Octopus Alibi (33 page)

Liska said, “Nice pants.”

I had slept in the trousers that Macho had torn apart in the C-store parking lot in Dania Beach.

“Bad dreams last night,” I said.

Liska nodded. “Saw your name in the paper this morning.”

So much for keeping my BBDC investment under wraps.

“The
Citizen
or the
Herald
?”

“Does it matter? They spelled your name right.”

“Top of the day to you, too,” I said. “I just woke up, recovering from a long day yesterday. If you came for snappy chatter…”

Monty said, “Why don’t we let Marnie take care of her business first?”

“Good,” I said. “The tank’s full. I’ll get Liska’s keys for you.”

Monty shook his head. “We have much to discuss.”

“Okay,” I said. “Your slot’s in fifteen minutes. You’re better off that way, because I’m barely awake right now. Maybe you could run to the Sunshine Market, buy me a newspaper and a greasy glazed doughnut.”

Liska appeared frightened at the prospect of exercise. Monty sneered. He led the way out the door.

I caught myself staring at Marnie’s Jeep. “Sorry about the tire.”

“Why? You didn’t poke a hole in it. But I like your sense of duty. Make your coffee while you can, and I’ll tell you what I’ve found out.”

She followed me to the kitchen, glanced for a moment at Teresa Barga’s belongings inside the door. “Shouldn’t that go to the curb?”

“If she doesn’t come back, I’ll auction it to benefit the homeless. Have you recovered from getting scooped?”

“I buried myself in work. I dug into old newspapers, county tax records, and state corporate papers. I spent eleven hours online. I’ve done fifteen telephone interviews. It’s like untangling a hair ball.”

“Because time has passed, or people made it complicated?”

“Both,” she said. “I learned yesterday that Borroto Brinas was started by a Miami architect, Manuel Reyes Silveria. He came up with a concept, then brought in advisors and investors.”

“I know there’s a chapter two.”

She pulled a Spiral notepad from her back pocket. “From the October seventh, 1983,
Miami Herald
: ‘Reyes took his life with a shotgun yesterday at the canal edge behind his Coral Gables home. A friend said he had been despondent, “embroiled in a war of lawyers and financiers for control of his company.” A BBDC spokesman, Artemio Fernandez, expressed his colleagues’ “infinite grief and sense of loss.” He noted that the company’s projects in Dade and Monroe counties would move ahead “in keeping with our founder’s dreams.”’”

“Jesus,” I said. “Identical suicides, a generation apart, under the dark cloud of BBDC. Do we know anything about the company’s other projects?”

“Nope,” she said. “Just that island. They wanted condos and gift shops within swimming distance of North Roosevelt. I can’t find the corporate name attached to anything else. It was a one-pony circus.”

I said, “Why didn’t they build back then? Or do we know that?”

“They had everything in place by 1978. They got a hundred-year lease from the city, hired marine engineers, got all the permits, all the financing. Then Florida threw a wrench in the works. The state said the land was bay bottom. It wasn’t attached to the main island, so it didn’t belong to the city in the first place. It belonged to Florida, so all those permits were useless. Everything stopped in early ’seventy-nine.”

“Let me guess. That land is part of the big parcel the feds made the state give back to the city. When, two years ago?”

“Right,” said Marnie. “The district court said that the state’s land policy back then was illegal.”

“Should I be foolish enough to ask about environment?” I said.

“Our city attorney thinks that the project’s grandfathered in. Even if it screws the water and kills baby birds, there’s no way to stop it.”

“When the dreamer died by his canal, who inherited BBDC?”

Marnie checked her notepad. “His fifty-one percent went to a nephew and two nieces. They all live in Coral Gables, and the nephew’s an attorney. He campaigned for years to get the feds to declare the land grab void, and won. He’s the one who’s been pushing this deal into the city commission’s face. You want to guess his name?”

“The spokesman who bubbled over with grief?” I said.

“You got it. Artemio Fernandez.”

“Maybe Artie’s our expert in neat suicides. Who owns the rest of it?”

“Forty-four percent is held by Remigio Partners. Either the partners went by fake names, or they’re all dead. I found one reference to Remigio in the archives. It was an old DEA district court filing. The government wanted the company’s bank records during a big drug sweep called Operation Grouper. That was when the cops busted a hundred people, then the cops got busted, too. They got greedy with confiscated cash.”

“What you’ve told me adds up to ninety-five percent.”

“BBDC’s last five percent was sold to people in Key West prior to 1979. People who might have helped promote the project. Even quarter shares were sold on the docks and in bars. That’s where you and Sam and eighteen others came in, including five dead ones on that list, too.”

“Who were Borroto and Brinas?”

“I couldn’t find them in the corporate records, or anywhere else,” she said. “They may have been ancestors honored by the company name.”

I carried my coffee to the porch. Marnie followed, sat across from me.

“You said the other night that Gomez’s vote would’ve cost Sam and me our investments. Let’s say it passes now. Where’s that leave us?”

“I can only begin to guess,” she said. “With current land values, growth restrictions that this project could ignore, and future rents, we’re talking hundreds of millions. Even with your fractional ownership, you could be into the high five-, low six-figure range. Sam, twice as much. Who knows? It could be triple that. You two could sit back and take dividends and be set for life.”

“I had no idea…”

My phone rang. At the crack of dawn on Saturday?

Marnie said, “Don’t answer it. The
Herald
is running down that list of BBDC names. There’s nothing you can say that will sound good.”

“How is that different from the way I look and feel?”

“Let’s talk about your pity problem.”

I decided not to mention her bemoaning the
Miami Herald
’s scoop. “All this research, and we still don’t know who murdered Steve Gomez.”

“If we knew that, we could celebrate. Spend the day in the Snipe Keys.”

“We should do it anyway,” I said.

“On whose boat?” said Marnie. “Sam blew out the door at six-thirty. He took his skiff keys, but not his fly kit. He rolled his gun into a raincoat. It’s not going to rain today.”

Two possibilities. If he found Marlow, Sam would call the FDLE, give precision coordinates to a SWAT helo. Or else no one would ever again see that Fountain with its Yamaha motor.

“He needed to escape,” I said. “What does he call it, hydrotherapy? A trip to the backcountry and home by noon.”

“Too fast an answer, Alex. He doesn’t have a charter. He didn’t get any calls from friends in broken-down boats who needed to be towed in. What’s he doing?”

“I don’t know, for sure.”

“You’re holding back.”

I wanted to sip an endless coffee so I wouldn’t have to speak. It was too hot to put near my mouth. “I try not to be a gossip or a tattletale.”

“I just handed you three days of research, you bastard. Talk.”

“The man who probably killed Lorie Wheeler is a fugitive. He could be anywhere in America, but he ditched his car and owns a boat. Sam knows what the boat looks like…”

“Searching the ocean? That fucker. Is that why he took his gun?”

“We’re talking about a heartbroken man, Marnie.”

“You are so full of shit. He’s my partner and he’s shutting me out.”

The phone rang again.

I began to get up. “You going to advise me not to answer it?”

Marnie went for the door. “Kiss my ass. I’m not saying another word.”

I let it ring.

Marnie spun her tires in gravel as she hurried out of the lane. A guest at the Eden House pool played Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” for the dozen homes within earshot. I couldn’t hear the guitar solo because a twin-engine airplane flew low overhead.

*   *   *

Liska said, “We’re chasing our tails, here. The media’s watching. You know what happens when you chase your tail a thousand miles an hour? You look like a blurry circle, a hairy doughnut. You look like a tropical storm on the Weather Channel. You look like a poorly focused asshole.”

I put the glazed doughnut back in its bag. “Good similes,” I said. “Bad for the appetite. I watch the Weather Channel more than I look up assholes.”

“Obviously you and I don’t work in the same building.”

I warned myself to watch out. Aghajanian and Liska were more than just an out-of-town FBI guy and a rookie sheriff. They’d worked as a team at the city and were known for grabbing hardcore thugs. They had gone beyond good-cop–bad-cop routines, had taken their Q-and-As to free-form, abstract levels. Their act was more pester-and-comfort than maim-and-reprieve. They had puzzled criminals, confused them, coaxed accomplices’ names, street tips, and confessions. What they’d saved on rubber hoses they could have spent on Kleenex.

“Everyone’s looking for Odin Marlow,” I said to break the ice. “I saw him drive by the hospital in Miami when you were inside.”

Liska owed me an apology for his hospital tirade about Sam. He had called him a douchebag, a time waster. He’d insinuated that diet pills or mood drugs were behind Sam’s craziness.

He was going to save the apology. He inspected a spider’s web on my screening. “Marlow was my supervisor twenty-five years ago. He was taking payoffs to avoid certain docks at three
A.M.
, so bales could be moved from speedboats to vans. He was a rare one, never let the money show. They had to shitcan him for snagging free pussy off teenage whores. They got long-lens black-and-whites of a young girl squeezing his dick at four
A.M.
in the alley next to the Swizzle Stick on Duval. I say, ‘they,’ I mean, ‘me.’ I had to hide on the roof of the bank building and take his picture myself.”

“Bottom line, Marlow’s a Broward problem,” I said. “Has anyone made progress with the alleged murders of Naomi Douglas and Steve Gomez?”

“Have you talked to Bobbi Lewis?” said Liska.

I shook my head.

“You know about her relationship with Steve Gomez?”

“She mentioned they’d been friends.”

Liska faced me. “Or more than that?”

“I got that impression.”

“You know who ended it?”

“Don’t those things stop by mutual agreement?”

“Never,” said Liska. “Or should I say ‘always’ and ask how your personal life is doing?”

I turned my head to Monty. He looked impassive, patient. The FBI gives out its own annual Oscar awards.

“Lewis ended it,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave his wife for her.”

“Now we’re getting closer. A year ago his wife turned the table. She left him. We might assume that he didn’t resume his affair with Lewis.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“If he had, there would have been nothing wrong with making it public.”

“I’d have to be a dunce not to see where this is going.”

Liska went back to the spider. His eyes traced the web strands to where they connected with the screen framing. “Did you get the idea that Lewis had counted on that split with Yvonne?”

“When she talked the other day, the first I heard about it, she sounded like she had come to grips. It was over and done.”

Monty said, “You told me her investigation was ‘on again, off again,’ or something to that effect.”

“But that was her approach to Naomi, not to Gomez.”

“Right,” said Monty. “But you told us Thursday that Naomi had raised Steve Gomez. I sensed that Lewis learned that fact as you spoke it.”

“I did, too.”

“How do you think that affected her?”

“She might have felt a certain relief,” I said. “I was with her when Naomi’s neighbor told her that Gomez was a regular midday visitor. Both our minds, right then, went straight to nooners. That was one of the times when she went flaky.”

“What were the others?”

“Can I suggest you ask Lewis instead of me?”

“Since our last meeting here,” said Liska, “no one has seen or heard from her.”

I added up forty hours. “Has she missed work assignments?”

“She doesn’t punch a time clock,” said Liska. “She’s expected to call in so we can find her when we need her. She hasn’t called, she’s not answering.”

“Anyone knock on her door? Where does she live?”

Liska nodded. “She owns a canal house on Aquamarine, on Big Coppitt. We checked. Her Celica wasn’t there. One of our female dispatchers picked a lock on a sliding glass door early this morning. We were afraid she was in there, maybe done something to herself. Nobody home.”

“I’ve never heard her talk about friends,” I said.

Monty butted in. “We think she left town.”

In other words, they thought she was a valid suspect in the murder of her ex-lover.

“I was standing right where I’m standing now,” I said. “I showed Dexter a scene photo. The bloodstain on Steve Gomez’s shirt. He reacted by saying, ‘Oh.’”

“You betcha,” said Liska. “Right then I took the case away from the city.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Bullshit. I assigned the case to Lewis.”

“Wrong. She said, ‘It’s my case now,’ and you said, ‘Agreed.’ She took the initiative. Did she take the case file, too?”

Liska looked at Aghajanian. They both knew I was right.

“Fuck,” said Liska.

“I take it the FDLE didn’t swoop in and lift the case from your hands.”

Liska shook his head.

“Back to square one?” I said. “You’re not sold on Whit Randolph?”

“You ever see Randolph and Lewis together?” said Monty.

“No,” I said. “But let’s start from the beginning. Why don’t we go over to Steve Gomez’s yard and get a feel for his last moments? Do some down-and-dirty detective work? Maybe a bright lightbulb will appear in one of our heads.”

“Monty and I can go alone,” said Liska. “You stick around, do laundry, maybe take a few pictures in the yard.”