Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective (20 page)

Most of the dozen visitors going through the same process were women, soberly dressed in anonymous sweatshirts and slacks in an effort to not offend posted instructions against provocative clothing. Everyone maintained a poker face and kept their eyes averted. If the women knew each other, they gave no indication. Tree wondered how Mickey Crowley would have managed to befriend Elizabeth Traven.

Tree and the other visitors shuffled through two sealed rooms into a drab hall full of tables and chairs. Tree managed to find an empty table and took it just as a guard ushered Brand Traven into view.

He dressed in the uniform of prisoners at Coleman—olive green slacks and a short-sleeved olive green shirt—pausing to look around until Tree raised his arm. Traven sauntered over and said with a crooked smile, “There you are.”

The tubby corporate villain of newspaper front pages and six o’clock newscasts was gone, leaving a trim and rested man in his mid-sixties, pouches beneath dead eyes, deep lines crisscrossing a high forehead.

Traven offered Tree his hand.

“Mr. Callister,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

Traven sat down as a small, bald-headed man passed, hunch-shouldered, ashen-faced. He aimed a watery smile in Traven’s direction. “Don’t tell ’em anything, Brand.”

“Don’t worry, Jimmy.”

As the bald-headed man moved away, Brand lowered his voice and said, “Jimmy Tragg, bush-league Madoff. Ruined widows and orphans with that oldest and least original of all frauds, the Ponzi scheme. The usual thing. Take everyone’s money, say you’re investing it for them, pocket their life savings, and wait for the Feds to show up at your door. Jimmy took several hundred million from despairing widows and orphans so he’s cooling his heels here for the next hundred years. I’m very small potatoes compared to Jimmy.”

He sat back and his voice rose. “Lots of lawyers in here. They seem particularly susceptible to greed and avarice. Also, the usual parade of bankers and businessmen. There’s a former submarine commander convicted of fraud. America. Everyone’s stealing something. Everyone comes to Coleman. Some do very well here.” He nodded in Jimmy’s direction. “Others not so well.”

“Your wife says you survive, no matter what.”

“Does she? Of course that’s easy to say when you’re not in a place like this.” Traven spread his hands on the table in front of him. “I’m doing a lot of reading of Socrates. Haven’t studied him since I was a kid. He’s kind of like Shakespeare. Not much is actually known about Will, so you can make up any Shakespeare you like. He can be in love. He can be gay. He can even be a fraud who didn’t actually write those plays. Who’s to contradict you? The same is true of Socrates. Create your own Socrates, whatever suits.”

“What sort of Socrates do you have in mind, Mr. Traven?”

“Plato offered a kind of saint, a god-like figure sending down philosophical decrees like thunderbolts from the heavens. I prefer the version created by Aristophanes. A clown. Aristophanes has him in a basket hanging from a rope, musing on the buzzing noise made by a gnat, advising acolytes on how to beat fraud charges.”

“He would fit in nicely at Coleman.”

Traven laughed. “I’m not so sure about the moralist, but the clown would, Mr. Callister. Yes, he would.”

He looked over at the hulks of stainless steel vending machines lining the far wall. “Lunch, Mr. Callister? I’m afraid you’ll have to buy. They don’t allow us to have money.”

Tree got Brand a cappuccino and a ham sandwich. He retrieved another sandwich for himself as well as a Diet Coke. They returned to their table and Brand began to extract the sandwich from its plastic wrap, his movements slow and meticulous, as though unwrapping a small bomb.

“Did you get out of the business or did they throw you out?”

“They threw me out.”

“A.J. Liebling once said the function of a press in society is to inform. Its role is to make money. Alas, it no longer informs, and certainly it doesn’t make money. I won’t say I saw it coming but let’s face it, the business has been on the downslide for years. Is it the end of newspapers? I wonder.”

“Do you?”

“Some will disappear—a few are already gone—but there will be survivors. Like radio. When television came along everyone thought radio was finished. But the medium adapted, survived. A similar situation, I believe, will occur with newspapers, although not the ones with which I was associated.”

“No?”

Brand laid the sandwich wrapper on the table, using the flat of his hand to smooth it.

“They say I defrauded the company, bled it dry. Yet when I gave up the chairmanship, shares traded at eight dollars. Now they’re down to seventy-eight cents. The company is worthless. The people who were supposed to save it ended up destroying it and raping shareholders in the bargain. They say I lined my pockets. What about these charlatans? They’ve pilfered hundreds of millions of dollars in unearned fees and no one says anything. But then I suppose everyone in this room can do a variation on my speech. You should hear Jimmy Tragg go on about how he was victimized by the government.”

“Were you victimized?”

His grin widened. “Well, that’s my story isn’t it? This place is filled with the innocent. I feel right at home.”

“You’re just more innocent than the rest,” Tree said.

“I like to think so.” No grin this time.

“Is that why I’m here? To help you prove your innocence?”

“Or perhaps a prisoner without a lot of visitors just needs an interesting conversation from time to time. Whatever I may think of journalists, they do make great talkers.”

Traven raised his eyebrows as though to cue interesting conversation from Tree.

“I haven’t been a journalist for a while,” he said.

“Then perhaps curiosity brings us together.”

“Whose curiosity? Yours or mine?”

“I’m curious as to why—or I suppose the better word is how—how a man of your obvious talents ends up on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico, anonymous and forgotten, pursuing detective work of all things.”

Tree said, “The Socrates you talk about is from the play by Aristophanes titled
The Clouds
. At the end, the intellectual brilliance of Socrates, his terrible arrogant belief in his own omnipotence, is defeated by the rabble rising against him.”

Traven stared a long moment before he produced something approximating a smile. “Dear me, Mr. Callister, I hope we’re not all misjudging you.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Tree said.

“But when it comes down to it, Socrates aside, we’re both in the same boat.”

“No, we’re not. I’m on a lovely island in the sun. You’re sitting in a jail cell.”

“I didn’t mean to anger you, Mr. Callister,” Traven said.

“No, of course not.”

“And I do not deride your new profession. To the contrary. I hope to make use of it.”

He leaned forward. “I have a small, closely knit group around me. My wife, obviously, a few others. I would like you to be part of that group.”

“Your wife fired me.”

“Have you read any of her books?”

“The Stalin. Years ago.“

“The secret of my wife, Mr. Callister, I believe she’s actually quite enamored of communism. She writes continually of those who corrupted its ideals, but the philosophy itself, what Marx originally espoused, I think she is a believer. A disappointed believer, but a believer.”

“Married to a jailed capitalist.”

Traven spent more time looking at his hands. “Anyway, I’m rehiring you.”

“To do what?”

“Continue your work. Help my wife with security, especially when it comes to this woman.”

“Mickey Crowley?”

“Yes.”

“And her husband, Dwayne.”

“Dwayne Crowley is here.”

“Is he?”

“Unless you know something I don’t.”

“What about Reno O’Hara?”

“What about him?”

“Was he part of your group?”

“Reno did some work for me.”

“What kind of work?”

“Do you mean did he do anything illegal? No, he did not. However, I would be lying if I said I didn’t know something of his background.”

“The work he did for you, did that include coming to my office to threaten me?”

Traven looked taken aback. “No, of course not. I’m not trying to scare you, Mr. Callister, I’m trying to hire you to help us.”

“If you were interested in finding Reno’s boy, Marcello, for example, I might be able to help you there.”

Traven’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, provided, of course, we were looking for the boy.”

“For the operation.”

Traven picked his next words carefully. “What operation, Mr. Callister?”

“I thought Marcello needed an operation, and you are helping him with it.”

“I know my wife is concerned about the young fellow’s well-being,” Traven said with studied smoothness. “Our first priority would be to locate him, ascertain what his needs are, and decide how we can help him.”

“You know the FBI is looking for him?”

Traven paused longer than he should have before he said, “I didn’t know the FBI was involved.”

“They are.”

“Twenty thousand dollars, Mr. Callister.”

Tree looked at him.

“Is that enough?” Brand Traven asked.

“False words are not only evil in themselves,” Tree said, “but they infect the soul with evil.”

“And that is?”

“Socrates,” Tree said.

Brand Traven frowned at his uneaten sandwich. “You’ll have your money by eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

29

H
ad he been bought? Tree thought as he drove south along I-75 toward Fort Myers.

He supposed he had—or would be, as soon as he had twenty thousand dollars in his hands. He always had wondered what it would be like to be bribed, tempted—
corrupted
. Rather matter-of-fact, it turned out, dressed up as a simple business transaction. Tree could see how Brand Traven might have done the same with his media empire. It’s business so I’ll just skim a few million out of the till and stick it in my pocket. Well, Tree Callister was a long way from a few million. He could be had for a measly twenty thousand dollars.

“What was Traven like?” Freddie asked after he got home that evening. She had spent the day with Marcello, uneventful, she said. Except they had a lot of fun together.

“He talked about Socrates.”

“You must have felt right at home.”

“If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you become a philosopher.”

“Where did that come from?”

“Socrates.”

Freddie looked impressed—fleetingly. “From Traven?”

Tree shook his head. “When I fed him Socrates he didn’t recognize the quote.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And when I launched into a bunch of meaningless gibberish about a play called
The Clouds
in which Socrates makes an appearance, Traven bought right into it.”

“Which is to say what? Anyone who really did know the play or Socrates never would have swallowed it?”

“Not for a moment.”

“Maybe he was just trying to be polite.”

“Traven doesn’t strike you as a man who feels an overwhelming need to be polite.”

“So he’s full of shit?”

“Or a man not telling the truth about any number of things.”

“I think they know we have the boy,” she said. “Or they strongly suspect.”

“That’s a distinct possibility.”

“They’ve threatened you, and broken into the house, and none of that has worked. So the question they must be asking is, What will work?”

“Money,” Tree said.

“Exactly. Cue your new Socrates-loving friend Brand Traven.”

“He even likes the way I write.”

“Flattery won’t work, either.”

“It won’t?”

“You can’t be bought.”

“I can’t?” Tree said. “You’re sure about that?”

“I am.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. You’re incorruptible. That’s what I love about you. You are as honest as the day is long.”

“Twenty thousand dollars could shorten the day considerably. Particularly when the guy bribing me compliments my writing.”

“You would turn Marcello over for a measly twenty thousand dollars?”

“Well, I would need a compliment or two to go along with it.”

“Tree.”

“Maybe it’s a lifetime of being underpaid in the newspaper business, but twenty thousand dollars is not my idea of measly.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Would you turn him over or not?”

“Not even if he likes the way I write.”

“Then you really are the man I married.” Freddie yawned. “Being with a child all day is tiring, let me tell you.”