CHAPTER TWENTY
As messes go this one had to be an eleven on a ten-point scale. I was back in the rear seat of a car with my hands cuffed behind my back, exactly how I started in Jacksonville thirty-six hours ago. Only this time, instead of going to jail, I was headed east on U.S. 441 to God knows where.
Jansen sat in the front seat and had not said much of anything. I wondered what had happened to the Fosters and company, but realized that I’d only be told what he wanted me to know. A sinking realization had taken hold. Benjamin Foster had definitely wanted this to happen. Is that why he alerted me to the possible house surveillance? To throw me off guard? To make me think him a friend? Then he sent me off to get food, with the files conveniently in the trunk and the coin in my pocket. Straight to Jansen. I was actually getting pretty good at being bait.
Still, I thought I’d try, “You do know that I reported in to the Justice Department.”
“Ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa?” Jansen asked.
I got the message, and with the Everglades just a stone’s throw away it would not be all that difficult to accomplish.
“We saw you make a call,” Jansen said. “But agents disappear all the time. It’s an occupational hazard. Which explains why pains in the ass like Stephanie Nelle recruit young, stupid hotshots like you.”
Good to know.
We passed a lot of citrus groves, sugarcane fields, and cattle pastures before finally crossing under Interstate 95, cruising farther east into downtown West Palm Beach. From its inception the town had always lived in the shadow of Palm Beach, its more glitzy neighbor across the Intracoastal Waterway. One was created for people with money, the other for those who worked for the people with money. I’d visited both a couple of times, this side of the water reality, the other side like going to Mars. I saw that we were headed straight into outer space as the car veered right and drove across the bridge.
Tall palm trees lined the main avenue like sentinels keeping watch. We stopped at an intersection, then turned north on the old A1A highway that bisected the narrow spit of island north to south. Past a stretch of churches and high-end businesses, houses appeared.
Big ones.
“We headed to your mansion?” I asked Jansen.
He shifted in his seat and turned around to face me. His right arm came up with a gun that he nestled to my forehead.
Then he cocked the hammer.
I will say, the experience was unnerving. Never had I felt a weapon that close to me, being held by a man who clearly wanted to pull the trigger. Making it worse, my hands were cuffed behind my back so there was nothing I could do about it.
“I’m looking forward to killing you,” he said.
“Just not yet, right? Somebody higher on the food chain wants me delivered in one piece?”
His silence confirmed I was right.
“It’s a bitch to be a peon, isn’t it?” I asked.
He released the hammer and withdrew the gun, then turned back around in his seat. I exhaled, realizing I’d been holding my breath a long time.
We kept driving, traffic moving like blood through a clogged artery. The ocean was no more than a hundred yards off to the right, but invisible, shielded by the trees, the mansions, and some unbelievably well-groomed, towering hedges. There must have been some local ordinance that encouraged everyone to grow theirs thick to the sky. Here and there the road nestled close to the shore. Old money hummed a loud and obvious tune. Side streets radiated every couple of hundred feet in defined blocks and we turned down one, a narrow lane that passed between more houses, these not as large as their oceanfront companions, but nonetheless impressive.
We finally stopped at a two-story brick Colonial with a portico supported by columns that reminded me of the White House. More tall hedges screened the front yard from the street. We stopped in a forecourt, enclosed on three sides by a stone balustrade topped with urns. Flowers filled the lavish beds among more shrubbery.
Waiting at the front door was a man with neatly clipped silver-gray hair and a face as smooth and rosy as a child’s. He wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. I was led from the car. Our footsteps made rasping sounds on the soft stone steps as we entered a vestibule dominated by a carving stairway of gray marble that reached up to a second-floor balcony. I was waiting for the queen or the president to descend amid a flurry of trumpets. A crystal chandelier burned bright. We walked across a floor inlaid with black marble highlighted by—of all things—the seal of the FBI.
Glasses led the way to a pair of carved wooden doors that opened into a spacious library. But a quick perusal showed it was in name only, the shelves stocked with the kind of nondescript leather bindings that interior decorators used to make a room appear important.
Scores of framed photographs dotted the walls, all of the same man posing with others. I caught Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Warren Burger, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert Redford, Charlton Heston, and Walter Cronkite. Most mere poses in an office or at some gathering. Others while holding drinks. One on a golf course, another a sailboat. But at the center was always the same man looking equal to whomever he was with. His hairline progressively lightened and receded through the years but was always immaculate. I had a sense of an indexed life, collected and stored right here on this trophy wall. The whole room seemed a suffocating display, overloaded with nostalgia, like stepping back in time with someone who lived around their possessions.
A cluster of wingback chairs and a sofa, all in creamy leather, dominated the center of the room atop a hardwood floor covered with a pale-blue rug. Fading sunlight managed to find a way in though the curtained French doors. A man rose from one of the chairs and waited for our escort to bring us to him. The face was identical to the man in the pictures, but a small potbelly had grown against the tall, commanding frame. He was pushing seventy easily, but the hard and uncompromising expression from the photos remained. He wore fashionable wire-rimmed spectacles with a fawn-colored sport coat, vintage jeans, and shiny penny loafers, which gave him the air of an aging academic, the persona surely not random.
My eye caught a clock on the wall, which read 7:10 P.M.
“Uncuff him,” he ordered.
Jansen complied.
“My name is Tom Oliver.”
His attire, impeccable posture, and poorly restrained confidence came straight out of the FBI manual. But not his manners. No hand was extended for me to shake, which was fine by me.
“Please, have a seat. You and I need to speak. Alone.”
Jansen and the other guy got the message and left, closing the door behind them. Oliver assumed a position in one of the wingback chairs and reached for a pipe on the side table, lighting it up, puffing out acrid smoke. I had already caught its lingering odor in the air.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked me.
I sat. “Not a clue.”
“I worked for the FBI my entire career in law enforcement, retiring a few years ago as deputy director.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“Is this amusing to you.”
My patience was reaching its end. “What’s not amusing is your lapdog out there, who wants to kill me. And the fact that I’ve been kidnapped and brought here against my will.”
“I doubt it was all against your will. After all, you are on a mission.”
“You know who sent me.”
“I do. Which is why we’re talking, instead of your corpse floating in the Everglades waiting for the alligators to eat it.”
He gave a grunt of satisfaction at his threat, his words and wealth seemingly enough for me to believe him.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You married money. Because a career FBI agent couldn’t afford the power bill on this place.”
He reached for a drink on the side table and swirled the clear liquid in the glass, then downed it in curious little sips.
/> “My wife’s family has owned this house for generations.”
I knew that this guy was going to be nothing more than a mine of misinformation. Every movement was measured, calm, and resolute. His goal was to suck in far more information than he let out. Best guess? The subject of the hour was Stephanie Nelle. He knew about her, just not enough. So why not corral the new guy, stick a gun in his face, then drag him into this sorry excuse for a library and wait for him to crack.
Yeah. Good luck with that plan.
I’d rather take my chances with the gators.
The study door opened and Jansen appeared.
“They’re here.”
Oliver nodded.
“Are we having a party?” I asked.
He grinned, still trying to rattle me.
“Something like that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jansen laid the waterproof case on the hardwood floor a few feet from where I sat. Atop it rested the 1933 Double Eagle inside its plastic sleeve. That coin was certainly making the rounds. Jansen left again, closing the library door behind him.
“He’s well trained,” I noted. “You do it yourself, or send him to obedience school?”
“Are you always so disrespectful?”
“Only to those I really like.”
“Your new friends have arrived,” Oliver said, ignoring my humor. “Foster, his daughter, and her husband.”
Good to know.
Like with Desi and Lucy, the reverend had some ’splainin to do.
“Did you make a deal with Foster?” I asked. “To get that case and coin?”
“Reverend Foster understands the gravity of this situation. He wants this contained, as I do. I’m hoping we can all come to an understanding and end this matter quickly and quietly.”
“You have the files, which makes you and Foster happy. You have the coin, which will make Valdez happy. What will make Stephanie Nelle happy?”
Oliver laid his drink down and continued puffing the pipe.
“Without the files or Valdez, she has nothing but a bunch of unsubstantiated talk. I’m trying to keep this at that level and avoid the taking of any drastic measures.”