Everglades df-10 Read online

  “He bought a Harley; stayed out all night sometimes. He began hanging out with what I’d call weirdo types-” She turned and looked at Tomlinson. “Old hippies, no offense.”

  “None taken,” Tomlinson said, amused.

  “It was like he went through the adolescence he’d never had. He was smoking marijuana, going to bars, hanging around Coconut Grove and South Beach. Then he took up the martial arts, and started studying meditation.

  “By that time, I was in my corporate-wife mode. So I’m the one who actually ran things, took care of all the details. What a strange reversal, huh?”

  It was around that time that Geoff met Bhagwan Shiva-the most important “karmic event” of his life, he told Sally. He found the Church of Ashram “fascinating.” Better yet, Shiva was looking for big-profit investment opportunities. He had cash, and he was enthusiastic about Minster’s theme communities.

  Shiva perceived an additional advantage: He suggested that each community also have a “Meditation Center” staffed with Shiva’s followers.

  “At first, he wanted to call them Ashram Centers, but there were some legal problems with that. So they settled on Meditation Centers, but they were the same thing.”

  Other theme communities were built. Audubon Estates was designed to attract people who loved bird-watching, natural history, astronomy. There were butterfly gardens, landscaped sections of rain forest and cypress swamps, all built far inland in what was once cattle and sugarcane flatland, so there was no light pollution.

  It was even more upscale than the Cross Country projects.

  In the Everglades, closer to Miami, they built their most exclusive community, Sawgrass. Sawgrass was designed to attract the adventurer types, the sporting market. Fly-fishing, hunting and shooting. Several well-stocked bass lakes, quail-shooting from horseback, a landing strip, a hunting lodge, a restaurant with mahogany beams, stone fireplaces, animal heads on the wall.

  According to Sally, Sawgrass was Shiva’s favorite, and so it became Geoff’s favorite.

  “The hunting and fishing, it attracted the big-money guys. The heavy drinkers, the gambling and hard-living types. The best Scotch whiskey, the best Cuban cigars and the main restaurant serves nothing but prime beef. It was so exclusive, Shiva and Geoff could both let their hair down a little. He began to spend more and more time there. In fact, the month before he disappeared, he didn’t spend more than a night or two at home.”

  DeAntoni said, “That’s where I was headed next. Sawgrass. I’m going to talk to people who knew your husband. There’s a little redneck town nearby. I hear they aren’t so happy about rich Yankees and Shiva’s followers taking over the area. People like that might be a good source of info.”

  Sally told us that Sawgrass was southeast of Immokalee, in the Everglades region between Alligator Alley and the Tamiami Trail. It was near a crossroads settlement called Devil’s Garden, out in the middle of nowhere. There was a bar, a feed store, a couple of houses.

  She added, “About the people who live around Devil’s Garden-gator poachers and Seminole drunks is the way Geoff described them-you’re right. There’ve been some nasty scenes between Shiva’s people and the locals. It’s because the Ashram owns most of the land around Devil’s Garden; a couple of thousand acres. It’s where Shiva wants to build his casinos.”

  DeAntoni looked at me, and said, “That was my deal with the chewing tobacco. I was experimenting with ways to go down there and maybe blend in a little better with the rednecks.”

  I said, “Shrewd. No way they’d recognize your New York accent while you’re throwing up.”

  “Funny. Maybe what I need is some local cover. You talk like a college professor, but you still got a little bit of Florida boy in your voice. You want to come along?”

  I told him no, I had a business to run, but then Tomlinson spoke up, saying, “Count me in. I’d love to go back to the Everglades. What about you, Karlita?”

  As she was telling him, yes, they could go there and try to tune in to Shiva’s dark vibes, Tomlinson was staring at me. He waited for her to finish before he said, “I wonder how those gator-poaching types are going to react to two enlightened visitors like me and Ms. ’Lita? A couple of long-haired flower children.”

  Trying to disguise his distaste, but not doing a very good job, DeAntoni said, “If this guy, your hippie pal, tags along, I can’t be responsible.”

  Meaning I had no choice.

  I listened to Frank add, “Sally, I’d appreciate it if you’d drive home and stay there. Just to be safe. Not tonight. Tomorrow, I mean.”

  I liked the man even more when he added, “I don’t want a nice woman like you getting hurt on my account.”

  As I walked her to her car, I listened to Sally tell me that visiting the marina, seeing my house and lab again after all the years, had really hit her emotionally. Brought back the memories, some of them pretty good.

  We were alone.

  She said, “Do you know who I miss from those times?”

  I had an idea, but remained silent.

  “I miss your uncle, Tuck, and Joseph Egret, too. Tucker was such a funny, wild, old flirt. But Joe, I miss him the most. What a dear, sweet man. The gentle giant. Him and his horse, the way he’d ride without a saddle. Cowboys in the Everglades, that’s the way I still think of both of them.”

  “Joseph,” I said. “Yeah, I miss him, too.”

  It was an uncomfortable topic for me, and because it was something I wanted to ask anyway, I changed the subject, saying, “On the porch, you started to tell us about your dog. What happened?”

  She slipped her arm into mine-allowing intentional contact for the first time. “It’s hard for me to talk about without bawling, and I didn’t want to do it in front of a stranger. It’s why I had to get out of Coconut Grove. I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  She’d been doing volunteer work at her local animal shelter. They took in a skinny little golden retriever-cocker mix. He was at the shelter for more than a month. His time ran out. They were going to euthanize him, so Sally adopted him. It was about a month after her husband’s disappearance. She named him Mango after the village where we’d both lived, and also because of his reddish-gold color. In her big, empty house, the two bonded quickly.

  She was right. She couldn’t tell it without crying.

  “Last Friday morning,” she said, “I went to Publix, came out and found I had another flat tire.”

  It was hour before Triple-A got the thing fixed.

  “I knew right away something was wrong when I unlocked the door, because he wasn’t there to meet me. Mango knew the sound of my car. He was always at the door. I dropped the groceries and went running, calling for him.”

  She found her dog floating in the pool. The policemen who took the report guessed the dog had gone swimming and maybe had a seizure.

  “That’s not what happened,” she said. “I told them, but they wouldn’t listen. Someone broke into my house again. They killed Mango-and for no reason. He was the sweetest dog. What kind of person would do such a thing?”

  I had my arms around her, holding her as she wept. I didn’t reply, but I was thinking, A very, very dangerous person.

  chapter twelve

  izzy

  Izzy was in a twenty-one-foot fiberglass Bayliner boat that a disciple had donated to the Ashram, and that Jerry Singh kept at the yacht basin just off U.S. 1 on the Coral Gables Canal, up the waterway from Coconut Grove. He kept the boat there in case he felt like running out and fishing for dolphin, or hitting Miami nightspots by water. It was a good place for that.

  Jerry was in a hunting and fishing phase, maybe because of the sporting types he’d been hanging with in the Carcass Bar at Sawgrass.

  Carcass Bar-that’s the way Izzy thought of it. All those dead animals that reminded him of roadkill, with their glassy stares. Or maybe Jerry was still trying to impress the Indians. Pointless. But who knew?

  It was 10:15 P.M. Izzy was still wearing his dancing
shoes and satin jacket. So what he could do if he wanted was run up the bay to the Biscayne Yacht Club-they had reciprocals with Sawgrass-and check out the waitresses, or see if there was maybe a lonely widow or two looking for companionship.

  Izzy loved to waltz. Since childhood, waltzes were his favorite.

  But no. If Sally Minster really had gone away for the weekend, this was a chance too good to pass up.

  She hadn’t answered her phone the five times he’d called during the drive down.

  Standing at the console, seeing city lights reflect off a pale moon, Izzy idled the boat west beneath the bridge at Cocoplum Plaza. Lots of fast, Friday-night traffic clattering overhead-it was a weird feeling to be on water beneath moving cars. It gave him an uncomfortable, drowning sensation that was gone the moment he exited from beneath the bridge.

  Ironwood, the gated community where Sally and Geoff Minster lived, was the fifth waterway down on the left, just past Sunrise Harbor, its own little island, right on Biscayne Bay.

  Izzy watched an Ironwood security patrol car pass over the bridge. He floated there, running lights off, for a full two minutes before he clunked the boat into gear again, and idled out into the bay, then north past the docks of the lighted mansions.

  Minster had built an ultramodern castle on the water, all stucco and glass. It had pointed gables and balconies built over a screened infinity pool, and a lawn landscaped in white quarry rock around islands of palms.

  Moonlight on the rock reminded Izzy of when he was a kid in New York, looking out the window at night on fresh snow.

  He swung the Bayliner into Minster’s dock and shut off the engine. Then he leaned to remove the white cowling of the Johnson outboard-he’d claim to have engine trouble if anyone confronted him.

  Izzy paused once more, crouching beneath a traveler’s palm as he watched the lights of the same security patrol car sweep by. Then he stood and walked toward the pool door, taking rubber surgical gloves from his pocket.

  Sally, the pretty, religious born-again church lady, still enjoyed her private time alone in the bedroom.

  Izzy was in her bedroom now, searching through drawers, seeing that certain items had been moved; presumably used.

  He liked her bedroom. It smelled of clean linen and body lotion, everything done in white and yellow, very feminine. Like the big four-poster bed with the overstuffed white comforter, pillows stacked in a way that suggested the lady liked lying on the bed watching the flat-screened television that was recessed into the wall.

  He checked a final drawer, and thought, Yep, she’s been at it again. Izzy felt a pleasant fluttering in his abdomen.

  Breathing slightly faster, he crossed the room to the electronics control center mounted at eye level behind a plastic cover. It was next to the hallway door.

  Beneath the cover, he’d hidden a Mitsubishi 900 MHZ wireless, sub-micro video camera. The camera’s lens was smaller than a dime. The entire unit was smaller than the nine-volt battery that powered each of the two mini-recorders he’d hidden beneath boxes in her closet.

  He’d placed a second camera on her bathroom ceiling.

  Touch any button on the control center-turn on the lights, dim the lights, adjust the air-conditioning, anything-both cameras were activated.

  Izzy went to the closet and removed two mini-cassette tapes. Then, as he fitted the first mini cassette into a standard-sized converter, he found the remote to Sally’s TV and VCR. When everything was ready, he threw himself onto her bed, turned on the television and pressed play. Then he lay back, watching.

  Izzy grinned. There she was, Sally Minster, walking into her bedroom, a little wrinkled after dealing with a flat tire, dressed in a peach-colored business suit.

  He scooched back, and began to fast-forward, searching for any good parts the camera might have captured. As he searched, he considered going to Minster’s study to make himself a gin and tonic. A big one with lots of ice. Or maybe just a nice cold beer, so he could savor the video in style.

  But Izzy was too excited.

  He got off the bed only once: Went to Sally’s drawer and selected blue satin bikini underwear before returning to her bed.

  It took a lot of fast-forwarding, but he finally found what he was hoping to find. It was on the second tape; the bathroom camera. He turned the sound up so loud that he could hear Sally breathing.

  He watched the screen as she came into the bathroom, wearing a white cotton robe. His stomach stirred as she turned to look at herself in the mirror, paused for maybe thirty seconds, thinking about it, before she loosened the robe, opening it, so that she could see herself.

  Then Sally stood with the robe loose, bare skin in the mirror, her ribs showing, abdomen showing, blond pubic hair in the shadows, one white breast bared, her nipple pink and elongated, her eyes intense.

  Izzy whispered, “Oh my God,” thinking, What a body. Pale skin, firm, heavy-breasted over thin hips. It was better than he’d hoped. No way of knowing she looked like that, the way she dressed, the religious woman always covering herself.

  He focused on the TV screen, thinking, Do it… do it… do it, as Sally let the robe slide off her shoulders. Then she stood naked, comfortable with herself, alone in her own bathroom.

  He watched her shake her hair free around her shoulders, looking into her own eyes. Then he watched her eyes seem to fog, as if her brain had drifted off to some distant place, and the color of her cheeks began to flush as she touched her stomach with long fingers, nails painted with pink gloss.

  Now she was relaxing, getting into it. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed, as her fingers moved over her breasts gently, touching them, then massaging the weight of her breasts with open palms, moaning in a voice that seemed high, experimental or apologetic, nipples squeezed long between her fingers.

  Izzy whispered, “Yeah. Go for it,” as Sally, moving faster now, knelt and removed a plastic, candle-sized object from the pocket of her robe.

  He was done, now. He’d cleaned the bedroom, put everything back just the way he’d found it. Everything, including the video equipment.

  The tape of Sally was so unbelievable, he’d considered removing the cameras, packing up the recorders. But then Izzy thought, What the hell, he’d leave them for one final week. His last week in the States.

  There was something about this woman that got to him. More than just her body. It was her face, the way she dressed, the fact that she was a religious priss. Something.

  Plus, he’d always detested Geoff Minster. A pompous, rich asshole who tried hard not to play the part. The few times he and Geoff were together, Geoff had looked at him as if he were something unsanitary.

  Izzy wanted to see the man’s wife naked again.

  So he decided to leave the cameras in place. He’d pick up the cameras and recorders before he split for Nicaragua. One more look. She was worth it. Just on the chance of getting something better.

  But, oh my God, it would hard to get anything better than this. He’d made lots of tapes of lots of women, but nothing as good as Sally alone in her bathroom.

  Izzy figured he’d give it six months, a year, wait ’til he had everything squared away in Nicaragua, then get a couple of thousand duplicate tapes made. Then he’d go to the Internet, upload a sample and put the tape up for sale. Maybe call it The Merry Widow.

  What would he make? Sixty, seventy grand easy. Maybe a lot more if word caught on. Because that’s how porno sold-word of mouth.

  He tried to imagine how she’d react when she found out. Sally Minster, the lady saint. Or maybe a male member of her church, being naughty, playing around in cyberspace, would find her. How would her preacher handle that?

  That made Izzy chuckle.

  His water-into-wine theory again. All religion was bullshit and fakery. Same with the holy goofs who pretended to practice it.

  Hypocrites.

  Izzy walked downstairs to the pool door, leaving the Minster home the same way he’d entered.

  Hurrying.r />
  Maybe hurrying too much because he had so much do tomorrow, Saturday. He had to spend the day making final preparations for the Bhagwan’s big magic trick on Palm Sunday. No simple task, which Jerry Singh was too self-obsessed to realize.

  Because the Ashram owned interests in many theme communities, and because each community had its own eighteen-hole golf course, collecting several tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer had not caused Izzy the legal problems it would’ve most people.

  The Feds had been nervous about the stuff ever since a U-Haul truck full of ammonium nitrate nearly brought down Oklahoma City. No way anyone could buy it in large quantities now without filling out forms and lots of background checks.

  So what Izzy did, over a period of eighteen months, he regularly borrowed fertilizer from the maintenance barns of every golf course in the organization, saying they needed it at Sawgrass. Then he went to the Ashram’s master computer and adjusted the inventory numbers.

  Easy.

  But now came the shitty part. Tomorrow, he had to dump forty bags of the crap into a cement mixer by hand, then add diesel fuel and mix it until it was the consistency of mayonnaise. Dirty work.

  He already had the blasting caps, two dozen six-volt batteries and timers wired, so the only thing left to do after that was transfer the gook to a Sawgrass maintenance truck. He’d had the truck rigged with a four-hundred-gallon skid-mounted tank and a pump that was powered by a Honda generator.

  Tomorrow was a full day. So he was hurrying. He wanted to get out and make it to Sawgrass tonight before the bar closed.

  Izzy keyed in the security password he’d found in Sally’s on-line computer files. He opened the door and stepped out into the night.

  Then he froze.

  Shit.

  He was standing face-to-face with a seventy-year-old man in a brown security guard’s uniform. The man had a silver badge on his shirt pocket. He was holding a flashlight, not a gun.