A Mighty Fortress (2 page)

“There’s twenty-five hundred there.” He pulled out another wad of cash from his right pocket and peeled off five bills. “And here’s another five hundred. That’s three grand. I’ll give you the other three—”

“When I serve this guy.” I read the subpoena. It ordered the witness, Chad Anthony Scalzo, to appear to testify in court at 800 North Twiggs Street, Tampa, Florida 33602, Courtroom 515. Then I glanced at Scalzo’s address. Another 33602 zip code, which meant he lived downtown. I studied the Ashley Street address; probably one of Tampa’s newer high-rise condos. “SkyGate?”

He nodded. “As far as we know.”

“I guess I’ll start there.”
 

“I don’t care where you start. Just get it done.”
 

Then my ego got the best of me. “If this is such an important job, why isn’t Sal handling it?” Sal Barton was Mattie’s go-to investigator, and the guy who had lured me down to sunny Florida from Long Island a few years earlier when the foreclosure attorneys couldn’t keep up with all the lawsuits the banks were filing. Sal eventually helped me hang out my own shingle and, I guess you could say, was a mentor of sorts to me—about as much a mentor as a Harley-riding recluse could be.

He studied me for a moment. When he smirked, I braced myself for a good old Mattie Wilcox insult. Instead, he simply said, “Sal had a conflict of interest,” and put the Porsche in reverse. And with that, he was speeding down the quiet residential street I’d called home for nearly fourteen months now.
 

“Who was
that
asshole?”
 

My neighbor, Hector Garcia, was rising from the new azalea bushes lining his front porch where, by the looks of his drenched t-shirt and grimy gloves, he’d been laboring all morning. Hector crossed our property line, removed the gloves, and gave my hand a squeeze. “You okay, Milo? You don’t look so great.”

I started to tell him about getting woken up after the week I’d had. Instead, I just shrugged.

He glanced at the envelope in my hand. “Work stuff?”

I nodded. “Just a subpoena. Want to come along?” Hector often joined me for jobs like this. He was good company, knew his way around Tampa, and seemed to enjoy the menial thrill of serving papers.

He nodded toward his house. “Not today. I got too much to do in the yard.”

I glanced back at his yard. It was immaculate—too immaculate for our neighborhood in West Tampa. Greener than the greens at the Palma Ceia Country Club—every flower, plant, leaf, and decoration perfectly and uniformly trimmed and arranged. Landscaping had been Hector’s obsession since his wife had left him for her high school boyfriend, a recent med school graduate who’d returned to Tampa for his residency at Tampa General. Unfortunately, the affair was bad news I had confirmed for Hector after his suspicions led him to hire me to trail her for a week. I felt so bad for him that I didn’t accept payment for the job. Funny how things like that bond a friendship. His ex and her new beau now lived in a quaint bungalow in the affluent Hyde Park neighborhood, and had a restraining order preventing Hector from coming within a hundred yards of their home. Other than some heartburn anytime the cable company sent him on an assignment within the 33606 zip code area, Hector didn’t seem to mind the injunction. “Have it your way, then,” I told him.

He grinned. “But I haven’t forgotten about tonight.”
 

Apparently, I had. “Tonight?”

“The pale ale. Aren’t we bottling it tonight?”

With the week I’d had, I’d forgotten that my latest batch of brew was ready to be bottled, and I’d invited Hector over to help with the honors. “Right.”

He smacked his lips. “How’s it coming along?”
 

“Let’s take a look.”

I opened the garage door. We slid around my forest-green ’82 Volvo wagon, and I opened the door to the beer closet I’d built in the southeast corner of the garage. A wine cellar compressor and fan I’d found at an estate sale kept the room at the perfect temperature for fermentation and bottling, even in August. “Let’s have a taste.”

Hector followed me and gazed at the carboy glimmering with shades of gold and amber. I carefully removed the lid. All traces of active yeast were long gone. I had left the batch alone for a few days after most brewers would have bottled it. This was due in part to my busy week, but also because I preferred the cleaner flavor the extra time gave the hops, which accentuated some of the subtler notes of fruit with the particular grains I used for this style of ale. India Pale Ales were all the rage these days, but I always preferred the subtlety and balance of a nice American Pale.
 

A waft of sweet cascade escaped the fermentation vessel. I grabbed two taster cups and set them on the worktable. Then I siphoned a few ounces into each cup and took a whiff of mine. We both took sips at the same time.

Hector’s eyes rounded, and his lips puckered to attention. “Milo, this is some good stuff.”

“If I may say so myself.”

“You may, sir. You may.”

We downed our samples, and Hector set his cup down. “I’m telling you, man, you need to expand your operations. Entering beer shows is one thing, but this stuff could give Cigar City a run for its money.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a businessman. Just a home brewer.” And I had no interest in giving Cigar City, Tampa’s premier craft brewery, a run for its money… although it certainly had taken a significant amount of mine since I’d started calling Tampa home. Still, I considered it money well spent. “So how’s your work going?”

He shrugged. “Oh, the joys of being a cable guy in Tampa. If it’s not an old lady who doesn’t know how to plug in her cable box, it’s an irate asshole blaming me when lightning strikes his house because I didn’t hold a gun to his head and make him buy a damn surge protector.” Hector grew up in Tampa. His grandparents had migrated here from Cuba when Castro took over, which made him a second-generation native Tampanian. A rare breed, but someone who just might recognize the name Chad Anthony Scalzo.

I showed him the subpoena. “This name mean anything to you?” I pointed to the name in question. “Chad Scalzo?”

He thought for a moment. “He any relation to Alfonse Scalzo?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, bud, you better find out.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know about Alfonse Scalzo?
The
Scalzo family? Only the most notorious Tampa crime family after Santos Trafficante?”

I shook my head. “I thought the mob had been out of Tampa for decades.”

“Maybe the mob, but not the mobsters.”

I sealed the lid to the carboy. We’d get another sample tonight.
 

Hector wasn’t ready to change the topic of conversation. “Tell you what, Milo. You ever listen to anything I tell you, you listen to this. If this guy has anything to do with Alfonse Scalzo’s family, do yourself a favor and stay the hell away.”

“That bad, huh?”

Hector nodded and kept talking. I knew he was summarizing the long list of misdeeds committed by the Scalzo family, and the crimes they’d gotten away with, but I wasn’t paying him much attention. I was already thinking ahead to how I’d get started on this job, wondering if I might finish before Val got off work.
 

Then the tremor hit. It took only the slightest rattle outside to get it going. It might have been a muffler backfiring a block away, or kids lighting firecrackers in the neighborhood. Whatever it was, it sounded enough like an explosion to set me off—and there I was, back in Fallujah. My vision blurred, and bright lights started flashing randomly in my field of vision. The rise in blood pressure and drop in blood sugar seemed to go in tandem. The shortness of breath followed.
 

I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, just as Dr. J had taught me to do, and next thing I knew, it was gone and my breathing eased back to normal.

I opened my eyes and realized that Hector was still lecturing me.

“I’m serious, Milo. Are you listening to me?” His voice had turned stern. “I’d stay the hell away from this Scalzo guy.”

I nodded a warm smile to my good friend, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

After Hector went home, I warmed up a bowl of leftover
ropa vieja
and poured half a pint of a chilled German
hefeweizen
. The sweetness of the wheat paired perfectly with the cumin and capers in the shredded beef. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a beer with breakfast, but the combination reminded me of my favorite Johnny Cash song, so I had an obligatory second one for dessert.

I finished breakfast at the computer in my office, otherwise known as the spare bedroom. My iMac seemed happy to see me, and purred like a lonely kitten. I considered working on the book I was always telling myself and Dr. J I was going to write, but always found a reason not to. At least I had a decent reason today.
 

So I got busy. I figured tracking down Scalzo would be routine. I started, as I did most jobs, by running a skip trace. My CC license gives me access to a few different databases. I usually start with Accurint, out of habit as much as any other reason. I entered the information I had and hit return. While I waited for the search results, I pulled out my phone and called my old pal Sal Barton.

“Porter, shouldn’t you be at church today?”

“Very funny, Sal. Mattie Wilcox just stopped by.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Said you had some kind of conflict of interest and couldn’t serve this Scalzo guy.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Really, Sal? A conflict of interest?”

“Let’s just say I’m not a disinterested person.”

I gazed ahead as dozens of names and addresses and dates and numbers started populating the screen. “You mind telling me why not?”

“None of your business now, is it?”

I sighed.

“Be careful, Porter. This Scalzo guy, I hope Mattie warned you about him.”

I stared at the search results now displayed on my computer screen. Time to see what I could find out myself. “Yeah, thanks, Sal. Thanks for nothing.”

We hung up, and I went back to work. The skip trace confirmed that the address Mattie put on the subpoena was in fact the most recent address of record for Chad Anthony Scalzo. It looked like Scalzo owned one of the three penthouse units at SkyGate. Based on his DOB, he was a few months older than me, both of us being born in 1978. He had no criminal or military record, and no consumer debts other than an American Express account he paid in full every month. He was named in about a dozen civil lawsuits starting around 2009, but had no judgments or liens. Most of the lawsuits involved a bank of some sort, which told me he’d probably caught the real estate bug when the bubble was booming. All pretty innocuous stuff. Ideally, I would catch him sleeping in on a Sunday morning, and this would be an easy six grand.
 

I didn’t want to disrespect or discount Hector’s warning, though, so I returned to Google. I had the bones on Scalzo; now I needed some flesh, and I needed to satisfy my interest about the Alfonse Scalzo connection. So I searched that name first. I found news reports about an Alfonse Sr. and an Art Scalzo, his son. The former was an associate of Santos Trafficante, Jr., the reputed leader of the Tampa mafia through the late seventies. Trafficante was a name I’d recognized earlier when Hector mentioned him. He’d evaded arrest for decades. Alfonse Sr. had not been so lucky. He’d spent most of the eighties in prison, where he died. Art Scalzo, it seemed, didn’t have the stomach for the family business, and moved to Jersey after the turn of the century.
 

I wasn’t finding anything on Art’s progeny. But then a search for “Alfonse Art Chad Scalzo” returned a
St. Pete Times
article from 2006: “Mafioso Grandchild Doing Good Business in Bay Area.” It was about a Chad Scalzo who was thriving in local real estate investment. The grandson of the legendary Alfonse Scalzo, he didn’t shy away from his family’s past, but had vowed he’d learned from his grandfather’s mistakes. He purportedly had nothing to do with the family business and was committed to being a legitimate businessman. He started from scratch with a little money he had saved up while majoring in finance at the University of Tampa. It was an impressive story, the kind that made you feel there might be some hope for humanity. Until you turned the page and read the next article.
 

My research put me somewhat at ease about Hector’s warning. Scalzo’s grandfather was long buried, connections with the family business appeared to have been retired with the father, and Chad seemed on the straight and narrow. I pulled a copy of Florida Statutes Section 48.031, just in case I needed to educate SkyGate security about my rights as a licensed process server. I finished my breakfast, rinsed my bowl and beer mug, and set out to earn my pay.

SkyGate was the first high-rise condo built downtown during the housing boom of 2005. By the time I arrived in Tampa, most developers were having a hard time selling units in downtown and nearby Channelside, so they’d turned to renting their vacancies as apartments. SkyGate was finished early enough that it didn’t suffer much from the market crash. It’s one of the first buildings you see upon entering downtown from I-275. There’s nothing spectacular about it: about forty stories of green mirrored glass, industrial gray steel and concrete, and narrow spires protruding like horns from the roof. The building overlooks Curtis Hixon Park across Ashley Street, and beyond that you can see the Hillsborough River running alongside the University of Tampa campus.
 

The university was housed in a converted hotel built by Henry Plant, an early twentieth-century developer whose name appears all over Tampa. The older buildings on campus were of Moorish architecture, and brightened the otherwise dull scenery around UT. I hoped Scalzo’s penthouse would offer a good view of the dazzling silver minarets lining the UT campus that always reminded me of the mosques I’d seen throughout Iraq.

Downtown was pretty dead at 10:00 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Downtown Tampa is never really bustling unless there’s something going on at the convention center, but Sunday mornings are especially quiet. I parked in one of a dozen empty spaces along Polk Street on the northern side of SkyGate. I crossed the street and passed Taps, an upscale bar that served a good selection of brews to a crowd that probably didn’t appreciate what they were drinking but had the money to pay ten bucks a goblet. The bar was closed, but I caught a whiff of fried food carried in the wind along the empty street, and again thought of the Man in Black. There is indeed something sad and lonely about Sunday mornings.