingested rat poison. I’ve only seen the
poison at the project site, in Elyse’s office, and now on Flower.
But the thing is, that female turtle couldn’t have ingested it
while nesting. According to Liam and Tom, turtles forage in the
water, not on shore. They go to shore for only one reason and
that’s to lay eggs. If the dead turtle on Billings’s boat got into
this poison, it wouldn’t have been while nesting.

I pulled my mask over my face and rolled into
the water. It was shallow here in the bay, no more than thirty
feet, and absolutely clear. The bottom was sandy from the shore all
the way out past the moorings, with patches of turtle grass—long
slender green blades, sprinkled with sand. Farther out were coral
formations.

I skimmed over the turtle grass, hovering
just off the bottom and keeping my fins from stirring up sand. It’s
amazing what one can encounter in turtle grass. Sea cucumbers,
conch, starfish lay in the sand among the blades. But what was
really amazing were all the wax pellets scattered among them. I
pulled a plastic bag out of one of my vest pockets and was filling
it with pellets from the ocean floor when I heard a boat
approaching. When I surfaced, a dinghy had pulled alongside the
Wahoo
.

Stark was arguing with the driver, Freeman’s
guard. I removed my fins and weight belt and threw them in the
Wahoo
, then climbed up on the back transom, pulling off my
mask and dive vest.

When the guy saw I’d been diving, he went
ballistic.

“Can’t be divin’ out here. Mr. Freeman finds
out, he have my hide.”

“How come you weren’t keeping an eye on the
place?” I already knew the answer to that question. He had a welt
forming on the side of his neck and a slash of frosty orange
lipstick on his chin.

Back in Road Harbor, Stark and I stopped at
the Calamari Cart, a dockside vendor that mimicked a city hot-dog
stand, except this one sold fried calamari in those red-and-white
checkered cardboard containers. I inhaled half a basket of fried
calamari and a beer. Stark had already consumed three overflowing
baskets of the stuff and was starting on his fourth when I left.
Once he filled up, he was going back to question Eleanor Billings
about the poison out at Flower. I was going to talk to Neville
Freeman.

Freeman’s office was in a new, three-story
building down on Nibbs Street. The building was typically
island—bright pink, pink roof, lush with hibiscus and
bougainvilleas. A gold plaque on the front exterior was labeled
“The Freeman Building.” I went inside and checked the directory.
Neville’s offices occupied the entire second floor.

A receptionist was sitting at a desk in the
waiting room that opened up at the top of the stairs. Freeman was
just coming out of his office—with O’Brien, of all people. I didn’t
like it.

“Guess you’re here to see me, not Peter,”
Freeman said, lecherousness in his tone. “Why don’t you have a seat
in my office while I walk Peter out.”

“Great. I’ll talk to you later, O’Brien,” I
said. I walked to the window and saw the two of them emerge from
the building. I went over to Freeman’s desk and, with the eraser
end of a pencil, nonchalantly pushed around the papers that layered
the desktop. Most appeared to be campaign material.

I took another quick peek out the window.
O’Brien and Freeman were standing on the sidewalk and it looked
like they were arguing. I could hear Freeman’s receptionist down
the hall shooting the breeze with another woman. I hurried back and
started shuffling through the stack of paper in the basket on the
corner of the desk. At the bottom, I found a contract. It was for
the transfer of Flower Island to a company called ASR
Associates.

I slipped it back in place when I heard
Freeman’s angry voice directed at his receptionist. He was giving
her grief about the length of her coffee breaks. I was standing at
the window admiring the view when he walked in.

“Have a seat, Detective Sampson. I hope this
is a social call and not business.” Freeman was too intent on
studying my legs to look me in the eyes. I knew he was wishing my
shorts were a whole lot shorter. I, however, wished they were a
whole lot longer. I got right to the point.

“Detective Stark and I were out on Flower
today.”

“What were you doing out there? You don’t
have any right to go on the island without my permission,” Freeman
said, his lust quickly turning to anger.

“We went out looking for you,” I lied. “I was
hoping to ask you a few more questions about Teddy Billings.”

“I told you to make an appointment. Besides,
there’s nothing else I can tell you.”

“Well, he did work for you and some things
have come up since we last spoke.”

“ ‘Did’ is the operative word here.” He stood
behind his desk, knuckles on the surface in a pose that was meant
to intimidate.

“I’d just like to confirm a few things,” I
said. “He’d been with you for how long?”

“A couple of years, but I didn’t know him
except in terms of his work on Flower. He and his wife lived in the
cottage in back. I rarely saw him, except in passing. He knew what
needed to be done around the place without a lot of guidance from
me.”

“You said that he’d been charging huge sums
on your account, but I talked with Abe down at the lumber yard. He
says no one from your office ever checked on the account and there
was no indication of a problem with Billings doing any excessive
charging. Why did you think he was stealing?”

“I’m afraid you’d have to ask my accountant,
but don’t expect access to my private finances, Ms. Sampson.”

“Billings told Betty Welsh that something was
going on out a Flower. Want to explain what?”

“Nothing but Billings looking to get even.
What better way than to have Welsh print some dirt about me in the
island newspaper and threaten my candidacy.” He was leaning over
his desk now, eyes glaring. “In terms of his murder,” he went on,
“I have no idea, but it’s pretty obvious Billings had a temper. And
it’s also obvious to me at least that he was a thief. Maybe he
stole from the wrong person.”

When I asked him why Billings was hanging out
around the island, Freeman shrugged and said he wouldn’t be
surprised if Teddy was looking for the chance to come ashore when
they were gone and get even, maybe vandalize the place.

“Sylvia told me he was drunk when he was out
there the last time, but the coroner didn’t find a trace of alcohol
in his system,” I said.

“Don’t know where she got that idea.”

“She said you told her.”

“She’s mistaken. And there is nothing more I
can tell you about Billings.”

“One other thing,” I said before he had a
chance to end the conversation. “We came across some rat poison out
there. What’s that all about?”

“I hired a fellow to get rid of the rats.
They’ve become a real problem.” Freeman didn’t miss a beat.

“Did you think about asking for assistance
from the woman doing the eradication on Hermit Cay?”

“My guy knows what he’s doing.”

“Why are the pellets scattered all over the
bottom of the bay then?”

He hesitated for just a split second.
“Evidently, one of the boxes broke on the deck of the boat and the
pellets were swept into the water.”

Freeman acted surprised when I told him about
the disturbed turtle nest.

“In the fifty years I have lived on that
island, I have never seen a turtle nesting and I’m sure there will
never be another. It was a fluke. I imagine rats got into it. You
can see why I want to get rid of them.” God, Freeman had a quick
answer for everything. Perfect politician.

“I hear you’re selling the island?”

“I don’t know where you heard that, but it’s
rubbish.”

I didn’t think it was wise to tell him I’d
been rifling through his desk. Freeman was getting really pissed,
red splotches surfacing under his dark skin.

“Now, Detective, if you don’t mind, I have a
meeting.” He’d finally had enough. He stood and ushered me to the
door.

“You know I can offer you a very lucrative
position on the police force, once I’m elected,” he said, his tone
shifting from indignation to something worse—a damned purr. “But I
need to know that you are a team player.” He was standing with his
hand on the doorknob. He actually put the other one around my
waist. I pushed him away and glared.

“Don’t cross me, Detective,” he said, and
opened the door.

“Is that a threat, Neville?”

“Just a friendly suggestion.”

***

O’Brien was sitting in the shade waiting for
me when I came out of Freeman’s building.

“How about a walk?” he said as he stood and
took my arm, not giving me a choice.

“I don’t know why you are supporting that
asshole,” I said. “He’s a womanizer and he’s corrupt. He actually
offered me a better position on the force if I would be a ‘team
player,’ as he put it.”

“I agree. In fact that’s why I was up at his
office. I told him that I had decided against endorsing him. I’ve
heard him talking out of both sides of his mouth during meetings
with various constituents. He’s trying to appease everyone, but
once he’s in office, it’s going to be his agenda.”