Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (17 page)

“Anything useful?” I asked.

“The German one was strange. It was written in an old-fashioned script that went out of fashion after World War II. I’ll have to get you the exact translation, but it said something about the documents containing vital information for the mission and that whoever it was addressed to was supposed to get the courier out of the country. Then there were some numbers that didn’t make any sense. It might be some sort of code. The forensic guys think the page we have might just be one of several pages that originally made up the document.”

“What about the Arabic documents?”

“They look like correspondence between somebody named Hank and somebody else named Al. They were pretty mundane.”

“Could they be in some kind of code?” I asked.

“They thought about that, but they think it’s just correspondence. They’ve sent all the documents to the National Security Agency to see if it might be a code.”

“I don’t guess you’ve gotten any more information on the identity of the killer.”

“Nada. But it occurred to me that the only indication we have that the killer is an American is what King told us about his accent. If King’s involved, you can bet he lied about that. This guy may be some kind of Arab terrorist. Who knows?”

“You going to be home for dinner?” I asked.

“Probably. Call me when you get back from Avon Park.”

“We lost a lot of good groves around here,” Frank Cartwright said. “Got turned into subdivisions. Now a lot of those houses are in foreclosure and the neighborhoods are going to hell.” He was garrulous in the way of old men. He hadn’t stopped talking since Jock and I arrived at the double-wide trailer where he lived with his three dogs. He was tall and spare, his face creased with wrinkles earned by age and hard work in the sun, his white hair mostly hidden by a ball cap with a John Deere logo, his ice-blue eyes rheumy. The jeans he wore were thin with age, his flannel shirt threadbare. His home smelled of unwashed dog and old cigarette butts. He was drinking from a mug half full of coffee that looked as if it had sat in the pot for the last year or two. Jock and I had declined his offer to join him.

“What can you tell me about Jim Fredrickson’s grove?” I asked.

“Wasn’t much to it. His ma and pa eked out a living with it. They couldn’t afford to hire no pickers, so they did it themselves. Little Jimmy filled his share of boxes before he got that scholarship to college down in Miami. Until a couple of years ago, he never came back here after they got killed in that car wreck.”

“I understand they left him the grove.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t interested in working it.”

“You were the caretaker?”

“If you can call it that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wasn’t much interested in citrus. I’d hire a gang of Mexicans to pick the fruit when it was ripe and send it off to a packinghouse. I never had anything else to do with it. He put money in a bank account, and I was supposed to take cash out every day to pay the pickers.”

“What do you mean by supposed to?”

“That’s what Jimmy told me to do.”

“Did you?”

“What? Pay the pickers? I sure did. Every penny. Ain’t nobody ever accused me of not being an honest man.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that, Mr. Cartwright. I understand that Mr. Fredrickson eventually sold the grove.”

“Nah. Jimmy didn’t sell it. Some lawyer over in Sarasota who’s handling the estate sold it after Jimmy got killed.”

“Was the grove making any money?”

“I doubt it. It was only ten acres. Was a time a family could make a living out of that kind of acreage, but not no more. You got to have at least twenty acres and then you got to take care of it. Jimmy wouldn’t spend no money on that old grove and it was dying. Then that hurricane came along a few years back and knocked down a lot of the trees. Jimmy wasn’t about to spend the money to replant.”

“What’s the property being used for now?”

“Just sittin’ there. I heard some developer from Orlando bought it. He’s supposed to have plans to put houses on it when times get better. He’s still got a few producing trees out there. Something to do with taxes, I heard. He has some locals pull a few oranges off the trees and take ’em to the packinghouse. Don’t make no sense to me. He probably clears just about enough to pay his pickers.”

“You said Jim didn’t come here much until about two years ago. Did he start coming often at that point?”

“Yeah. I’d say he was probably here three or four times a month. I didn’t always see him, but I’d hear he’d been around.”

“Do you know why he was here?”

“What do you mean?” asked Cartwright.

“You said he didn’t have much interest in the grove. I just wondered why he would come here fairly regularly.”

“He stayed in the old home place out on the lake. Used to bring his buddies down for the weekend.”

“To do what?”

“Nobody knows. Fish maybe. They didn’t hunt. They’d bring women
sometimes, maybe their wives, maybe not. Nobody around here knows. Come to think of it, his buddies are still using the place. Maybe he left it to them. Or maybe there really is a developer from Orlando and he and Jimmy had the same buddies.”

“Where is this house?”

“In the grove Jimmy owned.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Sure, but I don’t know why you’d want to go out there.”

“Just following up on some legal stuff,” I said.

Cartwright told us how to get to the property and said, “Help yourself, but there’s a locked gate on the road in. You’ll have to park and walk.”

Jock and I drove south toward Sebring and then turned off onto a secondary road going east. “You were pretty quiet in there,” I said.

“You were asking all the right questions. I didn’t want to interrupt your rhythm.”

“Well, all that silent intensity you were focusing on Cartwright didn’t seem to have much effect.”

“Usually doesn’t.”

We found the locked gate and took care of the combination lock with bolt cutters I had in the car. One never knows when a pair of bolt cutters will come in handy.

We drove down the dirt road, not much more than a rutted path, and parked in the front yard of an old house that had the weathered look that is the consequence of years of neglect. We got out of the car and walked around the house. There was a small lake tucked into the grove and the house sat on its bank. A twelve-foot Jon boat was upside down on the grass that served as a beach. It didn’t look as if it had been used for a long time.

“Want to take a look inside?” asked Jock.

“Sure. I hope the law doesn’t show up.”

“What are the chances of that?”

We went to the front door and Jock pulled his lock picks out of his wallet. We were inside in about two beats. The house smelled musty. The hardwood floors in the living room were warped in places and the upholstered chairs and sofa were probably as old as the house, but in surprisingly
good shape. No rips or tears. A large window looked out to the lake and a hall ran off to the right, probably to bedrooms. A kitchen was to the left, the appliances fairly new.

I walked down the hall. There were four bedrooms, each with two single beds. A bathroom on either side of the hall. I looked through the drawers of the chests and bedside tables in each room. Nothing. They were empty.

“Matt, better come look at this.”

Jock was in the kitchen on his hands and knees, his head stuck into a cabinet that flanked the refrigerator. “What’d you find?” I asked.

“Take a look.” He backed out, and I stuck my head inside the cabinet. A safe took up the whole area. What looked like two doors on the cabinet were really one working door and a fake one. The setup provided a large space for the safe. “That’s odd,” I said. “Who puts a safe in the kitchen?”

“Probably not the cleaning lady,” said Jock.

“From the looks of this place,” I said, “there is no cleaning lady. There was nothing in the bedrooms or baths, except dust.”

“Let me show you something else,” Jock said, and motioned me to follow him. We walked through a door and into a laundry room. There was a modern washing machine and clothes dryer, an ironing board folded against one wall, and a door to a closet. Jock opened the closet and switched on a light.

The closet held an arsenal. Half a dozen M-16s and several shotguns and pistols were clipped to a pegboard wall. Boxes of ammunition were stored on shelves. “I don’t think this is a hunting lodge,” I said.

“Not unless it’s used for hunting human game.”

“I wonder who owns this place.”

“Didn’t Katie’s parents know who the estate sold it to?” asked Jock.

“I didn’t ask.”

“Couldn’t you find out who owns it at the courthouse?”

“I could, but it’s Saturday. The courthouse is closed. I’ll pull up the property appraiser’s website when we get back to Longboat.”

Jock shrugged. “You ready to go?”

“I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

As the U-boat came into torpedo range of the
Robert E. Lee
, Captain Kuhlmann slowed his vessel and called out the range and other coordinates his torpedo officer would need to set up the firing solution. He looked at his watch again. Ten thirty. He wanted to remember the time of the attack so that he could properly insert it into the ship’s log. The officer working below advised the captain in the conning tower that everything was in readiness for the attack. “Fire on my count,” said Kuhlmann. There was a pause, then, “Three, two, one, fire.”

The torpedo blasted out of one of the tubes built into the submarine and was running straight for the freighter. She did not seem aware that her death was moments away. Suddenly, when the torpedo was about two hundred yards from the doomed ship, she started to turn away. Maybe a lookout had caught a glimpse of the onrushing torpedo. But it was too late. The torpedo struck just aft of the engine room.

“Dive. Dive. Dive,” the captain shouted into his microphone and motioned to the lookout to go below. Kuhlmann took one last look at the
Robert E. Lee
and knew she was mortally wounded. She had already begun to list to starboard and was slowing in the water, her engines silent. The last view the captain had as he descended the ladder was the patrol craft picking up speed and coming around the bow of the sinking freighter. Coming straight for the U-166.

The next hour was the longest Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf had ever experienced. The patrol craft was dropping one depth charge after another, the sound of the explosions reverberating through the submarine,
shaking it like an angry dog with a small animal in its mouth. He could hear rivets pop, the steel hull groan, men crying out in fear, Captain Kuhlmann’s orders uttered in a voice so calm they might have been part of a quiet conversation in a local bierstube.

Paulus was afraid he was about to die, but he refused to show fear. He was a German naval officer, and that was a point of pride with him. He came from a seafaring principality in the north of Germany and his ancestors had won and lost great sea battles for generations. Not one of them had ever run from a fight. He was sure of it. He would not be the first of his line to show fear.

He sat at the navigation table with the charts and plotting devices. He was trying to figure the best course out of harm’s way. It was difficult with all the shaking, rolling, and pitching of the boat, but he stayed with it. After a few minutes, he advised the captain that the best route of escape was due east. They’d have deep water, and the patrol craft would have to stop chasing them sooner or later in order to help the survivors of the sinking ship.

And then it was over, as quickly as it had begun. The explosions stopped and the men on the U-boat heard the propellers of the patrol craft pick up speed as it ran westward toward the sinking freighter.

Captain Kuhlmann stayed on course for the next six hours, running submerged. He was about twenty-five nautical miles from the site of the sinking when he surfaced. It was still dark, and the fresh night air that began to circulate through the boat was a welcome relief from the terror of the depth charges.

They continued east, running on the surface. “I want to get as far from the shipping lanes as we can,” Kuhlmann told Paulus. “We sustained some damage, and I want to get men into the water to check for hull ruptures. And, we need to repair some of the equipment that took a beating during the attack.”

“What’s our destination?” Paulus had asked.

“I think we can get to a place off the coast of the Florida panhandle that’s got enough water if we need to dive, but is far enough off the sea lanes that we ought to be able to lay to on the surface for a few hours while we fix the boat.”

After the batteries were charged, Kuhlmann dove again and ran for the
rest of the day submerged. By dawn on August second, he was where he wanted to be. There wasn’t much activity along this coast, and he could spend a few hours on the surface. He hove to and floated serenely on the flat water, his engines turning over in case he had to submerge in a hurry.

The captain and Paulus stood on the conning tower, alone except for the lookout posted behind them. The sun was rising above the eastern horizon and its brilliance masked the approach of a high-winged twin-engine amphibious aircraft that was homing in on the U-boat, coming fast, unseen by the German crew. The lookout in the tower finally saw the aircraft and shouted a warning, but it was too late, the plane too close. Before Kuhlmann could give an order, the plane had descended to within a couple of hundred feet and dropped its only weapon, a two-hundred-fifty-pound depth charge. It hit the boat’s bow and exploded, mortally wounding U-166. The men on the tower braced for another approach by the plane, but it didn’t come. The attacker climbed into the sky and headed north.

The explosion had ripped the hull apart and many men died immediately. The boat was breaking up and sinking and nobody was coming out. The lookout was bleeding badly. He’d taken a piece of the submarine’s hull in his neck when the shrapnel from the depth charge started to fly. Kuhlmann was pulling at a hatch on the deck of the conning tower. It finally came open and the captain pulled out a yellow two-man rubber life raft, folded into a small square. “Let’s get this thing down on the deck,” he shouted.