The Deceiver (51 page)

“Chief Inspector Jones, this is Lieutenant of Detectives Clay Broderick, speaking from Miami. Hallo? Can you hear me? … Look, as a colleague, I wonder if you could do me a favor. One of my men was on vacation on Sunshine, and he hasn’t showed up here. We hope there hasn’t been an accident. … Yes, an American. Name, Julio Gomez. No, I don’t know where he was staying. He was down there for the game fishing.”

Chief Inspector Jones took this call seriously. His was a tiny force, and Metro-Dade’s was enormous. But he would show the Americans that Chief Inspector Jones was not half-asleep. He decided to handle the case himself and summoned a constable and a Land-Rover.

Quite rightly, he started with the Quarter Deck Hotel, but there he drew a blank. He went on to the fishing quay and found Jimmy Dobbs working on his boat, having no charter that day. Dobbs related that Gomez had not shown up for their Friday charter, which was odd, and that he had been staying with Mrs. Macdonald.

The landlady reported that Julio Gomez had left in a hurry on Friday morning for the airport. Jones went there and spoke to the airport manager. He summoned the passport officer, who confirmed that Mr. Gomez had taken a lift with Mr. Klinger to Key West on Friday morning. He gave Inspector Jones the aircraft registration. Jones telephoned Broderick back at four
P.M.

Lieutenant Broderick took time out to phone the Key West police, who checked with their own airport. The lieutenant summoned Eddie Favaro just after six. His face was grave.

“Eddie, I’m sorry. Julio made a sudden decision to come home Friday morning. There was no scheduled flight back, so he hitched a lift on a private plane for Key West. It never made it. The plane went down from fifteen thousand feet into the sea, fifty miles short of Key West. The Coast Guard says there were no survivors.”

Favaro sat down. He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

“I hardly can myself. Look, I’m terribly sorry, Eddie. I know you were close.”

“Nine years,” whispered Favaro. “Nine years he watched my back. What happens now?”

“The machine takes over,” said Broderick. “I’ll tell the Director myself. You know the procedure. If we can’t have a funeral service, we’ll have a memorial. Full departmental honors. I promise.”

*   *   *

The suspicions came later that night and the next morning.

On Sunday, a charter skipper named Joe Fanelli had taken two small English boys fishing out of Bud ‘n’ Mary’s Marina on Islamorada, a resort in the Florida Keys well north of Key West. Six miles out beyond Alligator Reef, heading for the Hump and trolling as they went, one of the boys took a big bite on his line. Between them the brothers, Stuart and Shane, hauled in what they hoped was a big kingfish or wahoo or tuna. When the catch came up in the wake, Joe Fanelli leaned down and hauled it aboard. It turned out to be the remnants of a life-jacket, still bearing the stenciled number of the airplane to which it had once belonged, and some scorch marks.

The local police sent it up to Miami, where the forensic laboratory established that it had come from Barney Klinger’s Navajo Chief, and that the scorch marks bore traces not of gasoline but of plastic explosive. It became a Homicide investigation.

The first thing Homicide did was check on the business affairs of Mr. Klinger. What they discovered caused them to think the case was a dead end. They had, after all, no mandate on the British territory of Sunshine, and little confidence that the local force would get to the bottom of what had to be a professional hit.

On Tuesday morning Sam McCready eased himself onto his poolside lounger at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, settled his second after-breakfast coffee on the table by his side, and opened the
Miami Herald
.

Without any particular interest, he scanned the paper for international news—there was precious little—and settled for local affairs. The second lead concerned fresh revelations in the disappearance of a light airplane over the sea southeast of Key West the previous Friday morning.

The news sleuths of the
Herald
had discovered not only that the plane might well have been destroyed by a bomb inside it, but that Mr. Barney Klinger was known as the uncrowned king of the illicit trade, theft, and laundering of spare aviation parts in South Florida.

After narcotics, this abstruse area of illegal behavior is probably the most lucrative. Florida bristles with airplanes—airliners, cargo freighters, and private aircraft. It also contains some of the world’s major legitimate companies in the provision of constantly needed new or reconditioned spare parts. AVIOL and the Instrument Locator Service supply replacement parts on a worldwide scale.

The illegitimate industry, on the other hand, specializes either in commissioning the theft of such parts for no-questions-asked sales to other (usually Third World) operators, or in the even more dangerous purveying of parts whose operational life is almost expended, selling them as reconditioned parts with most of their operational life still left. For the latter scam, the paperwork is forged. Since some of these parts sell for a quarter of a million dollars each, the profits for a ruthless operator can be huge.

Speculation was running high that someone had wanted to remove Mr. Klinger from the scene.

“In the midst of life,” murmured McCready, and turned to the weather forecast. It was sunny.

Lieutenant Broderick summoned Eddie Favaro on that same Tuesday morning. He was even more grave than he had been the day before.

“Eddie, before we proceed with the memorial service with full honors for Julio, we have to consider a troubling new factor. What the hell was Julio doing sharing a plane with a sleazeball like Klinger?”

“He was trying to get back home,” said Favaro.

“Was he? What was he doing down there?”

“Fishing.”

“Was he? How come he was sharing the same week on Sunshine with Klinger? Did they have business to discuss?”

“Clay, listen to me. No way—no way in this world—was Julio Gomez corrupt. I won’t believe it. He was trying to get home. He saw a plane, he asked for a ride, is all.”

“I hope you’re right,” Broderick said soberly. “Why was he trying to get home two days ahead of schedule?

“That’s what puzzles me,” admitted Favaro. “He loved his fishing, looked forward to it all year. He would never have cut short two days of fishing without a reason. I want to go over there and find out why.”

“You have three reasons for not going,” said the lieutenant. “This department is overworked, you are needed here, and any bomb—if bomb there was—was certainly aimed at Klinger. The girl and Julio were accidents. Sorry, Internal Affairs will have to check out Julio’s financial situation. It can’t be avoided. If he never met Klinger before Friday, it was just a tragic accident.”

“I’ve got some leave time due me,” said Favaro. “I want it, Clay. I want it now.”

“Yes, you’ve got some leave time. And I can’t deny it to you. But you go there and you’re on your own, Eddie. That’s British territory—we have no authority there. And I want your gun.”

Favaro handed over his police automatic, left, and headed for the bank. At three that afternoon, he landed on Sunshine’s airstrip, paid off his chartered four-seater, and watched it leave for Miami. Then he hitched a lift with one of the airstrip staff into Port Plaisance. Not knowing where else to go, he checked into the Quarter Deck.

Sir Marston Moberley sat in a comfortable chair in his walled garden and sipped a whiskey and soda. It was his favorite ritual of the day. The garden behind Government House was not large, but it was very private. A well-tended lawn covered most of the space, and bougainvillaea and jacaranda festooned the walls with their brilliant colors. The walls, which surrounded the garden on three sides—the fourth side was the house itself—were eight feet high and topped with shards of glass. In one wall was an old steel door, seven feet tall, but it was long out of use. Beyond it was a small lane that led into the heart of Port Plaisance. The steel door had been sealed years before, and on its outer side two semicircular steel hasps were secured by a padlock the size of a small dinner plate. All were long fused by rust.

Sir Marston enjoyed the cool of the evening. His adjutant was somewhere inside his own quarters at the other end of the house; his wife was out on an errand visiting the local hospital; Jefferson, his chef/steward/butler, would be preparing dinner in the kitchen. Sir Marston sipped his whiskey with appreciation, then almost choked when his ears were assailed by the scream of rending steel. He turned. He had time to say, “I say, what on earth—Now look here—”

The roar of the first bullet shocked and stunned him. The slug went through a fold of loose fabric in the sleeve of his cotton shirt. It hammered into the coral-block wall of the house behind him and fell back onto the path, misshapen and twisted. The second hit him full in the heart.

DESPITE THE TWIN BOOMS OF THE HANDGUN
from the garden, there was no immediate reaction from inside the house. Only two people were there at that hour.

Jefferson was belowstairs preparing a fruit punch for the evening meal—Lady Moberley was a teetotaler. He would say later that when the blender was switched on the noise filled the kitchen, and it must have been on when the shooting took place.

The Governor’s adjutant was Lieutenant Jeremy Haverstock, a downy-cheeked young subaltern seconded from the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. He was in his room at the far end of Government House with the window closed and the air conditioning at full blast. He was also, so he would say, playing his radio and listening to music from Radio Nassau. He, too, heard nothing.

By the time Jefferson came out into the garden to consult Sir Marston over some point concerning the preparation of the lamb cutlets, the assassin had clearly withdrawn through the steel gate and had gone. Jefferson arrived at the top of the steps leading down to the garden and saw his employer lying flat on his back, arms wide, as the second shot had thrown him, a dark blotch still spreading across the front of his dark-blue-cotton shirt.

At first, Jefferson thought his master had fainted, and he ran down to help him up. When he saw the hole in the chest more clearly, he stood back, disbelieving for a moment, then ran panic-stricken to fetch Lieutenant Haverstock. The young army officer arrived seconds later, still in his boxer shorts.

Haverstock did not panic. He examined the body without touching it, established that Sir Marston was extremely dead, and sat down in the ex-Governor’s chair to ponder what to do.

A previous commanding officer had written of Lieutenant Haverstock, “Wonderful breeding, not terribly bright,” as if he were a Cavalry horse rather than a Cavalry officer. But in the Cavalry they tend to have their priorities about right: A good horse is irreplaceable, while a subaltern is not.

Haverstock sat in the chair a few feet from the body and thought the matter through, while a wide-eyed Jefferson watched from the top of the stairs that led to the verandah. The subaltern decided that (a) he had a dead Governor on his hands, (b) someone had shot him and escaped, and (c) he should inform a higher authority. The problem was, the Governor
was
the highest authority, or had been. At this point, Lady Moberley came home.

Jefferson heard the crunch of the wheels of the official Jaguar limousine on the gravel of the front drive and rushed out through the hallway to intercept her. His breaking of the news was lucid, if not very tactful. He confronted her in the hall and said, “Oh, Lady, de Governor been shot. He dead.”

Lady Moberley hurried to the verandah to look down and was met by Haverstock coming up the steps. He assisted her to her bedroom and comforted her as she lay down. She seemed more bewildered than grief-stricken, as if worried lest the Foreign Office might now play merry hell with her husband’s career.

Having got her settled, Lieutenant Haverstock dispatched Jefferson to summon the island’s only doctor—who also happened to be the island’s only coroner—and Chief Inspector Jones, who was the doctor/coroner’s nephew. The lieutenant instructed the distraught butler to explain nothing to them, simply to ask each man to come urgently to Government House.

It was a fruitless request. Poor Jefferson told Inspector Jones the news in the hearing of three wide-eyed constables, and Dr. Caractacus Jones in front of his housekeeper. Like wildfire the news spread, even as the uncle and his nephew hurried to Government House.

While Jefferson was away, Lieutenant Haverstock pondered how to tell London. The residence had not been equipped with modern or secure communication systems. It had never been thought necessary to do so. Apart from the open phone line, the Governor’s messages had always gone to London via the much more substantial British High Commission in Nassau, the Bahamas. For this, an elderly C2 system was used. It sat on a side table in the Governor’s private office.

To look at, it was an ordinary Telex machine of the type known to, and dreaded by, foreign correspondents the world over. Connection was made to Nassau by tapping in the usual code and securing an acknowledgment from the other end. The Telex could then be switched to encrypted mode through a second box that sat beside the Telex machine. Any message sent would then appear “in clear” on the paper in front of the sender and would be automatically decoded at the Nassau end. In between the two points, it would be in code.

The trouble was, to operate the encoder, one had to insert corrugated disks according to the day of the month. These disks were kept in the Governor’s safe, which was locked. The dead man’s private secretary, Myrtle, had the combination of the safe, but she was away visiting her parents on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. During her absences, the Governor was wont to send his own messages. He too knew the safe’s combination; Haverstock did not.

Eventually, Haverstock simply rang the High Commission in Nassau via the telephone exchange and told them verbally. After twenty minutes, an incandescent First Secretary called him back for confirmation, listened to his explanation, and told him crisply to seal Government House and hold the fort until backup could arrive from Nassau or London. The First Secretary then radioed a top-secret and coded message to the Foreign Office in London. It was already six
P.M.
and dark in the Caribbean. It was eleven
P.M.
in London, and the message went to the night duty officer. He called a senior official of the Caribbean desk at his home in Chobham, and the wheels began to roll.