Tampa Star (Blackfox Chronicles Book 1) (14 page)

Most gangsters stole for a living because they were too stupid for honest labor
, thought Michael. 

Char cleared away the breakfast dishes
, returned with a carafe of coffee and refilled their cups. He fished out a box of cigarettes and light one with a battered Zippo. 

“So, what now?”
asked Michael.  

“I am going finish th
e scuba class tomorrow as that’s eight hundred bucks in my pocket. After that, I will be moving down south, probably take up residence near Fort DeSoto.  Meet me there the day after tomorrow about an hour before sunset and we’ll take a look around.”    

Char knew the gold had to be secreted somewhere near where the
Bull Market
was swept ashore, and he returned on occasion to search, but he had never been able to find out where it was hidden. For some reason, he felt that this would be changing sometime in the near future. 

* * *

A passing motel guest reported hearing “a loud commotion” coming from room Five.  “It sounded like the walls were being torn down and there was lots of shouting and I distinctly heard the F word several times,” the retired podiatrist from Oak Park, Illinois told the desk clerk.  After a short while, he distinctly heard two vehicles depart in a hurry.

The desk clerk checked the registration and found the registered guest.  It was one Morris Simpleton
s of Jersey City, N.J.  The clerk, who had not checked him in, checked for a credit card slip and found there was none indicating that the guest had probably paid in cash. 

Curious, the clerk locked up the office and approached the room, intending to register a noise complaint, inspect the premise and remind Mr. Simpletons that it was
fifteen minutes from check out time. As he approached the door, he could tell something was amiss as the door was ajar and the area around the door knob appeared to be smashed in.

The clerk cautiously approached, slowly pushed open the door and peered into the room. Lying prostrate on the bed were two men handcuffed back to back and one had a bloody towel duck taped to his head. The police were called approximately
thirty seconds later. 

Upon arrival, Deputy Randy Coolidge of the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Department quickly summoned an ambulance.  Both men appeared to be beaten
—the younger one had bruises on the face from what appeared to be fist blows and complained of pain in his kidney.  The older man had a five inch gash on the top of his head that would require ten or so stitches and a huge angry yellow, black and blue bruise on his forearm.

The two victims initially claimed to have been robbed, but a cursory search of the younger man turned up a .38 caliber snub nosed revolver and approximately six hundred and fifty dollars in currency. He would be taken into custody for lack of a permit to carry a firearm. 

Interestingly, a search of the older man produced a badge and identification card identifying him as a Deputy with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s department. He claimed no knowledge of who the other man was or how he had come to be handcuffed to the man. Both men were taken for treatment at the North Florida Regional Medical Center in High Springs. Deputy Coolidge was going to have the detectives talk to him prior to release as evidence seemed to indicate that there was more to the Deputy’s story than met the eye.  At the very least, he would be calling the Sheriff down in Pinellas County to suggest that they might want to keep an eye on Deputy Handley.

Detective Doyle sat in his small windowless office surrounded by mementos from over thirty five years of police work, mostly as a homicide detective, and felt tired. He was fifty eight years old, and had been a policeman for over half his life.  He wanted to retire when he hit forty years on the job, if his bum ticker held out that long.

Pinellas County Sheriff Department needed good detectives and Eddie was one of the best.  They called him Eidetic Eddie, as he was known for his uncanny ability to remember little details about cases that frequently resulted in an arrest and conviction.

In 1985, Eddie investigated the death of a prostitute on Rt. 19 in Dunedin. A drugged out hooker had fallen in front of an eighteen wheeler and was killed; pretty straight forward actually—death by Mack truck. For all intents and purposes, the case should have been an open and shut, and it would have been, if not for Eddie’s uncanny memory.

Eight years earlier, Eddie sat in on a roll call briefing concerning a pimp named Smooth Earl
, who carried an ivory cane with a handle made of a gold death head skull with red ruby eyes which was often used to motivate some of his girls to apply themselves harder.

A Medical Examiner had conducted a preliminary investigation of the prostitute’s corpse at the scene but didn’t notice anything strange at the time, until Eidetic Eddie pointed it out—among the many wounds on the woman’s horribly mangled body was a strange circular gash above her left eyebrow.
Upon closer examination, small gashes clearly denoted the eyes, nose and mouth of a skull. Better still—a small red ruby was deeply embedded in one of the wounds. 

An autopsy was ordered and it was determined that the blow above the eye had killed her and all the other injuries occurred postmortem. A subsequent search of Smooth Earl’s vehicle, a pimped out 1984 Ford LTD, turned up the cane with one missing ruby eye. Earl copped a plea to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life at the Okaloosa Correctional Institution.

It was said that Eddie’s short marriage to another officer ended because Eddie’s computer like recitation of everything that had ever happened to him, and to her for that matter, drove her to distraction—no anniversary or birthday was ever forgotten and most arguments about who said what were essentially rendered moot as Eddie’s version was always the most accurate. 

In a phrase, Eddie made his wife totally bat-shit crazy.  She asked for a divorce and quickly moved in with a motorcycle cop said to have a Neanderthal level I.Q—he heard they were quite happy.  Since then, Eddie bought a boat and took up fishing in the gulf.

After he was diagnosed with a heart murmur, Eddie made movement towards retirement, but his longtime friend, Sam Waller, who also happened to be the Pinellas County Sheriff, asked him to take a less hectic position in Internal Affairs.  He had been there for the last three years and although the pace was calmer, he found investigating other cops to be disagreeable.

The other cops seemed to feel the same way
— overnight, Eddie went from local celebrity to pariah.  Still, the hours were good; once and a while he would get called out for an officer involved shooting, but it was mostly a nine to five existence, with weekends free. Since he was representing the long arm of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department, he dressed in business casual, normally Khaki pants and an American Eagle Outfitters Polo Shirt—he had a different color for every day of the week. 

As a service revolver, Eddie wore an ancient stainless steel snub nose, Colt .38 left exposed on his belt.  The younger cops joked that Eddie would have better luck throwing the revolver at a suspect rather than shooting at them.

The Sheriff himself asked Eddie to have a talk with Deputy Guy Handley regarding “being found handcuffed to a thug in a cheap motel in High Springs.” The Sheriff, having a penchant for understatement, mentioned that the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident involving Handley seemed “a bit odd.”

Handley had been a problem child from the start, but they had never been able to prove anything against him. Rumor had it that he collected protection money or other services from the numerous massage parlors and strip clubs located within the county.  But that was just a rumor and without substantiation, stayed that way.

Handley was very careful to always have a reason for visiting a locale that might include checking to see that no minors were being served or that the maximum occupancy was being violated. He was always one step ahead of the regular Internal Affairs types. 

Eddie remembered Guy Handley.  How could he not? He remembered everyone he ever met, but Handley was an odd duck.  Eddie had been involved in a scuffle with a suspect that resulted in a dislocated collarbone and he was given admin tasks to do until he healed up. One of the more onerous tasks given him during light duty was the conduct of background investigations of new hires and Guy Handley was one of these.  Eddie quickly learned that Handley had been fired from the Tampa Police Force for excessive force a few years previously.

Still, that was a long time ago and the incident was not serious enough to warrant criminal charges. Just some punk who got a beating during an arrest, old style police work that Eddie did not specifically approve of, but he was familiar with the emotions that caused it.  “Testosterone poisoning,” his wife used to say.

He gave Handley the benefit of the doubt and put a positive spin on the background investigation—Pinellas Sheriff Department needed deputies at the time. Another thing that Eddie remembered about Guy Handley was that he was found trespassing on private property on Halloween Night in 1974. 

Even if he didn’t have an eidetic memory, he would have never forgotten that night. An unexpected storm battered the coastline with record producing waves and was later found to be responsible for the sinking of a local cruise ship, the
Star of Tampa.
Eddie was a patrol deputy at the time and had responded to a report of a prowler at a waterfront mansion in Tierra Verde. 

Handley was found soaking wet and semi-clothed, his shirt having been stripped off him in the heavy surf.  He was also beaten up and bloody and claimed to have fallen off a party boat and been
bashed on the rocks trying to make land.  Doyle and a partner gave him a ride to a local motel and that was the last official action taken in the case. 

Later that night, a fellow deputy apprehended an escaped bank robber by the name of James O’Brien, walking across the causeway and a large yacht was found washed ashore at Fort
DeSoto. What were the chances that any of these events were related to Guy Handley?  

The current incident was called in by a deputy up near Gainesville. It concerned Handley being found beat-up and
handcuffed to a twenty-something tattooed hoodlum in a local motel―kind of strange stuff. Looks to the contrary notwithstanding, the thug was clean—no rap sheet, no wants or warrants—at least one tied to the last name he gave upon his arrest. 

So, the plot thickened.  He figured that Handley would Lawyer Up before any interview as that was the standard operating procedure employed by the Pinellas County's police union. The rumor mill also claimed that Handley was an associate of Sally Boots, as he had been seen on numerous occasions in a strip club Sally owned by an undercover narc that Eddie had known for years. 

Whatever Handley was doing near Ginnie Springs might have had something to do with the old gangster. The association was deniable and he figured that he had little to gain by calling him in for an interview.  It would put Handley on notice that he was being watched, but little else.

The hood was spending time up in the Gainesville Jail thanks to an unregistered firearm found in his pocket.  There might be another way to approach this case, thought Eddie.  He might just take a trip to the Gainesville jail and stop by the Sherriff’s station near
Ginnie Springs just for good measure.

Eddie looked at the information sheet supplied by the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Department. The suspect’s name was Vito
Viticoltore. Eddie looked at the mug shot. The thug was wearing a wife-beater t-shirt, one without sleeves, sometimes called a muscle shirt.  He was heavily tattooed and looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym. 

Something about the thug’s last name struck him odd
.

“Hey, Falcon, what the fuck does
Viticoltore mean?” He shouted into the squad bay.  Mike Falcon, a short stocky detective in the burglary division stuck his head into Eddie’s office.  “How the fuck would I know? I was born in Maryland!”

“Come on, Cocksucker, I know your parents came right off the boat from Sicily” countered Doyle.

“Jeez, Eddie, did you ever once forget one thing?”

“You know the answer to that, now answer my question!”

“I think it means Winemaker.  Are you happy now, douchebag?” 

“Yes, yes I am,” replied Eddie. 

The next morning Eddie left his houseboat before the sun was up and arrived at the Gainesville Jail just after breakfast.  He had stopped at a Burger King off the Interstate and bought a sausage, egg and cheese croissant and large coffee, and brushed the remnants of the sandwich off his
blue Polo shirt as he walked in the Gilchrest County Jail.  Eddie asked for the duty officer, identified himself and asked to meet with the suspect. He was escorted into an interview room to see the suspect, who had been denied bail as he was considered a flight risk.

“What the fuck you want with me, pig?” Spat Vito
Viticoltore through the interview screen. He was even more pleasant in person than Eddie had hoped.  The thug was dressed in a prisoner’s trademark orange jumpsuit and wore both hand and leg cuffs, chained together and locked to his chair which severely limited his movements.

They sparred verbally for a little, and Eddie got the distinct impression that the thug thought he held the upper hand.

“You got nothing but a misdemeanor gun charge on me and you know what? It’s not my gun. It belongs to that cop, Handley”. 

“Yeah, but what was it doing in your pocket, stud?”
Countered Eddie.

“Doesn’t matter, fuck-stick, as soon as my lawyer gets here, I will be out on bail.” Eddie knew that might probably be true, but in this case he had a hole card that he decided to show.

“Actually, I am not here to ask you about that, he countered, I am more interested in your last name.”

“What the fuck do you want to know about my last name?”

“Well, the funny thing is that when we run the name Viticoltore, it comes back clean, so that either means you are clean, which I severely doubt or that’s not your real name.”

The hood looked away inadvertently and then caught
himself and stared at Eddie with cold, venom filled eyes. 

“I thought about the name and found out it means “Winemaker,” did you know that kid?”  The thug said nothing, so Eddie continued.  “So I thought about it and I did a search of the known associated database that the FBI runs; see we have read access to it, and I did a search on the term winemakers and lo and behold, I came up with a Mustache Pete by the name Carlos
, the Winemaker, Gambochinno. Sound familiar?”

He is an old gangster, a made member of the
Patriarca crime family, and a known associate of a local gangster by the name of Sally Boots; ever heard of him?” He asked the thug and then continued as if he already knew the answer.  

“It seems this scumbag had several children; one of them, a Vito
Gambochinno, is currently wanted for armed robbery in the state of Massachusetts.  Here is a picture of him, said Eddie as he held the picture up for the thug to see. I think you will agree that he bears a sticking resemblance to you, right down to the tattoos. So, I wouldn’t worry about making bail right now, but if you want to cooperate and start telling the truth about why you were handcuffed to Deputy Handley, I think we could work out a deal.” 

“It had something to do with finding something valuable that had been hidden for a long time is all I was told.  Handley told me to work this guy over until he took us to his old man.” 

“And the guy’s father knew where the valuables were hidden?” Asked Eddie. 

“Yeah, but the cocksucker turned the table on us, came flying through the door like the terminator or some shit,” the hood smiled tentatively.

“What was the guy’s name?”

“I didn’t ask—it was just a job to earn some coin while I was….”

“On the lam?” Eddie offered.

“On vacation,” corrected Vito.

“Okay, Vito that will keep you from getting shipped up north for a while. How would you like to get transferred down to Pinellas County, we got lots of great Italian food down there?”

“Sure,” replied the hoodlum, “this place thinks a baloney sandwich is a Grinder.”