Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (6 page)

He opened the file. There was one piece of paper, a yellow lined sheet from a legal pad, paper clipped to the edge of the file. The client’s name
was written at the top and a date, five days before, a Wednesday. The notes didn’t mean much. They read:

Moultrie Creek Treaty

Large Res.

Black Sem.

Mineral rights

Codicil?

Matt Royal, Longboat Key

Nothing else. It didn’t mean anything to Charlie. He had no idea who Matt Royal was and wasn’t even sure where Longboat Key was. Somewhere down in the Keys, he figured, but he could never keep those little islands straight. Maybe Royal would know something. He picked up the phone, dialed 411, and got the information operator for Longboat Key. She gave him a number with a 941 area code. That surprised Charlie. The Keys were in the 305 area code; 941 was up in the Sarasota area. He’d check out the map when he got home and find out just where the hell Longboat Key was. When he had a little more information, he’d call Royal, see if he knew anything.

Charlie rubbed his face, stretched, felt the need for a beer. He surveyed the office. Still a mess. He’d come back tomorrow. Finish looking at all the paper. He didn’t expect much, but he had to start somewhere.

He pulled the lone sheet of paper from the Osceola file, folded it, tucked it into his shirt pocket, turned out the lights, locked the office, and walked toward the town’s lone bar.

Logan hadn’t moved. He was still lying on the bed, a quizzical look on his face. “What the hell was that all about?” he asked.

“Guy looking for a job,” I said.

“Huh. Messy way to do it. He could’ve gotten killed.”

Marie, who had sat on the side of the bed when Jube appeared with his gun, was pale and a little shaky. “Matt, that guy could’ve killed you.”

“Not with the safety on,” I said.

“Why did you let him go?” Marie asked. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

Sometimes a load of crap falls on a guy’s head and no matter what he does he can’t get out from under it. He gets sick for a week and can’t work. He gets fired and can’t find another job. It’s a dreary progression, a downhill spiral. His life is tenuous at best, living from payday to payday. Miss one paycheck and he never catches up. His wife gets sick and the medical bills roll in like a calamitous tide, inexorable in their crushing power. He has no money, can’t pay, so the wife doesn’t get the medicine that takes the edge off the pain. There’s no safety net. No family, friends tapped out. Hopelessness rides his shoulders. Desperation hangs like a miasma, thick, impenetrable, unyielding, and ultimately deadly. So he shows up in a hotel with a borrowed pistol trying to make enough to cover the next pharmacy bill.

I shook my head. “I don’t think cops are necessary. He didn’t seem to recognize Logan, and I believed him about his wife being sick. He’s just a guy at the end of his rope. Sometimes all a person like that needs is a chance. I heard Nestor Cobol was looking for another hand. Maybe that’ll work out.”

“Matt,” Logan said, “what the hell is going on around here? Why would somebody take a shot at me and then come after you?”

“Who knows,” I said. “I don’t like it.”

“Are the two connected?” asked Marie.

“They have to be,” I said. “I can’t imagine that different people are after us. They think Logan’s dead and I’ve been gone. I’m back and they came looking for me. It’s got to be the same people.”

My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. Bill Lester. I answered.

“Matt, where are you?”

“I’m in Logan’s palatial hotel suite. You guys aren’t spending a lot of money on this.”

“It’s better than he deserves.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I just got a call from Sarasota PD. They’ve got a guy down at Sarasota Memorial they think you might know.”

“Who is he?”

“Don’t know. He had a piece of paper in his pocket with your name and address written on it. Logan’s, too. No ID. Somebody hit him on the head with something hard. Tossed his hotel room. He’s still in a coma.”

“Where’d they find him?”

“He was in one of those old motels over on the North Trail. Checked in with a false name. Paid cash. Somebody heard a commotion, called the manager, and they found him in his room.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nope. But he might be from the Caribbean.”

“Why do they think that?” I asked.

“The woman who owns the motel said he spoke English with an island accent.”

“White or black?”

“He’s a black man.”

“What name did he use to check in?”

“Abraham Royal. Any relation?”

“No. But I might know him,” I said.

“One of my guys was on routine patrol Friday night and found a black man at the front door of Logan’s condo building. That door has a
code that you need to punch to get in. The guy didn’t have the code and wouldn’t or couldn’t give us a good reason for being there. He identified himself as Abraham Osceola and said he had come to the key looking for you. You weren’t here and somebody told him to ask Logan when you’d be back.

“He said something that didn’t make a lot of sense. He wanted you to help him with some kind of big money deal. One of my officers drove him across the bridges to Cortez and let him out. We had no reason to hold him. Now I wonder. Do you know this Osceola guy?”

I paused for a beat. “I met him once. Last year, down in the Keys. Do you think there’s a connection between Abraham and the guys gunning for Logan?”

“I don’t know, but I’m figuring the guy in the hospital must be the same Abraham who was at Logan’s”

“He probably is. But I can’t imagine why anyone would try to kill him.”

“What about the big money deal he mentioned to my officer?”

“Abraham isn’t the kind of person to get into big deals. Maybe he was just putting your guy on for some reason.”

“Could be. The officer who took the black man from Logan’s is on his way to the hospital to see if he can identify the guy. You’d better get over there too. Check in with a Detective Kintz in the ER.”

The scent of orange blossoms floated on the soft spring air, the night closer now, a time for owls and other predators, of human garbage who visit their sickness on the unsuspecting, who stalk the innocent and the unwary. The old house sat deep in the grove, hidden from the roads that traversed the area. It had a tin roof, rusted by years of summer downpours, and a sagging front porch that ran the width of the house. The windows were large, built to catch the minimal breeze that stirred the heat of a Florida summer. A crescent moon hung high in the sky amid a million pinpoints of light, suns for other solar systems, emitting energy that took thousands of years to reach this dark spot on a ragged peninsula hanging from the bottom of the continent.

The house smelled of age and decay and ancient family quarrels. The bare boards of the floor had not seen wax in a generation and they creaked with every step. A single bulb, suspended from the ceiling by a braided electric cord, cast its frugal light over the figure of a man hunched at a computer terminal. He was in his fifties, his thinning gray hair at odds with his head. He was paunchy and wore the pallor of a man too long away from the sun. His face hadn’t seen a razor in several days, the stubble gray and itchy. He wore a pair of faded jeans and a plaid shirt found in the mission box at a local church. He was barefoot, his toenails hardened and yellow, his soles gray with callouses.

He sat alone in the night, wandering the Internet, trolling for bits of information, for customers and victims. He stared at the monitor, occasionally scratching his face or stroking the keyboard. The stale odor of his unwashed body permeated the room, vying with the smells of fried food, beer, and whiskey. A box with the logo of a local fried chicken chain rested
on the floor beside his chair, bones from several meals overflowing the container.

A cell phone sat on the table next to the keyboard. It rang. The man picked it up, looked at it, opened it, answered. “Yeah?”

The voice on the other end was raspy and ancient. “You get Royal?”

“Not yet.”

The voice came again, breathless, wheezy, deep southern accent. “I’m not paying you to sit there with your thumb up your ass.”

“I’m working on it.”

“What happened today? I thought you were going to bring him in.”

“My subcontractor fucked up. Sent in an amateur.”

“What about yesterday? Can’t you do anything right?”

“It was a long shot. I’m told we had the best marksman money can buy.”

“Hamilton’s still alive.”

“Yeah, but we went through his apartment last night. No documents. My people are going to grab Royal tomorrow.”

“Forget Royal. Just kill him. Hamilton, too.”

“Okay.”

“Get your ass in gear, boy. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“I’ll be in touch.” The phone went dead.

“Pissant,” muttered the man at the computer. He lay the phone down and returned to his keyboard.

Night had fallen by the time I reached Sarasota Memorial Hospital. The buildings of the campus were awash in the light pouring from every window. I parked in a lot near the emergency room. A red neon sign above the entrance told me where I was. An ambulance in the driveway, its stern against the loading dock, rear doors open. Quiet now, its run finished, its patient delivered. The engine ticked as I walked by, the sound of a cooling motor, tired from its dash to the hospital.

I’d been told to meet a Sarasota detective in the emergency room waiting area. When I walked through the automatic doors, I saw a man in a suit standing at the counter, chatting idly with the woman who sat at a computer. I walked over. “I’m looking for Detective Kintz,” I said.

The man turned to me. “Mr. Royal? I’m John Kintz.”

We shook hands. “I appreciate your coming down,” he said. “I’ll get us a conference room. A little privacy, you know. Have a seat and I’ll be right with you.”

I had one of those fleeting moments of déjà vu, or something like it, a swelling of near recognition of the man, but not quite. He was a stranger, a man I’d never seen, as far as I knew. Yet my subconscious was clanging alarms, trying to tell me something that my conscious brain needed to know. Then recognition dawned. I didn’t know the man, but he looked uncannily like Bill Lester, the Longboat Key chief of police.

The detective disappeared through another set of doors that led into the bowels of the hospital. I took a seat. There were several others in the waiting area, some trying to nap, their heads against the backs of the uncomfortable chairs. They were waiting. Waiting for news of loved ones, those who had disappeared into the maw of the ER, the sick or injured
friends or relatives. It was a feeling of powerlessness, of impotency and fear, and of dread and hope.

I remembered how scared I was when I was thirteen and my mother had to go to Orlando to the hospital for what we thought was a brain tumor. I prayed a lot that summer. I thought about this as I sat in the cheerless waiting area in Sarasota. Everything was gray: carpet, furniture, the waiting patients. A soap opera played on the TV in the corner. A map of the world decorated one wall. A blonde woman with dark roots, late middle age, wearing a gray dress, and packing an extra thirty pounds, dozed on one of the chairs. Her husband, a dark Hispanic of indeterminate age, came by now and then to hug and kiss her, worry etched on his face.

The detective returned in ten minutes, apologized for keeping me waiting. I followed him through the interior doors, down a hall, and into a small conference room. A table, one end stacked high with journals and other loose papers, took up most of the room. A large portrait of a pretty blonde lady with a pronounced widow’s peak, wearing a pink blouse and white skirt, stared from the wall. A small bronze plaque dedicating the room to the woman was affixed to the frame. I wondered who had loved her and when and where and how she had come to have this poor space named for her.

“Do you know Chief Lester out on Longboat?” I asked the detective.

He laughed. “Oh, sure. People get us mixed up all the time. He called to tell me you were coming. Said you were old friends.”

“Yeah.”

The detective gestured me to a seat. He sat across from me and pulled an eight by ten photograph from the file he carried. It showed a black man lying in a bed, an IV in his arm, an oxygen cannula affixed to his nostrils, his eyes closed as if sleeping. “Do you know this man?”

“Yes. His name’s Abraham Osceola. He’s a Seminole Indian.”

“Mr. Royal, this man is black and he apparently has an island accent.”

“Mr. Osceola is one of the Black Seminoles who left Florida in the nineteenth century and went to the Bahamas.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s kind of complicated and not something you read about in the
history books. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a number of escaped slaves joined the Seminoles in Florida. They lived among the Indians and intermarried. The children of those marriages were part of the tribe and were considered Seminoles. At the end of the First Seminole War, and again after the Second Seminole War, many of the Indians’ black relatives fled in canoes to Andros Island in the Bahamas, where slavery had been outlawed. Their descendants are still there, and in most ways are indistinguishable from the other Bahamians.”

“Does this man live in the Bahamas?”

“I think he lives in Key West.”

“How do you know him?” the detective asked.

“I met him briefly in the Keys last year. I don’t really know him or anything about him.”

“Why would he have your name and your buddy’s name in his pocket?”

“I don’t know. Hamilton is my best friend.”

“Did you know that Osceola was in Sarasota?”

“No.”

“Could he have come to see you?”

“I suppose. He told the Longboat police that he had come looking for me to help him with a deal. But I don’t know why he would.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I was in a boat off Key West, and he was in a kayak. We chatted for a while and he told me his name and that he lived in the area. He used to work the fishing boats. He’s retired now.”