Setup on Front Street (14 page)

DOCTOR
Chicago stepped off the plane three days later, on the sixteenth.

I had to admit, he was looking good. The
years seemed a lot kinder to him than they were to me. Of course, his work
leaned toward the high-volume end of things, so it netted him a lot more dough
than mine ever got me. Plus, he never got caught.

"Hey, hey!" he cried as he came
to me with open arms. "My man! Don Roy! So great to see you again!"

His slender arms hugged my big shoulders as
best they could, and I returned the embrace.

"Same old Doc!" I said, pulling
away for a good look at him. "You don't look a day older, man."

It was true. He had to be in his late
fifties, but his eyes were dark and clear, his big smile showed gleaming teeth,
and his skin was still smooth, as if freshly-coated with a fine, dark polish.

We threw some of that small talk back and
forth for a few seconds. The tight little airport terminal building had no air
conditioning, so it got pretty thick in there.

"You got any bags?" I asked.

"Right here."

He held up a carry-on suitcase, along with
what appeared to be an empty satchel. "Everything the doctor
ordered."

"Let's go." We headed for the
car.

On the way back from the airport, I took a
detour to Key Haven to make a run past Whitney's house.

"There it is," I said, slowing
down to give him a good look.

Disbelief came out of his eyes and his
voice.

"That's it?"

He gazed hard at it as I drove by.

"That's it? No gates? No walls?"

"That's it."

"You mean, it's just some bullshit
hundred-dollar dinger inside the door? Which probably has a two-dollar deadbolt
on it?"

"That's it," I repeated.

"How 'bout animals? Any dogs? Or any
pets at all likely to make a noise?"

"No."

"Man, I don't get it. You could do
this yourself with your eyes closed. What you need me for?"

"You know I don't do a lot of this
kind of work, Doc. Besides, this is a big deal to me. I need the best. That's
why I called you. I need those files, and he can't know he's been broken into.
I'll make copies of the ones I need, and then you'll have to return them,
okay?"

He nodded.

"The owner? He gone now?"

"Left this morning for three days. I
think only the live-in maid is there."

"Shi-it!" he grumbled. "I
could take that place while she was in the other room eatin' breakfast."

I turned the car around to drive by once
more on our way out of the neighborhood.

"Like I told you, man. You done a lot
for me. You'll get your files, no-o-o problem."

≈≈≈

That night, Doc made his preparations in my room. He put on his
all-black throwaway over his regular street clothes, assembled a few pieces of high
and low-tech equipment into an oversized fanny pack, and wrapped the whole
package around his lean waist. Finally, he grabbed the empty satchel to put the
files in.

I'd drawn him a layout of the house,
pinpointing the file cabinet's location. Then I drove him out to Key Haven just
before 3:30 AM. The streets all around were empty and silent. All the houses were
dark.

"Let me off right in front," he
said as we approached Whitney's house. "Drive around for fifteen minutes.
Got it? Fifteen minutes." I nodded. He added, "Come back and pass by
the house. You won't see me. I'll be in the bushes. When you come by, I'll make
for the car and get in the driver's side back door. Leave it ajar so I don't
make no noise opening it. Got it?"

"Got it."

"If you don't see me runnin' for the
car, drive around the block and keep doin' it till you see me. Okay?"

I said okay, and we synched our watches.
After he got out, I watched him creep onto Whitney's front lawn.

Within seconds, he disappeared into the
dark.

Exactly fifteen minutes later, I returned.
I motored down the deserted street, slowing way down to look for Doc.

Suddenly, he was at the back door and in
the car, almost as though he'd just popped out of the pavement. We exited the
neighborhood while he peeled off his black clothing.

"Piece o' fuckin' cake, man! What'd I
tell you!" He patted the satchel. "You got you some files, my
man!"

I half-turned around to face him. I was
still driving.

"Everything go all right? No
problems?"

"None whatsoever. The locks, the
dinger, they all went down without a hitch. Man, I was in and out in eleven
minutes. My biggest problem was waitin' in the bushes till you came back."
He hefted the satchel. "Not many files in there, though. I was expecting a
ton of 'em, but there's only a few. Hope you get what you're lookin' for."

≈≈≈

Back in my room, we had a couple of beers to celebrate.

I looked through the files. Most of them
concerned Adams Securities and its ownership by WA Financial Group. There was a
copy of the agreement between Adams and Sully for the four hundred large, just
like Ryder had said. But mostly, it just looked like a lot of legalese
bullshit.

Until I came across one document that stood
out.

It appeared to be the purchase of a
building on Duval Street--the building which housed Sullivan's Irish Pub. The
buyer was none other than WA Properties, a subsidiary of WA Financial Group,
and the broker of record was listed as Adams Realty, Inc, a division of Adams
Securities.

The deal was dated May 4, 1989, one day
after Sully gave Adams our dough. A copy of Sully's lease with the previous
owner was attached.

Then there was one file marked
"WA-Caribbean Holdings". I opened it and read it with great interest.

WA-Caribbean Holdings was the name of a
company, owned by none other than Whitney-Adams Enterprises. From what I could
make out, WA-Caribbean Holdings itself owned a bunch of smaller companies.

One was called Trans-Caribbean Airways, a
small airline which, according to the documents, appeared to have the inside
track on the Key West-to-Havana route when the big day came.

Another was Cuba-Caribe, Inc., which a memo
said would be licensed "at some future date" by the Cuban government
to build a hotel/casino in downtown Havana, plus one on the beach at Varadero.
The officers of Cuba-Caribe, Inc. all had Russian names, except for the company
president, one Wilson J Whitney, Junior. The one and only BK himself.

I got out Ryder's phone number and called
him right away.

"Good morning!" I said with all
the perkiness I could muster. "This's Doyle. Did you sleep well?"

He tried to speak. I think he said
something like, "What time is it?"

"It's quarter of five! Rise and shine!
The new day is here. Come on, the FBI never sleeps, right?"

After a few seconds, he became conscious,
cursed me a little, then finally spoke clearly.

"All right, what is it? And this
better be good."

"Put on your best regulation Hawaiian
shirt and meet me at the Waffle House in a half an hour. I've got something
you'll want to see."

THIS
time I waited for him.

I had the files in a Sears bag next to me
on the seat. It took him nearly an hour to get there from the time of the phone
call, but what the hell. He works for the government.

You have to expect that.

He quickly poured himself a cup of coffee.
The aroma alone seemed to soothe him. Then, he lit a cigarette with his
blowtorch, blew on his coffee to cool it down, and planted that cellular
telephone perfectly in the center of the table. This guy was all ritual.

Finally, he got down to business.

"Let's have it," he said.

I showed
him the files, all but the one on WA-Caribbean Holdings. He examined them pretty
closely. Whitney's contract to buy the building, along with Sully's
accompanying lease, stopped him in his tracks, as it had me. He read it
carefully.

"Here it is," he said, pointing
to a date on the lease document. "Sullivan's lease was for ten years, and
it was set to expire on July 1, 1991. Just a few weeks from now.
And
he
had the option of renewing it for another ten."

"So what? Isn't that pretty
routine?"

"Wait. In addition, according to the
sale document, the lease agreement with Sullivan was binding on Whitney when he
bought the building because Sullivan had already been occupying the premises
for around eight years or so. Now, if you read this clause here —"
He pointed to the middle of a long paragraph containing mostly impenetrable
lingo. "It says if Sullivan wanted to renew the lease, which he
hadn't
done yet, he had to exercise
his option no later than ninety days before the expiration date."

He spoke as if that one fact wrapped the
whole thing up.

"April first," I said. "So
what."

"Sullivan was killed during the early
morning hours of April first."

I ran it over in my mind so it would all
fall into place.

We pull the job out in Vegas, I go down for
it and do a three-year bit. Sully keeps the money and, as he told me that night
when I shook him down, he'd washed it through the club.

Washing four hundred dimes through a bar
takes time. It can't all show up in just one or two nights. So he's patient,
doing it very carefully, spreading it out over a year.

So when it's all nice and clean, he turns
it over to Adams Securities. That would be in May of eighty-nine. They probably
came to him, since Whitney most likely knew Sully had a lot of cash on his
hands.

The very next day, Whitney buys the
building that Sully's bar is in. But Sully doesn't know that Whitney and Adams
are one and the same.

Anyway, Adams takes the money and invests
it, just like Sully had said. For a couple of years, they show him a little
income from it — standard procedure for a long con. So of course, he
thinks everything's aces.

But then, without warning, things change.

The money suddenly disappears behind
Whitney's smoke and mirrors, and Sully freaks out. Now we're coming up on April
1, the drop-dead date for Sully to renew his lease. The bar's doing great, he's
making a pile of dough, he's even thinking about expanding into Cuba, just like
he told me that night in his office. No reason to think he wouldn't renew for
another ten years.

Then, I happen to come back to town.

Of course, there was no way he could give
me my share of the take, much less tell me he'd been stung for the whole load.
He knew I'd think he was holding out on me.

And he was right. I would've.

So I push him around a little, and a few
nights later he's lying in the street with his throat cut — the very
night before he's scheduled to renew his lease.

Word gets out that I threatened him, and
presto!

The perfect frame.

I chewed on all of this for a minute. Then
I took it around the block for Ryder, who was crushing out his cigarette.

"It fits," he said. "But
wait. There's more."

"Go."

"While I'm on the phone to the office
in Tallahassee, it occurs to me that they're the people who also issue liquor
licenses. I inquire about the Sullivan's Irish Pub building, and guess
what?"

"What?"

"On April third, a mere two days after
Sullivan was killed, they receive an application for a liquor license to be
used at that address. The application stated the owner of the building, WA
Properties, was leasing it out to a company called Keys Good Times, Inc., for
the purpose of converting it into a strip joint."

"A strip joint?"

"Right. The kind of place where you
can launder money in great quantities and no one knows the difference. What's
more, the officers of Keys Good Times, Inc., the actual applicants for the
liquor license, were two gentlemen with Russian names. I ran them through our
files. They're clean, but you can be sure they're fronts for the Russian
mob."

"So Whitney must've promised the
building to the Russians for their strip joint, figuring they could wash money
a lot quicker than they could through a regular bar. Is that right?"

Ryder said yes, that's right.

I kept going. It fell into place for me
literally as I spoke.

"Whitney probably warned Sully, maybe
through BK, to let the lease expire. Sully wasn't the type of guy you could
push around, so he probably told BK to shove it. Whitney couldn't afford to
alienate the Russians, since they had their hearts set on his building, so
Sully had to go."

"You're catching on. However, there's
no real evidence that Whitney's done anything illegal."

He pulled out another cigarette, then
tamped it, filter end down, on the tabletop.

I said, "But listen to this. The night
I braced Sully for the money, he mentioned a deal he had working with BK. He
said he was going to open up a place in Cuba after Castro is gone. He must've
somehow gotten wind of Whitney's Russian connection and their Cuban ambitions,
and tried to bite off a little piece for himself."

I pulled out the WA-Caribbean Holdings
file.

"And check this out. A paper trail
leading from Whitney to the Russians, then straight to Cuba."

Ryder pored over the documents through
widening eyes. He got what he wanted.

I looked at my watch. Ten till seven.
Outside, up in the black sky, the first traces of dawn were slowly seeping in
from the east. I needed to sleep.

"You want copies of these files?"
I asked him.

"Naturally."

"Make what you need," I told him.
"But get them back to me by this afternoon."

I left the Waffle House and drove back to
my room. Doc was still asleep on the couch. I tried to be quiet as I got out of
my clothes, then crawled into bed.

Sleep hit me right away.