Authors: Paul Carr
“Mr. Craft, what can I do for you?” Tommy asked.
He shook hands with Jack.
Jack smiled. “You know Sam Mackenzie?”
Tommy glanced at Sam.
“Sure, Mackenzie, I remember you.” He grinned, pointed his index finger at Sam, thumb raised like the hammer of a Colt 45, and made a popping sound with his tongue.
Sam nodded, said, “Tommy.”
Tommy wore a charcoal suit with a pink knit shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He turned back to Jack, grinned, and pointed at his own feet.
“Check out the shoes.”
He wore dark green loafers made from alligator skin, with the heads of twin baby reptiles covering the tops. There were penny slots cut right between the little eyes. The backs of the shoes above the heels were pointed, with an inch of gator tail sticking out from each like cowboy spurs.
A smile teased at the corner of Jack’s mouth.
“Those are interesting, Tommy.”
“I can get you a pair, just say the word.”
“Maybe later.” Jack lost the smile. “Sam wants to talk to you about something.”
Tommy’s smile slipped away, too, and he nodded at two wing chairs.
“Sure. Have a seat.”
Tommy offered them drinks and both men said they would have a beer. Tommy pressed an intercom button and told Frankie to bring in three Coronas.
Sam told Tommy what had happened and Tommy squeezed his lips together, frowned, and shook his head.
“I haven’t seen her since that night,” Sam said.
“That’s too bad,” Tommy said. “’Cause I haven't talked to her in over a week.” He glanced down at one of his hands and picked at a thumbnail. Frankie entered the room and floated to the desk with a tray in his fat little hands. He poured the beer for Jack and Sam, and left Tommy’s beer in the bottle. Tommy nodded and Frankie left the room.
Sam took a swallow of beer and set his glass on a table next to his chair. “Why’d you send her to me?”
“Pretty simple. I had to stay out of it. Mr. Craft speaks highly of you, and I remembered you from, you know, back in Chicago.”
Tommy turned up the Corona bottle and drank about half of the beer. He set it down on the desk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Sam eyed him for a few seconds.
“Okay, who is she?”
Tommy held his hands up in front of him, palms out. “Like I said, I can’t get involved in this.”
“I’d consider it a personal favor, Tommy,” Jack said, his tone not that of a request at all. Tommy seemed nervous. He glanced at Jack, studied his face for a split second. “Okay, but this is probably going to get me in trouble.”
“We’ll keep it confidential,” Jack said.
Tommy glanced at the door, got up and closed it, and returned to his chair.
“Her name is Candi Moran. That name ring any bells?”
Sam stared at Tommy for a second and looked at Jack. Jack smiled.
“Moran,” Sam said, “I remember Philip Moran. Disappeared with a few million dollars his client’s had invested in his lending company.”
Tommy made his hand into a gun again, pointed it at Sam and popped his tongue.
“He turned up in the Miami River with about a hundred bullet holes in him,” Sam said. “And I heard they never found the money.”
Tommy nodded and glanced at Jack, whose eyes might have narrowed slightly. Tommy looked back at Sam, stuck his thumbnail between his teeth and chewed.
“So, who’s Candi Moran? His daughter?”
“Yep.” Tommy pulled his thumbnail from his mouth, looked at it, spat something invisible from his lips.
“Who plugged her?” Sam asked.
“Had to be La Salle.”
Tommy’s voice dripped venom when he said the name, and his lip peeled back in a sneer.
“La Salle?”
“Yeah, Vince La Salle. Big guy with long hair, looks like a weight lifter or something. You know him?”
“No. What does he have to do with anything?”
“He took over Philly Moran’s company.”
That meant he probably put the body in the river.
“He killed Moran?”
“Sure, but the police came around here busting
my
chops about it, ‘cause I used to work for Philly. I told ‘em I hadn’t seen the man since I started my own business a year or so ago. They said that's a good reason for us to be having problems, but we didn’t have any problems. When I left, he asked me to stay away from his clients, and I respected his wishes.”
Several seconds of silence passed, Tommy with a brooding look on his face. He glanced at his watch, said, “That about it?”
Sam looked at Jack, then back at Tommy. “Why would La Salle go after the girl?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she threatened him for killing her old man.”
Sam nodded at Tommy and glanced at Jack, who shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t think of anything else.
Sam drained his Corona. “What happened to Frankie?”
“La Salle’s men came by here a few days ago. Tried to get me to tell ‘em where Candi’s hiding. Frankie got pissed off the way they talked to me and mixed it up with one of ‘em. He’s kind of protective...you know what I mean. You think he looks bad, the other guy ran out of here carrying one of his own ears. Frankie clipped him with a sap.”
“Why would they think you know anything about Candi?”
Tommy looked wistful and his eyes softened.
“I used watch out for Candi, made sure nobody bothered her.”
Tommy looked as if he might say more, and Sam waited for several seconds until Tommy finally leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms.
“What about the Government? Where do they fit in?”
Tommy shook his head.
“They don’t fit in nowhere, far as I know.”
THEY FINISHED their beer, said good-bye, and left. As they rode through the electronic gate and pulled into the traffic, Sam looked for the gray Dodge. He spotted it turn onto the street several cars behind them.
“You knew all along, didn’t you?” Sam said.
“Knew what, Samuel?”
“About Candi Moran, her father, the money.”
Jack glanced at Sam and grinned. “What?”
Sam smiled and shook his head.
After several seconds Jack sighed. “Okay, I just didn’t want you to think I was in the middle of this. Tommy called me last week about Candi. He said this La Salle character had already threatened him about dealing with Philly’s former clients, and he didn’t want to make matters worse. I told him to send her to you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Jack raised an eyebrow and looked at Sam. “Hey, I knew you’d know what to do. And you did. This could be really big, you know.”
Those were the key words:
really big
. Millions of missing dollars get a lot of attention, especially from an old con man like Jack Craft. And Sam hadn’t missed the look Tommy and Jack exchanged at the mention of the money.
“Why all the games, then?”
“No games, I thought you might want to hear everything from Tommy.”
Which meant he would never have said anything if Sam hadn’t guessed it.
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t help but notice that you and Tommy are pretty chummy. Why is that?”
“I helped him out of a situation awhile back. I suppose he thinks he owes me.”
The Mercedes whisked north on US1, crossed the Miami River and turned right on the MacArthur Causeway. Sam looked out over the channel at a thunderhead rolling in from the Atlantic. The cruise ships wouldn’t like that. They passed the Coast Guard Station and Sam could see a curtain of rain in the distance sweeping across the tip of Miami Beach, coming fast toward the Causeway. He was glad when they rolled off the bridge ahead of the storm and slowed for the turn into the marina.
“He’s lying about the Government,” Sam said. “He knows something.”
Jack glanced at him. “Maybe he didn’t pay his taxes?”
“I recognized one of the men in the Dodge. His name is Grimes, and he isn’t a tax man.”
“Yeah?” Jack drove into his usual parking space and turned off the engine.
Rain pounded the roof of the Mercedes, and wind assaulted it like a grizzly tossing its prey. Jack turned on the radio and tried to get a weather report. A news program played, and the reporter said pieces of what was thought to be a missing fishing boat had washed up in Grand Cayman that morning. The authorities suspected an explosion of some kind. Sam wondered what might have happened to the boat. Lots of things can go wrong on the open sea. The weather man came on and said the rain would last through the night and be gone by morning. Jack turned off the radio.
“You should remember Grimes,” Sam said, “from that operation that went bad in Marseilles a couple of years ago.”
Jack nodded and Sam watched his face for some reaction, but he just leaned forward and gazed out the windshield at the sky. He looked at Sam, frowned and said, “Doozy of a storm, huh!”
Chapter 4
S
AM RAN in the downpour to his boat, a newspaper from Jack's car over his head. In his stateroom, he stripped off the wet clothes and changed into dry khakis and a sweat shirt. Still shivering from the sudden drop in temperature, he poured a shot of brandy and carried it into the lounge.
He picked up the phone and punched in a number he had not called in a long time, but knew from memory. He took a sip of the brandy while the phone rang. The vapors felt good in the back of his throat.
“Massage parlor,” the voice on the other end said. Sam heard rock music in the background. The music faded away to nothing.
“J.T.,” Sam said. His full name was John Templeton Smith III, and Sam had known him since his days in the military with Naval Intelligence. Now he spent his time as a computer criminal, taking money from the rich. Sam often wondered how well J.T. might have done in honest computer work, and concluded that he would have done poorly, because larceny fueled his genius.
“Sammy! I just thought about you.”
“What’s that massage parlor business all about?
“Oh, nothing, I didn’t recognize your ID. I see you finally broke down and got a cell phone.”
“Yep, sure did.” Sam had registered the phone to a fictitious person, as J.T. surely did with his own phone.
“Well, how you doing, buddy?”
“Not bad. You?”
“Hey, you know me, man. I’m doing great.” J.T. hesitated for a couple of seconds and Sam heard computer keys clicking. “If I could keep the bad guys off my ass I’d be even better. Anyway, what’s going on?”
People who lost large sums of money had been after J.T. for as long as Sam could remember, but J.T. always seemed to stay a step or two ahead of them.
“I wondered if you would check out some things for me.”
“Sure, what do you need?”
“You know anything about Philip Moran? I think he went by the name ‘Philly.’ Somebody killed him, maybe a couple of months ago.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember him. I figured he did something pretty bad to end up like he did.”
“The rumor mill said he stole a lot of money, and someone killed him for it.”
“Hmmm. How much?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
J.T. clicked the computer keys again.
“Any chance some of that money’s still laying around?”
J.T. could smell money almost as well as Jack Craft, and he usually tried to cut himself a slice of the pie. Sam didn’t really care. He just wanted to find out about the girl and the guys trailing him. If J.T. found some cash in the process, more power to him. Besides, he had saved Sam’s life a year or so before, and used a computer better than anyone Sam had ever seen. He always came up with answers no one else had.
“I heard they never got the money back,” Sam said, “which is kind of strange. Why would you kill somebody before you recovered the money?”
“Yeah, bizarre.”
Sam could almost hear the gears turning in J.T.’s head.
“His daughter also might be involved in it, so see what you can find on her, too. Her name is Candi. Probably Candace.”
Sam also asked him to see what he could find out about La Salle. That might be overkill, but it couldn’t hurt to get the information. This La Salle sounded like someone he needed to know about, even if he never saw Candi Moran again.
“Yeah, okay, I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”
“That should take care of it...no, wait, you remember a guy named Grimes?”
“Yeah, I think so. Crazy dude and real skinny.”
“That’s him. He’s here tailing me. He looks a little different, but I’m pretty sure it’s him.”
J.T. said he would call Sam as soon as he had something, and hung up. Sam set the phone on the table, looked at the empty brandy glass, and got up for a refill.
The rain quit almost as quickly as it had started. Sam walked on deck and leaned on the rail, looking toward the parking area. The gray Dodge sat there, empty, but he knew they lurked close by with their eyes on his boat. He had been trying to figure how they had gotten on to him, and decided that they probably were listening in on Candi’s phone when Tommy Shoes said Sam would help her.
Sam glanced up the dock and saw Grimes and the other man walk from the direction of the marina restaurant carrying cups of something, gazing out over the channel like they were tourists.
****
J.T. DIDN’T call back until a few minutes past seven. Sam sat in the Marina Bar and Grill, finishing a bowl of conch chowder when the phone chirped. He couldn't hear well because of the bar noise, so he went outside to a walkway overlooking the water. The beer sign came on and popped a couple of times. He pressed the button on the phone and said, “Hello.”
The Dodge was still in the parking lot. The man with Grimes had come inside about fifteen minutes earlier and picked up an order of food.
“There weren’t any newspaper stories worth anything,” J.T. said. “This guy Philly Moran was just another citizen who met up with foul play
,
as far as they were concerned. My source had some stuff, though. He said the word is he stole millions from a bunch of investors and tried to disappear. Apparently, the other man you mentioned, La Salle, is the one who had him killed, but nobody could prove it.”
“What about the daughter, Candi?”
“I found out she's missing, and might have something to do with the money.”