Everglades df-10 Page 8

  DeAntoni told her about the photograph.

  Hands folded in her lap, the lady shuddered, staring off toward the mangrove circle that creates Dinkin’s Bay.

  A bright night. Jupiter was like an illuminated ice shard in the April dusk. To the northwest was a dome of foggy light floating on a rim of gray: the stadium lights of Sanibel Elementary School. A Little League game was going on there, or maybe one of the beer-bash softball games.

  DeAntoni said, “You don’t have to look at it. You already been through a lot. And I’m not the kind’a guy who’d upset a woman for all the fuh… fuh…”

  He paused, flustered, trying to edit himself in midsen tence. “For all the, uhhh, freakin’ tea in China. So if you don’t want to see the picture, you want me to drop the subject, you just tell me, and it’s mum’s the word.”

  Touched by his deferential manner-this huge, burly man behaving like a respectful adolescent-she smiled, reached and patted the back of his hairy hand. “You’re very thoughtful. If I’d known what kind of man you were, that you were just doing your job, I’d have felt safer, actually.”

  Unsettled by the flattery, DeAntoni made a flapping gesture with his free hand. “You kiddin’? If I had some dago ugly as me followin’ me around, I’d’a called the fuckin’ cops myself.”

  Sally seemed not to notice that DeAntoni slapped his hand over his own mouth, nor did she react to the profanity.

  “If you have a picture of Geoff that proves he’s alive, I’m more than willing to look.”

  “Okay. But I got to warn you right now, Mrs. Minster. There’s another woman in the picture. She ain’t naked or nothing, but she’s kind’a naked. Topless, I mean. I don’t want your feelings gettin’ hurt.”

  Her voice steady, not giving it much emotion, Sally said, “The picture won’t bother me. My husband was having sex with the Ashram girls from the time he became a member. Little zombies is what they’re like. It’s allowed. Even if he’s still alive, he’ll never be my husband again. So why don’t you call me Sally? Or Ms. Carmel, if you want to keep it formal.”

  When DeAntoni grinned, I noticed for the first time that his upper incisors were a bridge. He’d had his teeth knocked out-no surprise there. “Formal? Oh, no way do I want to keep it formal… Sally.”

  My old friend smiled at his eager manner. “Then go get the photos, Frank.”

  They were digital photos printed on Kodak ink-jet paper, ultra-glossy, of a man lying on a beach chair, his hand on the thigh of a lean, dark woman. She wore a string bikini bottom, no top. Pink cloth no bigger than the standard dinner napkin. The man looked to be naked but for a billed fishing cap. Both of them comfortable, two lovers judging from the relaxed poses, a couple used to intimate contact.

  The photos were similar, both taken from the side, so the man’s face was clearly visible. Because her head was turned away from the lens, the woman’s face was not. In the first photo, you could see her body in profile, and that her brown hair was sun-bleached copper and salty, tied back with a crimson scarf that protruded from a straw sun hat. In the second photo, her back was to the camera, so all you could see were her hips and the hat’s brim.

  At the bottom of the photos were a digital date and time stamp: Feb. 2, 4:32 P.M. and 4:35 P.M.

  Today was Friday, April 11th. Geoff Minster had supposedly fallen overboard the previous year, somewhere near the Gulf Stream, on his way to Bimini, the night of October 27th.

  If the dates were accurate, the photos had been taken three months after Minster had supposedly died.

  DeAntoni handed the prints to Sally, who looked at them briefly, shaking her head in distaste or disapproval. She then handed them to me.

  “It’s like he’s gone insane,” she told me. “Over a period of three years, he went through a complete personality transformation. Now he does something like this. It’s sick. Truly sick.”

  I held the photos, saying to DeAntoni, “Isn’t it easy to change the date stamp on a digital camera?”

  He nodded, “You go to the menu, change it to anything you want. Question is, why would someone fake the date, unless they knew Minster was gonna disappear? Why would anyone intentionally want to cause that kind of trouble?”

  I said, “Well, one possibility comes to mind. Not a pleasant one.”

  “What’s that?”

  I said, “If someone planned to murder Minster, they might change the date, take the photograph. Kill the man, but make people like yourself keep looking, thinking he’s still alive. If authorities continue to search for him, they’re not going to waste time searching for the murderers.”

  As DeAntoni said, “I hadn’t thought of that one,” Sally murmured, “What an awful idea. It never crossed my mind someone would want Geoff dead.”

  I asked DeAntoni, “Are these your only copies?”

  “No. I got two more prints made. One’s at my office. One’s with Everglades Home and Life. That’s the insurance company that may have to pay Mrs. Minster-Sally here-four million-five. Did she tell you that it seems pretty certain that the court’s going to rule in her attorney’s favor? Once that happens, the Department of Vital Statistics will issue a death certificate, and then the company will have to pay.”

  I nodded as he added, “So I kind’a feel bad asking you to help me. I’m the one trying to prove you shouldn’t get the money.”

  I raised my eyebrows, looking into Sally’s handsome face, seeing the dullness of her eyes enliven slightly, as she said, “Before I found my church, before my life changed, wealth and possessions-all that stuff-social status? They meant something. Now, though, I couldn’t care less about the money. So that’s the problem. Money. It’s one of the reasons I came to see you, Doc. And why I’m happy to help you find Geoff if he really is still alive.”

  DeAntoni said, “Money’s the problem? You lost me there.”

  “I don’t want it. If I do get the insurance money, I’m giving it to my church. Most of it. I’ll keep just enough to live on. But I can’t if there’s a chance I got it illegally, because it’s dirty money. Or if there’s a chance that the insurance company will demand it back.”

  To DeAntoni, I said, “If they write the check, there’s not much chance they’ll do that, is there?”

  The big man looked uneasy. “I think the last they want to do is get their name in the papers for that kind’a scandal. The Feds would have to be involved. But for four million-five. Yeah, they’d take their bruises, suck it up. They’d want the money back.”

  I asked, “Scandal?”

  Sally said to DeAntoni, “I haven’t told Doc the whole story yet. He doesn’t know.”

  I said, “What don’t I know?”

  DeAntoni told me, “About the insurance company. Minster was one of the founders of Everglades Home and Life. The last bad hurricane, whatever its name was, it flattened a couple of big developments that he built. The insurance companies paid off, but they went bankrupt doing it.”

  Sally took over. “Geoff and some other developers around Miami couldn’t get insurance. People who wanted to buy a new house couldn’t get insurance. It was a mess. So Geoff and some of his business associates came up with their own solution. He was brilliant in his way. Driven, but brilliant.”

  DeAntoni said, “What he did was pretty smart. His group did the research and calculated that, when a certain area of Florida is hit by a really bad storm, there’s almost always a ten-to-twenty-year gap before it’s likely to get hit again. Statistically. Those’re good odds. How much can you make writing clean insurance over fifteen years? Start in the high millions, then add some nice big numbers at the front.

  “So they found investors, formed a company and applied to the Florida Department of Insurance. To push through the kind’a thing they wanted takes a lot of political juice. They had it.

  “In June, about three years ago, the state approved them as what they call a foreign property and casualty insurer, and accepted them into the state homeowners’ insurance pool. What tha
t means is, that quick”-DeAntoni snapped his fingers-“they were guaranteed to write policies on over a quarter million private homes and businesses. The insurance racket, man, it’s got its own language. They were granted a bunch of lines of business: Homeowners’ Multi-Peril, Commercial Multi-Peril, Auto, Ocean Marine, Health… and life insurance, too.”

  “Geoff had life insurance through his own company,” Sally said.

  I asked DeAntoni, “Aside from Sally, were there other beneficiaries?”

  “Yeah, and I’ll give you one guess who. The company may have to write out a whole lot bigger check to the International Church of Ashram Meditation. More than four times what they would pay to Sally.”

  “That explains it,” I said. Meaning why they’d hired DeAntoni to find out the truth-a small insurance company with a reason to keep things private and quiet, and maybe not have to go bankrupt.

  chapter ten

  I walked the two of them through mangroves to the marina. I hadn’t eaten since that morning-my camp breakfast in the Everglades. Not a very good breakfast, either, since Tomlinson had loaded his goofy little group with health-food types. We’d had bulgur wheat and a slab of some kind of fibrous-looking substance that was supposed to be a substitute for meat.

  DeAntoni said, yeah, he wanted to eat, too, but Sally was reluctant.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to see the old marina gang, Mack and Jeth, Rhonda and JoAnn and all the others,” she explained, “but I’ve learned that old friends feel a little uncomfortable when a friend changes.”

  Referring to herself.

  She certainly had changed. It happens a lot, and all too often to good men and women. It happens through misfortune, random accidents, the tragedy of disease, the realization of personal failure.

  It also happens because the detritus of an unsatisfying life can accumulate like a weight, until even a strong person finally breaks, gives in and seeks shelter in one of the many escapes available to us all. Drugs are a common route of escape. Religion can be another.

  Something had happened to this good lady. Maybe for better, maybe for worse. I have no illusions about my competence as a judge. I screw up my own life so consistently, disappoint my own vision of self so regularly, that I have become a reluctant critic of other people, other lives. But it was obvious that she was no longer the woman I had held, laughed with and made love to on the moonlit outside deck of my stilt house.

  Surprise, surprise. Tomlinson had returned for the party. Karlita, the television psychic, was with him. Her idea, he said. Totally. Because she wanted to see me.

  Tomlinson threw his arm around my shoulder, weaving mightily. Drunk, stoned, nearly out of it, slurring, “The lady likes the cut of your jib, compadre. Karlita the Chiquita. She’s looked you over port to starboard, bow and stern.”

  “Tomlinson,” I said trying to shush him. “Enough with the sailing metaphors. I have no interest in the woman. I already told you that. How’d you get here? Please tell me you didn’t drive your own car.”

  “My car? I’ve never owned a car in my…” He let the sentence trail off, thinking about it. “Wait a minute, I do own a car. I bought a Volkswagen Thing off Bud-O-Bandy. Classic beach transport. It’s like a tent with four slabs of drywall built around an engine. My dream car.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  We were standing by the sea grape tree next to the Red Pelican Gift Shop, the docks, the darkening bay behind us, the masts and fly bridges of boats strung with party lights. Tomlinson had a pink sarong knotted around his waist, tarpon and snook hand-painted on silk. Shirtless, he was skin over bone, all sinew and veins, his gaunt cheeks and haunted eyes suspended above his shoulders like a human face perched on the stem of a delicate mushroom.

  His hair was longer than ever, scraggly, sun-bleached to straw and silver. He’d isolated two shocks of hair with the kind of spring-loaded combs that little girls use: One shock was a ponytail that hung to the middle of his back. The other sprouted directly from the top of his head, a Samurai effect.

  He took a deep breath, eyes wide, trying to calm himself. Then he held up an index finger. “Ah-h-h-h, now it’s all coming back. I didn’t drive. I came with Karlita in her black sports car. A hundred fifteen miles an hour through the Everglades. Sawgrass a blur, rednecks in airboats flipping us the bird, screaming foul oaths while I sent out telepathic warning signals to innocent wildlife. Yes, of course. There’s no mystery here. I returned to Sanibel like any normal working lug. In a Lexus GS 400, my head mashed to the seat like I’d been Velcroed by kidnappers. So… what was your point again, Doc?”

  “Karlita,” I said. “She’s the point. I’ve got no interest. I don’t want her in my house. I don’t want her in my lab. I don’t want to spend more than a minute or two listening to her bullshit. As long as we’re clear on that.”

  He held up an index finger, asking me to pause so he could ask a question. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m getting a very negative vibe here. You don’t like the lady?”

  “No. I don’t like the lady.”

  I watched my old friend sigh heavily, eyes drowsy, his whole body drooping as if he were about to fall asleep. Or pass out-a more accurate term.

  I hoped it was my imagination, but lately, it seemed, Tomlinson was absolutely smashed after only nine or ten beers-a historically light night for him.

  Not a good sign.

  I am not a fretter, but, of late, I’d been worried about him. He was killing himself. Slowly and surely, he was destroying his own body, his own first-rate mind, by overindulging in a garden variety of legal and illegal drugs.

  He’d gotten worse in the last year or so. My personal guess was that it was his way of dealing with the pressure of his growing notoriety. A way of re-creating an insular privacy that he no longer enjoyed.

  So he was staying drunk most of the time. Or hiding out on his boat. Or on the Florida Keys: Key Largo, renting the little apartment overlooking the Mandalay Bar, Mile Marker 97.5. Or in Key West, moored at the Conch Republic Fish Company docks, or staying at Simonton Court, or Old Cypress House, doing happy hour with Dave, then drinking all night with Chris Robinson at Louie’s Backyard.

  Or exploiting absurd excuses to retreat to the Everglades.

  Every day by sunset, he was out of control. Mostly, it was alcohol-which is why the fact the he seemed to be getting drunk on fewer drinks was a troubling symptom.

  Chronic alcohol use causes the liver to become fatty. The fat chokes off blood that delivers oxygen to liver cells. Those cells are replaced with scar tissue called cirrhosis. Result? A drinker can tolerate less and less alcohol because there are fewer liver cells to process it.

  Of course, it was also probable that he was supplementing his alcohol intake with marijuana, illegal pharmaceuticals, psychedelic fungi, even surgical halothane gas when he could get it.

  Tomlinson made friends quickly, and he had a long list of medical professionals he could call on for special fun and favors. Because he knew I didn’t approve, he rarely confided in me when it came to his current drug of preference.

  The height of paradox was this: A couple of months back, he took me aside and said, “Doc, I don’t want to offend you, but I’m telling you for your own good. The whole marina’s worried because of your drinking.”

  I said, “What?”

  “Used to be, you’d have a couple of beers a night. Now you’re drinking that black Nicaraguan rum. Getting drunk, too-that’s the rumor floating ’round. That’s what I suspect. ”

  Trying my best to be patient, I told him, “Tomlinson, you know exactly what I drink because you’re right there with me. Drinking rum on my porch at sunset, or your boat, almost every night. Geezsh. ”

  Which made him pause a few beats, thinking about it, before he replied, “ Oh. In that case… well, you’re in the hands of a professional. Enjoy!”

  Standing near the marina’s picnic tables, where there were trays of crab cakes, bowls of ceviche, steamed shrimp and fried fi
sh, Tomlinson told me, “Last night, when you two were out canoeing, Karlita said she had a psychic vision. That you were destined to become lovers.”

  I answered, “The lady’s wrong. Count on it.”

  He wagged his finger at me, having fun. “Um-huh, the Ford Theory of Reality. You only accept as fact that teeny weenie bit of ignorance that can be measured, weighed and classified.

  “One day, though, you’ll step through the veil and experience the spiritual world. When you’re ready, man, when the student’s ready, your teacher will arrive. You put out such good vibes, my brother, I’m willing to bet cash money that your spiritual teacher will come complete with a really great ass. So maybe it’s Karlita.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “So now I have something to look forward to.”

  I turned and began to walk toward the docks, where I could see Sally and Frank DeAntoni standing among a group of liveaboards, red plastic cups in hand. Yet, by the way they stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, facing one another, talking intensely, they effectively isolated themselves. Two people alone in a crowded space.

  Behind me, Tomlinson said, “If Karlita says you two are going to end up lovers, my money’s on her. Might do you some good. Step into the Karlita cage and take a few swings.”

  First sailing metaphors, now baseball: two of the man’s great loves. But all drunks become tiresome after a while, and I was getting irritated.

  I told him, “I’m still seeing Grace Walker, just in case you’ve forgotten. I try to focus on one partner at a time.”

  “Focus,” he said. “I’m with you there. There are men who choose the vagina as their only telescope to the world. Bad choice. Poor light gathering capabilities and unpredictable resolution.” He stopped. “Hey, what’s that you got in your hand?”

  As I continued to walk, I held up the glossy photo DeAntoni had given me. “Nothing. No one you’d know.”

  “See? There you go being purely logical, which can be a bummer. That’s why you’re always surprised by the unexpected.”

  He took the photo from my hand, holding it up to the dock lights. Stood there weaving, studying it before he said, “This man’s name is. .. hum-mmm… it’s coming back to me. His name is Minster something. Jerry Minster? No… Geoff Minster. See? I do know the guy.”