Too Much Stuff (2 page)

No, it’s nothing like that. It’s two lanes of traffic, occasionally broken by the excitement of four lanes for fifteen seconds where everyone floors the gas pedal to pass all the really slow drivers.

And when your Chevy box truck only goes fifty-eight miles per hour at its top end, you really can’t make up a lot of time. I had to face it.
We
were one of the really slow drivers.

Nonetheless, James kept on course. There is no other solution. If you want to get to Islamorada, you just keep it pointing south.

Occasionally, there are some breaks, like a diver’s supply shop that put up a billboard, L
AST
C
HANCE
F
OR
A
LCOHOL, 34 MILES
. People certainly didn’t want to drive to the Keys sober.

And in the middle of scrub pine and scrawny bushes, on this narrow strip of land that extends to Key West, there’s a sign saying: 7 A
CRES
. $175,000. What would you do with it? Put up a liquor store and sell alcohol?

“Remember D. B. Cooper?” James was smoking a cigarette, blowing most of his product out the window at some cheap shell shops and a roadside cigar store.

“The guy hijacked a plane, right?”

He nodded. “Nineteen seventy-one, Portland to Seattle, this mysterious stranger grabs a flight attendant and tells her he has a bomb in his briefcase. When they land in Seattle, he asks for two hundred thousand dollars and a couple of parachutes.”

The story was that D.B. jumped somewhere over Washington State and was never found. Five or six thousand dollars were recovered years later by some hikers, and the FBI figure to this day that he died in the jump, but it’s the only unsolved airline hijacking case in history.

“I know the story, James.”

“Never found the money, Tonto. Never found the body.”

“And your point is?”

“Well, we need to do some research on the Kriegel guy. He had the gold, and when the hurricane hit, he could have used that as an excuse to split and take the bullion with him.”

I shook my head. “Do you know how much that stuff would have weighed? You don’t just
split
with ten cases of gold. That would be—”

“Over two thousand pounds of the yellow stuff. I figured it out.”

James kept his eyes on the road, and we passed a place called the Caribbean Club. A big billboard there announced that this was where the movie
Key Largo
was filmed. So there
were
some bars where Bogey and Edward G. Robinson had hung out.

The faded letters also announced that the Caribbean Club featured karaoke every Wednesday. Too bad it was Thursday.

“Are you thieves or what?” James glanced at me with a sly grin on his face. “You want money, is this a robbery?”

We’d spent too many hours watching the old movies during college, when we should have been studying, and this one with Bogart and Edward G. was a classic. I knew the answer.

“Yeah, Pop, we’re gonna steal all your towels.”

And then we passed Craig’s, with an even bigger sign that touted: H
OME OF THE
W
ORLD
-F
AMOUS
F
ISH
S
ANDWICH
. We were “crackers.” Florida natives. You’d think we would have heard of this. It being world famous and all.

Suddenly all the brake lights in front of us lit up at once. Red as far as the eye could see.

“Shit. Probably some accident up ahead.”

The Keys were legendary for traffic jams that could last all day. Or, in some cases, days.

“We’ve got four cases of beer.”

My roommate nodded. “Two big jars of peanut butter, a couple of jars of strawberry jam, and four loaves of bread.” We did. In the back of the truck. Just in case the money ran out.

“So, if there’s a traffic stop, we’re good for—”

“Oh, hell, at least two days.”

We met Mary Trueblood at Pelican Cove. The place is a neat little waterside resort very close to where the train went off the track. You can rent a motel-type room that can be expanded to have a kitchenette, or expanded further to a two- or three-bedroom suite with living room, Jacuzzi, and kitchen if you had the keys to open the proper connecting doors. Heck, you could own the entire place. If you had enough money. We had all kinds of money. Expense money. If we could prove that we needed that money. To be honest, we’d already spent four hundred dollars on a laptop computer. That and the fill-up and a case of oil. And the beer and peanut butter. So we were already watching our pennies. We had to have a computer with us, didn’t we?

As we stared at the sparkling water from her balcony, Mrs. T. passed out margaritas. “Boys, there’s a fortune out there. Are you up to finding it?”

I had a coach in high school who pushed the cross-country team the same way. “Boys, are you ready for an adventure? Are you up to running hundreds of miles each and every week?”

I wasn’t and I quit the team four days into the season.

Glory and honor do not compare to thousands of dollars, so in this case I put up with Mrs. Trueblood’s little speech.

“Matthew Kriegel had ten containers of gold on that train.”

“Why?”

Who loads ten crates of gold onto a train?

“Fair question,” she responded. “The Flagler enterprise, by now called the Florida East Coast Railway, consisted of railroads, hotels, restaurants, whorehouses, gambling casinos—”

“Slow down.” She had James’s attention.

“Did I say something that you didn’t understand?”

“Whorehouses?” He gulped at his drink.

She gave him a stern, schoolmarm look.

“Whorehouses.” She pointed back to where the two-lane highway ran. “Brothels. There had been thousands of people out there working on the railroad. Thousands. Almost one hundred percent of those people were men.”

“And?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you? The men worked better—more productively—if they had some release. Mr. Flagler was against it. Very much opposed to the floating party boats, the gambling, the girls, and the booze, but his company quietly funded some of those more seamy ventures.”

“Ah.” James absorbed it.

“And even after Henry Flagler died, the enterprise kept producing. There were always camps of men working on maintaining the railroad. There was property that needed to be purchased. The federal highway construction crews were building a road to paradise and there were existing Flagler businesses that needed cash infusions.”

“Lots of places to spend money.” I got it. I assumed that James did too.

“There had to be places to go if the railroad was to get riders. There had to be destinations.”

The lady sipped her margarita and gazed outside at the azure-blue water where two lodgers kayaked in bright yellow skiffs. Inside, Mrs. T. had the bright kitchenette, the seductive Jacuzzi, and all the other amenities. We had one room and a bath.

I noticed James checking her out in her black one-piece. She’d been on the beach sunning herself and she’d come directly to her suite. This lady probably could have been James’s mother, but it didn’t stop him from looking. Dark hair, great figure, a smooth tan. I had to admit, for an older lady she was hot.

“So the assumption is that they needed the gold to support activities in the Keys. Gold was used a lot back then.”

“But this was a rescue train. They threw it together at the last minute, didn’t they? I thought its purpose was strictly to bring camps of highway workers back up to Miami. I mean, these guys were going to be in the middle of this hurricane and they were housed in tents.” I remembered the story well.

She smiled, standing up and stretching herself. James never took his eyes off of her body. “Boys, no one had a clue how strong that storm would be. My great-grandfather was going to leave for Islamorada the next day and his boss decided to send him down early. It’s as simple as that. The Flagler system wanted him to spend the gold on the various enterprises that the system owned and enterprises they
wanted
to own.

“He and a security guard were going to be dropped off, with the gold, and spend a week in Islamorada and points south. They had a car waiting for him, a driver, a room that was reserved at the Coral Belle Hotel, but there is no record of exactly what the expenditures would be used for. There was speculation that he was going to purchase another hotel, and possibly a fishing camp located nearby. He would purchase more places for tourists to travel when they took the train.”

I swallowed the sour drink and absorbed the information. That’s what good PIs do. They absorb information.

“The Florida East Coast Railway looked at this last train ride more as goodwill than as a means to divert a catastrophe. I believe the managers and the owners thought this hurricane was going to pass them by, but they would look like heroes coming down on a white horse and saving these six hundred fifty plus workers.”

“And this money, this gold, was going to be used to buy property and support whorehouses and casinos throughout the Keys?”

James couldn’t leave that alone.

I got off the edge of my chair and approached the lady.

“I apologize for my friend. As you’ve noticed, he can be a little immature.”

“But I’m charming, Skip. I’ve got my charm going for me.”

Mary Trueblood smiled. “Gentlemen, Florida was born with graft, corruption, whorehouses, and gambling saloons. Like the Old West, this was cattle country and railroad country. Cowboys and construction workers are the same wherever you go.”

“So the gold was never found.”

“It disappeared. There were those who thought it washed out to sea, but I would think that the sheer weight of it would have prevented that.”

I had a vision of James and me diving for sunken treasure, swimming back up with a gold bar clutched in my hand.

“And your great-grandfather?” I already knew the answer.

“His body was never recovered. Neither was the security guy’s.”

“But,” James stated, “most of those bodies weren’t ever identified. You told us that they burned hundreds of them before the rotting corpses started an epidemic.”

“That’s true. Apparently some of the workers wore gas masks. The stench was terrible and when they burned them in funeral pyre-style, it was even worse.”

“Must have been a very nasty experience.”

“I’ve seen pictures,” she said. “Heads torn off bodies, tree limbs buried in people’s chests, bloated bodies twenty feet up in the trees.”

Information overload.

“So,” I walked to the balcony edge and drained my drink, hoping she’d offer another, “you think you know where the gold is.”

“I have some direction.”

“If they never identified his body and never found the gold, then how would you have a clue?” James just blurted it right out.

Mary Trueblood smiled, a thin-lipped smirk. “Because my great-grandmother got a letter.”

“Okay.”

“I found it in an old jewelry box when we cleaned out my mother’s home after she died. There was no signature and the whole thing was very cryptic.”

I glanced at my partner and saw that gleam in his eye. “Who was it from?”

I added, “So what did it say?”

“Oh, I’ll go you one better.” She walked inside to her open suitcase that was sitting on a bench and pulled out an envelope. “It was from Matthew Kriegel to his wife, my great-grandmother, and I made a copy. This is for you.”

The letter was two paragraphs long. Short and sweet, the flow of the dark blue ink was like a work of art. Thick, luxurious swirls of letters that are lost in today’s computerized world. I mean, why would you?

My Dear Mary
,

Upon receiving this, you can assume that something has happened to me. By following our aforementioned guidelines, I leave you with this
.

From that point on it was a jumble of letters spelling words I couldn’t even pronounce.

Sohdvh frph wr lvodprdgd dqg—

We both stared at the letter. Code. The only thing close to code I’d ever used was lemon juice. As kids, James and I, along with a handful of neighborhood buddies, would write messages using citric acid. When it dried on the paper, it was invisible. When you held it up to a candle or a hot lightbulb, the message would materialize. Of course our messages were not quite as
important as the location of forty-four million dollars worth of gold. We wrote things like, “Meet you at my house after school.”

“Do you want us to figure this out? Is that part of the job?”

Mary Trueblood smiled, then licked salt from the rim of her glass. “No. I’ve already figured out the code.”

“So? What does it say?”

“It’s what it doesn’t say.”

By definition, a code is cryptic. The Trueblood lady had solved the code and now
she
was being cryptic.

“So,” I tried to bring some common sense into the conversation, “what doesn’t it say?”

Holding the copy she pointed to the jumble of letters.

“Every letter is three letters off in the alphabet.”

James stood up and walked over to her, taking the paper from her. She touched his arm and gave him a very sweet look.

“So if the letter is
A
, it’s really
D
?”

“Exactly, James.”

I interrupted the intimate moment. “Mary—Mrs. True-blood—excuse me, but what is the message?”

“Obviously it’s from my great-grandfather. Written to his wife, as I said. He says, in a very short message, that he has survived the storm.”

“That’s it? Why did he write in code? Was this something they did for fun?” It made no sense to me.

“As to why the code, I have no idea. And as to the content of the letter, of course there is more,” her voice stern like a schoolteacher’s. “He describes the location of a hotel that had been blown off of its foundation. The Coral Belle. The two-story inn had been owned by the railroad, and, as I said, this was where Matthew Kriegel was to stay the night of the hurricane.”

“Why would he describe someplace that didn’t exist anymore?”