I rubbed my nose, and my olfactory lobe was immediately flooded by the strong scent of fine Cuban tobacco. Memories of the pleasant time just spent in Mackenzie’s company overwhelmed the pang of sadness I was experiencing. That thought quickly brought me back to the reason I was here in the first place: the hunt for the man of many names, among them Stefan Baumann.
Thirteen
The morning had started routine enough. The phone in my room buzzed me awake at the prescribed time, four-thirty in the morning. I got dressed and checked out of the hotel. It had started to rain once again but at least the wind had turned into an almost pleasant breeze. I wondered how much longer this front was going to last. I had driven the Escalade in the early morning darkness to the rental agency and left the keys in the locked box designated for after-hours drop-offs. It was deserted at this hour of the morning. Sammy arrived almost on cue. He had a tall cup of coffee and an egg and bacon sandwich waiting for me. We drove off and quickly headed north toward the Tamiami Trail which would eventually take us to Interstate 75.
The European auto dealership where Hamilton Gage worked was located in a commercial section of Jacksonville along State Route 9. It was a “fast and wide” area of town crisscrossed by several wide four lane roads, wide sidewalks, plenty of car dealerships as well as an odd assortment of related businesses, all stuffed in nondescript cinder-block boxes. Along the way, we drove past an endless stream of caramel-colored strip malls.
After driving into the car lot, Sammy parked in a slot marked “Parts Customers,” and he waited while I went in alone. The air inside the building was cool and sanitary as were the plain gray walls and the standard white counter surface. Soft music hummed in the background as I approached the solitary parts attendant. He was leaning over the white Formica counter, chin cupped in one hand, his gaze lost in the popular car-racing rag spread before him. He was a thin cadaverous man in his mid-fifties with a mop of curly blond hair. The red letters embroidered above his shirt pocket declared that he was “Mike.” He never looked up from his rag. I don’t think he even noticed me, or at least he pretended not to. I said hello, and Mike the parts guy regarded me with the same level of weariness that noncommissioned salespeople often exhibit. I asked to see a Mr. Hamilton Gage. Without a word in response, he disappeared through a glass door to his right. A minute later, the door opened again, and a different man appeared, in a gray shirt with “Ham” embroidered on it. Ham, who appeared to be in his early fifties, had brown hair going to gray at the temples. The dark eyes under thick brows revealed nothing. This was the countenance of a man who didn’t fear much, a man who had seen more than his fair share of hard times. He was clean-shaven and had the thick arms and the fit appearance of someone who took time to stay in shape or spent his weekends mixing concrete or building stone fences. He looked like a man who could take care of himself in a pinch. If Baumann had subdued him as effortlessly as Chase had described, then I must be careful as I got closer to my quarry. One thing I didn’t want to do with someone of Baumann’s skills was let him know I was hot on his trail and have him circle back on me.
“I’m Hamilton Gage,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Jason Justice, Mr. Gage,” I replied. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“What about?” His eyes narrowed as he studied my face.
“We’ve never met before,” I replied. “I’m an attorney from Palm Beach.”
“Yeah, and... ?”
I decided to get to the point. “I’m searching for Stefan Baumann.”
That got his attention. His back straightened, and he swallowed. He regarded me again with intense curiosity. “Why come to me?”
“Well, to be honest, Mr. Gage,” I replied, “I need help tracking down this man. Something tells me perhaps you can help.”
A customer and a man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit came in. Ham welcomed them both and said someone would be by to assist them. Then he lifted a phone from the counter, spoke briefly, and hung up. Almost instantly, Mike the parts man came to take care of the customers. Hamilton pointed to the opposite end of the counter, where we could talk in relative privacy.
“Because of that man,” he whispered with a deep-burning rage that seemed to build with every syllable, “my sister lost everything. Hell, she almost killed herself. I confronted the prick myself. For my troubles, I spent close to five years in a cage, so believe me when I tell you I’d like nothing more than to help that bastard get his due. But I don’t have a clue where he is.”
“After what he did to your sister, you’re telling me you haven’t kept tabs on the man?” I was a bit skeptical.
His mirthless grin revealed a row of yellowish teeth. “I’m under court order to stay away from Baumann. I get anywhere near him, I’m back in the slammer. It’s taken me a long time to get back on my feet. I don’t intend to mess that up, you get me?”
“I can appreciate that, Mr. Gage,” I replied. “Maybe you can point me to someone who might help me find him.”
“What’s your interest?”
“He did something similar to my client’s mother.”
He shook his head and then asked, “How much did he take her for?”
“Everything.”
“She rich?”
“She was.”
He looked surprised. “How much we talking about?”
“Let’s just say it’s in the tens of millions.”
“So good ol’ Stefan struck it big in Palm Beach, did he?” He shook his head and smiled, mostly to himself. He didn’t seem surprised. “That son of a bitch.”
“Help me find him. Put an end to this predation.”
His smile vanished, and he looked to his left. The two clients were examining some sort of auto part in a large white box. Mike the parts guy was laying a sales pitch on them in a drab monotone.
Gage returned his attention to me and said, “I can’t help you.”
Not exactly what I wanted to hear. I was tired, and my spirits sank.
“You need my sister.” Pulling a pen from the pocket beneath his monogram, he scrawled something on a notepad, then carefully ripped the page out and offered it to me.
“She’s not doing so well. She’s screwed up alcohol, drugs, you name it,” he added. “If you can get her to talk to you, maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
I examined the notepaper. It had a name and an address.
“I appreciate it, but...” I had to be mindful of the circumstances and tread carefully. This family had already been through enough pain thanks to Baumann. “With all due respect, how can your sister help?”
“Easy,” he said. “Baumann is her obsession, her passion. Every sober hour my sister has not that she has all that many she spends thinking about ways to make him pay. What he did to us... She used to disappear for days, never said where she’d been. I’m told she keeps a framed map in her house. When she comes back from one of her trips there are one or two more pins on the map. You do the math.” He nodded to himself and then, through a malicious yellow smile, added; “If anyone knows where to find him, she’ll know.”
I thanked him, we shook hands, and I left.
***
We drove mostly in silence to the address Ham Gage gave us. It was not a long drive, but my lack of sleep combined with the rhythmic sound of the tires hitting the evenly spaced expansion joints in the pavement made me drowsy. I even managed to take a brief nap.
Sammy had his Denali XL set up like an on-the-go office, complete with wireless Internet service and a wireless printer/fax permanently mounted in the cargo area. While I interviewed Gage, Sammy had retrieved from court and police records as much information as was available on Elizabeth Gage and her ex-husband, Stefan Baumann, a naturalized citizen originally from South Africa. Sammy had done extensive searches under the name Baumann and had come up empty. There were no records of a South African with that name ever becoming a U.S. citizen or applying for a visa in the past ten years. So Baumann was most certainly just another alias. The man was good at his craft. But for the trail of deceit and wrecked lives he’d left behind, we couldn’t prove the man even existed.
It took a lot of effort to be someone without a past, especially in this day of computerized records of everything we have ever done. It seems that every detail of our journey through this life, every accomplishment, as well as our failures, is somehow entered, catalogued, stashed and sorted in countless databases and much of that information is available for sale to anyone willing to pay for the information. Officials in the know as well as actuaries everywhere, had access to reams of electronic data on everyone: birth certificates; school, medical, insurance, and criminal records; credit reports all available with a click of a mouse.
Further examination of police records and court filings and countless lawsuits and counter lawsuits, revealed the extent of Baumann’s crimes against the Gage family. Elizabeth Gage had inherited a medium-size marina, boatyard, and restaurant on the banks of the St. John’s River, along with two parcels of waterfront property totaling 150 acres. Baumann had somehow convinced her to grant him power of attorney, which he then used to secretly mortgage the properties. He had then sold the properties and vanished, leaving behind a financial disaster for all involved. In the aftermath, Elizabeth lost the land, and then the lenders foreclosed on the marina and the restaurant. She was later sued in civil court by the land buyers for the money they lost in the deal, and eventually was forced into bankruptcy. She was left with little to live on. No wonder her brother had tried to kill Baumann. I would have done the same thing, only it would have been a very private encounter. And I wouldn’t have failed.
Fourteen
The small community of Ponte Vedra Beach lies just southeast of Jacksonville and a short distance to the north of the old Spanish colonial city of St. Augustine, and has some of the most beautiful golf courses in the country.
Driving past Ponte Vedra and headed southwest on Palm Valley Road, we left behind the affluent country club neighborhoods with their majestic mossy oaks and entered an area of local palmetto thickets, swamp pines, and scrub. As expected, Elizabeth Gage’s home was nowhere near the beach, but out on the eastern fringes of an area known as Hastings.
The place had that dated, hard-bitten feel one often finds in some of the country’s rural hinterlands, the places seldom visited by outsiders, the places most of society tends to ignore. It felt like a throwback to the era of grand suburban sprawls; identical boxy homes with zero-lot lines the type promoted by unscrupulous developers as an affordable alternative to the relatively pricier middle-class neighborhoods just east of Route 210. Of course, these modest developments were located a “safe” distance from the more exclusive and substantially more expensive country clubs and riverfront and beachfront mansions.
A little farther south, hidden in even taller scrub brush and on the west side of a swamp area, we found Elizabeth Gage’s neighborhood. It wasn’t much to look at: just a few dozen rectangular rambler boxes with too many coats of paint and a few long-ago dead appliances dotting untidy yards. I had been to places like this before, and the feeling was still the same: I wanted to leave as soon as possible.
Elizabeth’s home, like most of the identical structures on the narrow two-lane street that traversed her small neighborhood, was one of those typical 1960s single-story Florida white stuccos that are so plain and uninteresting: faded aluminum windows, glass blocks grown opaque with dinge, with dark roof tiles that were at least a decade or two overdue for replacement but still did what they could to protect a basic and rather unimpressive low-angle roofline. The entire structure seemed like a misguided effort at modern design that was somehow devoid of any forward thinking, a homestead that trudged more on the side of rat cage than a place you want to call home. Several rusty air conditioner boxes protruded in precarious ways from some of the windows. Each one of the shoe-box rambler homes on this unremarkable street was arranged in a strip-like fashion, as though the narrow passage-way that also doubles as if its main drag held some promise of a better life just ahead, all of course, a faux notion, nothing but the ingenious machinations of crafty developers and marketing types bent on selling their version of the American dream to unsuspecting buyers. But the false promise was there nonetheless and prospective homeowners, mostly young, hard working families, bought into this version of the dream only to end up trapped by its false promise, because once they bought into this sandy piece of paradise, they were forever stuck in mortgage purgatory, a place where a lifetime of mediocrity, dead end jobs and mundane routines gnaws inexorably at the dream and life itself. These streets were all the same; dead ends.
We parked in front of the house. The rain had eased, but low clouds were still racing south and east toward the Atlantic. Like most of the other yards on the street, Elizabeth Gage’s was an unkempt thicket of weeds, grass burrs, and untrimmed hedges. To the west side of the house, the desiccated skeleton of some long- dead tree stood eerily in the gloom. On the opposite side of the house, under the flimsy corrugated aluminum structure that passed for a carport, sat a dirty pewter-gray Ford Taurus. I walked up the uneven brick walk to the front porch while Sammy waited in the SUV. A fading sign warned solicitors not to bother.
I pressed the grimy plastic button that protruded from the belly of a weathered brass pineapple, and roused two or more smallish-sounding dogs to ferocious yapping. I heard someone fumbling with locks, a raspy female voice cursing, more fumbling, and eventually, the weathered wooden door creaked open.
Whatever vague image of a broken boozer I had constructed in my mind’s eye, it wasn’t what I encountered. I was expecting a middle-aged dipsomaniac, a wino, an insufferable neurotic, an overweight woman, perhaps addicted to God-knows-what, oozing of cigarette smoke and noxious BO.
The woman in the doorway was tall and a bit too slender. She looked to be in her late thirties, maybe early forties it was hard to guess her age beneath the mop of dishwater brown hair. Barefoot and wearing a thin, sleeveless cotton top and jeans cut off above the knee, she slouched against the doorjamb as if that were the only way she could possibly remain standing in her frail state. Even so, her pale alabaster skin had the look of a woman who once had looked after herself quite well. Her fingers were long and delicate, the nails short and as grimy and unkempt as her surroundings. She smelled of smoke and booze and sweat. With one delicate hand, she pushed the hair back from her face to reveal a lovely square jawline, high cheekbones, and full lips. The big hazel eyes, though, were another story entirely; cradled between thick layers of fine, dark long lashes, were expressive blood-shot eyes, feline eyes that did little to conceal the inner turmoil.