TURTLE DOVE (Alton Rhode Mysteries Book 7) (15 page)
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Authors: Lawrence De Maria
CHAPTER 24 - LAW AND ORDER
Bismarck once said that Providence watched over “fools, drunks and the United States of America”. To that I might add beat-up amateur private-eye sailors, because I found the marina!
Of course, it was pretty dark and I did not know exactly where the late Lenny Vole berthed his boat. So I headed along the piers near Mojo’s Restaurant until I found an open space and then docked. Or at least I tried to dock. I was not feeling too chipper at that point and my reflexes were a bit slow. My arrival, bow first, was more of a crash, and I took out a good chunk of the dock, as well as two previously nice-looking mini-yachts. The collision, which put Vole’s boat part way up on the dock, where it stuck, knocked me flat, and put some bruises on top of my bruises.
The noise was incredible and when I finally regained my feet I could see lights coming on all over the marina area and some people coming out of Mojo’s. The area would soon be swarming with people, including cops. I did not feel up to explaining what happened, especially with Vole now sitting legless in a fishing chair dripping gore all over the deck. So, I hopped onto the dock and ran past some of the people standing wide-eyed in front of Mojo’s to a line of golf carts. All the carts had keys in them. It was nice to be in a community where everyone trusted each other, although after this night that might change.
I jumped in a cart that had a mahogany dashboard with a bobble-head Jesus. I took that as a good sign. I needed all the help I could get. I heard angry shouts. I floored the cart, in a manner of speaking, racing away at an undignified 12 miles an hour. If I managed not to fall out again, I probably could get to Ashleigh Harper’s house before anyone could catch me.
***
The house was dark, and there was no one on the first floor. With Vole dead, I was not too worried, but I still wished I had my gun, which had been taken when I was unconscious. A light came on in one of the rooms when I reached the second floor.
“Leonard, is that you?”
It was Sandy Nidus, sounding sultry. I grunted an acknowledgment and walked toward the room.
“Have you cleaned yourself up?”
Another grunt. I was getting good at nonverbal communication.
“Then come to bed. You can take care of Bessie later. I’m horny.”
Apparently the thought of killing me got her all worked up. I took it as a compliment.
She was lying in bed, naked. Her eyes were closed and she was stroking herself.
“Lenny couldn’t make it,” I said, in an almost normal voice. “But don’t stop on my account.”
Her eyes snapped open and she sat bolt upright.
“You!”
“The one and only.”
She didn’t ask where Vole was. She could tell from my battered condition that he and I probably didn’t leave on the best of terms.
“You killed him.”
It was a statement of fact.
“Well, I had some help, but yes, I did. I’m beginning to feel bad about it, considering what poor Lenny is missing.”
Sandy Nidus stood up and started walking toward me. Even in my debilitated condition, she was something to see. I tried to maintain eye contact, but my gaze drifted from her large, white breasts to her lush pubic thatch.
She came up to me and ground her breasts and groin into me. I could smell her musk, or whatever a woman in heat exudes. She had really been priming her pump for Vole. But that did not prevent her from now throwing him over the side. For Vole, it was the second time in a couple of hours, although this time it was figurative. He had a bad day in anyone’s book.
“There is no reason any of this has to go further than this bedroom,” Sandy purred, and increased her grinding. It was all I could do not to fall over. “I want you. Fuck me, now. Hard. I’ll show you things you’ve never imagined.”
“I have an excellent imagination,” I said. “But what about Lenny?”
My voice was a little hoarse. Maybe after all that time on the water I was catching a cold.
“I’m sure you can take care of that. It’s a big ocean.” Her hand slithered down toward my belt. “I’ve been waiting for someone like you, Alton. Someone who could free me from him.” Her hand began moving in circles. “It’s obvious that Leonard Vole is not half the man you are.”
“Hell, Sandy,” I said, thinking of what was left of Vole on the boat, “he’s not half the man he used to be.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. She smiled at me and parted her lips. I eased her back toward the bed.
“I like it doggie style,” she said.
“I like to do it with humans,” I replied. “And you don’t make the cut.”
I pushed her hard and she sprawled across the bed. I turned to leave. Bessie Magruder was obviously still alive. The sooner I got her to the cops, the better. Without her, I’d have a hard time explaining the bloody scene down at the docks by Mojo’s, even with my iPhone recording.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” Nidus screamed.
I heard a drawer open. When I turned, she was frantically rummaging through the drawer.
“Is this what you are looking for, dearie?”
We both looked toward the door. Bessie Magruder was standing there, holding my gun.
“Shoot him,” Nidus screamed. “He will expose us.”
Bessie walked over to me.
“You’ll put a good word in for me, won’t you?”
“You bet.”
“What are you doing, you crazy old bitch! We could still get away with it.”
Bessie handed me the gun.
“I figure they were gonna use it on me and then blame you. It was their only way out, what with everything going into the crapper.”
“Smart thinking,” I said, in wonderment.
“Hey. I was on
Law and Order
. I picked up some things.”
We heard the front door open, and then someone running up the stairs. Bentley, the Police Chief, burst into the room.
“Hi, Fred,” I said. “How’s your golf game? Make any putts lately?”
He gaped at us. The scene was surreal. A bedraggled man holding a gun on a naked woman, with what he would have assumed was one of the world’s most-famous authors standing next to him.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Sandy and Vole murdered the real Ashleigh Harper and a college girl named Anna Dickson.”
“He’s lying, Fred,” Nidus said. “You know me. This maniac killed Vole and was going to kill me. Thank God, you are here.”
It was desperate, but just enough to confuse Bentley for a moment.
“I’m not Ashleigh Harper,” Bessie said, “just so you know.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out my iPhone. I hit play and raised the volume. Vole’s confession came through loud and clear.
“Sandy, I’m afraid neither you nor Vole has a leg to stand on,” I said. “Legally, or otherwise.”
Bentley stared back and forth at the three of us. I handed him my gun. He looked at Nidus.
“Sandy, put on some clothes, for Crissakes. We’ll sort this out at the station.” He turned to me. “I knew you were trouble.”
“Just do me a favor chief. When this is all over, tell Charlie and Jim that she is a natural redhead.”
CHAPTER 25 - HOME COOKING
“How did you get out of this one?” Arman Rahm asked me. He looked over at Maks Kalugin, who just shook his head.
A week had passed since I returned from North Carolina. I had just spent the better part of a vodka-lubricated hour regaling them with my experiences on quiet little Bald Head Island. We were in the office at the rear of Deep Gulag, the “gentleman’s club” the Rahm family owned in the South Beach section of Staten Island. The door was closed and we could barely hear the pulsating music coming from the stage-and-pole area where naked young women were slithering before sweaty-browed men. “Dancing” in a Rahm club was a great gig, as that kind of gig went. Arman offered the best wages and tip-sharing in the city, health insurance and, I was stunned to learn, tuition-assistance to those who wanted it. There was a strict “no-touch” rule and patrons who got out of line were quickly squelched by an assortment of beefy bouncers the size of side-by-side refrigerators.
“Well, the whole scene was a bit much for the local cops,” I said.
“You don’t say,” Arman said wryly. “It sounds like Iwo Jima.”
“Yeah, they are more used to the occasional golf cart collision or shark bite. Murders and legless corpses tend to excite them. Not to mention the local Chamber of Commerce. I think those folks wanted to string me up. But the local chief of police knew me and was willing to listen to what I had to say, no matter how unbelievable it sounded. He had to detain me, of course, what with all the damage I had done to the marina and some rich-men’s yachts. Some people were more concerned about that then all the dead bodies. In the end, he called for reinforcements from the mainland. By the next day Bald Head Island was awash with Southport cops and, thank God, North Carolina State Troopers. They were pros, and we soon got things sorted out, especially after I called Mike Sullivan and Cormac. They flew Vocci down to run interference for me.”
“I didn’t think Vocci was your biggest fan,” Arman said.
“We get along better now, even though he commented that a stretch on a North Carolina chain gang might do me a world of good. But he mellowed toward me after we all pulled his boss’s chestnuts out of the fire in the Denton case.”
“Sullivan would still put me away if he could.”
“That’s just professional courtesy, Arman. He’s still the D.A. You’d get a fair shake. Anyway, I told Mike he didn’t owe us anything. That Denton debacle was personal, and you know it.”
“It’s moot. He’ll never get anything on me.
There was a knock on the door, and a beautiful young woman, fully clothed, entered. She was holding a platter of food, which she set on the table between us, along with small plates, forks and napkins.
“Thank you, Galina,” Arman said, and she left.
“Russian appetizers,” he explained. “Every now and then I need some home cooking.”
“You were born here,” I said. “You’re more American than I am.”
“Eat up,” he said, smiling. “It goes well with vodka.”
“Everything goes well with vodka,” Kalugin observed.
The platter was piled with marinated herring and black bread, caviar on toast, fried meats, salami with Russian bread and butter, roasted potatoes and something I could not identify.” I pointed to it. “What is that?”
“Fermented cabbage,” Kalugin said. “A delicacy.”
I’d had enough vodka to try anything, so I filled my plate. Everything was delicious, even the cabbage.
“The Nidus woman’s lawyers will try to paint the old actress as an accomplice, to discredit her testimony,” Arman said.
“Or as a mental defective,” Kalugin said, piling more fermented cabbage on my plate. “Eat up. It is good for the hangover you will have.”
“The prosecution will have the recording I made on the boat,” I said.
“It’s lucky the bastard Vole died,” Kalugin observed. “He surely would have taken back what he said.”
“Maks is right,” Arman said. “After all, the recording was made under duress. Even now, the defense will argue, quite reasonably I might add, that a man will say anything when sharks are about to eat him.”
I took another swig of vodka.
“I knew that. I may have neglected to tell the cops that Vole was about to get chomped when he confessed. They think my hands were free the whole time I was on the boat and I secretly managed to turn on my phone. I told them he was bragging. They think he fell overboard in the struggle and I made a valiant effort to save him.”
“And you didn’t.”
I finished my glass of vodka and poured more shots all around. Then I told them how I loosened the drag on the reel and let Vole float back to his death. I wasn’t worried about the place being bugged. The Rahms had the best anti-surveillance people in the state on their payroll. The room we were in was swept daily.
“How did you finally get him into the boat?” Rahm asked quietly, when I finished.
“I gaffed him. He was pretty light by then.”
Arman shook his head. Even Kalugin looked shocked.
“Mater Bozhya,” he said. “I think you have been hanging around with us too much.” He leaned forward and looked hard at me. “You did not tell Alice this, did you?”
Kalugin always worried about her.
“Of course not. But she is still upset about the whole thing. Anna’s death, of course. She insisted on calling the kid’s brother. I was glad of that. I didn’t really have the heart for it.”
“You don’t deserve her,” Kalugin said.
“Tell me about it. Alice was also disturbed about what happened to the real Ashleigh Harper, who should have been remembered for her great book, and not her brutal murder and this literary scandal. She was a wonderful writer and to sully her reputation by publishing material she didn't want to see the light of day is a tragedy in itself. It is more than fraud. It is a mockery of everything the woman stood for.
To Bury a Turtle Dove
is part of the national conscience. Young people embraced its environmental message.”
The vodka had loosened my tongue. I was waxing poetic. I waited for one of the others to tease me. Instead, Kalugin started singing, in a deep, sonorous voice:
Ya plachu ne za golubyami,
Yya plachu za nas.
Moi slezy polivat' zemlyu,
Iz kotoroy ikh molodoy nikogda ne letat' besplatno.
Arman and I both stared at him, and he translated the song for my benefit:
I weep not for the doves,
I weep for us.
My tears water the earth,
From which their young will never fly free.
“Those are the most famous lines in
To Bury a Turtle Dove
,” I marveled. “The one the young girl says when she sees what the developers did to the nesting ground she loved to visit.”
“A good book,” Kalugin said. “It was translated into Russian and was required reading for my Guards division in Afghanistan. We turned those lines into a song. It proved you Americans were raping and polluting the planet.”
“I need more vodka,” I said, trying to picture Maks Kalugin sitting on a tank reading
To Bury a Turtle Dove.
“I bet it was a best seller in Chernobyl.”
Kalugin grunted in appreciation at my jibe. Arman laughed and poured us all drinks, and we sat there in silence for a while.
“It was the watch,” I finally said. “When those sharks were closing in on Vole all I could think of was that little Disney watch on Anna’s little arm.”
“Rotten bastard,” Kalugin said.
THE END
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***
Alton Rhode met Laurene Robillard in the first of this series, CAPRIATI’S BLOOD. This is an excerpt:
PROLOGUE
“They look smaller than the last bunch.”
“You’ll get more in the box,” the elderly woman working the counter said. “Same price. You can’t beat it.”
“They taste the same?”
“If anything, they are sweeter.” She pointed to a stand a few feet away. “We have some free samples cut up over there. Try them.”
The man looked over at the table and saw that some flies hadn’t needed an invitation.
“I’ll take your word for it.” His mother probably wouldn’t know the difference. At least that was what he’d been told. The information had eased his conscience. Why risk a visit to someone who wouldn’t even recognize her own son? But perhaps the occasional – and anonymous – gifts would soon be unnecessary. But just the thought of what he was going to do sent rivulets of sweat down the man’s sides. “What do I owe you?”
“It comes to $34.95, shipping included east of the Mississippi.”
Prices were going up on everything.
“Where’s it going?”
The customer recited the address. Three times. Like everyone else in the goddamn town, the clerk was a few years past her expiration date. That was one reason he was about to take the biggest risk of his life.
“Want to include a card?”
“No.”
“What’s the return address?”
“If it doesn’t get there,” he said, smiling. “I don’t want them back.”
“I know, but we can apply a refund to your account.”
“I don’t have an account.”
“It would be credited to your card. We take them all. American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Discover. Debit cards, too.”
“I’m paying cash, don’t worry about it.”
“Well, if you give us your address, phone number and email, we can contact you.”
He wanted to throttle the old crone. But long ago, for safety’s sake, the man learned not to make a scene.
“No, thanks.”
“We send out emails about our specials. People love them.”
He took a deep breath and forced another smile. Then he pulled out his wallet and handed the woman $40.
“Just send the box. Keep the change.”
***
It took the man an hour and a half to drive to Fort Lauderdale and settle in at the rundown motel off Dixie Highway straight out of the 1980’s and run by a couple of Russians, which he thought was ironic considering what he was about to do. He registered using one of the many phony I.D.’s he’d collected over the years. They’d wanted a credit card at the desk “for incidentals,” which from the look of the place might include pest control, but the extra hundred bucks he gave them along with the room charge he prepaid shut the Russkies up. They assumed he just wanted to get laid and didn’t want to leave a paper trail. They were half right.
The call he planned to make on the room phone wasn’t going to cost a hundred bucks. It would be short, sweet and to the point. A previous call, made a few days earlier from a similar dump in Sarasota, had insured that the lawyer would be in at 4 P.M. to take his call. The lawyer’s secretary was a dim bulb but the mention that he had important information about the lawyer’s main client finally sealed the deal.
The man looked at his watch. An hour to go. There was a bar across the street from the motel. He walked across and had three stiff bourbons. The last one barely managed to stop the tremor in his hand. One of the rummies sitting on a nearby stool smiled in commiseration. He pegs me as an alky like him, the man thought. He doesn’t know I’m just scared shitless.
***
“It’s that call you’ve been expecting, Mr. Rosenberg.”
Samuel Rosenberg’s secretary stood in the doorway to his office and could have announced the arrival of the Messiah with less fanfare. She was all of 22 and proof to him that the New York City public education system had gone into the toilet. He had tried to get her to use his first name and the phone intercom, with no luck on either.
Rosenberg sighed. She had only recently mastered the basic legal forms he rarely produced. His previous secretary was canned for running her mouth in the wrong places and the lawyer decided that if he had to choose between stupid and indiscreet, stupid was the way to go.
“Thank you, Francine,” he said. “That’s a fetching outfit you are wearing today.”
She smiled and twirled away. Her clothes were still terrible, he knew, but at least they now covered her midriff. That was one battle won.
“This is Samuel Rosenberg,” he said into the phone. He looked at the calendar on his desk for the name. “What can I do for you, er, Mr. Wagner?”He put his feet up on his desk and rocked back in his chair. “You mentioned something about one of my clients. I have many. Can you be more specific.”
“Quit dicking around, counselor. You don’t want me to be specific. We both know who we’re talking about. I want you to be an intermediary between us. I have a proposal, a trade.”
“I’m listening.”
“I know who killed Fred Jarvis.”
Rosenberg’s feet came off the desk as he sat up. Like every attorney on Staten Island, he remembered the unsolved killing. Jarvis was a piece of crap, a crook, but a lawyer nonetheless. If crooked lawyers became targets on Staten Island, who was safe?