ENCOMIENDA
Chapter 6
A Collier County Sheriff’s Department patrol car pulled up next to us about ten minutes after I made the call. Two deputies, the driver – a tall, burly, middle-aged man – and the passenger – a thickset young woman, got out of the car and walked over. The male deputy said, “You the one called in an accident?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“No, it happened about a month ago.”
The deputies exchanged glances. The young one’s glance seemed to be saying, What’s this, a crazy? The older one’s, I’ve seem ‘em all, but this is a doozey.
I pulled out my detective’s license and showed it. “I know it sounds strange, but I’ve been hired by a father to find his son. He and a friend were traveling from Miami to Tampa and disappeared somewhere along the way. They were driving a red and white car.” I pointed to the paint marks on the railing. I showed them the faded map and the tennis shoe. “I found these in the water.”
The two peered over the railing into the water as if they could derive some confirmation. The male removed his Stetson and scratched his head, “Well, Mr. Jaspers, could’a’ happened. These here canals are pretty deep, near a hunnerd feet some of ‘em. If no one saw him go in, he could be feedin’ the fishes. Was he drivin’ at night?”
“No, but it might have been raining. There are no skid marks.”
“Uh huh, going a trifle fast and start planing over a strip of puddle and next thing you know you’re slamming into the rail and going airborne.”
The female said, “Splashdown.”
The male said, “When did this happen?”
“About a month ago, December 7.”
“Yup, that was a messy week as I recall. Martha, wasn’t that when that cold air blew in and clamped everybody down fer a while?”
“Yes, I believe it was,” replied Deputy Martha.
I said, “Can you get some equipment here to locate the car?”
The beefy deputy, the strip tag pinned on his chest pocket displaying Johnson, grinned at me. “Sure, we can do that, but I doubt if it can all be done today. It’ll be dark in a few hours, so they’re not likely to even get started today. I have to make my report first. You got somewhere to stay?”
“Any motels in the area?”
“Your best bet is Naples, Mr. Jaspers. Here’s my card. Call me at the number tomorrow morning. I’ll tell you what we got cooking. Who’s the girl?”
“The daughter of a friend. I gave her a ride home from Miami. Lives in Fort Myers.”
* * * *
I drove into Naples but stopped once beside the road to call the office. Caridad answered. “Hey, Boss, I was just about to call you. I got your weather report. A cold front of arctic air had moved in from the north. It was a general overcast with scattered showers. Temperature: 45 to 57 degrees.”
“Thanks, Cari. Good work. Is Ruben there?”
“Sure, just a minute.” She transferred me to Ruben’s phone.
He said, “Compadre, how’ you doing?”
“Fine, Ruben, but I’ve probably got bad news for Concepción. I think we’ve located his son’s car, but it’s in deep, black water. We’ll try to find it tomorrow.”
“Too bad. Lo siento.”
“Did you get a line on the Menendez’ kid’s father?”
“I found a Venezuelan connection who knows the family, although he’s not a personal friend. He says the family is well-known, wealthy and definitely not a fan of El Presidente Chavez. The father has investments in and connections to both the oil industry and the soft drink distribution business and some clothing stores. That’s all so far.”
“Ok, keep digging. I’ll probably be here at least through tomorrow. Depends on what we find in the canal.” I clicked off.
To Iris I said, “Looks like I won’t be able to get you home tonight. Call your mother.”
“Great.” She punched the keypad and then said, “Mom, I won’t get home tonight. Something’s developed in the case, so we have to stay here.” She passed the phone to me.
I said, “Hello, Ms. Channing.”
“You’re not bringing her here?”
“No, I have to stay in Naples tonight. I got a break in the case.”
“Is she helping you with the case?”
“No, she’s just curious. Can you drive down to get her?”
“Not tonight. I have a previous engagement.”
“Then I’ll put her up in a motel for the night.”
“Her own room?”
“Well, I could let her stay with me if it’s ok with you. I’m not a wealthy man. Either way, she’ll be fine.”
“I sense I can trust you Mr. Jaspers. I’d prefer that she didn’t have her own room if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
I told Iris, “Looks like you’ll be staying with me tonight.”
“Cool.”
The cheapest motel I could find with vacancies cost $98 a night. I signed in and claimed Iris as my daughter, located a good restaurant a few blocks away and treated Iris and me to a dinner of frog legs and salad, which somehow seemed appropriate. At least the motel room was clean, cool and comfortable.
I let Iris clean up first. When she was finished, I washed up.
When I came out of the bathroom, I found her sitting cross-legged on her bed and watching CSI on the TV.
She said, “Do you like this show?”
“It’s good entertainment, but it’s not realistic.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for example, real CSI people just investigate the crime scene. They don’t assist on stakeouts or tails or participate in raids, and normally they don’t interview the suspects.”
“Shit. You’ve ruined the show for me.”
“You asked. Besides it’s late and I need to get some sleep, so you have to turn off the television and the lights.”
“Geez, you’re just like my parents.”
“Same age group – generally speaking.”
She turned off the TV and the lights. I heard her get into bed.
I slept well despite my fondness for my own apartment. Before I fell asleep I thought of my cats and Cyndi. I hoped Churchill and Franklin were content back there. I’d left them one of those timed feeders, plenty of water and clean litter boxes. They should be fine for a few days. Cyndi, of course, was more complicated. She would be fine with or without me, but I couldn’t shake the idea that she would be with me some day, some way. I remembered her smell and her touch.
When I woke the next morning, I made the complimentary pot of coffee, shaved, showered and dressed in jeans, a cotton pullover and hiking boots. My loafers were soaked from the canal. I let Iris sleep.
I called Deputy Johnson, who told me that a boat and a couple divers would be out at the accident site soon. “By the time you have breakfast and drive out there, they should be at work. A homicide detective will be there, too. His name’s Suarez. Lieutenant Suarez. He’ll be in charge. I told him you’d probably go out there.”
“Thanks, Johnson.”
I wrote a note for Iris and put it in front of the mirror on the dresser. “I’ve gone to the crime scene. Call your mother and arrange to go home. You’re a good kid. It was nice meeting you. Buck.” She was still sleeping when I left.
I found a breakfast café where I ordered some scrambled eggs and hash browns and more coffee. The motel coffee hadn’t been very satisfying.
By the time I arrived at the site, the boat was in the water. All the vehicles were parked on the opposite bank, so I continued down the highway until I came to a small bridge across the canal, turned right and then right again onto a dirt road that ran along the eastern side of the canal. When I pulled up beside the other vehicles – a pickup truck, boat trailer, crime scene van and an unmarked police sedan – a short, cleanly trimmed, black-haired Latino in a white shirt (spotted with sweat stains) and cotton trousers approached me.
“’You Jaspers?”
“Yes, I guess you’re Lieutenant Suarez?”
We shook hands. I said, “Anything yet?”
“No, the boat just got in. They’ve got sonar and will be going up and down every ten yards. I told ‘em to go a hundred yards each side of the smashed rail. No tellin’ how far the car floated before it sank. I hooked a couple things out of the water before the others got here. Have a look.”
I followed him over to a square of plastic sheeting spread out near his vehicle. On it were a Miami Hurricanes baseball cap and a small carryall that had been opened and its contents displayed – waterlogged male underwear, boxers. He said, “They were partially submerged near the bank.”
“I’m afraid I’m not going to have anything good to tell his father.”
“No, doesn’t look good” He pulled a notebook from his back pocket. “What are the names of the missing boys?”
“Fernando Concepción and Pablo Menendez.”
He wrote it down. “Were they students?”
“Yes, at M-U.”
“United States citizens?”
“No, Nano was from Mexico; Paulie, from Venezuela. A missing person report was filed by Nano’s father in Miami.”
“Good. I’ll let Miami know what we find.” He was a good detective, trying to fill in all the blanks.
I sat on the bank and watched the operation. Two men wearing wetsuits were in the boat. One was driving; the other was checking instruments. The boat did two circuits, and then on the third circuit about forty yards north of the bent railing in the middle of the canal, the men idled the engine and hovered over the sonar screen. The one who had been checking waved his right arm back and forth. I stood up. Lieutenant Suarez walked over, stood beside me and said, “They found something.” He yelled at the boat, “What’s up?”
“We got a strong positive!” the checker yelled. At the same time, the driver threw an anchored float over the side to mark the spot.
Then the two came into shore. Suarez and I helped secure the boat. The checker jumped out. “There’s definitely something large and metallic down there. But the water’s too murky to see. We’ll have to dive to check it out.” Both the driver and checker went to the crime scene van and pulled out two sets of scuba gear: tanks, masks and flippers. With expert and practiced grace they slipped the tanks on, tested each other’s oxygen and came quickly back to the bank, where they squatted, and donned the flippers and goggles. With no wasted motion like two sated giant frogs, they fell backwards into the canal.
They emerged seconds later and breaststroked over to the float. Then they did a last check of their masks and went down.
Suarez wrote furiously in his notepad, which was privileged. I would never see what was written there, but from his concentration, I gathered that he was recording as much as he could of everything that transpired, including the time and the weather (10:37 a.m., partly cloudy blue skies). He wanted not only the substance of what happened but also the sequence and any variables. While the divers were underwater, he bagged all the evidence that had been resting on the plastic sheeting and filed it inside the crime scene van. I liked him.
By the time he finished and stood beside me, the divers had been down twenty minutes. He said, “I need a smoke. You want one?”
“No, thanks, I quit many years ago.”
He lit a cigarette and took a short drag. “I should quit. Been working on it. I’m down to half a pack a day. When I’m tense, I really feel the need.”
“You don’t have to explain. I’ve been there myself. I wish smoking weren’t so bad for us. It was an enjoyable habit. I still miss it.”
He blew the smoke out and looked at me. “Are you an ex-cop? Lots of private cops are.”
“Not really, unless being an MP counts. I did that in the service for four years. While I was getting my bachelors in history, I also worked as a security guard. Took some criminology classes. Then studied psychology. Thought I’d be a teacher, but one year of that showed me teaching wasn’t just telling facts and explaining events. There was a lot more to it that I didn’t want to put up with. And then it dawned on me: what I liked about both psychology and history was unraveling the mystery of minds and social events. I realized that I was qualified to be a detective, got a license and started taking cases.”
“So how’s that? You making a living?”
“I struggled for a while because I had to figure out the business end of it. But I’m good at the detective part, so more and more cases came my way.”
“You work alone?”
“At first, but then I met another guy who was good, too, and we formed a partnership. Now we’ve got an office, a secretary, one practically full-time associate, and dozens of part-time operatives.”
“No kidding. That’s why you can afford a Z3.”
“No, the Z3 was practically a gift. We do all right, but we’re not rich.”
“Maybe I’ll get into that when I retire from here.”
I surprised him by saying, “I don’t think so. You’re a good detective and you’re organized and good with people. But you don’t strike me as a businessman. But if you stay with your job, you’ll rise and wind up running the department one day.”
He laughed and said, “Yeah, I suppose you got that right.”
“If you quit smoking.”
He threw the cigarette butt down and tapped the fire out. “I’m trying.”
The divers surfaced and swam to shore. We helped them out and the checker said, “It’s a red and white Toyota Samurai right side up, but no bodies.”
Suarez said, “Let’s hope alligators didn’t get them. Tell you what. You and Sam take the boat and drag up and down for floaters. I’ll walk the banks. Meet back here in two hours.”
He pulled out a cell phone and talked. “Dorinda, send a wrecker out here, one of the big ones. We’ve got to crank a car out of the canal.” He looked at me, “You want to walk the banks, too?”
“Sure.”
“Come here. I’ll give you one of these hooks.” He took me to the pickup and drew forth a long aluminum pole with a two-pronged hook on the end. “If you see something interesting, haul it out.” He took out another pole and we headed to the bank. “Why don’t you walk south and I’ll go north.”
I turned south and trudged the bank. I hadn’t gone thirty feet when I saw something incongruous and hooked it. It was the mate to the tennis shoe I had found yesterday. I set it on the bank and plodded on. I poked and nudged a few other items that turned out to be indiscriminate trash.
Just over a football field length from where I started, I poked at a leathery strip and jumped when the aroused alligator thrashed its tail and shot out into the middle of the black water. I watched it go, but it was a mere four feet long, not nearly big enough to consume a man. It stopped, turned sideways, so I could just make out the yellow reptilian eye with the slit of black pupil; then its body dropped tail first until just its head rested on the surface and only its eyes and nostrils above the water line, suspended like a raptor in a stiff wind, a silent and deadly hunter.
After I had gone at least three football fields, I turned back. In the distance, I could see a large tow truck bouncing down the dirt road toward the police cars. By then I was hot and thirsty. I traipsed back, dragging my pole on the ground behind me. I picked up the tennis shoe on the way and dropped it on Suarez’s plastic sheeting.
END of Chapter 6
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